Home Fires Read online

  “I won’t pry, Skip.” The smile appeared in earnest. “Not now, because I know I wouldn’t find out anything. Later, possibly. Some girls are terrified of ordering anything too costly. I was never one of those, but I knew some like that.”

  He nodded.

  “Others are afraid they’ll order something they don’t know how to eat. Lobster or pigs’ trotters, a dish that takes finesse. If they order what the man orders, he can’t object to the price, and they can see how he eats it.”

  “So you ordered what I ordered, without knowing what it was.”

  “It seemed simpler like that. Either I’m not hungry at all, or I’m so hungry I’ll eat anything. I’ll know when the food comes. Wouldn’t you think they’d have a waiter to take our order? He could answer our questions then.”

  Skip nodded absently. “They do that in second class.”

  It evoked a throaty chuckle. “We privileged few needn’t worry about keeping the proles employed. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with the system.”

  “It may be.”

  “I was a wealthy woman, Skip.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve almost nothing now. Just a few noras that a woman gave me before she let me out at the station. I’m going to need more.”

  “You want more. I anticipated that.”

  “May I have it?”

  “Not now. I have to have some way to control you.”

  “Surely there are others.”

  “There are, but I like this one.”

  She laughed. “You’re rather too much fun to cross blades with. I could cut Charles to pieces in two minutes—it was part of the reason I opted out. Would you like to stay in our compartment while I shower and get ready for bed?”

  He shook his head.

  “No? I was hoping you would. I was going to charge you for it.”

  “No. I’ll wait in the bar car.”

  A waiter arrived, trailed by an assistant who carried an identical meal. “Questions?” The waiter looked from one to the other. “Additional needs? Monsieur? Madame?”

  “I’ve a thousand,” Vanessa told him, “but you can’t supply any of them.”

  * * *

  As Skip sat in the bar car sipping Chablis-and-soda, the barmaid’s assistant’s helper muttered, “I wouldn’t call you an enthusiastic drinker, sir.”

  “I’m not,” Skip told her. “I’m just waiting for the dead woman in my compartment to go to bed.”

  REFLECTION 1: The Journey

  We sleep, and believe we wake with the minds we carried into bed with us, bearing them as a bride borne in her groom’s arms, the lifted, the treasured, the threshold flier; so we believe.

  But we do not. That weary mind has been dispersed in sleep, its myriad parts left behind on the tracks, lying upon the infinite concrete ties between endless, gleaming steel rails.

  We wake, and compose for ourselves a new mind (if some other does not compose it for us), a mind compounded of such parts of the old one as we can discover, and of dreams, and of odd snatches of memory—something read long, long ago, possibly something sprung into thought from a tele listing, the skewed description of a better presentation, the show as it existed in Platonic space. From such trifles as these and more we construct a new mind and call it our own.

  And yet the personhood, the soul remains. A roommate I had one year woke each morning as a beast, woke roaring, shouting, and fighting. Fighting air, for the most part, for I soon learned to absent myself before his autocall, or to jump back if circumstance forced me to wake him myself; there is such a beast in all of us—no, several such beasts.

  Chelle told me once that she woke each morning as a child, though strictly speaking it was untrue. It was most often true, I think, when she had been drinking and she was awakened an hour or two later, still somewhat drunk. She was small and guilty then, weeping for misbehavior she knew not of, a child like so many accustomed to being blamed and punished, quite often severely, for an act done or a word spoken in purest innocence. Thus I, who had met her at the university, came to know the child she had once been, and in truth to love and dread that child.

  For me, on the morning of the yellow notice, things were otherwise—or perhaps the same: I thought myself young and thought Chelle with me in bed, or (when at last I accepted her absence from our bed) in the lavatory. She had reentered my life, and so my hungry brain embraced and swallowed her, gulping down Chelle whole, Chelle here and now. And since she was here, was now, I myself must be twenty-seven. Twenty-seven and awakening in the studio apartment I shared with Chelle before she enlisted and shared with her afterward only when she got leave. All this when the present Chelle, my new Chelle, was nothing more than a single sheet of yellow paper fallen from my printer.

