by Gene Wolfe
“And he—this Barry Seigle—went through?”
“I pushed him through. The air was rushing out all around us, and Barry was screaming.” Alvard paused. “Have either of you ever really invented anything? Done anything creative?”
The warden only stared at him. Matluck shook his head.
“There’s a moment when you know what to do. You know it. Or the machine suddenly works the way it should, and you know why. Barry wore those big, old-fashioned belts. Nostalgia for the eighties. A big buckle with the Australian Army insignia and a U.N. motto. You’ve probably forgotten it. But I looked down and saw that buckle, and I knew what to do. I got my right hand under the belt, and heaved up as if I was pressing a weight. You ought to have seen his eyes pop.”
“I’m glad I didn’t,” Matluck said.
“I don’t think I owe society a damn thing. Or Barry’s family either—all he had was a wife, and when he was dead she owned Speaking Pages, and she was glad he was gone. I owe Barry himself; but there’s no way I can pay him, ever. Does it stand to reason that after killing my best friend, to hold on to the only thing in my life that’s really mine, I’d put that thing at your disposal for the sake of a prison job? For anything at all less than freedom and wealth?”
Despair is the oldest inhabitant of the punishment cells. She is there, sitting in her corner, when the prisoner arrives; when he leaves she will be there still, with her limp, useless hands clasping one another—though he may not leave her behind.
The cells were small rooms without windows. The floor was three meters long and a trifle under two meters wide. The ceiling was two meters high. Walls and ceiling were concrete, painted a faded brown; the room contained a bunk, a small basin with a cold water tap, and a slop jar. The light in the center of the ceiling could not be turned off.
The door was solid metal, unlike the doors of ordinary cells, which were barred. It was also unlike them in being always shut. About a hundred and seventy centimeters up, there was a small window fitted with thick glass, opaque from the prisoner’s side.
The walls were not scratched with names, dates, or clever sayings, because the prisoners had nothing to scratch them with. They wore gray prison shirts, gray trousers without belts, and stockings. They had nothing to look at, and nothing to read; they did not send one another tapped messages, because they had nothing to tap with, and no tunneling fellow prisoner ever came up through the floor. They marked the passage of time by counting their meals, which were unvarying, and served once a day. They were supposed to have no one to talk to, but occasionally a guard came (they were never sure if the guards were violating regulations, or had been sent to report on them) and once a week they were permitted to leave their cells for a shower.
For the first two days, Alvard waited patiently. He knew, or thought he knew, what was happening outside the prison, and he felt sure that he would spend no more than a few weeks at most in his punishment cell. On the third day, he grew bored with waiting, and began to amuse himself with fantasies. He wrote programs in his head and dwelled lovingly on his memory of the binding of Selections from the Novels of Charles Dickens. How sweetly and cleanly it had curled hack when the blade of his knife, as sharp as a scalpel, ran along its edge. The chips within had glittered like the windows of a city by night; and a city they had been, throbbing with a thousand voices.
He heard the click as the bolt of the door retracted under the prodding of a coded card. The guard who entered was male and muscular, with a broad, inexpressive Slavic face. “Dinner already?” Alvard asked. It was not a meal—the guard had no tray.
“Right. Sorry I’m late with your chow.” Deadpan, he extended two envelopes.
The tops had been slit by the censor. “Thanks,” Alvard said. By an effort of will he did not look at the return addresses.
“Nice view. Nice place you have here.”
“Sure.”
“We have mail service like this every day. I’m your friendly mail carrier, and if you’re not getting anything I write something for you myself. I got what you call a nice hand. Like you see in the ads for hotels. You get a letter signed Regency, why, that’s me. You want to read what I wrote you now, or you got time to blow air?”
“I’ll have a lot of time to look at these,” Alvard said.
“That’s the spirit. When I was in independent command of the Big Sandy, my woman was Nina Paynter. The star—you know? She used to send me tapes, just whispering on those little ones that only hold an hour. I used to play them over the bullhorn until I found out the crew was starting to tap-dance. Just the same, I think hearing the voice is better than looking at all those chicken scratches.”
“You can’t read.”
“I’m the fastest in the world. Got the best memory for it too. Want to hear the names of all the cities in the U.S. and K.? Listen.” The guard’s mouth opened and closed without a sound, leaving the wide face as impassive as before. “Backwards.” His lips opened and shut again. “Now I’ll slow ’em down for you.” An elaborate yawn.
“Okay, you didn’t read my letters,” Alvard said. “Great. Thanks.”
“I got to be moving. I’ll ask her majesty if I can come back tomorrow. You get some of the other guys in, and we’ll play soccer.”
“It’s a date. You bring the ball.”
When he was nearly out the door, the guard paused. “I almost forgot to tell you. Up at the hospital, everybody’s askin’ if we killed you yet. Especially one guy, the brain surgeon.” He held up a thick hand, with the first and second fingers bent out of sight.
For an hour afterward, the letters lay unread on the foot of Alvard’s bunk while he paced the room. From time to time, he stooped and touched their envelopes—one of common white paper, the other rough and tinged with cream.
