by Gene Wolfe
“Have you seen my lab? Behind the big mirror there?”
I hadn’t, though I had known that such a suite of rooms existed beyond the sliding mirror in the library and the servants occasionally spoke of his “dispensary,” where he compounded doses for them, examined monthly the girls we employed, and occasionally prescribed treatment for “friends” of patrons, men recklessly imprudent who had failed (as the wise patrons had not) to confine their custom to our establishment exclusively. I told him I should very much like to see it.
He smiled. “But we are wandering from our topic. Science is of great value, but you will find, as I have, that it consumes more money than it produces. You will want apparatus and books and many other things, as well as a livelihood for yourself. We have a not-unprofitable business here, and though I hope to live a long time—thanks in part to science—you are the heir, and it will be yours in the end. . . .”
(So I was older than David!)
“. . . every phase of what we do. None of them, believe me, are unimportant.”
I had been so surprised, and in fact elated, by my discovery that I had missed a part of what he said. I nodded, which seemed safe.
“Good. I want you to begin by answering the front door. One of the maids has been doing it, and for the first month or so she’ll stay with you, since there’s more to be learned there than you think. I’ll tell Mr. Million, and he can make the arrangements.”
I thanked him, and he indicated that the interview was over by opening the door of the library. I could hardly believe, as I went out, that he was the same man who devoured my life in the early hours of almost every morning.
I
did not connect this sudden elevation in status with the events in the park. I now realize that Mr. Million, who has, quite literally, eyes in the back of his head, must have reported to my father that I had reached the age at which desires in childhood subliminally fastened to parental figures begin, half-consciously, to grope beyond the family.
In any event, that same evening I took up my new duties and became what Mr. Million called the greeter and David (explaining that the original sense of the word was related to portal) the porter of our house—thus assuming in a practical way the functions symbolically executed by the iron dog in our front garden. The maid who had previously carried them out, a girl named Nerissa who had been selected because she was not only one of the prettiest but one of the tallest and strongest of the maids as well, a large-boned, long-faced, smiling girl with shoulders broader than most men’s, remained, as my father had promised, to help. Our duties were not onerous, since my father’s patrons were all men of some position and wealth, not given to brawling or loud arguments except under unusual circumstances of intoxication, and for the most part they had visited our house already dozens and in a few cases even hundreds of times. We called them by nicknames that were used only here (of which Nerissa informed me sotto voce as they came up the walk), hung up their coats, and directed them—or if necessary conducted them—to the various parts of the establishment. Nerissa flounced (a formidable sight, as I observed, to all but the most heroically proportioned patrons), allowed herself to be pinched, took tips, and talked to me afterward, during slack periods, of the times she had been “called upstairs” at the request of some connoisseur of scale, and the money she had made that night. I laughed at jokes and refused tips in such a way as to make the patrons aware that I was a part of the management. Most patrons did not need the reminder, and I was often told that I strikingly resembled my father.
When I had been serving as a receptionist in this way for only a short time, I think on only the third or fourth night, we had an unusual visitor. He came early one evening, but it was the evening of so dark a day, one of the last really wintry days, that the garden lamps had been lit for an hour or more and the occasional carriages that passed on the street beyond, though they could be heard, could not be seen. I answered the door when he knocked, and as we always did with strangers asked him politely what he wished.
He said, “I should like to speak to Dr. Aubrey Veil.”
I am afraid I looked blank.
“This is 666 Saltimbanque?”
It was of course, and the name of Dr. Veil, though I could not place it, touched a chime of memory. I supposed that one of our patrons had used my father’s house as an adresse d’accommodation, and since this visitor was clearly legitimate and it was not desirable to keep anyone arguing in the doorway despite the partial shelter afforded by the garden, I asked him in; then I sent Nerissa to bring us coffee so that we might have a few moments of private talk in the dark little receiving room that opened off the foyer. It was a room very seldom used, and the maids had been remiss in dusting it, as I saw as soon as I opened the door. I made a mental note to speak to my aunt about it, and as I did I recalled where it was that I had heard Dr. Veil mentioned. My aunt, on the first occasion I had ever spoken to her, had referred to his theory that we might in fact be the natives of Sainte Anne, having murdered the original Terrestrial colonists and displaced them so thoroughly as to forget our own past.
