Wolfe, Gene - The Ziggurat

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THE ZIGGURAT
by GENE WOLFE
[VERSION 1.1 (Dec 08 03). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update
the version number by 0.1 and redistribute.]
First published in Full Spectrum 5, edited by Jennifer Hersh, Tom Dupree and Janna
Silverstein, 1995.
It had begun to snow about one-thirty. Emery Bainbridge stood on the front porch
to watch it before going back into the cabin to record it in his journal.
13:38 Snowing hard, quiet as owl feathers. Radio says stay off the roads unless
you have four-wheel. Probably means no Brook.
He put down the lipstick-red ballpoint and stared at it. With this pen... He ought to
scratch out Brook and write Jan over it.
"To hell with that." His harsh voice seemed loud in the silent cabin. "What I wrote,
I wrote. Quod scripsi whatever it is."
That was what being out here alone did, he told himself. You were supposed to
rest up. You were supposed to calm down. Instead you started talking to yourself.
"Like some nut," he added aloud.
Jan would come, bringing Brook. And Aileen and Alayna. Aileen and Alayna were
as much his children as Brook was, he told himself firmly. "For the time being."
If Jan could not come tomorrow, she would come later when the county had
cleared the back roads. And it was more than possible that she would come, or try to,
tomorrow as she had planned. There was that kind of a streak in Jan, not exactly
stubbornness and not exactly resolution, but a sort of willful determination to believe
whatever she wanted; thus she believed he would sign her papers, and thus she would
believe that the big Lincoln he had bought her could go anywhere a Jeep could.
Brook would be all for it, of course. At nine, Brook had tried to cross the Atlantic
on a Styrofoam dinosaur, paddling out farther and farther until at last a lifeguard had
launched her little catamaran and brought him back, letting the dinosaur float out to
sea.
That was what was happening everywhere, Emery thought -- boys and men were
being brought back to shore by women, though for thousands of years their daring
had permitted humanity to survive.
He pulled on his red-plaid double mackinaw and his warmest cap, and carried a
chair out onto the porch to watch the snow.
Suddenly it wasn't... He had forgotten the word that he had used before. It wasn't
whatever men had. It was something women had, or they thought it was. Possibly it
was something nobody had.
He pictured Jan leaning intently over the wheel, her lips compressed to an ugly
slit, easing her Lincoln into the snow, coaxing it up the first hill, stern with triumph as
it cleared the crest. Jan about to be stranded in this soft and silent wilderness in high-
heeled shoes. Perhaps that streak of hers was courage after all, or something so close
that it could be substituted for courage at will. Little pink packets that made you think
whatever you wanted to be true would be true, if only you acted as if it were with
sufficient tenacity.
He was being watched.
"By God, it's that coyote," he said aloud, and knew from the timbre of his own
voice that he lied. These were human eyes. He narrowed his own, peering through the
falling snow, took off his glasses, blotted their lenses absently with his handkerchief,
and looked again.
A higher, steeper hill rose on the other side of his tiny valley, a hill clothed in
pines and crowned with wind-swept ocher rocks. The watcher was up there
somewhere, staring down at him through the pine boughs, silent and observant.
"Come on over!" Emery called. "Want some coffee?"
There was no response.
"You lost? You better get out of this weather!"
The silence of the snow seemed to suffocate each word in turn. Although he had
shouted, he could not be certain he had been heard. He stood and made a sweeping
gesture: Come here.
There was a flash of colorless light from the pines, so swift and slight that he could
not be absolutely certain he had seen it. Someone signaling with a mirror -- except
that the sky was the color of lead above the downward-drifting whiteness of the snow,
the sun invisible.
"Come on over!" he called again, but the watcher was gone.
Country people, he thought, suspicious of strangers. But there were no country
people around here, not within ten miles; a few hunting camps, a few cabins like his
own, with nobody in them now that deer season was over.
He stepped off the little porch. The snow was more than ankle-deep already and
falling faster than it had been just a minute before, the pine-clad hill across the creek
practically invisible.
The woodpile under the overhang of the south eaves (the woodpile that had
appeared so impressive when he had arrived) had shrunk drastically. It was time to
cut and split more. Past time, really. The chain saw tomorrow, the ax, the maul, and
the wedge tomorrow, and perhaps even the Jeep, if he could get it in to snake the logs
out.
Mentally, he put them all away. Jan was coming, would be bringing Brook to stay.
And the twins to stay, too, with Jan herself, if the road got too bad.
