by Gene Wolfe
“Yet you yourself were not so cautioned, or so you said. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir, it is. Your soup is getting cold, sir, if I may be so bold.”
I nodded and sipped a spoonful. “Very good.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“What do you know concerning Mr. Coldbrook, Junior’s, death? He died in the front hall, didn’t he? That’s what I’ve been told.”
“I believe that is correct, sir.”
“Did you see his body?”
“Yes, sir. I did, sir.”
“Had he been strangled?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. I have been given no medical programming, sir.”
Georges asked, “Was he bleeding?”
“No, sir, I believe not. If I may speak, sir?”
I said, “Go right ahead.”
“After Mr. Coldbrook, Junior’s, body had been removed, I cleaned the floor, sir. I waxed and polished it as well, sir. I saw no trace of blood, sir.”
I sipped more soup. “If there was no blood, why did you clean, wax, and polish the floor?”
“Mr. Coldbrook, Senior, told me to, sir.”
“I see. Had Mr. Coldbrook, Junior’s, traveling bag been searched?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Was it open? Were its contents scattered over the floor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You picked them up?”
“No, sir.”
“Why didn’t you? It would seem to me the natural thing for you to do.”
“I agree, sir. But I did not, sir. I thought it best to inform Mr. Coldbrook, Senior, first, sir.”
“What did you tell him? Your exact words, please.”
“I said, ‘Your son has come home and is lying in the front hall, sir. I believe, sir, that something may be amiss.’”
“Did he go to look?”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
“And afterward?”
“He had me summon an ambulance, sir.”
“Eventually someone must have screened the police. Do you know who that was?”
“Not specifically, sir. It was one of the medtechs, sir. If I may make a request, sir?”
“Certainly,” I said. I had the feeling it might ask for a little time off, but I knew ’bots never do that. “What is it?”
“The soup remains upon the stove, sir. In a thermery pod, sir. If no one would care for more, I must attend to it, sir.”
Georges said, “I would like some more.”
“Shall I leave this gentleman to serve you, sir?”
Georges looked his question at me, and I told the ’bot to go ahead.
As soon as it had gone, I asked Mahala whether she was familiar with screens. She nodded energetically.
Georges said, “She’s really very good. Much better than I am.”
I gestured. “There’s a screen over there, Mahala. Would you please go over and search for a company called Merciful Maids? I don’t know whether it’s local or worldwide.”
I watched the screen while I ate my sandwich. Mahala tried eight or ten approaches. Maybe more. Finally she cleared the screen, which announced, “No such company,” in a pleasant, feminine voice.
“Then here’s another one. This is strictly local. Look here in New Delphi for a lady named Bettina Johns, please.”
That took about as long as it took me to bite, chew, and swallow. Mahala turned around and pointed to the screen. I said, “See if you can get her, will you? I’d like to speak to her.”
Mahala nodded. That one took longer, maybe half a minute before she rose, clapped to get my attention, and motioned for me to sit down there.
“My name’s Smithe,” I said, as soon as Bettina Johns had said hello. “You’re a friend of Colette Coldbrook’s aren’t you? She said you were.”
“I certainly am. How is she?” Bettina Johns was blond and attractive, about Colette’s age.
“I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’m looking for her. I’m a friend of hers, too, and she was well the last time I saw her. I have to ask you a question, but I don’t want you to think I’m prying. I’m not—I’m just trying to locate Colette. Did you recommend a company called Merciful Maids to her?”
Bettina Johns shook her head. “I never heard of it.”
“Anything like that?”
“I don’t think so. What was this for?”
“To clean up the house, following her brother’s death.”
“No … they had servants for that. After Colette’s mother died, I mean. A housekeeper, maids, a cook, and so forth. I don’t know how many.”
I may have said something in reply. I do not know. Maybe I just froze; anyway, I stood up and Mahala sat down again, her fingers blurring as they danced over the keys. On Bettina Johns’s side one of the sweetest female voices I have ever heard said, “Mr. Smithe and I thank you very, very much, Ms. Johns. You’ve been wonderfully helpful.”
Bettina Johns said, “You have a simply marvelous secretary, Mr. Smithe,” and the screen went blank.
I must have looked ready for the meat wagon, because Georges said, “She can do that on a screen. You probably know about voice recognition. You just talk to the screen and never touch the keyboard. This is like that, only it goes the other way.”
I said, “I suppose it gives you a lot of voices to choose from.”
Georges nodded. “I’m not sure how many. Dozens.”
Mahala held up her pad: 500.
The third floor was just about all guest rooms, each with its own bathroom. I took a small one with a screen and a door that locked. Georges and Mahala took another one, a lot bigger, with a big bed. Probably their door locked, too. I never found out. As soon as they’d gone inside I went into my own room, locked the door, and sat down at the screen.
The way I figured it, there would be about a million guys named Georges Fevre, but most of them would be in la République. There would not be a whole lot of people named Mahala anywhere, since I had never even heard that name until Georges introduced me to this one. Also I had the feeling that Georges might be really interesting, but Mahala was sure to be.
