Home Fires

by Gene Wolfe

  “Let me have your number,” Skip said. “I’ve already got Virginia’s. We can search a lot faster if we split up. I’ll call you both if I find something; you call Virginia and me if you do. Ask for Jerry’s room. That’s all we know.”

  They separated, Vanessa going up to B Deck and the muscular woman to the crew’s quarters, forward on E Deck. Skip began knocking on doors.

  “Yes?” The woman’s face was innocent of makeup and smeared with cream. Her hair was in curlers.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Skip said, “but this is important.”

  “I was getting ready for bed.” The woman paused. “You should go to bed, too. You’re that man who goes around with the captain, aren’t you?”

  Skip nodded. “I’m trying to find Mastergunner Chelle Blue. I don’t suppose you’ve seen her within the past few hours?”

  “Not since yesterday, I think.”

  “She told me she would be in Jerry’s room. Just that—Jerry’s room. Do you have any idea where that would be?”

  “No. Not here. I have son-in-law named Jerry back home. Should I call him?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Skip said, and thanked her.

  The knocking at the doors of the next three cabins evoked no response. The fourth was opened by a boy. In response to Skip’s question he said, “I’m Jerry, and this is my room, right here.”

  No words came.

  “See, my folks don’t want me in with them because I drive Dad nuts, and I don’t want to be in with them anyhow because Mom drives me nuts, so I get my own room. Brass, right?”

  “Very brass.” Skip had recovered himself.

  “Only this game’s kinda itchy, and there’s never anything on tele.”

  Wondering what an itchy game was like, Skip nodded.

  “So I’m gonna sit around the pool, and maybe swim if it’s not too crowded.”

  “Could we go into your cabin for a minute? Please? You’d be doing me a great favor.”

  “Mom says not to let anybody in.” The boy shrugged. “Only you look okay, so I guess so.” He stepped aside.

  “Thank you, Jerry. I don’t think Chelle’s in here, but I’ve got to look. I really must.”

  There was no one in the lavatory, no one out on the veranda, and no one in the closet.

  Jerry said, “Who’s Chelle? Is that Mastergunner Blue? I saw her once, and Steve says her first name’s Chelle. Is she hot or what?”

  Skip nodded.

  “You think she might be hiding in my room? Wait’ll I tell Steve!”

  “I was hoping she was hidden in your room,” Skip said. His phone vibrated as he spoke; he took it out and flipped it open.

  “This Trinity, Mr. Grison. I found that man got no hands. You know? He say you know him.”

  “Achille,” Skip said.

  “Got big ol’ hooks. He say he know where that Jerry’s room is, and he take us there.”

  “Did he say what deck it was on?”

  There was a murmur of speech too faint for Skip to understand. Then: “This Achille, mon. Is on bottom, mon. Bottom deck, you know?”

  “M Deck?”

  “You know cheap bar? We meet you there, you buy drink, I show you.”

  “The tourist-class bar?”

  “Is so, mon. Meet there. I take you Jerry.”

  Skip sighed. “All right.”

  As he shut his phone, Jerry said, “Did somebody find Mastergunner Blue?”

  “I don’t think so. I think I’m going to find a wild goose. The tourist bar is aft, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. I’ll show you.”

  REFLECTION 13: Sleep

  When we need to be at our best, we’re always far from it. I could sleep now for twelve hours straight, or I feel I could, and rise refreshed. Instead, I walk through half the ship with a loaded submachine gun slantwise across my back and a pistol shoved into my belt. Both are much too heavy, and I much too tired. Would Chelle do this for me?

  I would like to think so, and perhaps she would. God only knows what she did on Johanna. She did much worse, in all probability.…

  Which is my cue to whine that she was younger.

  As she still is. Much, much younger than I, and she sleeps on her side, always turned away. It’s clearly a defensive posture, but does she know it? On her back sometimes when she has had a few; she snores then, snoring so soft that it is almost purring. I sleep on my belly, a good reason for staying in shape, for not gaining another kilo. Does the ship have a handball court? I don’t even know.

