by Gene Wolfe
“Lara!”
“Yes, this is Laura. What can I do for you, sir?”
“Lara, it’s me.”
“I think you probably have the wrong number, sir,” Lara said cautiously. “This is Walsh Promotions. I’m Laura Nomos, Mr. Walsh’s attorney.”
He drew a deep breath. “I think you’re Lara Morgan.”
She hung up. He dialed the number again, and the telephone rang and rang in the imaginary offices of Walsh Promotions; but no one answered.
North came out, fresh and pink now from the shower, still buttoning a blue-striped shirt. “You want to go to the john or anything?”
He shook his head.
“Then let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“Let’s just say it’s to a little meeting with some friends of mine, to discuss our strategy.”
He stood up, smoothing his suit and straightening his tie, got his topcoat and made certain nothing had fallen out of the pockets. “Strategy for what?”
“For taking over the government of this crazy place, what the hell do you think? We need men, and some sort of guarantee that the army won’t move against us.” North picked up the two guns in their black leather holsters and buckled them on, one for each shoulder.
The Conspiracy
“Turn in the middle of the block,” North told him.
He turned and drove down a narrow, twisting alley like the one down which he had run from the mounted policeman. Different in one respect, however, for it was now night, and the alley was utterly dark except for the headlights of their car. Cats with shining green eyes slunk to one side, and once he had to leave the car to move a fallen garbage can out of their path.
The alley divided, then redivided again and yet again; and though he saw wider streets at the ends of some of its branches, North always directed him away from them. Soon he decided that North himself did not know where they were going, that North had probably jotted directions on a slip of paper that could now, in the darkness, no longer be consulted; that some whim of insane pride prevented North from using the overhead light or striking a match.
At last they halted behind several other cars and edged past them on foot to reach a narrow flight of concrete steps that led to a metal door. North pounded the door with his fists until it was opened by an old woman.
“You need a light out here,” North said.
“The bulb’s out,” the old woman replied. She seemed to be expecting them, and ushered them into a cramped room with grimy concrete walls.
A tall woman in a dirty white coat switched on several very bright lights there, lights so powerful that he closed his eyes for a moment. The tall woman inspected their faces and daubed them with powder. “I like that smile,” the tall woman murmured, and touched his lips with scarlet salve, then held up a mirror so he could inspect them. He rubbed one lip against the other, trying to get off as much as he could.
“I thought—” he began.
“You don’t understand how they do things here,” North told him. “It wouldn’t do for us to look as if we’d just walked in off the street.”
“It certainly wouldn’t,” the tall woman agreed, and bustled about, touching their faces here and there with a pencil.
He heard voices from outside the room, and once there was a noise like the rumbling of distant thunder; girls and men passed to and fro, shadowy forms in a shadowy corridor. When the tall woman had nearly finished, he glimpsed the shambling silhouette of a bear.
“Here we go,” North told him. “Just follow me.”
The shadowy corridor led to a brilliantly lit room in which four men sat around a painted wooden table. One wore a rumpled uniform; two were dressed in suits, as if for work in an office; the remaining man, whose room it appeared to be, was in yellow pajamas and a maroon bathrobe. Half a minute or more had passed before he realized that the room was a great deal larger than it appeared, that only this end of it (which was perhaps much less than half) was lit, and that there were watchers in the darkness beyond the light.
The man in uniform spoke to North, briefly explaining what had been said before he and North had arrived. It seemed clear he wanted North to lead them, equally clear that he would resent any leader.
North said, “We can not only fight injustice; we can win. But only if every one of you and everyone involved in the whole movement is willing to do exactly as he’s told, and suffer the consequences if he doesn’t. A thing like this attracts a lot of dilettantes; but dilettantes are of no use to it. We must have disciplined men, and they must discipline themselves. Is there anyone here who wouldn’t be willing to eliminate the man next to him if I told him that man had failed us?”
He started to protest, but the man in uniform was already replying: “There isn’t one man here who wouldn’t be willing to eliminate himself if he failed.”
“A man like that would not have failed us,” North told him. “A man like that is strong, and it is through strength—and only through strength—that we can win. You may think the government is strong and we’re weak; but you’re wrong. The government is huge and rich, but it isn’t strong. Its massive limbs are bound by ten thousand cords, too fine for your eyes to see. They’re tied by religion and morality, and by the need to look moral and religious even when real religion and actual morality point in the other direction. They’re tied too by filthy businesses and rackets and hack politicians who’ve each bought their own little pieces of turf. When the government begins—too late!—to move against us, you’ll see just how clumsy and ineffective it really is. And the stronger we get, the weaker it will be. Strength is God! What is God, but the thing that grants our prayers? It is Strength that grants all prayers, that makes it possible for a nation or a man to do what he wants.”
There was scattered applause from the darkened part of the room.
“What about this man with you, sir?” the man in the yellow pajamas asked. “Can he be trusted?” Older than the rest, this man was thick-waisted and white-haired; his voice was deep and gelatinous, as if it proceeded from the bottommost cavities of lungs choked with fat.
