by Gene Wolfe
Antigravity. They had antigravity then. But in what struggle had that billion-ton ghost ship been ruined? Why didn’t they board and salvage it? Was it radioactive? Was there a nuclear device aboard? Was it, perhaps, simply too big for them—for anyone—to handle? The shadow reached his window, plunging it in darkness.
A new orderly comes and finds him in his bed. His legs are shaking from his exertions and his body is bathed in sweat, but the orderly seems to notice nothing. The shadow is still at the window.
“Visitors,” the orderly said. He too had a folding wheelchair.
The elevator thumped to a stop, and the doors grated back as they had when he was taken to the roof. The orderly muttered, “We got our own visiting area here. So you patients don’t have to go out in the bad weather to see them. Right over here. The screw will tell you the rules.”
The guard was already watching them. He was a heavy, middle-aged man. His uniform was blue gray, and he carried no weapon. “You got a hour,” he said, “if you want it all. Only you already lost ten minutes because you were late. If you don’t want to talk anymore, snap your fingers behind your back and I’ll come in and tell you your time is up. I’ll be listening to everything you both say—that’s the rule. She’s brought you something, and she’ll have to leave it with me to be checked out before you can have it; but if there’s nothing wrong with it, I’ll give it to you if you’ll wait around a little. Tomorrow’s a visiting day too; after that, no more until Friday. She’ll probably ask you.”
Alvard said, “Who is it?”
“You’ll see her in a minute.” The guard pulled open a metal door, and took the handles of the chair from the orderly. The floor changed from lumpy tile to squares of uneven wood. They turned a corner, and Alvard found himself looking across a battered countertop.
Behind another guard, Jessie walks the wide streets of the prison. The wrecked ship floats above her, casting everything into deepest shadow; but she pays no heed to it. From time to time she appears about to speak—not to the guard, but to an invisible presence to her left. Her head turns. Her lips twitch. Then she faces straight again and pats the leather bag she carries.
“In here. You been here before?”
Jessie shook her head.
“You look like you been coming here for years.”
“I used to come—a long time ago. It was a lot smaller then. We went to a different building.”
“He did a stretch before, huh?”
Jessie was looking away, and pretended not to hear him. Age had its uses. The television and most of the magazines she read said that people like her—people who had not received C.T. until they had already aged—would stay old, stay as they were. But last week she had read (in a small, square magazine she had gotten at the market) that a few doctors disagreed. Even old bodies, the magazine quoted them as saying, would gradually regenerate themselves. At any rate, no one knew for sure. The magazine was nestling in her purse now, next to the other present she had brought for him. She would give it to him too. Not tell him, but let him read the article himself Meantime there was Lisa. No, that wouldn’t be fair—the article. What if it was wrong?
“Sit down. If you have any object you want to give the prisoner, you have to let me have it. If it’s okay, I’ll pass it on to him. You can ask him if he got it next time you come.”
“I have a book.”
“You’ll have to let me see it when you’re finished.”
“All right.” A narrow line of black ran down the center of the counter. She reached out to touch it, and her hand struck an invisible substance. “They used to have wire,” she said.
“This way we don’t have to worry about your passing anything through. You’ll be able to hear each other fine.”
“All right,” she said again. The guard left. A minute ticked away, then two, before she heard someone coming, the shuffle of feet and the soft whirring of wheels. Then he came. He was in a wheelchair and looked terrible, yet still it was he, immediately recognizable. She had been twenty-five.
He said, “Hello, Mrs. Alvard.” It was a joke of his.
“You knew me. I didn’t think you would.” He had known her, but she had seen the shock in his face. She said, “I’m old now. Sixty-five. Time to retire if I were working, according to the old way of thinking.”
“Did you have to work?”
“No. Thanks to you.”
“They broke my patent. Somebody here told me.”
“Not until after twenty-five years. I had saved some from what the lawyer was giving me; by then I was too old to work anyway. Fifty.”
He nodded, the shock still lingering in his face.
“I know to you it seems like no time at all; but for me it’s been most of my life. You’re someone I remember from when I was young.”
For a moment, neither said anything. There was a fly in the room, on Jessie’s side. It buzzed and occasionally crashed into the invisible partition. He said, “It was good of you to come, Jessie; I know you didn’t have to, with the money gone.”
“I felt I owed it to you; it’s good that it happened now. Twenty years ago I was so worried about it. I was afraid they’d bring you back, and we’d both feel … that we ought to be together again. But I’d be too old for you; I was forty-five then.”
“I’m thirty-seven physiologically,” he said. “Remember? I was too old for you.”
“Yes, but you were intelligent. So brilliant, Al.” She sounded as though that had made a difference, had balanced her youth. “Now there’s no question about it. So we can both relax. I’ll write you sometimes, and send you things. Cookies and things.”
He smiled. “Don’t tell me you bake now.”
“I’ll get them from the store. They’ll still be better than what they give you here. No, I never learned to cook—it always seemed … you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“One of those second-class things that women did. I ate out. Or thawed freezer dinners in the oven. I guess the real second-class thing women do is live off men.”
