Collected Short Fiction, page 761
She said sadly, “I could feel the change in you the moment you touched me. Your touch is different. There was—fear?—in it. Disgust?”
“No.”
“Until tonight I was something exotic to you—but human, like a Bushman would be, an Eskimo. You didn’t keep me in a separate category outside the human race. Now you keep telling yourself that you’ve fallen in love with a mess of chemicals. You think you may be doing something sick by having an affair with me.”
“Lilith, I beg of you to stop it. This is all in your mind.”
“Is it?”
“I came here. I kissed you. I told you I loved you. I’m waiting to go to bed with you. Maybe you’re projecting some guilts of your own on me when you say—”
“Manuel, what would you have said a year ago about a man who admitted he’d been to bed with an android?”
“Plenty of men I know have been—”
“What would you say about him? What kind of words would you use? What would you think of him?”
“I’ve never considered such things. They simply haven’t concerned me, ever.”
“You’re evading. Remember, we promised that we wouldn’t play any of the little lie-games people play. Yes? You can’t deny that at most social levels sex between humans and androids is regarded as a perversion. Maybe the only perversion that’s left in the world. Am I right? Will you answer me?”
“ALL right.” His eyes met hers. He had never known a woman with eyes that color. Slowly he said, “Most men regard it as, well, cheap, foul, to sleep with androids. I’ve heard it compared to masturbation. To doing it with a rubber doll. When I heard such remarks, I thought they were ugly, stupid expressions of anti-android prejudice—and I obviously didn’t have such attitudes myself or I never could have fallen in love with you.” Something in his mind sang mockingly, Remember the vats! Remember the vats! His gaze wavered and moved off center—he stared intently at her cheekbone. Grimly he said, “Before the whole universe I swear, Lilith, that I never felt there was anything shameful or dirty about loving an android and I insist that despite what you’ve claimed to detect in me since my visit to the factory, I don’t have any such feelings even now. And to prove it—”
He gathered her to him. His hand swept down her satiny skin from her breasts to her belly to her loins. Her thighs parted and his fingers found her once more as fleeceless as an infant’s—and suddenly he trembled at the alien texture he felt there, and found himself unmanned by it, though it had never troubled him before. So smooth. So terribly smooth. He looked down at her, at her bareness. Bare, yes, but not because she had been shaven. She was like a child there. Like—like an android. He saw vats again. He saw moist crimson alphas whose faces were without expression. He told himself sternly that to love an android was no sin. He began to caress her and she responded as a woman would respond, with lubrication, with little ragged bursts of breath, with a tightening of her thighs against his hand. He kissed her breasts and clutched her to him. It seemed then that the blazing image of his father hovered like a pillar of fire in the air before him. Old devil, did artificer! How clever to design such a product! A product. It walks. It talks. It seduces. It gasps in passion. It grows tumescent in the labia minora, this product. And what am I? A product too, hey? A hodgepodge of chemicals stamped out from much the same sort of blueprint—muiatis mutandis, of course. Adenine. Guanine. Cytosine. Uracil. Born in a vat, hatched in a womb where’s the difference? We are one flesh. We are different races but we are one flesh.
His desire for her returned in a dizzying surge and he pivoted, topped her, drove himself deep within her. Her heels hammered ecstatically on his calves. The valley of her sex throbbed, clasping him in authentic frenzy. They rocked and climbed and soared.
When it was over, when they had both come down, she said, “That was disgustingly bitchy of me.”
“What was?”
“The scene I made. When I was trying to tell you what I thought was in your mind.”
“Forget it, Lilith.”
“You were right, though. I suppose I was projecting my own misgivings. Maybe I feel guilty about being the mistress of a human. Maybe I want you to think of me as something made of rubber. Somewhere inside me that’s probably how I think of myself.”
“No.”
“We can’t help it. We breathe it in all the time. We’re reminded a thousand times a day that we aren’t real.”
“You’re as real as anyone I’ve ever known. More real than some.” More real than Clissa, he did not add. “I’ve never seen you clutched like this before, Lilith. What’s happening?”