“No! No man can be trusted. You know that better than any of us—but when we betray our trust we die. We have been taught all our lives—taught by them—to think of that as our weakness. I tell you that it is our strength! We are supernatural beings chained by beings merely natural, and we must not turn our backs on the hand of God within us. We are a sacred band of brothers, and when every one of us knows that, we will be unconquerable!”
A curtain of thick, purple plush fell between the lighted part of the room and the dark. From the other side of it came the noise like distant thunder that he had heard earlier. The men at the table rose, the two in suits taking off their hats and wiping their faces. A balding man in shirtsleeves looked into the room. “Curtain call! One bow, everybody. One bow.”
North took his right hand, the fat man his left. The man in uniform took North’s right hand, and the two who wore suits separated so that there was one at each end of the line. Like so many children playing a game, they went through a break in the curtain and bowed—North twice—to an audience they could barely see.
“It’s working,” North told him when they were back in the shadowy corridor. “You heard them.”
“I thought you meant it. I thought you really were going to overthrow the government.”
“We are. This is how you start getting your ideas across to people. It’s the same where we come from.”
The man in shirtsleeves appeared, waving a slip of paper. “If you want to sit out front, here’s two together. Your next call’s at ten sharp. I’ve written it down here.”
North glanced at the paper and muttered thanks. “Come on, there’s a passage around the seating area, where the fire exits are. I used to work here before they put me in that place.”
Their seats were only three rows from the stage. He wanted to ask North if there was popcorn, though he knew that popcorn was only in m
ovie theaters. Or at least that in the real world it was sold only in movie theaters. He felt that Lara was in the theater somewhere, and if he could only find some excuse to leave his seat he might meet her.
A slight, blond girl came on stage carrying a stool and an instrument that seemed to be a cross between an electric guitar and a balalaika. She sat down on the stool and played, singing a song about pirates; as she sang, three swarthy pirates danced silently behind her. One had a black patch over one eye, one a steel hook to replace a missing hand, and one a wooden leg; the one with the wooden leg accompanied her on the concertina and danced too, his leg beating the air like the stick of a witch’s broom. When the pirate ship lay half a cable from its victim, the rolling of the broadsides filled the theater and the three dancers seemed to have become fifty.
“It was kind of sad, wasn’t it?” North whispered. “Her out there all alone. They didn’t like her much either. An act like that’s better in a supper club.”
A piano was wheeled on stage, and an old woman who might have been a scrubwoman anywhere played “L’isle Joyeuse.” The name was lettered on a card. He closed his eyes to listen to the music, conscious that though he had done nothing but hang around the hotel room he was very tired. The dancing pirates became harlequins and harlequinas, their ship long-prowed and slender with strangely shaped sails. He had seen such figures and such a ship somewhere, perhaps in a picture or on a painted screen in Furniture.
Though he could not see her through his eyelids, Lara had stepped from the piano. He knew it almost at once, opened his eyes, and sat up; she had already left the stage. He stood up. When North grabbed his sleeve, he muttered, “I’m getting sick,” and rushed down the aisle and into the empty passageway behind the exits.
To his surprise, it was empty no longer; a tall, unsmiling man was stationed before each of the fire doors. None spoke or moved to stop him; but he had the feeling they would, if he had tried to leave the theater.
He ran backstage instead, certain that Lara had gone there, exiting stage right or stage left as they said, and that she had not come down into the audience.
It was as dark as ever, though he felt that the melody of the old woman’s piano, the shining, sparkling notes, should have illuminated it—for it seemed to him that the crystal prisms of some priceless old chandelier had been turned to birds, and the birds set free. Cheered by this light, by which he could almost see, he flung open a door and saw the bear. It rose growling on its hind legs, and though it was muzzled and chained, he felt a sudden thrill of fear.
“Here you are,” the man in shirtsleeves said. “I thought you were going to miss your cue.” He closed the door.
“No, no,” he said. “I can’t do that again.” He tried to explain about Lara.
“You had a dream, my friend,” the man in shirtsleeves told him. “That’s all it was—Madame was playing out there, and you had a little nap.”
He said, “Even if it was just a dream, I’ve got to look. Even if there’s only one chance in a million, because it’s the only chance I’ve got.”
“No, even if it wasn’t a dream, you have to go on tonight. Klamm’s here—the President’s advisor, one of the most important men in the whole country.”
“Klamm?” he asked. “I talked to him once on the phone, but that man was German.”
The man in shirtsleeves looked at him with new respect. “That’s right, Klamm’s German.”
“I didn’t think the President would have a German advisor.”
North walked past them rapidly without looking at either of them.
“Klamm’s an immigrant, but very high up in the government. Now you have to go on. He’s in the box on your left.”
He tried to protest, but the man in shirtsleeves shoved him toward the stage. “If I see your Lara, I’ll send her on, make her part of the play. That’s a promise.”
North was already entering. He followed, trying to look like a plotter but feeling his face pale with shock. He had lost the gray hat somewhere; he could not remember where.
The stage had changed. The man in uniform lay on a cot covered with a thin blanket. “And so you see.”
