Gene Wolfe: Home Fires

“Sixty-seven kilometers an hour. Or so they say. That’s almost twice as fast as the fastest motor vehicles, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were stretching the facts a little.”

“Marvelous!”

“It is. We’re riding on a thin film of air, which is what makes the energy expenditure feasible. These cars are very light, of course. They say four men can lift one.”

She laughed and clapped like a delighted child. “I’d love to see that done. To really see it, I mean, with my own eyes. They do all sorts of tricks on tele.”

* * *

Later, in the dining car, she said, “You haven’t asked me about Chelle. Not one thing. I’ve been waiting for it, Skip, but it hasn’t happened. Want to tell me why?”

He shook his head.

“She divorced me, you’re quite correct. She divorced her father, too, after she enlisted. Were you aware of that?”

“No.” He studied the menu before touching several items.

“It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me, and it certainly doesn’t mean I don’t love her. If you thought she didn’t love me, why did you spend so much to bring me back?”

“I hope she’ll like having you again. I wanted to get her something that would delight her, and you were the only gift I could find that seemed to have much chance.” He hesitated. “I wanted to get you a separate compartment, a nice one near mine. We were too late with that, the train was full.”

“We?”

“Susan. Susan’s my secretary. She takes care of things like that for me. I asked if you’d mind sharing a compartment with me. They said they’d tell you that you had to.”

“They did. I made no objection.”

“Aren’t you going to order?”

“I suppose. What’s the green button?” The slight smile that twitched her lips made him suspect that she already knew.

“It means that you’re ordering what the previous diner at the table ordered. Women—young girls for the most part—often want to do that. I don’t know why.”

“But you know about them.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I won’t pry, Skip.” The smile appeared in earnest. “Not now, because I know I wouldn’t find out anything. Later, possibly. Some girls are terrified of ordering anything too costly. I was never one of those, but I knew some like that.”

He nodded.

“Others are afraid they’ll order something they don’t know how to eat. Lobster or pigs’ trotters, a dish that takes finesse. If they order what the man orders, he can’t object to the price, and they can see how he eats it.”

“So you ordered what I ordered, without knowing what it was.”

“It seemed simpler like that. Either I’m not hungry at all, or I’m so hungry I’ll eat anything. I’ll know when the food comes. Wouldn’t you think they’d have a waiter to take our order? He could answer our questions then.”

Skip nodded absently. “They do that in second class.”

It evoked a throaty chuckle. “We privileged few needn’t worry about keeping the proles employed. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with the system.”

“It may be.”

“I was a wealthy woman, Skip.”

He nodded.

“I’ve almost nothing now. Just a few noras that a woman gave me before she let me out at the station. I’m going to need more.”

“You want more. I anticipated that.”

“May I have it?”

“Not now. I have to have some way to control you.”

“Surely there are others.”

“There are, but I like this one.”

She laughed. “You’re rather too much fun to cross blades with. I could cut Charles to pieces in two minutes—it was part of the reason I opted out. Would you like to stay in our compartment while I shower and get ready for bed?”

He shook his head.

“No? I was hoping you would. I was going to charge you for it.”

“No. I’ll wait in the bar car.”

A waiter arrived, trailed by an assistant who carried an identical meal. “Questions?” The waiter looked from one to the other. “Additional needs? Monsieur? Madame?”

“I’ve a thousand,” Vanessa told him, “but you can’t supply any of them.”

* * *

As Skip sat in the bar car sipping Chablis-and-soda, the barmaid’s assistant’s helper muttered, “I wouldn’t call you an enthusiastic drinker, sir.”

“I’m not,” Skip told her. “I’m just waiting for the dead woman in my compartment to go to bed.”

We sleep, and believe we wake with the minds we carried into bed with us, bearing them as a bride borne in her groom’s arms, the lifted, the treasured, the threshold flier; so we believe.

But we do not. That weary mind has been dispersed in sleep, its myriad parts left behind on the tracks, lying upon the infinite concrete ties between endless, gleaming steel rails.

We wake, and compose for ourselves a new mind (if some other does not compose it for us), a mind compounded of such parts of the old one as we can discover, and of dreams, and of odd snatches of memory—something read long, long ago, possibly something sprung into thought from a tele listing, the skewed description of a better presentation, the show as it existed in Platonic space. From such trifles as these and more we construct a new mind and call it our own.

And yet the personhood, the soul remains. A roommate I had one year woke each morning as a beast, woke roaring, shouting, and fighting. Fighting air, for the most part, for I soon learned to absent myself before his autocall, or to jump back if circumstance forced me to wake him myself; there is such a beast in all of us—no, several such beasts.

Chelle told me once that she woke each morning as a child, though strictly speaking it was untrue. It was most often true, I think, when she had been drinking and she was awakened an hour or two later, still somewhat drunk. She was small and guilty then, weeping for misbehavior she knew not of, a child like so many accustomed to being blamed and punished, quite often severely, for an act done or a word spoken in purest innocence. Thus I, who had met her at the university, came to know the child she had once been, and in truth to love and dread that child.

For me, on the morning of the yellow notice, things were otherwise—or perhaps the same: I thought myself young and thought Chelle with me in bed, or (when at last I accepted her absence from our bed) in the lavatory. She had reentered my life, and so my hungry brain embraced and swallowed her, gulping down Chelle whole, Chelle here and now. And since she was here, was now, I myself must be twenty-seven. Twenty-seven and awakening in the studio apartment I shared with Chelle before she enlisted and shared with her afterward only when she got leave. All this when the present Chelle, my new Chelle, was nothing more than a single sheet of yellow paper fallen from my printer.

Then I knew myself old; and for a moment, only for a moment, before I pushed back sheet and blankets, I thought I heard the light steps of Susan’s departure. She would leave me now, I thought, leave me to sleep and go down to her three rooms to wash and eat and dress and prepare for the day’s work. I had heard her, I thought; yet the door had neither opened nor closed.

I rose, and knew that I had not known the pleasure of her company during the night and had not wanted it. We are never quite so alone as we are in the company of others; a paradox, but a paradox in a world so filled with them that one more can make no difference—or only a small and trifling difference, though that difference may mean the world to some unfortunate individual.

As this one to me. I live by defending others from a law that is grown monstrous, devoid not only of justice but of the very thought and ideal of justice. I defend others, yet no one is more alone than I. In centuries long past, the accused was defended by a champion, a knight (paid, unless the accused was of the highest rank) who engaged the accuser’s champion in the court of justice, confident that God would defend the right. The time-wind rises, the mist disperses, and we see that nothing has changed. I have my squire and my pages, my body servants and men-at-arms, now called secretaries, clerks, researchers, and detectives; figuratively it might be said that I ride into court with Susan’s scarf bound about my helm. Yet who is more alone than I?