Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (11 page)

It isn’t really a question. I can go with them or I can go with my aunt and uncle who came from Ohio for the funeral. The state won’t let me stay alone yet because I am only seventeen. My aunt told me that much. She is angry because my mother, her sister, killed herself. It was irreligious of her. It was selfish of her. I despise my aunt.

I feel Paula’s toe digging my side and I squirm, wanting not to cry. She giggles and the bare toe prods again, digs and wiggles against my side. I look at her and I know that I won’t cry now. I jump up and grab her, meaning to shake her, but I just hold her, and she stops giggling. We don’t move for a long time until Gregory interrupts us. He hasn’t noticed anything so maybe it wasn’t so long, but that moment goes on and on.

When we go back to my house my aunt is angry with me. She says I am selfish for leaving now when people have been coming by to pay respects. She is going to lecture me, but Paula goes to her and puts her dirty hand on my aunt’s smooth, clean sleeve, and Paula says something I can’t hear. Then she says, “It’s going to be all right. We’ll take care of him.” My aunt bursts into tears and falls down in a chair crying like that, shaking, ugly with crying, and Paula, Gregory and I leave her there.

Thornton woke up, remembering the dream in detail. He made notes of it for Feldman’s benefit. He rolled over again and went back to sleep.

The work went slowly, and badly. They had plateaued and apparently could go no further. But all of them could see the next step so clearly, and all of them knew that without the next step the project was a failure. The Secretary returned and huddled with the Director and several other top men, and following this meeting there was something not so open, something uglier about the Project. No leaks came from the meeting, and there was a dearth of rumors for once. A new brain was installed, and hope rose as it continued to function after twenty-four hours, then thirty-six hours. A field test was scheduled, but before it could be held, the brain went mad.

Gloom settled heavier over the men, and mistakes were made that would have been unthinkable four months in the past. They analyzed the results of the last psycho-modular unit and its stresses and the final breaking point, and it was then that Thornton learned that this brain had been especially selected. He knew vaguely who Lester Ferris had been, but he didn’t know how he had died, or when, or how his brain had come into the possession of the Institute. Ferris had been a child prodigy, a brilliant mathematical physicist who had shaken up the world of physics at the age of fifteen. Crippled in body, with a mind that sang, he had drawn the attention of the entire world with theories that might be proven in some distant future, or might never be proven, but were unmistakably original and brilliant. He had settled down at the Institute for Advanced Study at the age of twenty-five, and as far as Thornton knew no more had been heard from him.

Thornton began reading the daily papers that were brought to the Institute, and every time they had a brain that was more successful than the previous ones, he searched the obituaries, but he didn’t ask anyone any questions. No one was asking questions.

He and Feldman went over the incident of his mother’s suicide several times, and slowly he found that he was remembering things about Paula that he had forgotten completely. Feldman knew her work and was impressed that Thornton had been her lover. Thornton found that he could talk of it freely, as if it had happened to someone else.

Sometimes Thornton went for walks in the woods, now dark green and summery, harboring snakes behind rocks and logs, alive with rabbits, birds, insects that sang and whirred and buzzed. He didn’t do it as often as he would have liked because there was no time. His year was running out. The second test was due within weeks, and although the idea of a battle test had been abandoned, the field test was still on the schedule. They were learning what kinds of brains were best suited for the symbiotic relationship with the computer that was called Phalanx, but they were unable to find just the right one. The brains continued to go mad.

They had a Delphi session, with each man answering questions about the sort of mind, the kind of mentality that would work with the Phalanx. Thornton bit his pencil and slowly filled in the answers to the printed questions. Afterward they read them aloud and talked about them. The papers were gathered by the Director.

“What do you think now of Paula Whitfield?” Feldman asked.

“Oh, she’s a promiscuous bitch. Exciting, probably very beautiful still. She was, you know, but in a wild, unpremeditated way. Not the cover-girl look of studied loveliness.”

Feldman nodded. “Your wife is very lovely,” he said after a moment. He was making idle talk now that the hour was almost over and Thornton had been wrung out.

“Ethel is beautiful,” Thornton said. It surprised him. She really was. He had a letter from her in his pocket then. She would meet him and they would drive to Florida and go from there to Nassau. She was excited about the trip. She was lonesome for him.

