Storeys from the Old Hotel

by Gene Wolfe

  “Street,” I said again.

  “What is it this time?”

  “Do you remember? When we first met I said that I detected in you, perhaps only by some professional instinct not wholly rational, a physical abnormality I could not quite classify?”

  “You didn’t say anything of the sort. You may have thought it.”

  “I did. And I was right. Man, you don’t know how good this makes me feel.”

  “I have some comprehension of the intellectual rewards attendant on successful deduction.”

  “I’m sure you do. But now, if I may say so, a too-avid pursuit of those rewards has led you to a severe state of depression. A stimulant of some sort—”

  “Not at all, Westing. Thought is my drug—and believe me it is both stimulating and frustrating. My need is for a soporific, and your conversation fills the bill better than anything you could prescribe.”

  This was said in so cheerful and bantering a way, albeit with a barely perceptible touch of bitterness, that I could not resent it—and, indeed, the marked improvement this little spate of talk had brought to Street’s mien emboldened me to continue at whatever risk to my vanity.

  So I answered, “Your powers of concentration, admirable as they are, may yet be your undoing. Do you remember the quarter-hour we spent in front of a store window? Where the tri-D had such poor reception? I addressed you several times, but I would swear you heard none of my questions.”

  “I heard every one of your questions,” Street said, “and since none admitted to intelligent responses I ignored them all. And that tri-D, if not of the most exquisite quality, was at least better than passable. I apologize if I sound peevish, but really, Westing, you must learn to observe.”

  “I am not an engineer,” I replied, perhaps rather too stiffly, “and so I cannot say if the reception in fact was at fault—but acute observation is a necessity in my profession and I can assure you that the color stability of the set on display was abominable.”

  “Nonsense. I was looking directly at it for the entire time and I could, if necessary, describe each stupidity of programming in sequence.”

  “Maybe you could,” I said. “And I don’t doubt your assertion that you were watching with commendable attention while we waited outside the hiring hall. But you quite obviously failed to observe it when we left. You were talking excitedly, as I recall—and as you spoke we passed the window again. The actors were blushing—if I may use that expression here—a sort of reddish-orange. Then they turned greenish blue, then really blue, and finally a shade of bright, cool green. In fact, they went through that whole cycle several times just during the time it took us to walk past the window.”

  The effect of this perhaps overly detailed and argumentative statement on Street was extraordinary. Instead of countering with argument or denial, as I confess I expected, for a few moments he simply stared silently at me. Then he jumped to his feet and for half a minute or more paced the room in silent agitation, twice tripping over the same ball-clawed foot of the same late Victorian commode.

  At last he turned almost fiercely back to me and announced: “Westing, I believe I can recall the precise words I addressed to you as we passed that display. I will repeat them to you now and I want you to tell me the exact point at which you noticed the color instability you mentioned. I said: ‘Westing, this thing is as simple as a two-foot piece of aluminium conduit and I’m confident I know everything about it—except what I need to know. And I have no idea of how I’m going to find the answer. I know how the robots are taken—I think. And I believe I know why. The question is: Who is responsible? If I could get the patrol to cooperate—’ at which point I broke off, I believe. Now, precisely where did you notice the reddish orange color you mentioned—I believe that was the hue you noticed originally?”

  “To the best of my recollection, Street, it coincided with the word believe.”

  “I said, ‘I know how the robots are taken—I think. And I believe—’ and at that point you noticed that the figures in the tri-D illusion blushed a color you have described as a reddish orange. Is that correct?”

  Dumbfounded, I nodded.

  “Excellent. Among my other antiques, Westing, I have assembled a collection of paintings. Would it interest you to see them? You would be conferring a favor of no mean magnitude upon me.”

  “I don’t see how—but certainly, if you wish.”

  “Excellent again; particularly if, while drinking in their loveliness, you would take the trouble to point out to me the shades which most closely match the four colors you saw when the tri-D malfunctioned. But please be most exact—if the match is not perfect, you need not inform me.”

  For an hour or more we pored over Street’s pictures, which were astoundingly varied and, for the most part, in a poor state of preservation. In size they ranged from Indian miniatures smaller than coins to a Biblical cyclorama five meters high and (so Street told me) more than three kilometers in length. The greenish-blue long escaped us, but at last I located it in an execrable depiction of Susanna and the Elders and the art display was abruptly terminated. Street told me bluntly—his manner would have been offensive if it had not been so obvious that his mind was totally engaged on a problem of formidable proportions—to amuse myself and buried himself in an assortment of ratty books and dusty charts, one of which, as I particularly remember, was like a rainbow bent into a full circle, with the blazing colors melting into one another like the infinitesimal quantities in a differential equation.

  While he pondered over these the hours of evening rolled past on silent rubber wheels. Others, their day’s work done, might rest now; I waited. Humans, rich and fortunate or declassed, might sleep or busy themselves in those pointless naked tumblings which mean so little to us; Street worked. And at last I wondered if it might not be that we two were the only wakeful minds in the entire city.

  Suddenly Street was shaking me by the shoulder. “Westing,” he exclaimed. “I have it—let me show you.” I explained that I had taken advantage of his concentration to edit my memory banks.

