Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

Proofed By MadMaxAU

Copyright © 1971 by Damon Knight

All rights reserved

Published by arrangement with the editor's agent

Originally published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

SBN 425-02116-5

BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by Berkley Publishing Corporation 200 Madison Avenue New York, N.Y. 10016

BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS ® TM 757,375

BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, FEBRUARY, 1972

In Africa the clouds never cross the sun. Clouds countable changing, racing, dispersing and gathering fill the skies of Africa and yet they never veil the sun. That I read once and believe and the idea attracts me violently. Perpetual sun. Cosmic cosmetic glamorizing protective layer on my grayish hide, sunglasses and bright lipstick, beautiful at a glance. For what enhances the human frame more than color? Deeper than bronze I would bake, for even in England I have achieved miracles of transformation in two days on a withering lawn. And in seven days become bleached beneath the clouds that do most frequently obscure the sun. Yes.

Now when I was in a bar in Greenwich Village, sitting shivering in the heat of a New York August, this because I was wet to the skin with the waters of Washington Square fountains, the temptation to douse myself publicly and thoroughly having proved too great and sudden an onslaught on my sexual mores (and what else would have prompted a woman to wet herself to the skin whilst several hundred hippies in various states of degradation watched and whilst her male companion watched unmoved except for a faint startlement appearing in his otherwise controlled pale eyes), shivering all the more violently because not only was the bar too efficiently air-conditioned so that even the sweat of normal people in the bar dried before it had properly beaded beneath the arm but the man I was listening to spoke of Africa. He did not tell me that the sun never hides behind clouds, he did not mention the weather much at all, but mostly the beautiful scenery in East Africa, most particularly Kenya. I manifested as one born under blazing sun. In any other climate such people shiver. Some poor wretches arrive in England with the sun in their blood and never feel warm again. Though I have not touched the tropics in my feeble wanderings I felt that I had the sun in my blood. I thought: how could my blood congeal with benison continuous?

Outside my window now, in England, the skies are clear, the sun is yellow on the white garden rocks and birds and butterflies are active. Second flowerings occur. Almost November. Exquisite, excellent, and, in case the nights prove cool, the house is centrally heated. Yet my marrow is solid and my breath steams and icicles, crystallizes on the rim of a cup. I sweat rime, I do not bathe but crack open my shell and step out on the shattered fragments, clean, cold. I wept last night and Rhinestones woke me, embedded in my spine, my own tears taken shape, sharp. And my hair, oh that, it is like the winter lawn cutting—did you know that to cut the lawn with the hoar frost on it is good for the grass? Snap and tinkle goes my brush and little fragments that I must remember to look at under a microscope fall conspicuously onto my black-clad shoulders. And my teeth how they ache at contact with water, how the brush scratches and brazes down into the soft nerve with burning cold, how I could scream into the blue handbasin if only I did not fear I should strike the right note and crash it into splinters. And I am menstruating rubies and bloodstones and pink opals. At first I thought it was sacramental wine, it was so thin and clear and mean but it froze solid and lost its odor in the mineral world. So I have to take care of my fingernails and drum up a little warm breath now and again to soften them lest they break away. It is getting harder and harder to breathe warm, it is getting harder and harder to breathe at all.

Africa, you would thaw me out I know. And yet I fear to live in you, your men are far too tempting and I can always resist temptation nowadays, I have learned strength and the consistency of moral fiber and the value of faithfulness, but not without enormous pain. I am a great one for suffering. People have been known to despise me for it, and also, but less often, love me because of that capacity.

It was nice to hear David talk of East Africa.

“Farms of white set in trees, each more perfect than the one before, it was too much for me.”

“Was it David?” I said. And I further enquired how it could be that he lived in squalid New York when the best places in the world were obtainable to him. He had hitchhiked around the entire world, why not go again?

OH HE HAD TO LIVE IN NEW YORK TO KEEP HIS HEAD STRAIGHT

“I see.” And thought that Africa would straighten my head, that it would, and true. Not having at that moment thought about the frustration of seeing a thousand ideal lovers every time one went out to buy a bit of cheese. It would be too much, one’s head would not only grow askew, it would burst, ripe with substances more proper to other body-parts. Thoughts of Africa and of a rather dull party I attended in New York, perhaps the only dull hours I spent there. I am reminded of an African ballet we all went to see many years ago in the North of England. The dancers had blue-painted nipples and excited my senses more than anything had for months. Afterwards in the pub I fell to dreaming of fancy-dress parties in my studio, everyone wearing raffia and blue poster-paint, dancing wildly until Sunday dawn. Aloud I said:

“We’ll definitely have to have an African party.” The place was silenced until they comprehended.

“I thought you said ‘a fuckin’ party’ for a moment.” Perhaps I did, are not such floating fragments on the sea of the unconscious called Freudian ships?

“Oh David, tell me about it,” I said, shuddering so hard I could not hold my glass. “Did you go to the Mountains of the Moon?”

“Yes I did, of course I did, and the Great Rift Valley.” And he told me of the high craters set about with giant weeds and sitting numerous on the ground dappled panthers naked and slithery in the moonlight; plateaux unexplored and the metallic light that would not keep the head straight.

Oh Jesus Christ I could have wept into my beer.

“You are shivering,” said Tom who is an observant fellow, he being a professional writer.

“Yes, I was watching my limbs shaking, it is interesting, I cannot think why I shake quite so much, I am perfectly relaxed.”

He left the bar to go and purchase a secondhand chair which later proved too large to go into his apartment without removing the door which might in turn ruin the doorbell connection. I thought of him lonely and unvisited, sitting in his apartment in the chair, wondering if the chair had been a jinx on all his friendships. The fact of him having a telephone spoiled that joke, oh surely, they would call him on the phone? But if all one’s means of communication fail, do people come and tell you about it?

It is nice to arrive at a destination and discover that it is the one place on the planet that will KEEP THE HEAD STRAIGHT. I found that New York was that very destination to me once I had taken a few deep breaths and looked around. I loved it, and strangely, it loved me back. I felt blessed walking the streets, I felt warm and alive and I could find my tongue, it was like being reborn, I had an answer for everyone and I also had things to say from myself. Whoever that was.

There was a hippopotamus in a pond on a cold day, and we approached it eagerly and stood amazed as it explained to us about itself. Our children were entranced that a hippo could talk. Its voice was very deep and very slow and it opened its mouth with apparent difficulty, slowly and muddily enunciating its likes and dislikes, the name of its natural habitat (Africa) and a warning about its powerful jaws which were capable of breaking a man into two pieces, although it seldom did so. Oh, hippo from Africa, are you not cold to the bone in that English slime? Where is your mate? When do you mate? How often? Do you wallow in your cool distress and groan and grunt for a suitable mate, do you sublimate your sexual energies by eating salted peanuts thrown by the crowd, producing instead of orgasms enormous stinking farts? Do you long for the sun to bake a crust of mud onto you, do you wish you could jump into the fountains of Washington Square on a hot summer afternoon and get wet through whilst the Americans watched? A hippopotamus in the fountains, what a gas, natural gas, it smells suspiciously like sublimation, exhibitionism. No, no, it is just the hot weather, anyone with the sense would do it, I am now so cool in the breeze it is a delight to be alive. To add to our comforts, let’s have a beer in a bar.