Castle of Days (1992) SSC

by Gene Wolfe

  “One of the Native Amer’cans doesn’t work.”

  “Never mind, dear, we’ll take him back. Robin, I’ve got something important to tell you.”

  Bertha the robot maid came in with Corn Flakes and milk and vitamins, and café au lait for Robin’s mother. “Where is those old toys?” she asked. “They done a picky-poor job of cleanin’ up this room.”

  “Robin, your toys are just toys, of course—”

  Robin nodded absently. A Red Calf was coming out of the chute, with a Cowboy on a Roping Horse after him.

  “Where is those old toys, Ms. Jackson?” Bertha asked again.

  “They’re programmed to self-destruct, I understand,” Robin’s mother said. “But, Robin, you know how the new toys all came, the Knight and Dragon and all your Cowboys, almost by magic? Well, the same thing can happen with people.”

  Robin looked at her with frightened eyes.

  “The same wonderful thing is going to happen here, in our home.”

  CHRISTMAS DAY

  La Befana

  When Zozz, home from the pit, had licked his fur clean, he howled before John Bannano’s door. John’s wife, Teresa, opened it and let him in. She was a thin, stooped woman of thirty or thirty-five, her black hair shot with gray; she did not smile, but he felt somehow that she was glad to see him. She said, “He’s not home yet. If you want to come in we’ve got a fire.”

  Zozz said, “I’ll wait for him,” and, six-legging politely across the threshold, sat down over the stone Bananas had rolled in for him when they were new friends. Maria and Mark, playing some sort of game with beer-bottle caps on squares scratched on the floor dirt said, “Hi, Uncle Zozz,” and Zozz said, “Hi,” in return. Bananas’ old mother, whom Zozz had brought here from the pads in his rusty powerwagon the day before, looked at him with piercing eyes, then fled into the other room. He could hear Teresa relax, the wheezing outpuffed breath.

  He said, half humorously, “I think she thinks I bumped her on purpose yesterday.”

  “She’s not used to you yet.”

  “I know,” Zozz said.

  “I told her, Mother Bannano, it’s their world, and they’re not used to you.”

  “Sure,” Zozz said. A gust of wind outside brought the cold in to replace the odor of the gog-hutch on the other side of the left wall.

  “I tell you it’s hell to have your husband’s mother with you in a place as small as this.”

  “Sure,” Zozz said again.

  Maria announced, “Daddy’s home!” The door rattled open and Bananas came in looking tired and cheerful. Bananas worked in the slaughtering market, and though his cheeks were blue with cold, the cuffs of his trousers were red with blood. He kissed Teresa and tousled the hair of both children, and said, “Hi, Zozzy.”

  Zozz said, “Hi. How does it roll?” And moved over so Bananas could warm his back. Someone groaned, and Bananas asked a little anxiously, “What’s that?”

  Teresa said, “Next door.”

  “Huh?”

  “Next door. Some woman.”

  “Oh. I thought it might be Mom.”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In back.”

  Bananas frowned. “There’s no fire in there; she’ll freeze to death.” “I didn’t tell her to go back there. She can wrap a blanket around her.”

  Zozz said, “It’s me—I bother her.” He got up. Bananas said, “Sit down.”

  “I can go. I just came to say hi.”

  “Sit down.” Bananas turned to his wife. “Honey, you shouldn’t leave her in there alone. See if you can’t get her to come out.”

  “Johnny—”

  “Teresa, dammit!”

  “Okay, Johnny.”

  Bananas took off his coat and sat down in front of the fire. Maria and Mark had gone back to their game. In a voice too low to attract their attention Bananas said, “Nice thing, huh?”

  Zozz said, “I think your mother makes her nervous.”

  Bananas said, “Sure.”

  Zozz said, “This isn’t an easy world.”

  “You mean for us. No it ain’t, but you don’t see me moving.”

  Zozz said, “That’s good. I mean, here you’ve got a job anyway. There’s work.”

  “That’s right.”

