Innocents Aboard

by Gene Wolfe

  Soon they stood before the box of which the princess had spoken, which was in fact a cabinet or locker set into one of the interior walls of her castle. She explained that the sun was now high—one of the times at which the box might be opened. She further described the food they might expect to find within it, and having received Sir Bradwen’s courteous consent, she touched the latch.

  At which the floor gave way beneath them, dropping nearly as fast as a falling stone. Together, she clutching him in terror, they descended into the hill of green glass.

  Their fall slowed, and at length it halted altogether. Soft green light bathed them; unguessable shapes surrounded them. “Welcome!” a small voice cried; and again, “Welcome!”

  A very small man with a very small face in a very large head approached them riding in a silent and ugly little cart with invisible wheels.

  “The unconscionable and tricksy person you see before you,” whispered the princess, “is that very wicked magician who snatched me from the City of Peace.”

  Sir Bradwen bowed as he would have at Arthur’s court. “Perhaps we meet as antagonists,” he said politely, “yet I would much prefer to count among my friends a man so learned in all the ways of the Unseen World. You placed the lovely and royal lady at my side atop this mountain—”

  “To find us a man of the Dark Ages who showed a glimmer of intelligence,” the very small man in the cart replied. “She’s done it, too, as I knew she would.” He simpered, and seemed to be on the verge of laughter. “My name’s 12BFW-CY-, by the way, and I come from the remote future.”

  The knight bowed deeper still. “Sir Bradwen of the Forest Tower am I, and in a larger sense of glorious Camelot. In a sense larger still, of Albion, the White Isle.”

  “This inconsiderable person,” the princess said, “is called by the unattractive name of Apple Blossom. She has been torn, as may be known, from the Land of the Black-haired People, Kingdom of Ch’in, a country well governed by the most illustrious person whose light dazzles these inferior eyes, her father, here styled King of Far-Off Cathay.”

  12BFW-CY-’s smile broadened, becoming almost as wide as both the princess’s thumbs. “You wish to return home, I’m sure. This knight has won you, though. He probably won’t agree to it.”

  “On the contrary,” Sir Bradwen declared, “if this lovely lady can be returned to her parents in safety, I could wish for no happier outcome. I declare her—” His voice wavered, and he paused to clear his throat. “I declare her free to go at once, and may God speed her on her way.”

  At this, the princess clung more tightly than ever. “This wr-wretched person, the m-m-most m-miserable of w-women, w-would—w-w-would …” She burst into tears.

  With his free hand, Sir Bradwen patted her shoulder. “There, there. Do not weep, Your Highness. You will be in the arms of your royal mother almost before you know it. Do you have sisters?”

  “She has five hundred and twenty-six,” 12BFW-CY- put in somewhat dryly. “And six hundred and ten brothers. It was because she came from such an extensive family that we selected her—the removal of one very minor princess from so large a group is unlikely to result in historical—”

  “I w-want to st-st-stay here!” wailed the unfortunate princess. “I w-w-want to be in your arms!”

  Sir Bradwen’s heart bounded like a stag. “Then you shall! As long as my hand can grasp a sword, no one shall take you from me. By good Saint Joseph I swear it! By the Holy Family! By my honor and my mother’s grave!”

  “Certainly not me,” 12BFW-CY- remarked dryly. “I don’t want her. As for your sword—” He tittered. “I am about to give you a more effectual weapon.”

  Sir Bradwen’s eyebrows went up. “Do you mean a magic bow? An enchanted lance? Something of that kind?”

  12BFW-CY- tittered again. “Precisely. It will enable you to overcome the most powerful opponent without fighting him at all. A little background must be filled in first, I think. If you’ll indulge me.

  “Hem, hem! My companions—vile and selfish creatures with whom you would not wish to speak—and I represent a sizable fraction of humanity in the year thirty-two thousand three hundred and eleven. In another generation or two the human gene pool will be too small to support a viable race, even with all that genetic engineering can do for us, and humanity will be irrevocably doomed. Finished. Ended. Headed to be shredded, eh?”

