Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

Ceedeesy, as I said, was old. So old that he could no longer be repaired sufficiently for active service, which was why we youngsters received the benefit of the deep wisdom he had won during his decades in the wild parts of the world. I recall his saying, “How many times, Eyebem, I’ve seen the trumpeter swans black against the morning sun!” then the little pause as he searched—the pause that told of hysteresis gathering on his aging mind like cobwebs. “A hundred and twenty-three times, Eyebem. That’s an average of 3.8622 times a year, but the hundred and twenty-fourth time will never come for me.”

No. Nor will the first for me.

Ceedeesy skin had yellowed. They said at the crèche that it was an older type of vinyl and that they had since improved the color stability so that our own will be virtually unaffected by the ultraviolet in sunlight, but I suspect that when my crèche-mates are as old as Ceedeesy, their skin too will be yellowed at the back of the neck and the back of the hands, where the harsh noon light will have seen it too often.

It was because his skin was yellowed—or so I used to think—that Ceedeesy never left the compound. I was too young then to know that humans could always identify one of us in a second or two in spite of new skin and different face patterns with each crèche-cycle. Once I persuaded him to go with me to a little store my crèche-mates and I had found scarcely more than a block from the compound gate. It was run by a plump woman who, in order to get our custom, pretended to be too simple to recognize us. I think, too, that having us there attracted tourists for her. At least several times when I was there people-humans, I mean—entered the store and stared, only buying something when the plump woman pressed it into their hands. As young as I was I understood that she was exerting some form of psychological pressure on them.

Since our faces within the crèche-cycle were all the same, this woman pretended to think we were all the same human person, a young man who was her best customer, coming ten or twenty times a day into her little shop. Pretending, as I said, to think we were all the same person, she called us all Mark; one of my crèche-mates had told her to, no doubt; it’s the name stupid youngsters always give when they want to pass, useful because it’s a human name as well as being one of ours. How ironic that seems now.

We would wander about the store one at a time looking at the trusses and contraceptives we had no use for, and pretending to drink a carbonated liquid until the woman, with what I realize now was the most elephantine tact, contrived to turn her back so that we could pour it into a conveniently placed spittoon.

On the one occasion that Ceedeesy accompanied me we sat on high, swiveling stools, sloshing the sweet drinks in our cups and occasionally putting the straws to our mouths. Ceedeesy, I am certain, was only doing it to please me. He must have known I was the only one being deceived, but at the time I believe he felt I was weak in marine biology, and he was ready to take any opportunity to tutor me before the junior examination. The store faced west, and as we talked I watched a spot of sunlight creep along the floor to his feet, then up his faded denim trousers, then past the moose-hide belt he had made himself and over his patched hunting shirt until his face and throat, and the hand that held his cup, were all brightly illuminated. I looked at them then, cracked with minute cracks and discolored, and it was as though Ceedeesy were an old piece of furniture covered with stiff, peeling plastic; it was terrible. I thought then that the woman must know (being too innocent to realize that she had known when the first of us walked in), but she was puttering in the back of the store—waiting, no doubt, for the display at her soda fountain to attract tourists.

To keep myself from staring at Ceedeesy I began watching the crowds on the street outside. In the space of a few minutes a thousand human beings must have passed the store. It made me interrupt Ceedeesy’s lecture to ask, “When it’s so beautiful out there—as the training tapes show and you and the other old ones say—why don’t some of them”—I waved a hand at the window—”go out and look at it? Why send us?”

Ceedeesy laughed. “When I was a youngster, the explanation given was always blackflies.”

“Blackflies?”

“A stinging insect. That explanation’s just a put-off, of course. There are repellents to take care of them.”

“Then-”

“A few of them do go out,” Ceedeesy said. He went on to tell me about a man he had once rescued in the gorge of the Colorado. The man had been a fanatic Ecumenical Neo-Catholic, and had wanted to shoot the river on an air mattress because St. Kennedy the Less was reputed to have done something of the kind. “He was so naive,” Ceedeesy said, “that he called me Ranger the whole time he was with me. Or perhaps he was just afraid of me, out there away from the cities, and thought that was safest. I doubt if there are ten human rangers left in the world now.” A pot-bellied man leading two children came into the store then, pointing at Ceedeesy and me and whispering; we left.

I think that was the only time Ceedeesy went out of the compound. Last month (it seems so much longer) when we graduated he saw us off as we climbed into the trucks that would take us to the launch area. I was on the last truck, and I can still picture him waving as we went through the compound gate. At the time I was eager to leave.

The launch area was a new world to all of us, a huge building filled with bustling humans and machines, with the ships rising outside on columns of fire. I wasn’t thinking about it then, but I suppose it’s having these ships, as well as being able to synthesize food, that have caused human beings to concentrate more and more in the cities. In the old days they had to go out to get from one to another, or at least fly low enough that treetops and lakes became familiar. Now - well, my own experience was typical, I suppose. We were issued tickets, and after several hours (we sat around and compared tickets - the North for me) my ship was called. An enclosed traveling walk put me into it. That was the last I saw of my crèche-mates.

After a few minutes more a human girl with inquisitive fingers came and strapped me to my couch, giving herself a lesson on how our anatomy differs from theirs. Another wait, a recorded announcement, and the ship was rising under me, slowly at first, then faster and faster until the acceleration drove me down against the upholstery so hard I could sense there wasn’t enough strength in my servos to move my arms.

And then nothing. The acceleration faded and I was disoriented, feeling sure that something had gone wrong. After a short time the disoriented feeling changed to one of descending in an elevator. The couch was beneath me again and we were going down. Slowly. There was no sensation of speed.

This time instead of the enclosed walk there was an aluminum ramp; the building was older and the concrete pad small enough for its edges to be visible, but there was no more feeling of having traveled or having been out of the city than I would have gotten from going to the top of the central shop complex in our compound.

For me there was, however, at least one valid difference in emotional quality. I was alone, and as I carried my one small bag into the old and rather grimy port building, I came to realize what that meant. There were several machines moving smoothly over the terrazzo floor, but to these machines I was a man. There were a number of humans waiting for their ships to leave or greeting arriving relatives, but to them I was a machine in spite of my pointed, broad-brimmed field hat and high-laced boots, and they stared.