“Your factory trip,” she said. “Until today I was always sure that you were different. That you hadn’t ever spent one second worrying about how or where I was born, or whether there might be something wrong about what we have going. But I was afraid that once you saw the factory, saw the whole process in clinical detail, you might change—and then, when you came in tonight there was something about you, something chilly that I knew hadn’t been part of you before—” She shrugged. “Maybe I imagined it. I’m sure I imagined it. You aren’t like the others, Manuel. You’re a Krug. You’re like a king. You don’t have to build up your status by putting other people down. You don’t divide the world into people and androids. You never did. And a single peek into the vats couldn’t change that.”
“Of course it couldn’t,” he said in the earnest voice in which he did his lying. “Androids are people and people are people and I’ve never thought otherwise and I never will think otherwise. And you’re beautiful. And I love you very much. And anyone who believes that androids are some kind of lesser breed is a vicious madman.”
“You support full civic equality for androids?”
“Certainly.”
“You mean alpha androids, don’t you?” she said mischievously.
“I—well—”
“All androids ought to be equal to humans. But alphas ought to be more equal than others.”
“You bitch. Are you playing games again?”
“I’m sticking up for alpha prerogatives. Can’t a downtrodden ethnic group establish its own internal class distinctions? Oh, I love you, Manuel. Don’t take me seriously all the time.”
“I can’t help it. I’m not really very clever and I don’t know when you’re joking.” He kissed the tips of her breasts. “I have to go now.”
“You just got here!”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
“You came late, we wasted half our time in that dumb argument—stay another hour, Manuel!”
“I have a wife wailing in California,” he said. “The real world intervenes from lime to time.”
“When will I see you again?”
“Soon. Soon. Soon.”
“Day after tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so. But soon. I’ll call first.”
He slipped on his clothes. Her words crackled in his mind.
You aren’t like the others, Manuel . . . you don’t divide the world into people and androids.
Was it true? Could it be true? He had lied to her. He was festering with prejudices and his visit to Duluth had opened a box of poisons in his mind. But perhaps he could transcend such things by an act of will. He wondered if he might have found his vocation tonight. What would they say if the son of Simeon Krug were to embrace the explosive cause of android equality? Manuel the wastrel, the idler, the playboy, transformed into Manuel the crusader? He toyed with the notion. Perhaps. Perhaps. It offered an agreeable opportunity to shake off the stigma of shallowness. A cause, a cause, a cause! A cause at last! Perhaps. Lilith followed him to the door and they kissed again. His hands stroked her sleekness and he closed his eyes. To his dismay, the room of the vats glowed against his lids and Nolan Bompensiero cavorted in his brain, piously explaining how newly decanted androids were taught the art of controlling their anal sphincters. Manuel pulled free of Lilith, in pain, “Soon,” he said. “I’ll call.” He left.
1644, California. He stepped from the transmat cubicle into the slate-floored atrium of his home. The afternoon sun was edging out over the Pacific. Three of his androids came to him, bearing a change of clothes, a freshener tablet, a newspaper.
“Where’s Mrs. Krug?” he asked. “Still asleep?”
“By the shore,” a beta valet told him.
Manuel changed quickly, took the freshener and went out to the beach. Clissa was wading in the surf. Three long-legged beach birds ran in giddy circles around her and she was calling to them, laughing, clapping her hands. He was almost upon her before she noticed him. After Lilith’s voluptuousness she seemed almost wickedly immature—narrow hips, flat boyish buttocks, the breasts of a twelve-year-old. The dark hairy triangle at the base of her belly seemed incongruous, improper.
I take children for my wives and plastic women for my mistresses. “Clissa?” he called.
She swung about.
“Oh! You scared me!”
“Having some fun in the ocean? Isn’t it too cold for you?”
“It’s never too cold for me. You know that, Manuel. Did you have a good time at the android plant?”
“It was interesting,” he said.
“What about you? Feeling better now, I see.”
“Belter? Was I sick?”