He said, “Jessie, I wanted you to have the money,” very softly.
“I know, and I thought that was my chance. I could live on it until I got into acting, or dancing. And I had some parts. Really, Al, I got some parts. I just never went over.” He nodded, and she relaxed her grip on the edge of the counter. Her purse had fallen to the floor.
“I hope there were some other men,” he said.
“Oh, yes.”
“That’s good. I wouldn’t want to think of you waiting alone for forty years.”
“There were others.” She laughed, and it sounded almost like her old, happy laugh. “You weren’t even the first, Al. It was Barry, remember? But you were the only one that left me with anything when he was gone. If you’re worried that you owe me something for waiting …”
“I’m not,” Alvard said.
“Good. Don’t be. I’m the one who owes you.” She bent to fumble in her purse. Her eyes were wet, and she blinked back the tears as though she were afraid they would make her mascara run, though she wore none. “I’m the one. It’s me.” Because her head was below the level of the counter, the words were muffled.
When she straightened up again, she was holding a brown paper envelope. She said, “She’s going to come. For you.” And pressed a picture flat against the invisible wall between them.
It was a young woman lying on a chaise lounge on what appeared to be the terrace of a small apartment. Billowing smoke-black hair above an expressionless face, clear, pale skin touched with pink at the cheeks, narrow waist, swelling hips, long, straight legs.
“She looks like you,” Alvard said. “Exactly like you. The way you used to be.”
“Her name is Lisa.”
“Pretty name.”
“She was here with me yesterday, but they said you couldn’t come, and she had to go back last night. They’re casting a play. I already signed up for her, so she can get in. They still have the visiting t
hing like they used to—you know, the cottages—even though there’s women in here too now.”
He teased her in the old way. “What will she call herself? Jessica Alvard or Lisa Alvard?”
“She won’t have to pretend; they’ve dropped all that.”
“Don’t cry, Jessie.”
She shook her head, blindly and helplessly. The first tear had overflowed her tiny handkerchief. “I won’t be jealous of Lisa, Al. Do you remember how jealous I used to be?”
Alvard said, “We really should have been married before I went in. It would have made everything easier.”
“I wanted to, Al.”
“I know you did; but what would it have been for you, being chained—” He paused, as if suddenly conscious of the banality of what he was saying.
“Maybe it would have been better for me. I don’t think the men I lived with after you did me much good.” Outside, the shadow of the great derelict, slowly drifting over the expanse of the prison, came at last to an end. A ray of sunlight as sudden as the glare from a flashbulb darted through the window and transformed the invisible partition between them into something that reflected almost as much light as it transmitted. As though some tormentor had thrust a mirror at her face, Jessie saw herself as she sat in the worn wooden prison chair. Her hands, too small for her body and dotted with reddish brown, were clenched in her lap; her shoulders were rounded and bent; her face, beneath her gray hair, was rounded too, and bent away from the image of the face she recalled from only a few years before—the corners of the eyes twisted down, the nose pulled out and coarsened. She looked like every old woman she had known and despised while she herself had been young: like the wardrobe mistress at the Theater in the Park, like that woman in Paris who took care of the apartment building, like the one who came to clean when she was living at the Towers; most of all, like her mother.
And through her own aged image she could see Al; still young, but looking (the phrase came to her mind and was accepted before she realized how appropriate it was) as if he were dead and buried—his cheeks sunken, and his face livid with bruises. Worse, she saw him seeing himself. He raised his right arm, and it was half a second before she understood that he was trying to cover his face. It should have been comic, the old melodramatic vampire gesture; but it was not. It was so not-funny, that high, knobbed forehead with the skull showing so plainly through the tightened skin, those haunted blue eyes in nests of dark flesh, so not-funny that she forgot her own anger and the hatred she had directed against herself, against the old woman in the wooden chair.
Her lips were moving, but she seemed to stop and listen to discover what it was she was saying: “Poor Count. Poor Count.” He was wheeling the chair clumsily around. “I brought you something, Al,” she called. “I’ll leave it with the guard. He’ll give it to you.” He was nearly through the door now. “Next time Lisa will come. She’ll come, Al, I promise.”
The guard was beside her chair already. “You folks finished?”
“Thank God,” she said, “Lisa didn’t see him this time. He’ll look better in a week, won’t he?” She stood up, holding the edge of the counter. Other fingers had worn depressions in it there. “You were brought up on a farm, weren’t you?”
The guard smiled. “That’s right, ma’am. How did you know?”
“The way you talk. He was too. I was raised in Queens.”
“Is that so? Mostly city people in here. We don’t get country people very often.”
“Murder,” she said. She sounded as though she wanted to lay everything out at once.
“It usually is, for country. Farm people don’t steal.” He seemed proud of it. “But they’ll kill you if they get mad enough.”
“That’s what Al did—got mad and killed his friend.”
“It figures. Cain was a stockman, you know, and Abel was a farmer. You talk to your Bible, ma’am?”
