Дэймон Найт - Orbit 11

The first time I saw Sherry, she was yelling at the top of her lungs. A fish-faced sea of flesh stared back. “Make noise!” she screamed, “Laugh, cry, anything! I can’t do it alone!”

It was an art exhibit, Sherry’s first—an entire room sensitive to body heat, noise, alpha waves. “Scream, you idiots!”

“Let’s go, Greg,” said the petite girl at my side. She clutched my hand. “I don’t like this.”

I paid her no attention; I was much too fascinated by the charismatic young woman at the center of the gallery. Impulsively, I yelled out something, anything, it didn’t matter what.

Sherry’s eyes flashed at me for the first time as the room came to glowing life. I yelled again, and Sherry yelled back, all in front of a skyburst cyclorama of color and sound. The girl at my side faded away, with the others, and later, after love with Sherry, there was only blue susurrating equilibrium.

“They’re closing the exhibit tomorrow,” she said matter-of-factly. “A public nuisance, they say. Some old woman tried suing the gallery—she said it aggravated her neurasthenia.”

“What will you do now?”

“Something. Something exciting and challenging.” She laughed.

Some of us felt responsibility—others, like Sherry and myself, thrived on the very madness of our overloaded, crumbling world. We were quicker, smarter—she as an artist and I as a news “editor.” We could cope.

“That girl,” Sharon asked me once. “Why did you drop her?”

“She bored me.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, if you must know, she was a slug. A leech. She held me down and she knew it was coming anyway.”

Sunlight streamed down in diagonal streaks across the acoustic mall. People walked barefoot; others had inch-thick soles of foam rubber on their canvas sandals. The streets were filled with silent bicyclers.

We walked quietly down the Boulevard for a block. Sherry was still shivering. I didn’t notice as she stepped off the curb against the “DON’T WALK” sign. A woman in horseblinders on a Schwinn Deluxe veered in her direction, and there was the heart-stopping, rocket-sled shriek of rubber on road as her bike skidded to a perpendicular halt. “ Damn you!” screamed Sharon in a voice I had never heard before.

The air froze as a hundred pairs of eyes flashed in our direction. Hidden eyes. Frightened eyes of the people with static-charged clothing that would jolt you at the slightest touch.

The woman with the blinders threw her arms around her head and sobbed pitifully, her parcels of gimcracks and toiletries strewn across the pavement like broken toys.

A cop came, looking like a deep-sea diver in his padded, pressurized uniform, faceless behind a mask of gradient density glass. I felt a vague, swelling anger at the blatant impersonality of his costume, although I knew the reasons for the heavily insulated suit. Day-to-day existence was difficult enough without the added sensory bombardment a law officer would have to undergo.

“What’s the trouble here?” he asked, the filtered voice sounding like a long-distance phone call.

“Look,” I said quietly, producing my press credentials. “This young lady just lost her job and she’s very upset. If you’d just let me—”

“You realize that this kind of disturbance is a serious misdemeanor, punishable by law?”

Sharon nodded, shaking, sobbing, not looking at the cop. A crowd had gathered to console the other sobbing woman with soft words and sign language.

The cop shifted nervously, then started waving the crowd back with his anesthetic billy. Then, to Sharon: “Are you on medication?”

“Yes.”

My stomach turned into a knot.

“Listen,” said the cop in an electronic sotto voce. “I’ll let you go this time.” To me: “Watch her.” Click. Over and out.

“Bitch’“ hissed the woman in the horseblinders before she was lost in the crowd.

The subsonic relaxamusic thrummed throughout the little restaurant, like low-key bat radar.

“So you’re taking the Cure?”

Yes again.

“How long?”

“Six months. I would have told you earlier only I was afraid that—”

She was starting up again. I leaned over the counter, whispered. “For God’s sake, Sherry, calm down!”

The waitress brought our coffee, placing the soft squeeze tubes on the padded table with robotlike precision. She was blind. I looked away.

“Energizers,” she went on. “They started with B-12, adrenalin.” She started to cry again, but not about the job or the accident.

“But, God, Sherry—wasn’t there any other way? You could have spent a year on one of those farms, relaxed—”

She laughed, almost hysterically. “Relaxation? Is that what you call it? I need activity. I’m an artist—at least I was. Those farms would be stagnant hell for me! Don’t you understand?”

I understood. I should have known before; the symptoms were all there. The books, piled high in her soundproof apartment. Three, four a night. “Speed reading,” she called it. Her increased sexual demands. It was all there.

She sipped her black coffee. Caffeine. The tip of the metabolic iceberg. I should have known.

“It’s not like I’m dying or anything,” she said. “It’s not like I won’t have a full life.”

Full to her, perhaps, rewarding in its richness and productive complexity. But what about me? I knew what would happen next—she’d stay on a little longer, but as the therapy began taking hold, she would become a frenetic gibbering thing to me, I a sluggish animal to her. Finally she would go off to a colony of her own kind, speaking their language of clicks and whirs, ultimately learning to hate the slow, static, paralyzed world outside. And in ten short years—

Already she was more animated. Already the injections were taking effect, and it was with effort that she spoke, with forced distinctness and painful clarity.

“Come on,” she said.

We tried to make love in my apartment, but it ended in tears. One of her heavy thighs rested across my body, and she nestled her head under my chin. I ran my fingers through her sandy-blond hair, noting the room, the particular aroma of scented candles and incense, freshly made love and Sherry. The room was very quiet. Sharon’s eyes, gold-flecked and desperate.

“You won’t leave me,” she pleaded. A petite girl long ago, holding my hand at an art show, terrified—

“No,” I said.

But after that, things went pretty quickly.

Michael Tobias Kidd was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., at exactly 8:03:47 on 12 April 1943. His birth was made as easy as the birth of a millionaire’s son can be.

Roger William Wellings was born in New Orleans, La., at exactly 8:03:47 on 12 April 1943. His prostitute mother died in giving birth, and his father could have been any one of an indeterminate number of businessmen she had serviced seven months before at a war matériel planning convention.

Michael’s mother considered herself progressive. She alternated breast-feeding with a sterilized bottle of scientifically prepared formula. An army of servants cared for the mansion while she lavished time and affection on her only son.

Roger’s wet nurse, a black woman hired by the orphanage, despised the spindly pink premature baby and hoped he would die. Somehow, he lived.

Both babies were weaned on the same day. Michael had steak and fresh vegetables laboriously minced and mortared and pestled by a skilled dietician on the kitchen staff. Roger had wartime Gerber’s, purchased by the orphanage in gallon jars that were left open far too long.