by Gene Wolfe
They set me to washin’ windows, and I did that for a while. It was a little old house, and there isn’t one of you ever seen anythin’ like it. That kind was what the Biologicals built for themselves, way back when. There was still quite a few houses sort of like it left in them days, and had a sight of windows.
Finally I was doin’ the fifth level, which was the top, and wonderin’ what I’d have to do when I finished it. I got to one particular window, a big one with a world of little panes, and lookin’ in through the one I started on I could see Aunt Esmerelda sittin’ by a sort of big booth with curtains all around, embroiderin’. After a minute or two she seen me, too, and come over to the window and opened it told me to come in.
“I got a hundred things to do, Youngone,” she says, “and you can watch him as good as me. He’s in bed.” She pointed to the booth I’d seen. “And quiet as a nut, for he hasn’t got power, hardly, to kiss his hand. You set in the chair, and don’t you dare open them curtains. Only if he asks for anythin’, you bring it quick. And if he tells you to do somethin’, you do it quick. Do you understand every word I’ve said to you, Youngone?”
Course I said I did.
“You better. And if there’s anythin’ you can’t handle, you run for me or else Mrs. Brassbound.”
I said I would.
“His great-great-grandson, Mr. Oberman, he don’t look in more than once a hundredtime. But he’s due, or about due, and if Mr. Man ain’t satisfied, there’s hell to pay. So you do exactly like I said.”
She went, and I sat, and time wore on. Turnin’ up the gain on my hearin’, I could hear Mr. Man on the other side of the curtain, you know, takin’ in gases and blowin’ them out. Takin’’em in and blowin’ them out, like it was a game he was playin’ with himself that never got over and nobody won. And I got curious, the way boys will.
I was thinkin’ about home a lot, too. My ma, and the other youngones, you know, boys and girls like you. The old compartment, with the colored wires runnih’ up and down the walls home-like. The room I was in had paper on the walls—you don’t have to believe this, but it did. Paper with pictures, like in a book. Thinkin’ about all that, I forgot what Aunt Esmerelda had said about not pullin’ the curtain back.
And I did.
There he lay. There was white cloth cut to fit his arms and legs, only not tight on. His hair was as white as that cloth, and spread all around. His eyes was shut.
Well, I was startin’ to put the curtain back, and they opened. Wide! I tell you, I never been so scared in my life. He sat up, and I seen his mouth work. He was tryin’ to tell me somethin’, I knew he was, only he couldn’t get it out. Just noise was all it was. Sound waves, you know.
I backed away mighty fast.
He swung his feet over the edge of the bed. I had seen him and I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have enough power to get up, even. Well, he had some trouble with it, but he did, and he come at me, makin’ noises all the time. I backed off till my back was to the wall, and so scared I might have gone right through it.
Then he fell on his face. Broken, you see. Broken so bad he couldn’t be fixed. Dead’s what Mrs. Brassbound called it.
Well, sir. I waited quite a while for him to move again, or make more noise, only he never did. So I lifted him up and laid him in the booth where he belonged, and closed that curtain again. And when Aunt Esmerelda came back, I lied. I’m not proud of it, but I did. I told part of all that had happened, only I said it had been him that had pushed back the curtain. She pushed back the curtain herself and got Mrs. Brassbound, and she come and that’s when I heard about “dead.” They said they’d have to tell Mr. Oberman, which they did. Only he was out on A-1117, and couldn’t come. He said to burn him and save the ashes, which we did, and he’d come as soon as he was able. Meantime we was to stay right where we was and take care of the place.
So we did, and it was quite a while, too. One day I was told to go into the library and dust the books and readers. I did it and got to lookin’ around, and there was a little thing there that would take noises and turn them into readin’, you know. Like a book. I tried to think of noises I had heard that might be interestin’, like the gas made in the trees sometimes, or the water that dripped on the house. I put them in, and it was fun. So then I remembered the noises Mr. Man had made before he broke, and I put them in. When I read that, I thought I had to tell Aunt Esmerelda, and I did.
