Gene Wolfe - Home Fires

As he shut his phone, Jerry said, “Did somebody find Mastergunner Blue?”

“I don’t think so. I think I’m going to find a wild goose. The tourist bar is aft, isn’t it?”

“Sure. I’ll show you.”

When we need to be at our best, we’re always far from it. I could sleep now for twelve hours straight, or I feel I could, and rise refreshed. Instead, I walk through half the ship with a loaded submachine gun slantwise across my back and a pistol shoved into my belt. Both are much too heavy, and I much too tired. Would Chelle do this for me?

I would like to think so, and perhaps she would. God only knows what she did on Johanna. She did much worse, in all probability.…

Which is my cue to whine that she was younger.

As she still is. Much, much younger than I, and she sleeps on her side, always turned away. It’s clearly a defensive posture, but does she know it? On her back sometimes when she has had a few; she snores then, snoring so soft that it is almost purring. I sleep on my belly, a good reason for staying in shape, for not gaining another kilo. Does the ship have a handball court? I don’t even know.

I could walk around and around the Main Deck. A lot of people do that, but I have walked now until my feet are blistered and feel that they must burst through my shoes. Through canvas shoes I bought for comfort, visualizing much shopping on this island and that, see the fort, built in 1615 by the Spanish. “There are a hundred and fifty-three steps so perhaps the old people should wait here while the rest of us go up.” Me climbing the stairs to show Susan that I was still young, Susan climbing behind me to show that she was still loyal. Once Susan would have combed this ship for me, I know. She’d have combed it ’til she dropped, and I may drop soon.

Would I do this if Chelle and I were the same age? Yes, and if anything more willingly. Chelle has still the fire of youth, a fire I would control if I could. That’s wrong, perhaps. Wrong but right. Wrong but true.

Correct.

Why is it my dreams are never the dreams I would like? Other men have good dreams, or so they tell me. Dreams of success. Of flying without a plane, of flying like a bird or flying like a balloon. (But it is never the fat ones who fly like balloons. Am I the only one to notice?)

I dream of prisons, of windowless concrete walls and being locked in boxes. Prisons in which I never sleep and never eat, or drink, or defecate. Dreams of driving down doubtful roads that narrow and narrow, of driving a car as big as a bus across a footbridge that falls to bits behind me.

Of getting out of the car in a wilderness to shout at someone on the farther side of a gorge, someone who turns away with no sign of having heard. Soon I give up—and do not try the car door, knowing that the car cannot cross the gorge and that I have locked myself out.

In the future, I may dream of walking through this endless ship, of painted corridors that rock and pitch and lead only to more corridors, silent corridors lined with locked doors.

Once I dreamed of Chelle, dreamed that she was leaving me, going to the stars to fight a war from which she would never return, and I was old.

No dream, that last. I am. Fifty will be at my doorstep only too soon. Chet is what? Eighty-something. I have never hoped that Chet would die; now I hope that he will live. If Chet achieves one hundred, why Skip might, too. At one hundred, no one will care if I remain abed, or how long I sleep.

A long walk to the nearest stair was succeeded by a weary descent to E Deck and an even longer walk aft, a walk that took Skip and Jerry through the tourist-class casino and almost to the tourist-class dining room. By the time they reached the tourist-class bar, the ship was pitching hard enough to force them to hold the railings.

Trinity and Achille were sitting at a table in the bar, Trinity with a glass before her and Achille with none. Trinity waved them over. “He say he know, Mr. Grison. Say he know Jerry and know where is Jerry’s room, too. We buy him a drink, an’ he show us. Only I didn’t buy him none. I don’t think we ought to ’til Ms. Healy come. I call her after I call you. She say she come right away. What you bring this li’l boy for?”

“He knew where this bar was,” Skip explained, “and I didn’t. At least, I wasn’t sure.”

Jerry stopped staring at Achille’s hooks. “I’d have followed you anyhow.”

“Yes. I thought you would, and I might as well make use of you.”

Achille asked, “You buy drink, mon?”

Skip nodded, and signaled the barman. “What do you want, Achille?”

“Drink rum, mon.”

“A rum, please. Whatever kind you have. It might be best if there were a straw as well.”

The barman nodded. “I’m on it. What about you? I could get the kid a Coke or something.”

“Coffee,” Skip told him, “if you’re got it. What would you like, Jerry?”

Trinity looked startled. “This Jerry?”

“This is another Jerry.”

“Pepsi,” Jerry said. “Is that okay?”

Vanessa arrived soon after the drinks, bracing herself against the pitching of the ship and moving cautiously from one handhold to another. “Shouldn’t we be going?”

“I doubt it.” Skip stirred his surging coffee as he spoke. “I don’t have a lot of confidence in this, to tell you the truth. Have you found anything?”

She shook her head.

“Then this is all we have, this room Achille knows about on M Deck. If it doesn’t pan out—and I don’t believe it will—what are we going to do?”

In the silence that followed, Skip flipped open his mobile phone and selected Chelle’s number. Her phone was off; so was Susan’s.

“We need to talk to everyone who was at that party,” Vanessa said.

“I concur. Unless you can get us a list, we’ll have to talk to those we can find. If each of them names everyone else he can think of we may get something. I said may .” He drew in air and let it out. “We can ask about Jerry’s room at the same time.”

Achille grunted, bent over his shot glass, closed his mouth around it, and raised his head. The boy called Jerry watched him, fascinated, as he swallowed, lowered his head again, and spat out the shot glass.

“Did you see that!” Jerry’s eyes were wide.

“I did,” Vanessa told him. “I wish I hadn’t.”

“You don’t got to do this you say, mon.” Achille rose. “I take you now.”

M Deck, reachable by freight elevator, smelled of hot oil and smoke, and housed the storage batteries that hoarded the electrical energy created by the Rani ’s wind-driven generators. Achille led the little group along a straight central corridor that seemed to reach beyond the ship, a corridor blocked at one point by what Skip decided was most likely a disassembled heat exchanger. Even here, well below the waterline, they could hear the crash of thunder.

“You see big door, mon? Door there, this side. You see him?”

As Skip was about to reply, the big door opened and a middle-aged man stepped out; he wore coveralls and carried a tool kit.

Skip waved to him. “Just a moment, please. We need to talk to you.”

He stopped, but shook his head. “You can’t schedule a job through me, sir. You’ll have to book it through the engineering office.”

“We don’t want to schedule anything,” Skip explained, “but I have to ask you a few questions.”

“Something go wrong with the hooks? I can probably fix ’em in a minute or two, but you ought to leave them with me and get a work order.”

“They’re fine.” Skip held out his hand. “My name’s Skip—Skip Grison. Are you Jerry?”