Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

“I don’t suppose anyone does, anywhere.”

“I saw them on the TV, in some other country. But do you know, all those American companies are coming in there too? All the ones that stopped everything here. I saw it, and the TV said the people liked it, and I suppose they were just telling the truth, they really do, or they wouldn’t buy those things. I wanted to yell at them not to do it, don’t you do it, only of course they couldn’t hear me. I would have wrote them a letter, but they couldn’t have read it. Lots of times when I watch the TV, I feel like some kind of ghost.” She retreated to the kitchen with the kettle, leaving a wisp of steam hanging in the air.

The brunette looked speculatively around the room, then shrugged. This time she remained seated and did not take her glasses from her purse.

“They’re all just the same as we were, except slower,” Mrs. Baker continued, coming in again. “Sometimes I think if only the ordinary people here could sit down and talk to the ordinary people there, those people would never let things go the way they are. But look at the way we do here. We don’t try to change the way things are. If one of those boys down the street steals a car, why he goes to prison for years. But if some rich man that’s had everything a person could want all his life steals a million dollars, the only thing that happens is he doesn’t get elected again unless he’s pretty lucky. The comics in the paper have all these men that fight against crime. If they were real, they’d go and find that man and shoot him. Maybe if we were real, we’d do the same thing.”

“I was just wondering,” the brunette said. “You’ve lived here so many yars, Mrs. Baker. Was Mr. Free your neighbor when you moved in?”

“Let me think,” Mrs. Baker said, sitting down. “Goodness, how time fleas, just jumps away whenever you try to catch at it.” She dabbed at one eye with a corner of her robe. “You’ll have to excuse me, Miz Valor. I always cry when I think too much about back then.”

“I don’t care if you cry.”

“It was a lady,” Mrs. Baker said, still blotting her eyes, “that used to give me cookies. Or anyhow one time she did. You know what they say, ‘Let them beat cake.’ Well, they did. Or it did. Maybe it was only once. It was a great bigsugar cookie with a great big raisin in the middle. Except that wasn’t here at all. That was Miz Carpenter down on Oak Street when I was a little girl.”

The brunette glanced at her wrist. “I have to go soon, Mrs. Baker, but before I do, I’d like you to tell me anything you can recall about those four people who used to live with Mr. Free. Perhaps you won’t find that so traumatic.”

“There was nothing foreign about it, it’s just that it makes me sad to think about all those old times. Pretty soon I’ll be dead, and then I won’t feel sad any more, so I figure I’d better get it done now. People always complain if a child laughs or an old person cries, but pretty soon they’re quiet, and that’s for a long time. A lot of children have started to die young again, have you noticed?”

The brunette shook her head impatiently.

“Why, pretty soon people will be saying, ‘Farewell to this vile of tears,’ just like they used to. I don’t suppose you ever read Dickens, Miz Valor?”

“No. Is he a newspaperman? Someone Mr. Free knew?”

Mrs. Baker nodded. “Isn’t it strange that you should mention that! Yes, Mr. Free knew his Dickens well, I think. We used to read him too before we got the TV, and one time I said to Mr. Free—he helped me carry some groceries home—‘Why, thank you, Mr. Free. You’ve been a wonderful help,’ and he said back, ‘What we’ve got to do is keep up our spirits and be neighborly. We’ll come all right in the end, never fear!’ Which wasn’t exactly apres poor, because what I had was potatoes and canned goods and things, and not any kind of spirits. But it was Dickens, and I knew it. I said right away, ‘Why that’s Dickens, Mr. Free, isn’t it?’ and then I explained about not having any liquor in the bags, but I invited him for a little sherry if he would like some. I always keep a bottle in the house because it benefits me so when I have the cold. And he said he had used the word—the word spirits was what he meant—in the Pickwickian sense.”

“I had understood that Mr. Free was a rather uneducated man.”

“Why, I don’t think—bless me, Miz Valor, here I’ve been sitting and jabbering and not giving you any tea. It’ll be stewed to prunes.” She picked up the flowery teapot and decanted pale brown liquid into the brunette’s cup.

“Would you say that Mr. Barnes, for example, was well educated? More so than Mr. Free?”

“Why he would be bound to be, wouldn’t he?” Mrs. Baker asked. “They go to school so much longer than what we did. We never learned but readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic. That was the way we used to say them. Nowadays you young people don’t even bother with those.”

“Are you teasing me, Mrs. Baker?” the brunette asked.

“Me?” Mrs. Baker shook her head. “Course not! Why I’m innocent as a limb. I suppose Mr. Barnes is very well educated, in the modern manor.”

“Marie,” the King boomed, “I want you to meet a special friend of ours.”

The special friend was a tall and very spare old man with a bristling white mustache; he wore a loose gray tweed suit that was either British or a remarkably good imitation of it. When the witch extended her hand, he bowed over it, brushing her knuckles with dry lips.

“I am very pleased to meet you,” she said. “I cannot welcome you to this house—it is our King’s, not mine—but I join him in welcoming you to the encampment of the Last Free People.”

“I thank you,” the elderly man said. “Indeed, I thank you very much, Mademoiselle.”

“When we shorted the juice to get you and Rose and the rest of our people out of Belmont, Mr.—uh—” The King snapped his fingers.

“Illingworth, Mademoiselle,” the old man said. “Cassius Illingworth, at your service.”

“Mr. Illingworth was able to help us quite a bit. It turned out he knew about the tunnels downtown where the power lines run. He drew a map, and Bella and some of the other young guys went down there and fixed things.”

“I am a journalist, Mademoiselle, and in a lifetime a journalist acquires many bits of queer lore. During the Second World War, those tunnels were prepared for use as air-raid shelters. How preposterous it seems now to suppose that German bombers might have reached this city in nineteen and forty-two! Yet it did not seem preposterous then; many serious-minded men believed it. And afterward, when everyone except a few laborers employed by the utility had forgotten them, they were used as a meeting place by certain—ah—seekers.”

The witch regarded him speculatively.

“He knows about that too, Marie.” There was sly pleasure in the King’s smile. “See, when you came here and asked me to help you find this Ben Free, Mr. Illingworth was one of the first gadje I came across. He says he never met this Free, but he knows people who have.”

Illingworth nodded. He stood with his back to the fire, big, age-spotted hands clasped behind him. “I have the honor and pleasure of editing and publishing certain journals of the occult, Mademoiselle. I believe you have already met one of my staff, Miss Duck.”

“Ah!” The witch nodded. “So you are her employer.”

“I am, Mademoiselle. I have that honor.”

“Mr. Illingworth used to belong to the Golden Dawn,” the King said. “He’s been in the business a long time.”

“You knew Aleister Crowley?”

“I did, Mademoiselle. He was perfectly charming, despite all you may have read of him, and a fine mountaineer. We climbed together in the Himalayas on several occasions, and we are still not wholly separated, though our essential energies are now on different planes. I have been so fortunate as to communicate with him on several occasions.”