by Gene Wolfe
The stocky one said, “I’ll give you your last chance now. Do you have the book?”
Naturally I said, “What book is that?”
“The book Conrad Coldbrook gave his sister here.”
I shook my head.
“But you know about it.”
“I believe she mentioned a book. The Lantern in the Library? I think that was the one. An excellent book! I’ve read it.”
That was when Colette tried to run to the door. She nearly made it, but the tall one grabbed her from behind before she could get it open. Somebody jumped on his back and got an arm around his neck—and that is all that I remember.
I said “somebody” because I cannot remember deciding to do it. I cannot remember doing it, either, but I know somebody did. Somebody, not me. I was standing nice and quiet in front of the couch.
By and by my arms were behind me. I could not move them forward no matter how much I wanted to rub the side of my head. Colette was off to my left, her hands tied with white stuff and held behind the back of her ebonite dining-room chair. She was naked. When I finally looked away, scared that she could see my reflection and I was embarrassing her, it soaked through to me that I was naked, too.
I am not sure what I said then, but this is close. “It was nice of them not to gag us. I don’t suppose it will do much good to shout for help.”
Colette did not say a word. As far as I could tell, she was staring straight ahead, and tears were trickling down her cheeks.
“Soundproofed, no doubt. Otherwise they would have killed us.”
“Yes. It’s very good.” She spoke so softly that I could scarcely hear her.
“Have they gone?” I was taking care not to look at her anymore, afraid that she would be looking right at what might happen if I did.
“Yes. They ransacked the whole place. Where did you put it?”
“I didn’t put it anywhere. I thought you intended to destroy it.”
She worked her chair around until she could stare at me for a moment, then managed a brave smile. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I don’t believe I can free myself,” I told her, “but if you’ll permit it, I may be able to free you. I’m afraid I’ll have to break this chair to do it, though.”
She stared.
“Have I your permission?”
“Can you? Go right ahead, if you can.”
My legs had been tied to the legs of the chair, and the chair legs were not braced with rungs. I could not describe all the contortions I went through trying to put as much stress as I could on the spindly front legs of my own chair, but eventually one snapped. Five minutes later I got the other one. That was the only time in either life that I have wanted to be fatter than I am.
With them broken, I was able to shake free of the rest of the chair and walk into the kitchen. They had searched it, and their search had included throwing a set of ceramic-bladed steak knives onto the floor. I found one whose blade had not broken, and by kneeling and bending down I was able to grab the figured naturewood handle between my teeth. I had not expected it to be easy to cut through the strips of stout cloth that held Colette’s hands; but that steak knife was sharp, and it was not as difficult as I had been afraid it might be.
She rubbed her hands and slapped them together, muttering cuss words (including a couple that were new to me) and rubbed and slapped them again.
“You cut me a little.” She stopped to lick one of her cuts.
I said, “I couldn’t help it.”
“I suppose not. You couldn’t see what you were doing, could you?”
“No. Not at all.”
“They’re listening to us. Maybe watching us, too. How long will it be before they come through that door again?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think they will.”
“Really? Did they find it?”
I shrugged again.
“You went into my kitchen.”
I admitted I had, and explained that I had forgotten her rule.
“We’ll forget about that this time, but not next time.” Colette paused. Then, “I think I can get you loose now.”
And she did. We found our clothes and dressed, and after that she wanted me to help her move the furniture to barricade the door. I told her to wait.
Half to herself she muttered, “I suppose you want to screen the police.”
I shook my head. “They’d want the book, and arrest you when you couldn’t produce it.”
For a few seconds, she digested that. Then she said, “I don’t see how they got around that lock. Those locks are terribly sophisticated.”
“So are our friends.” I sat down on the divan and rubbed my head.
“I suppose.”
“Five hundred years ago, you would have had an iron bar you could drop into brackets. Anybody who wanted to get in would have to demolish your door with an ax. Today we’re very clever, but someone more clever still can get in easily.”
“Are you sick?”
I shook my head. “Just tired. I want to take whatever you’ve got for headaches.”
Leaning very close, she whispered, “Where did you put it, Ern?”
I shook my head again.
“I know I gave you a bedroom and a bed, but can I get you to sleep out here? And make noise if they come in to wake me up? You’ll have to sleep on the divan.”
“They won’t come back, but I’ll be delighted to sleep here if it is your wish. I need to ask you about laundry facilities, however. In the basement?”
“That’s right, and you’ll need a card. Would you like me to take you down?”
“That won’t be necessary. Or at least, I hope it won’t. Can you lend me a robe?”
“One of mine? I’ll be happy to, but I’m going to come with you; I’d have to lend you my card—you’ll need a card to get into the laundry room and operate the universals. Are you going to clean that suit?”
“Not unless you think it needs it.”
“It doesn’t. That shirt doesn’t have to be pressed, does it?”
I shook my head.
“Then the whole thing should take ten minutes or so. You’ll want to strip in your room. Wait a minute and I’ll find a robe for you.”
