The Best of Gene Wolfe

by Gene Wolfe

  “No,” Lewis said, “this is Cougar, moving up Interstate Seventy-five from the Rockwood-Gibraltar area. We’ll be seeing Wolverine in a few moments now.”

  Another voice: “May I ask how we are receiving these pictures? They do not appear to be coming by helicopter.”

  “That is correct. Although we have a great deal of airpower—I believe you can see some fighter-bomber strikes in the background there—we prefer to use handheld cameras for this sort of coverage, since they permit us to contact individuals directly. I believe an officer sitting on the roof of a truck is taking this.”

  “Would it be possible for us to talk to one of the soldiers involved?”

  “I’ll see if I can’t arrange it.”

  The picture abruptly changed to show a burning building that might have been an apartment house. “This is Wolverine: the skirmish line preceding the main force, which I believe is just now jumping off.”

  A soldier with an assault rifle dashed past, followed by two dungareed sailors carrying carbines. Abruptly the burning apartment house wobbled and fell away to a street lined with buildings with sandbagged windows, then sky, then the face of General Virdon, who said, “It appears our operator has bought it, sir. We’ll have another one for you in a few seconds.”

  Lewis said, “We quite understand.”

  Peters, trying to make it appear that he was relaying a question from one of the people near him, asked, “Can you tell us the composition of Force Wolverine, General?”

  “Certainly.” Virdon leaned forward to glance at a note on his desk before answering, and Peters wondered suddenly where he was—if he was within a hundred miles of the battle. “Wolverine comprises elements of the Thirty-first Airborne, strengthened with naval detachments from the Great Lakes Training Station and armored units of the Wisconsin National Guard—the name, as you may have guessed, has been chosen to honor these last.”

  In Peters’s ear Donovan said, “Belongs to ——[he named a mining company] and we’re getting them on loan. Lou set it up.”

  A tall black man said, “I represent the National Trade Bureau of the Empire of Ethiopia. May I ask a question?”

  Lewis said, “Certainly. It isn’t necessary, however, for anyone to identify themselves.”

  “I wish to ask my question of General Virdon.”

  On the colossal screen the general nodded.

  “Would you tell us your prior military experience, sir?”

  Solomos, who had reappeared from somewhere, said to Peters, “A very nice party. I enjoy it. But what do you think of the attack as far as this?”

  Peters said, “If we win in Detroit it will be the key to opening up the Midwest and splitting the radicals.” It was what he had heard Lewis tell a Swiss banker earlier that day.

  “No doubt. But will you win?”

  “We have to win,” Peters said, and found that he had surprised himself. As quickly as he could he added, “The odds are too heavily weighed in our favor. Suppose, for example, Mr. Solomos, that your company was going to open up a new territory, or introduce a new product. You would observe your competitors: not just how much advertising they are doing, but how much they are capable of doing—and how many salesmen they have, how good those salesmen are, any special advantages they may have, like high customer loyalty in this particular area. When you’ve learned all those things you’re in a position to calculate just how much it will take to knock them out of the top spot quickly, and decide whether or not you can do it. If you go in at all, you go in with about double the top ad budget they can afford, free samples, coupon offers, and the pick of your sales force—on special bonus incentives. You don’t go in until you’ve asked yourself, How can I lose? and found that you can’t imagine any possible way you could—and then you can’t. Well, that’s what we’ve done”—Peters waved at General Virdon on the screen—“and we’re going in.”

  “Bravo,” Solomos said. “Magnificent. You say all that very well. But they have more men than you.”

  “Ours are better armed and have air support and tanks, and I doubt that they really have more people—at least not many. A great part of the population of Detroit is still loyal to free enterprise, or just doesn’t want to get involved.”

  “But that was interesting to me,” Solomos continued, “about the selling. What if the product you sell is not better?”

  “Actually,” Peters said, “that hardly matters, unless it’s really pretty bad. We—I mean United Services—always try to have the best, and in fact we spend a lot on that sort of thing: R and D, and quality control. But mostly we do it because it energizes the sales force.”