“He said to look in the bottom drawer of the biggest bureau,” I told her, “and to be really, really careful of what was in there.”
“He said this to you?”
I remembered that I had not opened the curtain. “He just said it,” I told her. “I heard him makin’ noise in there, and just now I put that noise in the machine, and that’s what it said.”
“I could’ve given you software.” She went back to her dustin’, lookin’ thoughtful. “Only I’m not sure there’s room enough in that little head for it.”
“But what about the drawer?” I asked. “He said to look in there.”
“It’s locked,” she said. “I used to straighten out everythin’ and put the clean clothes away. That one was always locked.”
I said that he probably had a key, but maybe we burned it with him.
She shook her head. “I washed him and dressed him. That was the last time, so I wanted to do it. It must be around somewhere. We’ll find it when Mr. Oberman comes, never fear.”
“Maybe we ought to find it now.”
She shook her head again. “I don’t want Mr. Oberman to think I’ve been thievin’,” she said, and wouldn’t talk any more about it.
“What happened next, Grandpa?” one of the children asked. The old man smiled, but soon his face grew serious.
All the leaves fell off the trees—that’s the green part you see in pictures. It all fell away, and left only the brown part. Solid water came out of the sky in little chips and flakes, pullin’ the branches down and breakin’ some, and everythin’ out there looked white.
Mr. Oberman came. I thought he’d be a Biological like Mr. Man, but he looked like everybody. He talked for a long time with Mrs. Brassbound, then for a long time with Aunt Esmerelda, and then for a long time with both of them together. I was scared even to talk to him, but when he was about to go out into the white, I did. I said, “What about the drawer?”
Aunt Esmerelda had forgotten to ask him. He seemed kind of interested and got out a big bunch of keys. Later I found out that Mrs. Brassbound had given them to him. All four of us went upstairs to the room that had been Mr. Man’s, and Aunt Esmerelda, Mrs. Brassbound, and I watched while he found the key to the drawer, unlocked it, and pulled it open. Inside was a lot of paper, written like in a book. He wadded it up so it wouldn’t scatter around and laid it on the carpet. Under the paper was a old, old set of disks, probably five or six in the box. I can’t be sure. Big letters on the box said THE HISTORY OF HUMANKIND. Underneath that in smaller letters was: From the Stone Age to the Present Moment.
Mr. Oberman put it back into the drawer, and the papers, too. The next time he came, he burned a lot of stuff out back where Mrs. Brassbound had grown special plants for Mr. Man for fuel. The things that had been in that drawer were only a little bit of it.
“What happened to you then, Grandpa?” the same child inquired.
“Oh, ever so many things,” the old man said, “some you might hear’bout tomorrow.”
After that he left them to their beds, and turned out the lights.
Shields of Mars
Once they had dueled beneath the russet Martian sky for the hand of a princess—had dueled with swords that, not long before, had been the plastic handles of a rake and a spade.
Jeff Shonto had driven the final nail into the first Realwood plank when he realized that Zaa was standing six-legged, ankle-deep in red dust, watching him. He turned a little in case Zaa wanted to say something; Zaa did not, but he four-legged, rearing his thorax so that his arms hung like arms (perhaps in order to
look more human) before he became a glaucous statue once again, a statue with formidable muscles in unexpected locations.
Zaa’s face was skull-like, as were the faces of all the people from his star, with double canines jutting from its massive jaw and eyes at its temples. It was a good face, Jeff thought, a kind and an honest face.
He picked up the second Realwood plank, laid it against the window so it rested on the first, and plucked a nail from his mouth.
Zaa’s gray Department shirt (“Zaa Leem, Director of Maintenance”) had been dirty. No doubt Zaa had put it on clean that morning, but there was a black smear under the left pocket now. What if they wanted to talk to Zaa, too?
