by Gene Wolfe
“He is dead,” Amor sighed. “And I, a neglectful daughter, ought to have said ‘my late father’ and not spoken as I did.”
“What? Brave Chivalry late? But Chivalry cannot be late, or else ’tis not Chivalry.”
“How truly you speak. No, that poor body cannot be my noble father, ever so light of step, even when he was stiff of knee. It is—what it is. But Chivalry was never so.”
“As for Poetry,” continued Harlequin. “She still lives, I believe; but she is old and crank and ill.”
“I feared it might be thus. It has been so very long since last I saw her.”
“Then you are alone in the world,” Harlequin said, and made her a deep bow. “But not entirely alone, for you have me.”
“And you,” Amor said. “You are alone also.”
“Indeed, I hope not.”
She took him by the hand. “My dear friend—”
Fearing her words: “Your touch thrills me still. It was your touch, beloved Amor, that called me to life. I came down from that block of stone to feel your touch. There is true magic in your touch, I swear!”
“How could my touch kindle anything to life?”
He kissed her hand. “I cannot say—and yet I know it brought life to me.”
“Shall we make trial of it?” Amor inquired doubtfully. “If it were so, I might—I even might—Shall I touch another?”
“Oh, not another!” Harlequin gasped.
“Not another such as you, dear friend, for there is no other such as you. But should I not touch something else? Perhaps the dragon on that vase?”
“But suppose your touch effectual. We would have a dragon between us. Would that not be horrible?”
“And if it were not—”
“That would be more horrible still.”
“What then? There is a painted mask upon that wall.”
“Friend to you, he would prove a false friend. No, touch …”
“What?”
“Touch …”
“Yes?”
“The entire palace!”
“Everything? I cannot touch it all at once.”
“You did not touch me all at once, but only in a single spot.”
“I’ll try,” she said; and while Harlequin watched, she knelt upon the floor, embraced a column, and blew a kiss to the ceiling.
Nothing occurred.
“I knew it could not be,” she said.
“I knew it could.” He hung his head.
She took his hand again, and together they wandered down the many and dividing corridors that lead to the grave.
“It worked for me,” he said.
“I know it did.”
And the marble was white no longer, but flushed with rose. She said, “It would have been a wondrous thing.”
“It was, for me.” And later, “It will always be.”
As their footsteps echoed the ticking of the clocks in the benighted corridors, a new wind fluttered the candle flames and whispered to the dry stones there of rain in spring.
“It was joy even to fancy it,” she said, “though it was only for a moment.”
“It is true,” he told her.
A daisy pushed its golden eye from between two blocks of marble. Harlequin nearly trod on it. “It’s true! Amor, you can, you do! You did! Oh, Amor, don’t you see? It only took longer because the palace is so huge.”
“I do?” she asked. Then whispered, “I did.” And with trembling hand touched her own heart.
Checking Out
THE SLAM OF THE DOOR JERKED HIM TO WAKEFULNESS.
He lay on top of the bed on a blue satin coverlet, fully dressed except for his shoes. He sat up and saw his suitcase on the bed beside him. No doubt the bellboy had brought it. No doubt the bellboy had promised to follow him to his room—they did that sometimes. And instead of staying awake for him, he had lain down to get a little rest. No doubt the bellboy was angry at not getting a tip.
It was his best suit; he should not have gone to sleep in it. He went to the closet and hung up his jacket. The room seemed very small, the bed so narrow he was surprised the bellboy had found room for his bag on it. He wondered what hotel this was.
He liked the Algonquin in New York, though its rooms were so small, its beds so narrow. But everything in the Algonquin was old and good and a little worn; everything was new here, and a little bit shiny and cheap. He did not think they built hotel rooms this small any more.
He opened his bag and saw that Jane had not packed it. Martha, perhaps. Martha was their cleaning woman, the old woman who would not do windows. No, Martha was dead.
Jane’s picture was on top, and he took it out and looked into her clear blue eyes. She would miss him. Or rather, she would say she did, though he knew the only time she really relaxed was when he was gone—when he was gone, and she could pretend they were rich for life, and there would never, never be a need to make anything more, no need for late nights at the office, for flights to New York with Jan.
Flights. That was it. They had been on the plane, he remembered, and tired. He had drunk the free martini they gave you and leaned back to relax. After that, they would have hired a cab. No doubt the old furniture at the Algonquin had given out at last, and the management had had to get this stuff.
You could buy The New York Review at the magazine stand in the Algonquin; he liked that. He decided to go out and get one, but his shoes were not in the closet, not under the bed. Well, to hell with them. His slippers would be in his bag, and you could go into the lobby in your slippers at the Algonquin—he liked that too. Perhaps Jan was in the lobby or the bar.
He found Jan’s picture while looking for his slippers. How had that got in there? Perhaps Martha had put it in for fear that Jane would see it. He tossed it toward the wastebasket. Jan was a good secretary, and sometimes he felt that she loved him in a way Jane never had, at least not since Bruce was born. But he could not leave Jane. Paradoxically, he could not leave her because he had left her so often.