  The Ethiopian was saying to General Virdon, “Then you have not ever actually fought—you yourself fought.”

  “What matters in combat is organization and fire support—the total fire-power that can be directed at the enemy. We learned that in Vietnam. If you can blow up enough jungle you can kill anybody. . . . Now, Mr. Lewis—sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Your guests mentioned that they would like to talk directly to one of the enlisted men taking part in this operation. We have that set up now, sir.”

  “Fine.”

  A young man appeared. He was handsome in a boyishly appealing way and wore neatly pressed fatigues with a PFC’s stripe. To the audience he said, “Private Hale reporting, sir.” His forehead was abundantly beaded with sweat, and Peters wondered if it was really that hot in Detroit. After a moment Hale wiped it off.

  Someone called, “You are a soldier? Don’t you know you could be killed in this action?”

  Hale nodded solemnly into the screen, then said, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, sir, but you can get killed crossing the street—anyway, you could in the good old days—and I think what my buddies and me are doing here is more important than a whole lot of streets.”

  “And you are confident this operation will succeed?”

  The soldier nodded. “Yes, sir, I am. There’s a whole bunch of good guys wrapped up in this thing, and . . .”

  Peters became aware that the soldier’s voice was fading, and with it his image on the screen.

  “. . . all of us know . . .” It was barely audible. The screen went white, dazzlingly bright.

  “What is this?” a new voice asked. The voice was young, unpolished, and unprofessional, the muttering of the new tenant next door to himself, heard through the walls at 11:00 P.M.

  Lewis said, “I’m afraid we’re having some communications problems here, gentlemen; you’ll have to bear with us.” Addressing the disembodied voice: “Is this Grizzly Bear?”

  “Ken!”

  “Grizzly Bear One—General Virdon—come in, please.”

  As though drawn long ago in invisible ink and only now called up by heat or the ammoniacal fumes of blood, a face materialized. Peters had expected a beard and the conventional exotic, vaguely erotic, jewelry, but the boy was too young for the first and had removed—if he ever wore it—the second, save for the rhinestoned frames (each weeping a crystal acrylic tear) of thick glasses. “Well,” he said, and then, “ken.” He moved toward his screen, appearing to lean out of the illusion, his thin, unlined face suspended above them as it might have been over a cage of white rats. Then his eyes left them and he looked toward the window that was the west wall of the room, and the tossing Atlantic.

  “Who are you?” Lewis asked.

  “Philadelphia,” the boy answered simply. Peters saw Lewis wince; Philadelphia was in radical hands.

  From the floor someone called, “We were watching the attack on Detroit.”

  “Oh,” the boy said. And then, “I can get you Detroit. Wait a minute.”

  The screen flashed, and was filled with a young man whose forehead was painted with hieroglyphics. He said, “This is Free Michigan Five with uninterrupted battle coverage, music, and macrobiotic diet tips, except when we are interrupted. Did everyone get to see the pig plane that crashed in Dearborn Heights?”

  Someone called,
“No!” but the young man appeared not to have heard. “I guess you’ve got the news that six kenkins are going to donate their bodies to Peace, and we’re going to give you that live right now. Hold on.”

  A bigger man, with a bushy beard, his hair held back by a beaded band. Behind him four men and two women sat cross-legged on ground littered with rubble, their heads bent. “No Roman circus,” the bearded man said. “If you’re not considering doing this yourself, please tune out.”

  “This is a television picture,” Lewis said at the front of the room. “That’s what’s giving the streaky effect. Vidlink does not do this.”

  “Over there”—the bushy-bearded man waved an arm—“is what they call Cougar. That’s the big pig force attacking us from the south. I think you can hear the shooting.”

