Interlibrary Loan

by Gene Wolfe

  “If he does know, he’ll never tell us.”

  I nodded again. “Maybe he’ll show us, and that’s better.”

  Behind Audrey, Peggy said, “You haven’t asked me why I want to see him.”

  I looked back at her. “None of my business. Do you want to tell me?”

  “It’s the cadavers. I’m taking his classes while he’s on sabbatical.”

  Audrey said, “That can’t be much fun, and I imagine you have a great deal to do.”

  “It is fun, really. I enjoy teaching. The students are horrified for the most part. I can handle a cadaver as if it were an allsweeper, or—”

  Audrey said, “There are thousands of them here, and the closer they are the more they bother me.”

  Peggy completed her thought. “Or a chicken. What’s the difference between a human being and an animal?”

  “Intelligence, I suppose.” Audrey looked at me for guidance. “We’re smarter. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  I nodded. “As long as we’re writing the tests.”

  Peggy said, “You then, Mr. Smithe. What would you say the difference is?”

  “We’re us. We bury our dead, and sometimes we even bury our pets. There are pet cemeteries. Animals—”

  Audrey interrupted me. “Except that we burn them sometimes. My parents were cremated, both of them. That was the way they had wanted it.”

  I could not indicate the hundreds of frozen corpses with a single gesture, but I got about half of them. “Not always.”

  “Three hundred years ago people would have said human beings had an immortal soul that fled the body after death,” Peggy told us. “I believe that now. Does that surprise you?”

  I was looking at the wide cavern we had entered, and I didn’t know what to say anyhow.

  Audrey said, “That’s what your folks thought, I’ll bet.”

  “No, they didn’t. They would have laughed at the idea. I’ve cut up a great many cadavers. Close to a hundred, I suppose. Believe me, the thing that made them human has gone.”

  I was looking around the ice cavern. “We’ve never been in this one before.”

  That sent Peggy’s flashlight exploring; its beam was lost in the immensity.

  “My goodness, but it’s huge!” That was Audrey.

  “It is huge, and there’s a sort of scree of broken ice ahead.” I held up my light stick so the two women could see what I had seen. “It will be hard to get down that slope without falling, and it may be impossible to climb back up. Do we want to go down it?”

  Peggy said yes and Audrey no.

  “Then here’s what we’ll do. I’ll go down. If I fall, you’ll see me. Don’t go after me. Tell Dr. Fevre when you find him. He may be able to help me if I’m still alive down at the bottom.”

  Audrey said, “I wish you wouldn’t, Ern.”

  “Let’s assume I get down safely. If I do, I’ll try to get back up. If I can’t, you two had better turn back.” I handed my box to Audrey. “I’ll go looking for a way out. As big as this cave is, there may be a dozen.”

  Maybe I ought to have waited to hear what they would say, but I didn’t. I just stuck my light stick in an arm pocket that seemed to have been meant for pens or pencils, walked forward, and started down. The truth is that I was afraid I’d lose my nerve if I didn’t. The caves and the cold had been draining away my guts—at least, that’s what it felt like.

  My guess is that the scree was pieces broken from a really huge ice curtain that fell; anyway, it was made up of jagged flat plates about twice as thick as my thumb. Some were almost as small as coarse gravel, some were as big as a tabletop. Most were somewhere in between. Climbing down would not have been hard if they had been stuck together, and some were. Most were loose. Hard ice—and everything in those caves was frozen hard—is not as slick as ice near the melting point. Water lubes ice, and soft ice melts a little under your weight. The slight friction of this hard ice let me keep my feet, but I nearly fell a dozen times.

  Keeping my balance meant waving my arms a lot, and there were two or three places where I had to turn around and crawl down, holding on wherever I could. My fingers were always cold in those ice caves, and they got so cold when I was scrambling down the scree that I had to stop to warm them in my pockets. The cold made my hands weak, too, so weak that I lost my grip a couple of times and started sliding. The scree was long but not very steep—a little steeper and I might have died. By the time I got to the bottom I knew two things for sure.