“I’ve seen it before,” North said.
He wanted to look for Lara in the audience, for Klamm in his box, but the lights blinded him. He felt that his first impression had been correct, that they were in a basement room, that it was the theater that was illusion, not the play. I’ve been an actor in a play all my life, he thought, and not known my lines. The only difference is that I know it now.
North asked the fat man, “How long?”
The fat man shrugged. “Today, sir. Tomorrow perhaps, at the very latest. The immunological system goes, and after that it’s just a question of what gets there first.”
One of the men in suits asked, “Why, Nick? Why did you do it?”
“I’m sorry, David,” the man in the cot answered. “I simply couldn’t help myself.”
North turned away. “And there was nobody to help him.”
His eyes had adjusted to the bright stage lights. He could see the audience now, oblique lines of pale, blurred faces that stretched into the darkness, here and there broken by an empty seat. Standing (as always) at North’s shoulder and pretending to watch the man in the cot, he studied the faces in the hope of seeing Lara’s; and when he did not see her, he thought to look for Klamm in his box, though he could not recall whether the man in shirtsleeves had said it was to the right or to the left, or whether the directions had been given from the point of view of the actors or the audience.
Klamm was there, the only occupant of a box, a crag-faced old man with long, pointed mustaches dyed jet black and cheeks pulled flaccidly downward by the weight of years. The great man wore a dinner jacket with a white dress shirt and a white tie, and seemed to be sleeping with open eyes, staring straight ahead as if content to wait, cigar in hand, for taller actors or more lofty themes, though they might be never so long in coming.
“Salmon die after they’ve spawned,” the fat man was saying. “Drones when they’ve fertilized the queen. In many species, the male spiders are devoured by their mates. At least we’re spared that.”
He had looked to one side for a moment, and in that moment Lara had entered Klamm’s box; now she stood with a hand upon the old man’s shoulder. She wore a gown of shimmering material that wrapped one breast in a prismatic highlight, a double rainbow—violet, blue, green, and gold. Yet he thought her own glorious hair more beautiful, a part of her person that in transfiguring her transfigured itself.
He took a step toward the wings, and because he had, he saw the men with guns before anyone else did.
Children of the Dragon
After passing through his topcoat at hip level, the first shot killed the man who had been dying on the cot. North was firing at once, a gun in each hand. More police—if they were police—were coming from the other side of the stage. He saw a dot of blood appear on the fat man’s yellow pajama leg and rapidly grow larger. The fat man stared down at it open-mouthed, clutched the leg in fat, neatly manicured hands, and fell slowly until the crash of his gross body shook the stage.
“This way,” North yelled, and went straight back, smashing the concrete wall like so much painted canvas. Dodging to stay out of North’s line of fire, he found himself face-to-face with a magician in immaculate evening clothes. With practiced grace, the magician threw open the door of a crimson and gold cabinet.
North darted in. He followed, feeling rather than hearing the door slammed after him. They fell through darkness, sliding down something too steep and too slick to hold. Later he would remember that he had been afraid one of North’s pistols would go off when the slide ended.
Neither did, but he could hear shots and screams above, and running feet. There was a scratch and a flare of light; North held a silver cigarette-lighter. Like the visiting princess who must feel a single pea, they lay upon a pile of mattresses. All about them stood a shadowy crowd of barrels, shelves
, and boxes.
With strong teeth, North was tearing the cellophane from a cigar. “Know where we are?”
He nodded. He had seen a paper lantern and recognized the place. “In the basement of the Chinese shop.”
North bit the end from the cigar and spat it out. “Close enough. We’re in the basement of the theater. That magic act was supposed to follow us, so he was setting up in back of our scenery. He makes stooges from the audience disappear in that cabinet.”
He shook his head and climbed from the mattresses, which were grimy with dust.
“It’s probably better to lie low for a while,” North told him, lighting the cigar.
He already had a foot on the stair. “Go ahead and shoot,” he said. “They’ll hear it, and they’ll know where you are. Or you can start a fight. I’ll yell, and they’ll hear that.” He took Sheng’s matches out of his pocket and struck one, just as Sheng himself had struck a match upon an earlier occasion that now seemed forlorn beneath an infinite drift of calendar leaves. A dragon of red and yellow fire appeared, emitting black smoke, illuminating their corner of the dusty basement. It appeared to wink at him, then vanished.
“God DAMN!” North said, picking up the cigar and swatting at sparks. “How’d you do that?”
“Have fun.” He waved good-bye.
He went up the stairs and into Sheng’s shop. Sheng and Dr. Pille were sitting in Sheng’s back room drinking tea. “Nice see you again,” Sheng said. “This sister’s son. Doctor. Fine man. Like tea? Want buy something?”
Dr. Pille extended a hand. “We’ve met, more or less. You were only semiconscious at the time, though. Later I saw you in the moopsball game. You were extremely impressive.”
“And now you’ll take me back. Or try to.” He pulled out the remaining chair and sat down.
“Not really.” Dr. Pille paused. “That is, not unless you want me to.”