  I could walk around and around the Main Deck. A lot of people do that, but I have walked now until my feet are blistered and feel that they must burst through my shoes. Through canvas shoes I bought for comfort, visualizing much shopping on this island and that, see the fort, built in 1615 by the Spanish. “There are a hundred and fifty-three steps so perhaps the old people should wait here while the rest of us go up.” Me climbing the stairs to show Susan that I was still young, Susan climbing behind me to show that she was still loyal. Once Susan would have combed this ship for me, I know. She’d have combed it ’til she dropped, and I may drop soon.

  Would I do this if Chelle and I were the same age? Yes, and if anything more willingly. Chelle has still the fire of youth, a fire I would control if I could. That’s wrong, perhaps. Wrong but right. Wrong but true.

  Correct.

  Why is it my dreams are never the dreams I would like? Other men have good dreams, or so they tell me. Dreams of success. Of flying without a plane, of flying like a bird or flying like a balloon. (But it is never the fat ones who fly like balloons. Am I the only one to notice?)

  I dream of prisons, of windowless concrete walls and being locked in boxes. Prisons in which I never sleep and never eat, or drink, or defecate. Dreams of driving down doubtful roads that narrow and narrow, of driving a car as big as a bus across a footbridge that falls to bits behind me.

  Of getting out of the car in a wilderness to shout at someone on the farther side of a gorge, someone who turns away with no sign of having heard. Soon I give up—and do not try the car door, knowing that the car cannot cross the gorge and that I have locked myself out.

  In the future, I may dream of walking through this endless ship, of painted corridors that rock and pitch and lead only to more corridors, silent corridors lined with locked doors.

  Once I dreamed of Chelle, dreamed that she was leaving me, going to the stars to fight a war from which she would never return, and I was old.

  No dream, that last. I am. Fifty will be at my doorstep only too soon. Chet is what? Eighty-something. I have never hoped that Chet would die; now I hope that he will live. If Chet achieves one hundred, why Skip might, too. At one hundred, no one will care if I remain abed, or how long I sleep.

  14. NO YOU DON’T!

  A long walk to the nearest stair was succeeded by a weary descent to E Deck and an even longer walk aft, a walk that took Skip and Jerry through the tourist-class casino and almost to the tourist-class dining room. By the time they reached the tourist-class bar, the ship was pitching hard enough to force them to hold the railings.

  Trinity and Achille were sitting at a table in the bar, Trinity with a glass before her and Achille with none. Trinity waved them over. “He say he know, Mr. Grison. Say he know Jerry and know where is Jerry’s room, too. We buy him a drink, an’ he show us. Only I didn’t buy him none. I don’t think we ought to ’til Ms. Healy come. I call her after I call you. She say she come right away. What you bring this li’l boy for?”

  “He knew where this bar was,” Skip explained, “and I didn’t. At least, I wasn’t sure.”

  Jerry stopped staring at Achille’s hooks. “I’d have followed you anyhow.”

  “Yes. I thought you would, and I might as well make use of you.”

  Achille asked, “You buy drink, mon?”

  Skip nodded, and signaled the barman. “What do you want, Achille?”

  “Drink rum, mon.”

 
“A rum, please. Whatever kind you have. It might be best if there were a straw as well.”

  The barman nodded. “I’m on it. What about you? I could get the kid a Coke or something.”

  “Coffee,” Skip told him, “if you’re got it. What would you like, Jerry?”

  Trinity looked startled. “This Jerry?”

  “This is another Jerry.”

  “Pepsi,” Jerry said. “Is that okay?”

  Vanessa arrived soon after the drinks, bracing herself against the pitching of the ship and moving cautiously from one handhold to another. “Shouldn’t we be going?”

  “I doubt it.” Skip stirred his surging coffee as he spoke. “I don’t have a lot of confidence in this, to tell you the truth. Have you found anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then this is all we have, this room Achille knows about on M Deck. If it doesn’t pan out—and I don’t believe it will—what are we going to do?”

  In the silence that followed, Skip flipped open his mobile phone and selected Chelle’s number. Her phone was off; so was Susan’s.

