Дэймон Найт: Orbit 10

Pitcock’s voice was lower. “I have a suggestion then, Eliot. Not an order, merely a suggestion. How about starting a book on the data we’ve collected here?”

“Me? Write a book? About what?”

He listened to Pitcock’s low voice, and his own articulated thoughts, and those stirrings that never found words, and later he couldn’t separate them. “If you knew you had to have surgery, would you permit it when your cycle is at its low point? You know you wouldn’t. How about starting a business? You know the fig­ures for failures and successes, the peaks and troughs. You’d be crazy to pick one of the low spots. An eagle doesn’t have to under­stand updrafts and currents and jet streams in order to soar and ride the winds. . . .”

Something for everyone. Cycles on every side, ready to be used, causes unknown, but obviously there. Circadian cycles, menstrual cycles, creativity cycles, excitability cycles. War cycles, peace cycles. Constructive and destructive cycles. Determinism as conceived of in the past, so simplistic, like comparing checkers to chess. A reordering of life-styles, acceptance of the inevitable, using the inevitable instead of always bucking it, trying to circumvent it.

He walked on the beach and seemed to feel the earth stirring beneath his feet. Bits of the earth flowing down the river, into the bay, material to be used by the sea as it constructed the islands grain by grain, shaping them patiently, lovingly as the very face of the earth was changed, subsiding here, growing there, swelling and ebbing. Eternal cycles of life and death.

He stumbled over the stones of the ruins and climbed the rough steps of the incompleted tower, a sand-filled stone cylinder. There was lightning out over the ocean, a distant storm too far away to hear the thunder. He watched the flashing light move northward. I don’t want to do your goddamned book, Pitcock. Hire yourself a nice obedient ghost writer and do it yourself. Where does it lead? What does it imply? Something I don’t want to examine. Flea on the dog, ready to be scratched off, sprayed off, get swept off in the torrent of the river when the dog swims.

“Something happened last night. I don’t know what it was, but it has everyone on the island uptight today. Do you know?”

“No.” I don’t know. I won’t know. I dreamed a crazy dream. Or else they had a bacchanal, and I don’t know which, and won’t know.

“I thought I had time, five years, even more. But now . . . Don’t tell me you won’t do it, Eliot. Don’t say anything about it for a while. Let it lie there. You’ll come back to it now and again. See what happens if you don’t worry it.”

But I won’t. I don’t want to do it. I want to finish my three years and get the hell out. Chess and checkers. Not with humans, Pit. Not a game, even on a macrocosmic scale. Not fleas on a dog. Free agents, within the limits set down by our capabilities and the government.

He slept and dreamed, and rejected the dream on awakening. Although unremembered, it left an uneasy feeling in his stomach, and he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. Later he found him­self at the ruins and he stood gazing at a mammoth oak tree. The Spaniards had built around it. They had laid a terrazzo floor be­tween the tower and the fort, connected by a walkway that was to have been covered. The pillars were there. And they had built around the oak tree. Crazy pagans, he muttered. Hypocrites with your beads and crucifixes and inquisitions. He walked on the top layer of the stones that made up the fort. They hadn’t closed the square. One-tenth of it done, then abandoned.

That week Marty fell in love with Donna. Marty had been friendly to Eliot in the past, but now avoided him, refused to look directly at him, and managed to be gone with Donna every day when Mrs. Bonner announced lunch from the basement inter­com at the office building.

Eliot kept to himself all week. He worked alone in his office, had a solitary dinner, then prowled about the island until early morning when fatigue drove him to bed and fitful sleep beset by dreams that vanished when he tried to examine them. He knew that the others were together much of the time. Sometimes late at night when the wind eased he could hear their voices, laughing, but he didn’t see them again. He caught himself watching one or the other of them for an overt sign of conspiracy.

Friday afternoon Marty and Donna went to the northern islands for the weekend. Beatrice was gone, to the mountains to visit Gina. Ed Delizzio and Eliot were invited to Lee’s house for dinner on Friday night, and there was no graceful, or even possible, way for Eliot to refuse without hurting Mary’s feelings.

“It’s been a funny week, hasn’t it,” Mary said. “Eliot . . .” She looked toward her husband, set her mouth, and continued quickly, “Last week, the night that she came, did you have a peculiar dream?”

Lee put his knife down too hard, and she said, “I have to find out. Has Marty spoken to you all week?” She had turned back to Eliot almost instantly.

“No. Why? What about a dream?”

“All right. We all dreamed of ... an orgy. Either we dreamed it, or it happened. Lee and I talked about it right away, of course. We thought it was our dream, strange, but ours. Then something Marty said made me realize that he had dreamed it, too. Only he had the players mixed up. And Beatrice . . . Well, you can ask her what she dreamed sometime. So I asked Ed, and he said almost the same thing. You?”

Eliot nodded. “Yeah. Except I wasn’t asleep. I saw it, down on the beach. I hadn’t gone home yet.”

No one moved or spoke. Mary paled, then she flushed crimson, and finally broke the silence with a sound that was meant to be a laugh but sounded more like a sob. She picked up her wine glass and choked on a swallow. Without looking at Eliot she said, “Well, if you saw what Lee and I dreamed, you must have had quite a show.”

“It wasn’t on the beach,” Ed Delizzio said hoarsely. “It was back by the ruins, between the fort and the tower. We had a fire, and a ceremony. Rites of some kind.” He stared ahead as if seeing it again. “I searched for ashes, for a scorched place. I got down on my knees the next morning and searched for a sign. . . . Nothing.”

Eliot looked at him curiously, wondering how he had missed noting the haggard appearance of the younger man. Ed’s eyes appeared sunken, haunted, as if there were only darkness before him that he was trying to pierce.

“It’s her fault,” Mary said softly. “I don’t know how or why, what she has done, anything. But I know she’s to blame. Night after night I wake up listening and I don’t know what for.”

“Hey, knock off talk like that,” Lee said, and while his voice was light, his hand that closed over hers on the table made her wince.

Mary looked at Lee and there was certainty on her face. Eliot stood up. “Is there coffee, Mary? I have an appointment with Pitcock later on. Can’t dawdle here all night.”

Lee looked relieved as Mary’s face relaxed and she smiled a genuine smile and stood up. “Sorry, Eliot. Pie? Cherry pie and coffee coming up.”

They all helped her clear the table and ate pie and drank coffee. Mary refilled the cups, then asked, “Are you quitting, Eliot? Is that why you have to see Mr. Pitcock?”

“Mary!” Lee looked at Eliot and shrugged eloquently. Eliot laughed.

“No, dear heart, I’m not quitting. In fact I might write a book for the old goat.”

Mary looked disappointed. “She thinks that if you’d just quit then the whole thing will fold and I won’t have to actually do anything,” Lee said.

“You really want to go, don’t you?” Eliot asked her.

“I was willing to stay, wasn’t I, Lee? I never mentioned leaving, did I? But now, after this week, I’m afraid and I don’t know why. I don’t like that.”