“Is Paula Whitfield really promiscuous?” Feldman asked curiously. “There’s no hint of that in her work.”

“She sleeps around,” Thornton said, hearing the contempt in his voice. “She’s got a couple of illegitimate kids, you know.” He shrugged and got up. “I guess that’s unfair. I don’t really know what she’s like now. It’s been twenty years since I saw her. A genius with the morals of an alley cat. That’s what she was then.”

He opened the door. Feldman said, “Tomorrow, five, one hour. Okay?” Thornton looked back and nodded, and Feldman added, “Why did you put her down as the one mind that could exist with the Phalanx?”

He ate little dinner, and walked afterward. He hadn’t. He knew he hadn’t. He visualized the sheet of questions and his answers, and he knew that his memory would reproduce it faithfully for him. He hadn’t put her name down. The questions had all led to that one, of course: Can you name anyone who you think would qualify as a psycho-modular unit?

He had left it blank.

He saw it again in his mind, and it was blank.

He felt a stab of fear. What was Feldman after?

He wouldn’t recommend Paula, even if the thought had occurred to him. When Gregory died, eighteen years ago, she had written that crazy poem about the boy who chose death rather than killing. Gregory had died under enemy fire. He had mailed her the firing pin of his rifle, then had walked upright until he was felled. Stupid act of insanity. It had made all the papers, his death, and the bitter poetry that had flowed from Paula afterward. She was practically a traitor, as Gregory certainly had been. Again he wondered what Feldman was trying to do. He returned to his desk and worked until midnight.

He dreamed that night of the psycho-modular unit fixed in the island inside the house that was the Phalanx. It was a sealed tank that looked very much like an incubator, with rubber gloves built into it so that the operators could push their hands into them and handle the thing inside. There were six pairs of the gloves. To one side of the tank a screen, not activated now, had been placed to show electroencephalograph tracings. Thick clusters of wires led to desks close by, and on them were screens that showed chemical actions, enzymic changes, temperature of the nutrient solution and any fluctuations in its composition. Inside the tank were wires that ended in electrodes in the brain, the input and output wires, and they too were tapped so that men at desks could know exactly what was going in and out.

The Phalanx had been in steady operation for seven days and nights. The lights twinkled steadily, and in the back the EEG tracings were steady. The technicians had replaced the walls about the computer so that it was a house within a room, a tank within the house, a brain within the tank. There was still work to be done, still many programs to plan and translate and feed to the Phalanx, but any good programmer could do them now. They were talking about increasing the number of bugs to an even four dozen, and no one doubted that the computer could keep them all under control.

Thornton stood in the doorway looking at it for the last time. His work was done, his year over. Others would be interviewed now, or already had been, and they would feel the excitement coursing through them at the chance to work at the Institute for a year. He turned and left, picking up his bag at the main door. A car was outside to take him to the gate where Ethel would meet him. Feldman was on the steps waiting. He thrust a book into Thornton’s hand.

“A goodbye present,” he said. Thornton wondered if he had seen tears in the analyst’s eyes, and decided no. It had been the wind. The wind was blowing hard. He rode to the main gate, and when he left the car and walked through, he dropped the book. He got in his own car and drew Ethel to him.

“I was so afraid you’d be different,” she said after a moment. “I didn’t know what to expect after your year among geniuses. I thought you might not want to come out at all.” She laughed and squeezed his hand. “I am so proud of you! And you haven’t changed, not at all.”

He laughed with her. “You too,” he said. He wondered if there had always been that emptiness behind her eyes. She pressed on the accelerator and they sped down the road away from the Institute.

Behind them the wind riffled through the book until the guard noticed it lying in the dust and picked it up and tossed it in a trashcan.