  The first was that I could climb back up if I wanted to, but it was going to be harder than climbing down.

  And the second was that I didn’t want to.

  I had not gone more than a hundred steps or so when I came to another scree. It was steeper than the first one, but a lot shorter, too. I figured I would not have much trouble with it going down or getting up, so I started climbing down pretty confidently. That was when disaster struck.

  My light stick fell out of my arm pocket, started rolling and bouncing down the scree, and went out.

  I don’t know how long I scrambled around in the dark, groping that ice. It was probably only ten minutes or so, but it felt like an hour. Finally I sat down to rest for a minute, halfway determined to start back up blind when I was through resting. I knew which way I had come, or thought I did; and I felt sure I would see Audrey’s light, or Peggy’s flashlight beam, a long time before I found them.

  Then somebody was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes, and the light was close to blinding.

  “Well, I found you anyway,” Chandra said. “I think I’d rather find you than her.”

  “I’m overjoyed to be found by you,” I told her, “and with your light stick we ought to be able to find mine pretty easily.”

  “Where is it?” Chandra was being careful, holding on with both hands; her light stick hung around her neck.

  “Right here somewhere.” I had begun looking already. “I had it in a pocket, but it fell out.”

  “If it went out, it’s probably broken.”

  “Do they break that easily?” I was still looking.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Then it may not be.” I was dead set on looking.

  “Where’s the lady?” Chandra paused. “Audrey. The one you sleep next to. Where’s Audrey?”

  I pointed up the scree and saw my light stick at once. A short scramble got me close enough to grab it.

  “Is it busted?”

  I twisted it and it lit up beautifully.

  Chandra hesitated. “I’ll tell my father she’s up there.”

  “So will I,” I said.

  We both did, but I am getting ahead of myself. At the far end of that huge ice cavern was something that seemed so completely out of place that I thought I was seeing things. It was a house.

  11

  JINGLE BELLS

  No, not a cute little cottage with a smoking chimney and some kind of climbing rose blooming pink and white on the front wall; but a house just the same. It was about twenty paces wide, and exactly half as high as it was wide. Maybe it was fifty or sixty paces long, maybe a couple of hundred. I never did find that out.

  It was built of blocks of ice. Big square blocks formed the front wall, and trapezoidal ones a nice round arch over that. They fitted so closely you couldn’t always see where one ended and the next began.

  Chandra had stopped for a minute to let me look. When I had checked out the construction, she said, “This is one of my father’s labs. He’s got a generator in there and everything.”

  I nodded to show I understood. I was still too stunned to talk. Then Chandra opened the door, and it was warm inside. Warm and bright. Angels would not—the angels (I’ll tell you about them in a minute) did not—have surprised me more.

  Adah Fevre was inside, sitting on a little folding chair that had her fur coat draped back over it. Sven was standing behind her, stiff and erect as ever.

  Farther back in that long room Dr. Fevre stood between the angels, two radiant
blondes. He had turned his light stick off, or maybe just put it back in his pocket, because the light came from ceiling fixtures. I got the feeling that Adah had been talking a blue streak when the door opened and had shut up right away. I’m not sure of that, but that’s how it felt. She was leaning forward on the edge of her chair, looking like she was about to spring out and kill somebody; definitely at the top of her cycle. It seemed like she might lose control any minute.

  There are times to let other people talk, and times to step up and take charge if you can. This was one of the take-charge-if-you-can kind. I took a deep breath. “You two strolled off and left Audrey and me lost in this God forsaken maze of ice caves. I say you two because I’m not blaming Chandra—she’s just a kid. But you”—I leveled my finger at Dr. Fevre—“were the guy who knew his way around, the guy Audrey and I were counting on to guide us.”

  I paused to give them a chance, but nobody spoke.

