by Gene Wolfe
She died, and a letter from an attorney informed me that by her favor I had inherited “a large house in the city of Port-Mimizon, together with the furniture and chattels appertaining thereto.” And that this house, “located at 666 Saltimbanque, is presently under the care of a robot servitor.” Since the robot servitors under whose direction I found myself did not allow me writing materials, I could not reply.
Time passed on the wings of birds. I found dead larks at the feet of north-facing cliffs in autumn, at the feet of south-facing cliffs in spring.
I received a letter from Mr. Million. Most of my father’s girls had left during the investigation of his death; the remainder he had been obliged to send away when my aunt died, finding that as a machine he could not enforce the necessary obedience. David had gone to the capital. Phaedria had married well. Marydol had been sold by her parents. The date on Mr. Million’s letter was three years later than the date of my trial, but how long the letter had been in reaching me I could not tell. The envelope had been opened and resealed many times and was soiled and torn.
A seabird, I believe a gannet, came fluttering down into our camp after a storm, too exhausted to fly. We killed and ate it.
One of our guards went berserk, burned fifteen prisoners to death, and fought the other guards all night with swords of white and blue fire. He was not replaced.
I was transferred with some others to a camp farther north where I looked down chasms of red stone so deep that if I kicked a pebble in, I could hear the rattle of its descent grow to a roar of slipping rock—and hear that, in half a minute, fade with distance to silence, yet never strike the bottom lost somewhere in darkness.
I pretended the people I had known were with me. When I sat shielding my basin of soup from the wind, Phaedria sat upon a bench nearby and smiled and talked about her friends. David played squash for hours on the dusty ground of our compound, slept against the wall near my own corner. Marydol put her hand in mine while I carried my saw into the mountains.
In time they all grew dim, but even in the last year I never slept without telling myself, just before sleep, that Mr. Million would take us to the city library in the morning, never woke without fearing that my father’s valet had come for me.
T
hen I was told that I was to go, with three others, to another camp. We carried our food, and nearly died of hunger and exposure on the way. From there we were marched to a third camp where we were questioned by men who were not prisoners like ourselves but free men in uniforms who made notes of our answers and at last ordered that we bathe, and burned our old clothing, and gave us a thick stew of meat and barley.
I remember very well that it was then that I allowed myself to realize, at last, what these things meant. I dipped my bread into my bowl and pulled it out soaked with the fragrant stock, with bits of meat and grains of barley clinging to it, and I thought then of the fried bread and coffee at the slave market not as something of the past but as something in the future, and my hands shook until I could no longer hold my bowl and I wanted to rush shouting at the fences.
In two more days we, six of us now, were put into a mule cart that drove on winding roads always downhill until the winter that had been dying behind us was gone, and the birches and firs were gone, and the tall chestnuts and oaks beside the road had spring flowers under their branches.
The streets of Port-Mimizon swarmed with people. I would have been lost in a moment if Mr. Million had not hired a chair for me, but I made the bearers stop, and bought (with money he gave me) a newspaper from a vendor so that I could know the date with certainty at last.
My sentence had been the usual one of two to fifty years, and though I had known the month and year of the beginning of my imprisonment, it had been impossible to know, in the camps, the number of the current year which everyone counted and no one knew. A man took fever and in ten days, when he was well enough again to work, said that two years had passed or had never been. Then you yourself took fever. I do not recall any headline, any article from the paper I bought. I read only the date at the top, all the way home.
It had been nine years.
I had been eighteen when I had killed my father. I was now twenty-seven. I had thought I might be forty.
T
he flaking gray walls of our house were the same. The iron dog with its three wolf heads still stood in the front garden, but the fountain was silent, and the beds of fern and moss were full of weeds. Mr. Million paid my chairmen and unlocked with a key the door that was always guard-chained but unbolted in my father’s day—but as he did so, an immensely tall and lanky woman who had been hawking pralines in the street came running toward us. It was Nerissa, and I now had a servant and might have had a bedfellow if I wished, though I could pay her nothing.
A
nd now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account, which has already been the labor of days, and I must even explain why I explain. Very well then. I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometime read what I am now writing and wonder.
Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself, or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.
I
t has been three years since my release. This house, when Nerissa and I reentered it, was in a very confused state, my aunt having spent her last days, so Mr. Million told me, in a search for my father’s supposed hoard. She did not find it, and I do not think it is to be found; knowing his character better than she, I believe he spent most of what his girls brought him on his experiments and apparatus. I needed money badly myself at first, but the reputation of the house brought women seeking buyers and men seeking to buy. It is hardly necessary, as I told myself when we began, to do more than introduce them, and I have a good staff now. Phaedria lives with us and works too; the brilliant marriage was a failure after all. Last night while I was working in my surgery I heard her at the library door. I opened it and she had the child with her. Someday they’ll want us.
AFTERWORD
This was the pivotal story that changed my life. The truly strange thing was that I knew it would do it before it had done it. Damon Knight’s Orbit was my main market back then; I had sold Damon several stories, been invited to his Milford Writer’s Conference, and gone (I think twice).