He went to the door, tried to peer through the glass, and pounded on it with his fist. No one came. “Margotte is dead,” he called. “He was an old man. He must have been dead for years before the discovery of C.T.”
No one replied.
“You were only waving, right? You just happened to hold your hand that way.”
He waited for an answer, but none came, and at last he stepped back from the door. “Maybe there are a whole line of them—the doctors with blasted hands. Maybe they don’t know themselves.” For the first time since childhood, tears welled in his eyes.
After hours have gone by, he sleeps; and after hours more, wakes and sits up, and rubs his face with his fingers, and picks up the two letters and juggles them in his hand.
He smiled as if the juggling were a conscious prolongation of pleasure.
The cream envelope:
My friend:
I hope you understood, during our talk in Nancy’s office, that the arrangement I outlined to you then was the most generous authorized at that time. Since returning here to the Capital, I have discussed your case with the District President himself. Soon I will be visiting you again, with a still more generous offer. Meanwhile, I hope that you will give consideration not only to the profound advantages such an arrangement offers you but also to the service you can render your District, and your fellow citizens.
With respect,
Lon mattuck
Chairman, Advisory Commission on Technological Development
Alvard nodded to himself, then read the letter over a second time. He chuckled.
The second envelope contained a folded sheet of plain paper, and what seemed to be a greeting card, its exterior reddish and pebbled in imitation of crushed morocco, and stamped in gold: I’M SENDING YOU A BIT OF
MYSELF.
The letter first:
Dearest Al,
I tried to come and see you again, did they tell you? Somebody in the lobby said you were sleeping with a woman—in her cell; but you know I don’t believe it. Anyway, at the office they said you were in punishment.
Lisa was going to come too, but at the last minute something came up for her, so she could not make it. I don’t know what
you did, but I hope you will be out of punishment soon because we both want to see you. Lisa wants to meet you.
Lisa sends a greeting for you. To say high is the way she puts it. You’ll like her—she is fantastically cute and has such a sweet disposition and such a sweet way about her. (She’s watching over my shoulder when I write this, Al, but I’d say it anyway!) We’ll be back next weekend, hoping you are out of p. See you then!!
Much, much love
Lisa and Jessie
Lisa and Jessie
ps. Al, a man came around to talk to me and he asked a lot of questions about you. Lisa was gone. He wouldn’t say what it was for, and I didn’t tell him anymore than everybody knows already—except I said I thought you had already suffered enough, too much for something you did when anybody would be crazy mad. What’s happening, Al? But if it’s true about the woman there, don’t tell me.
The card opened stiffly—the paper was thicker and harder than that of the Christmas and birthday cards he had been accustomed to. The picture inside seemed to leap out in startling three-dimensionality: a room—or perhaps a small stage—decorated with white Louis XVI furniture, and tapestries of aristocratic shepherdesses and swains bearing lutes. A young woman’s voice, high-pitched and plaintive, began to speak.
“Hello. My name is Lisa. Here’s what I look like.”
A slender, black-haired girl walked out onto the tiny stage. Megan had said they could clone individuals now; this was surely Jessie’s clone duplicate—graceful, yet with an amateurish quality to her motions that was at once appealing and unsettling.
“I can sing, dance, act for you. Anything you like. I am a fashion model, and I’ve experience distributing literature at trade shows and conventions.”
The miniature girl was taking off her clothing, one filmy piece after another.
“I might fill in if your receptionist is ill, but I don’t want a full-time job doing that. And I won’t wait on tables, or serve cocktails—it’s bad for your legs, and you wouldn’t want to ruin legs like mine, would you? I will pose in the nude for real artists and photographers, but I don’t want to be intimate with a male model.”
A new voice, not radically dissimilar, ingenuesque and theatrical, asked: “I beg your pardon, but did you ever play at Canterbury? I recollect meeting a gentleman at Canterbury, only for a few moments, for I was leaving the company as he joined it, so like you that I felt almost certain it was the same.”
Alvard’s lips twitched, and he whispered, “Miss Snevellicci.” He dropped the card, which closed as it fell. “Miss Snevellicci, from Nicholas Nickleby. They have gone out, even though I have been in here. My own army. I feel like Mephistopheles.” For a time he paced the room.
“Hello. My name is Lisa.”
“Will you talk to me, Lisa?”
“Of course, if you like. But I am not just a pictured figure in this card. There is a real Lisa. Would you like to know how to reach her?”
“No, I’d rather just talk. You see, I’m in prison. I will live forever, but I am imprisoned. And it isn’t really you I want to chat with—it’s your guest, Miss Snevellicci. Could you let her speak, please?”
“I’ll see,” the Lisa voice said.
But when the new whisper came, it had neither Miss Snevellicci’s archness nor Lisa Stewart’s strained sensuousness. It was an old man’s voice, foolish and quavering: “Will you go and see if Bob is on the lock? Send for Bob.”
