Gene Wolfe: Home Fires

May God defend the right!

I look out over the city like an eagle from a spire of rock, and it is not my kingdom but my hunting ground. Nor am I the only hunter; others hunt there, and some may hunt me. The common man, so celebrated a century ago by those who were even then plotting to bring him down, has in this age been driven to the wall. Every elective office is held for life, and those who hold those offices may rule by whim if it be their whim to rule so. Hated, they glory in it, and know not how weak they are.

I know how weak I am, or I think I do; my imitation Vanessa does not, or so I believe, but she surely knows how weak she herself is, and she is far weaker than I, weaker than Susan, and no doubt far weaker than her daughter, the strapping lacrosse player, the glory of the women’s track team. It is not Vanessa’s weakness that attracts me, for I, possessing a superabundance of weakness myself, am never attracted to it; rather it is her defiance of her weakness, for there is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.

Even in a dead woman.

The sky seemed oddly threatening. Patches of clearest blue separated cloud towers the color of city faces. Like all the rest, Skip studied the sky and watched for the shuttle, buffeted by the crowd and striving to shelter Vanessa from similar shoving and elbowing. “I thought they’d be about my age,” he whispered. “I wasn’t ready for these kids.”

“They are waiting for their fathers and mothers, for parents they’ve been told about but can’t remember.” She seemed cool and collected, small and splendid in the black wool coat he had bought her and a black pillbox hat whose scarlet feather matched her earrings.

“There are some as old as we are.” It sounded more defensive than he had intended.

“Some. Not many.”

Then there were cheers, and the young man on Skip’s right pointed and shouted. Very far away, a shining dot had emerged from one of the gray-faced clouds. The crowd surged against the fence, which bowed but held. Military Police—big men with polished white helmets above tired, brutal faces—were clearing a path with white batons, shoving people aside and whacking the shoulders of those who refused to move.

Half a dozen uniformed women unrolled a red carpet; somewhere nearby a band struck up “El Continente de los Héroes.”

“Catchy, isn’t it?” Vanessa whispered.

There seemed to be no point in answering her, and Skip did not. To the north, the shining dot had sprouted stubby wings.

“It looks too small to hold many people.” Vanessa was shading her eyes with her hand and squinting; there were tiny lines at the corners of her eyes.

Skip said, “I think it must be the size of a bus.”

It was far larger, swooping down toward the end of a runway as long as many highways, a runway so long that its end was well beyond their sight. The thunder of rockets—just the little braking rockets, Skip reminded himself—was like a storm at sea.

“Her name,” he said.

Vanessa turned to him quizzically.

“Chelle Sea Blue. Her eyes are as blue as the sea down around Tobago.”

Perhaps Vanessa replied; if so, Skip did not hear her. He was watching the shuttle bringing Chelle. It looked as large as a ship without masts—a ship in drydock, with no part hidden by the sea. Stopping, it turned and rolled toward them, moving slowly and ponderously on landing gear with so many wheels that Skip, who often counted things by reflex, lost count of them—huge rubber wheels, some of which (and perhaps all of which) were clearly powered.

A man standing behind him said, “Imagine how big the mother ship is!”

Skip nodded, though he knew he had not been addressed.

A stunned silence had settled over the crowd; the band was heard distinctly once more, a band that seemed much too small for the occasion, a little band of children welcoming a stainless-steel archangel. “The Union Anthem” had always sounded as though it had been composed by a machine, but never more than now.

A silver gangplank unrolled from an airlock a hundred feet in the air, a gangplank that stiffened as it came and brought its own spidery railing of slender posts and still more slender black cords.

Someone shouted, “Here they come!” But they did not come.

Vanessa was sniffling. After a moment, Skip gave her his handkerchief, a man’s handkerchief, white with a dark gray border, a handkerchief so large that it might easily have been knotted about her slender throat like a bandana. “My baby!” It was gasped, not said. “My baby!”

He put his arm around her shoulders.

“I only had one. I never wanted more. But … But…”

“I understand.”

An officer with a bullhorn had appeared, tiny at the top of the gangplank. “… WHO TOUCHES ANY SOLDIER WILL BE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY. ANYONE WHO BREAKS THE MILITARY POLICE LINES WILL LIKEWISE BE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY.”

The crowd growled in response, one vast beast with a thousand savage heads.

The officer disappeared into the shuttle. For thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes and more, nothing happened.

The band struck up a march, a bass drum thumping the cadence while two trap drums pranced around it, the whole punctuated by trumpets that for once sounded like trumpets on a battlefield.

And they came, a single file of women and men in blue garrison caps and dress cloaks, booted feet drumming the long silver gangplank and arms swinging. Someone shouted, “Oh, don’t they look fine!”

In reply Vanessa whispered, “They don’t tell anyone when the dead and wounded come back.”

The first marching soldier stepped off the end of the gangplank, and the crowd surged toward her—toward her and toward those who came behind her. The white-helmeted MPs shouted. Their white batons rose briefly above the heads of the crowd and fell upon them.

More soldiers came, and more, an endless stream; and the crowd parted for white-helmeted MPs dragging a gray-haired woman in handcuffs.

“There she is!” Vanessa was shouting and pointing. “Chelle! Chelle, darling! Over here!”

With Vanessa in his wake, Skip fought through the crowd and pushed past a white-helmeted MP to seize Chelle and kiss her. The shock of a white baton on his shoulder was less painful than Chelle’s startled stare. Goaded to savagery by pain and stare, Skip whirled, grabbed the coat of the MP who had struck him, butted him in the face, kneed him in the groin, and let him fall.

When he turned again, Chelle was gone, the crowd was rioting, and soldiers were no longer marching out of the ship. Grinning as she was forced tightly against him by the rioters, Vanessa asked, “Where the devil did you learn that?”

“Law school,” he told her.

* * *

He had nearly unpacked when Vanessa knocked at the door of his hotel room. “I can’t speak for you, Skip, but I’m starved. There’s nothing like stoning the police to give one an appetite.” She sniffed. “You still have that dreadful gas on your clothing. You must change—shower and change.”

“I will,” he said, and returned to his shirts.

“You brought so many clothes!”

He nodded absently.

“I brought everything I have, but it isn’t much.” When he said nothing, Vanessa added, “That’s a hint.”

“I thought so.”

“Two dresses and a pants suit. A few cosmetics. I ask you.”

“Ample. Now get out of here. I have to change, as you suggested. I have to shower. I’ll get you when I’m ready to eat.”

Vanessa leveled a long, crimson-tipped finger. “I am starving, I’ve scarcely a nora, and I’m not leaving ’til I am fed. If you try to throw me out bodily, I’ll scream my glamorous little head off. I bite, too.”