  Then I knew myself old; and for a moment, only for a moment, before I pushed back sheet and blankets, I thought I heard the light steps of Susan’s departure. She would leave me now, I thought, leave me to sleep and go down to her three rooms to wash and eat and dress and prepare for the day’s work. I had heard her, I thought; yet the door had neither opened nor closed.

  I rose, and knew that I had not known the pleasure of her company during the night and had not wanted it. We are never quite so alone as we are in the company of others; a paradox, but a paradox in a world so filled with them that one more can make no difference—or only a small and trifling difference, though that difference may mean the world to some unfortunate individual.

  As this one to me. I live by defending others from a law that is grown monstrous, devoid not only of justice but of the very thought and ideal of justice. I defend others, yet no one is more alone than I. In centuries long past, the accused was defended by a champion, a knight (paid, unless the accused was of the highest rank) who engaged the accuser’s champion in the court of justice, confident that God would defend the right. The time-wind rises, the mist disperses, and we see that nothing has changed. I have my squire and my pages, my body servants and men-at-arms, now called secretaries, clerks, researchers, and detectives; figuratively it might be said that I ride into court with Susan’s scarf bound about my helm. Yet who is more alone than I?

  May God defend the right!

  I look out over the city like an eagle from a spire of rock, and it is not my kingdom but my hunting ground. Nor am I the only hunter; others hunt there, and some may hunt me. The common man, so celebrated a century ago by those who were even then plotting to bring him down, has in this age been driven to the wall. Every elective office is held for life, and those who hold those offices may rule by whim if it be their whim to rule so. Hated, they glory in it, and know not how weak they are.

  I know how weak I am, or I think I do; my imitation Vanessa does not, or so I believe, but she surely knows how weak she herself is, and she is far weaker than I, weaker than Susan, and no doubt far weaker than her daughter, the strapping lacrosse player, the glory of the women’s track team. It is not Vanessa’s weakness that attracts me, for I, possessing a superabundance of weakness myself, am never attracted to it; rather it is her defiance of her weakness, for there is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.

  Even in a dead woman.

  2. WHEN JANIE COMES MARCHING HOME

  The sky seemed oddly threatening. Patches of clearest blue separated cloud towers the color of city faces. Like all the rest, Skip studied the sky and watched for the shuttle, buffeted by the crowd and striving to shelter Vanessa from similar shoving and elbowing. “I thought they’d be about my age,” he whispered. “I wasn’t ready for these kids.”

  “They are waiting for their fathers and mothers, for parents they’ve been told about but can’t remember.” She seemed cool and collected, small and splendid in the black wool coat he had bought her and a black pillbox hat whose scarlet feather matched her earrings.

  “There are some as old as we are.” It sounded more defensive than he had intended.

  “Some. Not many.”

  Then there were c
heers, and the young man on Skip’s right pointed and shouted. Very far away, a shining dot had emerged from one of the gray-faced clouds. The crowd surged against the fence, which bowed but held. Military Police—big men with polished white helmets above tired, brutal faces—were clearing a path with white batons, shoving people aside and whacking the shoulders of those who refused to move.

  Half a dozen uniformed women unrolled a red carpet; somewhere nearby a band struck up “El Continente de los Héroes.”

  “Catchy, isn’t it?” Vanessa whispered.

  There seemed to be no point in answering her, and Skip did not. To the north, the shining dot had sprouted stubby wings.

  “It looks too small to hold many people.” Vanessa was shading her eyes with her hand and squinting; there were tiny lines at the corners of her eyes.

  Skip said, “I think it must be the size of a bus.”

  It was far larger, swooping down toward the end of a runway as long as many highways, a runway so long that its end was well beyond their sight. The thunder of rockets—just the little braking rockets, Skip reminded himself—was like a storm at sea.

  “Her name,” he said.

  Vanessa turned to him quizzically.