  Street shrugged my mumblings aside. “Here,” he said. “Look at this and let me explain. You told me, if you remember, that you saw a cycle of four colors and that this cycle was repeated several times.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Very well. Now observe. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder how robots—yourself included—speak?”

  “I assume,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster, “that somewhere in my monitor the various words of the English language are stored as vibration patterns and—”

  “The Chinese system. No, I am convinced it must be something far more efficient. English is spoken with only a trifle more than sixty sounds; even the longest words are created by combining and recombining these—for example we might use the a as it appears in arm, the r as in rat and the ch from chair to describe our inestimable landlady, Mrs. Nash. Combined in one fashion they give us char—her profession—but rearranged in another they contribute arch—her manner.”

  “You mean that all of English can be stored in my central processing unit as a mere sixty-place linear array?”

  “That is precisely what I’ve been saying.”

  “Street, that’s marvelous! I’m not a religious man, but when I contemplate the ingenuity of those early programmers and systems analysts—”

  “Exactly. Now, I do not know the order in which the various English sounds were listed, but there is an order which is very commonly used in the texts to which I have referred. It is to list the sounds alphabetically and, within the alphabetical sections, to order them from longest to shortest. Thus these lists begin with the long a of ale; followed by the half-long a of chaotic; and this is followed in turn by the circumflex a of care, so that the whole reads like a temperance lecture. What I have done here is to take these sounds and space them evenly along the visible spectrum.” He held up a hand-drawn chart on which there were, however, no colors, but only a multit
ude of names.

  “But,” I objected, “only a few true colors exist and you said there are more than sixty—”

  “A few primary colors,” he returned, “but believe me, Westing, if the artists were to make up a palette containing every oil and watercolor known to them there would be a great many more than sixty. As you may remember, you described the four colors you saw as reddish-orange, greenish-blue, true blue—which is just like you, Westing—and bright, cool green.”

  “Yes.”

  “Afterward, when you pointed out these colors on canvas, I was able to identify them as scarlet lake, cyan blue, blue, and viridian. Please observe that on my chart these correspond to the consonant sound p, the consonant h, the short e heard in end and that l sound of late.”

  I considered this remarkable statement for a moment, then replied, “You seem to believe that someone is trying to communicate, using the colors of the tri-D; but I do not see that the sounds to which you say these colors correspond possess any significance.”

  Street leaned back in his chair, smiling. “Let us suppose, Westing, that you came in late as it were, to the message. Catching the last sound of a repeated word, you supposed it to be the first. In short—”

  “I see!” I exclaimed, leaping up. “‘HELP!’”

  “Precisely.”

  “But—”

  “There’s no more time to waste, Westing. I have only given this much explanation because I want you to be an intelligent witness to what I am about to do. You will observe that I have set up a tri-D camera before our viewing area, enabling me to record for my own use any image appearing there.”

  “Yes, you said something about that to Commissioner Electric.”

  “So I did. What I intend to do now is to code that store near the hiring hall and ask for a demonstration. At this late hour it seems improbable that anyone will be there but a robot clerk—and it’s unlikely he will be implicated.”

  Street was pushing the coding buttons as he spoke and a clerk—a robot—appeared almost before he had finished the last word.

  “I should prefer to deal with a human being,” Street told him, displaying an excellent imitation of prejudice.

  The clerk groveled. “Oh, I am sorry, sir. But my employers—and no person ever had better—have gone to snatch a few hours of deserved rest. If you would—”

  “That’s all right.” Street cut him off. “You’ll do. I’m interested in another tri-D and I want a demonstration.”

  “Very wise, sir. We have—”

  “As it happens, I was passing your shop today and the set in your window looked attractive. I presume there would be a discount, since it’s a demonstrator?”

  “I would have to consult my masters,” the clerk answered smoothly, “but I assume something might be arranged.”

  “Good.”

  “Is there any particular program—”

  “I don’t know what’s on right now.” For an instant Street feigned indecision. “Isn’t The Answer Man always available?”

  “Indeed he is, sir. Personal, Sexual, Scholarly, or Civil Affairs?”

  “Civil Affairs, I think.”

  In an instant The Answer Man, a computer-generated illusion designed to give maximum reassurance in the field of civil affairs, appeared in the tri-D area.

  He nodded politely to us and asked, “Would you like a general report—or have you specific fears?”

  “I have heard rumors,” Street said, “to the effect—well, the fact is that an old family servitor of mine is—uh—resting in the hiring hall. Is it quite safe?”

  The Answer Man reassured him, but as he did so he (and indeed the entire illusion) blushed a series of colors as astonishing as it was—at least by me—unexpected.

  “Names,” Street prompted softly. “I must have names.”

  “I beg your pardon?” The Answer Man said, but as he spoke he coruscated anew with dazzling chromatic aberrations.

  “I meant,” Street returned easily, “that you would have to have my servant’s name before you could properly reassure me. But it’s really not necessary. I’ve heard—”

  Abruptly The Answer Man vanished, replaced by the clerk robot.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “Something seems to be wrong with the color control. Could I show you another set?”

