The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

by Gene Wolfe

  “Some of you will be thinking you would like to do what they are doing,” the bushy-bearded man said. “You can sign up at most Buddhist and Christian spiritual centers, and also at the temple of Kali just off the Edsel Ford Express-way. Also in the basement of——[—he named a well-known department store]—where the travel office used to be. Of course nothing is final right up to the bullets.”

  The camera jumped, and the men Lowell Lewis had gathered together saw the six emerging from an alley choked with rubble. The girl in the motorcycle helmet was no longer visible. Awkwardly they spread to form a single straggling line, three young men on one end, then the two girls, then an older, balding man. Two had contrived, or perhaps been given, white rags on sticks; they waved them. The remaining four advanced with lifted hands.

  At Peters’s ear Solomos whispered, “How near are they now? To the fighting?” As if to answer him a bullet kicked up dust before one of the young men’s feet. He hesitated for a moment, then trotted to catch up.

  “Please,” the bushy-bearded man’s voice said, “if you aren’t a potential volunteer we ask you to tune out.”

  Someone called to Lewis, “Switch it off.”

  Lewis said, “As you have seen, they have taken control of our channel.”

  Solomos asked, “He could still deactivate this receiver, could he not?” And Peters answered, “Sure.” He felt that he was going to be sick, and was surprised to see one of Tredgold’s Portuguese girls still circulating with a tray of drinks and canapés. He took a martini and drained it; when his eyes returned to the screen three of the six were gone. The remaining three, seen now from behind, still advanced. The young man with the curly beard had removed his acorn-printed shorts and walked naked.

  Whether from a remote mike or by some sound-gathering device, voices came suddenly into the Lisbon hotel room. The naked boy was saying, “Peace! Peace! Don’t shoot; look at us!” A girl crooned wordlessly, and the bald man recited the Lord’s Prayer.

  Distantly someone called, “Hey, cease fire. They’re giving up. Squad! Hold it!”

  The three continued to advance, but diverged as they came, first six, then twelve, then twenty-four or more yards separating each from his or her companions, as though each were determined to die alone. The screen could not longer encompass all three, and began to move nervously from one to the next as though afraid to miss the death of any. A soldier stood and motioned to the curly-bearded young man, indicating the midden of smashed concrete which had sheltered him. As the soldier did so he was shot, and fell backward. The curly-bearded young man turned toward his own lines shouting, “Stop! Stop!” and was shot in the back. The camera showed him writhing on the dusty pavement for a moment, then switched to the girl, now remote and fuzzy with distance but still large in the picture provided by the telephoto lens. Four soldiers surrounded her, and as they watched one put his arms about her and kissed her. Another jerked them apart, shoved the first aside, and tore away the girl’s thin shirt; as he did she exploded in a sheet of flame that embraced them all.

  The bald man was walking rapidly toward a half-tracked combat car mounting quad-fifties; faintly they could hear him saying, “Hey, listen, the Giants won twenty-six straight in 1916, and the biggest gate in baseball was more than eighty-four thousand for a Yankees-Browns game in New York. The youngest big leaguer ever was Hamilton Joe Nuxhall—he pitched for Cincinnati when he was fifteen. Don’t you guys care about anything?” The crew of the half-track stared at him until an officer drew a pistol and fired. The bald man leaped to one side (Peters could not tell whether he had been hit or not) and ran toward him shouting something about the Boston Braves. The officer fired again and the bald man’s body detonated like a bomb. The voice of the young man with hieroglyphics on his forehead said, “I think we’re going to catch the Zen Banzai charge over on the west side now.” There was a sudden shift in picture and they saw a horde of ragged people with red cloths knotted around their heads and waists streaming toward a line of soldiers supported by two tanks. Some of the ragged people had firearms; more were armed with spears and gasoline bombs. For a moment they were falling everywhere—then the survivors had overwhelmed the tanks. Peters saw a soldier’s head still wearing its steel helmet, open-eyed in death and livid with the loss of blood, held aloft on a homemade spear. The picture closed on it as it turned and swayed above the crowd; it became the head of General Virdon, who said, “Now we’ve got you again. My communications people tell me we lost you for a few minutes, Mr. Lewis.” He sounded relieved.

