Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

It was not merely that Crane Wessleman was rich and widowed, although it was a great deal that. She liked him, knowing happily and secretly as she did that he was hard to like; and, deeper, there was the thought of something else: of opening a new chapter, a wedding, flowers, a new last name, a not dying as she was. And then four months after the last game Crane Wessleman himself called her.

He asked her to have dinner with him, at his home; but he asked in a way that made it clear he assumed she possessed means of transportation of her own. It was to be in a week.

She borrowed, reluctantly and with difficulty, certain small items of wearing apparel from distant friends, and when the evening came she took a bus. You and I would have called it a helicopter, you understand, but Sonya called it a bus, and the company that operated it called it a bus, and most important, the driver called it a bus and had the bus driver mentality, which is not a helicopter pilot mentality at all. It was the ascendant heir of those cheap wagons Boswell patronized in Germany. Sonya rode for half because she had a Golden Age card, and the driver resented that.

When she got off the bus she walked a considerable distance to get to the house. She had never been there before, having always met Crane Wessleman at the former partner’s, and so she did not know exactly where it was although she had looked it up on a map. She checked the map from time to time as she went along, stopping under the infrequent streetlights and waving to the television cameras mounted on them so that if the policeman happened to be looking at the time and saw her he would know that she was all right.

Crane Wessleman’s house was large, on a lot big enough to be called an estate without anyone’s smiling; the house set a hundred yards back from the street. A Tudor house, as Sonya remarked with some pleasure—but there was too much shrubbery, and it had been allowed to grow too large. Sonya thought roses would be nicer, and as she came up the long front walk she put pillar roses on the gas lantern posts Crane Wessleman’s dead wife had caused to be set along it. A brass plate on the front door said:

C. WESSLEMAN

AND

KITTEE

and when Sonya saw that she knew.

If it had not been for the long walk she would have turned around right there and gone back down the path past the gas lamps; but she was tired and her legs hurt, and perhaps she would not really have gone back anyway. People like Sonya are often quite tough underneath.

She rang the bell and Kittee opened the door. Sonya knew, of course, that it was Kittee, but perhaps you or I might not. We would have said that the door was opened by a tall, naked girl who looked a good deal like Julie Newmar; a deep-chested, broad-shouldered girl with high cheekbones and an unexpressive face. Sonya had forgotten about Julie Newmar; she knew that this was Kittee, and she disliked the thing, and the name Crane Wessleman had given it with the whining double e at the end. She said in a level, friendly voice, “Good evening, Kittee. My name is Sonya. Would you like to smell my fingers?” After a moment Kittee did smell her fingers, and when Sonya stepped through the door Kittee moved out of the way to let her in. Sonya closed the door herself and said, “Take me to Master, Kittee,” loudly enough, she hoped, for Crane Wessleman to hear. Kittee walked away and Sonya followed her, noticing that Kittee was not really completely naked. She wore a garment like a short apron put on backward.

The house was large and dirty, although the air filtration units would not allow it to be dusty. There was an odor Sonya attributed to Kittee, and the remains of some of Crane Wessleman’s meals, plates with dried smears still on them, put aside and forgotten.

Crane Wessleman had not dressed, but he had shaved and wore a clean new robe and stockings as well as slippers. He and Sonya chatted, and Sonya helped him unpack the meal he had ordered for her and put it in the microwave oven. Kittee helped her set the table, and Crane Wessleman said proudly, “She’s wonderful, isn’t she.” And Sonya answered, “Oh yes, and very beautiful. May I stroke her?” and ran her fingers through Kittee’s soft yellow hair.

Then Crane Wessleman got out a copy of a monthly magazine called Friends , put out for people who owned them or were interested in buying, and sat beside Sonya as they ate and turned the pages for her, pointing out the ads of the best producers and reading some of the poetry put at the ends of the columns. “You don’t know, really, what they were anymore,” Crane Wessleman said. “Even the originators hardly know.” Sonya looked at the naked girl and Crane Wessleman said, “I call hear Kittee, but the germ plasm may have come from a gibbon or a dog. Look here.”

Sonya looked, and he showed her a picture of what seemed to be a very handsome young man with high cheekbones and an unexpressive face. “Look at that smile,” Crane Wessleman said, and Sonya did and noticed that the young man’s lips were indeed drawn back slightly, “Kittee does that sometimes too,” Crane Wessleman said. Sonya was looking at him instead of at Kittee, noticing how the fine lines had spread across his face and the way his hands shook.

After that Sonya came about once a week for a year. She learned the way perfectly, and the bus driver grew accustomed to her, and she invented a pet of her own, an ordinary imaginary chow dog, so that she could take a certain amount of leftover meat home.

The next to last time, Crane Wessleman pointed out another very handsome young man in Friends, a young man who cost a great deal more than Sonya’s income for a year, and said, “After I die I am going to see to it that my executor buys one like this for Kittee. I want her to be happy.” Then, Sonya felt, he looked at her in a most significant way; but the last time she went he seemed to have forgotten all about it and only showed Sonya a photograph he had taken of himself with Kittee sitting beside him very primly, and the remote control camera he had used, and told her how he had ordered it by mail.

The next week Crane Wessleman did not call at all, and when it was two days past the usual time Sonya tried to call him, but no one answered. Sonya got her purse, and boarded the bus, and searched the area around Crane Wessleman’s front door until she found a key hidden under a stone beneath some of the shrubbery,,

Crane Wessleman was dead, sitting in his favorite chair. He had been dead, Sonya decided, for several days, and Kittee had eaten a portion of his left leg. Sonya said aloud, “You must have been very hungry, weren’t you, Kittee, locked in here with no one to feed you.”

In the kitchen she found a package of frozen mouton Sainte-Menebould , and when it was warm she unwrapped it and set it on the dining-room table, calling, “Kittee! Kittee! Kittee!” and wondering all the time whether Crane Wessleman might not have left her a small legacy after all.

After months in flight, the crew of the merchant ship was happy to land almost anywhere: Galen was an exception. When they learned that a repair stop on the planet was unavoidable, morale dropped. “Solitary confinement” was the captain’s wry comment to Lorn Newent, the other unmarried crewman. Lorn, the ship’s communications man, contacted the stationmaster just as he had three years before. He focused the image on the screen.

“Hello...”

This time the station operator was female. She looked very young, and pretty enough for Lorn to term fragile. He usually described her race as scrawny nondescripts.

“Communicator Newent. Have received your request: permission granted. We sympathize with your mechanical difficulties. Three weeks is an extended tour; however, regulations must be maintained. Please order the crew to remain within the restricted area. We apologize for the limited facilities, but unfortunately no more space is available. Any requests may be registered with me. We will, of course, expect reimbursement for the extra two-week occupancy.”