The coyote had gone up on the back porch!
After a second or two he realized he was grinning like a fool, and forced himself to
stop and look instead.
There were no tracks. Presumably the coyote had eaten this morning before the
snow started, for the bowl was empty, licked clean. The time would come, and soon,
when he would touch the rough yellow-gray head, when the coyote would lick his
fingers and fall asleep in front of the little fieldstone fireplace in his cabin.
Triumphant, he rattled the rear door, then remembered that he had locked it the
night before. Had locked both doors, in fact, moved by an indefinable dread. Bears,
he thought -- a way of assuring himself that he was not as irrational as Jan.
There were bears around here, that was true enough. Small black bears, for the
most part. But not Yogi Bears, not funny but potentially dangerous park bears who
had lost all fear of Man and roamed and rummaged as they pleased. These bears were
hunted every year, hunted through the golden days of autumn as they fattened for
hibernation. Silver winter had arrived, and these bears slept in caves and hollow logs,
in thickets and thick brush, slept like their dead, though slowly and softly breathing
like the snow -- motionless, dreaming bear-dreams of the last-men years, when the
trees would have filled in the old logging roads again and shouldered aside the
cracked asphalt of the county road, and all the guns had rusted to dust.
Yet he had been afraid.
He returned to the front of the cabin, picked up the chair he had carried onto the
porch, and noticed a black spot on its worn back he could not recall having seen
before. It marked his finger, and was scraped away readily by the blade of his
pocketknife.
Shrugging, he brought the chair back inside. There was plenty of Irish stew; he
would have Irish stew tonight, soak a slice of bread in gravy for the coyote, and leave
it in the same spot on the back porch. You could not (as people always said) move the
bowl a little every day. That would have been frightening, too fast for any wild thing.
You moved the bowl once, perhaps, in a week; and the coyote's bowl had walked by
those halting steps from the creek bank where he had glimpsed the coyote in summer
to the back porch.
Jan and Brook and the twins might -- would be sure to -- frighten it. That was
unfortunate, but could not be helped; it might be best not to try to feed the coyote at
all until Jan and the twins had gone. As inexplicably as he had known that he was
being watched, and by no animal, he felt certain that Jan would reach him somehow,
bending reality to her desires.
He got out the broom and swept the cabin. When he had expected her, he had not
cared how it looked or what she might think of it. Now that her arrival had become
problematic, he found that he cared a great deal.
She would have the other lower bunk, the twins could sleep together feet-to-feet in
an upper (no doubt with much squealing and giggling and kicking), and Brook in the
other upper -- in the bunk over his own.
Thus would the family achieve its final and irrevocable separation for the first
time; the Sibberlings (who had been and would again be) on one side of the cabin, the
Bainbridges on the other: boys here, girls over there. The law would take years, and
demand tens of thousands of dollars, to accomplish no more.
Boys here.
Girls over there, farther and farther all the time. When he had rocked and kissed
Aileen and Alayna, when he had bought Christmas and birthday presents and sat
through solemn, silly conferences with their pleased teachers, he had never felt that he
was actually the twins' father. Now he did. Al Sibberling had given them his swarthy
good looks and flung them away. He, Emery Bainbridge, had picked them up like
discarded dolls after Jan had run the family deep in debt. Had called himself their
father, and thought he lied.
There would be no sleeping with Jan, no matter how long she stayed. It was why
she was bringing the twins, as he had known from the moment she said they would be
with her.
He put clean sheets on the bunk that would be hers, with three thick wool blankets
and a quilt.
Bringing her back from plays and country-club dances, he had learned to listen for
them; silence had meant he could return and visit Jan's bed when he had driven the
sitter home. Now Jan feared that he would want to bargain -- his name on her paper
for a little more pleasure, a little more love before they parted for good. Much as she
wanted him to sign, she did not want him to sign as much as that. Girls here, boys
over there. Had he grown so hideous?
Women need a reason, he thought, men just need a place.
For Jan the reason wasn't good enough, so she had seen to it that there would be no
place. He told himself it would be great to hug the twins again -- and discovered that
it would.
He fluffed Jan's pillow anyway, and dressed it in a clean white pillowcase.
She would have found someone by now, somebody in the city to whom she was
being faithful, exactly as he himself had been faithful to Jan while he was still married
in the eyes of the law, to Pamela.
The thought of eyes recalled the watcher on the hill.
14:12 Somebody is on the hill across the creek with some kind of signaling device.