  “We need to talk to everyone who was at that party,” Vanessa said.

  “I concur. Unless you can get us a list, we’ll have to talk to those we can find. If each of them names everyone else he can think of we may get something. I said may.” He drew in air and let it out. “We can ask about Jerry’s room at the same time.”

  Achille grunted, bent over his shot glass, closed his mouth around it, and raised his head. The boy called Jerry watched him, fascinated, as he swallowed, lowered his head again, and spat out the shot glass.

  “Did you see that!” Jerry’s eyes were wide.

  “I did,” Vanessa told him. “I wish I hadn’t.”

  “You don’t got to do this you say, mon.” Achille rose. “I take you now.”

  M Deck, reachable by freight elevator, smelled of hot oil and smoke, and housed the storage batteries that hoarded the electrical energy created by the Rani’s wind-driven generators. Achille led the little group along a straight central corridor that seemed to reach beyond the ship, a corridor blocked at one point by what Skip decided was most likely a disassembled heat exchanger. Even here, well below the waterline, they could hear the crash of thunder.

  “You see big door, mon? Door there, this side. You see him?”

  As Skip was about to reply, the big door opened and a middle-aged man stepped out; he wore coveralls and carried a tool kit.

  Skip waved to him. “Just a moment, please. We need to talk to you.”

  He stopped, but shook his head. “You can’t schedule a job through me, sir. You’ll have to book it through the engineering office.”

  “We don’t want to schedule anything,” Skip explained, “but I have to ask you a few questions.”

  “Something go wrong with the hooks? I can probably fix ’em in a minute or two, but you ought to leave them with me and get a work order.”

  “They’re fine.” Skip held out his hand. “My name’s Skip—Skip Grison. Are you Jerry?”

  The man grinned. “No, sir. My name’s Gary.” He accepted Skip’s hand and shook it. “I’m Gary Oberdorf.”

  Vanessa asked, “Is there a man named Jerry who works with you, Mr. Oberdorf?”

  Skip began, “This is Gary—”

  “We’ve already met.” Vanessa smiled. “He fixed a filing-cabinet drawer for me. Now it seems like a long time ago.”

  “Nobody,” Oberdorf said. “There’s only four of us, ma’am. That’s Eddie Qualter, Walt Weber, Ray Upjohn, and me. Listen, I’d like to talk to you folks, but I’ve got to change the lock on Lieutenant Brice’s door.”

  “We’ll walk with you,” Skip told him. “What’s the matter with Lieutenant Brice’s lock? Did someone break in?”

  “No, sir. It’s just that he’s lost one card. The officers get two, just like passengers. Only he lost one, and anybody who finds it could go into his stateroom and take everything he’s got.”

  “I see.” Skip nodded to himself. “Brice is in the infirmary, isn’t he? Isn’t he the officer who was shot?”

  “Yes, sir. He was in the Navy, and I guess they get training there with pistols and so on. Only he had some bad luck.”

  “A former serviceman.” Skip nodded again. “I don’t suppose you know his first name?”

  “No, sir. No, I don’t.”

  “Virginia?”

  She shook her head.

  “You got that li’l fold-away phone,” Trinity remarked. “I got me one, too.” She displayed it, flipped it open, and pressed keys. “Silvia, honey, this Trinity. You got that Lieutenant Brice where you workin’ now? I got a lady asking ’bout his first name. You know what ’tis?”

  A moment later she thanked the woman she had called Silvia and closed her phone. “His name Gerard,” she told Vanessa.

  Skip touched his lips before turning to Oberdorf. “Do you know how he happened to lose his cabin card?”

  “I haven’t talked to him, sir.” He pressed the worn button that summoned the elevator. “But I know a lot of people lose things in the infirmary. They’ve got those lockers in there, and they hang the patients’ clothes in them. Only they don’t lock. Visitors come in and go out all the time. I got my foot broke once, and they put me in there for a couple of days before we made port, so I know how it is.”

  “Chelle had a private room,” Skip said.