The stranger had seated himself in one of the musty gilded armchairs. He wore a beard, very black and more full than the current style, was young, I thought, though of course considerably older than I, and would have been handsome if the skin of his face—what could be seen of it—had not been of so colorless a white as almost to constitute a disfigurement. His dark clothing seemed abnormally heavy, like felt, and I recalled having heard from some patron that a starcrosser from Sainte Anne had splashed down in the bay yesterday, and asked if he had perhaps been on board it. He looked startled for a moment, then laughed. “You’re a wit, I see. And living with Dr. Veil you’d be familiar with his theory. No, I’m from Earth. My name is Marsch.” He gave me his card, and I read it twice before the meaning of the delicately embossed abbreviations registered on my mind. My visitor was a scientist, a doctor of philosophy in anthropology, from Earth.
I said, “I wasn’t trying to be witty. I thought you might really have come from Sainte Anne. Here, most of us have a kind of planetary face, except for the gypsies and the criminal tribes, and you don’t seem to fit the pattern.”
He said, “I’ve noticed what you mean; you seem to have it yourself.”
“I’m supposed to look a great deal like my father.”
“Ah,” he said. He stared at me. Then, “Are you cloned?”
“Cloned?” I had read the term, but only in conjunction with botany, and as has happened to me often when I have especially wanted to impress someone with my intelligence, nothing came. I felt like a stupid child.
“Parthenogenetically reproduced, so that the new individual—or individuals; you can have a thousand if you want—will have a genetic structure identical to the parent. It’s antievolutionary, so it’s illegal on Earth, but I don’t suppose things are as closely watched out here.”
“You’re talking about human beings?”
He nodded.
“I’ve never heard of it. Really I doubt if you’d find the necessary technology here; we’re quite backward compared to Earth. Of course, my father might be able to arrange something for you.”
“I don’t want to have it done.”
Nerissa came in with the coffee then, effectively cutting off anything further Dr. Marsch might have said. Actually, I had added the suggestion about my father more from force of habit than anything else, and thought it very unlikely that he could pull off any such biochemical tour de force, but there was always the possibility, particularly if a large sum was offered. As it was, we fell silent while Nerissa arranged the cups and poured, and when she had gone Marsch said appreciatively, “Quite an unusual girl.” His eyes, I noticed, were a bright green, without the brown tones most green eyes have.
I was wild to ask him about Earth and the new developments there, and it had already occurred to me that the girls might be an effective way of keeping him here, or at least of bringing him back. I said, “You s
hould see some of them. My father has wonderful taste.”
“I’d rather see Dr. Veil. Or is Dr. Veil your father?”
“Oh, no.”
“This is his address, or at least the address I was given. Number 666 Saltimbanque Street, Port-Mimizon, Département de la Main, Sainte Croix.”
He appeared quite serious, and it seemed possible that if I told him flatly that he was mistaken he would leave. I said, “I learned about Veil’s Hypothesis from my aunt; she seemed quite conversant with it. Perhaps later this evening you’d like to talk to her about it.”
“Couldn’t I see her now?”
“My aunt sees very few visitors. To be frank, I’m told she quarreled with my father before I was born, and she seldom leaves her own apartments. The housekeepers report to her there and she manages what I suppose I must call our domestic economy, but it’s very rare to see Madame outside her rooms, or for any stranger to be let in.”
“And why are you telling me this?”
“So that you’ll understand that with the best will in the world it may not be possible for me to arrange an interview for you. At least, not this evening.”
“You could simply ask her if she knows Dr. Veil’s present address, and if so what it is.”
“I’m trying to help you, Dr. Marsch. Really I am.”
