Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

It grows dark as I run and then the moon comes up and I run on and on, back where the hills are steeper and there are more rocks and fewer trees. In my shoes I don’t worry about the sharp stones or the long, steep, slippery climbs, for the shoes stick like flies on the wall and I go up or down like a lizard. I’ve never run like this in my life. I’m supple as water. Nothing can stop me. My steps are like wind in summer. My eyes fly with me and they see everything.

Then there’s the steepest climb of all. He can’t be close behind me now, for even I, with my magic shoes, am winded, but I keep on to the top where the trees are twisted and small from the wind. There’s a hollow, soft with pine needles. I lie down there to hide and turn to face the moon. I’m not afraid of the forest or the night. It’s not as dark as blindness.

I lie panting and when my own breathing quiets I hear panting still. I look away from the moon and I see the creature, Man, lying as I lie, exhausted. I watch him until his eyes close, then I close my own. I’ve run a long way. I don’t think or even dream anymore now.

In the first light of dawn the brother to the goat’s ghost touches me on my breast and wakes me. My anger of yesterday has changed. I tremble. Man’s fingers are strong as the golden bed cords. His hands aren’t dry and cool like my sister’s hands. He tears away a green scarf and I feel there, at my neck, the coarse hairs by his mouth. I shut my eyes and for a moment I think that I’m being eaten, but then I feel again that I’m running like a lizard on the mountainsides, and Man breathes like a lion in my ear.

Afterward he rolls away and looks at the morning sky. Quickly, before it’s too late, I smash the other dagger open, grasp the two and stab him twice with each hand. He makes a big bird sound and curls like a caterpillar. Then I rest a little while.

I understand now. Of course the Queen hates me, but she’ll care for me, and all those like me, well. And I hate her, but I don’t feel irritable any longer. I’m happy and relaxed. I rest, and later I hear my sisters coming for me, singing in the hills. How I love my sisters. Someday they might stand by me before the Queen, so I’ll let them comb my hair. I’ll drink milk from their cups and I’ll eat strawberries out of their hands even though I’m no longer blind.

Now Mara and Netta will be the first to come to me. I’ll kiss them and they’ll feed me. We’ll stay on this hill and in this hollow all night and we’ll pray together by moonlight to the goat’s ghost for the birth of a girl.

Robinson had been driving for nearly two days, across Pennsylvania, up through the sooty barrens of New Jersey, pushing both the car and himself with brutal desperation. Exhaustion had stopped him once in a small, rotting coast town, filled with disintegrating clapboard buildings and frightened pale faces peering from behind tight-closed shutters. He had moved slowly through empty streets washed by a tide of crumpled newspapers and dirty candy wrappers, rolling and rustling in the bitter sea wind. On the edge of town he’d found a deserted filling station and gone to sleep there with doors locked and windows rolled up, watching moonlight glint from a rusting gas pump and clutching a tire iron in his hands. He had dreamed of sharks with legs, and once banged his head sharply on the roof as he lunged up out of sleep and away from ripping teeth, pausing and blinking afterward in the hot, sweat-drenched stuffiness of the closed car, listening to the hungry darkness.

In the drab, pale red clarity of morning, a ragged comber of refugees from Atlanta had washed through town and swept him along, metallic driftwood. He had driven all day by the side of the restless sea, oily and cinder-flecked as a tattered gray rug, drifting through one frightened shuttered town after another, watching the peeling billboards and the boarded-up store fronts.

It was late evening now, and he was just beginning to really believe what had happened, accept it with his bowels as well as his mind, the hard reality jabbing his stomach like a knifeblade. The secondary highway he was following narrowed, banked, and Robinson slowed to take the curve, wincing at the scream of gears as he shifted. The road straightened and he stamped on the accelerator again, feeling the shuddering whine of the car’s response. How long will this crate hold up, he thought numbly. How long will my gas last? How many more miles? He stamped uselessly harder on the accelerator, trying to avoid the inevitable next thought, trying to blank out the picture that had floated under his eyelids for days — a picture of a figure sprawled brokenly across a pile of rubble, the loved body blackened and charred, cracked skin sooty black as carbon paper, striped with congealing blood—

He bit his lip until his own blood flowed. Anna, he thought, Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, Anna — Exhaustion was creeping up on him again; a sledgehammer wrapped in felt, isolating him even from the aching reality of his own nerves.

There was a wreck ahead, on his side, and he drifted out into the other lane to avoid it. Coming past Philadelphia the highway had been choked with a honking, aimless mass of cars, but he knew the net of secondary roads better than most of them and had outstripped the herd. Now the roads were mostly empty. Sane people had gone to ground.

He pulled even with the wreck, passed it. It was a light pickup truck, tipped on its side, gutted by fire. A man was lying in the road face down, across the white dividing line. Except for the pale gleam of face and hands, it might have been a discarded bundle of rags. There were bloodstains on the worn asphalt. Robinson let his car slide more to the left to keep from running over the man, started to skid slightly, corrected it. Beyond the wreck he swerved back into his own lane and speeded up again. The truck and the man slid backward, lingered in his rear-view mirror for a second, washed by his taillights, and were swallowed by darkness.

A few miles down the road, Robinson began to fall asleep at the wheel, blacking out in split-second dozes, nodding and blinking. He cursed, strained his eyes wide open and rolled his window down. Wind screamed through the crack. The air was muggy, sodden with coal smoke and chemical reeks, the miasma of the industrial nightmare that choked upper New Jersey,

Automatically, Robinson reached for the radio, switched it on, and began turning the selector-knob with one hand, groping blindly through the invisible world for something to keep him company. Static rasped at him. Almost all the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh stations were off the air now; they’d been hit hard down there. The last Chicago station had sputtered off the air at dusk, after an outbreak of fighting had been reported outside the studio. For a while, some of the announcers had been referring to “rebel forces,” but this had evidently been judged to be bad PR, because they were calling them “rioters” and “scattered anarchists” again.

For a moment he picked up a strong Boston station, broadcasting a placating speech by some official, but it faded in a burst of static and was slowly replaced by a Philadelphia station relaying emergency ham messages. There were no small local stations anymore. Television was probably out too, not that he missed it very much. He hadn’t seen a live broadcast or a documentary for months now, and even in Harrisburg, days before the final flareup, they’d stopped showing any newcasts at all and broadcast nothing but taped situation comedies and old 1920’s musicals. (The happy figures dancing in tails on top of pianos, unreal as delirium tremens in the flickering wavering white glow of the television’s eye, as tinny music echoed and canned laughter filled the room like the crying of mechanical birds. Outside, there was occasional gunfire…)