  “Is that a lady? They’ve got two rooms like that for women, because it’s nearly all men. So they get those and don’t hear the nasty words. Not that they don’t know them already, if you ask me.”

  The freight elevator arrived. They went into it, and Oberdorf pressed a button for the signal deck.

  “I don’t understand this at all,” Vanessa whispered.

  “Later,” Skip told her, and turned to Oberdorf. “Will you have to open the door to change the lock?”

  “Sure. That’s the only way you can get those locks out, sir. You open the door, take off both knobs, and slip the lock out the side. That lets you get at the little keyboard. When you’ve got it, you can wipe the old code and stick in your new card. Press a couple of buttons and your new card opens the lock.”

  “I see.”

  “Hotels and so on use a different system, mostly. They can send a wireless signal that will change the code. Only a hell of a lot of people can send them now, and read them, too. Ours is more secure.”

  “You’ve got to have a card?”

  “Yes, sir. Or a master. Got to be able to open that lock before you can change the lock. Only a hell of a lot of passengers just walk off with their cards at the end of the cruise, sir. We try to get them to turn them in.” He shrugged.

  “But they don’t.”

  “Right. About half don’t. So one of the things we’ve got to do when we refit is recode those locks. Generally it takes one man four days to do them all. After the last cruise it took Walt and Ray three.”

  Skip had to brace himself against the side of the elevator.

  “She pitchin’ now,” Trinity remarked. “This wind behind her. Don’t nobody like it.”

  Vanessa said, “It must make us sail faster, though.”

  “No, ma’am. Off to the side and jus’ a little bitty bit back is what they want. That’s the fastest, and don’t pitch much. Don’t roll much neither.”

  “Are we gonna sink?” Jerry clearly hoped they would.

  “Not us, honey. We been through lots worse than what this is.”

  The elevator doors slid open. The ship’s motion seemed more pronounced here, the thunder almost deafening. Oberdorf ambled down the corridor, compensating for the pitching floor without apparent effort.

  Skip hung back. “There might be shooting.” He kept his voice down. “I’ll take the lead. Try your best not to shoot me in the back.”

  “How ’bout this li’l boy?”

  “Keep him away from the doorway.”

  As they neared the door, Oberdorf slid a master cabin card into th
e lock, pushed the door open, and froze.

  “Come in.” To Skip, still a dozen steps away, it sounded like an old man’s voice.

  “Come in. We must talk to you.”

  Oberdorf raised his hands, and Skip drew his gun.

  * * *

  When consciousness returned, he could not remember firing or being shot. Nor did he, for a minute and more, know where he was. He knew only that his head felt ready to split.

  His questing fingers found a broad strip of tape.

  Someone’s shoes were rather too near his eyes. They were white and nearly new, wing-tip shoes with pointed toes and a sprinkling of vent holes. He studied them, and could not have said for how long. Having marooned him, time had not yet returned for him.

  White shoes, and the crutch-tipped end of a blackthorn walking stick.

  Voices droned overhead: A man’s voice, quick and clipped, youthful and energetic. Another man’s, quietly humorous and overprecise. A woman’s, dark, frustrated, and angry. Another woman’s, mocking and almost too proper. A third, tremulous with … fear? Anger? A boy’s.

  Then a new woman’s, violent, profane, and lovely beyond every other voice in the world.

  Skip sat up. The man seated in front of him had overlong white hair, a wide white mustache, and a neatly trimmed white beard, the beard shaped like the blade of a spade. Blue eyes swam behind thick lenses.

  “Skip!” It was she, and in a moment she was on her knees beside him, her sound arm embracing him and her immobilized right arm trying to. She kissed him and kissed him again, and he was too stunned to respond. Thunder roared outside, lightning flashed beyond the glass doors, and he longed, suddenly and painfully, to make love to her in the midst of such a storm. They had never done it, and it seemed likely that they never would.

  “I told you we shouldn’t have untied her.” Rick Johnson needed no handhold to brace himself against the pitching of the ship.

  “Quite the contrary,” the older man replied. “The wisdom of my course is being made apparent to you. You are too stiff-necked to see it, which is a real pity.”