  Lewis said, “We had technical difficulties.”

  The voice of the boy in Philadelphia announced, “I did that fade with the faces—it was pretty good, wasn’t it?”

  Solomos asked Peters, “Why are you attacking? You should be defending. You have lost most of your country already.”

  “We don’t think so,” Peters said.

  “You have a few army camps and airdromes and some factories remote from centers of population; that is not the country. You survive thus far because they do not know how to fight, but they are learning, they are drilling armies everywhere, and you do not know how to fight either, and are not learning; after the defeat of the Germans and your small war in Korea you allowed your army to become only a consumer of your industrial production. What will this general do if they march from Chicago while his front is entangled in this street fighting?”

  Donovan, appearing drink in hand from some remote part of the room, said, “I’m glad you asked that, Colonel Solomos. You see, that’s part of our plan—to get these people out into the open where our planes can get at them.”

  Solomos made a disgusted sound. “Virdon has no reserve to cover his rear?”

  “Certainly he does,” Donovan said. “Naturally I can’t tell you how many.” A moment afterward, when Solomos was talking to someone else, Donovan warned Peters, “Be nice to that guy; he represents the Greek army—its business interests. Lou is trying to contract for some Greeks to stiffen things along the coast.”

  Peters said, “I’d think they’d be worrying about being nice to us, then. They ought to be glad to get the money.”

  “There’s not a lot of real money around. Mostly we’re talking trade agreements after the war, stuff like that.”

  A familiar voice asked, “Suppose one wished to get down a bit of a flier on this row; what’s the old firm offering?” It was Tredgold.

  Donovan, a little puzzled to see someone he did not recognize, said, “I’m afraid I’ve already laid out as much as I can afford.”

  Peters asked, “You’re betting against us?”

  “Only for sport. The fact is, I’d back either, but I shouldn’t expect you to turn against your own chaps. Ten thousand escudos?”

  “You’re on.” By a simultaneous operation of instinct both looked up at the screen, where General Virdon, looking much as though he were giving the weather, was outlining his battle plan in chalk.

  Tredgold called loudly, “I say, there! Those marks show where you are now, eh? But where shall you be in an hour?” The general began laboriously sketching phantom positions across the heart of Detroit. “Well, we’ll see, eh?” Tredgold whispered to Peters.

  Peters asked, “Have you had a drink?”

  “Well, no, I haven’t, actually. Just arrived a moment or so ago, to tell the truth. Are my birds behaving?”

  “Yes, they’ve been fine.” Peters waved over a tall dark girl whose hair, gathered behind her head in a cascade of curls, suggested a Greece not represented by Solomos. She smiled at each of them in turn, and they each took a drink—Peters was conscious that it was his third or fourth; he could not be sure which. “Listen,” he said to Tredgold when the girl had gone. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  They found chairs at the back of the room, next to the window, and Peters said, “Can you set me up with that girl?”

  “You didn’t need me, old boy; just ask her. Your chief is paying, after all.”

  T
hey talked of something else, Peters conscious that it was impossible— equally impossible to explain the impossibility. Time passed, and he knew that he would despise himself later for having missed this opportunity, though it was an opportunity that would only exist when it was too late. A few feet away Donovan was taking his wallet from his pocket, making a bet with a tall German; for some reason Peters thought of the recording company which, ultimately, employed Tredgold, and their trademark, a cluster of instruments stamped in gold, recalling the slow way it had turned round and round on the old-fashioned 33 disk player in his grandmother’s house in Palmerton, Pennsylvania. Tredgold was recounting some story about a badger that had hidden from dogs in the cellar of a church, and Peters interrupted him to say, “What’s it like in England now?”

