Gene Wolfe: Home Fires

From the doorway, Susan inquired, “Mr. Grison?”

He closed the safe.

“I just wanted to let you know I’m here if you need me. You beat me in this morning.”

“I do. I was about to write you a note. I want a first-class compartment on a Bullet for Canam. Depart before twenty tonight.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want a suite, one night, at the best hotel near the port. That’s for the day after tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir. Hypersuite?”

“If you can get one.” He paused. “If you can’t get a suite of any kind, then the best room you can get. Call me when you’ve got both, but not before. I’m leaving now. I want to get out before somebody ambushes me with something. Let Mick handle it, whatever it is.”

“If there are several trains…?”

“Nothing before noon—I’ve got to pack. The first one after that.”

He was ready to go, but she whispered, “I’ll miss you, Mr. Grison.” Already feeling the pangs of treachery, he gave her a quick kiss.

Dianne, his secretary’s assistant, greeted him with a bright smile and a cheerful hello as he left his office. Skip reflected that Susan would have work for her. As for him, he would have work for himself.

A doorman touched the bill of his cap. “Lester told me you were out early, Mr. Grison.”

If he had made any reply at all, he had forgotten it by the time he reached his apartment.

ANSWERS might or might not be of help. He touched VOICE. “Gifts for returning servicewoman.”

“Price?”

“Ten thousand and up.”

“Age?”

Chelle’s subjective age would have gone up by two years and what? A hundred-day or so. “Twenty-five.”

“Designer dresses and suits, jewelry, small red car, total makeover.”

“More.”

“Cruise, private island, show horse…”

He telephoned Research. “Boris? What do returning servicewomen want most? Somebody must have done a survey, and there might be two or three. Let me know.”

* * *

His gift met him at the station. “Are you Skip Grison?” Smile. “I’m Chelle’s mother.”

He studied her. She was shorter than Chelle and almost slender. Simply but stylishly dressed. “You’re younger than I expected,” he said.

She smiled again, a charming smile. “Thank you, Skip. You have my ticket?”

“Not yet. We can square it with the conductor.”

“You’ll be billed if I have to pay my own way. You understand that, I hope.”

He nodded, trying to place her perfume. Apples in a garden? Sun-warmed apples? Something like that.

“There would be a surcharge of twenty percent.”

“Certainly. I’ll take care of it.”

Another charming smile. “You look baffled, Skip.”

“I am. I pride myself on my ability to think on my feet, and I was told to expect you. But I…”

“In a courtroom.”

“Correct. I was going to say that even though I put in an order for you and knew you were coming, something about you took me by surprise. I need a moment to collect my thoughts. Where’s your luggage?”

“A nice porter took it for me. I gave him the number of your compartment.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You knew it?”

She nodded. “I found it out—it wasn’t difficult. Thirty-two C.”

“You’re right,” he said. And then, grateful for the opportunity to break off their conversation, “Let’s go find it.”

One side was Changeglass, switched off now for full transparency. His scuffed suitcases were on the lone chair, a red-fabric overnight bag on the lower bunk, a bed currently disguised as a couch. The door of the tiny private bath stood open; after a glance inside, Skip closed it. He stowed his briefcase under the lower bunk.

She was throwing switches. “Good reading lights,” she said. “That makes all the difference.”

He said, “It’s only a day and a half.”

“Thirty-four hours, if it’s on schedule. So one day and ten hours, since these Bullet Trains always are.”

“We need to talk.” Removing his overnight bag, he took the chair.

“That’s what I’m here for.” She smiled, warm and friendly. “To talk with you and my darling Chelle.”

“Can you play the part?”

“I don’t play parts, Skip. Really, I don’t.” Now she attempted to look severe, but the smile kept getting in the way. “I am your Chelle’s mother.”

“You mean that she’ll accept you, wholeheartedly, as her mother.”

“She will, Skip, and she’ll be right. You, thinking me a fraud, will be mistaken. Please try to understand. For thousands of years, we thought death the end, even though we knew of cases in which that had been untrue. Until we could raise the dead ourselves, we refused to believe that death was not necessarily final.”

Almost unnoticed, the train glided from the station.

“You call me Skip.”

She smiled yet again. He felt that he should by now have come to detest that smile, but found that it enchanted him instead. “I do, Skip, and I shall continue to do so.”

“Chelle calls you…?”

“Mother.” She sat down on the lower bunk.

“Then I’ll call you Mother Blue.”

Her eyes flashed. “Not without a quarrel. I have never used Charles’s surname, and I most certainly don’t intend to begin after going though a world of nonsense to terminate our contract. I am Vanessa Hennessey. You may call me that. Or Ms. Hennessey. Or Vanessa. But not Essy or Vanie or anything of that silly sort.”

“Vanessa, then. I don’t know where Chelle’s mother is buried, but it should be easy to find out. Suppose that I do, and that I take Chelle there and show her the grave—her real mother’s grave. What would you do then?”

Vanessa laughed. “Why should I do anything? Why should my daughter do anything, for that matter? I was dead, and now I’m alive. Pay close attention, Skip. You haven’t been thinking.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Are you? We’ll find out eventually. Every brain scan I ever had—and there were a good many of them—has been uploaded into the brain of a living woman whose own brain was scanned and wiped clean. Once it had been done, that living woman became me, the woman sitting across from you now.”

“Ms. Vanessa Hennessey.”

“Exactly. I’m so glad you understand.”

This time it was he who smiled. “Who is legally dead.”

“An error that could be corrected by any competent attorney. Surely you know that a person missing for seven years can be declared legally dead. You must also know that those people sometimes turn up, after which the record is set straight.”

“I paid a small fortune to have you resurrected.”

“A very small one. Yes.”

He wanted to pace, as he had so often in court. “Thus it’s against my interest not to accept you myself.”

The delightful smile. “I’m glad you understand.”

“Thus I shall venture one more question, and no more. None after this. Currently, I am paying the company by the hundred-day. I paid for the first in advance.”

She nodded. “That’s standard.”

“Suppose I stop paying?”

She laughed. “As you will, eventually. I understand that. Let’s say when you stop paying. We both know that you will. I’ll be returned to Reanimation. My brain will be scanned and wiped, and the earlier scan uploaded.”

“You’ll be dead.”

“I will. But I will die secure in the knowledge that death is not final—that if ever I’m wanted enough, I can be recalled to existence.” Smiling, she turned to look at the factory buildings and city streets they passed. “I’d heard that these things were wonderfully fast, Skip. But hearing it and seeing it … How fast can it go?”