  “You were the guy who bought us coats and gave me a pair of his old boots, but never got either one of us a hat or gloves. If you want your coat back, I’ll fight you for it. If I win, I get your hat and your gloves. I’ll give one glove to Audrey.”

  “You—” Dr. Fevre began.

  “I’m not finished yet!” I swung around to Adah. “You’re our patron, the fully human lady who had checked out both of us. You walked away from us like you might have set down a couple of magazines because they were too much trouble to carry around. Were you planning to come back for us? We don’t belong to you. Do you care about us at all?” One of the angels, a lovely girl of seventeen or so, nodded.

  Adah stood up. From somewhere she had gotten a weird hatchet with a straight handle and a spike on the back like a fire axe. “You’re correct, Smithe. I left you thinking that the less-than-human I had chosen to solve a point that puzzled me was at least capable of following my husband, my daughter, and me. You failed that simple test. Your library will be better off without you.” She raised the hatchet as she finished that, and when she did I got a surprise every bit as big as the warm house of ice or the angels. Sven grabbed her wrist.

  “Well done.” Dr. Fevre said it absently, like you might pat a dog.

  “I could’ve handled her, but I’m glad you helped.” I gave Sven my best smile. “I owe you.”

  Dr. Fevre told Adah to sit down. It got him exactly nowhere, but he got hold of her hatchet and twisted it out of her hand.

  “There are more chairs back there.” He pointed toward the dark back of the ice room. “Bring two for us.”

  I did, thinking it was one for him and one for me, but I was wrong. The blond angels got them both and had to be coached into them. The doctor did the coaching, motioning and touching the backs of their knees to get them to bend their legs and sit. At first their expressions were as blank as Sven’s, then one smiled at me. I had known she would have a great smile just by looking at her, and it lit up the room.

  “I was explaining to my wife what it is I do here,” Dr. Fevre began. “My daughter already knows, or at least knows most of it. Now I’ll explain to you as well, and to these two girls.”

  I interrupted him. “You must know about the screes of broken ice. I left Audrey at the top of one with a brunet called Peggy Pepper. You know her, I think.”

  He nodded. “She’s a coworker.”

  Adah snorted.

  “As a matter of fact, she’s taking some of my classes while I’m on sabbatical. That’s probably what she wants to see me about.”

  He turned to Chandra. “Will you be a darling and have a look for those two ladies? You won’t be sorry you did, I promise.”

  I motioned toward the blondes. “Why not send one of them?”

  “For one thing, they don’t know these caves. Chandra does—rather better than I, I believe. That’s enough, but another is that they have no warm clothing. Chandra does, as you know.”

  I wanted to say she had more than Audrey and I, but that would have brought it down to she’s my daughter while you two are reclones. It would not have helped Audrey and me a bit to go there.

  “Do you fear that their hearing what I’m going to tell you may cause trouble? It’s a reasonable fear, yet you and I must run the risk.”

  That one threw me.

  More softly, Dr. Fevre added, “They need to understand that I chose them when I might have chosen any of a thousand others.”

  “He has a harem,” Adah snapped. “The inmates are dead.” She sounded like she was about to walk out; that may have been why Sven was there.

  Her husband ignored her. “Most of your experience is a century out of date, Smithe.”

  “More than that,” I told him.

  “Yet even in your own time you must have heard or read of people who had fallen through ice being revived. Their bodies were freezing. Their hearts had stopped and so had all thought. Yet they were restored to life. To normality, or near it.”

  Looking at the angels, I nodded. They were barefoot, both of them, something I had not noticed before. Something about their long white skirts reminded me that people cover bodies with sheets sometimes.

  “Their breasts are lovely,” Dr. Fevre said, “I quite agree—yet you might learn several things of interest if you listened to me.”

  I told him I was.

  “That such people—patients who had not drawn breath in an hour or more and whose temperatures had fallen to the point at which water turns to ice—could be restored to life was common knowledge for more than a century; yet no one had acted upon it.”

  When no one spoke he added, “I teach anatomy.”

