by Gene Wolfe
It was a long time before she answered, and he knew the body was stiffening. That was bad, because as long as she lived in it the flesh would stay sweet; when the life was gone, he would have to cut it up quickly before the stuff in her lower intestine tainted the rest.
“Strange evolution,” she said at last. “Man become food for men.”
“I don’t understand the second word. Talk so I know what you’re saying.” He kicked her in the chest to emphasize his point, and knocked her over; he heard a rib snap. . . . She did not reply, and he lay down on the bed. His mother had told him there was a meeting place in the city where men gathered on certain special nights—but he had forgotten (if he had ever known) what those nights were.
“That isn’t even metalanguage,” the dead woman said, “only children’s talk.”
“Shut up.”
After a moment he said, “I’m going out. If you can make your body stand, and get out of here, and get down to the ground floor, and find the way out, then you may be able to tell someone about me and have the police waiting when I come back.” He went out and closed the door, then stood patiently outside for five minutes.
When he opened it again, the corpse stood erect with her hands on his table, her tremors upsetting the painted metal circus figures he had had since he was a child—the girl acrobat, the clown with his hoop and trained pig. One of her legs would not straighten. “Listen,” he said. “You’re not going to do it. I told you all that because I knew you’d think of it yourself. They always do, and they never make it. The farthest I’ve ever had anyone get was out the door and to the top of the steps. She fell down them, and I found her at the bottom when I came back. You’re dead. Go to sleep.”
The blind eyes had turned toward him when he began to speak, but they no longer watched him now. The face, which had been beautiful, was now entirely the face of a corpse. The cramped leg crept toward the floor as he watched, halted, began to creep downward again. Sighing, he lifted the dead woman off her feet, replaced her in the corner, and went down the creaking stairs to find the black-haired girl.
T
here has been quite a few to come after her,” her father said, “since we come into town. Quite a few.” He sat in the back of the bus, on the rearmost seat that went completely across the back like a sofa. “But you’re the first ever to find us here. The others, they hear about her, and leave a sign at the meetin’.”
Paul wanted to ask where it was such signs were left, but held his peace.
“You know there ain’t many folks at all anymore,” her father went on. “And not many of them is women. And damn few is young girls like my Janie. I had a fella here that wanted her two weeks back—he said he hadn’t had no real woman in two years; well, I didn’t like the way he said real, so I said what did he do, and he said he fooled around with what he killed, sometimes, before they got cold. You never did like that, did you?”
Paul said he had not.
“How’d you find this dump here?”
“Just look around.” He had searched the area in ever-widening circles, starting at the alley in which he had seen the girl and her father. They had one of the masters’ cold boxes to keep their ripe kills in (as he did himself), but there was the stink of clotted blood about the dump nonetheless. It was behind a high fence, closer to the park than he would have thought possible.
“When we come, there was a fella living here. Nice fella, a German. Name was Curtain—something like that. He went sweet on my Janie right off. Well, I wasn’t too taken with having a foreigner in the family, but he took us in and let us settle in the big station wagon. Told me he wanted to wed Janie, but I said no, she’s too young. Wait a year, I says, and take her with my blessing. She wasn’t but fourteen then. Well, one night the German fella went out and I guess they got him, because he never come back. We moved into this here bus then for the extra room.”
His daughter was sitting at his feet, and he reached a crooked-fingered hand down and buried it in her midnight hair. She looked up at him and smiled. “Got a pretty face, ain’t she?” he said.
Paul nodded.
“She’s a mite thin, you was going to say. Well, that’s true. I do my best to provide, but I’m feared, and not shamed to admit to it.”
“The ghost-houses,” Paul said.
“What’s that?”
“That’s what I’ve always called them. I don’t get to talk to many other people.”
“Where the doors shut on you—lock you in.”
“Yes.”