I waited, then retreated to Colette’s spare bedroom carrying a woman’s filmy robe with white roses and purple morning glories all over it. In there I took off my shirt, undershirt, socks, and briefs. I put my trousers and shoes back on, slipped into the robe, and told Colette I was all set to go.
As I had expected, each tenant had a locked bin for dirty clothing. “Now I have to borrow your card,” I told Colette. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not.” Unnecessarily, she pointed out the bin with her apartment number. “Your things should be in there.”
“No, yours.” I unlocked the bin.
“Some of mine, yes; but I usually do laundry once a week. There’s no need to do mine now.”
I was reaching into the bin. When I found Murder on Mars, I held it up.
Colette’s eyes widened and her mouth shaped a little round O.
I touched my finger to my lips. Her mouth formed the words “the chute,” and I nodded. The woman’s robe she had loaned me had a big pocket on each side, each of them plenty big enough to hold the book.
She shut her door that night, but she did not block it with furniture the way she had wanted to block the door of her apartment; doing it would have made a good deal of noise, and even though I listened for it I heard nothing. When I was dead certain she had gone to bed, I stripped again, took a shower, and moved the thin cushions from the couch onto the floor. That made it as much like my shelf in the library as anybody could want. Probably you know that after the library closes, we sleep on mats that we roll up and push to the back of the shelf during the day.
Right here it would be handy to say that I was dog tired and fell asleep at once—handy but a big lie. This new softer mat, with me stretching from corner to corner, was too new. Ditto t
he long lending. Colette had checked me out for ten days, which I had thought hard-rock unlikely. I had never been checked out for more than a couple of days. I had heard a few of us talk about a week or even two weeks, but I had never more than half believed any of it. Rose Romain the romance writer once told me she had kept tabs on three of her friends, and none of them had ever been out for more than five days. Now it seemed like Colette’s estimate had been crazy short. I got up and got my jacket out of the closet to look at the card I had put in the pocket: July thirtieth. Right. Before six o’clock that day, I was supposed to say good-bye if I could get away and go back to the library.
But tomorrow both of us would leave Spice Grove and flitter southeast to New Delphi to look at the Coldbrook house and quiz the expert who’d opened her father’s safe. Sooner or later we would come back here—or anyway, we had better.
What if we were grabbed again? Would we ever get loose? Both of us? Alive?
After worrying about all this and a couple of dozen other things for what seemed like an hour, I got up, got my book from the pocket of the robe Colette had loaned me, and read myself to sleep.
Only to dream about wrestling a monster with a man’s head at one end and an ape’s at the other end, and one hell of a lot of arms. This desperate struggle was in a grave thinly disguised as a wormhole through Mars. A wormhole that was already starting to flood. I guess they have a lot of water on Mars, when you are dreaming.
When I woke up it was nearly morning and I was soaked with sweat.
4
HER FATHER’S HOUSE
Somehow I had assumed a city house. It may only have been that in my time—I mean in the time of the earlier me, in my first life—there was not much land where new building was allowed. Anyway this house where the Coldbrook family had lived was not even close to the actual city of New Delphi. When Colette pointed it out, I asked her to circle it a couple times so that I could get a better picture of the house and the countryside around it. The house was supermodern and shiny as a new ground car, but you could see it was not really all that new. Built forty-three years ago was what she said, and added to and altered ever since. I counted four floors in some places but only one or two in a couple of additions. Scattered around it were a hangar, a barn, a garage, and some other outbuildings that were anybody’s guess. There was a walled garden, too. Seeing it from the air like that I did not realize how badly the garden had been neglected.
“You and your brother grew up here?” I asked.
“Not exactly.” She banked and dipped, bringing our racy little flitter closer to the house. “I was fourteen, I think, when we moved in. Conrad, Junior—we generally called him Cob or Cobby back then—would have been about sixteen, I suppose. Sixteen or seventeen.”
“Did you like it?”
“Not as much as Mother did. My father really bought it for her. She was … not social. Not a bad person or even an unfriendly one; but other people, even people she knew and liked, stressed her out.” Colette paused. “Do you understand what I mean?”
I had to admit that she had lost me.
“Well, after dinner the men would generally sit around the table, have another glass of wine, and talk. And the women would clear things away and feed the dishes to the washer. Sometimes Cob and I would help with that. Then they’d go into the music room or in nice weather out into the garden. Only Mother wouldn’t be there. It would generally be half an hour or so before anybody noticed. Nobody’d know where she’d gone or when, but she wouldn’t be with the others.”
“What about you?” I was trying to picture it. “Would you stay with the women?”
Slowly, Colette nodded. “Pretty often I did, or else go up to my room to watch some show or do my homework. My room was on the second floor. So was Cob’s, and I’ve been trying to decide whether I could bear seeing it again. All right if I land now?”
She did. The little red flitter’s cabin split, spreading its little red wing; and we drifted down on the wind like a maple leaf in the fall. I had never flown a flitter or even flown in one back then, and I had a hunch that I was going to have to fly that one before long; so I had been watching everything Colette was doing and trying to learn, following every motion. Once we had landed and recombined, and were taxiing over to the hangar, I asked, “Wouldn’t the autopilot do all that for you?”