He tossed Jan’s picture toward the wastebasket, and found Joan’s beneath it, a misty “glamour portrait” in the style of the forties, signed like a movie star’s. This was absurd. He had never owned such a picture.
Or had he? Yes, once.
What a strange, unpleasant sound the air conditioning made here, like a drawn-out sigh, an unending sighing.
Quite suddenly his desk appeared to his mind’s eye, more real than the tawdry room, and just as suddenly it shrank. There was a roll top now with cheap varnish over the stained oak, with just room enough to write, with a few books. Had that battered children’s dictionary ever been his? There was a fold-out shelf with just room enough to write, and a few pigeon holes, and Joan’s picture in the frame from Woolworth’s. He realized with a start that she might have been a virgin in those days, a real high-school virgin in those days, though he had never thought of her that way, only as a woman, though he had said “girl,” and infinitely desirable.
No doubt he had, later, put Jan’s picture into the frame so that it covered Joan’s. No doubt he had put them both into the new frame Jan had bought for his desk. No doubt Martha had put them, together, into his bag. No, Martha was dead.
He flung both pictures at the wastebasket and scuffed on his slippers as he opened the door.
Space.
An atrium—this hotel had an atrium; it was a Hyatt then. High, it rose so high he could see only blue sky at the top. His room was high up too, though it seemed less than halfway up. Tiny figures moved slowly across the lobby, wading in water nearly waist deep.
A flood—there was a flood in the city. He was lucky the lights in his room still worked, the air conditioning still sighed.
He looked back and saw that he had not in fact turned on any lights, that the bellboy had not turned on any lights at all. The room was dark and gloomy behind him, like a cave in which something slept.
He would go to the lobby. There was a flood, and he was still an active man. Perhaps he could
help. Perhaps Jan would see him helping.
He tried, but his balcony was not connected with the other balconies—there was a gap of at least ten feet. How did you get out in that case? How did you reach the elevators?
He went back into the room and saw Jan’s picture on top of his clean shirts. He would tell Jane, make a clean breast of it for once. He reached for the telephone.
Mrs. Clem said, “I thought he looked very nice. All that pretty blue.”
Jane nodded. “I bought a concrete dome to go over the casket, too. It sits right down over it and traps the air, so the water can’t get to him. It cost almost three thousand dollars.”
The telephone rang. “Excuse me,” she said. “Hello?”
“I’m coming back to you.” The words stuck in his throat. There had been no sound, only the unending sigh.
“Hello?”
“I love you, Jane. I’m checking out of here and coming back, whether you love me or not.”
Jane said, “There’s no one there, just an empty line.”
“I’d hang up, if I were you,” Mrs. Clem told her.
“Jane!” he said. And then, “Joan? Joan?”
Someone was knocking at the door. “Maid.”
He stared at it. “Jan? Joan?”
“Would you like your bed turned down, sir? It will only take a minute.”
Jane said, “Not even breathing,” and hung up.
Morning-Glory
SMYTHE PUT HIS HANDS BEHIND HIS HEAD and looked up at the ceiling. He was a short and untidy man now well entered on middle age, and his face showed embarrassment.
“Well, go on,” Black said.
Smythe said, “My father felt bread was sacred; if a piece was accidentally dropped on the floor he would demand that it be picked up at once and dusted off and eaten; if someone stepped on it he was furious.”
“Was this element of your father’s character present in reality, or is it only a part of the dream logic?”
Smythe put his head down and looked at Black in irritation. “This is just background,” he said. “My father would say, ‘Bread is the life of man, you dirty little hyena. Pick it up.’ He had been brought up in Germany.”
“Specifically, what was your dream?” Black opened his notebook.
Smythe hesitated. For years now he had been giving Black entries, and he had almost always made them up, thinking them out on the bus he took to the campus each morning. It seemed now a sort of descreation, a cheat, to tell Black a real dream. “I was a vine,” he said, “and I was pounding on a translucent wall. I knew there was light on the other side, but it didn’t do me any good where I was. My father’s voice kept saying: See! See! See! Over and over like that. My father is dead.”
“I had supposed so,” Black said. “What do you think this dream has to do with your father’s reverence for bread?”
More disturbed by the dream than he wanted Black to know, Smythe shrugged. “What I was trying to communicate was that my father had a sort of reverence for food. ‘You are what you eat,’ and all that sort of thing. I chewed morning-glory seeds once.”
“Morning-glory seeds?”
“Yes. Morning-glory seeds are supposed to be a sort of hallucinogen, like LSD or peyote.”
“I suppose your father caught you and punished you?”
Smythe shook himself with irritation. “Hell no. This wasn’t when I was a child; it was about three years ago.” He felt frustrated by Black’s invincible obtuseness. “All the blah-blah was going on in the newspapers about drugs, and I felt that as a member of the department I ought to know at least a little bit about it. I didn’t know where to get LSD or any of those other things, but of course I had morning-glory seed right in the lab.” He remembered the paper seed packet with its preposterously huge blue flower and how frightened he had been.
