by Gene Wolfe
“That’s right; you can’t go home. There’s one place where we can never go—haven’t you thought of that? We can dive to the bottom of the sea and someday NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there’s one place where we can’t go. We can’t go where we are already. We can’t go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there.”
Not knowing what to say, I nodded, and that seemed to satisfy him. Priest looked as calm as ever, but he made no move to shut the windows, and I sensed that he was somehow afraid.
“I was put into an orphanage when I was twelve, but I never forgot The Pines. I used to tell the other kids about it, and it got bigger and better every year, but I knew what I said could never equal the reality.”
He shifted in his seat, and the slight movement of his legs sent Marcella sprawling, passed out. She retained a certain grace still; I have always understood that it is the reward of studying ballet as a child.
Malone continued to talk. “They’ll tell you it’s no longer possible for a poor boy with a second-rate education to make a fortune. Well, it takes luck, but I had it. It also takes the willingness to risk it all. I had that too, because I knew that for me anything under a fortune was nothing. I had to be able to buy this place—to come back and buy The Pines, and staff it and maintain it. That’s what I wanted, and nothing less would make any difference.”
“You’re to be congratulated,” I said. “But why . . .”
He laughed. It was a deep laugh, but there was no humor in it. “Why don’t I wear a tie and eat my supper at the end of the big table? I tried it. I tried it for nearly a year, and every night I dreamed of home. That wasn’t home, you see, wasn’t The Pines. Home is three rooms above the stables. I live there now. I live at home, as a man should.”
“It seems to me that it would have been a great deal simpler for you to have applied for the job you fill now.”
Malone shook his head impatiently. “That wouldn’t have done it at all. I had to have control. That’s something I learned in business—to have control. Another owner would have wanted to change things, and maybe he would even have sold out to a subdivider. No. Besides, when I was a boy this estate belonged to a fashionable young couple. Suppose a man of my age had bought it? Or a young woman, some whore.” His mouth tightened, then relaxed. “You and your wife were ideal. Now I’ll have to get somebody else, that’s all. You can stay the night, if you like. I’ll have you driven into the city tomorrow morning.”
I ventured, “You needed us as stage properties, then. I’d be willing to stay on those terms.”
Malone shook his head again. “That’s out of the question. I don’t need props; I need actors. In business I’ve put on little shows for the competition, if you know what I mean, and sometimes even for my own people. And I’ve learned that the only actors who can really do justice to their parts are the ones who don’t know what they are.”
“Really—,” I began.
He cut me off with a look, and for a few seconds we stared at one another. Something terrible lived behind those eyes.
Frightened despite all reason could tell me, I said, “I understand,” and stood up. There seemed to be nothing else to do. “I’m glad, at least, that you don’t hate us. With your childhood it would be quite natural if you did. Will you explain things to Marcella in the morning? She’ll throw herself at you, no matter what I say.”
He nodded absently.
“May I ask one question more? I wondered why you had to leave and go into the orphanage. Did your parents die or lose their places?”
Malone said, “Didn’t you tell him, Priest? It’s the local legend. I thought everyone knew.”
The butler cleared his throat. “The elder Mr. Malone—he was the stableman here, sir, though it was before my time. He murdered Betty Malone, who was one of the maids. Or at least he was thought to have, sir. They never found the body, and it’s possible he was accused falsely.”
“Buried her on the estate,” Malone said. “They found bloody rags and the hammer, and he hanged himself in the stable.”
“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean to pry.”
The wind whipped the drapes like wine-red flags. They knocked over a vase and Priest winced, but Malone did not seem to notice. “She was twenty years younger and a tramp,” he said. “Those things happen.”
I said, “Yes, I know they do,” and went up to bed.
I
do not know where Marcella slept. Perhaps there on the carpet, perhaps in the room that had been hers, perhaps even in Malone’s servants’ flat over the stables. I breakfasted alone on the terrace, then—without Bateman’s assistance—packed my bags.
I saw her only once more. She was wearing a black silk dress; there were circles under her eyes and her head must have been throbbing, but her hand was steady. As I walked out of the house, she was going over the Sèvres with a peacock-feather duster. We did not speak.
I have sometimes wondered if I were wholly wrong in anticipating a ghost when the French windows opened. How did Malone know the time had come for him to appear?
Of course I have looked up the newspaper reports of the murder. All the old papers are on microfilm at the library, and I have a great deal of time.
There is no mention of a child. In fact, I get the impression that the identical surnames of the murderer and his victim were coincidental. Malone is a common enough one, and there were a good many Irish servants then.
Sometimes I wonder if it is possible for a man—even a rich man—to be possessed, and not to know it.
AFTERWORD
This was a dream story. I dream a good deal of fiction, but it is mostly very bad fiction. The title was in my dream and the setup, the possessed servant hiring a master and mistress. That and one visual image that has never left me, that of a large upper-class room at midnight swept by a high wind. Its drapes flutter among my thoughts even now.
Some are haunted by ghosts. I am haunted by stories.
