Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

“She seems to think this is important. Something she has to finish before she becomes a mother and stops for a year or two.”

Wymann looked at him sharply. “Is she taking that attitude?”

“You first. Why are you out here? What’s wrong with the master plan for the emerging superman?”

“He’s here because people aren’t dying any more. Are they, Dr. Wymann?”

Julia stood in the doorway in her stocking feet, stripping off the poncho. “You have to do things now, don’t you, Doctor? Really do things, not just sit back and watch.”

“There is some sort of underground then, isn’t there? That’s why you two made the grand tour, organizing an underground.”

Julia laughed and pulled off her sweater. “I’ll make us all some coffee.”

Martie watched her. “A final solution, Doctor. You have to come up with a new final solution, don’t you? And you find it difficult.”

“Difficult, yes. But not impossible.”

Martie laughed. “Excuse me while I shave. Make yourself comfortable. Won’t take five minutes.”

He went through the kitchen and caught Julia from behind, holding her hard. “They’ll have to change everything if that’s true. They won’t all go along with murder, wholesale murder. This will bring it out into the open where we can decide. …”

Julia pulled away and turned to look at him squarely. “This isn’t the end. Not yet. There’s something else to come… .”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I just know that this isn’t the end, not yet. Not like this. Martie, have you decided? It’s killing you. You have to decide.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it will be decided for me. I’m going up to shave now.”

She shook her head. “You’ll have to make the decision. Within a week, I think.”

“Dr. Wymann, why is it that proportionately more doctors than laymen are suicides?” Julia poured coffee and passed the sugar as she spoke. “And why are there more alcoholics and drug-users among the medical profession?”

Wymann shrugged. “I give up, why?”

“Oh, because doctors as a group are so much more afraid of death than anyone else. Don’t you think?”

“Rather simplistic, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Often the most unrelenting drives are very simplistic.”

“Julia, you have to come in to be examined. You know that. There could be unsuspected complications that might endanger the baby.”

“I’ll come in, as soon as I finish what I’m doing. A few more days. I’ll check in then if you like. But first I have to finish. It’s Martie’s Christmas present.”

Martie stared at her. Christmas. He’d forgotten.

She smiled. “It’s all right. The baby is my present. The sculpture is yours.”

“What are you doing? Can I see?” Wymann asked. “Although, remember, I like understandable things. Nothing esoteric or ambiguous.”

“This one is as simple … as a sunset. I’ll go get my boots.”

As soon as she had left them, Wymann stood up and paced back and forth in quick nervous strides. “I bet it reeks of death. They’re all doing it. A worldwide cultural explosion, that’s what the Sunday Times called it. All reeking of death.”

“Ready? You’ll need warm clothes, Doctor.”

Muffled in warm garments, they walked together to the barn. The work was ten feet high in places. The quartzite was gone, out of sight. Martie didn’t know what she had done with it. What remained was rough sandstone, dull red, with yellow streaks. It looked very soft. She had chiseled and cut into it what looked like random lines. At first glance it seemed to be a medieval city, with steeples, flattened places, roofs. The illusion of a city faded, and it became a rough mountainous landscape, with stiletto-like peaks, unknowable chasms. Underwater mountains, maybe. Martie walked around it. He didn’t know what it was supposed to be. He couldn’t stop looking, and, strangely, there was a yearning deep within him. Dr. Wymann stood still, staring at it with a puzzled expression. He seemed to be asking silently, “This is it? Why bother?”

“Martie, hold my hand. Let me explain. …” Her hand was cold and rough in his. She led him around it and stopped at the side that the west light hit. “It has to be displayed outside. It should rest on a smooth black basalt base, gently curved, not polished, but naturally smooth. I know that they can be found like that, but I haven’t been able to yet. And it should weather slowly. Rain, snow, sun, wind. It shouldn’t be protected from anything. If people want to, they should be able to touch it. Sculpture should be touched, you know. It’s a tactile art. Here, feel …” Martie put his hand where she directed and ran his fingers up one of the sharply rising peaks. “Close your eyes a minute,” she said. “Just feel it.” She reached out for Wymann’s hand. He was standing a foot or slightly more to her left. He resisted momentarily, but she smiled and guided his hand to the work.

“You can see that there’s order,” she said, “even if you can’t quite grasp it. Order covering something else …”

Martie didn’t know when she stopped talking. He knew, his hand knew, what she meant. Order over something wild and unordered, ungraspable. Something unpredictable. Something that began to emerge, that overcame the order with disorder, distorting the lines. The feeling was not visual. His hand seemed to feel the subliminally skewed order. Rain. Snow. Wind. The imperfections became greater, a deliberate deterioration of order, exposing the inexplicable, almost fearful inside. A nightmare quality now, changing, always changing, faster now. Grosser changes. A peak too thin to support itself, falling sideways, striking another lesser peak, cracking off the needle end of it. Lying at the base, weathering into sand, running away in a stream of red-yellow water, leaving a clean basalt base. Deeper channels being cut into the thing, halving it, dividing it into smaller and smaller bits, each isolated from the rest, each yielding to the elements, faster, faster. A glimpse of something hard and smooth, a gleam of the same red and yellow, but firm, not giving, not yielding. A section exposed, the quartzite, polished and gleaming. Larger segments of it now, a corner, squared, perfect, sharp. Even more unknowable than the shifting sandstone, untouched by the erosion.

But it would go, too. Eventually. Slowly, imperceptibly it would give. And ultimately there would be only the basalt, until in some distant future it would be gone too.

Martie opened his eyes, feeling as if he had been standing there for a very long time. Julia was watching him serenely. He blinked at her. “It’s good,” he said. Not enough, but he couldn’t say anything more then.

Wymann pulled his hand from the stone and thrust it deep inside his pocket. “Why build something that you know will erode away? Isn’t it like ice sculpture, only slower?”

“Exactly like it. But we will have a chance to look at it before it is gone. And feel it.” She turned toward the door and waited for them to finish looking. “Next year, if you look at it, it will be different, and ten years from now, and twenty years from now. Each change means something, you know. Each change will tell you something about yourself, and your world, that you didn’t know before.” She laughed. “At least, I hope so.”

They were silent as they returned to the house and the dancing fire. Martie made drinks for Wymann and himself, and Julia had a glass of milk. Wymann drank his Scotch quickly. He had opened his coat but hadn’t taken it off. “It reeks of death,” he said suddenly. “Death and decay and dissolution. All the things we are dedicated to eradicating.”

“And mystery and wonder and awe,” Martie said. “If you also kill those things, what’s left? Will man be an animal again, clever with his hands and the tools he’s made, but an animal without a dream. Inward that’s what it means. Isn’t that right, Julia? Inward is the only direction that matters.”