by Gene Wolfe
Tingles your nose, don’t it? Sweet on the tongue, though.
That’s only this old house a-creaking. Old houses do, you know, particularly by night, and this one was carpentered by Nor’s dad just after the War. It’s the cooling off when the sun sets. Drink up—it won’t hurt you.
No, I can’t say I felt a thing. Know what it is, though—Nor filling you with tales of the walking houses hereabouts.
It’s true enough, ma‘am, though we don’t often mention them to your women. I’ve seen them myself—Nor will have told you, no doubt. There’s those that think them so frightful—say that anybody setting foot in one just vanishes away, or gets ate, or whatever. Well now, it’s true enough they’re seldom seen again; but seldom’s not never, now is it? I’ll tell you a tale of my own. We had a man around here called Pim Pyntey; a drinking man in his way, as a good many of us are. Everybody said no good would come to him, though drunk or sober he was about as friendly a soul as I’ve known, and always willing to pitch in and help a neighbor if it was only a matter of working—didn’t have any money, you know; that kind never does. Still, I’ve gone fishing with him often, though I wouldn’t hunt with him—always afraid he’d burn one of these here legs of mine off by accident. I’m ‘tached to both of them, as they say.
Anyhow, Pim, he started seeing them. I’d run into him down at the Center, and he’d tell me about them. Followin’ him—that was what he always claimed. “They’re after me, Todd, I don’t know why it should be, but they are. They’re followin’ me.” You’ve got drink, I know, where you come from, ma‘am; but not like here. The Firstcomers didn’t feel it was up to what they were accustomed to—said the yeasts were different or some such; at least, that’s what I’ve heard. They put other things in them to raise it up, and we use them yet. There’s—oh, maybe twenty or thirty different herbs and roots and whatnot we favor, and a little whitey-greeny worm we get out of the mud around aruum trees that’s particularly good if there’s a den in the roots, and then a fungus that grows in the mountain caves and has a picture like an autochthon’s hand in the middle sometimes and smells like haying. Those are poison when they’re old, but if you get a young one and cut it up and soak it in salt water for a week before you drop it in the crock, it’ll give you a drink that makes you feel—well, I don’t know how to put it. Like you’re young and going to live forever. Like nothing bad ever happened to you, and you’re likely to meet your mother and dad and everybody you ever liked that’s dead now just around the next turn in the road.
What I’m trying to tell you is that Pim, when his head was full—which it was most of the time—was not entirely like anybody you’re likely to have known before. Now you may say, as a lot did, that it was the drinking that made him see the houses; but suppose it worked the other way, and it was the drinking that made them see him?
Be that as it may, when he was going across the Nepo pass he saw one up on a high rock. At least, that’s what he said. Maybe it’s true; it was snowing, according to what he told me, and a house would figure—as I see it—that it would be hard for any ornithopter to see through the falling flakes, and the buildup on the roof would be no different from what it would see on the stones of the Nepo. Angled stone, you see, looking a lot like angled roofs, with the snow on both.
There were buildings up there a long time ago—I don’t know of anybody who’ll say how long. Buildings and walls that run along the crests of the mountains for as far as a man can see to either side (all tumbledown now, some of that stone will run like sand if you rub it between your fingers), and closed-in places that don’t look like they ever had roofs or floors; and doorways, or what look like them, in front of the mouths of caves. People go up there on picnics in the summer, and go back into those caves carrying torches now. You can see the smoke marks on the ceilings. But there’s whippers farther back—you know about those, I expect, because they bother your flying machines after dark; and in the winter there’s other animals that come into the caves to get out of the cold, so the picnickers find bones and broken skulls in places that were clean the year before. Some say the autochthons cut the stone and built the buildings and the walls; some say they only killed the ones who did.
I can’t believe it matters much. The builders are gone now, whether they came from off-world and tried to stay here, like us, or were earlier people of this world, or the autochthons—in happier days, as you might say. We’re dying out too, now—I mean, the old settler families. You’ll be persuading your own people to come here to live soon, just to fill the place up. Yes you will. Then we’ll see what happens.
What Pim saw was a house. Three stories and a big attic. Lights in all the windows, he said, but only just dim. For some reason—I would guess it was the drink—he didn’t feel like he could turn around and go back; he had to go forward. He’d been to Chackerville, you see, and was coming home across the pass. A man with that much in him will get to where he can’t help but sleep sometimes, and he’d been worried about that, because of the snow, before he saw the house. Well, that was one worry less, was how he put it. Seeing it woke him right up. I guess I never will forget how he told me about all the time he spent climbing up to the saddle, him keeping open his eyes all the time against the snow, afraid of losing sight of the house up there because he thought it might jump down on him. It wouldn’t do such a thing, you know. They can’t jump. They’d crack something if they tried. Still, it was strange for him; and as he said himself, it’s a wonder he went on.
If you had been there, you’d know how it is—a hollow, like, between the two mountains, with the ground falling away to front and back. The old road, built I guess by the same ones that built the buildings there, went right through the middle of it; and when the Firstcomers started to travel in this part of the world, they laid a new road over the old one. That new one’s wearing away now, and you can see the bones of the old through it. Anyway, that was where Pim was walking, on those big lava blocks. One up, one down, one sidewise—that’s the way the slant of them always seems to me to run. There’s them that will tell you every seventh one is cracked, but I won’t vouch for that.
