Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free

“That’s crazy,” Barnes told him.

“I know.” Stubb blew out the match. “I’ve been telling myself that for the past couple hours.”

Candy looked in, filling the doorway and blotting out what little light spilled from the paneled room. “You guys find the bar yet?”

“Not yet,” Stubb told her.

“Let me know, okay? I’ve still got a headache. A couple shots would do me a world of good.”

From the end of the hall, the witch called, “I have found something. Two somethings. Come and see!”

The first was a stairwell, at the top of which one of the faint yellow lights still burned. The cramped steps wound on high risers through the ceiling to end before a door as narrow as the cubbyhole office’s and considerably lower. The second was a window about a foot across. The witch was staring through it as they arrived. She moved aside to let Stubb look.

He remained only a moment or two, whispered, “Jesus Christ,” and turned away. Then it was Barnes’s turn.

Without moon or stars, light streamed up from below. They flew, as it seemed, over an endless milky sea. Above them spread a vast dark that eclipsed the sky. Cowled engines hung on pylons suspended from that darkness like crowding stalactites.

Behind him, Barnes heard Candy say, “I’m not going up that. Forget it.”

He knew she was talking about the steps, but he did not turn around. He said, “This has been here almost fifty years. Flying,” and did not know he had spoken aloud until Stubb answered him.

“Look at those props.”

“I am,” Barnes whispered. “Most of them aren’t turning.”

Stubb seemed not to have heard him. “They refuel it. They have to. Refuel it the same way they brought us up. Or somebody does because they’re still taking orders from up here. You know about the jetstream?”

Barnes nodded, then realized Stubb was talking to Candy. “It blows west to east and makes it quicker to go from L.A. to New York than the other way, even in a jet. I guess it blows two or three hundred miles an hour. You could glide a hell of a long way in a two-hundred-mile-an-hour wind. If you had a few engines to help out when you needed them, maybe you could glide forever.”

Barnes said, “Radar—” and Candy, “Pilots—” almost together.

“This whole thing is wood. Didn’t you hear what the guy down on the ground said about the Spruce Goose ? It wouldn’t give much more trace on radar than a flock of geese. About the pilots—I don’t know. Yeah, it seems like they’d see it every once in a while.”

The witch said, “The pilots of airplanes see many strange things. They have learned not to speak of what they see if they wish to remain pilots.”

“This isn’t a flying saucer,” Barnes objected.

“Who spoke of them? Let us call them unidentified flying objects. Some are lenticular, yes. Some are not. We do not know what they may be; that is what unidentified means.”

Barnes nodded and turned away, looking out the port again and half expecting that everything would be changed, as things change in a dream. Far below, tiny yet unmistakably huge, he saw their racing shadow spread-eagled on the clouds, a rippling cross of black.

“In the old sailing-ship days,” the witch continued, “it was said to bring evil fortune to see the sea serpent. Captains who saw it could not obtain another command. That was when the captains were so much nearer the water and watched the water and the sky always. Now they watch their instruments and are more fortunate.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Stubb announced, “but I’m going up these steps. That door must lead out into the wing, and I want to see it.”

They watched him climb the narrow stair, the toes of his shoes making a hollow, thumping sound on each. The door was so small that a man of average height would have had to duck to enter it. Stubb would not have had to, but he ducked anyway, ducked to be seen, Barnes thought. The little door swung closed behind him.

“Well?” asked the witch. “Shall we wait for him? Or explore?”

Candy said, “They must have had grub on here. There might be something left.”

“On the level above, I should think. Here they received their visitors, as we have seen. Here also were their desks and papers, for they might need something while they conversed, some fact or document. But there are two levels at least. Perhaps three. Above this they would eat and sleep, I suppose.”

“You mean I’ve got to climb those things?”

“No. You may stay here, if you like. Mr. Stubb will be so happy to find you awaiting him. Perhaps Ozzie and I will bring you the food you crave, and some whiskey too, if we remember to do it.”

“I’m not staying alone in this spooky place.”

“As you wish. Ozzie, please go first. These steps are so very steep, and I should not like to have you peeping up my dress.”

Something in her tone told Barnes she had known of the hole he had made in the wall of Free’s house—that she had known and had posed for him, dressing again or turning out her light when she did not want him to see more. He stared at her.

“If we were alone, it might be otherwise. Now go up.”

He shook his head and mounted the little stair, finding it more difficult in the oxygen-poor air than he would have thought possible and hearing the witch’s laughter in the click of her heels behind him.

A narrow landing held the door through which Stubb had gone and another, larger, door that had been hidden by the ceiling when they had stood on the level below.

Beyond it was a wide room with a score or more of chairs and sofas, a dry fountain, and basins and boxes filled with dead, dry earth. Overhead spread a dome of tinted panes that dyed the moonlight.

“Here they took their ease,” the witch said, “surrounded by precious things. They were very clever, these men, very cunning, though not wise.”

Barnes was examining one of the chairs. Its fabric had torn under the pressure of its stuffing. When he touched it, it tore again, rotten with age. “This place is in a lot worse shape than the other one,” he said. “I don’t see anything precious here.”

“They are gone,” the witch told him. “And the suns of many years have done the damage you see. But water played in that fountain once, streaming from the horn held by the undine. I shall not trouble to explain the symbolism of horns or undines to you now, but here, so far above the seas and lakes of Earth, water was a precious thing. Fools would have said, ‘We must drink it, use it to make breathable the air, and so we will hide it in tanks.’ These men said, ‘We will put it in a fountain for our pleasure. Then it will make breathable our air, and we may drink it when we choose.’ There were flowers here as well, and flowers too are precious things.” She laughed. “The visitors saw the gracious room, the little offices, and thought those here lived spartan lives. They knew that when the structure is so large, mere space costs very little. It is the load, not the emptiness, that brings down the airplane. Is it not so?”

Candy came panting up behind them. “I didn’t think they’d hold me,” she said. “You should have heard them crack! I waited … minute … each step.”

“Here is the living illustration,” said the witch.

They went forward through the sere, ruined garden, with the witch leading the way, a witch of yellow, rose, and purple as she stepped from one shaft of moonlight to the next.

“It’s like that Wizard of Oz movie,” Candy puffed, holding out one hand to test the light. “Whores of a different color, remember?” If the witch heard her and understood her, she gave no sign.

Beyond the garden were half a dozen shadowy rooms filled with instruments and winking glass. A few of the yellow lights still burned in them; where their illumination was insufficient, the witch held her cigarette lighter aloft like a torch.