That last was right. Her last name was Levy, and she had been institutionalized because of what the screen called incurable hysterical paralysis of allocution, but she had escaped. There was a small reward. I knew already that people who had really serious stuff wrong with them, like they were blind and could not be fixed, were tucked away out of sight so they would not ruin the view for the healthy and practically perfect fully humans; but I had figured that was okay. They could not see people and now people could not see them. Only now I knew one—heck, I liked her—and it was not something I could just let go of and not think about.
So I thought, and one of the things I came up with was that nobody on the bus knew except me, and nobody in the bus station here, and nobody in the van. She just seemed like somebody’s wife or girlfriend who kept quiet and let her man do all the talking when they were out in public. Maybe you think that is okay and maybe you hate it like poison, but either way there is one hell of a lot of it and nobody notices much.
Another thing was that it explained something about Georges. He was a decent-looking guy and no dummy. Maybe he had no degree and maybe he had two or three, but either way he was a guy who could have landed a good job without much trouble. Only here he was, on the road with his lady, when it sure seemed like neither one of them had a scrap of money.
By that time I wanted to crawl into the sack so bad I could taste it, but I looked for Georges anyhow. There were two reasons for that. The first one was that I like to finish what I start. The second was that I knew I ought to take a bath before I turned in, but my body was arguing against it, and hard. I wanted to show it once and for all who was boss. So I did.
Like I had expected, there were more than a hundred Georges Fevres, but most of them were in France. Here, there were only four. One was three years past a hundred, one looked fat and worked in a winery, and one was
twelve. I figured the fourth one had to be mine, but it was not. That last Georges Fevre was a left-handed pitcher, twenty-eight, and he had gotten both legs broken trying to pull off some fool stunt.
So no. Whatever my guy’s real name was, Georges Fevre was not it. So maybe George F—? There would be hundreds of those, maybe thousands. I played around with it anyway, and what he was doing before. Suppose I just saw him coming down the street? Executive? Lawyer? Both wrong, but—cop! How about George Franklin, police?
Bang! There he was, good picture, full face, uniform, bars on his shoulders. Captain George G. Franklin of the High Plains Police. Found not guilty but dismissed from the force anyhow. Divorced shortly afterward. Present address unknown.
I took my bath, darned near fell asleep in the sauna, and went to bed. I ought to say here what time it was by then, but I do not remember.
12
BEHIND LOCKED DOORS
When I woke up I knew what I had to do. The room I had taken was not a corner room; but the one next to it was, and Georges (I kept calling him that because the way I saw it using his real one would be a double-cross) and Mahala were in another one across the hall. I washed up a little and got some clothes on, went into the empty one, opened a window, and took off my shoes and socks.
The rain had stopped. The sky was still sullen with clouds, but the window ledge I climbed out onto was almost dry. For a minute I wondered whether Conrad, Junior, had stood on a dry sill, and whether it had been this one. Then I stood up on my toes, got hold of the ledge above, and pulled myself up. He had not been all that much taller than I am, so it had been just about as hard for him as it was for me. Or anyhow, I kept telling myself that until I got one foot on the ledge above and was able to bring up the other and stand on that ledge.
Here let me stop and explain a couple of things. It was dangerous, sure it was; but it was not as dangerous as it sounds. If I had fallen I would have landed on the roof of the second floor, not on the ground. That would have shortened my fall quite a bit.
And the reason Junior had picked a corner room was that the third-floor corner room windows had fourth-floor windows directly above them. I had figured that one out the first time, when Colette and I had been there. The other third-floor windows did not. The third floor had a lot of windows; the fourth not nearly as many.
If the fourth-floor window I had climbed up to had been locked, I could probably have swung myself around the corner to another one, but I did not have to. Notint in a self-lubricating polymer frame works a lot better than the glass-in-wood windows we had. This one slid up smoothly as soon as I pushed. Climbing inside was a cinch.
It was a pretty small room and so full of equipment that for a minute I thought that was all there was. Then I saw a radiation sign and realized that the big round thing was a reactor. I had seen a micro pile once (which is what people generally call itty-bitty reactors) in the basement of the library, but that reactor had been one hell of a lot smaller than this one. My hands started to tremble; I had to wait until they calmed down a little (call it a quarter of an hour). Once they did, I got out of there fast and started working my way along the ledge until I got to a window I could see was not to the reactor room. I think that one must have been the one Junior had looked into. Maybe he opened it and stuck his head through, too. I do not know, but it makes sense.
Looking in, you did not see a room at all. You were seeing into a jungle or maybe some kind of greenhouse. At least that is what it looked like, a dark green jungle standing on edge. After a minute or two, I noticed a darker hole a little below the middle. At first I had not seen it because there were leaves and leafy branches and even some big flowers in the way. But behind them was this black hole. Back then, I figured it was probably the den of some animal.
Maybe Conrad, Junior’s, window did not open. Maybe it did. I don’t know. This one had, just about like the last one. It took me a long five minutes to get my nerve up to go in. I was standing there with my feet on a kind of shelf about as wide as my hand that sloped, barely holding on by my fingernails and breathing that air—warm, magical air full of water. It was like you had your nose in the groin of a flower, but I was not half as scared of falling off as I was of going in there.
