by Gene Wolfe
He was sympathetic. This, I have to admit, made me warm to him somewhat. The manager of my usual station had been pretty curt the third time I complained about my car’s “morning trouble,” as I called it. When I had described the symptoms to Bosko, he asked, “You smell gas when it happens, Colonel?”
“Yes, now that you mention it, I do. There’s quite a strong gasoline odor.”
He nodded. “You see, Colonel, what happens is that your engine is drawin’ in the gas from the carb, then pukin’ it back up at you. You know, like it was sick.”
So my American had a queasy stomach mornings. It was a remarkable idea, but on the other hand one of the very few things I’ve ever been told by a mechanic that made sense. Naturally I asked Bosko what we could do about it.
“There’s a few things, but really they won’t any of them help much. The best thing is just live with it. It’ll go away by itself in a while. Only I got something serious to tell you, Colonel. You want to come in my office?”
Mystified, I followed him into the cluttered little room adjoining the garage portion of the station and seated myself in a chair whose bottom was dropping out. To be truthful, I couldn’t really imagine what he could have to tell me since he hadn’t so much as raised the hood to look at my engine; so I waited with equanimity for him to speak. “Colonel,” he said, “you got a bun in the oven—you know what I mean? Your car does, that is. She’s that way.”
I laughed, of course.
“You don’t believe me? Well, it’s the truth. See, what we got here,” he lowered his voice, “is kinda what you would call a stud service. An’ when you told Bubber you wanted her serviced, you never havin’ come here before, that’s what he thought you meant. So he, uh,” Bosko jerked his head significantly toward the sleek, black Aston Martin in the garage, “he, you know, he serviced it. I was hopin’ it wouldn’t take. Lots of times it don’t.”
“This is ridiculous. Cars don’t breed.”
Bosko waggled his head at me. “That’s what they’d like you to think in Detroit. But if you’d ever lived around there and talked to any of the union men, those guys would tell you how every year they make more and more cars with less and less guys comin’ through the gate.”
“That’s because of automation,” I told him. “Better methods.”
“Sure!” He leveled a dirty finger at me. “Better methods is right. An’ what’s the best method of all, huh? Ain’t it the way the farmer does? Sure there’s lots of cars put together the old-fashioned way early in the year when they got to get their breedin’ stock, but after that—well, I’m here to tell you, Colonel, they don’t hire all them engineers up there for nothing. Bionics, they call it. Makin’ a machine act like it was a’ animal.”
“Why doesn’t everybody …”
He shushed me, finger to lips. “‘Cause they don’t like it, that’s why. There’s a hell of a big license needed to do it legal, and even if you’re willin’ to put up the bread, you don’t get one unless you’re one of the big boys. That’s why I try to keep my little operation here quiet. Besides, they got a way of makin’ sure most people can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know anything about horses? You know what a gelding is?”
I admit I was shocked, though that may sound foolish. I said, “You mean they … ?”
“Sure.” Bosko made a scissors gesture with his arms, snapping them like a giant shears. “Ain’t you ever noticed how they make all these cars with real hairy names, but when you get ’em out on the road, they ain’t really got anything? Geldings.”
“Do you think …” I looked (delicately, I hope) toward my American, “it could be repaired? What they call an illegal operation?”
Bosko spread his hands. “What for? Listen, Colonel, it would just cost you a lot of bread, and that little car of yours might never recover. Ain’t it come through to you yet that if you just let nature take her course for a while yet, you’re goin’ to have yourself a new car for nothing?”
I took Bosko’s advice. I should not have; it was the first time in my life I have ever connived at anything against the law; but the idea of having a second car to give my wife attracted me, and I must admit I was fascinated as well. I dare say that in time Bosko must have regretted having persuaded me; I pestered him with questions, and once even, by a little genteel blackmail, forced him to allow me to witness the Aston Martin in action.
