“We’re a team,” Fields continued, “and we’re going to function as a team. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a quarterback, and a coach”—he pointed toward the ceiling—“up there. It does mean that I expect every man to bat two fifty or better, and the ones that don’t make three hundred had better be damn good Fields. See what I mean?”
“I buy five hundred, and I’m selling them to you.”
Forlesen nodded again and asked, “What does our subdivision do? What’s our function?”
“I said I’m going to buy five hundred shares and then I’m going to sell them back to you.”
“Not so fast,” Forlesen said. “You don’t own any yet.”
“Well, I’m buying.” The man with the mustache rummaged among his playing materials and produced some bits of colored paper. Forlesen accepted the money and began to count it.
The man with the red jacket said: “Coffee. And sandwiches. Spam and Churkey.” The man with the mustache went over to get one, and Forlesen went out the door.
The corridor was deserted. There had been a feeling of airlessness in the game room, an atmosphere compounded of stale sweat and smoke and the cold, oily coffee left to stagnate in the bottom of the paper hot cups; the corridor was glacial by comparison, filled with quiet wind and the memory of ice. Forlesen stopped outside the door to savor it for a second, and was joined by the man with the mustache, munching a sandwich. “Nice to get out here for a minute, isn’t it?” he said.
Forlesen nodded.
“Not that I don’t enjoy the game,” the man with the mustache continued. “I do. I’m in Sales, you know.”
“I didn’t. I thought everyone was from our division.”
“Oh, no. There’s several of us Sales guys, and some Advertising guys. Brought in to sharpen you up. That’s what we say.”
“I’m sure we can use some sharpening.”
“Well, anyway, I like it—this wheeling and dealing. You know what Sales is—you put pressure on the grocers. Tell them if they don’t stock the new items they’re going to get slow deliveries on the standard stuff, going to lose their discount. A guy doesn’t learn much financial management that way.”
“Enough,” Forlesen said.
“Yeah, I guess so.” The man with the mustache swallowed the remainder of his sandwich. “Listen, I got to be going; I’m about to clip some guy in there.”
Forlesen said, “Good luck,” and walked away, hearing the door to the game room open and close behind him. He went past a number of offices, looking for his own, and up two flights of steps before he found someone who looked as though she could direct him, a sharp-nosed woman who wore glasses.
“You’re looking at me funny,” the sharp-nosed woman said. She smiled with something of the expression of a blindfolded schoolteacher who has been made to bite a lemon at a Halloween party.
“You remind me a great deal of someone I know,” Forlesen said, “Mrs. Frost.” As a matter of fact, the woman looked exactly like Miss Fawn.
The woman’s smile grew somewhat warmer. “Everyone says that. Actually we’re cousins—I’m Miss Fedd.”
“Say something else.”
“Do I talk like her too?”
“No. I think I recognize your voice. This is going to sound rather silly, but when I came here—in the morning, I mean—my car talked to me. I hadn’t thought of it as a female voice, but it sounded just like you.”
“It’s quite possible,” Miss Fedd said. “I used to be in Traffic, and I still fill in there at times.”
“I never thought I’d meet you. I was the one who stopped and got out of his car.”
“A lot of them do, but usually only once. What’s that you’re carrying?”
“This?” Forlesen held up the brown book; his finger was still thrust between the pages. “A book. I’m afraid to read the ending.”
“It’s the red book you’re supposed to be afraid to read the end of,” Miss Fedd told him. “It’s the opposite of a mystery—everyone stops before the revelations.”
“I haven’t even read the beginning of that one,” Forlesen said. “Come to think of it, I haven’t read the beginning of this one either.”
“We’re not supposed to talk about books here, not even when we haven’t anything to do. What was it you wanted?”
“I’ve just been transferred into the division, and I was hoping you’d help me find my desk.”
“What’s your name?”
“Forlesen. Emanuel Forlesen.”
“Good. I was looking for you—you weren’t at your desk.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Forlesen said. “I was in the Bet-Your-Life room—well, not recently.”
“I know. I looked there too. Mr. Frick wants to see you.”
“Mr. Frick?”
“Yes. He said to tell you he was planning to do this a bit later today, but he’s got to leave the office a little early. Come on.”
Miss Fedd walked with short, mincing steps, but so rapidly that Forlesen was forced to trot to keep up. “Why does Mr. Frick want to see me?” He thought of the way he had cheated the man with the mustache, of the time he had baited Fairchild on the telephone, of other things.
“I’m not supposed to tell,” Miss Fedd said. “This is Mr. Frick’s door.”
“I know,” Forlesen told her. It was a large door—larger than the other doors in the building—and not painted to resemble metal. Mr. Frick’s plaque was of silver (or perhaps platinum), and had the single word Frick engraved in an almost too-tasteful script. A man Forlesen did not know walked past them as they stood before Mr. Frick’s tasteful plaque; the man wore a hat and carried a briefcase, and had a coat slung over his arm.
“We’re emptying out a little already,” Miss Fedd said. “I’d go right in now if I were you—I think he wants to play golf before he goes home.”
“Aren’t you going in with me?”