He looked at her strangely. “This morning—when we were at the tower—you were, well, upset—”
“Oh, that! I’d almost forgotten. God, it was terrible, wasn’t it? Do you have the time, Manuel?”
“Sixteen-forty-eight, give or take a minute.”
“I’d better get dressed soon, then. We’ve got that early dinner party in Hong Kong.”
He admired her ability to slough off traumas.
He said, “Right now it’s still morning in Hong Kong. I here’s no hurry.”
“Well, then, do you want to take a swim with me? The water’s not as cold as you think. Or—” She paused. “You haven’t kissed me hello, yet.”
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello. I love you.”
“I love you,” he said. Kissing her was like kissing alabaster. The taste of Lilith was still on his lips. Which is the passionate, vital woman, he wondered, and which the cold, artificial thing? Holding his wife, he felt no sensation at all. He released her. She tugged at his wrist, pulling him with her into the surf. They swam a while and he came out chilled and shivering. At twilight they had cocktails together in the atrium. “You seem so distant,” she told him. “It’s all this transmat jumping. It takes more out of you than the doctors know.
For the party that night she wore a unique treasure, a necklace of pear-shaped soot-hued glassy beads. A Krug Enterprises drone probe, cruising 7.5 light-years from Earth, had scooped those driblets of matter from the fringes of the ashen, dying Volker’s Star. Krug had given them to her as a wedding present. What other woman wore a necklace made up of chunks of a dark star? But miracles were taken for granted in Clissa’s social set. None of their dinner companions appeared to notice the necklace. Manuel and Clissa stayed at the party well past midnight, Hong Kong time, so that when they returned to Mendocino the California morning was already far advanced. Programing eight hours of sleep for themselves, they sealed the bedroom. Manuel had lost track of the sequence of time but he suspected that he had been awake for more than twenty-four consecutive hours.
Sometimes transmat life gets to be too much to cope with . . .
He brought down the curtain on the day.
TO BE CONTINUED
The Reality Trip
Only one girl on Earth could bring out the beast in these two men!
I
I AM a reclamation project for her. She lives on my floor of the hotel, a dozen rooms down the hall: a lady poet, private income. No, that makes her sound too old, a middle-aged eccentric. Actually she is no more than thirty. Taller than I am, with long kinky brown hair and a sharp, bony nose that has a bump on the bridge. Eyes are very glossy. A studied raggedness about her dress; carefully chosen shabby clothes. I am in no position really to judge the sexual attractiveness of Earthfolk but I gather from remarks made by men living here that she is not considered good-looking. I pass her often on my way to my room. She smiles fiercely at me. Saying to herself, no doubt, You poor lonely man. Let me help you bear the burden of your unhappy life. Let me show you the meaning of love, for I too know what it is like to be alone . . .
Or words to that effect. She’s never actually said any such thing. But her intentions are transparent. When she sees me, a kind of hunger comes into her eyes, part maternal, part (I guess) sexual, and her face takes on a wild crazy intensity. Burning with emotion. Her name is Elizabeth Cooke. “Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Knecht?” she asked me this morning, as we creaked upward together in the ancient elevator. And an hour later she knocked at my door. “Something for you to read,” she said. “I wrote them.” A sheaf of large yellow sheets, stapled at the top; poems printed in smeary blue mimeography. The Reality Trip, the collection was headed. Limited Edition: 125 Copies. “You can keep it if you like,” she explained. “I’ve got lots more.” She was wearing bright corduroy slacks and a flimsy pink shawl , through which her breasts plainly showed. Small tapering breasts, not very functional-looking. When she saw me studying them her nostrils flared momentarily and she blinked her eyes three times swiftly. Tokens of lust?
