Gene Wolfe - Home Fires

Vanessa said, “Really now! We can’t eat in front of him while he has nothing.”

“Please go right ahead,” Tooley told her.

Skip put a half his entrée on his bread plate and set it before Tooley. “I’m sure there must be other attorneys on the ship, but most will be corporate. Very probably you and I are the only ones with backgrounds in criminal law.”

Tooley nodded. “As far as I know.”

“The gentleman to your right shot and killed a cyborg called Rick Johnson. He was one of your volunteers, wasn’t he?”

“Rick? He was the best of them, my right-hand man.”

“He was also a spy. The gentleman next to you says for the Os.”

The white-bearded man said, “That was what I gathered from a remark of his. It’s not iron-clad.”

Tooley said, “Do you remember the remark? It could be important.”

“Not precisely.” The white-bearded man paused. “It was something about his superior not understanding humans.”

“When the captain was here,” Skip told the white-bearded man, “he got me thinking about the actions, and the failures to act, that might be brought up in court. One of them was his failure to confine you. He must know that you killed Rick Johnson; Chelle says she told him.”

Chelle said, “He does. He also knows that Rick had kidnapped me and killed the doctor and his nurse. Mick saved this ship and everybody on it, but it was my dad who saved me.”

“Your ex-dad,” the white-bearded man muttered.

“Yeah. I divorced you. Don’t rub it in.”

Tooley stood up. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner. Skip and I will see each other in the office, but I wanted to say goodbye to you and now I have. You’ve got one hell of a woman there, Skip.”

He nodded and smiled. “I know.”

When Tooley had gone, Vanessa said, “There was something odd about that.”

“He’s a friend,” Chelle told her. “He just wanted to say goodbye.”

“He wanted something else, Chelle darling, and he got it. I’d love to know what it was.”

“He wasn’t even looking for us, Mother. Skip waved him over.”

“He was, but he hadn’t seen us. That was why Skip waved.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“We social directors know these things.” Vanessa smiled down from a height of years. “We must, and I do. I don’t suppose you’ve ever given a party. I’ve given … Oh, twenty.”

“Fifty,” the white-bearded man muttered.

“You’re counting small gatherings, Charles.”

Chelle’s good hand struck the table hard enough to make the plates jump. “Don’t look so damn smug!”

“I wasn’t, darling. Just because I’ve got my man and you’re losing yours? No indeed! I looked sympathetic.”

A handsome young man too informally dressed for Formal Night was approaching their table. Chelle turned, and as she did, her expression became one that Skip had never seen before. Her eyes were larger and seemed, somehow, darker; her mouth was tremulous. “D-Don? You’re Don, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

Chelle rose, taller than he. “You knew I was in here. How did you know, Don?”

“I loved you, sweet thing. You’re gone and I can’t see you again ’til it’s all over. I needed to tell you.”

Chelle made a soft little sound that might have meant anything or nothing.

Vanessa gasped.

And Chelle said, “Listen, we gotta keep in touch, all of us. You tell Joe and the sarge. Tell everybody.”

There was a soft sigh—perhaps from Don.

Chelle turned. “Hey, Skip, what’s our address?”

He gave it.

“What’s the apartment number? I forgot.”

“Penthouse,” he said. “Just tell them to write penthouse.”

She stared at him.

“We were renegotiating the penthouse lease. Before we left I told the manager to terminate the negotiations, that we’d move in when we got home.”

Don borrowed a pen and a used envelope from the white-bearded man and began scribbling rapidly.

“I don’t know about e-mail or any of that shit yet,” Chelle told him. “Only I’ll give you my phone number if you’ll hand over that pen.”

“Thanks!” Don said. “I’ll be calling you.”

“Sure.” When he had gone, Chelle sat down and took a sip of wine and a bite of fish. “You know, I donno why the fuck I stood up when he came. He’s not an officer.”

The white-bearded man told her, “All of us have forces within us, honey. Energies unseen by our conscious minds.”

“Isn’t he just amazing?” Vanessa looked from Skip to Chelle—then back to Skip, seeking confirmation. “Why did I void our contract, Charles? I’ve forgotten.”

“I treated you shamefully, showering you with money, then stealing it back when you were out shopping. When I stole the money other men had given you—”

“Why you big liar! No wonder I voided it!”

“And now you know.” The white-bearded man winked at Skip. “Which is what you wanted.”

“What I want to know,” Skip said, “is why you booked under an assumed name.”

“Did I?” The white-bearded man looked puzzled. “Really? I have forgotten.”

“I got a ship’s officer to call the purser’s office for me. He asked whether there were any passengers named Blue. The purser’s office, which would surely know, said there was one and only one. That was Mastergunner Chelle Sea Blue. No other Blues.”

“I see.”

“I’d like to see, too,” Skip said. “What name did you book under?”

“It hardly matters, does it? I could explain how I came to use my friend’s reservation, but you wouldn’t believe me—or at least you would ask confirmation, which I could not provide beyond a phone call.”

“You would give me your friend’s number?”

“Of course I will.” The white-bearded man smiled. “His name as well.”

“I’d like them both. Will you lend me that pen?”

He did, and Skip’s wallet provided a scrap of paper.

“The number is two, one, two, nine…” The white bearded man paused.

“I’ve got it.”

“Three, three, four, one, one, seven, seven, two, two. My friend is Cole Baum. Coleman A. Baum, if you wish to be precise.”

Skip wrote.

“I have a phone, if you’d like to borrow it.”

Skip shook his head. “I have one, too, and I’d like to eat before my food gets cold.”

“You should trust Charles,” Vanessa said.

“I’ll begin as soon as Charles trusts me.”

Although Skip was returning the paper to his wallet, he saw the white mustache twitch.

Down there, four decks below me, five tugs prepare to bring us up to the wharf. They are long and rather narrow craft with fifty oars a side. One hundred and one men in each tug, including the tug’s captain. Five hundred and five men, five hundred of whom are certainly making the Union Employment Administration wage—forty-three noras a week, enough to support a couple with one child (no more than one child) in subsidized housing, if both parents work.

Forty-three noras a week keeps these strong men busy and tired, too tired to riot. Too tired to steal, at least in theory. Our seamen mock them, although it seems good-natured. What is it the seamen get? The captain told me. Seventy noras a week, so one thousand per hundred-day. With a thousand noras every hundred-day, plus food and a bed, they have a right to mock.

I wonder how much he makes? He looked grim at dinner last night, though a part of that may have been the thought of losing Virginia.

That dinner … It will haunt me for a long time, I’m afraid—our last dinner on the Rani . We’ll be going ashore in what? An hour? More like two, I imagine. We may get lunch before we go ashore.