They were icy that night, so Pim said, and he had to pick his way along; but every so often he’d look up and see the house perched there on the outcrop. It reminded him, he said, of what the Bible tells about the man that built his house on rock; and he kept thinking that he could go into it and be home already. There was a fire there—he knew that because of the smoke-smell from the chimney—and he would sit down and put his feet up on the fender and take a pull or two at his bottle and finally have a nap.
In the end he didn’t do it, of course, or he wouldn’t have been in the Center telling it to me. But he said he always felt like there was some part of him that had. That he split into two, some way, coming through the pass, and the other half was in that house still—wherever it was, for it ain’t up there now or more people would have told about seeing it—doing he didn’t know what.
But the funny thing was what happened when he went past. He could hear it groan. The snow was flying right into his face, he said, but he knew it wasn’t just the wind; the house was sorry he hadn’t stopped. All the way down, until the pass was out of sight, he watched the lights in the windows blink out one by one.
Sure you won’t have another? The evening chill is coming now, and that machine of yours don’t keep the air off you, or so it looks to me. Still, you know best, and if you must go, you must; sorry Nor and me couldn’t be of more help.
I’ve got her—set easy, Nor.
Ma’am, you’ve got to be careful of your footing in here. These floorboards are uneven, and a lot of our furniture has those little spindly legs on it, just like that table. They can be tricksy, as you found out.
There’s no good ending to that story of Pim’s—no more than I told already. He dropped out of sight a while afterward, but he’d done that before. Old Wolter, down to the Center, says he looked out one night, and there was another house sett
ing beside his, and in at the window of it he could see Pim laying there with someone else beside him; he said he couldn’t be certain if either of them was dead or not. But Wolter ain’t to be believed, if you know what I mean.
I didn’t feel no shifting, ma’am. I oughtn’t to have given you what I did out of my flask. You’re not used to it, and it’s not for the ladies anyhow. I helped build this place, though, and it’s solid as a rock.
Not that way, ma’am. The door’s over—
Sure, I see your gun, and I know what it will do, too. I think you ought to put it away, ma’am. I don’t believe you’re feeling quite yourself, and you might harm Nor with that thing. You wouldn’t want to do that. Still, I don’t think you ought to open that door.
There! No, I won’t give it back; it’s safer, I think, with me. I doubt that you’ll remember; and if you was to, you couldn’t find us.
I didn’t want you to see her—that’s all. You’d have been happier, I think, without it—and it would’ve saved you that yell. Nor’s grandmother’s sister, she was. Still is, I guess. Great-aunt Enid. She talks to us still—there’s mouths, you see, in various places; would you credit she remembers people that was born before the first transporter left? That far back. Didn’t you ever wonder how different it was—
Old Woman: Well, Todd, that’s the last of her—at least, for now. Hear that machine kick gravel. She expected you’d try to stop her when she ran for it, and she’ll be disappointed you didn’t, once she gets away down the road. Hope she don’t run that thing into a tree.
We’ll move on now, Enid.
You’re right, she’s not ready yet; but someday—I suppose it might be possible. Look at that other one. Someday this one will be ready to seek her peace. Come into a woman. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—that’s why we’re all so comfortable here: we’ve been here before. Feel the motion of her, Todd. How easy she goes!
ARMISTICE DAY
Against the Lafayette Escadrille
I have built a perfect replica of a Fokker triplane, except for the flammable dope. It is five meters, seventy-seven centimeters long and has a wing span of seven meters, nineteen centimeters, just like the original. The engine is an authentic copy of an Oberursel UR II. I have a lathe and a milling machine and I made most of the parts for the engine myself, but some had to be farmed out to a company in Cleveland, and most of the electrical parts were done in Louisville, Kentucky.
In the beginning I had hoped to get an original engine, and I wrote my first letters to Germany with that in mind, but it just wasn’t possible; there are only a very few left, and as nearly as I could find out none in private hands. The Oberursel Worke is no longer in existence. I was able to secure plans though, through the cooperation of some German hobbyists. I redrew them myself translating the German when they had to be sent to Cleveland. A man from the newspaper came to take pictures when the Fokker was nearly ready to fly, and I estimated then that I had put more than three thousand hours into building it. I did all the airframe and the fabric work myself, and carved the propeller.
Throughout the project I have tried to keep everything as realistic as possible, and I even have two 7.92 mm Maxim “Spandau” machine-guns mounted just ahead of the cockpit. They are not loaded of course, but they are coupled to the engine with the Fokker Zentralsteuerung interrupter gear.
The question of dope came up because of a man in Oregon I used to correspond with who flies a Nieuport Scout. The authentic dope, as you’re probably aware, was extremely flammable. He wanted to know if I’d used it, and when I told him I had not he became critical. As I said then, I love the Fokker too much to want to see it burn authentically, and if Antony Fokker and Reinhold Platz had had fireproof dope they would have used it. This didn’t satisfy the Oregon man and he finally became so abusive I stopped replying to his letters. I still believe what I did was correct, and if I had it to do over my decision would be the same.