  “Chelle Sea Blue. Her eyes are as blue as the sea down around Tobago.”

  Perhaps Vanessa replied; if so, Skip did not hear her. He was watching the shuttle bringing Chelle. It looked as large as a ship without masts—a ship in drydock, with no part hidden by the sea. Stopping, it turned and rolled toward them, moving slowly and ponderously on landing gear with so many wheels that Skip, who often counted things by reflex, lost count of them—huge rubber wheels, some of which (and perhaps all of which) were clearly powered.

  A man standing behind him said, “Imagine how big the mother ship is!”

  Skip nodded, though he knew he had not been addressed.

  A stunned silence had settled over the crowd; the band was heard distinctly once more, a band that seemed much too small for the occasion, a little band of children welcoming a stainless-steel archangel. “The Union Anthem” had always sounded as though it had been composed by a machine, but never more than now.

  A silver gangplank unrolled from an airlock a hundred feet in the air, a gangplank that stiffened as it came and brought its own spidery railing of slender posts and still more slender black cords.

  Someone shouted, “Here they come!” But they did not come.

  Vanessa was sniffling. After a moment, Skip gave her his handkerchief, a man’s handkerchief, white with a dark gray border, a handkerchief so large that it might easily have been knotted about her slender throat like a bandana. “My baby!” It was gasped, not said. “My baby!”

  He put his arm around her shoulders.

  “I only had one. I never wanted more. But … But…”

  “I understand.”

  An officer with a bullhorn had appeared, tiny at the top of the gangplank. “… WHO TOUCHES ANY SOLDIER WILL BE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY. ANYONE WHO BREAKS THE MILITARY POLICE LINES WILL LIKEWISE BE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY.”

  The crowd growled in response, one vast beast with a thousand savage heads.

  The officer disappeared into the shuttle. For thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes and more, nothing happened.

  The band struck up a march, a bass drum thumping the cadence while two trap drums pranced around it, the whole punctuated by trumpets that for once sounded like trumpets on a battlefield.

  And they came, a single file of women and men in blue garrison caps and dress cloaks, booted feet drumming the long silver gangplank and arms swinging. Someone shouted, “Oh, don’t they look fine!”

  In reply Vanessa whispered, “They don’t tell anyone when the dead and wounded come back.”

  The first marching soldier stepped off the end of the gangplank, and the crowd surged toward her—toward her and toward those who came behind her. The white-helmeted MPs shouted. Their white batons rose briefly above the heads of the crowd and fell upon them.

  More soldiers came, and more, an endless stream; and the crowd parted for white-helmeted MPs dragging a gray-haired woman in handcuffs.

  “There she is!” Vanessa was shouting and pointing. “Chelle! Chelle, darling! Over here!”

  With Vanessa in his wake, Skip fought through the crowd and pushed past a white-helmeted MP to seize Chelle and kiss her. The shock of a white baton on his shoulder was less painful than Chelle’s startled stare. Goaded to savagery by pain and stare, Skip whirled, grabbed the coat of the MP who had struck him, butted him in the face, kneed him in the groin, and let him fall.

  When he turned again, Chelle was gone, the crowd was rioting, and soldiers were no longer marching out of the ship. Grinning as she was forced tightly against him by the rioters, Vanessa asked, “Where the devil did you learn that?”

  “Law school,” he told her.

  * * *

  He had nearly unpacked when Vanessa knocked at the door of his hotel room. “I can’t speak for you, Skip, but I’m starved. There’s nothing like stoning the police to give one an appetite.” She sniffed. “You still have that dreadful gas on your clothing. You must change—shower and change.”

  “I will,” he said, and returned to his shirts.

  “You brought so many clothes!”

  He nodded absently.

  “I brought everything I have, but it isn’t much.” When he said nothing, Vanessa added, “That’s a hint.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Two dresses and a pants suit. A few cosmetics. I ask you.”

  “Ample. Now get out of here. I have to change, as you suggested. I have to shower. I’ll get you when I’m ready to eat.”

