Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe

by Bill Fawcett

  “Your mother used to ask the same way when she was alive.”

  “Yeah, and she’s still alive. But you know why she can’t come here.” As I said it, I wondered if it was true.

  “That key won’t help you get what you seek. That’s not worth knowing. Only what I have written here. On some paper towels, if you’d help me look.” He gestured at the small table in front of him, laid out with clean towels and a large safety cup. His bookshelf, filled with some of his hardcovers, was almost within reach from his wheeled seat. “Roy—it’s all you need.”

  I ignored that. I saw where he was pointing, to the bits of crumpled paper between two volumes. Despite myself I reached out to retrieve and straighten it. “Did you put that there?”

  “I think we could say Sol or Mithras, but since it hasn’t been published yet, we can change it. I need to summon the spirit, not the letter. That’s harder, isn’t it?”

  I knew what he was talking about; I had seen his scrawled work weeks ago, and further, I knew its source. “I’m sorry, pops.” I couldn’t tell him that any historian would know in a few seconds. There was no solar cult in Rome until five centuries later; his allusions were getting less consistent.

  Yet the imp of the perverse grabbed me, and I glanced down despite myself.

  The sun reflected off the waters of Hiberus, and it suffused everything with such an inviting glow that I wanted to bathe in its warmth. The image was stuck in my head as surely as the knowledge that I am a soldier of the Great King. Senator Hadrianus Drusus had taken me to his apartment, and though he believed himself a clever man, I could see that he was trying to position me in a way to make the most of my talents—whatever he believed them to be.

  It was a small and mostly tidy place for someone who had identified himself as a senator of the republic. His voice was not fast, yet there was something not entirely languorous in him. “We are not a greedy people, you know. Life is getting better—and we can make it even more so.”

  “This ‘we’ you speak of,” I interposed, “is it this city, the eagle’s hordes? Or is this you and your friends? Or the two of us?” I would not be spoken to as a slave by this man—not anymore.

  Cautus had bared his teeth at the bridge, where the scarred girl had left us and Hadrianus had first called to me. Though I could not remember how he had responded to everyone, I knew that Cautus loved me. And for a while after that I had been distracted by the maiden with the sheath of grain, as she whispered in my ear that I was blessed by Asopus. Yet all that was behind me for now, and I had accepted Hadrianus’s offer to accompany him to his nearby residence.

  Hadrianus aimed a crooked leer at me. “You are a young and handsome man, and we have heard about the way you handled those plebes. I thought, here, this is what we have sought so long. I want to take you to a man named Aelius in the city, where we will see many things.”

  “It was not because they were plebes—” But I could not finish, for it was fading. For an instant on the road today, the woman with the grain had made me feel good as she brushed against me, but when she had mentioned it would be many and many years before she married the sun, I felt nothing but a bitter cold.

  That dread had carried me through the ambush, Cautus mauling along with us, until our inexplicable attackers were routed. We had little of value, and it made no sense, neither to me nor to those others with more context. Hadrianus handed me these scraps to write upon, saying that he was familiar with my pro cess and that I must find time to write. Then he continued.

  “Lucius Brutus was a great man. My older brother spoke of him often, revered him, and loved him for all that he embodied. But the Tarquins were great in their way, too, the old ways. Remember them? You might be old enough. I do, my father did. Tarquinius Superbus had real power. That cuckold Lucius Collatinus rode a bad situation to great success like any man with little talent in the right place at the right time. But Lucius Brutus was the one who saw beyond the surface.”

  I nodded, though I had little idea where this would go. “You see, Brutus in an instant twisted the oracle’s words to his own ends and the ends of Rome, but even he did not foresee that these plebes would be dissatisfied with an all patrician consul.”

  “I have little to do with that.” Cautus was sniffing at something in the corner. He had become used to the apartment now, though I could not remember if he was normally comfortable in such tight surroundings.

  “But you will have something to do with it.” At that point Cautus had pulled up the screaming woman from the corner altar as if from nowhere, the space between her legs and the gash in her throat a bloody mess.

  Hadrianus ignored her completely, and I tried to do the same. Her face was marred with an angry red stain, that much was clear, and I was thankful that soon, all too soon, I would forget it. Yet her wails stirred something inside me.

  “You see the plebes as your enemies, though you are from the same city. They see you as oppressors, I think. One can never vanquish an enemy if he does not stand in his place, for a time.”

  Hadrianus’s leer turned into a genuine smile then. “So you shall, then. You will stand in their place.” He reached out his hand. “For me.”

  “You still believe this stuff— that you found it?” I asked. “That you wrote all that?” I pointed to the shelf. Suddenly inspiration struck me. “Do you remember anything? About Rome? About your wife? What’s the earliest thing you remember?”

  At that question, his eyes shone blue in that little dark room, its cheap tiled floors and unused TV perennially silent, for this man had no use for the trappings of modern times, only for that which was long gone, sealed away in his scarred head.

