Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (14 page)

“The cities will die, Sax. They’ll run out of food. More epidemics. I can help the Seminoles.”

Friday I got the
Loretta
ready for the return trip. I packed as much fruit as it would hold. Enough for three, I kept telling myself. Forbidden fruit. For three. I avoided Corrie and Delia as much as I could and they seemed to be keeping busy, but what they were doing I couldn’t guess.

That night I came wide awake suddenly and sat up listening hard. Something had rattled or fallen. And now it was too quiet. It had been the outside door slamming, I realized, and jumped up from my bedroll and raced downstairs. No one was there, anywhere. They had left, taking with them Corrie’s medical supplies, Delia’s radiation kit, most of the food, most of the beer. I went outside, but it was hopeless. I hadn’t expected this. I had thought they would try to talk me into going into the swamps with them, not that they would try it alone.

I cursed and threw things around, then another thought hit me. The
Loretta
! I ran to the dock in a frenzy of fear that they had scuttled her. But she was there, swaying and bobbing in the changing tide. I went aboard and decided not to leave her again. In the morning I saw that the sail was gone.

I stared at the mast and the empty deck. Why? Why for God’s sake had they taken the sail?

They’ll be back, I kept thinking all morning. And I’ll kill them both. Gradually the thought changed. They would beg me to go with them inland, and I would say yes, and we would go into the first swamp and I would take their gear and leave them there. They would follow me out soon enough. They had needed the sail for a shelter, I thought dully. After noon I began to think that maybe I could go with them part of the way, just to help them out, prove to them that it was hopeless to go farther.

My fury returned, redoubled. All my life I had managed to live quietly, just doing my job, even though it was a stupid one, but getting paid and trying to live comfortably, keeping busy enough not to think. Keeping busy enough to keep the fear out. Because it was there all the time, pressing, just as the silence here pressed. It was a silent fear, but if it had had a voice, its voice would have been that scream we had heard. That was the voice of my fear. Loud, shrill, inhuman, hopeless. I felt clammy and chilled in the heat, and my stomach rejected the idea of food or drink.

Come back, I pleaded silently, willing the thought out, spreading the thought, trying to make contact with one of them. Come back for me. I’ll go with you, do whatever you want to do. Please!

That passed. The storm came, and I shivered alone in the
Loretta
and listened to the wind and the pounding rain. I thought about my apartment, work, the pamphlets I wrote. The last one I had worked on was titled: “Methods of Deep Ploughing of Alluvial Soils in Strip Farming in Order to Provide a Nutritionally Adequate Diet in a Meatless Society.” Who was it for? Who would read past the title? No one, I answered. No one would read it. They were planning for a future that I couldn’t even imagine.

The silence was more profound than ever that evening. I sat on deck until I could bear the mosquitoes no longer. Below, it was sweltering, and the silence had followed me in. I would start back at first light, I decided. I would have to take a smaller boat. A flat-bottomed boat. I could row it up the waterway, stay out of the ocean. I could haul it where the water was too shallow or full of debris.

The silence pressed against me, equally on all sides, a force that I could feel now. I would need something for protection from the sun. And boiled water. The beer was nearly gone. They hadn’t left me much food, either. I could do without food, but not without water and maps. Maybe I could make a small sail from discarded clothing. I planned and tried not to feel the silence. I lectured myself on synesthesia—I had done a pamphlet on the subject once. But the silence won. I began to run up the dock, screaming at Corrie and Delia, cursing them, screaming for them to come back. I stopped, exhausted finally, and the echo finished and the silence was back. I knew I wouldn’t sleep; I built a fire and started to boil water.

I poured the water into the empty beer bottles and stacked them back in their original boxes. More water started to boil, and I dozed. In my near sleep, I heard the scream again. I jumped up shaking. It had been inhumanly high, piercing, with such agony and hopelessness that tears stood in my eyes. I had dreamed it, I told myself. And I couldn’t be certain if I had or not.

Until dawn came I thought about the scream, and it seemed to me a thing uttered by no living throat. It had been my own scream, I thought, and I laughed out loud.

