Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

“How the hell would I know?” says Van Mesgeluk. “I may be a doctor, but I’m not quite God.”

“God who?” says Beinschneider, the orthodox atheist. He drops the ground wire into the hole; blue sparks spurt out. Van Mesgeluk lifts out the diamond with the tongs. Nurse Lustig takes it from him and begins to wash it off with tap water.

“Let’s call in your brother-in-law,” Van Mesgeluk says. “The jewel merchant, I mean.”

“He’s in Amsterdam. But I could phone him. However, he’d insist on splitting the fee, you know.”

“He doesn’t even have a degree!” Van Mesgeluk cries. “But call him. How is he on legal aspects of mineralogy?”

“Not bad. But I don’t think he’ll come. Actually, the jewel business is just a front. He gets his big bread by smuggling in chocolate-covered LSD drops.”

“Is that ethical?”

“It’s top-quality Dutch chocolate,” Beinschneider says stiffly.

“Sorry. I think I’ll put in a plastic window over the hole. We can observe any regrowth.”

“Do you think it’s psychosomatic in origin?”

“Everything is, even the sex urge. Ask Miss Lustig.”

The patient opens his eyes. “I had a dream,” he says. “This dirty old man with a long white beard . . .”

“A typical archetype,” Van Mesgeluk says. “Symbol of the wisdom of the unconscious. A warning . . .”

“. . . his name was Plato,” the patient says. “He was the illegitimate son of Socrates. Plato, the old man, staggers out of a dark cave at one end of which is a bright klieg light. He’s holding a huge diamond in his hand; his fingernails are broken and dirty. The old man cries, ‘The Ideal is Physical! The Universal is the Specific Concrete! Carbon, actually. Eureka! I’m rich! I’ll buy all of Athens, invest in apartment buildings, Great Basin, COMSAT!

“ ‘Screw the mind!’ the old man screams. ‘It’s all mine!’ ”

“Would you care to dream about King Midas?” Van Mesgeluk says.

Nurse Lustig shrieks. A lump of sloppy grayish matter is in her hands.

“The water changed it back into a tumor!”

“Beinschneider, cancel that call to Amsterdam!”

“Maybe he’ll have a relapse,” Beinschneider says.

Nurse Lustig turns savagely upon the patient. “The engagement’s off!”

“I don’t think you loved the real me,” the patient says, “whoever you are. Anyway, I’m glad you changed your mind. My last wife left me, but we haven’t been divorced yet. I got enough trouble without a bigamy charge.

“She took off with my surgeon for parts unknown just after my hemorrhoid operation. I never found out why.”

Except for the references to other planets and the fact that it is clearly set in the future, this story is not what is usually called science fiction. The author says he adopted the s.f. framework “as an intensifier of the poet's smallness against the huge, clanking ‘out there’ and as a symbolic reflection of his private strangeness (‘in here, deep in’)—to make it even deeper.” He believes this is one of the legitimate ways in which science fiction can be used. I think he’s right, and that much more will be heard of James Sallis.

Dear James Henry,

This morning your letter, posted from Earth over two years ago, at last reached me, having from all indications passed through the most devious of odysseys: at one point, someone had put the original envelope (battered and confused with stampings and re-addressings) into another, addressed it by hand, and paid the additional postage. You wonder what word suits the clerk who salvaged your letter from the computer dumps and took it upon himself to do this. Efficiency? Devotion? Largesse? Gentilesse?

At any rate, by the time it finally reached me here, the new envelope was as badly in need of repair as your own. I can’t imagine the delay; I shouldn’t think I’d be so hard a man to find. I move around a lot, true, but always within certain well-defined borders. Like Earth birds that never stray past a mile from their birth tree, I live my life in parentheses ... I suppose it’s just that no one especially bothers to keep track.

For your kind words I can only say: thank you. Which is not enough, never enough, but what else is there? (Sometimes, as with our mysterious and gracious postal patron, even that is impossible.) It makes me happy to learn that my poems have brought you pleasure. If they’ve given you something else as well, which you say they have, I am yet happier. You have expressed your joy at my sculpture. -That also makes me happy. Thank you.

In brief answer to your questions, I am now living in Juhlz on Topfthar, the northernmost part of the Vegan Combine, though I don’t know how much longer I shall be here. Political bickering breeds annoying restrictions and begins to throw off a deafening racket—and after four years the Juhlzson winter is at last creeping in (I’m sitting out on my patio now; I can see it far off in the hills). The two together, I’m afraid I can’t withstand.

The hours of my day hardly vary. I rise to a breakfast of bread and wine, pass the day fiddling at my books. I rarely write, sculpt even less, the preparation is so difficult . . . Night is a time for music and talking in Juhlz cafés, which are like no others. (The casual asymmetry of Juhlzson architecture always confounds the Terran eye. The people are like the buildings, off-center, beautiful. You never know what to expect.) I have taken up a local instrument—the thulinda, a kind of aeolian harp or perhaps dulcimer, fitted to a mouthpiece—and have got, I am told, passably good. I play for them and they teach me their songs.

(The sky’s just grown gray cumulus beards and a voice like a bass siren. It should snow, but won’t. My paper flaps and flutters against the table. Darkness begins to seep around the edges. This is dusk on Juhlz, my favorite time of day.)

As to your other questions, I was born on Earth: my first memories are of black, occluded skies and unbearable temperatures, and my parents fitting filters to my face when, rarely, we went outside (my poem, Eve Mourning).

My father was a microbiologist. Soon after I was born, he became a Voyager; I remember him hardly at all, and his hands mostly, at that. My mother, as you probably know since one of my publishers made a thing of it quite against my wishes, was Vegan, a ship’s companion, a woman whose gentle voice and quiet hands could do more than any medic to soothe a hurt, salve a scar. They met during a Voyage my father took in place of a friend —his first—and were together always after that. One of my early sculptures, Flange Coupling, was realized as a memorial to my parents. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. The last I heard, it was in a private collection on Rigel-7. But that was years and years ago.

My early life was spent in comfort, in my grandparents’ home on Vega and other times in crèches on Earth. When I was seven, my parents were killed in Exploration; shortly after, I was sent to the Academy at Ginh, where I passed my next twelve years and for which the Union provided funds and counsel. My Letters Home, which I’ve come in past years to misdoubt, was an attempt to commemorate that time, at least to invest it with private worth.

I don’t know what command you have of Vegan history; I suppose when I was a young man I eared nothing for history of any sort. But these were the years of the Quasitots, who supposed themselves a political group and spent their time and talents in metaphorical remonstrance against the mercenary trends of Vegan-Outworld affairs. (If I am telling you things you already know, please forgive me, but what looms large on my horizon may be unseen from yours : I have no way of knowing. )