Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

“I guess I hurt him,” he said as Edna rushed past him.

“You ruined him, you went and ruined him.” Edna was crying over Winston’s crumpled body.

“Five thousand dollars shot,” Artie said.

Winston began to moan so they called the company doctor, after all. it was in the guarantee. Winston turned out to be in a coma or something, he was burning up with fever and they sat up with wet compresses and stuff for several days and when Winston began to come out of it they noticed something funny and they called the doctor in again. After he had been with Winston for several minutes he came out and Edna gripped him by the elbow saying: “All right? Is he going to be all right?”

The doctor looked weary beyond description. “With a lot of care he’ll be all right.”

Shrewdly, Artie followed up. “One-sixty and all?”

“He’ll be all right, but he’ll never think again.”

“Then we get our money back.”

“Read your contract,” the doctor said, as if he had been through all this before. “You’ll find your baby intellectuals are only guaranteed against failure.”

“Failure, let me tell you about failure . . .”

But the doctor was moving toward the door. “Not against personal damage or acts of God.”

Artie had the doctor by the shoulders now and they were in the doorway, wrangling, but Edna paid no attention; instead she took a bowl of chicken soup and crept up to Winston’s room.

He was pale and diminished, lying there under the covers, but he looked more or less all right. He recognized her when she came in and he began to moan.

She stroked his forehead. “All right, baby, you’re going to be all right.”

“Sick.” Winston was blubbering. “Sick.”

“Mommy make you all right.” Because he wouldn’t stop crying she thought fast. “Diddy? Winston want his diddy?”

“Diddy,” Winston said, and when she produced it, took it to his bosom with a look of bliss.

“That’s a boy.”

Winston stopped stroking his cheek with his diddy and looked around the room until his eyes rested on the globe. He tried to sit up. “Baw?”

“Ball, Winston. Ball.”

“Baw.”

“That’s my baby. Ball. That’s my baby, baby boy.”

“Baw? Baw?”

“Him’s a sweet boy.” When he smiled like that he looked just like Margie or Little Artie. She swept him to her bosom. “Him can be my baby boy.”

“Ba-by?”

She had an apple pie cooking; she would give the whole thing to him. “Baby, poor baby.” She smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “All dat finking wadn’t dood for him.”

In the morning (he wasn’t sure which morning) he began the letter . . .

Dear Jim,

The last time I saw you, you advised against my coming here. You were quite insistent, and I don’t believe the perfectly awful 3-2 beer we were drinking was wholly responsible for said adamance. You virtually begged me not to come. And I suppose you must have felt somewhat duty-bound to sway me away. That since it was yourself who introduced me to the Ephemera, you’d incurred some sort of liability for my Fate. That you would be accountable.

I remember you said a man couldn’t keep his sanity here; that his mind would be whirled in a hundred directions at once, and he would ravel to loose ends—that he would crimp and crumble, swell and burst, along with this world. And you held that there was nothing of value here. But the government and I, for our separate reasons, disagreed.

And can I refute you now by saying that I’ve found peace, or purpose, or insight? No, of course not, not in or with this letter. For all my whilom grandiloquence, and accustomed to it as you are, such an effort would be fatuous and absurd. What I can do: I can show you this world in what is possibly the only way we can ever know it, I can show you where it brims over to touch my own edges. I can let you look out my window.

The Blue Twin. That was . . . three years ago? Close to that. (“Time is merely a device to keep everything from happening at once.” Isn’t that wonderful? I found it in one of the magazines I brought Out with me, in a review of some artist’s work about which I remember only the name of one painting: A Romantic Longing To Be Scientific.) Three years ... I miss Earth, dark Earth. I miss Vega.

(I remember that you were shortly to be reassigned to Ginh, and wonder if this letter will find you there among the towers.)

The Blue Twin, which we always insisted was the best bar in the Combine at least, probably the Union (and did I ever tell you that bars are the emblem of our civilization? A place to lean back in, to put your feet up. a place of silences and lurching conversations: still center, hub for a whirling universe. And pardon my euphuism, please).

And the two of us sitting there, talking of careers and things. Quietly, with the color-clustered walls of sky-bright Vega around us and the massive turning shut out. You dissuading. And bits of my land slaking into the sea. Talking, taking time to talk.

My work had soured, yours burgeoned, I envied you (though we always pretended it was the other way around). All my faces had run together like cheap watercolor. My classes had come to be for me nothing but abstract patterns, forming, breaking, reforming—while the faces around you were becoming distinct, defining themselves, giving you ways to go.

I envied you. So J took this sabbatical: “to do a book.” And the sabbatical became an extended leave of absence, and that became a dismissal. And no book.

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold . . . Talking about dissent and revolution, the ways of change, things falling by the way and no Samaritan—and you mentioning something you’d seen in one of the Courier bulletins that crossed your desk: which was my introduction to it all, to Ephemera. (Ephemera. It was one of those pale poetic jokes, the sort that gave us Byzantium and Eldorado and Limbo and all the others, names for out-Union planets, for distant places. You wonder what kind of man is responsible.)

How many weeks then of reading, of requesting information, of clotted first drafts? How long before the night I collapsed into my bed and sat up again with the line “Hold hard these ancient minutes in a cuckoo’s month” on my lips—days, weeks? It seemed years. Time, for me, had broken down. And I came to Ephemera . . .

The Ephemera. My window looks out now on one of their major cities, towered and splendid, the one I’ve come to call Siva. It is middle season, which means they are expanding: yesterday the city was miles away, a dark line on the horizon; tomorrow it will draw even closer and I’ll have to move my squatter’s hut back out of the way. The next day it will swell toward me again, then in the afternoon retreat—and the collapse will have begun. By the next morning I’ll be able to see nothing of Siva, and the hut will have to be relocated, shuttled back in for the final moments.

They live in a separate time-plane from ours—is that too abrupt? I don’t know another way to say it, or how I should prepare for saying it. Or even if it makes sense. They are but vaguely aware of my presence, and I can study them only with the extensive aid of machines, some I brought with me, a few I was able to requisition later (the government always hopes, always holds onto a chance for new resources). And all I’ve learned comes down to that one strange phrase. A separate time-plane.

When I first came here, I was constantly blundering into the edges of their city, or being blundered into by them; I was constantly making hasty retreats back into what I started calling the Deadlands. It took my first year just to plot the course of the cities. I’ve gotten little further.