That sounded as if he were going crazy, he decided. What if Jan saw it? He added,
maybe just a flashlight, although he did not believe it had been a flashlight.
A lion's face smiled up at him from the barrel of the red pen, and he stopped to
read the minute print under it, holding the pen up to catch the gray light from the
window. "The Red Lion Inn/San Jose." A nice hotel. If -- when -- he got up the nerve
to do it, he would write notes to Jan and Brook first with this pen.
The coyote ate the food I put out for him, I think soon after breakfast. More food
tonight. Tomorrow morning I will leave the back door cracked open awhile.
14:15 I am going up on the hill for a look around.
He had not known that until he wrote it.
The hillside seemed steeper than he remembered, slippery with snow. The pines
had changed; their limbs drooped like the boughs of hemlocks, springing up like
snares when he touched them, and throwing snow in his face. No bird sang.
He had brought his flashlight, impelled by the memory of the colorless signal from
the hill. Now he used it to peep beneath the drooping limbs. Most of the tracks that
the unseen watcher had left would be covered with new snow by this time; a few
might remain, in the shelter of the pines.
He had nearly reached the rocky summit before he found the first, and even it was
blurred by snow despite its protection. He knelt and blew the drifted flakes away,
clearing it with his breath as he had sometimes cleared the tracks of animals; an oddly
cleated shoe, almost like the divided hoof of an elk. He measured it against his spread
hand, from the tip of his little finger to the tip of his thumb. A small foot, no bigger
than size six, if that.
A boy.
There was another, inferior, print beside it. And not far away a blurred depression
that might have been left by a gloved hand or a hundred other things. Here the boy
had crouched with his little polished steel mirror, or whatever he had.
Emery knelt, lifting the snow-burdened limbs that blocked his view of the cabin.
Two small, dark figures were emerging from the cabin door onto the porch, scarcely
visible through the falling snow. The first carried his ax, the second his rifle.
He stood, waving the flashlight. "Hey! You there!"
The one holding his rifle raised it, not putting it to his shoulder properly but acting
much too quickly for Emery to duck. The flat crack of the shot sounded clearly, snow
or no snow.
He tried to dodge, slipped, and fell to the soft snow.
"Too late," he told himself. And then, "Going to do it for me." And last, "Better
stay down in case he shoots again." The cold air was like chilled wine, the snow he
lay in lovely beyond imagining. Drawing back his coat sleeve, he consulted his
watch, resolving to wait ten minutes -- to risk nothing.
They were robbing his cabin, obviously. Had robbed it, in fact, while he had been
climbing through the pines. Had fired, in all probability, merely to keep him away
long enough for them to leave. Mentally, he inventoried the cabin. Besides the rifle,
there had not been a lot worth stealing -- his food and a few tools; they might take his
Jeep if they could figure out how to hot-wire the ignition, and that was pretty easy on
those old Jeeps.
His money was in his wallet, his wallet in the hip pocket of his hunting trousers.
His watch -- a plastic sports watch hardly worth stealing -- was on his wrist. His
checkbook had been in the table drawer; they might steal that and forge his checks,
possibly. They might even be caught when they tried to cash them.
Retrieving his flashlight; he lifted the limbs as he had before. The intruders were
not in sight, the door of the cabin half open, his Jeep still parked next to the north
wall, its red paint showing faintly through snow.
He glanced at his watch. One minute had passed, perhaps a minute and a half.
They would have to have a vehicle of some kind, one with four-wheel drive if they
didn't want to be stranded with their loot on a back road. Since he had not heard it
start up, they had probably left the engine running. Even so, he decided, he should
have heard it pull away.
Had they parked some distance off and approached his cabin on foot? Now that he
came to think of it, it seemed possible they had no vehicle after all. Two boys
camping in the snow, confident that he would be unable to follow them to their tent,
or whatever it was. Wasn't there a Boy Scout badge for winter camping? He had never
been a Scout, but thought he remembered hearing about one, and found it plausible.
Still no one visible. He let the branches droop again.
The rifle was not really much of a loss, though its theft had better be reported to
the sheriff. He had not planned on shooting anyway -- had been worried, as a matter
of fact, that the twins might get it down and do something foolish, although both had
shot at tin cans and steel silhouettes with it before he and Jan had agreed to separate.
Now, with his rifle gone, he could not...
Neither had been particularly attracted to it; and their having handled and fired it
already should have satisfied the natural curiosity that resulted in so many accidents
each year. They had learned to shoot to please him, and stopped as soon as he had
stopped urging them to learn.
