Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

Then they all began to talk.

Even if I’d known what language it was, I think it would have been too fast for me; it was very fast, very hard-sounding, very urgent, like the numbers pilots call into the ground or something like that, like a code that everybody knows, to get things done as fast as you can. Only the seal-people talked slowly, and they gurgled and stank like a dirty beach. They did not even move their faces except to make little round mouths, like fish. I think I was put to sleep for a while (or maybe I just fell asleep) and then it was something about the seal-people, with the Morlock who was seated on the radio joining in — and then general enough — and then something going round the whole room — and then that fast, hard urgent talk between one of the Morlocks and my friend. It was still business, but they looked at me; it was awful to be looked at and yet I felt numb; I wished I were asleep; I wanted to cry because I could not understand a word they were saying. Then my friend suddenly shouted; she stepped back and threw both arms out, hands extended and fingers spread, shaking violently. She was shouting instead of talking, shouting desperately about something, pounding one fist into her palm, her face contorted, just as if it was not business. The other Morlock was breathing quickly and had gone pale with rage. He whispered something, something very venomous. He took from his black uniform, which could have hidden anything, a silver dime, and holding it up between thumb and forefinger, he said in perfectly clear English, while looking at me:

‘In the name of the war against the Trans-Tempor —’

She had jumped him in an instant. I scrambled up; I saw her close his fist about the dime with her own; then it was all a blur on the floor until the two of them stood up again, as far as they could get from each other, because it was perfectly clear that they hated each other. She said very distinctly, ‘ I do insist.’ He shrugged. He said something short and sharp. She took out of her own darkness a knife — only a knife — and looked slowly about the room at each person in it. Nobody moved. She raised her eyebrows.

‘Tchal grozny?’

The seal-woman hissed on the floor, like steam coming out of a leaky radiator. She did not get up but lay on her back, eyes blinking, a woman encased in fat.

‘You?’ said my friend insultingly. ‘You will stain the carpet.’

The seal-woman hissed again. Slowly my friend walked towards her, the others watching. She did not bend down, as I had expected, but dived down abruptly with a kind of sidewise roll, driving herself into the seal-woman’s side. She had planted one heel on the stomach of the woman’s diving suit; she seemed to be trying to tear it. The seal-woman caught my friend’s knife-hand with one glove and was trying to turn it on my friend while she wrapped the other gloved arm around my friend’s neck. She was trying to strangle her. My friend’s free arm was extended on the rug; it seemed to me that she was either leaning on the floor or trying to pull herself free. Then again everything went into a sudden blur. There was a gasp, a loud mechanical click; my friend vaulted up and backward, dropping her knife and clapping one hand to her left eye. The seal-woman was turning from side to side on the floor, a kind of shudder running from her feet to her head, an expressionless flexing of her body and face. Bubbles were forming in the goldfish-bowl helmet. The other seal-person did not move. As I watched, the water began falling in the seal-woman’s helmet and then it was all air. I supposed she was dead. My friend, our visitor, was standing in the middle of the room, blood welling from under her hand; she was bent over with pain and her face was horribly distorted but not one person in that room moved to touch her.

‘Life —’ she gasped, ‘for life. Yours,’ and then she crashed to the rug. The seal-woman had slashed open her eye. Two of the Morlocks rushed to her then and picked up her and her knife; they were dragging her towards the mirror in the archway when she began muttering something.

‘Damn your sketches!’ shouted the Morlock she had fought with, completely losing control of himself. ‘We are at war; Trans-Temp is at our heels; do you think we have time for dilettantism? You presume on being that woman’s granddaughter! We are fighting for the freedom of fifty billions of people, not for your scribbles!’ and motioning to the others, who immediately dragged the body of the seal-woman through the mirror and began to follow it themselves, he turned to me.

‘You!’ he snapped. ‘You will speak to nobody of this. Nobody!’

I put my arms around myself.

‘Do not try to impress anyone with stories,’ he added contemptuously. ‘You are lucky to live,’ and without another look he followed the last of the Morlocks through the mirror, which promptly disappeared. There was blood on the rug, a few inches from my feet. I bent down and put my fingertips in it, and then with no clear reason, I put my fingers to my face.

‘—come back,’ said my mother. I turned to face them, the wax manikins who had seen nothing.

‘Who the devil drew the curtains!’ shouted my father. I’ve told you’ (to me) ‘that I don’t like tricks, young lady, and if it weren’t for your mother’s —’

‘Oh, Ben, Ben! She’s had a nosebleed!’ cried my mother.

They told me later that I fainted.

I was in bed a few days, because of the nosebleed, but then they let me up. My parents said I probably had had anaemia. They also said they had seen our visitor off at the railroad station that morning, and that she had boarded the train as they watched her; tall, frizzy-haired, freakish, dressed in black down to between the knees and ankles, legged like a stork and carrying all her belongings in a small valise. ‘Gone to the circus,’ said my mother. There was nothing in the room that had been hers, nothing in the attic, no reflection in the window at which she had stood, brilliantly lit against the black night, nothing in the kitchen and nothing at the Country Club but tennis courts overgrown with weeds. Joe never came back to our house. The week before school I looked through all my books, starting with The Time Machine and ending with The Green Hat; then I went downstairs and looked through every book in the house. There was nothing. I was invited to a party; my mother would not let me go. Cornflowers grew around the house. Betty came over once and was bored. One afternoon at the end of summer, with the wind blowing through the empty house from top to bottom and everybody away, nobody next door, my parents in the back yard, the people on the other side of us gone swimming, everybody silent or sleeping or off somewhere — except for someone down the block whom I could hear mowing the lawn — I decided to sort and try on all my shoes. I did this in front of a full-length mirror fastened to the inside of my closet door. I had been taking off and putting on various of my winter dresses, too, and I was putting one particular one away in a box on the floor of the closet when I chanced to look up at the inside of the closet door.

She was standing in the mirror. It was all black behind her, like velvet. She was wearing something black and silver, half-draped, half-nude, and there were lines on her face that made it look sectioned off, or like a cobweb; she had one eye. The dead eye radiated spinning white light, like a Catherine wheel. She said:

‘Did you ever think to go back and take care of yourself when you are little? Give yourself advice?’

I couldn’t say anything.

‘I am not you,’ she said, ‘but I have had the same thought and now I have come back four hundred and fifty years. Only there is nothing to say. There is never anything to say. It is a pity, but natural, no doubt.’