Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

“No, no!” cried Miss Lira, but Miss Kira had already taken my sample ring, the setting scrambled to erase the last customer’s residual charge.

You have the choice of ten scenes. No two persons will see the same thing, of course, but the parameters remain fairly constant. Further choices on request. Sound, smell, taste, touch, and kinesthesia optional. We are strictly prohibited from employing illegal settings or the use of variable condensers with fluctuating parameters. Tampering with the machinery is punishable by law.

“But it’s so hard!” said Miss Kira in surprise. “And it’s not real at all!” That always reassures them. At first.

It takes considerable effort to operate the Circle of Illusion even with mechanical aid. Voltage beyond that required for threshold stimulation is banned by law; even when employed, it does not diminish the necessity for effort, but in fact increases it proportionately. No more than in life, ladies, can you get something for nothing.

Practice makes perfect.

Miss Kira, as I knew she would, had chosen a flowery meadow with a suggestion of honeymoon; Miss Lira chose a waterfall in a glade. Neither had put in a Man, although an idealized figure of a Man is standard equipment for our pastoral choices (misty, idealized, in the distance, some even see him with wings) and I don’t imagine either sister would ever get much closer.

Miss Lira said they actually had a niece who was actually married to a man.

Miss Kira said a half-niece.

Miss Lira said they had a cousin who worked in the children’s nursery with real children and they had holidays coming and if I use a variable condenser, what’s it to you?

Behind me, though I cannot imagine why, is a full-length mirror, and in this piece of inconstancy I see myself as I was when I left home tonight, or perhaps not, I don’t remember: beautiful, chocolate-colored, naked, gold braided into my white hair. Behind me, bats’ wings.

A mirror, ladies, produces a virtual image, and so does the Device.

Bats’ faces.

Hermaphroditic.

It is no more addicting than thought.

Little snakes waving up from the counter, a forest of them. Unable to stand the sisters’ eyes swimming behind their glasses, myopic Flora and Dora, I changed the office for them, gave them a rug, hung behind them on the wall original Rembrandts, made them younger, erased them, let the whole room slide, and provided for Dora a bedroom beyond the travel office, a bordello in white and gold baroque, embroidered canopy, goldfish pool, chihuahuas on the marble and bats in the belfry.

I have two heads.

Flora’s quite a whore.

The younger sister, not quite willing to touch the ring again, said they’d think about it and Kira, in a quarrel that must have gone back years, began in a low, vapid whisper—

Why, they’re not bats at all, I said, over at the nearest vitryl panel; I was mistaken , and Lira, Don’t open that! We’ll suffocate!

No one who is sane, of course, opens anything any more into that hell outside, but this old, old, old place had real locks on the vitryl and real seams between, and a narrow balcony where someone had gone out perhaps fifty years ago (in a diving suit) to admire the updrafts between the dead canyons where papers danced on the driving murk and shapes fluttered between the raw lights; one could see several streets over to other spires, other shafts, the hurricane tearing through the poisoned air. Nighttime makes a kind of inferno out of this and every once in a while someone decides on a gaudy exit: the lungs eaten away, the room reeking of hydrosulfurous acid, torn paper settling on the discolored rug.

When you have traveled in the tubes as much as I have, when you have seen the playground in Antarctica time after time, when your features have melted enough between black and brown and white, man and woman, as plastic as the lazy twist of a thought, you get notions. You get ideas. I saw once in a much more elegant office building a piece of polished wood, so large, so lovely, a curve fully six feet long and so beautiful that if you could have made out of that wood an idea and out of that idea a bed, you could have slept on that bed. When you put your hand on the vitryl panels at night, the heat makes your hand sweat onto the surface; my hand’s melted through many times, like oil on water. I stood before the window, twisting shapes for fun, seeing myself stand on the narrow balcony, bored with Kira and Lira, poor Kira, poor Lira, poor as-I-once-was, discussing whether they can afford it.

“... an outlet for creativity . . .”

“. . . she said it’s only ...”

What effort it takes, and what an athlete of illusion you become! able to descend to the bottom of the sea (where we might as well be, come to think of it), to the manless moon, to the Southern Hemisphere where the men stay, dreaming about us; but no, they did away with themselves years ago, they were inefficient, the famous Blank and Blank (both men) saw that men were inefficient and did themselves in (I mean all the men except themselves) in blank-blank. Only three percent of the population male, my word!

“. . . legal . . .”

“. . . never . . .”

“Don’t!” cried Miss Kira.

They know what I’m going to do. Ever since I found out those weren’t bats’ faces. As Miss Kira and Miss Lira sign the contract (thumbsy-up, thumbsy-down) I wrench the lock off the vitryl and squeeze through, what a foul, screaming wind! shoving desperately at the panels, and stumble off the narrow, railless balcony, feeling as I go my legs contract, my fingers grow, my sternum arch like the prow of a boat, little bat-man-woman with sketchy turned-out legs and grasping toes, and hollow bones and fingers down to my ankles, a thumb-and-forefinger grasper at the end of each wing, and that massive wraparound of the huge, hollow chest, all covered with blond fur; in the middle of it all, sunk between the shoulders, is the human face. Miss Kira would faint. I would come up to Miss Lira’s waist. Falling down the nasty night air until I shrug up hard, hard, hard, into a steep upward glide and ride down the currents of hell past the man-made cliff where Kira and Lira, weeping with pain, push the vitryl panel back into place. The walls inside are blackening, the fake marble floor is singed. It is comfy-cold, it is comfy-nice, I’m going to mate in midair, I’m going to give shuddering birth on the ledge of a cliff, I’m going to scream at the windows when I like. They found no corpse, no body.

Kira and Lira, mouths like O’s, stare out as I climb past. They do a little dance.

Tampering with the machinery is punishable by law, says Kira.

Oh my dear, we’ll tinker a bit, says Lira.

And so they will.

It’s happened again, I’m in bed with a stranger. Don’t know her name. If I want to remember the curve of the bottom of her breasts, the way they rest on her ribs or rise to her shoulder, I’ll have to reach out and touch them. Do I know her? She has a name, an address (which she refuses to give me), three telephone numbers at which I might reach her. Along with the last she has given me a chart showing the time of day I’m most likely to find her at each number. She has long hair. She is wearing a tight violet dress. Her eyes are violet. She is overweight but that’s something you always forget until you look at her again.

Also: I am being pursued. I saw the frost of his breath on the glass just a moment ago. Her lover, husband, father, a mutual friend? How am I to know? even that there is a connection? Each time I try and confront him, he flees. Last week in the press of crowds at 14th Street he took the only way open to him and was crushed to death in the doors of one of the uptown trains. His last words were I kept my promise, Tell them. My suit is still stained with his blood. And for a moment I envied the dead man: he kept his promise, I have to live up to mine. The next morning there was a certain wariness to his movements.