You know what did it for me? If you were to guess, I doubt you would get it in a year. I finally looked off to my left, and there was a door there. Nothing special, just a door that looked like regular ponticwood standing there in the jungle all by itself. No wall on either side, no floor under it. Just that door.
When I saw the door, I climbed inside. There was a wrench, like you might feel on a really rough carnival ride. It felt like my guts were being stirred up with a spoon (or maybe somebody’s fingers), and my brain was rolling over.
I fell on flowers, big leaves, and wet dirt. It was like falling into a flower bed that had just been watered, except that I was retching and gagging like I was going to turn inside out and there were little critters in among the plants that scampered off too fast for me to get a good look at them.
When I finally got up, I still felt sick and my head still hurt, but nothing was half as bad as it had been. I looked around for the window I had fallen from, but I could not even see it. I felt for it, too, but there was nothing there. I was in this new, hot, wet, growing place; and there was nothing there that was even the tiniest bit familiar except that door. It was still right there, and it still looked exactly like ponticwood, just like it had before.
So I walked over to it, stepping carefully and so shaken up that I thought I might fall any minute. When I started I was planning to knock, then I decided that might be a truly bad idea. So I just pushed down the handle and pulled.
It should have fallen over on me, and to tell the truth I had my free hand up to catch it. Only what I really thought was that it would swing toward me like any other door, and that is exactly what it did. It moved slowly because it was so heavy, but I had expected that.
What I saw then was what I expected, too. It was the fourth-floor landing, with the stairs coming up, and the lift tube doors, and the other doors, one to the room where the reactor was, and the other one to what had been Conrad, Senior’s, office and lab. I knew that if I stepped out and shut that door, I would have to climb through windows if I wanted to get in there again; I was about to try to figure out how to reset the door so it would not lock when a new thought hit me, and it hit me hard.
If I did it, it would mean that anybody else who came up here and tried that door could just open it and walk into the jungle. As if that was not bad enough, he might even leave the door standing open behind him, probably because he would be afraid it might lock if he closed it.
That would mean that anything in that jungle could get out and come right down the stairs even if it did not know about tube lifts. No sweat, just walk through the doorway. Animals would be bad. Bugs might be a lot worse. So I did not reset the door. I just walked out onto the landing and shut it good and tight behind me, which took a good hard pull. I tried it, too, bearing down on the handle and shaking it. It was locked as solidly as ever, a thick, probably steel door that somebody who knew what he was doing had painted to look just like stained and varnished ponticwood. By that time I was breathing Earth’s air again and glorying in it. It was the same air that I had been breathing ever since the day I had been pulled out of the incubator, air that knew warm golden light, birds’ wings, and good cooking. The air of home. I got into the lift tube.
When its doors clanked open, I was about to go back into the room I had slept in, but I got stopped. It was Georges. “Ah! There you are, Mr. Smithe. Mahala’s in the kitchen helping the ’bot make breakfast, and I’ve been looking around for you.”
Thinking fast I said, “I’m afraid I haven’t shaved. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll join you as soon as I shave. You’re in the dining room?”
“No, no! In the sunroom, where all the pictures are. Just take this lift tube—”
“I know where it is.”
&nb
sp; “Hurry up before your breakfast gets cold. Mahala, well, she gets angry.”
“I’ll shave as fast as I can,” I promised. Which I did, ducking into the corner room to put my socks and shoes back on, then taking the lift tube to the second floor and finding a bedroom that must have been Junior’s, with a shaver on the basin counter and almost a dozen nice clean shirts hanging in a closet; these were the usual thing, all colors, with a deep V-neck and no buttons. I picked a blue one with green sleeves.
Georges and Mahala were sitting down and eating when I came in, but Mahala did not look angry. She just smiled and pointed to all the food. There was a beautiful fruit salad, a platter with a big pile of bacon and another with a big pile of sausages, plus scones and clotted cream to spread on them. When I said, “This is a feast!” she gave me a happy grin.
Georges said, “The ’bot will make you an omelet, too, if you want one. They’re quite good.” He was eating one himself.
I told him this was more than enough to satisfy me, and helped myself to a little of everything, beginning with fruit salad and ending with bacon.
“So what have you been up to?”
“Not much.” I could not help smiling.
“You were outside your room without shoes? I’ll bet you thought I didn’t notice. If you were listening in on Mahala and the ’bot, you can’t have heard much.”
Mahala giggled.
“I wasn’t.” I tried to make it light.
“I didn’t think so.” Georges was having none of that. “What was it?”
I chewed and swallowed a bite of fresh pineapple. “I’ve been trying to decide how much to tell you.”
“Meaning that you’re not going to tell us everything?”
I had made up my mind. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you everything, so we’re going to leave it at this: I have been exploring the house.”
“But you’re not going to tell us what you found?” Georges raised an eyebrow.
“That’s right, because I want to show you and not spoil it in advance.” I stood up and picked up my plate. “Besides, you wouldn’t believe me.”