  “This fribbling person weeps,” declared the princess with feeling.

  To which Sir Bradwen added, “I’m not sure I understood everything you said, the bit about the magic pool especially, but it sounded very bad. If my sword can be of service to you, you need but ask.”

  “Oh, we don’t mind.” 12BFW-CY-waved an airy hand. “We don’t mind at all. In a way we rather enjoy it. Our race has always been a filthy mess, you know, and we feel it’s high time we gave the daisies a turn at the hupcontroller. Now I’ll show you. Don’t be afraid.”

  Sir Bradwen was sorely tempted, but said nothing.

  “Here’s what we’ve come up with, and very clever of us, too, if I may say it. Of me, especially, which is why I get to talk to you two.”

  It was a short staff with a bulging, lusterless crystal at one end.

  “I won’t point it at you,” 12BFW-CY- continued, “and if I did, I wouldn’t turn it on. That would be too dangerous for you. But you may point it at other people, you see. It’s thought-controlled, of course, just like my car. Point it, think of it working, and you’ll see a crimson flash, very short.”

  Sir Bradwen nodded slowly.

  “Suppose an enemy knight comes into view. He doesn’t have to attack you. If you can see him, that’s plenty. You merely have to point my paciforcer at him, and think of him being paciforced. He will be incapable of any violence whatsoever, from that moment on.”

  Softly and involuntarily, the princess moaned.

  “Yes! Yes, yes!” 12BFW-CY- paused to clear his throat. “But there’s—hem, hem!—more. The same holds true for his descendants. Or at least for any conceived after ten days or so. No violence. None! Can’t kill a chicken or bait a hook. And their own children will inherit the, er, tendency. If they have any. You appear troubled.”

  “I am,” Sir Bradwen conceded. “You see, Sir Magician, many of my foes are Arthur’s rebellious subjects. It is my task to return them to their loyalty, whether by killing them or by other means. With this … ?”

  “Paciforcer.”

  “With this paciforcer they will be of no use to Arthur even if they renounce their rebellion. Knights and nobles who will not smite the heathen have no value.”

  “Why worry?” 12BFW-CY- smiled. “In such cases you need not use it. But against the—ah?”

  “Heathen.”

  “Heathen themselves … Eh? Eh?”

  “I hesitate—” Sir Bradwen began.

  “Do not.” 12BFW-CY- held out the paciforcer, and edging his cart nearer actually forced it into Sir Bradwen’s hand. “I must warn you that should you decline, this toothsome lady will be restored to her family. I shall be compelled to use the paciforcer myself. On both of you.”

  Sir Bradwen bowed. “In that case I accept. No price is too great.”

  “Good. Good!”

  Sir Bradwen’s hand closed about the paciforcer.

  And 12BFW-CY- released it with a sigh. “An infinity of pain and suffering is thus wiped away. Human history will be infinitely more peaceful. Shorter, of course. Much shorter. But delightfully peaceful. My own generation will never have been.” For a moment he appeared radiantly happy. “We will have the oblivion we crave. Guard my paciforcer well. If it is not subjected to abuse, it will endure and continue to function for a thousand years.”

  “You may trust me,” Sir Bradwen declared, “to do the right thing.”

  “Then go.”

  12BFW-CY- pointed down a long aisle between towering devices of sorcery, and suddenly Sir Bradwen beheld an opening at its termination, and sunlight beyond the opening.

 
“Blessings are without meaning,” 12BFW-CY- murmured, “and yet, and yet …”

  “Farewell!” Sir Bradwen told him, and flourished the paciforcer.

  The princess bowed until her hair swept the floor. “This submissive person makes haste to remove her loathsome self from your august presence. Ten thousand blessings!”

  No sooner had she and Sir Bradwen left the glass hill than its opening shut behind them. A pleasant walk of a quarter mile (over much of which he carried her) brought them to the old peasant and his helpers. Sir Bradwen gave each of them a full day’s pay, though they had labored for less than half that.