THE GOD AND HIS MAN
O
nce long, long ago, when the Universe was old, the mighty and powerful god Isid Iooo IoooE, whose name is given by certain others in other ways, and who is determined in every place and time to do what is good, came to the world of Zed. As every man knows, such gods travel in craft that can never be wrecked—and indeed, how could they be wrecked, when the gods are ever awake and hold the tiller? He came, I say, to the world of Zed, but he landed not and made no port, for it is not fit (as those who made the gods long ago ruled) that a god should set his foot upon any world, however blue, however fair.
Therefore Isid Iooo IoooE remained above the heavens, and his craft, though it traveled faster than the wind, contrived to do so in such a way that it stood suspended—as the many-hued stars themselves do not—above that isle of Zed that is called by the men of Zed (for they are men, or nearly) Land. Then the god looked down upon Zed, and seeing that the men of Zed were men and the women thereof women, he summoned to him a certain man of Urth. The summons of Isid Iooo IoooE cannot be disobeyed.
“Man,” said the god, “go down to the world of Zed. For behold, the men of Zed are even as you are, and their women are women.” Then he let Man see through his own eyes, and Man saw the men of Zed, how they herded their cattle and drove their plows and beat the little drums of Zed. And he saw the women of Zed, and how many were fair to look upon, and how they lived in sorrow and idleness, or else in toil and weariness, even like the women of Urth.
He said to the god, “If I am ever to see my own home, and my own women, and my children again, I must do as you say. But if I go as I am, I shall not see any of those things ever again. For the men of Zed are men—you yourself have said it—and therefore crueler than any beast.”
“It is that cruelty we must end,” said the god. “And in order that you may assist me with your reports, I have certain gifts for you.” Then he gave Man the enchanted cloak Tarn
ung by which none should see him when he did not wish to be seen, and he gave Man the enchanted sword Maser, whose blade is as long as the wielder wishes it (though it weighs nothing) and against which not even stone can stand.
No sooner had Man tied Tarnung about his shoulders and picked up Maser than the god vanished from his sight, and he found he rested in a grove of trees with scarlet flowers.
The time of the gods is not as the time of men and women. Who can say how long Man wandered across Land on Zed? He wandered in the high, hot lands where men have few laws and many slaves.
There he fought many fights until he knew all the manner of fighting of the people of the high, hot lands and grew shamed of killing those men with Maser, and took for himself the crooked sword of those lands, putting Maser by. Then he drew to him a hundred wild men, bandits, and slaves who had slain their masters and fled, and murderers of many kinds. And he armed them after the manner of the high, hot lands, and mounted them on the yellow camels of those lands, that oftimes crush men with their necks, and led them in many wars. His face was like the faces of other men, and his sword like their swords; he stood no taller than they, and his shoulders were no broader; yet because he was very cunning and sometimes vanished from the camp, his followers venerated him.
At last he grew rich, and built a citadel in the fastness of the mountains. It stood upon a cliff and was rimmed with mighty walls. A thousand spears and a thousand spells guarded it. Within were white domes and white towers, a hundred fountains, and gardens that leaped up the mountain in roses and ran down it like children in the laughter of many waters. There Man sat at his ease and exchanged tales with his captains of their many wars. There he listened to the feet of his dancers as the pattering of rain, and meditated on their round limbs and smiling faces. And at last he grew tired of these things and, wrapping himself in Tarnung, vanished and was seen in that citadel no more.
Then he wandered in the steaming lands, where the trees grew taller than his towers and the men are shy and kill from the shadows with little poisoned arrows no longer than their forearms. There for a long while he wore the cloak Tarnung always, for no sword avails against such an arrow in the neck. The weight of the sword he had fetched from the high, hot lands oppressed him there, and the breath of the steaming lands rusted its blade, and so he cast it, one day, into a slow river where the black crocodiles swam and the river horses with amber eyes floated like logs or bellowed like thunder. But the magical sword Maser he kept.
And in the steaming lands he learned the ways of the great trees, of which each is an island, with its own dwellers thereon, and he learned the ways of the beasts of Zed, whose cleverness is so much less than the cleverness of men, and whose wisdom is so much more. There he tamed a panther with eyes like three emeralds, so that it followed him like a dog and killed for him like a hawk, and when he came upon a village of the men of the steaming lands he leaped from a high branch onto the head of their idol and smote the hut of their chief with the sword Maser and vanished from their sight. And when he returned after a year to that village, he saw that the old idol was destroyed and a new idol set up, with lightning in its hand and a panther at its feet.
Then he entered that village and blessed all the people and made the lap of that idol his throne. He rode an elephant with a bloodred tusk and two trunks; his war canoes walked up and down the river on a hundred legs; the heads of his drums were beaten with the white bones of chiefs; his wives were kept from the sun so their pale beauty would lure him to his hut by night and their fresh skins give him rest even in the steaming lands, and they were gorged with oil and meal until he lay upon them as upon pillows of silk. And so he would have remained had not the god Isid Iooo IoooE come to him in a dream of the night and commanded him to bestir himself, wandering and observing in the cold lands.
