The Best of Gene Wolfe

by Gene Wolfe

  Donovan, appearing drink in hand from some remote part of the room, said, “I’m glad you asked that, Colonel Solomos. You see, that’s part of our plan—to get these people out into the open where our planes can get at them.”

  Solomos made a disgusted sound. “Virdon has no reserve to cover his rear?”

  “Certainly he does,” Donovan said. “Naturally I can’t tell you how many.” A moment afterward, when Solomos was talking to someone else, Donovan warned Peters, “Be nice to that guy; he represents the Greek army—its business interests. Lou is trying to contract for some Greeks to stiffen things along the coast.”

  Peters said, “I’d think they’d be worrying about being nice to us, then. They ought to be glad to get the money.”

  “There’s not a lot of real money around. Mostly we’re talking trade agreements after the war, stuff like that.”

  A familiar voice asked, “Suppose one wished to get down a bit of a flier on this row; what’s the old firm offering?” It was Tredgold.

  Donovan, a little puzzled to see someone he did not recognize, said, “I’m afraid I’ve already laid out as much as I can afford.”

  Peters asked, “You’re betting against us?”

  “Only for sport. The fact is, I’d back either, but I shouldn’t expect you to turn against your own chaps. Ten thousand escudos?”

  “You’re on.” By a simultaneous operation of instinct both looked up at the screen, where General Virdon, looking much as though he were giving the weather, was outlining his battle plan in chalk.

  Tredgold called loudly, “I say, there! Those marks show where you are now, eh? But where shall you be in an hour?” The general began laboriously sketching phantom positions across the heart of Detroit. “Well, we’ll see, eh?” Tredgold whispered to Peters.

  Peters asked, “Have you had a drink?”

  “Well, no, I haven’t, actually. Just arrived a moment or so ago, to tell the truth. Are my birds behaving?”

  “Yes, they’ve been fine.” Peters waved over a tall dark girl whose hair, gathered behind her head in a cascade of curls, suggested a Greece not represented by Solomos. She smiled at each of them in turn, and they each took a drink—Peters was conscious that it was his third or fourth; he could not be sure which. “Listen,” he said to Tredgold when the girl had gone. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  They found chairs at the back of the room, next to the window, and Peters said, “Can you set me up with that girl?”

  “You didn’t need me, old boy; just ask her. Your chief is paying, after all.”

  They talked of something else, Peters conscious that it was impossible— equally impossible to explain the impossibility. Time passed, and he knew that he would despise himself later for having missed this opportunity, though it was an opportunity that would only exist when it was too late. A few feet away Donovan was taking his wallet from his pocket, making a bet with a tall German; for some reason Peters thought of the recording company which, ultimately, employed Tredgold, and their trademark, a cluster of instruments stamped in gold, recalling the slow way it had turned round and round on the old-fashioned 33'' disk player in his grandmother’s house in Palmerton, Pennsylvania. Tredgold was recounting some story about a badger that had hidden from dogs in the cellar of a church, and Peters interrupted him to say, “What’s it like in England now?”

  Tredgold said, “And so you see the poor blighters couldn’t explain what they were doing there,” and Peters realized that he had not spoken aloud at all and had to say again, “But what is it like in England now?”

  Tredgold smiled. “I daresay we’re fifteen years behind you.”

  “You’re expecting all this?” Peters waved a hand at the distant screen. “I mean, are you expecting it?”

  “Seems likely enough, I should think. Same problems in both countries, much. Same sort of chaps in authority. And ours look to yours—of course, it won’t last nearly so long on our side; we haven’t the space.”

  “If we win,” Peters said, “I doubt that it will ever break out in England.”

  “Oh, but you won’t, you know,” Tredgold said. “I’ve money on it.”

  Peters sipped his drink, trying to decide what kind of whiskey was in it; everything tasted the same. Probably Canadian, he thought. He had checked the supplies sent up by the hotel before the party began, and had noticed how much Canadian whiskey there was; the war had dried up the American market. “You could change things,” he told Tredgold suddenly, “before this happens.”

  “I could change things? I bloody well could not.”

  “You English could, I mean.”

  “Could have done the same sort of thing yourselves,” Tredgold said. “All your big corporations, owning everything and running everyone, everything decided by the economic test when it was forty or more years out of date. One firm’s economies only good because of prices set by another to encourage or discourage something else altogether, and your chemical works ruining your fishing, turning the sea into a dustbin, then selling their chemical foods. Why didn’t you change things yourselves, eh?”

  Peters shook his head. “I don’t know. Everybody was talking about it for years—I remember even when I was in grade school. But nothing was ever done. Maybe it was more complicated than it looked.”

  “Britain’s the same. These chaps everyone’s been shouting at to change things, they’re the very chaps that do so well as things are. Think they’re going to make new rules for a game they always win? Not ruddy likely.” Tredgold stood up. “Your crowd’s thinning out a bit, I fancy. I say”—he took a passing stranger by the arm—“pardon me, sir, but where’s everyone off to?”

  “The cabaret downstairs,” the man said in an accent Peters could not identify. “The last show there—it is ten minutes. Then we come here again and watch again the battle. You wish to come?”