  That done, he lifted the princess into his great war saddle and mounted behind her; and together they rode away until they reached the path beside the River Sart. There he took the paciforcer from his belt and flung it into the water.

  And the two of them rode on, upon a great white charger who felt and shared their joy, the princess singing and Sir Bradwen whistling.

  The Monday Man

  I knew John Genaro more than forty years, I suppose, if you want to go all the way back to the beginning. When we were kids and the old Harry S Truman School split the tracks (as the saying was), we made up the finest softball battery in the eighth grade. I forgot John when I went off to college, but ran into him again when I came home to hang up my shingle in the window of what we used to call the world’s smallest law office. By that time my dad had lost what little money he’d had. It killed him, and that killed Mom; but nothing had killed me yet, and I rented a walkup in John’s old neighborhood, writing wills for scrubwomen who’d saved five bucks a week and Korean families who wanted to split a little grocery among five sons.

  I took all the criminal cases I could get in those days, so it wasn’t very long before I found out that John was walking a beat a couple of blocks from my office: he’d collared a lot of the muggers and shoplifters I was defending. I tried to shake him the first few times he appeared as arresting officer, and found out I couldn’t; I recall thinking it might be because he wasn’t married.

  Anyhow, we became friends again, between fights over those pitiful little cases; and we stayed friends. Every season we’d hunt together (it’s mostly rabbits and pheasants in this part of the state), and we’d meet for lunch once or twice a month when there wasn’t anything to hunt. On and off I tried to interest John in fishing, which has always outrated hunting with me, but I never even got him to get a line wet; before he died he told me why. Now that I’m close to going myself, I think I ought to pass his story along. You won’t believe it, but perhaps you’ll remember it just the same.

  If only when it’s too late.

  My wife had gone to bed, and he and I were drinking in the kitchen. Perhaps he had a little too much that night; he rarely risked being disbelieved, but I think he’d kept it to himself so long it had started to fester, and the whiskey brought it out.

  It happened while I was still in law school, according to John, and I’ll let him take it from there.

  “I was still a rookie,” he said, “and it hit me harder than anything has since, though I’ve had a partner shot down beside me, and I was the one that opened the box they’d put the Rothman girl in. Know what a Monday man is, Gene?”

  I said I didn’t, and John kept talking.

  “This was back before they had these laundromats and driers all over, or anyway before the people on my old beat had ’em. A Monday man was a guy who stole washing off clotheslines. Monday was when most washing got hung out, so that’s when I’d have the most trouble with ‘em. Sometimes they were the kind that steals women’s underwear to keep—there’s something wrong with those—but mostly they’d take anything that wasn’t too worn, and wear it themselves or sell it. Very petty, petty larceny.

  “I was strolling along one afternoon, enjoying the weather and feeling proud of my nice new blue uniform—which I was still new and green enough myself to do—when a woman ran out of one of the buildings yelling that somebody’d just taken her husband’s overalls off the line. She’d seen him out the back window.

  “I got around to the end of the block just in time to spot a little guy with overalls in his hand come out of the alley. I chased him, but I lost him before long; that’s never been a good neighborhood for a cop to chase somebody in. It made me sore to lose him, because it was going to be my first pinch and I knew I’d get chewed out by my sergeant. They put guys in cars right away now and everybody’s a stranger; but in those days a good cop was supposed to know everyone on his beat, and I hadn’t recognized this Monday man.

  “Like I said, I felt lousy about the whole thing. So when I saw a kid I knew sitting on a stoop, I went over and asked if he’d seen the guy I’d been chasing, and did he know him. This kid had been in trouble before—mostly vandalism—so I suppose he wanted to get on the good side of the law. Anyway he told me he didn’t know the guy, but he’d seen where he’d gone.”

  I poured John another one. “Ah, the police informer.”

  “Yeah. Today that kid’s in the Assembly, but he still calls me Johnny, as democratic as you please.

  “Anyway the kid pointed out the place. These days it’d be full of addicts, but back then you didn’t see so much of that. I went through it, floor by floor, and when I got to the fourth I could hear somebody moving around up on the fifth—that was the top floor. I figured I had him if it was him, because there wasn’t but the one stairway and no fire escape.