Moored by a gracefully curving stem of crystal lift tubes, the Presidential Center floats six kilometers above the city. One hundred thousand metric tons of material has gone into its construction—it weighs exactly nothing. Only the need for frequent communication with the surface, the crystal tubes and their shuttling free-dropping, free-rising cars, holds it bound at all. It makes its own power, purifies its own wastes. Though bound still to a stone ziggurat of stairs leading to the base of the tubes, it no longer requires those roots as it nods in the jet stream like a tulip.
The jewel in the center of the flower is the thousand-faceted dome cupping the President’s Conference Garden. The center of its arch is three hundred meters above the floor, and it holds royal palms as readily as orchids, ferns, seven fountains, and the four people talking.
“Pardon me,” Alvard said, twisting in his chair. “I’m not used to the suit yet.” It had been expensive, and was well cut in the new style, with the coat loose at the waist and buttoning at the side.
The President smiled. “I understand you haven’t worn a suit for some time.”
“I think it comes to forty-four years.”
“Well, we’re glad you came out now to help us with this problem.”
Alvard shrugged. “I hardly know what it is yet.”
The thin woman, Dr. Pomme, snapped, “Dickens.”
“Dickens?” Alvard swiveled his chair to face her.
The other woman (she was blond and soft-looking, with large, intelligent eyes, and her name was Yarwood) murmured, “Yes, Dickens … Alan? After nearly fifty years of operation of the speech-active book and record system, it would appear that … some barrier … some kind of insulation … has broken down. The … personalities generated in the cover circuitry are …”
The President interrupted. “Are able to travel from one dossier, report, or whatever to another. Things are already in a hell of a mess, and they’re getting worse.”
“Only Dickens,” Dr. Pomme said. She had a narrow chest, close-set eyes, and a little nose as sharp and shining as the blade of a penknife.
“Edith has investigated all the instances we have been able to produce for her; Edith holds the chair of modern English literature at Yale. She tells me that in her opinion all the misplaced personae are major or minor characters from the works of Charles Dickens.”
“The Question,” the Yarwood woman began in her soft voice, “is whether this was done purposefully or accidentally, and whether it is a continuing or a singular phenomenon. The fact that all of them are from one book …”
Dr. Pomme shook her head, a gesture that might have pared an apple. “Not all from one book. Thus far we have identified characters from every one of Dickens’s major works, and quite a few of his minor efforts—Augustus Minns from ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk,’ for example.”
“Edith and I disagree on terms, you see … she is a student of literature; I am a physicist. When I say all are from one book, you, as the inventor of that kind of book …”
Alvard said, “The law has decided that I was not the inventor.”
“The credit was stolen from you. We know that now. Even President Sanderson … he’s going to do something for you, if you can help us with this. I was going to say that physically, there might be only one book involved. Edith and Sandy seem to feel that sabotage of some kind is indicated … . I think it may be a circuit failure … an accident occurring in a single volume.”
The President said, “But they move about; they actually go from one file to another.”
“If the gain were shorted … so that these personalities were conceived, so to speak, at maximum amplitude, they would remain so when inductive forces impressed them on the circuitry of another book …” To Alvard, the blond woman added, “They must be cover-to-cover. I’ve duplicated the effect in the lab … it’s a social disease of books, if you want to look at it that way. I destroyed my experimental materials.”
For a moment, no one said anything more. The sound of the fountains filled the silence.
The President cleared his throat. “Your invention, Alan, has made it possible for my administration—and those that preceded it—to employ a great number of persons who, quite frankly, are close to functional illiteracy. Reading today, you understand, is something of a specialty. I don’t even do much myself. We can’t go back, now, to the enormous effort that was made for hundreds of years to implant in every citizen what is fundamentally a freakish communications skill. We can’t afford to have the present system destroyed.”
The elevator
s are small rooms, with comfortable chairs. The three of them sit facing one another, ignoring the unequaled view through the translucent walls.
“You’ll want some of the infected books to work with,” Dr. Pomme said. “I brought you this.” She fumbled in her attaché case for it, then handed Alvard a small volume. “A modern novel. Just junk, but there are several of them in there.”
“Thank you,” Alvard said.
The other woman touched his shoulder confidentially. “You’re going to need someone to show you around. The world … it’s changed. You’ll work with me? We have nice facilities. In Chestertown, across from Baltimore.”
“Some people are meeting me outside,” Alvard said, “but I’d be delighted if you’d come with us. Jessie and Lisa, and I’m sure that Jessie, at least, will be there. She’s supposed to rent us a car.”
“My name is Brenda,” the blond woman said. “I’ve never heard you use it.”
“You look a lot like Megan—that’s a woman I knew—”
“In the prison? You shouldn’t … be ashamed of it. Or her. Naturally you knew women there. Was she beautiful?”
Dr. Pomme swiveled her seat until she faced the serene clouds.
“Very,” Alvard said.
When the elevator stopped at last, she hung on his arm. Edith Pomme ignored them as they made their way down the long flight of broad steps. Alvard could see Jessie sitting alone in a vehicle that looked like a matchbox on wheels. “I doubt that you two are going to like each other,” Alvard said. “She may even think you’re the woman I knew in prison, but what does it matter? We’re going to live forever and be free.”