Jessie shook her head, but the question seemed to remind her of her gift. She drew it out of her bag and handed it to the guard. “I brought something for him. Would you look it over, like you said, and give it to him?”
On the way back to the city, on the bus, her eyes were obstructed by tears, and she could not read. She held the magazine from the market open in her lap instead, and let the little voice Al had put there so long ago tell her of the sunken continent of Mu, and of women who held communion with the joyful spirits of the dead, and how C.T. would—in time—make even old, round, bent faces young again. Provided the degenerative diseases did not kill their owners first.
Alvard lies with his hands behind his head, while a doctor—his name is Porter—looks him over. “‘What we’ve got to do, is to keep up our spirits, and be neighborly,’” Alvard quotes to him. “‘We shall come out right in the end, never fear.’”
“You must be feeling better today.”
“I don’t look bad, do I? For something brought back from the crypt?”
“For someone brought back from the crypt, you’re in very good condition indeed. So good that we should have you out of the hospital in another week or two.”
“I won’t be sorry to go,” Alvard told him.
“Most patients are. The food is better here, and there’s less crowding.”
“I don’t like being on this floor. I’ll still be able to use the library, won’t I, when I’ve left the hospital?”
The doctor glanced at the stack of books on the night stand beside the bed. Their dark bindings and faded gold stampings looked out of place against the white enamel of the stand and the white paint of the wall, but shadowy and comfortable. “You like to talk to books, don’t you?” he said.
“I like to read. I have all my life.”
“So do I.” The doctor was looking at the dim titles on the books’ spines. “Elements of Economic Statistics; Transitory Currents in Semiconductors; The Autobiography of Preceptor Neal; A Military History of the Union of South Africa; Selections from the Novels of Charles Dickens. Have you read all these?”
“Not yet. The Dickens book is mine—a woman I used to know brought it to me. The rest are from the library here.”
“You have varied tastes.”
“Something for everyone,” Alvard said.
The doctor nodded. “Now that we’re finished, you’ve another visitor, I’m afraid, waiting outside.”
A guard—a tall, hawk-faced woman—stepped into the room. The sound of her boots seemed incongruous in this building, dominated by the noises of patients’ soft slippers and the staff’s crepe-soled shoes. “Your tray from lunch—it had a knife, a fork, and a spoon on it. Is that right?” Her voice was hard, but without emotion.
“I think so,” Alvard said.
“You think so. Okay. It was supposed to, and the kitchen says only the fork and spoon came back. You want to give me the knife now?”
Alvard held out empty hands. “You think it’s here?”
The doctor said, “I doubt that he’s strong enough yet to stab anyone.”
“Probably the orderly took it,” the guard said, “but I’ve got to look.”
“Don’t be rough with him. That’s an order.”
“I wouldn’t anyway.”
When the doctor was gone, the guard began a methodical search, looking first in the drawers of the night table, then removing them to look behind them and under them. “You’re the person who invented talking books, aren’t you?” she said.
Alvard nodded, looking at the hawk face.
“I thought so. I’m glad I finally got to meet you. You’re one of the people who helped to make my girlhood happy, although of course I never thought of it that way at the time. Do you know what I liked? Those old Nancy Drew mysteries. They reissued all those old books as talkers, and I used to fall asleep gossiping with Nancy about footprints and mysterious lights.” (All this while the dark, sharp features never relaxed, and the sunken eyes, pretending to look under the night stand, behind the books, beneath the high bed, were on Alvard’s face.) “You know, sir,
I wouldn’t much blame you if you did take that knife.”
“I didn’t,” Alvard said, “so it’s no use watching me while you look. I can’t tell you where anything is hidden.”
“It’s a jungle out there.”
“It was in my time too,” Alvard said.
“I suppose it was blacks then, wasn’t it?”
“Mostly. If you were white it was blacks.”
“And if you were black it was the whites.” The guard laughed softly. “I can imagine. But at least you’d know what side everyone was on. That’s pretty well over with now—that black and white thing. It’s women now, if you’re a man. Ah, you didn’t know that, did you?”
“You’re a psychologist,” Alvard said.
“I try. In my little way.” The guard straightened up, running her hands down her thin body as though she were wiping her palms. “I’m married, myself. My husband and I get along. God knows why they do it; but they get the men who aren’t strong—boys and old men, mostly. Or the ones who are sick.” She paused, watching Alvard. “And of course some of the men have gone over to them—you know what they get. Then too there’s ganging up, and a certain amount of ambushing. There’s more of them now than there are men in here.”
“I see,” Alvard said. “I haven’t noticed many women guards.”
“There’s a few of us. Not many. The province thinks it’s a man’s job, mostly—and then they’ve got seniority. Seniority’s a great thing. Would you mind rising up? I’ve got to make sure you’re not lying on it. It would be good if you got out of that bed altogether. You’re here for murder, aren’t you?”
That night, when the hospital was quiet, Alvard drew the knife up, pulling gently at the thread he had raveled from his sheets, and began to whet the edge on the stone sill of the window.