Дэймон Найт: Orbit 5

It’s a simple thing, once you have the key: the cities develop in dependence to the seasons. The problem comes with Ephemera’s orbit, which is wildly eccentric (I’m tempted to say erratic), and with her queer climate. Seasons flash by, repeat themselves with subtle differences, linger and rush—all in apparent confusion. It takes a while to sort it all out in your mind, to resolve a year into particulars.

And now I’ve watched this city with its thousand names surge and subside a thousand times. I’ve watched its cycles repeat my charts, and I’ve thrown away the charts and been satisfied to call it Siva. All my social theories, my notes, my scribble-occluded papers, I’ve had to put away; I became a scientist, then simply an observer. Watching Siva.

It’s always striking and beautiful. A few huts appear and before you can breathe a village is standing there. The huts sprawl out across the landscape and the whole thing begins to ripple with the changes that are going on, something as though the city were boiling. This visual undulation continues; the edges of the village move out away from it, catch the rippling, extend further: a continuous process. The further from center, the faster it moves. There’s a time you recognize it as a town, a time when the undulation slows and almost stops—then, minutes later, endogeny begins again and its growth accelerates fantastically. It sprawls, it rises, it solidifies.

(A few days ago while I was watching, I got up to put some music—it was Bach—on the recorder. Then I came back and sat down. I must have become absorbed in the music, because later when the tape cut off, I looked up and the city was almost upon me. I keep thinking that someday I won’t move back, that I’ll be taken into the city, it will sprout and explode around me.)

Siva builds and swells, explodes upward, outward, blankets the landscape. Then, toward the end of the cycle, a strange peace inhabits it: a pause, a silence. Like Joshua’s stopping the sun.

And then: what? I can’t know what goes on in the city at these times. From photographs (rather incredible photographs) and inspection of the “ruins,” I’ve gathered that something like this must occur: some psychic shakedown hits the people in full stride; most of them go catto, fold themselves into insensible knots—while the rest turn against the city and destroy it. Each time, it happens. Each time. I’m unable to discover the respective groups or even the overall reason. And each time, destruction is absolute. The momentary stasis breaks, and the city falls away. No wall or relic is left standing; even the rubble is somehow consumed. It happens so quickly, the cameras can’t follow it; and I walk about for hours afterward, trying to read something in the scarred ground. . . . “All Pergamum is covered with thorn bushes; even its ruins have perished.”

Three years. Amusing and frightening to think of all I’ve seen in that time, more than any other man. And what have I learned? One thing perhaps, one clear thing, and this by accident, poking about the “ruins.” I found one of their devices for measuring time, which had inexplicably survived the relapse, a sort of recomplicated sundial—and I guessed from it that this race reckons time from conclusions rather than beginnings. (I leave it to you to decide whether this is a philosophical or psychological insight.) That is, their day—or year, or century, or whatever they might have termed it—seems to have been delimited by the sun’s declension rather than its rise; and I assume this scheme, this perspective, would have become generalized (or itself simply expressed an already prevailing attitude). There’s a part of the mechanism—a curious device, either rectifier or drive control, possibly both—that seems to work by the flux of the wind, I suppose bringing some sort of complex precision into their measurements: a kind of Aeolian clock.

And since that last sentence there’s been a long pause as I sat here and tried to think: what can I say now . . . Hours ago, when I began this letter, I had some vague, instinctive notion of things I wanted to tell you. Now it’s all fallen back out of reach again, and all I have for you and for myself are these pages of phatic gesturing: Look. See. That, and the first piece of an epiphany, an old song from the early years of Darkearth: “Time, time is winding up again.”

And so I sit here and look out my window, watching this city build and fall. I stare at their clock, which no longer functions, and have no use for my own. I am backed to the sea, and tomorrow Siva will spread and extend out onto these waters. I’m left with the decision, the ancient decision: shall I move?

Iput on my music—my Bach, my Mozart, my Telemann—and I beat out its rhythms on chrome tiles. For a while I lose myself in it, for a while I break out of the gather and issue of time . . .

And outside now, the sky fills with color like a bowl of strung ribbons, the ribbons fall, night billows about me. Twelve times I’ve begun this letter over a space of months, and each time faltered. Now at last, like the day, I’ve run through to a stammering end. I’ve filled hours and pages. Yet all I have to offer you is this: this record of my disability. Which I send with enduring love.

Your brother, John

In the evening he finished the letter and set it aside and felt the drag of the sea against his chest.

He sat at the empty table he used for a desk, looking up at the opposite wall. On it, two reproductions and a mirror, forming a caret: mirror at the angle, below and left The Persistence of Memory, one of Monet’s Notre Dame paintings across from that. Glass bolted in place, stiff paper tacked up—time arrested, time suspended, time recorded in passing. And about them depended the banks of shelves and instrumentation which covered the hut’s walls like lines and symbols ranked on a page.

He rose, making a portrait of the mirror, seeing: this moment. Behind that, three years. Behind that, a lifetime. And behind that, nothing.

(Take for heraldry this image: the palimpsest, imperfectly erased.)

He ambled about his room, staring at the strange, three-dimensional objects which surrounded him, not understanding. He picked up the Ephemera chronometer, turned it over in his hands, put it back. Then (four steps) he stood by the tape deck. Making sound, shaping sound.

(All of this, all so . . . vivid, so clearly defined. Clear and sharp like an abstraction of plane intersecting plane, angle and obtrusion . . . hard, sharp on a flat ground.)

Bach churned out of the speakers, rose in volume as he spun controls, rose again till bass boomed and the walls rattled.

And then he was walking on the bare gray ground outside his hut. . .

(Feet killing quiet. No: because the silence hums like a live wire, sings like a thrown knife. Rather, my feet tick on the sands. Passing now a flat rock stood on its feet, leaning against the sky. A poem remembered . . . Time passes, you say. No. We go; time stays . . . And on Rhea there are a thousand vast molelike creatures burrowing away forever in heart-darkness, consuming a world.)

He stopped and stood on the beach in the baritone darkness, with the pale red sea ahead and the timed floodlights burning behind him. Three yards off, a fish broke water and sank back into a target of ripples.

Looked up. Four stars ticked in the sky, an orange moon shuttled up among them.

Looked down. The city, Siva, swept toward him.

(A simple truth. What denies time, dies. And that which accepts it, which places itself in time, lives again. Emblem of palimpsests. Vision of this palimpsest city.)

The Bach came to his ears then, urgent, exultant. The night was basso profundo, the moon boxed in stars. He sat watching a beetle scuttle across the sand, pushing a pebble before it, deep red on gray.