by Gene Wolfe
When we were well away from the people onshore, Ardis asked me, rather suddenly, if I intended to spend all my time in America here in Washington.
I told her that my original plan had been to stay here no more than a week, then make my way up the coast to Philadelphia and the other ancient cities before I returned home, but that now that I had met her I would stay here forever if she wished it.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to see the interior? This strip of beach we live on is kept half-alive by the ocean and the trade that crosses it, but a hundred miles inland lies the wreck of our entire civilization, waiting to be plundered.”
“Then why doesn’t someone plunder it?” I asked.
“They do. A year never passes without someone bringing some great prize out—but it is so large . . .” I could see her looking beyond the lake and the fragrant trees. “So large that whole cities are lost in it. There was an arch of gold at the entrance to St. Louis—no one knows what became of it. Denver, the Mile High City, was nested in silver mines; no one can find them now.”
“Many of the old maps must still be in existence.”
Ardis nodded slowly, and I sensed that she wanted to say more than she had. For a few seconds there was no sound but the water lapping against the side of the boat.
“I remember having seen some in the museum in Tehran—not only our maps, but some of your own from a hundred years ago.”
“The courses of the rivers have changed,” she said. “And when they have not, no one can be sure of it.”
“Many buildings must still be standing, as they are here, in the Silent City.”
“That was built of stone—more solidly than anything else in the country. But yes, some, many, are still there.”
“Then it would be possible to fly in, land somewhere, and pillage them.”
“There are many dangers, and so much rubble to look through that anyone might search for a lifetime and only scratch the surface.”
I saw that talking of all this only made her unhappy, and tried to change the subject. “Didn’t you say that I could escort you to a party tonight? What will that be like?”
“Nadan, I have to trust someone. You’ve never met my father, but he lives close to the hotel where you are staying, and has a shop where he sells old books and maps.” (So I had visited the right house—almost—after all!) “When he was younger, he wanted to go into the interior. He made three or four trips, but never got farther than the Appalachian foothills. Eventually he married my mother and didn’t feel any longer that he could take the risks. . . .”
“I understand.”
“The things he had sought to guide him to the wealth of the past became his stock-in-trade. Even today, people who live farther inland bring him old papers; he buys them and resells them. Some of those people are only a step better than the ones who dig up the cemeteries for the wedding rings of the dead women.”
I recalled the rings I had bought in the shadow of the broken obelisk, and shuddered, though I do not believe Ardis observed it.
“I said that some of them were hardly better than the grave robbers. The truth is that some are worse—there are people in the interior who are no longer people. Our bodies are poisoned—you know that, don’t you? All of us Americans. They have adapted—that’s what Father says—but they are no longer human. He made his peace with them long ago, and he trades with them still.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Yes, I do—I must. Would you go into the interior, if I went with you? The government will try to stop us if they learn of it, and to confiscate anything we find.”
I assured her with every oath I could remember that with her beside me I would cross the continent on foot if need be.
“I told you about my father. I said that he sells the maps and records they bring him. What I did not tell you is that he reads them first. He has never given up, you see, in his heart.”
“He has made a discovery?” I asked.
“He’s made many—hundreds. Bobby and I have used them. You remember those men in the restaurant? Bobby went to each of them with a map and some of the old letters. He’s persuaded them to help finance an expedition into the interior, and made each of them believe that we’ll help him cheat the other—that keeps them from combining to cheat us, you see.”
“And you want me to go with you?” I was beside myself with joy.
“We weren’t going to go at all—Bobby was going to take the money, and go to Baghdad or Marrakesh, and take me with him. But, Nadan”—here she leaned forward, I remember, and took my hands in hers—“there really is a secret. There are many, but one better—more likely to be true, more likely to yield truly immense wealth than all the others. I know you would share fairly with me. We’ll divide everything, and I’ll go back to Tehran with you.”
I know that I have never been more happy in my life than I was then, in that silly boat. We sat together in the stern, nearly sinking it, under the combined shade of the tiny sail and Ardis’s big straw hat, and kissed and stroked one another until we would have been pilloried a dozen times in Iran.
At last, when I could bear no more unconsummated love, we ate the sandwiches Ardis had brought, and drank some warmish, fruit-flavored beverage, and returned to shore.
When I took her home a few minutes ago, I very strongly urged her to let me come upstairs with her; I was on fire for her, sick to impale her upon my own flesh and pour myself into her as some mad god before the coming of the Prophet might have poured his golden blood into the sea. She would not permit it—I think because she feared that her apartment could not be darkened enough to suit her modesty. I am determined that I will yet see her.
* * *
I have bathed and shaved to be ready for the party, and as there is still time I will insert here a description of the procession we passed on the way back from the lake. As you see, I have not yet completely abandoned the thought of a book of travels.