He bought this story and praised it. When I said I wanted it to be my next conference story he very reasonably objected that it did not require fixing. I told him I wanted to hear what others said about it, and eventually won him over.
The time came. We had just bought a new car, small and cheap—but brand-new. I was returning to the Milford Conference (which I loved) with a story I felt certain was good. Ten or twenty miles from Milford, Pennsylvania, I topped a hill and saw yellow dots in the road. They were goldfinches, and as my new car drew nearer they flew up, a golden shower rising from the earth. There are no words to describe how happy I was at that moment, when I felt that a whole new life was opening before me.
It was perfectly true. One was.
BEECH HILL
B
ubba goes off by himself like this every year—don’t you, Bubba?” So Maryanne had said, and looked venomously at Bobs. He recalled it as he sat in Beech Hill pretending to read, his legs primly together, his back (because, no longer young, it hurt if he sat on his spine) straight.
“I suppose he needs it. Uh . . . needs the rest.” Thus Mrs. Hilliard, a friend of Maryanne’s friend Mrs. Main.
“That’s what I always say. I say: ‘Bubba, God knows you work hard all year. We don’t have much money, but you go off by yourself like you always do and spend it. I can get around in my chair perfectly well, and anyway Martha Main will come over to look after me. Nobody ought to have to take care of a cripple forever, but if it wasn’t for Martha I don’t know what I’d do.’ ”
Mrs. Hilliard had asked, “Where do you go, Mr. Roberts?”
S
omeone came in, and
Bobs looked up and saw the countess, black hair stretched tight around her after-midnight face. His watch said seven and he wondered if she had been up all night.
At seven, fifty-one weeks of the year, he was at work. He looked at the watch again. Twelve hours later he and Maryanne had dinner, again at seven. Afterward he read while she watched television. At six he would get up, and at seven relieve the night man.
Bishop came in, followed by a young man Bobs had not seen before. The young man was pale and nervous, Bishop portly and assured behind mustache, beard, eyebrows, and tumbling iron-gray forelock. “You’re among us early this morning, Countess.”
“I could not sleep. It is often so.”
Bishop nodded sympathetically, then gestured toward the young man beside him. “Countess, may I present Dr. Preston Potts. Dr. Potts is a physicist and mathematician—the man who developed the lunar forcing vectors. You may have heard of him. . . .”
More formally he said to Potts, “Dr. Potts, the Countess Esterhazy.”
“I have heard of Dr. Potts, and I am charmed.” The countess held out a limp hand glittering with rhinestones. “I at first thought you were a doctor who might give me something for my not sleeping, but I am even so charmed.”
Potts stammered: “Our a-a-astronauts have trouble sleeping too. If you imagine you’re in space it might help you f-f-feel better about it.”
The countess answered, “We are all in space always, are we not?” and smiled her sleepy smile.
For a moment Potts stood transfixed; then he managed to smile weakly in return. “You are something of a mathematician yourself. Yes, we are all in space or we would not exist—perhaps that’s why we sometimes have trouble sleeping.”
“You are so clever.”
“And this is Mr. Roberts,” Bishop continued, drawing Potts away from the countess. “I cannot tell you a great deal about Mr. Roberts’s activities, but he is one of the men who protect the things you discover.”
Bobs stood to shake hands and added: “And who occasionally arrange that you discover what someone else has just discovered on the other side. Pleased to meet you, Dr. Potts. I know your work.”
“Looks a lot like Bond, doesn’t he?” he overheard Bishop say as the two of them left him. “But he’s different in one respect. Our Mr. Roberts is the real thing.”
Bobs sat down again. There was a Walther PPK under his left arm, but it was no help and he felt unsettled and a little afraid. Behind him, at the far end of the big room, Bishop was introducing Potts to someone else—Claude Brain, the wild animal trainer, from the sound of the voice—and Bobs caught the words: “Welcome to Beech Hill.”
E
ach year he came to Beech Hill by bus, with an overnight stop. The stop had, itself, become a ritual. In fact, the entire trip from the moment he carried his bag out of the apartment was marked with golden milestones, events that were—so strong was the anticipation of pleasure—pleasures themselves.
To enter the terminal and buy his ticket, to sit on the long wooden bench with the travel worn, with the servicemen on leave, with the young, worried, cheaply clothed women with babies and the silent, shabby men (like himself) he always hoped were going to their own Beech Hills but who, in their misery, could not have been.
To sit with his bag between his feet, then carry it to be stowed in the compartment under the bus’s floor. To zoom the air-conditioned roads and watch the city slip behind. The hum of the tires was song, and if he were to fall asleep on the bus (he never did) he would know even sleeping where he was.
And the stop. The hotel. A small, old, threadbare hotel; they never put him in the same room twice, but he could walk the corridors and recall them all: Here’s where, coming, in ’62. There in ’63. The fourth floor in ’64. He stayed at the hotel on the return trip as well, but the rooms, even last year’s room, faded.
Checking in, he always asked if they had his reservation, and they always did. A card to sign—R. Roberts, address, no car.