  “By the time I got up there, he’d locked himself in one of the apartments. I rapped on the door with my billy and yelled, ‘Police!’ All by the book and just like he really lived there. But when he didn’t open up, I kicked down the door.

  “He was just standing in the middle of the room, with the overalls still in his hand. I figured he’d been looking for a place to hide ’em and couldn’t find one, because that was about as bare a room as you could find. There was an empty bottle on the floor and a closet, and that was all there was except for the guy himself. He was pretty ordinary-looking, or at least I thought so then. Had on an old sportcoat a little too big for him.”

  I asked whether the Monday man had been living there, and if so, where he had slept.

  John shook his head. “I doubt that he did,” he said.

  “I yelled that he was under arrest and grabbed his arm with my left hand, just above the cuff of that old plaid sportcoat. Like this, see?” John grasped my forearm. “That was what saved me, even though I didn’t know it then. Every once in a while I still dream about it.

  “With my right I snapped my handcuffs over both our wrists, and I told him to come along. We were about halfway down the first flight when he started to pull back. I gave a hard jerk on the cuffs and went down two or three more steps. Then he pulled me right off my feet.”

  I said, “It sounds as though your Monday man was stronger than he looked.”

  “He dragged me clear back to the landing before I could get my legs under me again. I got pretty mad about that; I rapped him alongside the head and told him to cut it out. His knees gave a little and he stopped pulling, but he never said a word.

  “I started back down and got a little farther before the same thing happened.”I’d have sworn there wasn’t a man alive that could drag me up a flight of stairs if I didn’t want to go, but here was this little guy who didn’t look like he weighed a hundred and forty doing it. I dropped my billy and the overalls when that pull came, and he got me back almost to the door of the apartment. Well, that was more than enough for me—I pasted him one on the jaw that ought to have broken it.”

  I asked, “But it didn’t?”

  John rubbed the white scars on his knuckles reflectively. “No. But he stopped pulling. You want to shove that bottle over a little?

  “The funny thing was that my fist stayed right on his chin. You ever touch a piece of bare metal that’s been in a freezer? It was just like that, except he didn’t feel cold. It was like when you get Krazy Glue on your fingers, except we didn’t have
Krazy Glue then. I tried to shake my hand loose and couldn’t—all it did was hurt.

  “Naturally I looked at my hand and his jaw, trying to see what was wrong, and I think that was the first time I’d really looked at this Monday man. He was such an ordinary little bum that I hadn’t paid any more attention to him than I would to one particular match in a folder. I had his face turned up so I could see my knuckles, and I noticed his nostrils.”

  “What was the matter?” I asked. “Were they square?”

  “No, that wouldn’t have been so bad. He didn’t have any, not real ones. Where they should’ve been there were two little black depressions. His eyes were the same way—they didn’t have any depth. Oh, the look was there all right, just like a good photo has it, when you can scrape it with a fingernail and hit paper just below the surface.”

  I said, “In other words, your Monday man had on a mask.”

  John shook his head. “A mask ends someplace. It was more like he was a dummy, like they have in department stores. Only I’ve never seen one half as good as he was.

  “While I was getting used to what I had hanging off the end of my hand, he began pulling hard again, trying to drag me back into that apartment. I pulled the other way, doing most of it with the cuffs. It hurt like hell when I tried to pull with the stuck hand. With the cuffs on my left and my right stuck like that, I didn’t have a free hand, which scared the hell out of me. Being scared can make you strong sometimes, and I was able to drag him clear down to the first floor, although I lost ground once or twice.

  “When I’d got him out the front door I’d gone as far as I could go, and I knew it. He’d stopped pulling steady and was making sudden jerks whenever he could catch me off balance. I’d wrenched a knee going down the last flight and between that and my hand and my left wrist the pain was awful. I yelled—screamed is a lot more like it—but you know how much chance a cop has of getting help in that neighborhood. I could hear windows banging shut and people hustling to get off the street. Then he dragged me back inside the building.