Дэймон Найт - Orbit 10

It had been nine years.

I had been eighteen when I had killed my father. I was now twenty-seven. I had thought I might be forty.

The flaking gray walls of our house were the same. The iron dog with his three wolf-heads still stood in the front garden, but the fountain was silent, and the beds of fern and moss were full of weeds. Mr. Million paid my chairmen and unlocked with a key the door that was always guard-chained but unbolted in my father’s day—but as he did so, an immensely tall and lanky woman who had been hawking pralines in the street came running toward us. It was Nerissa, and I now had a servant and might have had a bedfellow if I wished, though I could pay her nothing.

And now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account, which has already been the labor of days; and I must even explain why I explain. Very well then. I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometimes read what I am now writing and wonder.

Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself; or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.

It has been three years since my release. This house, when Nerissa and I re-entered it, was in a very confused state, my aunt having spent her last days, so Mr. Million told me, in a search for my father’s supposed hoard. She did not find it, and I do not think it is to be found; knowing his character better than she, I believe he spent most of what his girls brought him on his experiments and apparatus. I needed money badly myself at first, but the reputation of the house brought women seeking buyers and men seeking to buy. It is hardly necessary, as I told myself when we began, to do more than introduce them, and I have a good staff now. Phaedria lives with us and works too; the brilliant marriage was a failure after all. Last night while I was working in my surgery I heard her at the library door. I opened it and she had the child with her. Someday they’ll want us.

LIGHT LAY bloody on the mountainside. From our promontory jutting above the scrub pine, we looked out over the city. Denver spread from horizon to horizon. The tower of the U.S. Capitol Building caught the sun blindingly. We watched the contrail of a Concorde II jetliner making its subsonic approach into McNicholls Field, banking in a sweeping curve over the pine-lined foothills. Directly below us, a road coiled among rocks and trees. A campfire fed smoke into the November air. The wind nudged the smoke trail our way and I smelled the acrid tang of wood smoke. We watched the kaleidoscope of cloud shadows crosshatch the city.

Jody and I sat close, my arm around her shoulders. No words, no facial expressions as afternoon faded out to dusk. My feet gradually went to sleep.

“Hey.”

“Mmh?” she said, startled.

“You look pensive.”

Her face stayed blank.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m not. I’m just feeling.” She turned back to the city. “What are you thinking?”

“Uh, not much,” I said. Lie; I’d been thinking about survivors. “Well, thinking how beautiful you are.” Banal, but only half an evasion. I mean she was beautiful. Jody was imprinted in my mind the first time I saw her, when I peered up out of the anesthetic fog and managed to focus on her standing beside my hospital bed: the half-Indian face with the high cheekbones. Her eyes the color of dark smoke. I couldn’t remember what she’d worn then. To­day she wore faded blue jeans and a blue chambray work shirt, several sizes too large. No shoes. Typically, she had climbed the mountain barefoot.

Without looking back at me, she said, “You were thinking more than that.”

I hesitated. I flashed a sudden mental image of Jody’s face the way she had described it in her nightmares: pocked with red and black spots that oozed blood and pus, open sores that gaped where her hair had grown, her skin. . .

Jody squeezed my hand. It was as if she were thinking, that’s all right, Paul, if you don’t want to talk to me now, that’s fine.

I never was any good with evasions, except perhaps with my­self. Survivors. Back after the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese had called them hibakusha - which translates roughly as “sufferers.” Here in America we just called them survivors, after the Chinese suicided their psychotic society in the seventies, and destroyed most of urban America in the process. I guess I was lucky; I was just a kid in the middle of Ne­vada when the missiles hit.I’d hardly known what happened east of the Mississippi and west of the Sierras. But Jody had been with her parents somewhere close to Pittsburgh. So she became a sur­vivor; one of millions. Most of them weren’t even hurt in the bomb­ings. Not physically.

Jody was a survivor. And I was lonely. I had thought we could give each other something that would help. But I wasn’t sure any­more. I wondered if I had a choice after all. And I was scared.

Jody leaned against me and shared the warmth of my heavy windbreaker. The wind across the heaped boulders of the moun­tainside was chill, with the sun barely down. Jody pressed her head under my chin. I felt the crisp hair against my jaw. She rested quietly for a minute, then turned her face up toward mine.

“Remember the first time?”

“Here?”

She nodded. “A Sunday like this, only not so cold. I’d just got­ten in from that Hayes Theatre assignment in Seattle when you phoned. I hadn’t even unpacked. Then you called and got me up here for a picnic.” She smiled. In the new shadows her teeth were very white. “What a god-awful time.”

That picnic. A summer and about fourteen hundred miles had separated us while she set up PR holograms of Hamlet and I haunted Denver phone booths.

Then here on the mountainside we’d fought bitterly. We had hurt each other with words and Jody had begun to cry and I’d held her. We kissed and the barbed words stopped. Through her tears, Jody whispered that she loved me and I told her how much I loved her. That was the last time either of us said those words. Funny how you use a word so glibly when you don’t really understand it; then switch to euphemisms when you do.

“You’re very far away.”

“It’s nothing.” I fished for easy words. “The usual,” I said. “My future with Ma Bell, going back to school, moving to Seattle to try writing for the network.” Everything but—Liar! sneered some­thing inside. Why didn’t you include damaged chromosomes in the list, and leukemia, and paranoia, and frigidity, and . . . ? Shut up!

“Poor Paul,” Jody said. “Hemmed in. Doesn’t know which way to turn. For Christmas I think I’ll get you a lifesize ‘gram from Hamlet. I know a guy at the Hayes who can get me one.”

“Hamlet, right. That’s me.” I lightly kissed her forehead. “There, I feel better. You ought to be a therapist.”

Jody looked at me strangely and there was a quick silence I couldn’t fill.

She smiled then and said, “All right, I’m a therapist. Be a good patient and eat. The thermos won’t keep the coffee hot all night.”

She reached into the canvas knapsack I’d packed up the moun­tain and took out the thermos and some foil parcels. “Soybeef,” she said, pointing to the sandwiches. “The salt’s in with the hard-boiled eggs. There’s cake for dessert.”

Filling my stomach was easier than stripping my soul, so I ate. But the taste died in my mouth when I thought about Jody fixing meals all the rest of our lives. Food for two, three times a day, seven days a week, an average of thirty days a . . . Always un­varying. Always food for two. God, I wanted children! I concen­trated on chewing.