  Unexpectedly Maria said: “We get enough to eat here, and me and Mark can find wood for the fire. Where we used to be there wasn’t anything to eat.”

  Bananas said, “You remember, honey?”

  “A little.”

  Zozz said, “People are poor here.”

  Bananas was taking off his shoes, scraping the street mud from them and tossing it into the fire. He said, “If you mean us, us people are poor everyplace.” He jerked his head in the direction of the back room. “You ought to hear her tell about our world.”

  “Your mother?”

  Bananas nodded. Maria said, “Daddy, how did Grandmother come here?”

  “Same way we did.”

  Mark said, “You mean she signed a thing?”

  “A labor contract? No, she’s too old. She bought a ticket—you know, like you would buy something in a store.”

  Maria said, “That’s what I mean.”

  “Shut up and play. Don’t bother us.”

  Zozz said, “How’d things go at work?”

  “So-so.” Bananas looked toward the back room again. “She came into some money, but that’s her business—I didn’t want to talk to the kids about it.”

  “Sure.”

  “She says she spent every dollar to get here—you know, they haven’t used dollars even on Earth for fifty, sixty years, but she still says it, how do you like that?” He laughed, and Zozz laughed too. “I asked how she was going to get back, and she said she’s not going back, she’s going to die right here with us. What could I say?”

  “I don’t know.” Zozz waited for Bananas to say something, and when he did not he added, “I mean, she’s your mother.”

  “Yeah.”

  Through the thin wall they heard the sick woman groan again, and someone moving about. Zozz said, “I guess it’s been a long time since you saw her last.”

  “Yeah—twenty-two years Newtonian. Listen, Zozzy …”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know something? I wish I had never set eyes on her again.”

  Zozz said nothing, rubbing his hands, hands, hands.

  “That sounds lousy I guess.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “She could have lived good for the rest of her life on what that ticket cost her.” Bananas was silent for a moment. “She used to be a big, fat woman when I was a kid, you know? A great big woman with a loud voice. Look at her now—dried up and bent over; it’s like she wasn’t my mother at all. You know the only thing that’s the same about her? That black dress. That’s the only thing I recognize, the only thing that hasn’t changed. She could be a stranger—she tells stories about me I don’t remember at all.”

  Maria said, “She told us a story today.”

  Mark added: “Before you came home. About this witch.”

  Maria said: “That brings the presents to children. Her name is La Befana the Christmas Witch.”

  Zozz drew his lips back from his double canines and jiggled his head. “I like stories.”

  “She says it’s almost Christmas, and on Christmas three wise men went looking for the Baby, and they stopped at the old witch’s door, and they asked which way it was and she told them and they said come with us.”

  The door to the other room opened, and Teresa and Bananas’ mother came out. Bananas’ mother was holding a teakettle; she edged around Zozz to put it on the hook and swing it out over the fire.

  “And she was sweeping and she wouldn’t come.”

  Mark said: “She said she’d come when she was finished. She was a real old, real ugly woman. Watch, I’ll show you how she walked.” He jumped up and began to hobble around the room.

  Bananas looke
d at his wife and indicated the wall. “What’s this?”

  “In there?”

  “The charity place—they said she could stay there. She couldn’t stay in the house because all the rooms are full of men.”

  Maria was saying, “So when she was all done she went looking for Him only she couldn’t find Him and she never did.”

  “She’s sick?”

  “She’s knocked up, Johnny, that’s all. Don’t worry about her. She’s got some guy in there with her.”

  Mark asked, “Do you know about the baby Jesus, Uncle Zozz?”

  Zozz groped for words.

  “Giovanni, my son …”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Your friend … Do they have the faith, Giovanni?”

  Apropos of nothing, Teresa said, “They’re Jews, next door.”

  Zozz told Mark, “You see, the baby Jesus has never come to my world.”

  Maria said: “And so she goes all over everyplace looking for him with her presents, and she leaves some with every kid she finds, but she says it’s not because she thinks they might be him like some people think, but just a substitute. She can’t never die. She has to do it forever, doesn’t she, Grandma?”