I read the poems. Is it fair for me to offer judgment on them? Even though I’ve lived on this planet eleven of its years, even though my command of colloquial English is quite good, do I really comprehend the inner life of poetry? I thought they were all quite bad. Earnest, plodding poems, capturing what they call slices of life. The world around her, the cruel, brutal, unloving city. Lamenting failure of people to open to one another. The title poem began this way:
He was on the reality trip. Big black man, bloodshot eyes, bad teeth. Eisenhower jacket, frayed. Smell of cheap wine. I guess a knife in his pocket. Looked at me mean. Criminal record. Rape, child-beating, possession of drugs. In his head saying, slavemistress bitch, and me in my head saying, black brother, let’s freak in together, let’s trip on love—
And so forth. Warm, direct emotion; but is the urge to love all wounded things a sufficient center for poetry? I don’t know. I did put her poems through the scanner and transmit them to Homeworld, although I doubt they’ll learn much from them about Earth. It would flatter Elizabeth to know that while she has few readers here, she has acquired some ninety light-years away. But of course I can’t tell her that.
She came back a short while ago. “Did you like them?” she asked.
“Very much. You have such sympathy for those who suffer.”
I think she expected me to invite her in. I was careful not to look at her breasts this time.
THE hotel is on West 23rd Street. It must be over a hundred years old; the façade is practically baroque and the interior shows a kind of genteel decay. The place has a bohemian tradition. Most of its guests are permanent residents and many of them are artists, novelists, playwrights, and such. I have lived here nine years. I know a number of the residents by name, and they me, but I have discouraged any real intimacy, naturally, and everyone has respected that choice. I do not invite others into my room. Sometimes I let myself be invited to visit theirs, since one of my responsibilities on this world is to get to know something of the way Earthfolk live and think. Elizabeth is the first to attempt to cross the invisible barrier of privacy I surround myself with. I’m not sure how I’ll handle that. She moved in about three years ago; her attentions became noticeable perhaps ten months back, and for the last five or six weeks she’s been a great nuisance. Some kind of confrontation is inevitable: either I must tell her to leave me alone, or I will find myself drawn into a situation impossible to tolerate. Perhaps she’ll find someone else to feel even sorrier for, before it comes to that.
My daily routine rarely varies. I rise at seven. First Feeding. Then I clean my skin (my outer one, the Earth-skin, I mean) and dress. From eight to ten I transmit data to Homeworld. Then I go out for the morning field trip: talking to people, buying newspapers, often some library research. At one I return to my room. Second Feeding. I transmit data from two to five. Out again, perhaps to the theater, to a motion picture, to a political meeting. I must soak up the flavor of this planet. Often to saloons; I am equipped for ingesting alcohol, though of course I must get rid of it before it has been in my body very long, and I drink and listen and sometimes argue. At midnight back to my room. Third Feeding. Transmit data from one to four in the morning. Then three hours of sleep, and at seven the cycle begins anew. It is a comforting schedule. I don’t know how many agents Homeworld has on Earth, but I like to think that I’m one of the most diligent and useful. I miss very little. I’ve done good service, and, as they say here, hard work is its own reward. I won’t deny that I hate the physical discomfort of it and frequently give way to real despair over my isolation from my own kind. Sometimes I even think of asking for a transfer to Homeworld. But what would become of me there? What services could I perform? I have shaped my life to one end: that of dwelling among the Earthfolk and reporting on their ways. If I give that up, I am nothing.
OF COURSE there is the physical pain. Which is considerable.
The gravitational pull of Earth is almost twice that of Homeworld. It makes for a leaden life for me. My inner organs always sagging against the lower rim of my carapace. My muscles cracking with strain. Every movement a willed effort. My heart in constant protest. In my eleven years I have as one might expect adapted somewhat to the conditions; I have toughened, I have thickened. I suspect if I were transported instantly to Homeworld now I would be quite giddy, baffled by the lightness of everything. I would leap and soar and stumble, and might even miss this crushing pull of Earth. Yet I doubt that. I suffer here; at all times the weight oppresses me. Not to sound too self-pitying about it. I knew the conditions in advance. I was placed in simulated Earth gravity when I volunteered, and was given a chance to withdraw, and I decided to go anyway. Not realizing that a week under double gravity is not the same thing as a lifetime. I could always have stepped out of the simulation chamber. Not here. The eternal drag on every molecule of me. The pressure. My flesh is always in mourning.