  “I wake.” He paused for a second, as if he considered stopping. But he continued, and I had not seen his eyes so blue in many years, or the skin on his forehead look less angry. “I run down the hall to see my grandmother in the kitchen. The light from the window suffuses everything in an interminable glow, the sun blurring the physical limits of the sill or the table and even my grandmother herself. I see the large pot of water on the stove. She places it in a basin and begins to heat another, and another after that. And she turns to me, and the hot water for my bath is ready, heated up with painstaking care, for we had no hot water. Pot by pot, heated and emptied, the purifying wholeness of love, love, love, bathed in that impossible light.” He looked down at his legs in that binding chair, averting his increasingly reddened eyes. “When it is time for me to run down another hallway into the dark, she will be there with that love, to wash me clean again.”

  That oversized white mustache he insists on keeping glistened with moisture, though he had never worn one for the entirety of his youth. It looked oddly out of place on that emaciated frame, with those hollow cheeks.

  “But sometimes I remember other things than that,” he said, and when he looked up, his eyes were dark once more, hidden in the shadows created by his brow.

  “Like the war, on guard duty. We had been fighting, boxing. He was a lot bigger, you know, and strong. But he was afraid, when it was time to relieve me on guard duty, because there are some things that can take away all those advantages. All I had to do was say he did not answer the challenge. I hid behind the ammunitions dump, and tapped him on the shoulder as he walked by. He thought I was going to kill him, Barkis did. Barker, I mean. He had flattened me rather badly, you know. Syngman had just released thirty-four thousand prisoners, they said. Even if it was two-thirds that number, that many enemies behind your lines is a nightmare. Around that time a carrier plane with more than a hundred men on R&R had crashed. It was alive in the air. It’s funny what you remember so clearly, from so long ago. It doesn’t even seem like you could have been there. I could have killed him, you know; it happened all the time. An accident.”

  “Yeah, there was an accident. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Do you remember Eleanor? She is helping me work on this, and I need to get it resolved. It’s wearing on me, Grandpa. I feel like you look. And
don’t you want to shave? It will make you feel better.”

  “Why? That’s why the time was right, you know. Everything was better. The whole world was at peace. That’s what He was waiting for, to instantiate into temporality.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Sure. In a manger with the stinking beasts. You know the sun cult is like at least a five- hundredyear anachronism in your little notes, right?”

  Then he smiled, and paraphrased one of his insidious hymns at me. “A thousand ages are but an instant gone.”

  “Yeah. Gram’s gone, too, Grandpa, and you need to let me know why.”

  He wouldn’t answer me, and I knew that I was wasting my time, that he would just sit there and begin to glare, as he had every week after the initial success. But did he really forget that we had spoken of this over and over?

  I asked him a few more questions but was met only with silence. He did not complain when I walked out with his garbage napkins in my hands.

  “Eleanor, you have to understand what caused it; the accident had him bleeding in multiple places inside his brain. Even back then some days he wasn’t the same. But he was lucid afterwards, it’s only lately he’s like this.”

  She was sitting at her home office desk, her mute little Chihuahua sitting placidly, staring up with love from her lap. Or with something. Maybe it was obedience. I wondered if it was mute, or just scared to disturb her.

  “Sweetie, if you ever want to see this money, if you want to be able to know what they were really doing there and get those documents released that the company has sealed, we need a competent witness. A witness to what happened to your grandmother and to the state of the study. Tone, you sure your mother won’t come forward?”

  I looked at the red of her lips as she spoke, and remembered the way she had leaned against me those months ago, pretending to trip ever so slightly in that oldest of fashions, though there was little else I could see that was very old-fashioned about her.

  “We can’t get that old man in as a reliable witness. Can you imagine when they ask him to identify himself?” As I said it, a picture of the thin twisted man hobbling up there with his thin twisted cane, repeating his name for the record, and the travesty that would follow.

  “So does he forget? Is that what his association is?” Eleanor’s face was placid, but I remembered her last week in the throes of what should have been passion between us, and felt her claws once again along my back.

  “He pretends to forget, I think. I don’t know why they were there, both of them. He said it was the last remnants of the followers of some ancient cult, but his scholarship is shoddy, second-rate. He was always full of crap; his life sounded like a circus if you believe his nonsense. Then it got even worse. But the problem was—” Here I paused, trying to take in the way her hands caressed the Chihuahua’s head, but still held it contained, so that its movements were restricted. I wondered if it was content.

  I repeated myself when she looked up at me. “The problem was his partner really was a genius, whatever it was they were working on. My grandfather had biochemistry experience, but he was a scientific joke. But the partner was something else, a real prodigy. I don’t know, stopping cell death, reprogramming the cellular limits of reproduction without inducing unlimited growth, animating dead tissue. It was kind of mystical. Nobody really liked the idea, or messing much with it. They had sampled natural specimens globally—with some anomalous results. They claimed there was some naturally occurring substance in the area that had catalyzed a mutation—one that resembled what they sought to reproduce in the lab. It wasn’t in a modern church or anything, but certainly an older part of Rome they were looking in. Even digging. And that’s where the argument started.”

  I knew Eleanor would not be interested in that—she had other concerns here—ones I happened to share. All that he had hinted to me in our correspondence before his trips and in the incoherent babbling when he would almost nap, but in his most lucid moments he had been extremely tight-lipped.

