Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (28 page)

“So what can I do?” she asked.

Her hands opened and closed convulsively. She shut her eyes hard. “What?” she whispered desperately.
“What?”

She worked on the red sandstone on the ground floor of the barn. It was too big to get up to her studio, so she’d had her tools, bench, table, everything brought down. It was drafty, but she wore heavy wool slacks and a tentlike top, and was warm.

She whistled tunelessly as she worked…

Julia stood up too fast, then clutched the chair for support. Have to remember, she told herself severely. Work. She had to go to work. She picked up her sketch pad, put it down again. Red sandstone, 10x10x8. And red quartzite, 4x3x2. She called her supplier on Long Island.

“Funny, Mrs. Sayre. Just got some in,” he said. “Haven’t had sandstone for… oh, years, I guess.”

“Can you have it delivered tomorrow?”

“Mrs. Sayre, everyone who’s ever touched rock is working. Had to put on an extra man. Still can’t keep up.”

“I know. And the painters, and composers, and poets…” They settled for the day after her arrival home.

She reserved seats on the 6
p.m
. flight to New York, asked for their hotel bill within the hour, and started to pack. She paused once, a puzzled frown on her forehead. Every one of her friends in the arts was working furiously. They either didn’t know or didn’t care about the disastrous epidemics, the travel bans, any of it.

Martie walked slowly, his head bowed. He kept thinking of the bridge that he had stood on for an hour, watching filthy water move sluggishly with bits and pieces of junk floating on the surface: a piece of orange, a plastic bag, a child’s doll with both arms gone, one eye gone. The doll had swirled in a circle for several minutes, caught in a branch, then moved on out of sight. Of no use to anyone, unwanted, unloved now. Imperfect, cast away.

The wind blew, whipping his coat open, and he shivered. On trial, before his judges. Martin Sayre, do you dare risk your immortal soul for this momentary fling? Confess, go to the flame willingly, with confession on your lips, accept the flame, that too is momentary, and rejoice forever in Paradise.

“Dr. Sayre, you’re a reasonable man. You know that we can’t do anything for your wife. She will be allowed to bear her child here. No other hospital would admit her, none of the city hospitals would dare. We won’t harm her, Dr. Sayre. We won’t do anything that is not for her own good…”

Torquemada must have argued so.

And, somewhere else. He couldn’t keep them apart, all the same, different faces, but the same. “Of course, the child will have to be taken from her, no matter what happens. The fear of death is a disease as dangerous almost as death itself. It drives man mad. These new children must not be infected with it.…”

And somewhere else. “Ah, yes, Dr. Sayre. Meant to call you back, but got tied up. Appropriations Committee sessions, don’t you know. Well now, Dr. Sayre, this little theory of yours about the serum. I’ve been doing some thinking on that, Dr. Sayre, and don’t you know, I can’t come up with anything to corroborate what you say. Now if you can furnish some hard proof, don’t you know, well now, that would make a difference. Yes, sir, make a big difference.”

And again, “Hello, Martie, I just don’t know. You may be absolutely right. But there’s no way to get to anything to make sure. I can’t risk everything here on a wild-goose chase. I checked your data file, as you suggested, and they have a diagnosis made by a Dr. Fischer of Lester B. Hayes Memorial Hospital, who examined you extensively in four examinations from March through August of this year. He recommended treatment for schizophrenia; you refused. Face it, Martie, I have to ask myself, isn’t this just a schizophrenic construct?”

He should have jumped, he decided. He really should have jumped. He opened the door to the apartment to find Julia surrounded by their luggage, her coat over a chair, and sketch pads strewn about her on the floor.

“Honey, what’s the matter?”

“I want to go home. Now. We have seats for six o’clock plane…”

“But, Julia, you know…”

“Martie, with you, or without you, I’m going home.”

“Are you giving up, then? Is that it? You go slinking back licked now, let them take away your baby, do whatever they mean to do to you…”

“Martie, I can’t explain anything. I never can, you know. But I have to go back. I have work to do before the baby comes. I just have to. It’s like this with every artist I know. Jacques Remy, Jean Vance, Porter, Dee Richardson… I’ve been in touch with different ones here and there, and they’re all driven to work now. Some of my best friends simply didn’t have time to see me. None of them can explain it. There’s a creative explosion taking place and we’re helpless. Oh, if I could drink, I could probably resist it by getting dead drunk and staying that way…”

“What are you going to do?” He picked up several sheets of her drawing paper, but there were only meaningless scribbles on it.

