Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

Enter Gloria Wish, bearing a basket of kisses: “Starfinder, my starfinder—why are you so pale?”

She divests herself of gossamer lace, puts out the lights and sits down on the edge of the bed. Her breasts are like twin pale hills looming above him, and beyond them hovers her face. Its beauty intensifies as he looks up at it, outshines the stars themselves. She is like a wind that has come up from the south, and the wind is warm upon him as the pale hills descend toward his face. Famished, he feeds. And now the wind grows wanner, enveloping him and lifting him into the sky, the stars shine brightly as they pinwheel in the night, and the wind lifts him higher yet, and now he is among the pinwheeling stars. One by one, they nova around his head and fall like flowers past his face, down, down, down ... Dimly he feels the faint prick of the first hypodermic, wakes to the quickening of his blood; the wind, a hot and searing blast now, whips him aloft again, and now there are supernovas in the heavens, he can see them from the Aurignadan plain across which he is walking, weaponless and alone. Once again the great gaunt beast leaps out of the shadows of the copse and bears him to the earth. Once again the Cyclopean jaws spread wide. Foul saliva drips upon his face. His lungs are a holocaust of pain. Growls of anticipation reverberate in the beast’s throat as it lowers its face for the feast.

If he could but move. He tries to break the invisible bonds that hold him helpless to the earth. He tries with every shred of himself, with every molecule, with every atom—break! break! break!...and suddenly there is a terrible rending within him, a spasm of incomprehensible pain, and then his arms are free and rising, his fingers are sinking into the tawny throat. Deeper still, and deeper, and now the growls have given way to screams; but the screams do not remain long, Starfinder’s fingers drive them away. He rises to his feet with a strength that amazes him, and shakes the dying sabertooth as though it were an empty sack. And shakes and chokes and shakes and chokes. Then he realizes that his eyes are tightly closed, and opens them...and sees the face of the angel Gloria Wish, and even then his fingers do not fall away, although the blueness of her face testifies that she is dead.

Up the ladder into heaven climbs Starfinder once again. This time he climbs alone.

He docks the shuttleship against the flank of the whale and passes through the boarding tube into the whale’s belly. He overpowers the watchguard and carries him back into the shuttleship. He programs the automatic pilot to orbit the ship three times and then go in for a landing. He reenters the belly of the whale and proceeds directly to the lowest deck. He waits till his hands have stopped trembling; then he repairs the rose.

After sealing the machine-shop door from the outside, he makes his way to the bridge. He gives the rose time to absorb the energy it needs, then says, “Deorbit, whale —break free!” And the whale disengages itself from the oribital shipyards of Altair IV, which are both a source of beauty and a source of prosperity to the planet’s inhabitants, and parts company forever with its dead brothers.

Ravenous after months of starvation, it feeds upon the dust and debris of space. Its interior phosphorescence takes on a brighter hue; a throbbing comes from below as its drive tissue comes to life. Replenished, the whale floats upon the surface of the sea. “Now,” Starfinder says, and the whale gathers itself for the plunge, “Now, whale.” The throbbing of the drive tissue becomes a powerful pulse. “Dive!” And the whole dives, deep into , and and the go free.

The book lay on a rough stone shelf, its pages and golden script unfaded by the sun. To the near-man crouched over the pages he really could not comprehend, the book seemed the answer to all wants and longings.

He crouched there, drooling slightly from the corners of his mouth. His skin was goosefleshed from the morning cold; his joints were swollen. His name was Brandon.

He went back on his heels to cough and choke. From the cave’s entrance, greasy smoke had backed to fill his lungs and redden his eyes.

Brandon bellowed his anger. “Dammit, Jilly! Put out that fire!”

Slowly the smoke cleared.

But the only vision it had concealed was that of Jilly’s broad face and pendulous udders. Her mouth opened to reveal the yellowed stubs of her teeth.

“Can’t bake a snake without a fire.”

Brandon tried to glare. “ Move the fire, woman! Over to the cliffs edge!”

“You want someone see? You want them come take me?”

Brandon considered. It wasn’t as if a woman were always easy to find, and he would miss Jilly on cold nights. In the old days when the world was not-old, there had been more people than was good for Brandon’s ease of mind. He had been very strong in body, so strong that every male he had challenged had given up what he wanted, whether it was a woman, a haunch of deer or a bigger club. He had taken other men’s women, and their brains. Remembering, Brandon licked his lips. But as the years passed it had become harder to swing the club; the book was safer. He had retreated to this valley and raised his deadfalls.

Jilly was insisting: “Brandon?”

He straightened, his spine making a snapping sound. He tried to walk to the cave’s mouth as a young warrior walks. It was an absurdly short journey.

The tree branch with its knobbed end was leaning against the cave wall at the entrance. He took it up, raised it and feinted at Jilly.

“Move it far enough,” he said. “Far enough; not too far. You hear, woman? Must I bash dirt loose from your ears?”

“N-no, Brandon. I move it.” She was not really frightened of him any longer. Brandon returned to the book.

He had often thought, How to build a better deadfall? How to trap more game? And because he had brooded long over the open pages, answers had come to him. Sometimes they made little sense, those thoughts that tortured his slow mind. Why did it work for him? He did not know. He did not know.

There had been a time:

His young muscles straining against the boulder that had concealed the cave’s entrance. It moved, because everything moved to his shoulder, then. Inside was the book, with all its magic. It took him long to learn its use: concentrating, staring, watching the lines crawl and gradually, gradually become a thought for him. For him only.

He wondered, sometimes, why he stared at the book for so many hours each day. Time not spent picking the fruits and berries that crowded each other in this valley; time not spent in spearing fish in the chuckling stream, or in setting animal traps, or in watching for strangers. It had first occurred to him while staring at the book that he might stay here and protect himself. A new thought: traps for defense. But why should he not eat of certain roots, and why should Jilly eat of them? Why should they make clay vessels to hold their food? Why should they plunge into the stream at least every moon to scrub the dirt from their sides, rubbing a rough, foaming root all over their bodies?

It was unmanly, this slavery to the book. It had kept him from the fresh air, stooped his back, dimmed his eyesight. Because of the book, he had done things that would have provoked the young Brandon to howls of outrage. It had persuaded him to keep but one wife, to send away the children of his own seed and the women he could not protect—send them away from the valley rather than destroy them. Why save a woman for another man? Why raise young if not to satisfy his own appetites?

That reminded him: Jilly had been acting strangely.