For all its sleek good finish it was a remarkably unprepossessing car, with something freakish about it. Bosko told me it had been specially built for use on some British television program now defunct. I suppose the producers had wanted to project the most masculine possible image, and it was for this reason that it had been left reproductively intact—to fall, eventually, into Bosko’s hands. When Bubber started the engine it made a sound such as I have never heard from any car in my life, a sort of lustful snarl.
The Aston Martin’s bride for the night was a small and rather elderly Volks squareback, belonging I suppose to some poor man who could not afford to buy a new car through legal channels, or perhaps hoped to turn a small profit on his family’s fecundity. I must say I felt rather sorry for her, forced to submit to a beast like the Aston Martin. In action all its appearance of feline grace proved a fraud; it experienced the same difficulties a swine breeder might expect with a huge champion boar, and had to be helped by Bosko with ramps and jacks while Bubber fought the controls.
The months of my American’s time passed. Her gasoline consumption went up and up until I was getting barely eleven miles to the gallon. She acquired a swollen appearance as well, and became so deficient in endurance she could scarcely be forced up even a moderate hill, and overheated continually. When eight months had passed the plies on her tires separated, forming ugly welts in the sidewalls, but Bosko warned me not to replace them since the same problem would only occur again.
On the night of the delivery Bosko offered to allow me to observe, but I declined. Call it squeamishness, if you will. Late that night—very late—I walked past his station and stared from the sidewalk at the bright glow of a trouble light and the scuttling shadows within, but I felt no urge to let them know I was there. The next morning, before I had breakfast, Bosko was on the phone asking if I wanted to pick my cars up: “I’ll drive your old one over if you’ll give me a lift back.” Then I knew that my American had come through the ordeal, and breathed somewhat more easily.
My first sight of her son was, I admit, something of a shock. It—I find it hard to call him he—is a deep, jungle green inherited from Heaven knows what remote ancestor, and his seats are covered in a long-napped sleazy stuff like imitation rabbit fur. I had expected—I don’t know quite why—that he would be of some recognizable make: a Pontiac, or perhaps a Ford, since they are made in both England and America. He is nothing of the sort, of course, and I realize now that those marques with which we are familiar must be carefully maintained purebred lines. As it is I have searched him everywhere for some sort of brand name that would allow me to describe the car to prospective purchasers, but beyond a sort of trademark that appears in several places (a shield with a band or stripe running from left to right) there is nothing. Where part numbers or serial numbers appear, they are often garbled or illegible, or do not match.
It was necessary to license him of course, and to do this it was necessary to have a title. Through Bosko I procured one from an unethical used-car dealer for thirty dollars. It describes the car as a ’54 Chevrolet; I wish it were.
No dealer I have found will give me any sort of price for it, and so I have advertised it each Sunday for the past eight months in the largest paper in the city where I work, and also in a small, nationally circulated magazine specializing in collector’s cars. There have been only two responses: one from a man who left as soon as he saw the car, the other from a boy of about seventeen who told me he would buy him as soon as he could find someone who would lend him the money. Had I been more alert I would have taken whatever he had, ma
de over the spurious title to him, and trusted him for the rest; but at the time I was still hoping to find a bona fide buyer.
I have had to turn my American over to my wife since she refuses to drive the new car, and the several mechanical failures he has already suffered have been extremely inconvenient. Parts in the conventional sense are nonexistent. Either alterations must be made which will allow the corresponding part from some known make to be used, or the part must be made by a job shop. This, I find, is one of the penalties of our—as I thought—unique automotive miscegenation; but when, a few weeks ago, I grew so discouraged I attempted to abandon the car, I discovered that someone else must have made the same crossing. When the police forced me to come and retrieve it, I found that the radiator, generator, and battery were missing.
ARMED FORCES DAY
The Blue Mouse
“It’s an awful thing you’re doing,” the old woman said, “an awful, terrible thing. How old are you, anyway? Have another cookie.” Her voice was as thin as the wind that tossed her gray hair against the background of winter-gray hills.
