Gene Wolfe: The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Forty-seven sends: ONE FORTY-THREE, ARE YOU CRIMINAL OR POLITICAL?

POLITICAL. (I wish to hear what he will say.)

WHICH SIDE?

YOU?

POLITICAL.

WHICH SIDE?

ONE FORTY-THREE, THIS IS RIDICULOUS. ARE YOU AFRAID TO ANSWER MY QUESTION? WHAT MORE CAN THEY DO TO YOU? YOU ARE ALREADY HERE.

I rap: WHY SHOULD I TRUST YOU IF YOU DO NOT TRUST ME? YOU BEGAN. (Hurting my knuckles.)

OF THE FIFTH OF SEPTEMBER.

WHEN I GET ROCK. HAND HURTS.

COWARD! (So sends Forty-seven, very loudly. He will break his glasses.)

Where was I? Yes, my arrest. The whole house was quiet—I thought this was only because of the lateness of the hour, but I now realize that most of them must have been awake, knowing that they were waiting in my room for me, lying in their beds hardly daring to breathe while they waited for the shots or screams, Madame Duclose, particularly, must have been concerned for the large, gilt-framed mirror in my room, which she had cautioned me about repeatedly. (Mirrors, I have found—I mean good ones of silvered glass, not polished bits of metal—are quite expensive in Port-Mimizon.) And thus there was no snoring, no one stumbling down the corridor to the lavatory, no muffled sighs of passion from Mlle Etienne’s room while she entertained herself with the fruits of imagination and a tallow candle.

I did not notice. I scrawled my note (others think my hand very bad, but I do not think so; when I receive my appointment I will—if I have to teach classes at all—have my students write on the chalkboard for me, or distribute notes for my classes already printed in purple ink on yellow paper) for Mme Duclose and went up, as I thought, to bed.

They were quite confident. They had a light burning in my room, and I saw the stripe of radiance at the bottom of my door. Surely if I had in fact committed some crime I would have turned and fled on tiptoe when I saw that light. As it was, I thought only that there had been some letter or message for me—perhaps from the president of the university, or possibly from the brothelkeeper at the Cave Canem who had earlier that evening asked my help in dealing with his “son”; and I decided that if it were he, I would not answer until the evening following; I was very tired and had drunk enough brandy to feel let down now when it was flickering out, and I was conscious of the inefficiency of my motions as I got out my key and then discovered that my door was not locked.

There were three of them, all seated, all waiting for me. Two were uniformed; the third wore a dark suit which had once been good but was now worn and stained with food grease and the oil from lamps and, moreover, was a little too small for him, so that he had the appearance of the valet of a miser. He sat in my best chair, the chair with the needlepoint seat, with one arm hanging quite carelessly over the back of it, and the lamp with the globe painted with roses and the fringed shade at his elbow as though he had been reading. Mme Duclose’s mirror was behind him, and I could see that his hair was cut short and that he had a scarred head, as though he had been tortured or had had an operation on his brain or had fought with someone armed with some tearing weapon. Over his shoulder I could see myself in the tall hat I had bought here in Port-Mimizon after landing, and my second best cape and my stupid, surprised face.

One of the uniformed men got up and shut the door behind me, throwing the night bolt. He wore a gray jacket and gray trousers and a peaked cap, and around his waist a broad brown pistol belt with a very large, old-fashioned looking revolver in a holster. When he sat again, I noticed that his shoes were ordinary workmen’s shoes, not of much quality and already quite worn. The second uniformed man said, “You may hang up your hat and coat, if you like.”

I said, “Of course,” hanging them, as I usually did, on the hooks on the back of the door.

“It will be necessary for us to search your person.” (This was still the second uniformed man, who wore a short-sleeved green jacket with many pockets and loose green trousers with straps about the ankles, as though he were intended to ride a bicycle as part of his duties.) “We will do this in either of two ways, depending on your own preference. You may, if you like, disrobe; we will then search your clothing and allow you to dress yourself again—however, you must disrobe before us so that you have no opportunity to secrete anything you may have on your person. Or we will search you here and now, as you are. Which do you prefer?”

I asked if I were under arrest and if they were the police. The man in the needlepoint chair answered, “No, Professor, certainly not.”

“I am not a professor, at least, not at present as far as I know. If I am not under arrest, why am I being searched? What am I supposed to have done?”

The man who had shut the door said, “We’re going to search you to see if there’s any reason to arrest you,” and looked at the man in the black suit for confirmation. The other uniformed man said: “You must choose. How will you be searched?”

“And if I will not submit to being searched?”

The man in black said: “Then we will have to take you to the citadel. They will search you there.”

“You mean that you will arrest me?”

“Monsieur…”

“I am not French. I am from North America, on Earth.”

“Professor, I urge you—as a friend—not to force us to arrest you. It is a serious matter here, to have been arrested; but it is possible to be searched to be questioned, to be—as it may be—even held for a time—”

“Perhaps even to be tried and executed,” the man in the green jacket finished for him.

“—without having been arrested. Do not, I beg you, force us to arrest you.”

“But I must be searched.”

“Yes,” said both the uniformed men.

“Then I prefer to be searched as I am, without undressing.”

The two uniformed men looked at one another as though this were significant. The man in black looked bored and picked up the book he had been reading, which I saw was one of my own— A Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte Anne .

The man with the pistol belt came over, half-apologetically, to search me, and I noticed for the first time that his uniform was that of the City Transit Authority. I said: “You’re a horsecar driver, aren’t you? Why are you carrying that gun?”

The man in black said: “Because it is his duty to carry it. I might ask why you yourself are armed.”

“I’m not.”

“On the contrary, I have just been examining this book of yours—there are tables of figures penciled on the flyleaves in the back, you see? Can you tell me what they are?”

“They were left there by some former owner,” I told him, “and I have no idea what they are. Are you accusing me of being some sort of spy? If you’ll look at them you’ll see they’re nearly as old as the book and badly faded.”

“They are interesting figures; pairs of numbers of which the first is given in yards and the second in inches.”

“I’ve seen them,” I said. The man in the City Transit uniform was patting my pocjcets; whenever he found anything—my watch, my money, my pocket notebook—he handed it with an obsequious little gesture to the man in black.

“I am of the mathematical turn of mind.”

“How fortunate for you.”

“I have analyzed these figures—they approximate quite well the conic section called a parabola.”

“That means nothing to me. As an anthropologist I am more often concerned with the normal distribution curve.”

“How fortunate for you,” the man in black said, repaying me for my sarcasm of a moment before. He motioned to the two uniformed men, who came to him. For a moment the three whispered together, and I noticed how similar their faces were, all three with pointed chins, black brows and narrow eyes, so that they might have been brothers, the man in black the eldest and probably the cleverest as well, the City Transit man the least imaginative, but all three of a family.