“Of course not—he’s got a group in there already, and I have things to do. Don’t knock; just go in.”
Forlesen opened the door. The room was very large and crowded; men in expensive suits stood smoking, holding drinks, knocking out their pipes in bronze ashtrays. The tables and the desk—yes, he told himself, there is a desk, a very large desk next to the window at one end, a desk shaped like the lid of a grand piano—the tables and the desk all of dark heavy tropical wood, the tables and the desk all littered with bronze trophies so that the whole room seemed of bronze and black wood and red wool. Several of the men looked at him, then toward the opposite end of the room, and he knew at once who Mr. Frick was: a bald man standing with his back to the room, rather heavy, Forlesen thought, and somewhat below average height. He made his way through the smokers and drink holders. “I’m Emanuel Forlesen.”
“Oh, there you are.” Mr. Frick turned around. “Ernie Frick, Forlesen.” Mr. Frick had a wide, plump face, a mole over one eyebrow, and a gold tooth. Forlesen felt that he had seen him before.
“We went to grade school together,” Mr. Frick said. “I bet you don’t remember me, do you?”
Forlesen shook his head.
“Well, I’ll be honest—I don’t think I would have remembered you, but I looked up your file while we were getting set for the ceremony. And now that I see you, by gosh, I do remember—I played prisoner’s base with you one day; you used to be able to run like anything.”
“I wonder where I lost it,” Forlesen said. Mr. Frick and several of the men standing around him laughed, but Forlesen was thinking that he could not possibly be as old as Mr. Frick.
“Say, that’s pretty good. You know, we must have started at about the same time. Well, some of us go up and some don’t, and I suppose you envy me, but let me tell you I envy you. It’s lonely at the top, the work is hard, and you can never set down the responsibility for a minute. You won’t believe it, but you’ve had the best of it.”
“I don’t,” Forlesen said.
“Well, anyway, I’m
tired—we’re all tired. Let’s get this over with so we can all go home.” Mr. Frick raised his voice to address the room at large. “Gentlemen, I asked you to come here because you have all been associated at one time or another, in one way or another, with this gentleman here, Mr. Forlesen, to whom I am very happy to present this token of his colleagues’ regard.”
Someone handed Mr. Frick a box, and he handed it to Forlesen, who opened it while everyone clapped. It was a watch. “I didn’t know it was so late,” Forlesen said.
Several people laughed; they were already filing out.
“You’ve been playing Bet-Your-Life, haven’t you?” Mr. Frick said. “A fellow can spend more time at that than he thinks.”
Forlesen nodded.
“Say, why don’t you take the rest of the day off? There’s not much of it left anyhow.”
• • • •
Outside, others, who presumably had not been given the remainder of the day off by Mr. Frick, were straggling toward their cars. As Forlesen walked toward his, feeling as he did the stiffness and the pain in his legs, a bright, new car pulled onto the lot and a couple got out, the man a fresh-faced boy, really, the girl a working-class girl, meticulously made up and dressed, cheaply attractive and forlorn, like the models in the advertisements of third-rate dress shops. They went up the sidewalk hand in hand to kiss, Forlesen felt sure, in the time clock room, and separate, she going up the steps, he down. They would meet for coffee later, both uncomfortable, out of a sense of duty, meet for lunch in the cafeteria, he charging her meal to the paycheck he had not yet received.
The yellow signs that lined the street read: YIELD; orange and black machines were eating the houses just beyond the light. Forlesen pulled his car into his driveway, over the oil spot. A small man in a dark suit was sitting on a wood and canvas folding stool beside Forlesen’s door, a black bag at his feet; Forlesen spoke to him, but he did not answer. Forlesen shrugged and stepped inside.
A tall young man stood beside a long, angular object that rested on a sort of trestle in the center of the parlor. “Look what we’ve got for you,” he said.
Forlesen looked. It was exactly like the box his watch had come in, save that it was much larger: of red-brown wood that seemed almost black, lined with pinkish-white silk.
“Want to try her out?” the young man said.
“No, I don’t.” Forlesen had already guessed who the young man must be, and after a moment he added a question: “Where’s your mother?”
“Busy,” the young man said. “You know how women are . . . Well, to tell the truth she doesn’t want to come in until it’s over. This lid is neat—watch.” He folded down half the lid. “Like a Dutch door.” He folded it up again. “Don’t you want to try it for size? I’m afraid it’s going to be tight around the shoulders, but it’s got a hell of a good engine.”
“No,” Forlesen said, “I don’t want to try it out.” Something about the pinkish silk disgusted him. He bent over it to examine it more closely, and the young man took him by the hips and lifted him in as though he were a child, closing the lower half of the lid; it reached to his shirt pockets and effectively pinioned his arms. “Ha, ha,” Forlesen said.
The young man sniffed. “You don’t think we’d bury you before you’re dead, do you? I just wanted you to try it out, and that was the easiest way. How do you like it?”
“Get me out of this thing.”
“In a minute. Is it comfortable? Is it a good fit? It’s costing us quite a bit, you know.”
“Actually,” Forlesen said, “it’s more comfortable than I had foreseen. The bottom is only thinly padded, but I find the firmness helps my back.”
