Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

His showering and shaving, his changing his clothes for those of the present fashion, are like adventures, they are so fraught with novelty. The representatives of the Public depart as he performs these private rites, but leaving Mary behind, as she is to escort him to the Academy, with which she seems to have some intimate connection. “Some intimate connection?” Was that a throb of jealousy? Drying his face with a towel, he pleasantly contemplates this dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty. She is accessible; this is certainly the appropriate time and place; and yet he abstains. His refraining from any hasty physical grappling is not only a sign to himself and to her of his easy confidence but preserves a little longer that fragile and somewhat tentative charm that plays about the moment and their conversation together.

She makes several laughing remarks to the effect that she is well familiar with Cargill, that she is acquainted with Cargill’s dark and stormy moods, that Cargill would be much improved by lots of fresh air and purer sunlight — before he quite makes out that she is talking about a place. What place? One of the two planets of Proxima Centauri. Why, yes — hadn’t he understood? There have been some other such flights, several hundred to the Alpha Centauri cluster alone, because of advances in space travel. Almost everyday affairs, you know.

The ground opens silently at his feet. There is a black void one step before him — a piece of that same dark emptiness into which he has dropped so many years of his life. His accomplishment, then, is nothing, just one of a number of routine transactions, gone stale and familiar. Or worse than nothing: for his heroic effort is now qualified by irony and pity. They will feel pity for him! They will be kind to him! The cordial and attentive faces of this morning flash before him suddenly as images of sly mockery. But, no — he desperately grasps at something: there is no mistaking the expression on the girl’s face. He knows that look. There can be no counterfeiting that. She has turned toward him that spontaneous, steady, observant gaze of admiration, that look, as unironic as an appetite, which a woman directs toward a man who connects her somehow with a larger life, a life of spirit and imagination. Before the magnificent fact of her countenance his inward tremor pales into a delusion. Somehow he is still what he wanted to be. His heroism is undivided and unqualified. The awful hole at his feet closes as silently and invisibly as it had opened.

She never knew it had been there; and he, his conversation becoming lighter and more effortlessly charming by the moment, doesn’t tell her. They go on to the Presentation together. They enter what appears to be a large auditorium from the rear and pass into what he recognizes as the wings of a stage. And then he hears it. The audience. Breathing, stirring, talking. . but not, it takes him a puzzled moment to realize, coughing. A man has moved forward to greet them, a pleasant and powerful man whom Mary introduces as Browning, and who is to introduce him to his public. As Browning and he shake hands, Cargill glances out onto the stage — and smiles. For sitting on the stage are the old familiar wooden chairs, two of them, facing the audience with their old familiar patient expectant air.

His introducer, smiling, touches him on the shoulder and leads the way onto the stage. As Cargill comes out from the wings there is a sudden storm of thunderous applause. The audience rises at him. He is stunned by the size and splendor of the gathering. It is not so much a crowd as a great concourse, a galaxy, of distinguished and distinguishable individuals, brilliantly dressed, gaily alive. He feels a curious movement in his scalp, as if the top of his head were coming off. He walks to the chairs, bows and seats himself on one of them as the beaming Browning steps to the podium. The applause is warm and prolonged — twice or thrice Browning tries to speak, without success — and it dies reluctantly.

“We are gathered here,” Browning begins — the acoustics are perfect; Cargill might have heard a whisper in the gallery—”we are gathered here to speak with a man who comes to us from the past, a man who was born almost one hundred and forty years ago. But he is more than a survivor. He is our vinculum with the past. We honor the bravery and dedication which have made it possible for him to appear before us as a personal representative and a witness. Many of us have eagerly awaited his return for decades, because we are sure that he has much to tell us. We are sure that he can tell us much that would otherwise have been lost.” There is the slightest stirring in the gathering, to which the speaker responds. “Yes, the broad outlines of the man we so much admire we already know. The genius, the daring, the shaping spirit exploring and appropriating the world — these large things, I say, we already know. But where our hearts are, every fact, no matter how small, is of importance; every fact speaks to us. And Major Ralph Cargill — for who knows the facts better than he? — is here to tell us of them.”

Cargill, comfortably at home in his prominent position, listens to this flattering rhetoric without missing a nuance of the audience.

“There are spirits,” continues the orator, “which have enlarged the boundaries of the physical world by their aggressive daring. Our guest is one of those. And there are others, those few and precious others, who have enlarged the world by enlarging our lives, who have claimed for the imaginative life what had previously seemed inaccessible to it, or not worthy of its attention, as not offering the suitable objects and occasions for feeling — the everyday, the routine, the necessary.

Cargill glances at the speaker, as if he has not quite followed the line of thought here.

“And Ralph Cargill means so much to us today because of his past connection with such a spirit. For he, as we all know, was the closest personal friend of the greatest novelist of the late twentieth century. Yes, he has seen Limbert plain.”

The speaker, on saying this, indicates the guest with a gracious and genial gesture; but glancing reflexively in the same direction, freezes — with his arm still outstretched. For the honored guest’s face is contorted and from his open mouth there come uncouth sounds, seemingly torn from him and at first unrecognizable.

The audience subsides into silence. There is an utter cessation of noise. More than three thousand persons watch as on the stage Major Ralph Cargill, the hero of space, the pioneer of Alpha Centauri, his body taut and rigid, his head thrown back, astonishes their ears with a loud and roaring laughter.

There are always the helping hands of my sisters and everywhere the rustle of soft silk and the tinkle of iced drinks, so being blind is no hardship. All is dark and calm and cool with the flutter of fans. Hands touch me, guide me. My sisters talk in soft voices and sometimes they sing. Their hands are thin and dry. Their long fingernails seldom scratch, only now and then when they can’t help it.

Sometimes I say, “I wish I could see,” yet never really wanting to, for I have all I could wish for now. I don’t need to see with their hands always about me and their fans fanning me. “Better not to see,” they answer. “The world is a black place. The days are sharp with thorns. Better not to see the world,” and they sing me a slow song.

Mara says the world is blacker even than anything I see now, but I don’t believe it. Also I don’t see black always, but red sometimes and sometimes purple stripes, sometimes white pricks of light.

Mara and Netta take me to the banks of the stream to listen to the water. “It’s nice to hear water over stones,” they say, and, “sound is better than sight.” Mara combs my hair and Netta washes my feet. I lie on my side with my knees drawn up and play with my blunted daggers, thick as fingers on the string of my belt. I put my hands down sometimes to rub my knees or across to feel how my breasts have grown. I think: There’s a change coming. I’m nervous. I’m not sure, today, if I like my hair combed or not or my feet washed. Perhaps I do. Perhaps I don’t. (One of these days the daggers won’t be so blunt. I wonder if, under their thick shells, there might not be needle points, with poison perhaps, to kill or put asleep. I hope so, but what a strange hope and what a strange thought that comes from nowhere unless from the sound of the pines which also have needles.) This time I won’t tell Mara my thoughts, but shall I tell her to stop combing? I don’t believe I can ask it gently. I don’t feel gentle. I turn onto my other side. By mistake I kick Netta.