“I don’t know. I can’t get it on paper. I need my tools, the sandstone. My hands know, will know when they start.…”

“Julia, you’re feverish. Let me get you a sleeping pill. We’ll go home in a day or two, if you still feel like this. Please…”

She grabbed up her coat and swung it about her shoulders, jerking her arms through the sleeves, paying no attention to him. “What time is it?”

“Four. Sit down, honey. You’re as pale as a ghost…”

“We’ll have to wait at the airport, but if we don’t leave now, traffic will get so bad. Let’s start now, Martie. We can have a sandwich and coffee while we wait.”

At the airport she couldn’t sit still. She walked the length of the corridors, rode the ramps to the upper levels, watched planes arriving and departing, walked to the lowest levels and prowled in and out of shops. Finally they boarded their plane and the strap forced her into a semblance of quietude.

“Martie, how do you, science, explain dreams? The content of dreams? Wait, there’s more. And the flashes of intuition that almost everyone experiences from time to time? The jumps into new fields that scientists make, proposing new theories explaining the universe in a way that no one had ever thought of before?
Déj
à
vu
feelings? Oh, what else? Flashes of what seems to be telepathy? Clairvoyance? Hilary’s X factor? All those things that scientists don’t usually want to talk about?”

“I don’t. I don’t try. I don’t know the answer. And no one else does either.” The engines roared and they were silent until the mammoth jet was above the clouds. Clouds covered the earth from Chicago to Kennedy Airport.

Julia looked down sometime later and said, “That’s like it is with us. There are clouds hiding something from us, and once in a while a strong light probes through for a minute. The clouds thin out, or the light is strong for a short time, whatever. It doesn’t last. The cloud layer thickens, or the power source can’t keep up the strength of the beam, and there are only the clouds. No one who wasn’t there or didn’t see through them at that moment would believe they could be penetrated. And trying to make a whole out of such glimpses is a futile thing. Now a bit of blue sky, now a star, now pitch-black sky, now the lights of a passing plane…”

“So then we invent an infrared light that penetrates the clouds…”

“What if there were something on the other side of the layer that was trying to get through to us, just as much as we were trying to get through from this side, and with as little success…”

She hadn’t even heard him. Martie took her hand and held it, letting her talk on. Her hand was warm and relaxed now that they were actually heading for home.

“Suppose that it, whatever it is, gets through only now and then, but when it does it is effective because it knows what it’s looking for, and we never do. Not infrared…” She had heard. “But the other direction. Inward. We send other kinds of probes. Psychoanalysis, EEG, drugs, hypnosis, dream analysis… We are trying to get through, but we don’t know how, or what we’re trying to reach, or how to know when we have reached it.”

“God?” Martie turned to look at her. “You’re talking about reaching God?”

“No. I think that man has always thought of it as God, or some such thing, but only because man has always sensed its presence and didn’t know what it was or how it worked, but he knew that it was more powerful than anything else when it did work. So, he called it God.”

“Honey, we’ve always been afraid of what we didn’t understand. Magic, God, devils…”

“Martie, until you can explain why it is that more comes out of some minds than goes in, you haven’t a leg to stand on, and you know it.”

Like the new geometries, he thought. The sum can be greater than its parts. Or, parallel lines might meet in some remote distance. He was silent, considering it, and Julia dozed. “But, dammit,” he breathed a few minutes later…

“You’re a Hull, Watson, Skinner man,” Julia finished, not rousing from her light sleep. He stared at her. She hadn’t studied psychology in her life. She didn’t know Hull from Freud from Jung.

The polishing wheel screamed for hours each day as the carborundum paste cut into the quartzite. Martie dragged Julia from it for her meals, when it was time to rest, at bedtime.

“Honey, you’ll hurt yourself. It might be hard on the baby.…”

She laughed. “Have I ever looked better or healthier?”

Thin, pale, but with a fiery intensity that made her more beautiful than he had seen her in their lives together. Her eyes were luminous. The tension that had racked her for months was gone. She carried the baby as if unaware of the extra burden, and when she slept, it was deep untroubled sleep that refreshed her wholly.

“You’re the one who is suffering, darling,” she said softly, fairy-touching his cheek. Her hands were very rough now, fingernails split and broken jaggedly. He caught her rough hand and pressed it hard against his cheek.