“No.”
“Until tonight I was something exotic to you—but human, like a Bushman would be, an Eskimo. You didn’t keep me in a separate category outside the human race. Now you keep telling yourself that you’ve fallen in love with a mess of chemicals. You think you may be doing something sick by having an affair with me.”
“Lilith, I beg of you to stop it. This is all in your mind.”
“Is it?”
“I came here. I kissed you. I told you I loved you. I’m waiting to go to bed with you. Maybe you’re projecting some guilts of your own on me when you say—”
“Manuel, what would you have said a year ago about a man who admitted he’d been to bed with an android?”
“Plenty of men I know have been—”
“What would you say about him? What kind of words would you use? What would you think of him?”
“I’ve never considered such things. They simply haven’t concerned me, ever.”
“You’re evading. Remember, we promised that we wouldn’t play any of the little lie-games people play. Yes? You can’t deny that at most social levels sex between humans and androids is regarded as a perversion. Maybe the only perversion that’s left in the world. Am I right? Will you answer me?”
“ALL right.” His eyes met hers. He had never known a woman with eyes that color. Slowly he said, “Most men regard it as, well, cheap, foul, to sleep with androids. I’ve heard it compared to masturbation. To doing it with a rubber doll. When I heard such remarks, I thought they were ugly, stupid expressions of anti-android prejudice—and I obviously didn’t have such attitudes myself or I never could have fallen in love with you.” Something in his mind sang mockingly, Remember the vats! Remember the vats! His gaze wavered and moved off center—he stared intently at her cheekbone. Grimly he said, “Before the whole universe I swear, Lilith, that I never felt there was anything shameful or dirty about loving an android and I insist that despite what you’ve claimed to detect in me since my visit to the factory, I don’t have any such feelings even now. And to prove it—”
He gathered her to him. His hand swept down her satiny skin from her breasts to her belly to her loins. Her thighs parted and his fingers found her once more as fleeceless as an infant’s—and suddenly he trembled at the alien texture he felt there, and found himself unmanned by it, though it had never troubled him before. So smooth. So terribly smooth. He looked down at her, at her bareness. Bare, yes, but not because she had been shaven. She was like a child there. Like—like an android. He saw vats again. He saw moist crimson alphas whose faces were without expression. He told himself sternly that to love an android was no sin. He began to caress her and she responded as a woman would respond, with lubrication, with little ragged bursts of breath, with a tightening of her thighs against his hand. He kissed her breasts and clutched her to him. It seemed then that the blazing image of his father hovered like a pillar of fire in the air before him. Old devil, did artificer! How clever to design such a product! A product. It walks. It talks. It seduces. It gasps in passion. It grows tumescent in the labia minora, this product. And what am I? A product too, hey? A hodgepodge of chemicals stamped out from much the same sort of blueprint—muiatis mutandis, of course. Adenine. Guanine. Cytosine. Uracil. Born in a vat, hatched in a womb where’s the difference? We are one flesh. We are different races but we are one flesh.
His desire for her returned in a dizzying surge and he pivoted, topped her, drove himself deep within her. Her heels hammered ecstatically on his calves. The valley of her sex throbbed, clasping him in authentic frenzy. They rocked and climbed and soared.
When it was over, when they had both come down, she said, “That was disgustingly bitchy of me.”
“What was?”
“The scene I made. When I was trying to tell you what I thought was in your mind.”
“Forget it, Lilith.”
“You were right, though. I suppose I was projecting my own misgivings. Maybe I feel guilty about being the mistress of a human. Maybe I want you to think of me as something made of rubber. Somewhere inside me that’s probably how I think of myself.”
“No.”
“We can’t help it. We breathe it in all the time. We’re reminded a thousand times a day that we aren’t real.”
“You’re as real as anyone I’ve ever known. More real than some.” More real than Clissa, he did not add. “I’ve never seen you clutched like this before, Lilith. What’s happening?”