And the room: a small room on an air shaft, bright papered walls with big flowers, a ceiling fixture with a string. And the door, a solid door with a chain and dead bolt. Snick! Rattle! His bag on the bed. Secret papers on the bed. Not NOW, Maryanne, I’m not decent. His hand on the Luger. If Maryanne should see those—It would be his duty, and the Organization would cover for him as it always did. . . . Suppose she hadn’t heard him? Come in—Snickback!—Maryanne, Rattle! His own sister, they say. There’s devotion for you!
H
e always changed at the hotel the day he arrived, not waiting until morning. This time too, he had removed his old workaday clothes, showered, and, glowing, gone to the open bag for new, clean underwear bought for the occasion—and executive-length hose. His shirt of artificial fabrics that looked like silk stayed new from year to year; he wore it only at Beech Hill. His slacks were inexpensive, but never before worn.
He was proud of his jacket, though it had been very cheap, an old Norfolk jacket, much abused (by someone else) but London made. The elbows had been patched with leather; the tweed smelled faintly of shotgun smoke, and the pockets were rubber lined for carrying game. Handy in my line of business. Just the sort of coat the right sort of man would continue to wear though it was worn out, or nearly. Also just the sort to effectively conceal his HSc Mauser in his shoulder holster—at Beech Hill.
But not at the stop. Regretfully he left the Mauser in his bag, but this too was part of the ritual. The empty holster beneath his arm, the strange clothes, told him where he was. Even if he had fallen asleep . . . (but he never did.)
There were restaurants near the hotel, and he ate quietly a meal made sumptuous by custom. There was a newsstand where he stopped for a few paperbacks, and, next door, a barbershop.
A haircut was not part of the ritual, but it might well be. He might, in years to come, remember this as the year when he had first had his hair cut on the way to Beech Hill. The shop was clean, busy, but not too busy, smelling of powder and alcoholic tonics. He stepped inside, and as he did a customer was stripped of his striped robe and dusted with the whisk. “You’re next,” the barber said.
Bobs looked at another (waiting) customer, but the man gestured wordlessly toward the first chair.
“Chin up, please. Medium on the sides?”
“Fine.”
There was a television, not offensively loud, in a corner. The news. He watched.
“Don’t move your head, sir.”
The man on the screen was portly, expensively dressed, intelligent looking. A newsman, microphone in hand, spoke deferentially:—a strike . . . , pollution . . . , Washington? . . .
“I know that man.” Bobs twisted in the chair. “He’s a billionaire.”
“Damn near. He sure enough owns a lot around here.”
When Bobs paid him the barber said, “You feel okay, sir?”
T
he next day he dropped the black Beretta into its holster. On the bus the weight of it made him feel for a moment (he had closed his eyes) that the woman next to him was leaning against him. The woman next to him became Wally Wallace, a salesman he had once known, the man who had introduced him to Beech Hill, but that seemed perfectly natural. Opposite, so that the four of them were face-to-face as passengers had once sat in trains, were Bishop and his wife, pretending not to know them. This was courtesy—the Bishops never spoke to anyone until it had been definitely decided what they were going to be. He knew that without being told.
“You,” Wally began. Bobs suddenly realized that he (Bobs) was ten years younger, and the wistful thought came that he would not remain so. “. . . can’t beat this place. There’s nothing like it.” Bobs had wondered if Wally was not getting a commission—or at least a reduction in his own rate—for each new guest he brought. Wally had returned the second year, but never after that. Lost in the jungle he loved.
W
hen Bishop and Potts and Claude Brain were gone (they had said something about a morning swim) Bobs remarked to the cou
ntess, “I saw a friend of ours on television. On my way up.” He mentioned the billionaire’s name.
“Ah,” said the countess. “Such a nice man. But”—she smiled brilliantly— “married.”
“He was here when I first came.”
At first he thought the countess was no longer listening to him; then he realized that he had not spoken aloud. The billionaire had been there when he had first come. Very young, as everyone had said, to have made so much money. Great drive.
And yet perhaps—he tried to push the thought back, but it came bursting in anyway, invading his consciousness like the wind entering a pauper’s shack—perhaps he had made it.
He had wanted to badly. You could see it in his eyes. And then—
What fun! What sport to return, posing with the others year after year.
The bastard.
The bastard. Was he here yet?
Bobs could not sit still. The fear was on him, and he stalked out of the immense house that was Beech Hill, hardly caring where he was going. The ground sloped down, and ahead the clear water of the lake gleamed. Half a dozen guests were swimming there already: drama critic, heart surgeon, the madame of New York’s most exclusive brothel. Fashion designer, big-game hunter, test pilot. Bobs stood and watched them until Claude Brain, coming up behind him, said, “No dip today, Roberts?”
“I don’t usually,” Bobs replied, turning. Brain was in trunks. His arms were horribly scarred, and there were more scars on his chest and belly.
His eyes followed Bobs’s. “Tiger,” Brain said. “I was lucky.”
“I guess it’s hard to become a wild-animal man? Hard to get started?”