  Vanessa leveled a long, crimson-tipped finger. “I am starving, I’ve scarcely a nora, and I’m not leaving ’til I am fed. If you try to throw me out bodily, I’ll scream my glamorous little head off. I bite, too.”

  “I’m going to strip—”

  “Shut up! Do you think I’ve never seen a naked man?”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “One must shout at idiots when kindness doesn’t work. You have a robe, I see it in your closet. Take your robe and go into the bathroom. Take off those clothes and have a nice shower. Put on the robe and I will bring you fresh clothes piece by piece. Why did you bring so much anyway?”

  Skip sat down on the bed. “Chelle has a year’s leave coming. I was hoping—I don’t know that it will happen—that we could go off together right away.”

  “The EU?”

  His shoulders rose and fell. “Wherever she wanted. Paris or Antarctica or around the world.”

  “Without me.”

  “Correct.”

  “You will stop paying, and I will die again. Is that right?”

  “Only if you turn yourself in.”

  “I’ll be broke and friendless. Starving on the streets, and they’ll be counting on that.”

  He sighed. “I specialize in criminal law, Vanessa. Maybe you knew that.”

  “It must be interesting. Serial killers, hijackers, burglars, and counterfeiters. The woman who drove me to the station told me.”

  “Then let me tell you something. Nearly everything is against the law on this continent. Cockfighting. Using a few watts over your energy allotment. Signing with someone too young to contract. Picking your nose in a public park. On and on and on. As a result there are at least seventy million fugitives, and there could be more. Nobody really knows.”

  “Most of whom nobody gives a hoot about.”

  He sighed. “You’re right.”

  “Reanimation would care a great deal about me. More than enough to offer a reward. Enough to have its private security run me down, a friendless woman without money.”

  The telephone on Skip’s nightstand caroled; the screen lit to show Chelle’s anxious face.

  * * *

  While they waited for a room-service dinner, Skip said, “If they won’t let anybody off base, what are you doing here?”

  Ch
elle grinned. “I hopped over the fence. Went AWOL. Bad, bad Chelle!”

  “Won’t you be punished?”

  She shook her head. “I could be—court-martialed and reduced in grade. All that shit. I won’t be. There are too many of us, and we’re just back from the smokehouse and in line for uppity-ump awards and citations. I’ll go back tomorrow morning, get a chewing-out and a lecture, and keep processing. I’m going to sleep here, right? With you?”

  Skip nodded. “I certainly hope so.”

  “But you deserted to see me,” Vanessa protested. “You didn’t even know who Skip was.”

  “Yeah.” Chelle paused, looking from one to the other. “Except that I didn’t desert. I went away without leave. You don’t desert unless you put on civvies, and you have to have been missing for more than a week.”

  She yawned and smiled at Skip. “Hey, listen to me—I’ve turned into a guardhouse lawyer. You probably know all this already.”

  He shook his head. “Military law’s a different field. I should have boned up on it while you were away. I’ll do it, now that you’ve come back.”

  Vanessa said, “You’re getting out, aren’t you, Chelle? Getting a discharge?”

  “No, sir! Not ’til I use up my paid leave.”

  Their food arrived, and Skip signed for it.

  “I’ve got a ton of pay coming, too,” Chelle remarked as the waiter left. “How long was I gone?”

  “Twenty-two years, one hundred and six days.” Skip cleared his throat. “I didn’t count the hours. I was…”

  “Speechless, Counselor?”

  “Looking for the best word. Devastated. Knocked off my feet. Half dead. Veritas nihil veretur nisi abscondi. None of those I’ve found are quite right, and I’m still groping for it.”

  Chelle uncovered her plate. “This smells heavenly. Army food’s not really as bad as everybody thinks, but I’m starved and this is going to be better. So I’m going to ask questions now, and you two are going to have to answer while I liberate the best chow.” Abruptly her voice grew serious. “This one’s driving me nuts. Why don’t you look old, Mom?”