Wolfe, Gene: The Best of Gene Wolfe

Then Junie’s voice got sort of trembly. “Now suppose that you were to make a telephone call to your wife back in America,” is what she said. So I explained I did not have one, and after that she sounded a lot better.

“Well, if you were to call your family, your mother and father, your call would go through a communications satellite that circles the Earth once a day, so that it seems to us that it is always in the same place. It can do that because it’s a good deal lower and going a great deal faster.”

Then she got out a pen and a little notepad and showed me how fast the bullet would have to go to stay in orbit just whizzing around the world over and over until it hit something. I do not remember how you do it, or what the answer was except that it was about a jillion. Junie said anything like that would make a terrible bang all the time if it was in our air instead of up in space where stuff like that is supposed to be. Well, about then is when the tip came in for the last show. I did my act and Junie sat in the front row smiling and cheering and clapping and I felt really swell.

So after it was all over we went to Merlin’s cave under the big castle and down by the water, and that was when Junie told me how King Arthur was born there, and I told her how I was putting up at the King Arthur, which was a pub with rooms upstairs. I said they were nice people there and it was clean and cheap, which is what I want anywhere, and the landlord’s name was Arthur too, just like the pub’s. Only after a while when we had gone a long ways down the little path and got almost to the water I started to sort of hint around about why are we going way down here, Junie, with just that little flashlight you got out of your purse?

Maybe I ought not say this right here, but it is the truth. It was scary down there. A big person like I am is not supposed to be scared and I know that. But way up on the rocks where the fair was the lights kept on going out and you could see the fair was just sort of like paint the old walls of that big castle. It was like somebody had gone to where my dad was buried and painted all over his stone with flowers and clowns and puppies and kitties and all that kind of thing. Only now the paint was flaking away and you could see what was underneath and he had run out with his gun when the feds broke our front door and they killed him.

Here is what I think it was down there and what was so scary about it. King Arthur had been born there and there had been knights and stuff afterward that he was the head of. And they had been big strong people like me on big strong horses and they had gone around wearing armor and with swords and for a while had made the bad guys pay, and everybody had loved them so much that they still remembered all about them after a hundred years. There was a Lancelot room in the pub where I was staying and a Galahad room, and I was in the Gawain room. And Arthur told me how those men had all been this king’s knights and he said I was the jolly old green giant.

Only it was all over and done with now. It was dead and gone like my dad. King Arthur was dead and his knights were too, and the bad guys were the head of everything and had been for a long, long time. We were the paint, even Junie was paint, and now the paint was getting dull the way paint does, with cracks all over it and falling off. And I thought this was not just where that king was born; this was where he died too. And I knew that it was true the way I meant it.

Well, there was a big wire fence there with a sign about the electricity, only it was not any fifteen feet high. I could have reached up to the top of it. Ten feet, maybe, or not even that.

“Can you pick me up and throw me over?” Junie said.

It was crazy, she would have come down on rocks, so I said I could, only she would have to tell why she wanted me to so much or I would not do it.

She took my hand then, and it felt wonderful. “People come back, Sam. They come back from death. I know scientists aren’t supposed to say things like that, but it’s true. They do.”

That made me feel even better because it meant I would see my dad again even if we would not have our farm that the feds took anymore.

“Do you remember that I said I might have been one of the fifty daughters of Thespius three thousand years ago? I don’t know if that’s really true, or even whether there was a real King Thespius who had fifty daughters. Perhaps there was, and perhaps I was one of them—I’d like to think so. But this really was Merlin’s cave and Roy T. Laffer was Merlin in an earlier life. There were unmistakable indications in his papers. I know it with as much certainty as I know Kepler’s Laws.”

That got me trying to remember who Kepler was, because I did not think Junie had told anything about him up to then. Or after either. Anyway, I did not say much.

“I’ve tried to contact Laffer in his house in Tulsa, Sam. I tried for days at a time, but he wasn’t there. I think he may be here. This is terribly important to me, and you said you’d help me. Now will you throw me over?”

I shook my head, but it was really dark down there and maybe Junie did not see it. I said I was not going to be on the other side to catch her and throw her back, so how was she going to get out? She said when they opened in the morning. I said she would get arrested and she said she did not care. It seemed to me that there were too many getting arrested when she said that, so I twisted on the lock, thinking to break the shackle. It was a pretty good lock and I broke the hasp instead. Then I threw the lock in the ocean and Junie and I went inside like she wanted. That was how she found out where White Cow Moon was and how to get on it too, if she wanted to.

It was about two o’clock in the morning when we came out, I think. I went back to the King Arthur’s and went to bed, and next day Junie moved in down the hall. Hers was the Lancelot room. After that she was my manager, which I told everybody and showed her off. She helped me write my course then, and got this shop in Falmouth to print it up for us.

Then when the fair was over she got us tickets home, and on the airplane we got to talking about the moon. I started it and it was a bad mistake, but we did not know it for a couple of days. Junie had been talking about taking pictures and I said, “How can you if it goes so fast?”

“It doesn’t, Sam.” She took my hand and I liked that a lot. “It circles the Earth quite slowly, so slowly that to an observer on Earth it hardly seems to move at all, which was one of the things Roy T. Laffer confided to me.”

I said I never had seen him, only the lady with the baby and the old man with the stick.

“That was him, Sam. He told me then, and it was implied in his papers anyway. Do you remember the rock?”

I said there had been lots of rocks, which was true because it had been a cave in the rocks.

“I mean the White Cow Moon rock in the picture, the one he lent to the science fair.”

I said, “It didn’t hardly weigh anything.”

“Yes.” Junie was sort of whispering then. “It had very little weight, yet it was hard to move. You had to pull and pull, even though it felt so light when you held it. Do you understand what that means, Sam?”

“Somebody might have glued it down?”

“No. It means that it had a great deal of mass, but very little weight. I’m sure you haven’t heard of antimatter—matter in which the protons are replaced by antiprotons, the electrons by positrons, and so on?”

I said no.

“It’s only theoretical so far. But current theory says that although antimatter would possess mass just as ordinary matter does, it would be repelled, by the gravitational field of ordinary matter. It would fall up, in other words.”