“The screen? Yes, of course. But if you only do the easy parts, it takes a lot of fun out of flying. I like knowing that if the screen failed, I could do everything myself. I—well, sometimes I teach my students myself, Ern. The eds could do everything for me, all the teaching, but my job is to make them want to learn, and sometimes my own teaching helps. Then they know I know it—or that’s how it seems to me. Since I’ve learned it, they can, too, and they should. Do you understand? Understand a little bit at least?”
I said, “We’re like that, I believe. I mean people like me, people who belong to libraries or museums, or to you fully humans.” For a minute I shut up, trying to spit my foot out of my mouth. “Does it bother you when I call us ‘people’? If it does, I apologize.”
“Not in the slightest.” She stopped our flitter in front of the hangar, and its engine ceased to purr. “What are you getting at?”
“You fully humans have our books already, and our books are better than we are. Better than we can be, really. But what the books give you is one thing and what we can give you is another. You’ve got A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, and a lot more. David Copperfield and Bleak House and in fact just about everything Charles Dickens wrote. But you don’t have Charles Dickens. You would spend a lot now if you could get his DNA and one scan, but if you were willing to spend a hundred times that much you still couldn’t get them. You’d like to ask him how he really felt about Kate, and about that actress. How he had intended to finish Edwin Drood—and so would I.”
She grinned at me as she pulled up in front of the hangar. “You understand what I mean, or at least I think you do. I could make love to a joyboy. It would be warm and handsome and do everything I wanted, and it would tell me over and over how beautiful I am and how much it loved me. But they’re not the same as a real lover.” She got out easily and skillfully, and I followed. “They’re for women who can’t get a real lover, or at least can’t get one they like.”
I had heard of joyboys, and I nodded. “There must be a lot of those.”
“There are.” We got out in front of the hangar. “I’d put our flitter in here if it weren’t locked, but it’s sure to be. There may be a card in the house. Keep an eye out when we get inside.”
“I certainly will,” I promised. I pushed the button next to the door. “You have a card for the house, don’t you, Colette?”
“To get us in? Of course. I wouldn’t have come here without one.”
“Is it possible that your card might open this hangar, too?”
For a moment, she stared. “You know, I never thought of that. The hangar was hardly ever locked when all of us lived here.”
“I’ve never seen the interior of a hangar,” I told her. “I’d like to see it.”
“I’m not certain this will work.” She was rummaging in her shaping bag. “It won’t open the fourth-floor doors, but it’s worth a try.”
She waved her card at the lock, and the green light flashed; I pushed the button again, and the big hangar door slid smoothly upward.
“Well, I’ll—you’ll have to move, Ern. I want to taxi in.”
I did. There were two sleek flitters in the hangar already, one shiny black and the other bright yellow; both were quite a bit bigger than Colette’s. Peeking through their windows I could see they had six seats instead of two, and I believe they may have had a longer range and that they could carry more baggage. How much money had it taken for a family to have three flitters? The black one for Colette’s father, the yellow one for her brother, and the little red one for Colette? I did not know then and I do not know now, but it must have been a lot.
“Come on. I’m glad you find this interesting, but I want to show you the house.”
“And I want to see it.” I followed her out of the hangar and closed the door.
A broad, paved path led from the hangar to a rear door of the house. “This is the kitchen,” Colette said as she stepped inside. “The ’bot can fix us some lunch after we’ve seen the house.”
I remembered a great many kitchens, but I had never learned my way around a modern one. The room was wide and bright, with butter-yellow walls and a faint odor not so much suggestive of food as of vegetables and fruits laid out for sale. Somehow I had thought I would recognize the stove, the refrigerator, and so forth, which shows you just how dumb I can be.
Colette wanted to know whether I was hungry, and I shook my head.
“I doubt that you’ll find anything in here,” she said, “and the ’bot will whip up something when we want to eat.” I did not reply, and she added, “You can look around if you want to.”
I said I might do that later, but right now I wanted to see her father’s study. I did not tell her how badly I wanted to see it, but it was a lot.
“And the safe, I’ll bet. It’s in there.”
I nodded and kept my mouth shut.
“We can go this way or that way.” Colette pointed to the doors. “This way’s the formal dining room. It’s two floors high, with skylights, very impressive. It seats…” She paused to consider. “Twenty-two, I believe. That was where we entertained two or three times a year.”
I nodded to show I understood.
“The other way’s the sunroom. That’s where the family ate, mostly. It’s long and kind of narrow. An artist told me once the proportions were off, but I like it. All windows on one side—it faces south—and a long wall on the other with framed family pictures. You can tap them and get a lecture, and sometimes the people will start talking. You know the kind of thing, I’m sure.”
“Not intimately,” I told her.
“Which way do you want to go?”
“The sunroom, of course.”
She nodded and led the way. It was long, bright, and cheerful, as she had hinted, with a small table for meals—four chairs—and other chairs with side tables scattered around for reading or conversation. Here was Colette’s father, unsmiling, with a bony, unhandsome face and intelligent eyes.