“But you don’t think that’s the best way to go about it?”
“No.”
“In other words, if your aunt were simply asked, without being given a chance to form her own judgment of me, she wouldn’t give me information even if she had it?”
“It would help if we were to talk a bit first. There are a great many things I’d like to learn about Earth.”
For an instant I thought I saw a sour smile under the black beard. He said, “Suppose I ask you first—”
He was interrupted—again—by Nerissa, I suppose because she wanted to see if we required anything further from the kitchen. I could have strangled her when Dr. Marsch halted in midsentence and said instead, “Couldn’t this girl ask your aunt if she would see me?”
I had to think quickly. I had been planning to go myself and, after a suitable wait, return and say that my aunt would receive Dr. Marsch later, which would have given me an additional opportunity to question him while he waited. But there was at least a possibility (no doubt magnified in my eyes by my eagerness to hear of new discoveries from Earth) that he would not wait—or that, when and if he did eventually see my aunt, he might mention the incident. If I sent Nerissa I would at least have him to myself while she ran her errand, and there was an excellent chance—or at least so I imagined—that my aunt would in fact have some business which she would want to conclude before seeing a stranger. I told Nerissa to go, and Dr. Marsch gave her one of his cards after writing a few words on the back.
“Now,” I said, “what was it you were about to ask me?”
“Why this house, on a planet that has been inhabited less than two hundred years, seems so absurdly old.”
“It was built a hundred and forty years ago, but you must have many on Earth that are far older.”
“I suppose so. Hundreds. But for every one of them there are ten thousand that have been up less than a year. Here, almost every building I see seems nearly as old as this one.”
“We’ve never been crowded here, and we haven’t had to tear down; that’s what Mr. Million says. And there are fewer people here now than there were fifty years ago.”
“Mr. Million?”
I told him about Mr. Million, and when I finished he said, “It sounds as if you’ve got a ten nine unbound simulator here, which should be interesting. Only a few have ever been made.”
“A ten nine simulator?”
“A billion, ten to the ninth power. The human brain has several billion synapses, of course, but it’s been found that you can simulate its action pretty well—”
It seemed to me that no time at all had passed since Nerissa had left, but she was back. She curtsied to Dr. Marsch and said, “Madame will see you.”
I blurted, “Now?”
“Yes,” Nerissa said artlessly, “Madame said right now.”
“I’ll take him then. You mind the door.”
I escorted Dr. Marsch down the dark corridors, taking a long route to have more time, but he seemed to be arranging in his mind the questions he wished to ask my aunt, as we walked past the spotted mirrors and warped little walnut tables, and he answered me in monosyllables when I tried to question him about Earth.
At my aunt’s door I rapped for him. She opened it herself, the hem of her black skirt hanging emptily over the untrodden carpet, but I do not think he noticed that. He said, “I’m really very sorry to bother you, Madame, and I only do so because your nephew thought you might be able to help me locate the author of Veil’s Hypothesis.”
My aunt said, “I am Dr. Veil; please come in,” and shut the door behind him, leaving me standing openmouthed in the corridor.
I
mentioned the incident to Phaedria the next time we met, but she was more interested in learning about my father’s house. Phaedria, if I have not used her name before now, was the girl who had sat near me while I watched David play squash. She had been introduced to me on my next visit to the park by no one less than the monster herself, who had helped her to a seat beside me and, miracle of miracles, promptly retreated to a point which, though not out of sight, was at least beyond earshot. Phaedria had thrust her broken ankle in front of her, halfway across the graveled path, and smiled a most charming smile. “You don’t object to my sitting here?” She had perfect teeth.
“I’m delighted.”
“You’re surprised too. Your eyes get big when you’re surprised; did you know that?”
“I am surprised. I’ve come here looking for you several times, but you haven’t been here.”
“We’ve come looking for you, and you haven’t been here either, but I suppose one can’t really spend a great deal of time in a park.”