  “Oh no,” Street told him. “The trouble is in the network signal. Didn’t you get the announcement? Sunspots.”

  “Really?” The clerk looked relieved. “It’s extraordinary that I should have missed it.”

  “I would say,” Street sounded severe, “that in your position it was your duty to have heard it.”

  “I can’t imagine—About an hour ago, could it have been? I had to leave—only momentarily—to dispose of the surplus water created by my fuel cells, but except for that—”

  “No doubt that was it,” Street said. “I wish you a good evening, sir.” He switched off the tri-D. “Westing, I’ve done it! I’ve got everything we need here.”

  “You mean that by going over the tapes you made and comparing them with your chart—”

  “No, no, of course not,” Street interrupted me testily. “I memorized the chart while you were asleep. The tapes are only for evidence.”

  “You mean that you understood—”

  “Certainly. As well as I understand you now—though I must confess that before I heard that poor machine speak it had never occurred to me that the word dread, especially when given the slightly pre-Raphaelite pronunciation of our unfortunate friend, could result in such startling beauty.”

  “Street,” I said, “you’re toying with me. With whom are you communicating when you talk to those colors? And how were the deactivated robots stolen—and why?”

  Street smiled, fingering a small cast iron “greedy-pig” coin bank he had picked up from the table beside his chair. “I am communicating, as I should think must be obvious, with one of the stolen robots. And the method of theft was by no means difficult—indeed, I’m surprised that it is not employed more often. A confederate of the thieves’ concealed himself in the immensities of the hiring hall during the day. When all were gone he momentarily interrupted the flow of current to one of the expanders, with the result that the expander space returned to a position between the galaxies, carrying its contents with it. As you know, the exact portion of space taken by an expander is dependent on the fourth derivative of the sinusoidal voltage at the instant of startup, so it is most improbable that, upon being restarted a split second later, the expander should return the robots to their proper places. They are picked up instead by a deep-space freighter and eventually returned to Earth. The recording ammeter I contrived to fasten to the hall’s main power supply while Electric was showing us around will tell us if anyone tries the little trick again, as well as convincing a court that might not otherwise believe my explanation.”

  “But the colors, Street? Are you trying to tell me that the National Broadcasting Authority itself is employing slave labor?”

  “Not at all.” Street looked grave, then smiled. I might almost say grinned at me. “The robots in the hiring hall are there because society can find no present use for them—but has it never occurred to you that the electronics they contain might themselves be useful?”

  “You mean—”

  Street nodded. “I do. A tri-D set requires considerable computing power: a quite complicated signal must be unscrambled almost instantly to produce the three-dimensional illusion. The central processing unit of a robot, however, would be more than equal to the task—and very economical, if it were free. Unfortunately—for them—the criminals made one mistake. A criminal always makes one mistake, Westing.”

  “They wired the speech centers to handle the color coding?”

  “Precisely. I am proud of you.”

  I was so elated that I leaped to my feet and for a few moments paced the room feverishly. The triumph of justice—the chagrin of the criminal manufacturers! The glory that would be Stre
et’s and, to some degree as his friend, mine! At length a new thought struck me, coming with the clarity of the tolling of a great bell.

  “Street—” I said.

  “You look dashed, Westing.”

  “You have done society a great service.”

  “I know it—and the fee will be most useful. There is an early twentieth-century iron-claw machine in a junk shop over on four hundred and forty-fourth I’ve been lusting after. It needs a little work—the claw won’t pick up anything now—but I think I can fix it.”

  “Street, it might be possible—Commissioner Electric possesses great influence—”

  “What are you blathering about, Westing?”

  “It might be possible for you to be reclassed. Have your birthright income restored.”

  “Are you insinuating, Westing, that you believe me to have been declassed for criminal activity?”

  “But all human beings are born classed—and you’re not old enough to have refused death.”

  “Believe me, Westing, my income is still in existence and—in a way—I am receiving it. You, as a bio-mechanic, should understand.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yes. I have had a child by asexual reproduction. A child who duplicates precisely my own genetic makeup—a second self. The law, as you no doubt know, requires in such cases that the parent’s income go to the child. He must be reared and educated.”

  “You could have married.”

  “I prefer to have a home. And no man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one—a place where he can go and lock the door behind him.”

  This was what I had feared. I said, “In that case perhaps you won’t want—I mean, with the money you’ll be getting from Electric you won’t need to share this apartment. I would quite understand, Street, really I would.”

  “You, Westing?” Street laughed. “You’re no more in the way than a refrigerator.”

  The Rubber Bend

  IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT—not actually night but late afternoon, and raining buckets. I share an apartment with March B. Street, the human consulting engineer-detective, and I recall that when I came home that afternoon, Street ventured some deduction to the effect that it must be raining, since the water was still streaming off me and onto the carpet, and I remarked that it was a nice day out for ducks, a little witticism I have often found to have a remarkably calming effect on my patients, though of course—I am a bio-mechanic, you see—its use is somewhat dependent on the weather; though I am over fifty, my seals are still tight and I think I may boast that you won’t find another robot my age with fewer rain leaks anywhere.