“Good, that’s great. Now have you decided about the Explainer?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Didn’t you read your orientation? Everyone’s entitled to an Explainer—in whatever form he chooses—at the end of his life. He—”
“It seems to me,” Forlesen interrupted, “that it would be more useful at the beginning.”
“—may be a novelist, aged loremaster, National Hero, warlock, or actor.”
“None of those sounds quite right for me,” Forlesen said.
“Or a theologian, philosopher, priest, or doctor.”
“I don’t think I like those either.”
“Well, that’s the end of the menu as far as I know,” his son said. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll send him in and you can talk to him yourself; he’s right outside.”
“That little fellow in the dark suit?” Forlesen asked. His son, whose head was thrust out the door already, paid no attention.
After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen’s son placed a chair close to the coffin for him and went into the bedroom. “Well, what’s it going to be,” the small man asked, “or is it going to be nothing?”
“I don’t know,” Forlesen said. He was looking at the weave of the small man’s suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos. “I wish I could talk to my wife.”
“Your wife is dead,” the small man said “The kid didn’t want to tell you. We got her laid out in the next room. What’ll it be? Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, National Hero, aged loremaster, or novelist?”
“I don’t know,” Forlesen said again. “I want to feel, you know, that this box is a bed—and yet a ship, a ship that will set me free. And yet . . . it’s been a strange life.”
“You may have been oppressed by demons,” the small man said. “Or revived by unseen aliens who, landing on the Earth eons after the death of the last man, have sought to re-create the life of the twentieth century. Or it may be that there is a small pressure, exerted by a tumor in your brain.”
“Those are the explanations?” Forlesen asked.
“Those are some of them.”
“I want to know if it’s meant anything,” Forlesen said. “If what I suffered—if it’s been worth it.”
“No,” the little man said. “Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.”
©1974, 2002 by Gene Wolfe.
Previously published in Orbit 14 and The Best of Gene Wolfe.
Reprinted by permission of the author and The Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gene Wolfe—who is perhaps best known for his multi-volume epic, The Book of the New Sun—is the author of more than 200 short stories and thirty novels, is a two-time winner of the Nebula Award, a four-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, and was once praised as “the greatest writer in the English Language alive today” by author Michael Swanwick. His most recent novels are An Evil Guest, The Sorcerer’s House, and Home Fires.
NOVEL EXCERPTS
NOVEL EXCERPT:
The Causal Angel
Hannu Rajaniemi
CHAPTER ONE
The Thief and the Last Battle
We are barely past the orbit of Mars when Matjek figures out the truth about Narnia and helps me find Mieli’s trail.
“That can’t be the end!” he says, holding up a book. It is a big, battered purple volume, with a circular window-like cover image that shows clashing armies. He has to lift it with both of his four-year-old hands. He struggles with its weight and finally slams it down onto the table in front of me.
The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis, I note with a sigh. That means difficult questions.
For the past few subjective days, the tiny main vir of our ship, the Wardrobe, has been a calm place. I created it based on a dream Matjek told me about. It is an incense-scented labyrinth of high bookshelves full of haphazardly stacked books of all sizes and colours. Matjek and I usually sit at a rough wooden table in the small café area in the front, brightly lit by diffuse sunlight through the display windows.<
br />
Outside—painted on the imaginary glass for us by the vir—is the turbulent flow of the Highway, thousands of lightwisps, rockships, calmships, beamriders and other craft of every kind, reflected from the Wardrobe’s solar sails in a myriad glinting fragments. And somewhere in the back, in the shadows, the blue and silver books that hold the fractally compressed minds of the people and jinni and gods of Sirr whisper to each other with papery voices.
Until now, Matjek has been reading his books quietly, leaning his chin on his fists. Which has suited me fine: I have been busy looking for Mieli in the death cries of Earth.
“They can’t just all die! It’s not fair!” Matjek says.
I look at him and make my sole Highway-zoku jewel—an emerald crystal disc with a tracery of milky veins inside, a gift from a friendly cetamorph— spin between my fingers.
“Listen, Matjek,” I say. “Would you like to see a trick?”
The boy answers with a disapproving stare. His eyes are earnest and intense, a piercing blue gaze that is at odds with his soft round face. It brings back uncomfortable memories from the time his older self caught me and took my brain apart, neuron by neuron.
He folds his arms across his chest imperiously. “No. I want to know if there is a different ending. I don’t like it.”
I roll my eyes.
“Usually, there is only one ending, Matjek. Why don’t you find another book to read if you didn’t like that one?”
I really don’t want to have this conversation right now. My minions—a swarm of open-source cognitive agents distantly descended from rats and nematode worms—are scouring the System public spimescapes for public data on Earth’s destruction. There is a steady stream of qupts in my head, cold raindrops of information from the storm of ships beyond our ancient vessel’s walls.
And each of them is like the stroke of a clock, counting down time that Mieli has left.
• • • •
A lifestream from a Ceresian vacuumhawk. A grainy feed recorded by photosensitive bacterial film on the solar sail wings of a fragile non-sentient space organism that was following a female of its species past Earth. Not nearly detailed enough. Next.
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50 Page 19