I loaded an aluminum rowboat the next day and rigged up a sail that might or might not fall apart when the wind blew. I made myself a poncho and a sun hat, and then, ready to go, I sat in the boat and watched some terns diving. They never had asked me what I had wanted to do, I thought bitterly. Not one of them had asked me what I would have liked to have done.

J.P. had complained about being forced into teaching, while I would have traded everything I had for the chance to write, to teach—but worthless things, like literature, art appreciation, composition. A pelican began to dive with the terns, and several gulls appeared. They followed the pelican down, and one sat on his head and tried to snatch the fish from his mouth.

I thought again of all the pamphlets I had written, all the thousands of pages I had read in order to condense them. All wasted because in reducing them to so little, too much had been left out. I started to row finally.

When I left the mouth of the bay, I turned the small boat southward. The sea was very blue, the swells long and peaceful. Cuba, I thought. That many people, some of them had to be left. And they would need help. So much had been lost already, and I had it, all those thousands of pages, hundreds of books, all up there in my head.

I saw again the undersecretary’s white, dry, dead face, the hurt there, the fear. He hadn’t expected me to come back at all, I realized. I wished I could tell Corrie.

The wind freshened. If not Cuba, then Central America, or even South America. I put up my little sail, and the wind caught it and puffed it, and I felt only a great contentment.

• • •

A Brother to Dragons, a Companion of Owls

(Orbit 14 — 1974)

This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in

her heart, I
am,
and
there
is none beside me: how is she

become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in!

every one that passeth by her shall hiss, and wag his hand.

It is late in the afternoon, a warm, hazy autumn day; the frost has already turned the leaves golden and scarlet, and the insects are quieted for the season. Although there are no fires in the city, no smokestacks sending clouds to meet clouds, the air is somehow thick and blurs the outlines of things in the distance. In the distance the buildings seem more blue than stone-colored, more grey than they are, and they have no distinct edges. Finally the canyons of the buildings and the thick air blend and there is only the grey-blue. The city is still.

In the fourth-floor apartment of one of the buildings overlooking a park, an old man sits at a table that is six feet long, covered with books and notebooks. There is a kerosene lamp on the table, not lighted at this hour. The books are Bibles, and a concordance that is a thousand pages thick. Another table abuts the work table, and it is covered also, but most of the material there is the old man’s writing. Notebooks filled, others opened, not yet completed, card files, piles of notes on yellow paper.

The old man is bent over the table, following a line of print with his finger, pursing his lips, his face rigid with concentration. He wears glasses that are not properly fitted, and now and again he pushes them onto the bridge of his nose. Occasionally he pauses in his reading and looks at the park across the street, the source of the yellow in the light. The trees at this end of the park are almost uniformly gold now. The old man thinks that one day he will study the trees and relearn their names—he knew them once—and the names of the flowers that are still blooming, having become naturalized in the park long ago. Wildflowers, that is all he knows about them. They are yellow also. The old man thinks that it is shameful that he knows so little about the trees, the flowers, the insects. They all have names, every tree its own name, every kind of grass, every kind of insect. The clouds. The kinds of soils, the rocks. And he knows none of them. Only recently has he begun to have such thoughts. He rubs his eyes; they tend to water after reading too long, and he wonders why so many of the Bibles were printed in such small type. He thinks it was to save paper, to keep the weight manageable, but that is only a guess. Perhaps it was custom. He pushes his glasses up firmly and bends over the books again.

The old man is strong, with good muscles in his legs and arms, his back strong and straight. His hair is very light, and even though it has whitened in the past three years, it looks much the same as always, except that now it has become very fine, almost like baby’s hair. It is as if his hair is wearing out before anything else. He has a beard that is soft also, not the coarse pubic hair of many beards. When the wind blows through it, it parts in unfamiliar ways, just as a girl’s long hair does, and when the wind is through rearranging it, it falls back into place easily and shows no disarray. The old man reads, and now he turns and searches among the many notebooks, finds the one he wants and draws it to him. On the cover is his name, written in beautiful script: Llewellyn Frick.