  Tredgold glanced at Peters, then shook his head. “Some other time, and thank you very much. You come to Lisbon often? Wait a bit; I’ve a card here somewhere.” He walked as far as the corridor door with the stranger, then returned to Peters. “Nice chap. Hungarian or something. Hope he fancies dark women.”

  Donovan, who had been standing a few feet away watching the screen, said, “In there, mister,” and pointed to the two outside bedrooms. “We can’t use the middle one—Lou’s on the private vidlink in there.”

  Tredgold feigned puzzlement and looked around the room. “I don’t even see one now.”

  “Two in each room,” Donovan said. “They’ll come out when they’re ready—that’s what most of the guys in the chairs are waiting for.”

  “How’s the attack going?” Peters asked. He was conscious of swaying a little and took hold of the back of a chair with one hand.

  “Great,” Donovan said. The door of the east bedroom opened and a short man in a wool suit too heavy for Portugal came out sweating; after a moment a man who had been smoking stinking Dutch cigarettes in a chair near the door got up and went in.

  “Great?” Peters asked.

  “We haven’t lost an inch of ground yet. Not an inch.”

  Peters looked at the screen. It showed a parking lot, apparently part of a shopping complex. Some broken glass lay on the asphalt, and several dead men, but nothing much seemed to be happening. Occasionally the whine of a shot came, its origin and its target equally unknowable.

  “This is our side,” Donovan explained. “The stuff near the screen. The hairies have still got those buildings over on the far side.”

  “We’re not supposed to be holding ground,” Peters said. “We’re supposed to be, you know, going forward.” He looked at his watch. “They ought to be almost to the lake shore by now.”

  “We’re regrouping,” Donovan said.

  “Listen. Will you listen to me for a minute?” Peters was aware that he was about to make some kind of fool out of himself, and that he could not prevent it. “We ought to be there, doing something, helping them. I mean we’re three men;
we’re not just nothing.” He tried to make a joke of it: “Tredgold here’s smart, I’m strong, and you’re Irish—we could do something.”

  Donovan looked at him blankly, then slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Yeah, sure,” and turned away.

  Tredgold drawled, “Another thing I forgot to tell you about l’ancien régime— the winners are those who don’t fight for it. Thought your mum would have put you wise to that already. The mums know.” After a second’s hesitation he added, “Only works while the chaps who do fight play the game, of course. No profit otherwise—no anything at all.”

  “Profit?” Peters said. “You said they didn’t really want profits, and I’ve been thinking about that and you’re right—for them profit above a certain point is just taking from each other. You said that.”

  “Did I? I suppose I did. It sounds familiar. Wait a sec, will you? All my bloody birds are nesting and I want a drink.”

  Peters called after him, “But what is it they do want?” and heard Tredgold mutter, “To hang on to their places, I should think.”

  “Ah.” Lowell Lewis put his hand on Peters’s shoulder. “You and Donovan taking care of things for us out here, Pete? How’s it going?”

  “Quiet,” Peters said.

  “You’re up on the battle, I assume?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. We’ve been getting quite a number of calls on the private link from other companies—they have a stake in this of one sort or another, and they want to know the situation. To keep from clogging General Virdon’s communications with that sort of thing I’ve arranged that we would handle them. Think you can hold down the hot seat for a while?”

  Peters nodded.

  “There’s one other thing. You remember the soldier we had on-screen? The one that hippie-type boy from Philadelphia cut off?”

  “Hale,” Peters said.

  “Right. He was from the PR agency, of course; but when he had made the take that fool major who’s replacing Colonel Hopkins grabbed him; he seems to have put him in one of the combat outfits. Naturally the agency is very upset. Try to bail him out, will you?”

  Peters nodded again.

  “Fine. In an hour I’ll send in Donovan or Miss Morris, and you can bring yourself up to date.”

  Peters went into the center bedroom, trying to walk as steadily as he could, though he knew Lewis had already turned away to talk to someone else.

  The bedroom was empty and dark. The vidlink screen was flashing the identity of some caller—Peters did not bother to discover who. He drew the curtains at the far end of the room and looked out over the patio wall at the headlights of the cars on the street outside, and noted vaguely that a diagonal view showed him the same dark Atlantic that sometimes seemed ready to invade the big room from which he had come.

  There was a bathroom and he used it. He felt that he might have to vomit, but he did not.

  Communicating doors linked this bedroom with those to east and west. He tried them, and found (as he had expected) that they were locked on the other side. Outside each he listened for a moment and heard the creaking of springs and whispered words, but no laughter.

  At the vidlink he ignored the incoming calls and coded the Library of Congress, wondering if there was still anyone left there. There was, a plain-looking black girl of about twenty. He asked if she had a taped summary of American history for the last thirty years. She nodded and started to say something else, then asked, “Who is this calling, please?” And he said, “My name is Peters. I’m with United Services Corporation.”

  “Oh,” she said. And then, “Oh!”

  He asked her if something was the matter.

  “It’s just that I have this friend—not really a friend, someone I know—that works in the Pentagon. And he says they weren’t paid there at all for several months . . . but now they are getting paid again . . . only now the checks are from your company . . . Do you know Mr. Lewis?” This was said with many pauses and hesitations.