• • •

Somerset Dreams

(Orbit 5 — 1969)

I am alone in my mother’s house, listening to the ghosts who live here now, studying the shadowed features of the moon that is incredibly white in a milky sky. It is easier to believe that it is a face lined with care than to accept mountains and craters. There a nose, long and beaked, there a mouth, dark, partially open. A broad creased forehead… They say that children believe the sun and moon follow them about. Not only children… Why just a face? Where is the rest of the body? Submerged in an ethereal fluid that deceives one into believing it does not exist? Only when this captive body comes into view, stirring the waters, clouding them, does one realize that space is not empty at all. When the moon passes, and the sky clears once more, the other lights are still there. Other faces at incredible distances? I wonder what the bodies of such brilliant swimmers must be like… But I turn my gaze from the moon, feeling now the hypnotic spell, wrenching free of it.

The yard has turned silvery and lovely although it is not a lovely place any more. Below the rustlings in the house I hear the water of Cobb’s Run rippling softly, breaking on the remains of an old dam. It will be cool by the flowing water, I think, and I pull on shorts and a blouse. I wonder how many others are out in the moonlight. I know there are some. Does anyone sleep peacefully in Somerset now? I would like to wander out by the brook with nothing on, but even to think of it makes me smile. Someone would see me, and by morning there would be stories of a young naked woman, and by noon the naked woman would be a ghost pointing here and there. By evening old Mr. Larson, or Miss Louise, would be dead. Each is waiting only for the sign that it is time.

I anoint myself with insect repellent. It is guaranteed to be odorless, but I can smell it anyway, and can feel it, greaseless and very wet, on my arms and legs.

I slip from the house where my mother and father are sleeping. The night is still hot, our house doesn’t cool off until almost morning, and there is no wind at all, only the moon that fills the sky. Someone is giggling in the yard and I shush her, too close to the house, to Mother’s windows on the second floor. We race down the path to the pool made by damming the run and we jump into the silver-sheened water. Someone grabs my ankle and I hold my breath and wrestle under the surface with one of the boys. I can’t tell which one it is. Now and then someone lets a shriek escape and we are motionless, afraid Father will appear and order us out. We play in the water at least an hour, until the wind starts and blows the mosquitoes away, and then we stumble over the rocks and out to the grass where now the night is cool and we are pleasantly tired and ready for sleep. When I get back to the house I see the door closing and I stop, holding my breath. I listen as hard as I can, and finally hear the tread on the steps: Father, going back to bed.

I slip on sandals and pick up my cigarettes and lighter without turning on the light. The moonlight is enough. In the hall I pause outside the door of my parents’ room, and then go down the stairs. I don’t need a light in this house, even after a year’s absence. The whole downstairs is wide open, the kitchen door, the front door, all the windows. Only the screens are between me and the world. I think of the barred windows of my 87th Street apartment and smile again, and think how good to be free and home once more. The night air is still and warm, perfumed with grass and phlox and the rambling rose on the garage trellis. I had forgotten how much stronger the fragrance is at night. The mosquitoes are whining about my face, but they don’t land on me. The path has grown up now with weeds and volunteer columbines and snapdragons. By day it is an unruly strip with splashes of brilliant colors, now it is silver and gray and dark red.

At the creek I find a smooth rock and sit on it, not thinking, watching the light change on the moving water, and when the wind starts to blow, I think it must be three in the morning. I return to the unquiet house and go to bed, and this time I am able to fall asleep.

I walk to town, remembering how I used to skip, or ride my bike on the sidewalks that were large limestone slabs, as stick as polished marble when they were wet. I am bemused by the tilted slabs, thinking of the ground below shoving and trying to rid itself of their weight. I am more bemused by myself; I detest people who assign anthropomorphic concepts to nature. I don’t do it anywhere but here in Somerset. I wear a shift to town, observing the customs even now. After high school, girls no longer wore shorts, or pants, in town.

I have been counting: seven closed-up houses on First Street. Our house is at the far end of First Street, one ninth of a mile from the other end of town where Magnolia Avenue starts up the mountain as Highway 590. All the side streets are named for flowers. I pass Wisteria Avenue and see that the wicker furniture is still on the porch of Sagamore House. The apple trees are still there, gnarled, like the hands of men so old that they are curling in on themselves, no longer able to reach for the world, no longer desiring the world. I come back every year, and every year I am surprised to see that some things are unchanged. The four apple trees in the yard of the Sagamore House are important to me; I am always afraid that this year they will have been cut down or felled by one of the tornadoes that now and again roar like express trains from the southwest, to die in the mountains beyond the town.