  The Chihuahua bit at her fingers, but I could see it had no teeth, and for some reason that fact filled me with dread. I pulled my own fingers into the pockets of my jacket, and the ache in my eyes suddenly made me pull out the napkin there, and toss it toward the small basket at the end of her desk.

  The dog looked to the movement excitedly, its tail beating even faster, maybe longing for a chance to search through the trash. I was tired of rifling through grandfather’s trash.

  “It might have been futile research, baby, but you need to keep your eyes on getting what should have always been yours. It’s justice.” Yet she didn’t look directly at me.

  “Do you think I can get a shower here?” I suddenly felt I needed the hot water to clear my eyes for the drive I would obviously be taking to my own apartment soon.

  “Not tonight, it’s a mess. You have to go talk to him again, and again, until he tells you something you can use.”

  I knew she was right, but I wished then that I wasn’t doing it for her. And I knew her shower was very far from a mess.

  Later, as I cried in my car, I realized I had been using his dirty napkins to wipe the tear streaks away.

  Antonius told me that the Crimson Men had called me Lewqys, but that they had left and that I must write again as I had before, though I did not have much room here. When I looked at Aelius I remembered that I could see through him, that he was not all there, but indeed, though transparent, there was something hidden. The boy Antonius was tow-headed, and the older woman with him was stern despite her painted face.

  “My father,” Antonius said, “has brought a Dacian here.”

  They were not slums, but the dwellings were far more humble than the ones Aelius had taken me to when he handed me off to Antonius.

  “He has fascinated some of my father’s friends with some talk. It is not only justice he speaks of, but something that will last a sight longer.” Antonius was speaking to me, but I could tell the woman Aenora had a hold on at least some of his focus.

  “And why would a Dacian have anything to do with the Eagle’s Republic?” I asked.

  “He speaks of man rising with the sun anew, and a paradise that will never, ever end.”

  Thus it was that as we walked, others joined us, the plebes. Some seemed to be well dressed and fed, others to be sun-browned and weary. The meeting house was of decent and sturdy quality, though I have not time to describe it here. We entered together, but dispersed throughout the seats. Aenora had tied Cautus about thirty yards away to a large tree, something I was at first concerned over but later had reason to rejoice.

  Antonius whispered to me as the crowd settled, while Aenora took her place at the front with the others. It was Antonius’s father who spoke for them.

  “Our consul has agreed that it is the moral responsibility of the republic to at least consider that nonpatricians may hold a yearly office, selected by those they will represent,” Antonius’s father began. Though he had seemed easy enough to read before, I could not tell what the boy thought of his father. “His peer is still reluctant to accede, but it is in the manner of Lucius Brutus, who fell and kissed the earth so that we would all rise up, that we too shall have a voice, perhaps even seats in the Senate. Our Dacian friend Isokrates has other matters to speak of, ones that I hope you consider. It would be foolish to look at things from only this worldy perspective we have adopted.”

  This Isokrates was a stout man, bearded and with a mottled and uneven swarthiness, but his voice was resonant and penetrating. At his neck, a golden boar-headed medallion hung suspended with a depiction of the sun.

  With a taper lit from a wall sconce, he lit a small censer that had been ignored behind the supposed leaders of the community. I do not have time to write what he said, nor space, though I knew it was important because the woman of the thread, who called herself Lachisis, came through the rear altar wall in rage. The Golden Man pushed her back.

  Worse things happened. Soldiers armed with pila and daggers ope
ned the rear doors to the meeting hall, and trained dogs burst through. In the confusion I saw Antonius’s father fall, and, as I moved close to Antonius to protect him, I saw Aenora behind the would-be representative, the bloody claw already disappearing in her robes and the smile on her face already subdued. I vowed to write it down as quickly as possible—as I have, at the risk of cutting out Isokrates’s rhetoric.

  When Grandfather had first come back, they had run a lot of tests on that skin infection. It was not malignant, and eventually we just assumed it was a discoloration or an innocuous condition. He had been acting strangely then, but when they finally found those bodies over there and a trial was scheduled, his stroke and eccentricities had postponed everything.

  Now it was light enough to see what he had written, which I had read before. I skimmed over the rest to the end. There, in the temple of the sun that had never been there, my grandfather always concluded the narrative he had rewritten at least twice already. What made me really irate about all this was that his insanity, so lucid, was based on a complete misreading of the source material.

  “A sphere is the most perfect shape,” I said to her, and she held that sphere in her hands, though her eyes were the eyes of a lioness.

  And Aelius, with the golden hair, the effulgent face so radiant—he stood near her, flickering away into her shadow. “You were right to treat Hadrianus as you did,” he said, “though he was my friend.”

  I nodded, and admitted then what I had feared to admit before, when Aelius had cast aside the fleshly appearance of a Senator and the plebian retaliation and the rise to arms had stopped dead before it could begin. Hadrianus had known they would trust me, and gambled that the consul would listen to him in forcefully putting them down.

  “Once I would have fought for him, or fought against him with the outraged. Now I don’t want to fight, not anymore. I spared him, though he did not beg for mercy.”