  They could. The distant whine of ricocheting bullets, the nervous chattering of assault rifles and machine guns; and below all this (like the bass section of an orchestra, in which iron-souled strings, and horns, and wild kettledrums inherited from Ottoman cavalry speak of the death of spring and heroes) the doubletoned pounding of the quad-fifties—four fifty-caliber machine guns mounted together on a combat car and controlled by a single trigger—as they chewed down stone and brick and sandbags to splash the blood and brains of lonely snipers across the debris.

  “It’s strictly voluntary whether you talk or not,” the man with the beard said. “We’ve asked everyone who isn’t actually thinking about doing this themselves to tune out, but probably there are a lot of them still on. You know how it is. Anybody want to talk?”

  For a moment no one moved; then a thin young man with a curly beard stood up. He was wearing only undershorts, boxer shorts dotted with a pattern of acorns. The interviewer said, “This is great, man. In the last two batches nobody would talk.” He smiled. He had bad teeth and a good smile.

  The curly-bearded young man in shorts said, “What do you want to know?”

  The bearded man said, “I guess most of all why.”

  “If you don’t know I can’t tell you. Yes, I can; because I want to turn things around. Like, everybody all the time only does it for himself or something he sees being part of him only bigger, an empire or a church, like that. I’m doing it for ants, to set us loose.”

  The bearded man said, “You stoned?”

  “Sure I’m stoned. Ken, I’m stoned blind.”

  “You don’t look stoned, man.”

  “Trust me.”

  “You believe in more life after you die?”

  The curly-bearded young man in boxer shorts shook his head. “That isn’t what it means. When there’s no more, that’s Death.”

  “Just the big dark?”

  He nodded. “The big dark.”

  One of the girls stood. She was a thin and rather flat-chested girl, with straggling brown hair and the large, trusting eyes of a fawn. “I don’t agree with that,” she said. “If Death is Nothing, why have another name for it?”

  “That’s nominalism,” the curly-bearded young man said. “That’s camp.” After he had said it he seemed sorry he had spoken.

  “And I’m not killing myself,” the girl continued. “That’s up to them— whether I die or not. I don’t think this I is going to live afterward if they kill me— of course not. But something will continue in existence, and there are a lot of things here”—oddly, she touched her shoulders, each hand against its own so that for a moment her doubled arms seemed wings, small and thin and featherless— “we could do without.”

  The bushy-bearded man said, “You’re going to let them be your judges?”

  “My Lord let Pilate be his.” She sat down. The curly-bearded young man had turned his back to the screen.

  “Anyone else,” the bearded man said. “Anybody at all.”

  No one looked toward him. A girl wearing a motorcycle helmet came trotting up and announced, “Ready.” The six stood. The bearded man said, “This is it. We’ll follow them as long as we can.” In point of fact the six were already offscreen, though the bearded man was, presumably, looking toward them. “We get all kinds, I suppose you could say—you just talked to two of them. Truth seekers, Jesus freaks, activists, pacifists, about twice as many boys as girls. No one has to come, and anyone can turn back at any time. The people you just talked to could turn back now if they wanted, although it doesn’t look like any of them are going to.”

  A shot of the six showed them following the girl in the motorcycle helmet. The buildings to either side of them had been largely destroyed by air strikes, and they might have been tourists trailing a guide through some older ruined city.

  “Some of you will be thinking you would like to do what they are doing,” the bushy-bearded man said. “You can sign up at most Buddhist and Christian spiritual centers, and also at the temple of Kali just off the Edsel Ford Express-way. Also in the basement of——[—he named a well-known department store]—where the travel office used to be. Of course nothing is final right up to the bullets.”

  The camera jumped, and the men Lowell Lewis had gathered together saw the six emerging from an alley choked with rubble. The girl in the motorcycle helmet was no longer visible. Awkwardly they spread to form a single straggling line, three young men on one end, then the two girls, then an older, balding man. Two had contrived, or perhaps been given, white rags on sticks; they waved them. The remaining four advanced with lifted hands.

  At Peters’s ear Solomos whispered, “How near are they now? To the fighting?” As if to answer him a bullet kicked up dust before one of the young men’s feet. He hesitated for a moment, then trotted to catch up.