  The bent old woman said, “Not forever, dearest; only until tomorrow night.”

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  Melting

  I am the sound a balloon makes falling into the sky; the sweat of a lump of ice in a summer river.

  It was the best cocktail party in the world. It took place in someone’s (never mind whose) penthouse apartment; and it spilled over into the garden outside, among the fountains and marble ruins, and into the belly of the airship moored to the building, and the ship spilled over into the city, taking off from time to time to cruise the canyons of clotheslines and neon signs, or rise to the limbus of the moon. Many were drinking, and certain of the fountains ran with wine; many were smoking hashish—its sweet fumes swirled into men’s pockets and up women’s skirts until everyone was a trifle dazed with them and a little careless. A few were smoking opium.

  John Edward was drinking, but he was fairly certain he had been smoking hashish an hour before, and he might have been smoking opium, but it was the best cocktail party in the world, a party at which he knew everyone and no one.

  The man on his left was British, and had a clipped mustache and the thin, muscled look John Edward associated with Bagnold and the Long Range Desert Group. The man across from him was Tibetan or perhaps Nepalese, and wore a scarlet robe. The girl beside him (who stood up often, sometimes bringing other people drinks, sometimes drinking herself, sometimes only to wave at the airship as it circled overhead while partygoers threw confetti from its balconies) was tall and auburn-haired, and wore a white gown slit at one side from hem to armpit. The girl to John Edward’s right was blond, and beautiful, and had a cage of singing birds, living but too small to be alive, in her hair.

  “This is a good party,” John Edward said to the man on his left.

  “Smashing. You know why, I take it?”

  John Edward shook his head, but before the Englishman could tell him, a being from the Farther Stars who resembled not so much a man as a man’s statue—with some of the characteristics of a washing machine—interrupted them to ask for a light. The Tibetan leaned forward, kindling a blue flame in the palm of his hand; and the man from the Farther Stars walked away puffing gentle puffs, his cycle on Delicate Things.

  The girl with the birdcage in her hair said: “Some of these people are from the past. Mankind’s mastery of the laws of Time makes it possible to ask the people of the past to parties. It makes for a good crowd.”

  The auburn-haired girl, she of the slit dress, said: “Then that man at the piano who looks like Napoleon must be Napoleon.”

  “No, that’s his brother Joseph; I don’t think Napoleon’s here right now.”

  The Tibetan (leaning forward, so that his robe opened to show a hairless chest puckered with old scars) said: “It is the use of temporal arresters—such is my own opinion—which have rendered delectable these celebrations.” He was talking half to the auburn-haired girl, half to the birdcage girl, totally to John Edward. “So. One pays one’s fee. One receives a machine so subtle that it is in a card contained. One attends. When wishes, one absents. That, too, is good. One returns at the time of absenting.”

  “Damned good,” the Englishman put in, “for sweating up conversational crushers. You’ve all the time in the world. If you’ve got the card.”

  “I don’t,” John Edward said.

  “Didn’t think you had, really.”

  The birdcage woman, who no longer had a birdcage in her hair, but wore instead chaste coiled braids, said: “The card lets you sparkle as a wit—be Queen of Diamonds. And it’s a Chance card, because when you leave, you Go to Jail out there.” She drew John Edward’s hands to her until they were cupping her breasts. “Do you like my Community Chest?”

  “Very much,” John Edward said. The auburn-haired girl stood up and waved her glass, shouting, “Everybody’s under temporal arrest!” No one paid any attention.

  “High cost for cardholders,” the Tibetan continued. “Oh, high cost. Others selected for interesting people, as I. Or look nice.” He made a little bow toward the (ex)birdcage woman.

  Who said to John Edward: “Would you in the dark?”

  “Yes, but it’s better with a nightlight.”

  “Or candle,” said the Tibetan.

