In the same science fiction story, written on a different day, he would build the doomsday machine, but at the last minute, he would realize the folly of deploying it. Instead, he would continue to plead as I turned away, until finally the doctors would pull his outstretched hand away from mine as they slid the needle into my skin.
In yet a third science fiction story, a meteor would crash to the earth, and upon it, there would be a sentient alien symbiont, and for it to survive, it would require a human host. Testing would determine that I was the only viable candidate. They would cut me open and stitch the alien into my side, and it would tell me stories about the depths of space, and the strange whales that fly between stars, and the sun-and-dust thoughts of nebulae. It would tell me of its adventures on the surfaces of alien monuments so large that they have their own atmospheres and have evolved sentient populations who think it’s natural for the world to be shaped like the face of a giant. The alien would help my wounded soul rediscover how to accept my love’s touch, and the three of us would live together, different from what we were, but unbreakably unified.
In this science fiction story, I am a fetus; I am a mouse; I am an eggshell; I am a held breath; I am a snowdrift; I am a cyborg; I am a woman whose skin cannot bear the sensation of love.
"Please," he whispers in his sleep, "Please."
Lying awake, I see the fetal creatures in the snow, not in a dream this time, but as a waking vision. My palm pushes futilely on the window between us. The fetal things are fragility I cannot rescue. They are love I cannot reach. They are myself, slowly freezing.
I, too, am fragmented. I am the creatures dying, and I am the woman pounding at the window. I am the glass between us. I am the inability to shatter.
I watch him lying next to me, his breath even with sleep. In an hour or so, while it is still deep dark, he will wake. He will take me down to the laboratory. In the morning, I will wake inhabited by an army of genetically engineered viruses, instructed to wrap each of my cells in a protective coat, a cloud-like embrace of softness and safety.
Do you know why I wear your armor? I don’t ask him.
When you take me to the lab, I’m not always asleep. Sometimes, I’m aware. Sometimes, I feel the numbness of your anaesthetic spreading across my skin. Sometimes, I watch your face.
The flash of my sensors makes him seem alien.
In the laboratory, I don’t continue, your hands, laboring over me, are like the hands of an unknown creator god, working his clay.
He stirs. The mice rustle in their cage. They draw schematics for spaceships that can escape this earth.
I don’t say, I wear your armor because I love you.
I don’t say, I wear your armor because I am the fetal thing in the snow.
I don’t say, I wear your armor because you will not make me into a Stepford revenant, and you will not build a doomsday machine, and there are no alien symbionts to weave me stories about metal rain on distant planets. I wear your armor because my skin is hot with the sun’s memory. Because nanobot armies are love poems written in circuitry.
I don’t say, I wear your armor because, in my dreams, I’m still pounding on the glass.
(2014)
MASKS
Damon Knight
Though his output was modest, Damon Francis Knight (1922–2002) was one of America’s leading critics, editors and writers of science fiction. He was a member of the Futurians, a group which included Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth and James Blish, and in 1956, with Blish and Judith Merril, he started the Milford Writers’ Conference, still the most important gathering for established science fiction writers. He also edited the Orbit anthologies (21 volumes between 1966 and 1980), a series which launched many writers of the New Wave. Knight was married three times. His third wife, Gertrude Meredith, was the sf writer Kate Wilhelm, who died in 2018. Of Knight’s work – by turns mature, surreal, melancholy, and funny – the editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden wrote, "He had a wry but not entirely pessimistic view of human nature. I don’t think anybody that works that hard to get other people to do better work is fundamentally a pessimist."
The eight pens danced against the moving strip of paper, like the nervous claws of some mechanical lobster. Roberts, the technician, frowned over the tracings while the other two watched.
"Here’s the wake-up impulse," he said, pointing with a skinny finger. "Then here, look, seventeen seconds more, still dreaming."
"Delayed response," said Babcock, the project director. His heavy face was flushed and he was sweating. "Nothing to worry about."
"Okay, delayed response, but look at the difference in the tracings. Still dreaming, after the wake-up impulse, but the peaks are closer together. Not the same dream. More anxiety, more motor pulses."
"Why does he have to sleep at all?" asked Sinescu, the man from Washington. He was dark, narrow-faced. "You flush the fatigue poisons out, don’t you? So what is it, something psychological?"
"He needs to dream," said Babcock. "It’s true he has no physiological need for sleep, but he’s got to dream. If he didn’t, he’d start to hallucinate, maybe go psychotic."
"Psychotic," said Sinescu. "Well—that’s the question, isn’t it? How long has he been doing this?"
"About six months."
"In other words, about the time he got his new body—and started wearing a mask?"
"About that. Look, let me tell you something, he’s rational. Every test—"
"Yes, okay, I know about tests. Well—so he’s awake now?"
The technician glanced at the monitor board. "He’s up. Sam and Irma are with him." He hunched his shoulders, staring at the EEG tracings again. "I don’t know why it should bother me. It stands to reason, if he has dream needs of his own that we’re not satisfying with the programmed stuff, this is where he gets them in." His face hardened. "I don’t know. Something about those peaks I don’t like."
Sinescu raised his eyebrows. "You program his dreams?"
"Not program," said Babcock impatiently. "A routine suggestion to dream the sort of thing we tell him to. Somatic stuff, sex, exercise, sport."
"And whose idea was that?"
"Psych section. He was doing fine neurologically, every other way, but he was withdrawing. Psych decided he needed that somatic input in some form, we had to keep him in touch. He’s alive, he’s functioning, everything works. But don’t forget, he spent forty-three years in a normal human body."
In the hush of the elevator, Sinescu said, "… Washington."
Swaying, Babcock said, "I’m sorry, what?"
"You look a little rocky. Getting any sleep?"
"Not lately. What did you say before?"
"I said they’re not happy with your reports in Washington."
"Goddamn it, I know that." The elevator door silently opened. A tiny foyer, green carpet, gray walls. There were three doors, one metal, two heavy glass. Cool, stale air. "This way."
Sinescu paused at the glass door, glanced through: a gray-carpeted living room, empty. "I don’t see him."
"Around the ell. Getting his morning checkup."
The door opened against slight pressure; a battery of ceiling lights went on as they entered. "Don’t look up," said Babcock. "Ultraviolet." A faint hissing sound stopped when the door closed.