“I would have,” I said, “if I’d known you were looking for me. I went here as much as I could anyway. I was afraid that she”—I jerked my head at the monster—“wouldn’t let you come back. How did you persuade her?”
“I didn’t,” Phaedria said. “Can’t you guess? Don’t you know anything?”
I confessed that I did not. I felt stupid, and I was stupid, at least in the things I said, because so much of my mind was caught up not in formulating answers to her remarks but in committing to memory the lilt of her voice, the purple of her eyes, even the faint perfume of her skin and the soft, warm touch of her breath on my cool cheek.
“So you see,” Phaedria was saying, “that’s how it is with me. When Aunt Uranie—she’s only a poor cousin of mother’s, really—got home and told him about you he found out who you are, and here I am.”
“Yes,” I said, and she laughed.
Phaedria was one of those girls raised between the hope of marriage and the thought of sale. Her father’s affairs, as she herself said, were “unsettled.” He speculated in ship cargoes, mostly from the south—textiles and drugs. He owned, most of the time, large sums which the lenders could not hope to collect unless they were willing to allow him more to recoup. He might die a pauper, but in the meantime he had raised his daughter with every detail of education and plastic surgery attended to. If when she reached marriageable age he could afford a good dowry, she would link him with some wealthy family. If he was pressed for money instead, a girl so reared would bring fifty times the price of a common street child. Our family, of course, would be ideal for either purpose.
“Tell me about your house,” she said. “Do you know what the kids call it? ‘The Cave Canem,’ or sometimes just ‘The Cave.’ The boys all think it’s a big thing to have been there and they lie about it. Most of them haven’t.”
But I wanted to talk about Dr. Marsch and the sciences of Earth, and I was nearly as anxious to find out about her own world, “the kids” she mentioned so
casually, her school and family, as she was to learn about us. Also, although I was willing to detail the services my father’s girls rendered their benefactors, there were some things, such as my aunt’s floating down the stairwell, that I was adverse to discussing. But we bought egg rolls from the same old woman to eat in the chill sunlight and exchanged confidences and somehow parted not only lovers but friends, promising to meet again the next day.
At some time during the night, I believe at almost the same time that I returned—or to speak more accurately was returned, since I could scarcely walk—to my bed after a session of hours with my father, the weather changed. The musked exhalation of late spring or early summer crept through the shutters, and the fire in our little grate seemed to extinguish itself for shame almost at once. My father’s valet opened the window for me and there poured into the room that fragrance that tells of the melting of the last snows beneath the deepest and darkest evergreens on the north sides of mountains. I had arranged with Phaedria to meet at ten, and before going to my father’s library I had posted a note on the escritoire beside my bed, asking that I be awakened an hour earlier; and that night I slept with the fragrance in my nostrils and the thought—half plan, half dream—in my mind that by some means Phaedria and I would elude her aunt entirely and find a deserted lawn where blue and yellow flowers dotted the short grass.
When I woke, it was an hour past noon and rain drove in sheets past the window. Mr. Million, who was reading a book on the far side of the room, told me that it had been raining like that since six and for that reason he had not troubled to wake me. I had a splitting headache, as I often did after a long session with my father, and took one of the powders he had prescribed to relieve it. They were gray, and smelled of anise.
“You look unwell,” Mr. Million said.
“I was hoping to go to the park.”
“I know.” He rolled across the room toward me, and I recalled that Dr. Marsch had called him an unbound simulator. For the first time since I had satisfied myself about them when I was quite small, I bent over (at some cost to my head) and read the almost obliterated stampings on his main cabinet. There was only the name of a cybernetics company on Earth and, in French as I had always supposed, his name: M. Million— “Monsieur” or “Mister” Million. Then, as startling as a blow from behind to a man musing in a comfortable chair, I remembered that a dot was employed in some algebras for multiplication. He saw my change of expression at once. “A thousand-million-word core capacity,” he said. “An English billion or a French milliard, the M being the Roman numeral for one thousand, of course. I thought you understood that some time ago.”