“Your factory trip,” she said. “Until today I was always sure that you were different. That you hadn’t ever spent one second worrying about how or where I was born, or whether there might be something wrong about what we have going. But I was afraid that once you saw the factory, saw the whole process in clinical detail, you might change—and then, when you came in tonight there was something about you, something chilly that I knew hadn’t been part of you before—” She shrugged. “Maybe I imagined it. I’m sure I imagined it. You aren’t like the others, Manuel. You’re a Krug. You’re like a king. You don’t have to build up your status by putting other people down. You don’t divide the world into people and androids. You never did. And a single peek into the vats couldn’t change that.”
“Of course it couldn’t,” he said in the earnest voice in which he did his lying. “Androids are people and people are people and I’ve never thought otherwise and I never will think otherwise. And you’re beautiful. And I love you very much. And anyone who believes that androids are some kind of lesser breed is a vicious madman.”
“You support full civic equality for androids?”
“Certainly.”
“You mean alpha androids, don’t you?” she said mischievously.
“I—well—”
“All androids ought to be equal to humans. But alphas ought to be more equal than others.”
“You bitch. Are you playing games again?”
“I’m sticking up for alpha prerogatives. Can’t a downtrodden ethnic group establish its own internal class distinctions? Oh, I love you, Manuel. Don’t take me seriously all the time.”
“I can’t help it. I’m not really very clever and I don’t know when you’re joking.” He kissed the tips of her breasts. “I have to go now.”
“You just got here!”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
“You came late, we wasted half our time in that dumb argument—stay another hour, Manuel!”
“I have a wife wailing in California,” he said. “The real world intervenes from lime to time.”
“When will I see you again?”
“Soon. Soon. Soon.”
“Day after tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so. But soon. I’ll call first.”
He slipped on his clothes. Her words crackled in his mind.
You aren’t like the others, Manuel . . . you don’t divide the world into people and androids.
Was it true? Could it be true? He had lied to her. He was festering with prejudices and his visit to Duluth had opened a box of poisons in his mind. But perhaps he could transcend such things by an act of will. He wondered if he might have found his vocation tonight. What would they say if the son of Simeon Krug were to embrace the explosive cause of android equality? Manuel the wastrel, the idler, the playboy, transformed into Manuel the crusader? He toyed with the notion. Perhaps. Perhaps. It offered an agreeable opportunity to shake off the stigma of shallowness. A cause, a cause, a cause! A cause at last! Perhaps. Lilith followed him to the door and they kissed again. His hands stroked her sleekness and he closed his eyes. To his dismay, the room of the vats glowed against his lids and Nolan Bompensiero cavorted in his brain, piously explaining how newly decanted androids were taught the art of controlling their anal sphincters. Manuel pulled free of Lilith, in pain, “Soon,” he said. “I’ll call.” He left.
1644, California. He stepped from the transmat cubicle into the slate-floored atrium of his home. The afternoon sun was edging out over the Pacific. Three of his androids came to him, bearing a change of clothes, a freshener tablet, a newspaper.
“Where’s Mrs. Krug?” he asked. “Still asleep?”
“By the shore,” a beta valet told him.
Manuel changed quickly, took the freshener and went out to the beach. Clissa was wading in the surf. Three long-legged beach birds ran in giddy circles around her and she was calling to them, laughing, clapping her hands. He was almost upon her before she noticed him. After Lilith’s voluptuousness she seemed almost wickedly immature—narrow hips, flat boyish buttocks, the breasts of a twelve-year-old. The dark hairy triangle at the base of her belly seemed incongruous, improper.
I take children for my wives and plastic women for my mistresses. “Clissa?” he called.
She swung about.
“Oh! You scared me!”
“Having some fun in the ocean? Isn’t it too cold for you?”
“It’s never too cold for me. You know that, Manuel. Did you have a good time at the android plant?”
“It was interesting,” he said.
“What about you? Feeling better now, I see.”
“Belter? Was I sick?”