Jeff’s power hammer said bang and the nail sank to the head. Faint echoes from inside the store that had been his father’s might almost have been the sound of funeral drums. Shrugging, he took another nail from his mouth.
A good and a kind face, and he and Zaa had been friends since Mom and Dad were young, and what did a little grease matter? Didn’t they want Zaa to work? When you worked, you got dirty.
Another nail, in the diagonal corner. Bang. Mind pictures, daydream pictures showed him the masked dancers who ought to have been there when they buried Dad in the desert. And were not.
Again he turned to look at Zaa, expecting Zaa to say something, to make some comment. Zaa did not. Beyond Zaa were thirty bungalows, twenty-nine white and one a flaking blue that had once been bright. Twenty-eight bungalows that were boarded up, two that were still in use.
Beyond the last, the one that had been Diane’s family’s, empty miles of barren desert. Then the aching void of the immense chasm that had been renamed the Grand Canal. Beyond it, a range of rust-red cliff that was in reality the far side of the Grand Canal, a glowing escarpment lit at its summit by declining Sol.
Jeff shrugged and turned back to his plank. A third nail. Bang. The dancers sharp-edged this time, the drums louder.
“You’re closing your store.”
He fished more nails from his pocket. “Not to you. If you want something I’ll sell it to you.”
“Thanks.” Zaa picked up a plank and stood ready to pass it to Jeff.
Bang. Echoes of thousands of years just beginning.
“I’ve got one in the shop that feeds the nails. Want me to get it?”
Jeff shook his head. “For a little job like this, what I’ve got is fine.”
Bang.
“Back at the plant in a couple hours?”
“At twenty-four ten they’re supposed to call me.” Jeff had said this before, and he knew Zaa knew it as well as he did. “You don’t have to be there … .”
“But maybe they’ll close it.”
And I won’t have to have to be the one who tells you. Jeff turned away, staring at the plank. He wanted to drive more nails into it, but there was one at each corner already. He could not remember driving that many.
“Here.” Zaa was putting up another plank. “I would have done this whole job for you. You know?”
“It was my store.” Jeff squared the new plank on the second and reached to his mouth for a nail, but there were no nails there. He positioned his little ladder, leaning it on the newly nailed one, got up on the lowest step, and fished a fresh nail from his pocket.
Bang.
“Those paintings of mine? Give them back and I’ll give you what you paid.”
“No.” Jeff did not look around.
“You’ll never sell them now.”
“They’re mine,” Jeff said. “I paid you for them, and I’m keeping them.”
“There won’t ever be any more tourists, Jeff.”
“Things will get better.”
“Where would they stay?”
“Camp in the desert. Rough it.” Bang.
There was a silence, during which Jeff drove more nails.
“If they close the plant, I guess they’ll send a crawler to take us to some other town.”
Jeff shrugged. “Or an orthopter, like Channel Two has. You saw Scenic Mars. They might even do that.”
Impelled by an instinct he could not have described but could not counter, he stepped down—short, dark, and stocky—to face Zaa. “Listen here. In the first place, they can’t close the plant. What’d they breathe?”
Even four-legging, Zaa was taller by more than a full head; he shrugged, massive shoulders lifting and falling. “The others could take up the slack, maybe.”
“Maybe they could. What if something went wrong at one of them?”
“There’d be plenty of time to fix it. Air doesn’t go that fast.”
“You come here.”
He took Zaa by the arm, and Zaa paced beside him, intermediate armlike legs helping support his thorax and abdomen.
“I want to show you the plant.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Come on. I want to see it myself.” Together, the last two men in the settlement called Grand Canal went around the wind-worn store and climbed a low hill. The chain-link fence enclosing the plant was tall and strong still, but the main gate stood open, and there was no one in the guard shack. A half mile more of dusty road, then the towers and the glassy prisms, and the great pale domes, overshadowed by the awe-inspiring cooling stack of the nuclear reactor. On the left, the spherical hydrogen tanks and thousands upon thousands of canisters of hydrogen awaiting the crawler. Beyond those, nearly lost in the twilight, Number One Crusher. It would have been a very big plant anywhere on Earth; here, beneath the vastness of the russet sky, standing alone in the endless red-and-black desert, it was tiny and vulnerable, something any wandering meteor might crush like a toy.