“Wymann has been calling, hasn’t he?” Julia asked after a moment. She didn’t pull her hand from his face. He turned it over and kissed the palm. “It’s all right to talk about it, Martie. I know he’s been calling. They want to see me as soon as possible, to make sure of the baby, to see if the delivery will be normal, or if a C-section is called for. It’s all right.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“No. No. But I know what they’re thinking now. They’re afraid of me, of people like me. You see, people who have high creativity don’t usually have the right sort of genes to take their RNA. A few, but not enough. It worries them.”

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

“Martie, you know where I’ve been spending my time.” She laughed. “It is nice to be home, isn’t it?” The fireplace half of the living room was cheerful and glowing, while shadows filled the rest of the long room. “Of course, when you consider that only about twenty-five percent of the people are getting the RNA it isn’t surprising that there aren’t many with creative abilities that have been developed to any extent. But, what is sad is that those few who were writers or painters, or whatever, don’t seem to continue their work once they know they are immortal. Will women want to continue bearing children if they know they’re immortal already?”

“I don’t know. You think that the maternal instinct is just a drive to achieve immortality, although vicariously?”

“Why not? Is a true instinct stilled with one or two satisfying meals, or sex acts, or whatever? Women seem to be satisfied as soon as they have a child or two.”

“If that’s so, then, whatever happens, the race will be finished. If women don’t want children, don’t have to satisfy this drive, I should say, it’s a matter of time. We have the means to prevent pregnancy, why would they keep on getting knocked up?”

“Because something else needs the children, the constantly shifting, renewing vision that is provided by children. Not us, not me. It. Something else. That thing that is behind us pushing, learning through us. You have the books. You’ve been reading everything you can find on psychology. The nearest we have been able to describe that something is by calling it the collective unconscious, I think.”

“Jung’s collective unconscious,” Martie muttered. “You know, some scientists, philosophers, artists work right down the middle of a brightly illuminated strip, never go off it. Darwin, for instance. Skinner. Others work so close to the edge that half the time they are in the grey areas where the light doesn’t follow, where you never knew if madness guided the pen or genius. Jung spent most of his time on the border, sometimes in the light, sometimes in the shadows. His collective unconscious, the fantasy of a man who couldn’t stand mysteries not solved during his own lifetime.”

Julia stood up and stretched. “God, I’m tired. Bath time.” Martie wouldn’t let her get into and out of the bathtub alone now. “Martie, if there is such a thing, and there is, there is, it’s been threatened. It has to have the constantly shifting viewpoint of mankind in order to learn the universe. A billion experiences, a trillion, who knows how many it will need before it is finished? It was born with mankind, it has grown with mankind, as it matures so does man, and if mankind dies now, so will it. We are its sensory receptors. And what Wymann and the others propose is death to it, death to them eventually. It feeds the unconscious, nourishes it, gives it its dreams and its flashes of genius. Without it, man is just another animal, clever with his hands perhaps, but without the dream to work toward. All our probes into space, into the oceans, so few inward. We are so niggardly in exploring the greatest mystery of all, potentially the most rewarding of all.”

She had her bath, and he helped her from the tub and dried her back and smoothed lotion over it. He tucked her into bed, and she smiled at him. “Come to bed, Martie. Please.”

“Soon, honey. I’m… restless right now.”

A few minutes later when he looked in on her, she was sound asleep. He smoked and drank and paced, as he did night after night. Julia was like one possessed. He grimaced at the choice of words. She worked from dawn until night, when he forced her to stop. He made their meals, or she wouldn’t have eaten. He had to touch her before she knew he was there to collect her for a meal. He stood sometimes and watched her from the doorway, and he was frightened of her at those times. She was a stranger to him, her eyes almost closed, sometimes, he thought, and discarded the thought immediately, her eyes were all the way closed. Her hands held life of their own, strong, white knuckled, thin hands grasping mallet and chisel. She couldn’t wear gloves while she worked. She dressed in heavy wool pants, and a heavy sweater, covered by a tentlike poncho that she had made from an army blanket. She wore fleece-lined boots, but her hands had to be bare. He would touch her arm, shake her, and slowly recognition would return to her eyes, she would smile at him and put down her tools; without looking at the thing she was making, she would go with him. He would rub her freezing hands for her, help her out of the heavy garments that were much too warm for the house.