He looked at her strangely. “This morning—when we were at the tower—you were, well, upset—”
“Oh, that! I’d almost forgotten. God, it was terrible, wasn’t it? Do you have the time, Manuel?”
“Sixteen-forty-eight, give or take a minute.”
“I’d better get dressed soon, then. We’ve got that early dinner party in Hong Kong.”
He admired her ability to slough off traumas.
He said, “Right now it’s still morning in Hong Kong. I here’s no hurry.”
“Well, then, do you want to take a swim with me? The water’s not as cold as you think. Or—” She paused. “You haven’t kissed me hello, yet.”
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello. I love you.”
“I love you,” he said. Kissing her was like kissing alabaster. The taste of Lilith was still on his lips. Which is the passionate, vital woman, he wondered, and which the cold, artificial thing? Holding his wife, he felt no sensation at all. He released her. She tugged at his wrist, pulling him with her into the surf. They swam a while and he came out chilled and shivering. At twilight they had cocktails together in the atrium. “You seem so distant,” she told him. “It’s all this transmat jumping. It takes more out of you than the doctors know.
For the party that night she wore a unique treasure, a necklace of pear-shaped soot-hued glassy beads. A Krug Enterprises drone probe, cruising 7.5 light-years from Earth, had scooped those driblets of matter from the fringes of the ashen, dying Volker’s Star. Krug had given them to her as a wedding present. What other woman wore a necklace made up of chunks of a dark star? But miracles were taken for granted in Clissa’s social set. None of their dinner companions appeared to notice the necklace. Manuel and Clissa stayed at the party well past midnight, Hong Kong time, so that when they returned to Mendocino the California morning was already far advanced. Programing eight hours of sleep for themselves, they sealed the bedroom. Manuel had lost track of the sequence of time but he suspected that he had been awake for more than twenty-four consecutive hours.
Sometimes transmat life gets to be too much to cope with . . .
He brought down the curtain on the day.
TO BE CONTINUED
The Reality Trip
Only one girl on Earth could bring out the beast in these two men!
I
I AM a reclamation project for her. She lives on my floor of the hotel, a dozen rooms down the hall: a lady poet, private income. No, that makes her sound too old, a middle-aged eccentric. Actually she is no more than thirty. Taller than I am, with long kinky brown hair and a sharp, bony nose that has a bump on the bridge. Eyes are very glossy. A studied raggedness about her dress; carefully chosen shabby clothes. I am in no position really to judge the sexual attractiveness of Earthfolk but I gather from remarks made by men living here that she is not considered good-looking. I pass her often on my way to my room. She smiles fiercely at me. Saying to herself, no doubt, You poor lonely man. Let me help you bear the burden of your unhappy life. Let me show you the meaning of love, for I too know what it is like to be alone . . .
Or words to that effect. She’s never actually said any such thing. But her intentions are transparent. When she sees me, a kind of hunger comes into her eyes, part maternal, part (I guess) sexual, and her face takes on a wild crazy intensity. Burning with emotion. Her name is Elizabeth Cooke. “Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Knecht?” she asked me this morning, as we creaked upward together in the ancient elevator. And an hour later she knocked at my door. “Something for you to read,” she said. “I wrote them.” A sheaf of large yellow sheets, stapled at the top; poems printed in smeary blue mimeography. The Reality Trip, the collection was headed. Limited Edition: 125 Copies. “You can keep it if you like,” she explained. “I’ve got lots more.” She was wearing bright corduroy slacks and a flimsy pink shawl , through which her breasts plainly showed. Small tapering breasts, not very functional-looking. When she saw me studying them her nostrils flared momentarily and she blinked her eyes three times swiftly. Tokens of lust?
