Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (3 page)

“Beatrice?”

“She’s here. She’ll be over later too.”

“Okay. See you around eight?”

Donna was there. Eliot paused in the doorway when he saw her, shrugged, and entered. She smiled at him, dimpling both cheeks. Beatrice nodded, murmured thanks for Gina’s gifts, then turned away. Pitcock handed him a martini, and Eliot sat down with it and studied an Escher drawing over the mantel. It reminded him of his dream, following his own trail that he was making so that he wouldn’t get lost when he came along. He shook his head and tried to pick up the gist of the story Pitcock was telling. Donna was hanging on every word. She was no more burned than she had been that morning, must have spent the day inside somewhere. He wondered with whom, then concentrated on Pitcock.

“Selling you down the river was no idle threat, not just a little piece of slang that got started; what it was was a death sentence. It meant actually selling a slave to work in the bottom lands on the coast—downriver. Swamps, disease, floods, alligators, snakes. Sure death real quick. And the sands kept piling up on the islands, the rocks got buried deeper and deeper. In eighteen forty my great-granddaddy bought three of these islands, ten dollars an island, or some such amount. He was ashamed to put down the real figure he paid for them, just said they were cheap. Along about nineteen twenty-eight, twenty-nine, a hurricane came and stripped a lot of the sand away again, and by the time I got around to coming out to see the damage, hell, I found a pile of rocks and stones, the foundation of a fort, all that stuff. Decided to keep the island. But I sold off the other two. One island’s enough for a man.

“Fifteen fifty,” Donna said, her eyes wide. “Wow! I wonder what happened to them, the Spaniards.”

Pitcock shrugged and glanced at the glasses the others were holding. He poured more martini into Eliot’s, was waved away by Beatrice. Donna hadn’t touched hers. “Malaria. Possibly a hurricane. They went ahead with St. Augustine, but they never came back up here.”

“Well, I think they were crazy. It’s the grooviest place I’ve ever seen. Last night the wind in the palm trees and the sound of the ocean, and the way the air smells here. I mean, I slept like a baby. I’ve never slept like that before in my life. And awake at dawn! I couldn’t stand not going out right away! I just had to go out and jump into the water and swim.”

Eliot laughed harshly and choked. “Nothing,” he said when he finally could speak again. “Nothing. Just thinking how we all felt at first, then how the days began to melt into each other, and the weekends tended to blur and run together, and how you’re always tearing off another page of the calendar, another month gone to hell.”

Beatrice swept him with a sharp look, and he returned her gaze coldly. She was always so cool, so self-possessed, she didn’t like scenes or emotional outbursts, and his voice had been thick with emotion. “Just don’t go childish on me, okay? If you have something to say, say it, but don’t pout or sulk or scream obsceni­ties.” And he said, “You can sweat and moan and cry, just like any other woman.”

“But not with you, not again. I don’t like performing, even for an audience of only one.”

“Dinner’s ready.” The goddam intercom.

“But the work’s coming along,” Pitcock said to Donna. Pitcock was laughing at him, Eliot knew, not on his face where it would show, or in his voice where it could be heard, but somewhere inside him there was laughter.

Pitcock told Donna about the hotel suite he maintained in the Windward Hotel, and the car there available at all times. “Bonner will run you over to the mainland, or the other islands any time you want to go, pick you up again later, or you can just check in and spend the night. Nice shops, a movie or two. Don’t want you getting lonesome, you know.”

Donna’s eyes grew larger and she ate without glancing at her food.

