Дэймон Найт: Orbit 6

‘Oh, please!’ I whispered. ‘Stay!’ She put one foot up on the edge of the mirror as if it were the threshold of a door. The silver sandal she had worn at the Country Club dance almost came into my bedroom: thick-heeled, squat, flaking, as ugly as sin; new lines formed on her face and all over her bare skin, ornamenting her all over. Then she stepped back; she shook her head, amused; the dead eye waned, filled again, exploded in sparks and went out, showing the naked socket, ugly, shocking, and horrible.

‘Tcha!’ she said, ‘my grandma thought she would bring something hard to a world that was soft and silly but nice, and now it’s silly and not so nice and the hard has got too hard and the soft too soft and my great-grandma — it is she who founded the order — is dead. Not that it matters. Nothing ends, you see. Just keeps going on and on.’

‘But you can’t see!’ I managed. She poked herself in the temple and the eye went on again.

‘Bizarre,’ she said. ‘Interesting. Attractive. Stone blind is twice as good. I’ll tell you my sketches.’

‘But you don’t — you can’t —’ I said.

‘The first,’ she said, lines crawling all over her, ‘is an Eloi having the Go-Jollies, and that is a bald, fat man in a toga, a frilled bib, a sunbonnet and shoes you would not believe, who has a crystal ball in his lap and from it wires plugged into his eyes and his nose and his ears and his tongue and his head, just like your lamps. That is an Eloi having the Go-Jollies.’

I began to cry.

‘The second,’ she went on, ‘is a Morlock working; and that is myself holding a skull, like Hamlet, only if you look closely at the skull you will see it is the world, with funny things sticking out of the seas and the polar ice caps, and that it is full of people. Much too full. There are too many of the worlds, too.’

‘If you’ll stop —’ I cried.

‘They are all pushing each other off,’ she continued, ‘and some are falling into the sea, which is a pity, no doubt, but quite natural, and if you will look closely at all these Eloi you will see that each one is holding his crystal ball, or running after an animated machine which runs faster than he, or watching another Eloi on a screen who is cleverer and looks fascinating, and you will see that under the fat the man or woman is screaming, screaming and dying.

‘And my third sketch,’ she said, ‘which is a very little one, shows a goldfish-bowl full of people in black. Behind that is a smaller goldfish-bowl full of people in black, which is going after the first goldfish-bowl, and behind the second is a third, which is going after the second, and so on, or perhaps they alternate; that would be more economical. Or perhaps I am only bitter because I lost my eye. It’s a personal problem.’

I got to my feet. I was so close I could have touched her. She crossed her arms across her breast and looked down at me; she then said softly, ‘My dear, I wished to take you with me, but that’s impossible. I’m very sorry,’ and looking for the first time both serious and tender, she disappeared behind a swarm of sparks.

I was looking at myself. I had recently made, passionately and in secret, the uniform of the Trans-Temporal Military Authority as I thought it ought to look: a black tunic over black sleeves and black tights. The tights were from a high school play I had been in the year before and the rest was cut out of the lining of an old winter coat. That was what I was wearing that afternoon. I had also fastened a silver curling-iron to my waist with a piece of cord. I put one foot up in the air, as if on the threshold of the mirror, and a girl in ragged black stared back at me. She turned and frantically searched the entire room, looking for sketches, for notes, for specks of silver paint, for anything at all. Then she sat down on my bed. She did not cry. She said to me, ‘You look idiotic’ Someone was still mowing the lawn outside, probably my father. My mother would be clipping, patching, rooting up weeds; she never stopped. Some day I would join a circus, travel to the moon, write a book; after all, I had helped kill a man. I had been somebody. It was all nonsense. I took off the curling-iron and laid it on the bed. Then I undressed and got into my middy-blouse and skirt and I put the costume on the bed in a heap. As I walked towards the door of the room, I turned to take one last look at myself in the mirror and at my strange collection of old clothes. For a moment something else moved in the mirror, or I thought it did, something behind me or to one side, something menacing, something half-blind, something heaving slowly like a shadow, leaving perhaps behind it faint silver flakes like the shadow of a shadow or some carelessly dropped coins, something glittering, something somebody had left on the edge of vision, dropped by accident in the dust and cobwebs of an attic. I wished for it violently; I stood and clenched my fists; I almost cried, I wanted something to come out of the mirror and strike me dead. If I could not have a protector, I wanted a monster, a mutation, a horror, a murderous disease, anything! anything at all to accompany me downstairs so that I would not have to go down alone.

Nothing came. Nothing good, nothing bad. I heard the lawnmower going on. I would have to face by myself my father’s red face, his heart disease, his temper, his nasty insistencies. I would have to face my mother’s sick smile, looking up from the flowerbed she was weeding, always on her knees somehow, saying before she was ever asked, ‘Oh the poor woman. Oh the poor woman.’

And quite alone.

No more stories.

Leaves in his face.

He had chosen, in order to prepare himself, to go surface and walk in the sycamore-shaded park where he and Ruth had once received their diplomas. Surface the air had been cool and fragrant with autumn and rain just past; but once underground and on the belt again there was only the never-changing odorlessness, and the eighty-three-degree warmth, set to make coeds in body paint comfortable.

He was always a little apprehensive when he had to go in a classroom now. Already this semester he had received two student senate reprimands for speaking sharply to undergraduates (“in such a manner as to impugn or debase the human dignity of those addressed. .”), and he could not afford a third.

On the other side of the door he could hear the coughing and shuffling of feet; he reminded himself that these were only more of the sleek young people he had watched streaking across the campus on their bikes a few minutes before. He glanced furtively at his notes, then entered the room and walked to the projector console. Several of the students, the good ones, or perhaps only those who hoped to lull his suspicions, called out, “Hiya, David,” or “Hi, Dave,” as he made his way up the aisle. He forced himself to nod and wave, although he would have preferred to ignore these greetings. A few instructors did, but they were the ones who were always having complaints lodged against them. “Well, what did you think of it?” he asked.

There was a roar of comment, suggesting mixed reactions. He seated himself and allowed it to continue — not that he could have stopped it — as the more vociferous gathered knots of others around them and shouted to make themselves heard above the din. It occurred to him as it had many times before that it should be possible for them to do all this ranting before he came in; but he knew psychologists felt the effect would not be the same, and from what he had observed himself, they were correct. Without an instructor present the subject matter of all this gabble would rapidly swing to the eternal topics of politics, sex, and sport.