I read the poems. Is it fair for me to offer judgment on them? Even though I’ve lived on this planet eleven of its years, even though my command of colloquial English is quite good, do I really comprehend the inner life of poetry? I thought they were all quite bad. Earnest, plodding poems, capturing what they call slices of life. The world around her, the cruel, brutal, unloving city. Lamenting failure of people to open to one another. The title poem began this way:
He was on the reality trip. Big black man, bloodshot eyes, bad teeth. Eisenhower jacket, frayed. Smell of cheap wine. I guess a knife in his pocket. Looked at me mean. Criminal record. Rape, child-beating, possession of drugs. In his head saying, slavemistress bitch, and me in my head saying, black brother, let’s freak in together, let’s trip on love—
And so forth. Warm, direct emotion; but is the urge to love all wounded things a sufficient center for poetry? I don’t know. I did put her poems through the scanner and transmit them to Homeworld, although I doubt they’ll learn much from them about Earth. It would flatter Elizabeth to know that while she has few readers here, she has acquired some ninety light-years away. But of course I can’t tell her that.
She came back a short while ago. “Did you like them?” she asked.
“Very much. You have such sympathy for those who suffer.”
I think she expected me to invite her in. I was careful not to look at her breasts this time.
THE hotel is on West 23rd Street. It must be over a hundred years old; the façade is practically baroque and the interior shows a kind of genteel decay. The place has a bohemian tradition. Most of its guests are permanent residents and many of them are artists, novelists, playwrights, and such. I have lived here nine years. I know a number of the residents by name, and they me, but I have discouraged any real intimacy, naturally, and everyone has respected that choice. I do not invite others into my room. Sometimes I let myself be invited to visit theirs, since one of my responsibilities on this world is to get to know something of the way Earthfolk live and think. Elizabeth is the first to attempt to cross the invisible barrier of privacy I surround myself with. I’m not sure how I’ll handle that. She moved in about three years ago; her attentions became noticeable perhaps ten months back, and for the last five or six weeks she’s been a great nuisance. Some kind of confrontation is inevitable: either I must tell her to leave me alone, or I will find myself drawn into a situation impossible to tolerate. Perhaps she’ll find someone else to feel even sorrier for, before it comes to that.
My daily routine rarely varies. I rise at seven. First Feeding. Then I clean my skin (my outer one, the Earth-skin, I mean) and dress. From eight to ten I transmit data to Homeworld. Then I go out for the morning field trip: talking to people, buying newspapers, often some library research. At one I return to my room. Second Feeding. I transmit data from two to five. Out again, perhaps to the theater, to a motion picture, to a political meeting. I must soak up the flavor of this planet. Often to saloons; I am equipped for ingesting alcohol, though of course I must get rid of it before it has been in my body very long, and I drink and listen and sometimes argue. At midnight back to my room. Third Feeding. Transmit data from one to four in the morning. Then three hours of sleep, and at seven the cycle begins anew. It is a comforting schedule. I don’t know how many agents Homeworld has on Earth, but I like to think that I’m one of the most diligent and useful. I miss very little. I’ve done good service, and, as they say here, hard work is its own reward. I won’t deny that I hate the physical discomfort of it and frequently give way to real despair over my isolation from my own kind. Sometimes I even think of asking for a transfer to Homeworld. But what would become of me there? What services could I perform? I have shaped my life to one end: that of dwelling among the Earthfolk and reporting on their ways. If I give that up, I am nothing.
OF COURSE there is the physical pain. Which is considerable.
The gravitational pull of Earth is almost twice that of Homeworld. It makes for a leaden life for me. My inner organs always sagging against the lower rim of my carapace. My muscles cracking with strain. Every movement a willed effort. My heart in constant protest. In my eleven years I have as one might expect adapted somewhat to the conditions; I have toughened, I have thickened. I suspect if I were transported instantly to Homeworld now I would be quite giddy, baffled by the lightness of everything. I would leap and soar and stumble, and might even miss this crushing pull of Earth. Yet I doubt that. I suffer here; at all times the weight oppresses me. Not to sound too self-pitying about it. I knew the conditions in advance. I was placed in simulated Earth gravity when I volunteered, and was given a chance to withdraw, and I decided to go anyway. Not realizing that a week under double gravity is not the same thing as a lifetime. I could always have stepped out of the simulation chamber. Not here. The eternal drag on every molecule of me. The pressure. My flesh is always in mourning.