  “I’m his assistant,” Peters said.

  “Well, would it be possible . . . The staff here hasn’t been paid since January. . . . Most of them are gone, and you wouldn’t have to pay them, of course; I live with my mother, and anything you could get for us . . .”

  “I don’t—,” Peters began, then changed it to: “I don’t see why we couldn’t put you under military administration. I mean, nominally. Then you’d be civilian employees of the Department of Defense.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, and then, “Oh, thank you.” And then, “I—I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten what it was you wanted. I’m a graduate of Maryland—I really am. Library science.”

  “The history tape,” Peters said. “You ought to get more rest.”

  “So should you,” the girl said. “You look tired.”

  “I’m drunk.”

  “Well, we’ve had so many requests for that tape that we just looped it, you know. We run it all the time. I’ll connect you.”

  She pushed buttons on her own vidlink, and her face faded until only her mouth and bright eyes were visible, overlaying the helmeted figure of an astronaut. “All right?” she said.

  Peters asked, “Is this the beginning or the end?”

  “Sir?”

  “I wanted to know—” He heard the door open behind him and hit the Cut button. “Later.” The screen filled at once with incoming calls. He turned.

  It was Clio Morris. She shut the door behind her and said, “Enough to drive you crazy, isn’t it?”

  He looked at her and made some commonplace reply, paying no more attention himself to what he had said than she would. She said, “Who do I remind you of?”

  “Was I staring?” he said. “I’m sorry. Did you come to relieve me?”

  “No, just to get away from the mess out there for a while. All right if I sit down?” She sat on the bed.

  He said, “You don’t remind me of anyone.”

  “That’s good, because you remind me of somebody. Mr. Peters. I’m going to have a drink—want me to bring you one?”

  “I’ll get them,” Peters said. He stood up.

  “No, I will. Back in a minute.”

  Automatically Peters seated himself at the vidlink again and pressed the first Ready button. A man appeared who said he wanted, quite frankly, to tell Peters his management was worried about the way things were going, and that they already had a great deal sunk in this thing and could not afford to lose more. Peters agreed that things were going poorly (which disconcerted the man) and asked for positive suggestions.

  “In what way?” the man said. “Just what do you mean?” “Well, we clearly need to apply greater force to Detroit than we have so far. The question, I suppose, is how we raise the force and how we can best apply it.”

  “You certainly don’t expect us to commit ourselves to any plan with this little preparation.”

  Peters said, “I just hoped you might have a few off-the-cuff suggestions.”

  The man shook his head. “I can take the question to my management, but that’s as far as I can go.”

  Peters told the man that he had heard certain foreign countries might have soldiers for hire, and that it would be possible for the man to ask among his own employees for volunteers to fight in Detroit. The man said that he would keep that in mind and signed off, and Clio came in with two old-fashioneds, one of which she handed to Peters. She asked him if he had gotten anywhere with Burglund.

  Peters shook his head. “Is that who I was talking to?”

  “Uh-huh. He works for ——.” She named a conglomerate, and Peters, suddenly curious, asked what they made.

  “They don’t make anything,” Clio said. “Not themselves. They own some companies that make things, I suppose, and some oil tankers and real estate. Pulp-wood holdings in Georgia.”

  Peters said, “I guess this is different from running pulpwood holdings in Georgia.”

  “Sure,” Clio said. She sat down on one of the beds. “That’s why Lowell i
s losing his war.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “Four or five months ago when he started all this I thought they could handle it—I really did.” When Peters looked at her questioningly she added, “The companies. I thought they could hold things together. So did Lou, I guess.”

  “So did I,” Peters said.

  “I know. You’re a lot like Lou—when he was younger. That’s what I meant when I said you reminded me of somebody: Lou when he was younger.”

  “You couldn’t have known him then,” Peters told her.

  “I didn’t. But about a year ago he showed me some tapes he had. They were training tapes he made twenty or twenty-five years ago. They showed him explaining some kind of machine; he was an engineer originally, you know. He looked a lot like you—he was a handsome man, and I guess he wanted me to see that he had looked like that once.”

  “You sleep with him, don’t you?”

  “I used to. Up until about six weeks ago. Now I’m trying to figure out why.”

  Peters said, “I wasn’t asking you for an explanation.”

  “I know,” the girl said. “You just wanted to find out if it was safe to fight with me, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “The formal business power structure and the informal one.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You still think there’s a chance we’ll win and you’ll have a career with U.S.”

  Peters shrugged. “With my education I don’t see anything else to shoot for— that’s something I didn’t understand until recently: you don’t get that degree; it gets you. Now, for me, it’s this or nothing.” He moved away from the vidlink and sat down beside her on the bed. The spread was satin, and he began to stroke it with his fingers.

  “You think people like Burglund are going to pull us through? I mean, really?”

  Peters was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “He won’t, but I still don’t know why not.”

  “I do,” Clio said. “I’ve been helping Lou deal with some of them. What do you think it takes to be a successful businessman? Enterprise, lots of guts, hard work, high intelligence—right?”