A very old man—I suppose a priest—carried a cross on a long pole, using it as a staff, and almost as a crutch. A much younger one, fat and sweating, walked backward before him swinging a smoking censer. Two robed boys carrying large candles preceded them, and they were followed by more robed children, singing, who fought with nudges and pinches when they felt the fat man was not watching them.
Like everyone else, I have seen this kind of thing done much better in Rome; but I was more affected by what I saw here. When the old priest was born, the greatness of America must have been a thing of such recent memory that few could have realized it had passed forever; and the entire procession—from the flickering candles in clear sunshine, to the dead leader lifted up, to his inattentive, bickering followers behind—seemed to me to incarnate the philosophy and the dilemma of these people. So I felt, at least, until I saw that they watched it as uncomprehendingly as they might if they themselves were only travelers abroad, and I realized that its ritualized plea for life renewed was more foreign to them than to me.
* * *
It is very late—three, my watch says.
I resolved again not to write in this book. To burn it or tear it to pieces, or to give it to some beggar; but now I am writing once again because I cannot sleep. The room reeks of my vomit, though I have thrown open the shutters and let in the night.
How could I have loved that? (And yet a few moments ago, when I tried to sleep, visions of Ellen pursued me back to wakefulness.)
The party was a masque, and Ardis had obtained a costume for me—a fantastic gilded armor from the wardrobe of the theater. She wore the robes of an Egyptian princess, and a domino. At midnight we lifted our masks and kissed, and in my heart I swore that tonight the mask of darkness would be lifted too.
When we left, I carried with me the bottle we had brought, still nearly halffull, and before she pinched out the candle I persuaded her to pour out a final drink for us to share when the first frenzy of our desire was past. She—it—did as I asked, and set it on the little
table near the bed. A long time afterward, when we lay gasping side by side, I found my pistol with one groping hand and fired the beam into the wide-bellied glass. Instantly it filled with blue fire from the burning alcohol. Ardis screamed, and sprang up.
* * *
I ask myself now how I could have loved; but then, how could I in one week have come so near to loving this corpse-country? Its eagle is dead—Ardis is the proper symbol of its rule.
One hope, one very small hope, remains. It is possible that what I saw tonight was only an illusion, induced by the egg. I know now that the thing I killed before Ardis’s father’s house was real, and between this paragraph and the last I have eaten the last egg. If hallucinations now begin, I will know that what I saw by the light of the blazing arrack was in truth a thing with which I have lain, and in one way or another will see to it that I never return to corrupt the clean wombs of the women of our enduring race. I might seek to claim the miniatures of our heritage after all, and allow the guards to kill me—but what if I were to succeed? I am not fit to touch them. Perhaps the best end for me would be to travel alone into this maggot-riddled continent; in that way I will die at fit hands.
* * *
Later, Kreton is walking in the hall outside my door, and the tread of his twisted black shoes jars the building like an earthquake. I heard the word police as though it were thunder. My dead Ardis, very small and bright, has stepped out of the candle flame, and there is a hairy face coming through the window.
* * *
The old woman closed the notebook. The younger woman, who had been reading over her shoulder, moved to the other side of the small table and seated herself on a cushion, her feet politely positioned so that the soles could not be seen. “He is alive then,” she said.
The older woman remained silent, her gray head bowed over the notebook, which she held in both hands.
“He is certainly imprisoned, or ill; otherwise he would have been in touch with us.” The younger woman paused, smoothing the fabric of her chador with her right hand, while the left toyed with the gem simulator she wore on a thin chain. “It is possible that he has already tried, but his letters have miscarried.”
“You think this is his writing?” the older woman asked, opening the notebook at random. When the younger did not answer she added, “Perhaps. Perhaps.”
Afterword
Have you read The last camel died at noon? It’s a mystery by Elizabeth Peters, and stars a young and attractive Egyptologist named Amelia Peabody. (Do you think there are no attractive young Egyptologists? I know one.) I love those books, and I love the Victorians who probed Africa when almost nothing was known about it. Sir Samuel Baker, that hero of boys’ stories come to life, the wellborn Englishman who bought his wife at a slave auction, is a hero of mine and always will be.
What about us? Who will probe our ruins? Who will come to Washington as we come to Athens? There are myriad ways to answer these questions. The story you have just read is only one of them.
The Detective of Dreams
I was writing in my office in the rue Madeleine when Andrée, my secretary, announced the arrival of Herr D——. I rose, put away my correspondence, and offered him my hand. He was, I should say, just short of fifty, had the high, clear complexion characteristic of those who in youth (now unhappily past for both of us) have found more pleasure in the company of horses and dogs and the excitement of the chase than in the bottles and bordels of city life, and wore a beard and mustache of the style popularized by the late emperor. Accepting my invitation to a chair, he showed me his papers.
“You see,” he said, “I am accustomed to acting as the representative of my government. In this matter I hold no such position, and it is possible that I feel a trifle lost.”
“Many people who come here feel lost,” I said. “But it is my boast that I find most of them again. Your problem, I take it, is purely a private matter?”