“That ain’t ghosts—now don’t you think I’m one of them fools don’t believe in them. I know better. But that ain’t ghosts. They’re always looking, don’t you see, for people they think ain’t right. That’s us. It’s electricity does it. You ever been caught like that?”
Paul nodded. He was watching the delicate swelling Janie’s breasts made in the fabric of her filthy shirt, and only half-listening to her father; but the memory penetrated the young desire that half-embarrassed him, bringing back fear. The windows of the bus had been set to black, and the light inside was dim—still it was possible some glimmer showed outside. There should be no lights in the dump. He listened, but heard only katydids singing in the rubbish.
“They thought I was a master—I dress like one,” he said. “That’s something you should do. They were going to test me. I turned the machine over and broke it, and jumped through a window.” He had been on the sixth floor, and had been saved by landing in the branches of a tree whose bruised twigs and torn leaves exuded an acrid incense that to him was the very breath of panic still; but it had not been the masters, or the instrument-filled examination room, or the jump from the window that had terrified him, but waiting in the ghost-room while the walls talked to one another in words he could sometimes, for a few seconds, nearly understand.
“It wouldn’t work for me—got too many things wrong with me. Lines in my face; even got a wart—they never do.”
“Janie could.”
The old man cleared his throat; it was a thick sound, like water in a downspout in a hard rain. “I been meaning to talk to you about her, about why those other fellas I told you about never took her—not that I’d of let some of them: Janie’s the only family I got left. But I ain’t so particular I don’t want to see her married at all—not a bit of it. Why, we wouldn’t of come here if it weren’t for Janie. When her monthly come, I said to myself, she’ll be wantin’ a man, and what’re you goin’ to do way out here? Though the country was gettin’ bad anyway, I must say. If they’d of had real dogs, I believe they would have got us several times.”
He paused, perhaps thinking of those times, the lights in the woods at night and the running, perhaps only trying to order his thoughts. Paul waited, scratching an ankle, and after a few seconds the old man said, “We didn’t want to do this, you know, us Pendeltons. That’s mine and Janie’s name—Pendelton. Janie’s Augusta Jane, and I’m Emmitt J.”
“Paul Gorou,” Paul said.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gorou. When the time come, they took one whole side of the family. They were the Worthmore Pendeltons; that’s what we always called them, because most of them lived thereabouts. Cousins of mine they was, and second cousins. We was the Evershaw Pendeltons, and they didn’t take none of us. Bad blood, they said—too much wrong to be worth fixing, or too much that mightn’t get fixed right, and then show up again. My ma—she’s alive then—she always swore it was her sister Lillian’s boy that did it to us. The whole side of his head was pushed in. You know what I mean? They used to say a cow’d kicked him when he was small, but it wasn’t so—he’s just born like that. He could talk some—there’s those that set a high value on that—but the slobber’d run out of his mouth. My ma said if it wasn’t for him we’d have got in sure. The only other thing was my sister Clara that was born with a bad eye—blind, you know, and something wrong with the lid of it too. But she was just as sensible as anybody. Smart as a whip. So I would say it’s likely Ma
was right. Same thing with your family, I suppose?”
“I think so. I don’t really know.”
“A lot of it was die-beetees. They could fix it, but if there was other things too they just kept them out. Of course when it was over there wasn’t no medicine for them no more, and they died off pretty quick. When I was young, I used to think that was what it meant: die-beetees—you died away. It’s really sweetening of the blood. You heard of it?”
Paul nodded.
“I’d like to taste some sometime, but I never come to think of that while there was still some of them around.”
“If they weren’t masters—”
“Didn’t mean I’d of killed them,” the old man said quickly. “Just got one to gash his arm a trifle so I could taste of it. Back then—that would be twenty aught nine; close to fifty years gone it is now—there was several I knowed that was just my age. . . . What I was meaning to say at the beginning was that us Pendeltons never figured on anythin’ like this. We’d farmed, and we meant to keep on, grow our own truck and breed our own stock. Well, that did for a time, but it wouldn’t keep.”