  “Please,” the bushy-bearded man’s voice said, “if you aren’t a potential volunteer we ask you to tune out.”

  Someone called to Lewis, “Switch it off.”

  Lewis said, “As you have seen, they have taken control of our channel.”

  Solomos asked, “He could still deactivate this receiver, could he not?” And Peters answered, “Sure.” He felt that he was going to be sick, and was surprised to see one of Tredgold’s Portuguese girls still circulating with a tray of drinks and canapés. He took a martini and drained it; when his eyes returned to the screen three of the six were gone. The remaining three, seen now from behind, still advanced. The young man with the curly beard had removed his acorn-printed shorts and walked naked.

  Whether from a remote mike or by some sound-gathering device, voices came suddenly into the Lisbon hotel room. The naked boy was saying, “Peace! Peace! Don’t shoot; look at us!” A girl crooned wordlessly, and the bald man recited the Lord’s Prayer.

  Distantly someone called, “Hey, cease fire. They’re giving up. Squad! Hold it!”

  The three continued to advance, but diverged as they came, first six, then twelve, then twenty-four or more yards separating each from his or her companions, as though each were determined to die alone. The screen could not longer encompass all three, and began to move nervously from one to the next as though afraid to miss the death of any. A soldier stood and motioned to the curly-bearded young man, indicating the midden of smashed concrete which had sheltered him. As the soldier did so he was shot, and fell backward. The curly-bearded young man turned toward his own lines shouting, “Stop! Stop!” and was shot in the back. The camera showed him writhing on the dusty pavement for a moment, then switched to the girl, now remote and fuzzy with distance but still large in the picture provided by the telephoto lens. Four soldiers surrounded her, and as they watched one put his arms about her and kissed her. Another jerked them apart, shoved the first aside, and tore away the girl’s thin shirt; as he did she exploded in a sheet of flame that embraced them all.

  The bald man was walking rapidly toward a half-tracked combat car mounting quad-fifties; faintly they could hear him saying, “Hey, listen, the Giants won twenty-six straight in 1916, and the biggest gate in baseball was more than eighty-four thousand for a Yankees-Browns game in New York. The youngest big leaguer ever was Hamilton Joe Nuxhall—he pitched
for Cincinnati when he was fifteen. Don’t you guys care about anything?” The crew of the half-track stared at him until an officer drew a pistol and fired. The bald man leaped to one side (Peters could not tell whether he had been hit or not) and ran toward him shouting something about the Boston Braves. The officer fired again and the bald man’s body detonated like a bomb. The voice of the young man with hieroglyphics on his forehead said, “I think we’re going to catch the Zen Banzai charge over on the west side now.” There was a sudden shift in picture and they saw a horde of ragged people with red cloths knotted around their heads and waists streaming toward a line of soldiers supported by two tanks. Some of the ragged people had firearms; more were armed with spears and gasoline bombs. For a moment they were falling everywhere—then the survivors had overwhelmed the tanks. Peters saw a soldier’s head still wearing its steel helmet, open-eyed in death and livid with the loss of blood, held aloft on a homemade spear. The picture closed on it as it turned and swayed above the crowd; it became the head of General Virdon, who said, “Now we’ve got you again. My communications people tell me we lost you for a few minutes, Mr. Lewis.” He sounded relieved.

  Lewis said, “We had technical difficulties.”

  The voice of the boy in Philadelphia announced, “I did that fade with the faces—it was pretty good, wasn’t it?”

  Solomos asked Peters, “Why are you attacking? You should be defending. You have lost most of your country already.”

  “We don’t think so,” Peters said.

  “You have a few army camps and airdromes and some factories remote from centers of population; that is not the country. You survive thus far because they do not know how to fight, but they are learning, they are drilling armies everywhere, and you do not know how to fight either, and are not learning; after the defeat of the Germans and your small war in Korea you allowed your army to become only a consumer of your industrial production. What will this general do if they march from Chicago while his front is entangled in this street fighting?”