“Not at all. It is a public matter in the truest sense of the words.”
“Yet none of the documents before me—admirably stamped, sealed, and beribboned though they are—indicates that you are other than a private gentleman traveling abroad. And you say you do not represent your government. What am I to think? What is this matter?”
“I act in the public interest,” Herr D——told me. “My fortune is not great, but I can assure you that in the event of your success you will be well recompensed; although you are to take it that I alone am your principal, yet there are substantial resources available to me.”
“Perhaps it would be best if you described the problem to me?”
“You are not averse to travel?”
“No.”
“Very well then,” he said, and so saying launched into one of the most astonishing relations—no, the most astonishing relation—I have ever been privileged to hear. Even I, who had at firsthand the account of the man who found Paulette Renan with the quince seed still lodged in her throat; who had received Captain Brotte’s testimony concerning his finds amid the Antarctic ice; who had heard the history of the woman called Joan O’Neil, who lived for two years behind a painting of herself in the Louvre, from her own lips—even I sat like a child while this man spoke.
When he fell silent, I said, “Herr D——, after all you have told me, I would accept this mission though there were not a sou to be made from it. Perhaps once in a lifetime one comes across a case that must be pursued for its own sake; I think I have found mine.”
He leaned forward and grasped my hand with a warmth of feeling that was, I believe, very foreign to his usual nature. “Find and destroy the Dream-Master,” he said, “and you shall sit upon a chair of gold, if that is your wish, and eat from a table of gold as well. When will you come to our country?”
“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “There are one or two arrangements I must make here before I go.”
“I am returning tonight. You may call upon me at any time, and I will apprise you of new developments.” He handed me a card. “I am always to be found at this address—if not I, then one who is to be trusted, acting in my behalf.”
“I understand.”
“This should be sufficient for your initial expenses. You may call on me should you require more.” The check he gave me as he turned to leave represented a comfortable fortune.
I waited until he was nearly out the door before saying, “I thank you, Herr Baron.” To his credit, he did not turn; but I had the satisfaction of seeing a red flush rising above the precise white line of his collar before the door closed.
Andrée entered as soon as he had left. “Who was that man? When you spoke to him—just as he was stepping out of your office—he looked as if you had struck him with a whip.”
“He will recover,” I told her. “He is the Baron H——, of the secret police of K——. D——was his mother’s name. He assumed that because his own desk is a few hundred kilometers from mine, and because he does not permit his likeness to appear in the daily papers, I would not know him; but it was necessary, both for the sake of his opinion of me and my own of myself, that he should discover that I am not so easily deceived. When he recovers from his initial irritation, he will retire tonight with greater confidence in the abilities I will devote to the mission he has entrusted to me.”
“It is typical of you, monsieur,” Andrée said kindly, “that you are concerned that your clients sleep well.”
Her pretty cheek tempted me, and I pinched it. “I am concerned,” I replied, “but the baron will not sleep well.”
* * *
My train roared out of Paris through meadows sweet with wildflowers, to penetrate mountain passes in which the danger of avalanches was only just past. The glitter of rushing water, sprung from on high, was everywhere; and when the express slowed to climb a grade, the song of water was everywhere too, water running and shouting down the gray rocks of the Alps. I fell asleep that night with the descant of that icy purity sounding through the plainsong of the rails, and I woke in the st
ation of I——, the old capital of J——, now a province of K——.
I engaged a porter to convey my trunk to the hotel where I had made reservations by telegraph the day before, and amused myself for a few hours by strolling about the city. Here I found the Middle Ages might almost be said to have remained rather than lingered. The city wall was complete on three sides, with its merloned towers in repair, and the cobbled streets surely dated from a period when wheeled traffic of any kind was scarce. As for the buildings—Puss in Boots and his friends must have loved them dearly: there were bulging walls and little panes of bull’s-eye glass, and overhanging upper floors one above another until the structures seemed unbalanced as tops. Upon one gray old pile with narrow windows and massive doors, I found a plaque informing me that though it had been first built as a church, it had been successively a prison, a customhouse, a private home, and a school. I investigated further, and discovered it was now an arcade, having been divided, I should think at about the time of the first Louis, into a multitude of dank little stalls. Since it was, as it happened, one of the addresses mentioned by Baron H——, I went in.
Gas flared everywhere, yet the interior could not have been said to be well lit—each jet was sullen and secretive, as if the proprietor in whose cubicle it was located wished it to light none but his own wares. These cubicles were in no order; nor could I find any directory or guide to lead me to the one I sought. A few customers, who seemed to have visited the place for years, so that they understood where everything was, drifted from one display to the next. When they arrived at each, the proprietor came out, silent (so it seemed to me) as a specter, ready to answer questions or accept a payment, but I never heard a question asked, or saw any money tendered—the customer would finger the edge of a kitchen knife, or hold a garment up to her own shoulders, or turn the pages of some moldering book, and then put the thing down again, and go away.