  I nodded. “I know that.”

  “It is not hard to learn, or very difficult to teach provided one has a sufficient supply of cadavers for one’s students to work on. Without those…” He shrugged. “It simply cannot be taught well. Any bright child could learn the names of the bones and the notoriously mazed muscles of the back. Drill and encouragement. You wrote novels?”

  “Yes, mysteries. Whodunits.”

  “Could you teach a bright student to write those if he could never try his hand at one?”

  I said, “I’ve got it.”

  “Just so. The hardest part of my job is securing a sufficient supply of cadavers. A friend joked to me about going to Lichholm. I questioned him, and found he had sighted it when he and his wife had gone on a cruise to Norway. He had asked the cruise director about it, and had been told that it was merely a barren island inhabited by a few fishermen.”

  “True enough!” Adah snapped. “I would never have come here if I hadn’t been looking for you. I know you think I’m insane.”

  “Disturbed, darling.”

  “While you yourself are sane. Hasn’t it struck you, my darling living doctor, that you and I are surrounded by the re-animated dead? That man you’re instructing”—Adah pointed to me—“is dead. These beautiful, speechless girls you’re itching to toy with—”

  “Adah!”

  “Are dead. This guard you’ve set upon me is dead too.”

  One of the blondes shouted, “I’m not dead!” and burst into tears.

  Sometimes I do things that are flat-out crazy, and that was one of the times. When it happens, it’s like I am outside myself watching what I do. Up until then I thought my conscious mind was all alone in my skull; when I ran over to the blonde I found out that there is at least one other mind in there, and saying, Oh never mind! does not fix one damned single thing. I was crouched down beside her chair before I knew it and had my arms around her. Want to know what she smelled like?

  She smelled like ice.

  A whole lot more calmly, our patron said, “You’d better do something, Barry; you’re about to lose a concubine.”

  If he heard her, he gave no sign of it. He sort of patted the sobbing girl’s head, smoothing her golden hair, and said, “Of course you’re not dead, darling. Adah’s being vindictive. Neither the law nor I can hold her responsible for her acts.”

  I said, “She knows you’re a
live just as well as we do,” and after a while the two of us got the girl calmed down. Pretty soon I found out that her name was Ricci, and when I think of Ricci now I always remember how she pulled up the bottom of that long white sheet-turned-skirt and buried her face in it.

  Dr. Fevre said, “All this began when one of my grad students came running to me almost too excited to speak. She pulled me over to the cadaver she had been working on. She had opened the chest—that’s standard procedure in my class—and swore she had seen the heart beat. I touched it, and it seemed to me that I could feel a faint tremor. There are half a dozen ways to restart a heart, if it can be restarted. I lacked the equipment for most of them, but I tried two. The heart beat twice, then would not beat again. I told the student to come to my office the following afternoon at three.”

  I nodded. “Did she?”

  “Yes, she did. I told her we had stumbled across a fact of great importance, one that we had to pursue. I promised she would be credited in every paper I published. She gave me the same promise, and we shook hands on it.”

  I said, “Would I get her name right if I tried to guess it?”

  “I’m sure you would. She’s Professor Margaret Pepper now.”

  I nodded. “What did you do?”

  Dr. Fevre sighed. “For as long as records have been kept, people have been discovering bodies in tombs untouched by decay. I could spend hours describing all the strange beliefs that have been attached to them. Some people have closed the tombs again and prayed. Others have burned the undecayed bodies or driven stakes into their hearts.” He paused. “What’s going on, Mr. Smithe? Can you solve the mystery?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I can’t.” I was sitting on the floor beside Ricci’s chair by then, and when I said that her hand tightened on mine.

  “What’s the difference between a puppy and the sofa it hides behind? We would agree, I’m sure, that the puppy is alive and the sofa is not. But how do we know that? Is it because the puppy moves while the sofa doesn’t? A tree is alive, but without a wind the tree moves no more than the sofa.”

  I shrugged.