I have had a trailer specially built to move the Fokker, and I traded my car in on a truck to tow it and carry parts and extra gear, but mostly I leave it at a small field near here where I have rented hangar space, and move it as little as possible on the roads. When I do because of the wide load I have to drive very slowly and only use certain roads. People always stop to look when we pass, and sometimes I can hear them on their front porches calling to others inside to come and see. I think the three wings of the Fokker interest them particularly, and once in a rare while a veteran of the war will see it—almost always a man who smokes a pipe and has a cane. If I can hear what they say it is often pretty foolish, but a light comes into their eyes that I enjoy.
Mostly the Fokker is just in its hangar out at the field and you wouldn’t know me from anyone else as I drive out to fly. There is a black cross painted on the door of my truck, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. I suppose it wouldn’t have meant anything even if you had seen me on my way out the day I saw the balloon.
It was one of the earliest days of spring, with a very fresh, really indescribable feeling in the air. Three days before I had gone up for the first time that year, coming after work and flying in weather that was a little too bad with not quite enough light left; winter flying, really. Now it was Saturday and everything was changed. I remember how my scarf streamed out while I was just standing on the field talking to the mechanic.
The wind was good, coming right down the length of the field to me, getting under the Fokker’s wings and lifting it like a kite before we had gone a hundred feet. I did a slow turn then, getting a good look at the field with all the new, green grass starting to show, and adjusting my goggles.
Have you ever looked from an open cockpit to see the wing struts trembling and the ground swinging far below? There is nothing like it. I pulled back on the stick and gave it more throttle and rose and rose until I was looking down on the backs of all the birds and I could not be certain which of the tiny roofs I saw was the house where I live or the factory where I work. Then I forgot looking down, and looked up and out, always remembering to look over my shoulder especially, and to watch the sun where the S.E. 5a’s of the Royal Flying Corps love to hang like dragonflies, invisible against the glare.
Then I looked away and I saw it, almost on the horizon, an orange dot. I did not, of course, know then what it was; but I waved to the other members of the Jagstaffel I command and turned toward it, the Fokker thrilling to the challenge. It was moving with the wind, which meant almost directly away from me, but that only gave the Fokker a tailwind, and we came at it—rising all the time.
It was not really orange-red as I had first thought. Rather it was a thousand colors and shades, with reds and yellows and white predominating. I climbed toward it steeply with the stick drawn far back, almost at a stall. Because of that I failed, at first, to see the basket hanging from it. Then I leveled out and circled it at a distance. That was when I realized it was a balloon. After a moment I saw, too, that it was of very old-fashioned design with a wicker basket for the passengers and that someone was in it. At the moment the profusion of colors interested me more, and I went slowly spiraling in until I could see them better, the Easter egg blues and the blacks as well as the reds and whites and yellows.
It wasn’t until I looked at the girl that I understood. She was the passenger, a very beautiful girl, and she wore crinolines and had her hair in long chestnut curls that hung down over her bare shoulders. She waved to me, and then I understood.
The ladies of Richmond had sewn it for the Confederate army, making it from their silk dresses. I remembered reading about it. The girl in the basket blew me a kiss and I waved to her, trying to convey with my wave that none of the men of my command would ever be allowed to harm her; that we had at first thought that her craft might be a French or Italian observation balloon, but that for the future she need fear no gun in the service of the Kaiser’s Flugzeugmeisterei.
I circled her for some time then, she turning slowly in the basket to follow the motion of
my plane, and we talked as well as we could with gestures and smiles. At last when my fuel was running low I signaled her that I must leave. She took, from a container hidden by the rim of the basket, a badly shaped, corked brown bottle. I circled even closer, in a tight bank, until I could see the yellow, crumbling label. It was one of the very early soft drinks, an original bottle. While I watched she drew the cork, drank some, and held it out symbolically to me.
Then I had to go. I made it back to the field, but I landed dead stick with my last drop of fuel exhausted when I was half a kilometer away. Naturally I had the Fokker refueled at once and went up again, but I could not find her balloon.
I have never been able to find it again, although I go up almost every day when the weather makes it possible. There is nothing but an empty sky and a few jets. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I have wondered if things would not have been different if, in finishing the Fokker, I had used the original, flammable dope. She was so authentic. Sometimes toward evening I think I see her in the distance, above the clouds, and I follow as fast as I can across the silent vault with the Fokker trembling around me and the throttle all the way out; but it is only the sun.
THANKSGIVING
Three Mullion Square Miles
“Hey,” Richard Marquer said to his wife Betty one August afternoon. “Hey, ninety percent of the United States is uninhabited.” They were reading the Sunday paper.
“That’s right,” Betty said, “it’s parking lots.”
“No, really. It says so right here: ‘At least ninety percent of the land area of the United States is employed neither in agriculture nor as sites for roads and buildings.’”
“I didn’t know Texas was that big.”
“Listen, this is serious. Where the hell is it all?”
“Dick, you don’t really believe that junk.”