Paul, who had never considered living off the land, or even realized that it was possible to do so, could only stare at him.
“You take chickens, now. Everybody always said there wasn’t nothing easier than chickens, but that was when there was medicine you could put in the water to keep off the sickness. Well, the time come when you couldn’t get it no more than you could get a can of beans in those stores of theirs that don’t use money or cards or anything a man can understand. My dad had two hundred in the flock when the sickness struck, and it took every hen inside of four days. You wasn’t supposed to eat them that had died sick, but we did it. Plucked ’em and canned ’em—by that time our old locker that plugged in the wall wouldn’t work. When the chickens was all canned, Dad saddled a horse we had then and rode twenty-five miles to a place where the new folks grew chickens to eat themselves. I guess you know what happened to him, though—they wouldn’t sell, and they wouldn’t trade. Finally he begged them. He was a Pendelton, and used to cry when he told of it. He said the harder he begged them the scareder they got. Well, finally he reached out and grabbed one by the leg—he was on his knees to them—and he hit him alongside the face with a book he was carryin’.”
The old man rocked backward and forward in his seat as he spoke, his eyes half-closed. “There wasn’t no more seed but what was saved from last year then, and the corn went so bad the ears wasn’t no longer than a soft dick. No bullets for Dad’s old gun, nowhere to buy new traps when what we had was lost. Then one day just afore Christmas these here machines just started tearing up our fields. They had forgot about us, you see. We threw rocks, but it didn’t do no good, and about midnight one come right through the house. There wasn’t no one living then but Ma and Dad and brother Tom and me and Janie. Janie wasn’t but just a little bit of a thing. The machine got Tom in the leg with a piece of two-by-four—rammed the splintery end into him, you see. The rot got to the wound and he died a week after; it was winter then, and we was living in a place me and Dad built up on the hill out of branches and saplings.”
“About Janie,” Paul said. “I can understand how you might not want to let her go—”
“Are you sayin’ you don’t want her?” The old man shifted in his seat, and Paul saw that his right hand had moved close to the crevice where the horizontal surface joined the vertical. The crevice was a trifle too wide, and Paul thought he knew what was hidden there. He was not afraid of the old man, and it had crossed his mind more than once that if he killed him there would be nothing to prevent his taking Janie.
“I want her,” he said. “I’m not going away without her.” He stood up without knowing why.
“There’s been others said the same thing. I would go, you know, to the meetin’ in the regular way; come back next month, and the fella’d be waitin’.”
The old man was drawing himself to his feet, his jaw outthrust belligerently. “They’d see her,” he said, “and they’d talk a lot, just like you, about how good they’d take care of her, though there wasn’t a one brought a lick to eat when he come to call. Me and Janie, sometimes we ain’t et for three, four days—they never take account of that. Now here, you look at her.”
Bending swiftly, he took his daughter by the arm; she rose gracefully, and he spun her around. “Her ma was a pretty woman,” he said, “but not as pretty as what she is, even if she is so thin. And she’s got sense too—I don’t keer what they say.”
Janie looked at Paul with frightened, animal eyes. He gestured, he hoped gently, for her to come to him, but she only pressed herself against her father.
“You can talk to her. She understands.”
Paul started to speak, then had to stop to clear his throat. At last he said, “Come here, Janie. You’re going to live with me. We’ll come back and see your father sometimes.”
Her hand slipped into her shirt; came out holding a knife. She looked at the old man, who caught her wrist and took the knife from her and dropped it on the seat behind him, saying, “You’re going to have to be a mite careful around her for a bit, but if you don’t hurt her none she’ll take to you pretty quick. She wants to take to you now—I can see it in the way she looks.”
Paul nodded, accepting the girl from him almost as he might have accepted a package, holding her by her narrow waist.
“And when you get a mess of grub she likes to cut them up, sometimes, while they’re still movin’ around. Mostly I don’t allow it, but if you do—anyway, once in a while—she’ll like you better for it.”