“You didn’t think you should obtain departmental permission?”
“I felt,” Smythe said carefully, “that it would be better for the department if it were not on record as having officially approved of something of that sort.” Besides, he told himself savagely, you were afraid that you would get the permission and then back out; that’s the truth, and if you tell too many lies you may forget it.
“I suppose you were probably right,” Black said. He closed his notebook with a bored snap. “Did you really have hallucinations?”
“I’m not sure. It may have been self-hypnosis.”
“Nothing striking though?”
“No. But you see, I had eaten—at least in a sense—the morning glory. I think that may be why my father—” He hesitated, lost in the complications of the thought he was trying to formulate. Black was the Freudian; he himself, at least by training, a Watsonian behaviorist.
“Further dreams may tell us more about what’s going on,” Black said. It was one of his stock dismissals. “Don’t forget you’ve got counseling tomorrow.” As Smythe closed the door Black added, “Good-bye, Schmidt.”
Smythe turned, wanting to say that his father’s father had been American consul in Nuremberg, but it was too late. The door had shut.
To reach his own laboratory he went down two flights of stairs and along a seemingly endless hall walled with slabs of white marble. The last lecture of the day had been finished at four, but as he approached the laboratory area in the rear of the building he heard the murmur of a few late-staying students still bent over their white rats. Just as he reached his own door one of these groups broke up, undergraduates, boys in sweaters and jeans, and girls in jeans and sweaters, drifting out into the corridor. A girl with long blond hair and a small heartshaped face stopped as he opened the door, peering in at the twisting, glowing, rectangular tubes that filled the bright room. On an impulse Smythe said, “Come in. Would you like to see it?”
The girl stepped inside, and after a moment put the books she was carrying on one of the lab benches. “What do you do here?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this place.” The light made her squint.
Smythe smiled. “I’m called a vine runner.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“People who put rats through mazes are called rat runners; people who use flatworms are worm runners.”
“You mean all these square pipes are to test the intelligence of plants?”
“Plants,” Smythe said, allowing himself only a slight smile, “lacking a nervous system, have no intelligence. When they display signs of what, in such higher creatures as flatworms, would be called intelligence, we refer to it as para-intelligence or pseudo intelligence. Come here, and I’ll show you how we study it.”
The rectangular passages were of clouded, milky white plastic panels held together with metal clips. He unfastened a panel, showing her the green, leafy tendril inside.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “And I don’t think you really believe that about pseudo intelligence. Intelligence ought to be defined by the way something responds, not by what you find inside when you cut it open.”
“Out of fear of being accused of heresy I won’t agree with you—but I have, on occasion, been known to point out to my departmental superiors that our age is unique in preferring a pond worm to an oak tree.”
The girl was still looking at the twisting white passages sprawling along the bench. “How does it work?” she asked. “How do you test them?”
“It’s simple, really, once you understand that a plant ‘moves’ by growth. That’s why it has no musculature, which in turn, by the way, is why it has no nervous system. These mazes offer the plants choice points in the form of forked passages with equal amounts of light available in each direction. As you see, we keep this room brightly lit, and these plastic panels are translucent. The trick is that we have more than twenty grades, ranging from ones which admit almost as much light as plate glass to ones which are nearly opaque.” He held up the panel he had unfastened so that she could see the light through it, then rummaged in a drawer to produce another of the same color which none the l
ess admitted much less light.
“I see,” the girl said. “The smart plants find out by and by that there’s less and less light when they go down a wrong turn, and so they stop and go back.”
“That’s right, except that the tendrils don’t, of course, actually turn around and grow backward. The growth of the ‘wrong’ tendrils just slows and stops, and new growth begins where the bad decision was made.”
The girl reached down and gently, almost timidly, stroked a leaf. “It’s like a society more than an animal, isn’t it? I mean it sort of grows an institution, and then if it finds out it’s going the wrong way it grows another one. What’s the name of this plant?”
“Bindweed,” Smythe told her. “It’s one of the most intelligent we’ve found. Far brighter, for example, than scarlet runner bean—which in turn is more intelligent itself than, say, most varieties of domestic grapes, which are among the stupidest vines.”
“I ought to be going now,” the girl said. She picked up her books. “What’s that big one, though? The one that sprawls all over?”
Smythe was replacing the panel he had removed for her. “A morning-glory,” he said. “I should rip it out, actually, so that I could use the room and the maze components for something else. What I did was to subject the seeds to radiation, and apparently that destroyed the vine’s ability to discriminate between light levels. Once it makes a wrong turn it simply continues indefinitely in that direction.”
“You mean its mind is destroyed?”
“No, not really. That’s the odd thing. On other types of tests—for example, when we lop off tendrils until it memorizes a pattern of ‘safe’ turns: right, right, left, left, or something of the sort—it still does quite well. But it will keep running down a passage of diminishing light level until it reaches nearly total darkness.”
“How horrible,” the girl said. “Could I see it?” While he was unfastening a panel for her she asked suddenly, “Did you see that awful show on television the other night? About the turtles?”