“Eighteen.” Lonnie accepted the cookie with one in his mouth already and another in his throat. They were large, and the sour milk and brown sugar the old woman had used had given them a scratchy and persistent crumb. A big raisin occupied the center of each.
“You’re but a little lad and not responsible,” the old woman said, “but if you’d seen the half of all I have, you’d not be here killin’ our boys.”
Lonnie, whose two meters plus towered over her, nodded—knowing she would not listen if he tried to defend the Peace Force. A sip of the warm, weak tea she had given him softened cookies number one and two enough for him to swallow number three.
“And where would you be from?”
He gave her the name of his home city. From her blank expression he knew she had never heard of it. She said, “What country was it, I meant.”
The crumbs clung to the front of his blue fatigue shirt, and he tried to brush them off. “Sector ten,” he said.
She helped him absently, smoothing the wrinkled twill with age-crooked fingers. “And where is that?”
“South of nine, close to the Great Lakes. If you don’t want us here putting down the unrest—” (it was always called “the unrest” in orientation lectures, and he felt an obligation, here alone by the old woman’s tumbledown stone cottage, to represent the official view) “—why are you giving me the cookies and tea?”
“It said to do it on the tel. Our free channel. It says we does our part by tellin’ you it’s wrong that you should come here killing’. And it’s easy enough to do—you’re nice enough lads, the ones I’ve talked with.” The wind was rising, and she took her free hand, the one not holding the blue-rimmed plate of cookies, away from his shirt to keep her skirt in place.
Lonnie said, “I don’t kill anyone. I’m a Tech, not a Marksman.”
“It’s the same. You’re carrying the bullets that will take the lives of boys here.”
“It’s not ammunition.” He glanced toward the road, where his loaded truck stood with its launcher slanted at the sky. “Mostly it’s winter clothes.”
“It’s the same,” the old woman said stubbornly. (Up there the wild geese were calling, lost in the gray clouds. There was a feeling of rain.) “Never mind. You but think on it that our lads are only wanting to be free of the foreign law and the greasy dark foreigners followin’ your blue rag half ‘round the world to suck our blood. Think on it, if you should find such a thing as a conscience about you.”
Later, as Lonnie jolted along in the truck, the rain came. A sensor near the windshield detected it and sprayed out a detergent, transforming the drops into a cleansing film more optically flat and transparent than the polycarbonate windshield itself. Lonnie set the autodriver for MUD and switched it in. Occasionally, the insurgents cut the guide cables or pulled a slack section into a bog, but at such low speed he would be able to regain control if necessary, and he wanted to send a letter. He got out his Hallmark Voisriit.
“Dear Mother,” he said. The feedback screen, showing the picture which on his mother’s own viewer would accompany his voice, displayed a cartooned soldier ignoring exploding shells; the balloon over his head held the ezspeek words, “Hii thair,” and an exclamation point.
“October 15th. Dear Mother. I don’t have a great deal to say, but I’ve some time on my hands right now and I wanted to tell you everything’s all right here and really very quiet. It’s damp and cold, but our tents are warm and dry. You asked if I still believed in what we’re supposed to be doing. Yes I do, but I see it more clearly. It’s not only whether or not we’re going to let the world slip backward into nationalism and war, but—”
The truck topped a hill and he saw the wet plastic of the battalion tents. He had not realized there was so short a distance yet to go; sighing, he touched the eeraas button and slipped the Voisriit back into its leatheroid envelope, then took over from the autodriver.
The road dove between high tangles of wire, and the camp unfolded around him. The battalion supply tents, where he was going, were at the end of the road. Beyond them, linked to the road by a rutted track, lay the tank park with its three hunchbacked hard-shell tanks and the combat cars. The Battalion Headquarters tents and the SAM-guarded helicopter pad flanked the road; and from it the company streets of the four Marksman companies branched at measured intervals, with that of his own Headquarters Company and the motor pool parking area further on.