Paul nodded again. His hand, as if of its own volition, had strayed to the girl’s smoothly rounded hip, and he felt such desire as he had never known before.
“Wait,” the old man said. His breath was foul in the close air. “You listen to me now. You’re just a young fella and I know how you feel, but you don’t know how I do. I want you to understand before you go. I love my girl. You take good care of her or I’ll see to you. And if you change your mind about wanting her, don’t you just turn her out. I’ll take her back, you hear?”
Paul said, “All right.”
“Even a bad man can love his child. You remember that, because it’s true.”
Her husband took Janie by the hand and led her out of the wrecked bus. She was looking over her shoulder, and he knew that she expected her father to drive a knife into his back.
T
hey had seen the boy—a brown-haired, slightly freckled boy of nine or ten with an armload of books—on a corner where a small, columniated building concealed the entrance to the monorail, and the streets were wide and empty. The children of the masters were seldom out so late. Paul waved to him, not daring to speak, but attempting to convey by his posture that he wanted to ask directions; he wore the black cloak and scarlet-slashed shirt, the gold sandals and wide-legged black film trousers proper to an evening of pleasure. On his arm Janie was all in red, her face covered by a veil dotted with tiny synthetic bloodstones. Gem-studded veils were a fashion now nearly extinct among the women of the masters, but one that served to conceal the blankness of eye that betrayed Janie, as Paul had discovered, almost instantly. She gave a soft moan of hunger as she saw the boy, and clasped Paul’s arm more tightly. Paul waved again.
The boy halted as though waiting for them, but when they were within five meters he turned and dashed away. Janie was after him before Paul could stop her. The boy dodged between two buildings and raced through to the next street; Paul was just in time to see Janie follow him into a doorway in the center of the block.
He found her clear-soled platform shoes in the vestibule, under a four-dimensional picture of Hugo de Vries. De Vries was in the closing years of his life and, in the few seconds it took Paul to pick up the shoes and conceal them behind an aquarium of phosphorescent cephalopods, had died, rotted to dust, and undergone rebirth as a fissioning cell in his mother’s womb with all the labyrinth of geneti
cs still before him.
The lower floors, Paul knew, were apartments. He had entered them sometimes when he could find no prey on the streets. There would be a school at the top.
A confused, frightened-looking woman stood in an otherwise empty corridor, a disheveled library book lying open at her feet. As Paul pushed past her, he could imagine Janie knocking her out of the way, and the woman’s horror at the savage, exultant face glimpsed beneath her veil.
There were elevators, a liftshaft, and a downshaft, all clustered in an alcove. The boy would not have waited for an elevator with Janie close behind him. . . .
The liftshaft floated Paul as springwater floats a cork. Thickened by conditioning agents, the air remained a gas; enriched with added oxygen, it stimulated his whole being, though it was as viscous as corn syrup when he drew it into his lungs. Far above, suspended (as it seemed) in crystal and surrounded by the books the boy had thrown down at her, Paul saw Janie with her red gown billowing around her and her white legs flashing. She was going to the top, apparently to the uppermost floor, and he reasoned that the boy, having led her there, would jump into the downshaft to escape her. He got off at the eighty-fifth floor, opened the hatch to the downshaft, and was rewarded by seeing the boy only a hundred meters above him. It was a simple matter then to wait on the landing and pluck him out of the sighing column of thickened air.
The boy’s pointed, narrow face, white with fear under a tan, turned up toward him. “Don’t,” the boy said. “Please, sir, good master—,” but Paul clamped him under his left arm, and with a quick wrench of his right broke his neck.
Janie was swimming head down with the downshaft current, her mouth open and full of eagerness, and her black hair like a cloud about her head. She had lost her veil. Paul showed her the boy and stepped into the shaft with her. The hatch slammed behind him, and the motion of the air ceased.