And later: “Supposing that you were an intelligent flea on a dog. Life’s been pretty good, plenty to eat, no real drastic changes in your life, or that of your parents or grandparents. You can look forward to generations of the same existence for your children and theirs. But supposing that, because you are intelligent, you want to know more about this thing that is home to you, and when you start digging you find that it isn’t the universe after all. What you thought was the whole world turns out to be a tiny bit of it, with masters ordering it, forces working on it that you never dreamed of. Things you thought were causes turn out to be effects, things that you thought were making you act in one way or another turn out not to be causing any such thing, they just happen to correspond to your actions. Take weather, for instance. Sunspots affect weather. Weather affects people, the way they feel, moody or elated. Right? Maybe. What if weather, sunspots and moods are all the effects of something else that we haven’t even begun to suspect yet? You see, they are synchronous, but not causal. What else has that same periodicity of eleven point three years? Some business cycles.” Pitcock was warming up now. Eliot had forgotten how long it had been since there had been someone new to explain things to. He scowled at his wine glass and wished the old fool would finish. “A businessman was shown a chart of the ups and downs of his business, and he nodded and said, yep, and he could explain each and every one of them. A strike, a lost shipment of parts, an unexpected government contract. Another man might compare the ups and downs to the excitability curve and claim that that explained it. Someone else might point to a weather chart and say that was the cause. Or the sunspot charts. Or God knows what else. But what if all those things are unrelated to each other, just happen to occur at the same time, all of them caused by something apart from any of them, something that happens that has all those effects? That’s what we’re after. Keep taking another step backward so you can get far enough away to see the whole pattern.”

Or until you step off the end of the gangplank, Eliot added silently.

Donna was staring at Pitcock. “That’s… that’s kind of spooky, isn’t it? Are you serious?”

“Let me tell you about one more cycle,” Pitcock said, smiling benignly. “Ed will give you a chart tomorrow, your own personal information chart. Every day at the same time you will be required to
X
in a square that will roughly indicate your mental state for the day. Feeling very optimistic, happy. Moody, apprehensive. Actively worried. At the end of the month Ed will go over it with you and draw you a curve that will show you your high point and your low. It’ll take about fifty days to finish it, probably. Most people seem to have a cycle of fifty to fifty-five days from one high to the next. Now, I’ll warn you, nothing you do or don’t do will change that chart. You’re like a clock ticking away, when it’s time to chime, there it is.”

Donna made dimples, shaking her head. “I don’t believe it. I mean, if I flunk a test, I feel low. Or if a boyfriend shows up with someone else. You know. And I feel good when I look nice, and someone pays attention to me.”

“Furthermore,” Pitcock said, ignoring her, “statistics show that although the low points occupy only ten percent of the sub­ject’s life, during these periods more than forty percent of his accidents occur. This is the time that suicides jump, or take an overdose. It’s the time that wives leave husbands, and vice versa. During the high points, roughly twelve percent of the time, twenty percent of the accidents take place, suggesting that there might be overoptimism. The other forty percent of all the accidents are spaced out in the rest of the time, sixty-eight percent of your life. It’s the high and the low periods that you have to watch for.”

“But why?” Donna said, looking from him to Beatrice to Eliot.

“That’s one of the things we want to find out with this research,” Pitcock said. He glanced at his watch. “May I suggest coffee on the terrace? It’s always pleasant out there this time of the evening.”

“Do you mind if I beg off?” Beatrice asked, rising. “I still have some packing to do. I want to get an early start with Gina in the morning.” She added to Donna, “She’s going to spend a couple of weeks with her grandparents in the mountains.”

Donna nodded. “Could I come with you, help you pack or something?”

There was a quick exchange of glances between Beatrice and Pitcock; then she smiled and said of course. Eliot stood up also, but Pitcock said, “You won’t rush off, too, will you? Something I wanted to bring up, if you aren’t in a hurry.

Progress report? A dressing down? A boost in morale? Eliot shrugged and they watched the girls vanish among the magnolia trees. “Drambuie and coffee on the terrace. Right?” Pitcock moved ahead of him and sat down facing the sea. The breeze was warm and gentle, clouds drifted by the moon; a shift, and the moon was gliding among castles.

“What would you do if you left here tomorrow?” Pitcock asked after several minutes.

“I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about it. Not much, at least not very soon.”

“Nothing so fascinating to you that you’d dash right off instantly to do it?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Listen.” Pitcock leaned forward slightly. A loon cried out three times, then stopped abruptly, and once more there was only the sound of the waves and the wind in the palm trees.

Pitcock’s voice was lower. “I have a suggestion then, Eliot. Not an order, merely a suggestion. How about starting a book on the data we’ve collected here?”

“Me? Write a book? About what?”

