Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

The scene is the belly of one of the orbiting whales. It is a pleasant scene, because this particular whale is nearing apotheosis, which is to say that most of its honeycombed interior has been converted into compartments, holds, corridors, and companionways, that its fissured and meteor-cratered skin has been inlaid with numerous portscopes and burnished to the smoothness of a woman’s thigh, that its asymmetrical lines have been made symmetrical, that locks have been installed in its transsteel flanks, and that artificial gravity and a thermostatically controlled atmosphere now supplant near weightlessness and an absolute-zero vacuum,.

An alien image has come unbidden into Starfinder’s mind and has caused him to pause in the phosphorescent corridor along which he has been walking. The corridor runs the length of the lowest deck and gives access to the two major holds, the machine shop, a dozen compartments, and three storage areas. In addition, it gives access to the drive-tissue chamber where Starfinder has been working all day adapting the whale’s natural propulsion unit to an outside power source. He has been working on the drive tissue ever since conversion began, and it will take him at least another week to finish the job.

The Image that has appeared in his mind can be indicated thus:

((*))

Starfinder is nonplussed. He has been thinking of the angel Gloria Wish, and he can see no connection between ((*)) and his thoughts.

Presently ((*)) fades away, and he resumes walking down the corridor toward the companionway which leads up to the main deck and the boarding locks. The twelve-hour workday is done, and like Jonah he is eager to be regurgitated from the belly of the whale; eager to see the angel and ride down with her on a starbeam to the city he has come to call Home.

Perhaps this is why the image has appeared in his mind. Because he is tired from too much work and too much Gloria Wish. Perhaps this is why it appears again, this time in duplicate:

((*)) ((*))

Again Starfinder comes to a halt. He is abreast of the machine-shop door; the base of the companionway is just around a bend in the corridor. He knows fear now, as well as mystification. He has had good reason once before to doubt his sanity; now he doubts it again.

The double ((*)) does not remain long, but no sooner does it fade than it is replaced by another. This one is slightly different:

((*))

Moreover, words accompany it; but the words come from within Starfinder’s mind:

Morning a thousand Roses brings, you say; Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday? And this first Summer month that brings the Rose Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.

The first image, then, denotes a rose; the second, two roses; and the third, a dead rose and a living one. Starfinder’s subconscious knows what the hieroglyphs stand for, if Starfinder does not.

His subconscious supplys yet another clue:

Roses are blue.

Starfinder is staring at the machine-shop door now. The machine shop formerly constituted the whale’s ganglion chamber. Here in its ganglion the whale kept its memories; here the whale thought its thoughts; here the whale made its decisions; here the whale dreamed its dreams. And the ganglion, like all such ganglions, was shaped like an enormous rose—

An enormous blue rose.

It makes sense now. Roses are blue.

Breaking free from his inertia, Starfinder rounds the bend in the corridor and starts up the companionway steps. By the time he arrives on the main deck the heiroglyphs have faded completely from his mind. None come to take their place; nevertheless, he is still shaken when he joins the other converters, all clad in gray coveralls like his own. One of them is the shift leader. He stands nearest the locks, awaiting like the others the arrival of the angel Gloria Wish. Starfinder does not like him. The shift leader is aggressive, domineering, and insensitive. No doubt this is why he is a shift leader.

The arrival of Gloria Wish is greeted with cheers, although she appears every evening at this time to post the watchguard and to take the converters home. Starfinder has slept with her; so have most of the other converters whom she ferries to and from their whales. But with Starfinder it is different, because it is he whom she has chosen to be made 1 with. Her silvery skin-tight coveralls enhance the fullness of her breasts, the paps of which protrude through little peepholes made especially for the purpose. She has wide but wiry hips and long slim legs. Her ageless face is of classic cut; beauty radiates from its smooth clear skin, iridesces in her eyes. Her hair is coiffed to form a sunbright halo round her head.

Not only does she own her own shuttle service, but she is a major stockholder in the company that owns the shipyards. This is not unusual on Altair IV. Terraltairan women have climbed the evolutionary ladder faster than Terraltairan men and during the ascent have acquired not only surpassing beauty but surpassing business acumen as well. Unfortunately, the faster they climbed the more of them fell off, and on Altair IV the males now outnumber the females four to one, which makes premarital promiscuity a must. Few men on Altair IV have the good fortune to be able to call a woman exclusively their own, as Starfinder shortly will be able to do. In less than a week now one of his ribs will be removed and fashioned into a circlet for Gloria Wish’s neck as a symbol of their 1-ness.

The converters file through the boarding tube into the shuttleship, and the watchguard takes over the whale. The angel sends the little ship dropping dizzily toward the blue-greenness of Altair IV; on all sides pulse the stars, and up above the whale turns into an ovoid moon; down, down, down falls the ship out of heaven, and the cities of the plain can be seen sparkling beyond Altair TV’s twilight belt, and now the belt advances to meet the plummeting ship, and there, advancing also, is Starfinder’s city; but he has no eyes for it, he is looking up through the overhead spacescope at the dead whales in the sky and at the stars beyond them blooming in the spacetime night. In the vast distances forget-me-nots grow, and parsecs to their right glow daffodils; over there are bluebells, lilies of the valley... Someday I will go a-Maying in the heavens—touch a bluebell, breathe the fragrance of a lily, pluck a ((*))...

The angel Gloria Wish sees him home in her late-model flyabout as she does every night. She has offered to buy him a flyabout of his own, but he has refused. This is because he is new to Terraltairan culture and has not wholly accepted its ways. But sooner or later he will accept them.

At the base of the tall bright building where he lives she bids him good-night and tells him she will see him later on after she has totaled the day’s receipts. He waves goodbye to her as she flits away.

His apartment comprises three rooms, but they share a single ceiling, as the partitions are only waist-high. The ceiling is the sky. Like all the other ceilings in the building it is televised from the building’s roof, but the picture is flawless and indistinguishable from the reality. Centered in it at the moment is the faint yellow pinpoint of the Earth Mother. Earth herself of course is not visible, but she can be sensed if not seen. Even Starfinder, who has never laid eyes on her, senses her presence. An umbilical cord light-years long stretches from his navel to her storied shores; like all his contemporaries he is as much of Earth as though he had been born there; they and he are the children of Earth—the inheritors of her ethos.

He undresses, showers, shaves, dons a lounge-around ensemble. He sits down and dials his evening meal. The apartment’s 3V screen has come on the minute he walked in the door; as he dines, he glances at it now and then. In it, a man and a woman are copulating, but he hardly sees them. Instead, he sees the rose—