Surrounding everything was the network of Marksman trenches and strong points, with computer-directed guns and launchers thrust forward to enfilade attackers, raking their advance from the side if they tried to overrun the trenches. Lonnie recalled that when he had first been assigned here he had thought these, with the wire and the mine fields, were impregnable. He had soon been enlightened by more experienced men. Leaving aside the chemical, viral, and nuclear weapons neither side dared use, there remained the ancient arithmetic of men. There were, all in all, blue-uniformed Techs and green-shirted Marksmen, a thousand United Nations soldiers defending this small outpost of the Peace Force. In the hills surrounding it, and in villages where they waited the order to take up arms, were perhaps fifty thousand insurgents.
He had helped the supply staff unload his truck and was about to see if it were still too early to get supper at the mess hall, when one of the supply clerks said casually, “Captain Koppel wants to see you.” Koppel was Battalion Intelligence Officer.
“What for?”
“He didn’t say. Just to send you over.”
Lonnie nodded and put on his poncho, though he was already soaked from unloading without it. Rain slanted into his eyes as he left the tent.
A Marksman in green, matte-finished armor, with weary eyes like caves, moved cautiously aside for him. Techs, who did not fight, who according to the psychological tests administered at induction, would not fight, sometimes had been known to trip or strike a passing Marksman from behind. Marksmen were usually almost too exhausted to protest, and more often than might be expected were physically small. Lonnie himself—once (he told himself)—only once …
There had been five of them, friends from camp, full of beer and bravery after completing the “tough” training course. They had surprised two Marksmen on the gravel parking lot of a roadside joint with savage, wide-swung head punches until—
He blinked the image away, turned into the HQ tent, and saluted. “Tech Specialist Third Leonard P. Daws, sir.”
“At ease, Daws.” Captain Koppel was a blue-uniformed Tech like himself despite his rank, a man heavily forty with an intelligent, unworldly face that seemed designed for a clergyman. “You’ve just returned from Corps?”
“From Corps supply dump, sir.”
“The road was clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You saw no signs of the enemy?”
“No, sir. Only an old woman.”
“Did you converse with her?”
>
Lonnie paused. “Only for a few minutes, sir. The orientation lectures always say that we’re to behave well toward the civilian population and be friendly, so I thought it couldn’t do much harm, sir.”
The captain nodded. “Who initiated the contact, you or she?”
“I guess she did, sir. She has a cottage on the road about twenty kilometers up, and when she heard my truck coming she came out with a plate of cookies and some tea, so I stopped.”
“I see. Go on.”
“Well, that’s about all there is to it, sir.”
“Oh, come now. You’re an intelligent young man, Daws—didn’t somebody tell me you had some college?”
“A semester, sir, before I was inducted. Biology.”
“Then you should be able to guess the sort of thing I want to know. Did this old lady of yours favor their side or ours? Did she pump you about anything? Did she try to subvert you?”
“Theirs, sir. I wouldn’t say she really questioned me, but she more or less said I had ammunition in the truck, and I told her I didn’t. Also, she asked what country I was from, and I told her Ten.”
The captain pursed his lips. “I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of our situation, Daws. It’s not at all serious, and there’s no question of our ability to maintain the integrity of our perimeter no matter what’s thrown at us, but the guide cable has been cut. Did you know that?”
“No, sir. I came in on it for the last five kilometers or so and it seemed okay then.”
“It was severed on the far side of the river, just over the bridge—we think. How long have you been in camp?”
“About an hour, sir. I helped unload before I came here.”
“You should have come at once.”
Lonnie stood a little straighter. The Supply sergeant and his men, he knew, had waited until he had helped unload before passing on Koppel’s message. “I didn’t think it was urgent, sir,” he said.
“We sent out a repair crew and they ambushed them. Some of them surrendered and they killed them, too, Techs as well as Marksmen. You didn’t see anything?”