There he walked down a thousand muddy roads and kissed cool lips in a hundred rainy gardens. The people of the cold lands keep no slaves and have many laws, and their justice is the wonder of strangers, and so he found the bread of the cold lands hard and scant, and for a long time he cleaned boots for it, and for a long time dug ditches to drain their fields.
And each day the ship of Isid Iooo IoooE circled Zed, and when it had made several hundred such circles, Zed circled its lonely sun, and circled again, and yet again, so that Man’s beard grew white, and the cunning that had won battles in the high, hot lands and burned the idol in the steaming lands was replaced with something better and less useful.
One day he plunged the blade of his shovel into the earth and turned his back to it. In a spinney he drew out Maser (which he had not drawn for so long that he feared its magic was no more than a dream he had had when young) and cut a sapling. With that for a staff he took to the roads again, and when its leaves withered—which they did but slowly in that wet, cold country—he cut another and another, so that he taught always beneath a green tree.
In the marketplace he told of honor, and how it is a higher law than any law.
At the crossroads he talked of freedom, the freedom of the wind and clouds, the freedom that loves all things and is without guilt.
Beside city gates he told stories of the forgotten cities that were and of the forgotten cities that might be, if only men would forget them.
Often the people of the cold lands sought to imprison him according to their laws, but he vanished from their sight. Often they mocked him, but he smiled at their mockery, which knew no law. Many among the youth of the cold lands heard him, and many feigned to follow his teachings, and a few did follow them and lived strange lives.
Then a night came when the first flakes of snow were falling, and on that night the god Isid Iooo IoooE drew him up as the puppeteer lifts his doll. A few friends were in the lee of a wood with him, and it seemed to them that there came a sudden flurry of snow spangled with colors and Man was gone.
But it seemed to him, as he stood once more in the presence of the god Isid Iooo IoooE, that he had waked from a long dream; his hands had their strength again, his beard was black, and his eyes had regained their clarity, though not their cunning.
“Now tell me,” Isid Iooo IoooE commanded him, “all that you have seen and done,” and when Man had told him, he asked, “Which of these three peoples loved you the best, and why did you love them?”
Man thought for a time, drawing the cloak Tarnung about his shoulders, for it seemed to him cold in the belly of the ship of Isid Iooo IoooE. “The people of the high, hot lands are unjust,” he said. “Yet I came to love them, for there is no falsity in them. They feast their friends and flay their foes and, trusting no one, never weep that they are betrayed.
“The people of the cold lands are just, and yet I came to love them also, though that was much harder.
“The people of the steaming lands are innocent of justice and injustice alike. They follow their hearts, and while I dwelt among them I followed mine and loved them best of all.”
“You yet have much to learn, Man,” said the god Isid Iooo IoooE. “For the people of the cold lands are much the nearest to me. Do you not understand that in time the steaming lands, and all of the Land of Zed, must fall to one of its great peoples or the other?”
Then while Man watched through his eyes, certain good men in the cold lands died, which men called lightning. Certain evil men died also, and men spoke of disease. Dreams came to women and fancies to children; rain and wind and sun were no longer what they had been; and when the children were grown, the people of the cold lands went down into the steaming lands and built houses there, and taking no slaves drove the people of the steaming lands behind certain fences and walls, where they sat in the dust until they died.
“In the high, hot lands,” commented Man, “the people of the steaming lands would have suffered much. Many of them I had, toiling under the whip to build my walls. Yet they sang when they could, and ran when they could, and stole my food when they could not. And some of them grew fat on it.”
And the god Isid Iooo
IoooE answered, “It is better that a man should die than that he should be a slave.”
“Even so,” Man replied, “you yourself have said it.” And drawing Maser he smote the god, and Isid Iooo IoooE perished in smoke and blue fire.
Whether Man perished also, who can say? It is long since Man was seen in the Land of Zed, but then he was ever wont to vanish when the mood took him. Of the lost citadel in the mountains, overgrown with roses, who shall say who guards it? Of the little poisoned arrows, slaying in the twilight, who shall say who sends them? Of the rain-washed roads, wandering among forgotten towns, who shall say whose tracks are there?
But it may be that all these things now are passed, for they are things of long ago, when the Universe was old and there were more gods.
AFTERWORD
This is a story about which I cannot say anything of real substance. On its first publication, the word maser was changed by the proofreader (I was told, at least, that it was by the proofreader) to master. Not all the time, only sometimes. The stories of other writers have suffered worse things, but when I read this one (or simply think about it) I can focus on nothing else. Most of you will already know what a maser is: a microwave amplifier.
Let us say you have this microwave, one that will scarcely hold a sixteen-inch frozen pizza. With a maser, you could make it a great big house-sized thing you might induce a proofreader to walk into. . . .
Oh, never mind!
ON THE TRAIN
W
hen I look out the window, the earth seems to have become liquid, rushing to flow over a falls that is always just behind the last car. Wherever that may be. The telephone poles reel like drunks, losing their footing. The mountains, white islands in the fluid landscape, track us for miles, the hills breaking to snow on their beaches.