  Tredgold said, “And so you see the poor blighters couldn’t explain what they were doing there,” and Peters realized that he had not spoken aloud at all and had to say again, “But what is it like in England now?”

  Tredgold smiled. “I daresay we’re fifteen years behind you.”

  “You’re expecting all this?” Peters waved a hand at the distant screen. “I mean, are you expecting it?”

  “Seems likely enough, I should think. Same problems in both countries, much. Same sort of chaps in authority. And ours look to yours—of course, it won’t last nearly so long on our side; we haven’t the space.”

  “If we win,” Peters said, “I doubt that it will ever break out in England.”

  “Oh, but you won’t, you know,” Tredgold said. “I’ve money on it.”

  Peters sipped his drink, trying to decide what kind of whiskey was in it; everything tasted the same. Probably Canadian, he thought. He had checked the supplies sent up by the hotel before the party began, and had noticed how much Canadian whiskey there was; the war had dried up the American market. “You could change things,” he told Tredgold suddenly, “before this happens.”

  “I could change things? I bloody well could not.”

  “You English could, I mean.”

  “Could have done the same sort of thing yourselves,” Tredgold said. “All your big corporations, owning everything and running everyone, everything decided by the economic test when it was forty or more years out of date. One firm’s economies only good because of prices set by another to encourage or discourage something else altogether, and your chemical works ruining your fishing, turning the sea into a dustbin, then selling their chemical foods. Why didn’t you change things yourselves, eh?”

  Peters shook his head. “I don’t know. Everybody was talking about it for years—I remember even when I was in grade school. But nothing was ever done. Maybe it was more complicated than it looked.”

  “Britain’s the same. These chaps everyone’s been shouting at to change things, they’re the very chaps that do so well as things are. Think they’re going to make new rules for a game they always win? Not ruddy likely.” Tredgold stood up. “Your crowd’s thinning out a bit, I fancy. I say”—he took a passing stranger by the arm—“pardon me, sir, but where’s everyone off to?”

  “The cabaret downstairs,” the man said in an accent Peters could not identify. “The last show there—it is ten minutes. Then we come here again and watch again the battle. You wish to come?”

  Tredgold glanced at Peters, then shook his head. “Some other time, and thank you very much. You come to Lisbon often? Wait a bit; I’ve a card here somewhere.” He walked as far as the corridor door with the stranger, then returned to Peters. “Nice chap. Hungarian or something. Hope he fancies dark women.”

  Donovan, who had been standing a few feet away watching the screen, said, “In there, mister,” and pointed to the two outside bedrooms. “We can’t use the middle one—Lou’s on the private vidlink in there.”

  Tredgold feigned puzzlement and looked around the room. “I don’t even see one now.”

  “Two in each room,” Donovan said. “They’ll come out when they’re ready—that’s what most of the guys in the chairs are waiting for.”

  “How’s the attack going?” Peters asked. He was conscious of swaying a little and took hold of the back of a chair with one hand.

  “Great,” Donovan said. The door of the east bedroom opened and a short man in a wool suit too heavy for Portugal came out sweating; after a moment a man who had been smoking stinking Dutch cigarettes in a chair near the door got up and went in.

  “Great?” Peters asked.

  “We haven’t lost an inch of ground yet. Not an inch.”

  Peters looked at the screen. It showed a parking lot, apparently part of a shopping complex. Some broken glass lay on the asphalt, and several dead men, but nothing much seemed to be happening. Occasionally the whine of a shot came, its origin and its target equally unknowable.

  “This is our side,” Donovan explained. “The stuff near the screen. The hairies have still got those buildings over on the far side.”

  “We’re not supposed to be holding ground,” Peters said. “We’re supposed to be, you know, going forward.” He looked at his watch. “They ought to be almost to the lake shore by now.”

  “We’re regrouping,” Donovan said.

  “Listen. Will you listen to me for a minute?” Peters was aware that he was about to make some kind of fool out of himself, and that he could not prevent it. “We ought to be there, doing something, helping them. I mean we’re three men; we’re not just nothing.” He tried to make a joke of it: “Tredgold here’s smart, I’m strong, and you’re Irish—we could do something.”