“Take a good look,” Jeff said, wishing Zaa could see it through his eyes.
“I just did. We might as well go now. They’ll be wanting to call you pretty soon.”
“In a minute. What do you suppose all that stuff’s worth? All the equipment?”
Zaa picked his teeth with a sharp claw. “I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it. A couple hundred million?”
“More than a billion. Listen up.” Jeff felt his own conviction growing as he spoke. “I can lock the door on my store and board up the windows and walk away. I can do that because I’m still here. Suppose you and I just locked the gate and got on that crawler and went off. How long before somebody was out here with ten more crawlers, loading up stainless pipe, and motors, and all that stuff? You could make a better stab at this than I could, but I say give me three big crawlers and three men who knew what they were doing and I’d have ten million on those crawlers in a week.”
Zaa shook his head. “Twelve hours. Eight, if they never took a break and really knew their business.”
“Fine. So is the Department going to lock the door and walk away? Either they gut it themselves—not ten million, over a billion—or they’ll keep somebody here to keep an eye on things. They’ll have to.”
“I guess.”
“Suppose they’ve decided to stop production altogether. How long to shut down the pile and mothball everything? With two men?”
“To do it right?” Zaa fingered the point of one canine. “A year.”
Jeff nodded. “A year. And they’d have to do it right, because someday they might have to start up again. We’re pretty well terraformed these days. This out here isn’t much worse than the Gobi Desert on Earth. A hundred years ago you couldn’t breathe right where we’re standing.”
He studied Zaa’s face, trying to see if his words were sinking in, if they were making an impression. Zaa said, “Sure.”
“And everybody knows that. Okay, suppose one of the other plants went down. Totally. Suppose they lost the pile or something. Meltdown.”
“I got it.”
“Like you say, the air goes slow now. We’ve added to the planetary mass—covered the whole thing with an ocean of air and water vapor three miles thick, so there’s more gravity.” Jeff paused for emphasis. “But it goes, and as it goes we lose gravity. The more air we lose, the fas
ter we lose more.”
“I know that.”
“Sure. I know you do. I’m just reminding you. All right, they lose one whole plant, like I said.”
“You never lose the pile if you do it right.”
“Sure. But not everybody’s as smart as you are, okay? They get some clown in there and he screws up. Let’s take the Schiaparelli plant, just to talk about. How much fossil water have they got?”
Zaa shrugged.
“I don’t know either, and neither do they. They could give you some number, but it’s just a guess. Suppose they run out of water.”
Zaa nodded and turned away, four-legging toward the main gate.
Jeff hurried after him. “How long before people panic? A week? A month?”
“You never finished boarding up.”
“I’ll get it later. I have to be there when they call.”
“Sure,” Zaa said.
Together, as they had been together since Jeff was born, they strode through the plant gate upon two legs and four, leaving it open behind them. “They’re going to have to give us power wagons,” Jeff said. “Suppose we’re at home and we have to get here fast.”
“Bikes.” Zaa looked at him, then looked away. “In here you’re the boss. All right, you had your say. I listened to everything.”
It was Jeff’s turn to nod. He said, “Uh-huh.”
“So do I get to talk now?”
Jeff nodded again. “Shoot.”
“You said it was going to get better, people were going to come out here from Elysium again. But you were boarding up your store. So you know, only you’re scared I’ll leave.”
Jeff did not speak.
“We’re not like you.” To illustrate what he meant, Zaa began six-legging. “I been raised with you—with you Sol people is what I mean. I feel like I’m one of you, and maybe once a week I’ll see myself in a mirror or someplace and I think, my gosh, I’m an alien.”