He listened to Pitcock’s low voice, and his own articulated thoughts, and those stirrings that never found words, and later he couldn’t separate them. “If you knew you had to have surgery, would you permit it when your cycle is at its low point? You know you wouldn’t. How about starting a business? You know the figures for failures and successes, the peaks and troughs. You’d be crazy to pick one of the low spots. An eagle doesn’t have to under­stand updrafts and currents and jet streams in order to soar and ride the winds.…”

Something for everyone. Cycles on every side, ready to be used, causes unknown, but obviously there. Circadian cycles, menstrual cycles, creativity cycles, excitability cycles. War cycles, peace cycles. Constructive and destructive cycles. Determinism as conceived of in the past, so simplistic, like comparing checkers to chess. A reordering of life styles, acceptance of the inevitable, using the inevitable instead of always bucking it, trying to circumvent it.

He walked on the beach and seemed to feel the earth stirring beneath his feet. Bits of the earth flowing down the river, into the bay, material to be used by the sea as it constructed the islands grain by grain, shaping them patiently, lovingly as the very face of the earth was changed, subsiding here, growing there, swelling and ebbing. Eternal cycles of life and death.

He stumbled over the stones of the ruins and climbed the rough steps of the uncompleted tower, a sand-filled stone cylinder. There was lightning out over the ocean, a distant storm too far away to hear the thunder. He watched the flashing light move northward. I don’t want to do your goddamned book, Pitcock. Hire yourself a nice obedient ghost writer and do it yourself. Where does it lead? What does it imply? Something I don’t want to examine. Flea on the dog, ready to be scratched off, sprayed off, get swept off in the torrent of the river when the dog swims.

“Something happened last night. I don’t know what it was, but it has everyone on the island uptight today. Do you know?”

“No.” I don’t know. I won’t know. I dreamed a crazy dream. Or else they had a bacchanal, and I don’t know which, and won’t know.

“I thought I had time, five years, even more. But now… Don’t tell me you won’t do it, Eliot. Don’t say anything about it for a while. Let it lie there. You’ll come back to it now and again. See what happens if you don’t worry it.”

But I won’t. I don’t want to do it. I want to finish my three years and get the hell out. Chess and checkers. Not with humans, Pit. Not a game, even on a macrocosmic scale. Not fleas on a dog. Free agents, within the limits set down by our capabilities and the government.

He slept and dreamed, and rejected the dream on awakening. Although unremembered, it left an uneasy feeling in his stomach, and he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. Later he found him­self at the ruins and he stood gazing at a mammoth oak tree. The Spaniards had built around it. They had laid a terrazzo floor be­tween the tower and the fort, connected by a walkway that was to have been covered. The pillars were there. And they had built around the oak tree. Crazy pagans, he muttered. Hypocrites with your beads and crucifixes and inquisitions. He walked on the top layer of the stones that made up the fort. They hadn’t closed the square. One-tenth of it done, then abandoned.

That week Marty fell in love with Donna. Marty had been friendly to Eliot in the past, but now avoided him, refused to look directly at him, and managed to be gone with Donna every day when Mrs. Bonner announced lunch from the basement inter­com at the office building.

Eliot kept to himself all week. He worked alone in his office, had a solitary dinner, then prowled about the island until early morning when fatigue drove him to bed and fitful sleep beset by dreams that vanished when he tried to examine them. He knew that the others were together much of the time. Sometimes late at night when the wind eased he could hear their voices, laughing, but he didn’t see them again. He caught himself watching one or the other of them for an overt sign of conspiracy.

Friday afternoon Marty and Donna went to the northern islands for the weekend. Beatrice was gone, to the mountains to visit Gina. Ed Delizzio and Eliot were invited to Lee’s house for dinner on Friday night, and there was no graceful, or even possible, way for Eliot to refuse without hurting Mary’s feelings.

“It’s been a funny week, hasn’t it,” Mary said. “Eliot…” She looked toward her husband, set her mouth, and continued quickly, “Last week, the night that she came, did you have a peculiar dream?”

Lee put his knife down too hard, and she said, “I have to find out. Has Marty spoken to you all week?” She had turned back to Eliot almost instantly.

“No. Why? What about a dream?”

“All right. We all dreamed of… an orgy. Either we dreamed it, or it happened. Lee and I talked about it right away, of course. We thought it was our dream, strange, but ours. Then something Marty said made me realize that he had dreamed it, too. Only he had the players mixed up. And Beatrice… Well, you can ask her what she dreamed sometime. So I asked Ed, and he said almost the same thing. You?”