Gene Wolfe - The Land Across

“They made me, and that’s the absolute truth. I was under arrest in Puraustays. I was supposed to live with a guy there, and they were going to shoot him if I didn’t. Only I could go out in the daytime and take pictures for the travel book I’m going to write about your country. I found this very big, run-down old house, the Willows. I wanted to take a lot of pictures there. There were painted ceilings and lots of other neat stuff, and it’s supposed to be haunted.”

“You get any pictures of ghosts?”

“No.” After I said that I pulled up short to think. “You know, I really don’t know. Sometimes ghosts will show up in a picture even if you didn’t see them when you took it. I read a thing about that once, and I never had a chance to look at mine. Three guys knocked on the door, I opened it up to see what they wanted, and they grabbed me.”

He nodded to that.

“They put me in a boat and took me across the lake—”

“Up the lake.”

“Okay, up the lake to here. After that they held me in an old factory where they used to make shirts or dresses or something.”

He nodded again. “Go on.”

“They gave me a copy of their holy book that had been translated on somebody’s computer. And they—”

“Wait a minute. Is English the only language you know?”

“Huh-uh. I know German and French pretty well. A little Japanese, too, only not very much.”

“The report I got on you said that you only spoke English.”

“Yeah.” My mind was working so fast it damned near flew apart. “That’s what I pretended, okay? Put yourself in my shoes. I’m from America and I’m in big trouble. Do I want to talk to somebody who knows German or somebody who knows English?”

He nodded, slowly this time. “I’ve got it. Was this with the Legion of the Light, too?”

“No. They knew I spoke German, because that’s how I talked to them when I answered the door.”

He got out a little notebook and made a note in it. “Okay, I want you to think about this and think hard. Did you ever hear any of them speak English? Just one word, maybe?”

I shook my head. “Absolutely not. Believe me, I’d have jumped all over him if anybody had.”

“What they gave you was a computer translation? Did they say so?”

“No, it just read like one. What’s so big about this?”

“It’s my job to ask the questions. Your job is to answer them.”

“All right, I’ll take a stab at it. It seems like hardly anybody has computers here.”

I waited for him, but he did not say a word.

“It’s not like that in America. Suppose you were in America and somebody told you to go find a guy who owned a computer, it would take you about five minutes. Only not here. I’ve met quite a few of you, none of you seemed like you had a computer.” As soon as I had said that, I got the feeling it was not quite true. I could have named one guy who might have had one, and I wanted to kick myself for not having braced him on it.

“Go on.”

“So you can go looking for somebody who’s got one and software to translate your language into English.”

“Or German into English. We know they’ve got a German translation already, and we know who did that one.”

“Want to tell me?”

“Hell, no. Or anyway, not yet. You were forced to broadcast for the Legion?”

“Right.”

“Would you call them friends of yours?”

“No way!” I shook my head.

“Would you consider working for us? Coming over to our side?”

I did not say anything for a minute or two.

“Well? A straight answer.”

“Okay. The straight answer is that I’d have to think about it. For one thing I came over to your side already. I wrote all the things I said in my broadcasts. Did you know that? I wrote my own scripts.”

“I assumed it.”

“They gave me the book, like I said, and they lectured me a lot about the Light of Stability. After that I wrote myself a script. I’d found out we were in an old factory, and there was a room there with a million kinds of buttons in wooden boxes, so they’d been making clothes. Probably a lot of different kinds. I put that in a broadcast and you guys came like I knew you would.”

“We rescued you.”

I raised my shoulders and let them drop. “I’ve been in jail, and I’ve seen enough of this building to tell it’s a prison. If you want more, one of the cops I tipped off shot me. Want to see the place?”

He waved that one away. “I’ll get our doctor to take a look at it. What else can I do for you?”

“You can let me talk to somebody at the American embassy.”

“If I can.” He sounded tired. “I can let them know you’re here, and I will. They probably won’t come.”

“Why not?”

“Ask them. I don’t know. If you’ll work with us, you won’t be in prison. That’s a promise.”

“What if I quit?”

“Get real! What do you think?”

There was more, but I do not want to write it and you would not want to read it. We talked about America and the European Union, and he did not know as much as I wanted him to, and I did not know as much as he wanted me to. So after a while a guard—not the cop I had before—came and took me to a cell.

It was not as bad as I expected, which was something Butch had promised over Danish and coffee, a nice cell. There were two bunks in it, but no other prisoner. Right away I figured there would be somebody shoved in with me pretty soon, and he would be a plant.

Do you want more? There was a little window with wire over it, low enough for me to look through. That was bad in winter until they put a cover over it, but when I got there the nights were pretty warm and it was not bad at all. There was a toilet and a washbowl, too. There was no hot water, but I used my hands and my shirttail for a washrag and cleaned up as well as I could, telling myself that if I ever saw Butch Bobokis again I would ask him for soap.

The bunk was better than the one in the old factory, and the blanket was wool. I was more than ready for both of them.

I slept all night and half the morning. Probably they had called the prisoners for breakfast, but I slept right through it. When I sat up, there was a big guy in my cell sitting on the other bunk and looking at me. So I told him, “Good morning,” in German.

He said, “I don’t suppose you understand English?” It was in English, and you could tell he had about given up hope by the sound of his voice.

I said, “Sure I do. Where you from?”

“Cincinnati. We call it the Queen City.” He sighed. “And I wish to God I was back there.”

We talked some more, and I found out that his name was Russ Rathaus and he was sixty-three. He looked quite a bit younger than that to me, maybe fifty or fifty-five tops.

“I had a neat little novelty business,” he said. “We made voodoo dolls and sold them all over the country. I don’t mean we dealt with customers direct. We wholesaled them to novelty shops, the kind of stores where they sell souvenirs and plates with the presidents on them. All that junk. My partner invented the process, and I bankrolled him, running the business out of my garage at first. You looked at me funny when I said voodoo dolls. I guess anybody would.”

I said I thought you had to make those yourself.

“Hey, it doesn’t work, so who cares? The thing was the faces, see? Suppose you’ve got it in for the mayor. You ask around for a doll with the mayor’s face, only nobody’s got one because they’d have to have a contract with him and pay a royalty, and all that crap. Then you hear about our Imprinting Dolls. That was what we called them, Imprinting Dolls. You look at the dolls and the clerk explains how everything works. So you buy the complete kit. That will run you thirty-two ninety-nine to about forty-four ninety-five, depending on where you buy it. For your money you get one doll—male or female, your choice—an imprinting lens, about a hundred of our special pins, and our special book of spells and instructions. That’s everything you need except a picture of the mayor and a strong light source. The doll works sort of like film used to. You remember film cameras?”