He begins to write. He is still writing when the door is flung open and another man runs in wildly, his face ashen. He is plump and soft, unfinished-looking, as if time that has carved the old man’s face has left his untouched. He is forty perhaps, dressed in a red cape that opens to reveal a blue robe. He is barefoot. He rushes to the desk and grabs the old man’s arm frantically.

“Not now, Boy,” the old man says, and pulls his arm free. He doesn’t look up. Boy has made him trail a thick line down the page and he is too irritated to show forgiveness immediately, but neither does he want to scold. Boy shakes him again and this time his insistence communicates itself and the old man looks at him.

“For God’s sake, Boy…” The old man stops and stands up. His voice becomes very gentle. “What is it, Boy? What happened?”

Boy gestures wildly and runs to the window, pointing. The old man follows, sees nothing on the streets below. He puts his arm about Boy’s shoulders and, holding him, says, “Calm down, Boy, and try to tell me. What is it?”

Boy has started to weep, and the old man pulls him away from the window and forces him into a chair. He is much stronger than Boy, taller, heavier. He kneels in front of Boy and says soothingly, “It’s all right, Boy. It’s all right. Take it easy.” He says it over and over until Boy is able to look at him and start to gesticulate in a way the old man can understand.

Once, many years ago, a pack of wild dogs entered the city and almost ran Boy down. He fled through the alleys, through stores, through backyards, every short cut that he knew, and they followed, yelping, driven by hunger. The old man heard them blocks from the apartment building and went out with his shotgun.

Now Boy makes the same motions he made then.
They almost caught him. They were after him.
The old man returns to the window. “Dogs?” He looks out and the city is quiet; the sun is very low now and the shadows fall across the streets, fill the streets. Boy runs after him and tries fiercely to pull him away from the window, shaking his head.
Not dogs.

He shakes his head wildly now, and he touches the old man, touches himself, then holds his hand at waist level, then a bit higher, a bit lower. “Animals?” the old man asks. Again the wild shake. “People? Little people? Children?”

Children!
The old man stares at Boy in disbelief. Children? In the city? Boy pulls at him again, to get him away from the window. The old man searches the darkening shadows and sees nothing. The city is very quiet. No wind blows. There is nothing out there to make a sound.

Children! Again and again he demands that Boy change his story. It was animals. Dogs. Wild cats. Anything but children. Boy is weeping again, and when the old man starts to light the lamp, Boy knocks it from his hands. The oil spills and makes a gleaming, dark pattern on the tile floor, a runner from the door to the center of the room. The old man stares at it.

“I’ll have to tell the others,” the old man says, but he doesn’t move. He still can’t believe there are any children in the city. He can’t believe there are any children anywhere in the country, in the world. Finally he starts to move toward the door, avoiding the oil. Boy tugs at him, holds his robe, clutches at his arm.

“Boy,” the old man says gently, “it’s all right. I have to tell everyone else, or they might make fires, put lights on, draw the children this way. Don’t you understand?” Boy’s eyes are insane with fear. He looks this way and that like an animal that smells the blood of slaughter and is helpless to communicate its terror. Suddenly he lets go the old man’s robe and darts to the door, out into the hall, and vanishes into the shadows that are impenetrable at the end of the hall.

It is not so dark outside, after all. The twilight is long at this time of year, but there is a touch of frost in the air, a hint that by morning the grass will have a white sheath, that the leaves will be silver and gold, that the late-blooming flowers will be touched and that perhaps this time they will turn brown and finally black. The old man walks through the corner of the park, and it makes little difference to him if there is light or not. For thirty-two years he has lived in that building, has walked in this park at all hours; his feet know it as well by night as by day. It is easier to walk in the park than on the city streets and sidewalks. Whole sections of roadways have caved in, and other sections are upthrust, tilting precariously. Everywhere the grass has taken hold, creeping along cracks, creating chasms and filling them. When the old man emerges from the trees, he is on the far side of a wide street from a large department store. This side of the building is almost all open. Once it was glass-fronted and very expensive; now it is Monica Auerbach’s private palace.