  The auburn-haired girl: “Or with a bar sign outside. I was born under Aquarius, but conceived over the sign of the Pig and Whistle.” John Edward watched her hair to see if it had changed, but it had not.

  “Under a blanket at noon,” the Englishman said. “Had a Belgian girl up to my room at Shepheard’s like that once. I was on Allenby’s staff then …”

  “Many are tulpas,” remarked the man from the Farther Stars, who was passing by once again, and seemed to remember with gratitude the light the Tibetan had given him. “At least ten percent.” (His voice was water dashing against stone.)

  “But would you in the dark?” the braided-haired blond woman continued to John Edward. “If I asked you.”

  He nodded.

  “A Belgian girl,” the Englishman continued. “Refugee. Didn’t know if the Boche would ever be out of Belgium—none of us did then—and would do anything. The colonel one night and the sergeant the next. She’s saving you, m’boy. Going to save your bacon—save your sausage. Ha ha!” He hit John Edward on the shoulder.

  “What’s a tulpa?” the auburn-haired girl asked the Tibetan.

  “For a little while,” the blond woman said. Her hair was straight now, the style John Edward liked best, but it seemed a trifle too young for her. “Not anything that would disgust you, darling.”

  He stared at her, uncomprehending.

  “Ten years. Ten little years, darling. That’s nothing. With all they can do now—and I have money, darling—it’s less than nothing. In the dark, sweetheart, promise.”

  The Englishman said: “He’s a tulpa, old girl. Why bother. A nice chap, but a tulpa. I knew at once. Look at those shoulders. See how regular his features are? Handsome devil, eh? Not greasy at least, like so many of them.”

  “What’s a tulpa?” the auburn-haired girl asked John Edward.

  “I don’t know.” John Edward turned to the Englishman. “What do you mean, when you say she’s saving me?”

  “For her old age, you idiot. You flick off the lights and she flicks out for a quarter century or so. Then when no lover will have her, back she comes. One doesn’t know in the dark, eh? Not unless the gal’s been gone a devil of a long time.”

  “Please,” the blond woman said to the Englishman. “You didn’t have to.”

  “The chap’s a tulpa, I tell you. If that’s what you want, you can get an adept to stir one up for you anytime.”

  “But don’t you understand? I knew him when I was young.”

  “Certain lamas,” the Tibetan was telling t
he auburn-haired girl, “learn siddhis to flesh images from mind-stuff. Much same as ghosts, but never lived. Has been stolen and perverted in West, as all things.”

  “Can’t understand how the blasted Chinese could conquer your country if you could do that,” the Englishman said. “Inexhaustible armies.”

  The man from the Farther Stars, who was leaning over the auburn-haired girl’s shoulder now (and peeking down her dress, John Edward thought), moved his head rhythmically from side to side. “Sunspots,” he said. “Sunspots destroy tulpas.”

  John Edward said, “But between—”

  The man from the Farther Stars continued to shake his head. “Always sunspots on the sun, sun-where.”

  The auburn-haired girl stood up, ducking from under his white marble chin. “I’m going to be sick,” she said. “Take me to a lavatory.”

  She was looking at John Edward, and he stood too, and took her hand, saying, “This way.” He had not the least idea where he was, and discovered that the end table beyond the sofa was a rosebush. They were in the garden. Sober up, he thought, trying to give himself orders. Sober up, sober up, straighten out. Find a restroom.

  The auburn-haired girl said, “At least we’re away from those terrible people.”

  “Aren’t you really sick?”

  “Oh, yes I’m sick. Oh, Lord, am I.” She was clinging to his arm. “And drunk. Am I drunk. Are they staring at me? I can’t even tell.”

  The ramp of the airship was in front of them. There would be bathrooms on that; there would have to be.

  “The last time my hair went in the toilet. Will you hold it up for me? You can lie down with me afterwards. I want to lie down afterwards; I want to go to bed.”

  Somewhere a cock crowed.

  It could not be heard, of course. It was a hundred miles away, out in the country. But it crowed, and the sun came up, and people went out like candles in the wind.