  Donovan looked at him blankly, then slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Yeah, sure,” and turned away.

  Tredgold drawled, “Another thing I forgot to tell you about l’ancien régime— the winners are those who don’t fight for it. Thought your mum would have put you wise to that already. The mums know.” After a second’s hesitation he added, “Only works while the chaps who do fight play the game, of course. No profit otherwise—no anything at all.”

  “Profit?” Peters said. “You said they didn’t really want profits, and I’ve been thinking about that and you’re right—for them profit above a certain point is just taking from each other. You said that.”

  “Did I? I suppose I did. It sounds familiar. Wait a sec, will you? All my bloody birds are nesting and I want a drink.”

  Peters called after him, “But what is it they do want?” and heard Tredgold mutter, “To hang on to their places, I should think.”

  “Ah.” Lowell Lewis put his hand on Peters’s shoulder. “You and Donovan taking care of things for us out here, Pete? How’s it going?”

  “Quiet,” Peters said.

  “You’re up on the battle, I assume?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. We’ve been getting quite a number of calls on the private link from other companies—they have a stake in this of one sort or another, and they want to know the situation. To keep from clogging General Virdon’s communications with that sort of thing I’ve arranged that we would handle them. Think you can hold down the hot seat for a while?”

  Peters nodded.

  “There’s one other thing. You remember the soldier we had on-screen? The one that hippie-type boy from Philadelphia cut off?”

  “Hale,” Peters said.

  “Right. He was from the PR agency, of course; but when he had made the take that fool major who’s replacing Colonel Hopkins grabbed him; he seems to have put him in one of the combat outfits. Naturally the agency is very upset. Try to bail him out, will you?”

  Peters nodded again.

  “Fine. In an hour I’ll send in Donovan or Miss Morris, and you can bring yourself up to date.”

  Peters went into the center bedroom, trying to walk as steadily as he could, though he knew Lewis had already turned away to talk to someone else.

  The bedroom was empty and dark. The vidlink screen was flashing the identity of some caller—Peters did not bother to discover who. He drew the curtains at the far end of the room and
looked out over the patio wall at the headlights of the cars on the street outside, and noted vaguely that a diagonal view showed him the same dark Atlantic that sometimes seemed ready to invade the big room from which he had come.

  There was a bathroom and he used it. He felt that he might have to vomit, but he did not.

  Communicating doors linked this bedroom with those to east and west. He tried them, and found (as he had expected) that they were locked on the other side. Outside each he listened for a moment and heard the creaking of springs and whispered words, but no laughter.

  At the vidlink he ignored the incoming calls and coded the Library of Congress, wondering if there was still anyone left there. There was, a plain-looking black girl of about twenty. He asked if she had a taped summary of American history for the last thirty years. She nodded and started to say something else, then asked, “Who is this calling, please?” And he said, “My name is Peters. I’m with United Services Corporation.”

  “Oh,” she said. And then, “Oh!”

  He asked her if something was the matter.

  “It’s just that I have this friend—not really a friend, someone I know—that works in the Pentagon. And he says they weren’t paid there at all for several months . . . but now they are getting paid again . . . only now the checks are from your company . . . Do you know Mr. Lewis?” This was said with many pauses and hesitations.

  “I’m his assistant,” Peters said.

  “Well, would it be possible . . . The staff here hasn’t been paid since January. . . . Most of them are gone, and you wouldn’t have to pay them, of course; I live with my mother, and anything you could get for us . . .”

  “I don’t—,” Peters began, then changed it to: “I don’t see why we couldn’t put you under military administration. I mean, nominally. Then you’d be civilian employees of the Department of Defense.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, and then, “Oh, thank you.” And then, “I—I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten what it was you wanted. I’m a graduate of Maryland—I really am. Library science.”

  “The history tape,” Peters said. “You ought to get more rest.”