Four minutes, possibly five. He raised the pine boughs once more, hearing the
muted growl of an engine; for a second or two he held his breath. The Jeep or Bronco
or whatever it was, was coming closer, not leaving. Was it possible that the thieves
were coming back? Returning with a truck to empty his cabin?
Jan's big black Lincoln hove into view, roared down the gentle foothill slope on
which his cabin stood, and skidded to a stop. Doors flew open, and all three kids piled
out. Jan herself left more sedately, shutting the door on the driver's side behind her
almost tenderly, tall and willowy as ever, her hair a golden helmet beneath a blue-
mink pillbox hat.
Her left hand held a thick, black attaché case that was probably his.
Brook was already on the porch. Emery stood and shouted a warning, but it was
too late; Brook was inside the cabin, with the twins hard on his heels. Jan looked
around and waved, and deep inside Emery something writhed in agony.
By the time he had reached the cabin, he had decided not to mention that the
intruders had shot at him. Presumably the shooter had chambered a new round,
ejecting the brass cartridge case of the round just fired into the snow; but it might
easily be overlooked, and if Brook or the twins found it, he could say that he had fired
the day before to scare off some animal.
"Hello," Jan said as he entered. "You left your door open. It's cold as Billy-o in
here." She was seated in a chair before the fire.
"I didn't." He dropped into the other, striving to look casual. "I was robbed."
"Really? When?"
"A quarter hour ago. Did you see another car coming in?"
Jan shook her head.
They had been on foot, then; the road ended at the lake. Aloud he said, "It doesn't
matter. They got my rifle and my ax." Remembering his checkbook, he pulled out the
drawer of the little table. His checkbook was still there; he took it out and put it into
an inner pocket of his mackinaw.
"It was an old rifle anyhow, wasn't it?"
He nodded. "My old thirty-thirty."
"Then you can buy a new one, and you should have locked the door. I--"
"You weren't supposed to get here until tomorrow," he told her brusquely. The
mere thought of another gun was terrifying.
"I know. But they said a blizzard was coming on TV, so I decided I'd better move
it up a day, or I'd have to wait for a week -- that was what it sounded like. I told
Doctor Gibbons that Aileen would be in next Thursday, and off we went. This
shouldn't take long." She opened his attaché case on her lap. "Now here--"
"Where are the kids?"
"Out back getting more wood. They'll be back in a minute."
As though to confirm her words, he heard the clink of the maul striking the wedge.
He ventured, "Do you really want them to hear it?"
"Emery, they know. I couldn't have hidden all this from them if I tried. What was I
going to say when they asked why you never came home anymore?"
"You could have told them I was deer-hunting."
"That's for a few days, maybe a week. You left in August, remember? Well,
anyway, I didn't. I told them the truth." She paused, expectant. "Aren't you going to
ask how they took it?"
He shook his head.
"The girls were hurt. I honestly think Brook's happy. Getting to live with you out
here for a while and all that."
"I've got him signed up for Culver," Emery told her. "He starts in February."
"That's best, I'm sure. Now listen, because we've got to get back. Here's a letter
from your--"
"You're not going to sleep here? Stay overnight?"
"Tonight? Certainly not. We've got to start home before this storm gets serious.
You always interrupt me. You always have. I suppose it's too late to say I wish you'd
stop."
He nodded. "I made up a bunk for you."
"Brook can have it. Now right--"
The back door opened and Brook himself came in. "I showed them how you split
the wood, and 'Layna split one. Didn't you, 'Layna?"
"Right here." Behind him, Alayna held the pieces up.
"That's not ladylike," Jan told her.
Emery said, "But it's quite something that a girl her age can swing that maul -- I
wouldn't have believed she could. Did Brook help you lift it?"
Alayna shook her head.
"I didn't want to," Aileen declared virtuously.
"Right here," Jan was pushing an envelope into his hands, "is a letter from your
attorney. It's sealed, see? I haven't read it, but you'd better take a look at it first."
"You know what's in it, though," Emery said, "or you think you do."
"He told me what he was going to write to you, yes."
"Otherwise you would have saved it." Emery got out his pocketknife and slit the
flap. "Want to tell me?"
Jan shook her head, her lips as tight and ugly as he had imagined them earlier.
Brook put down his load of wood. "Can I see?"
"You can read it for me," Emery told him. "I've got snow on my glasses." He
found a clean handkerchief and wiped them. "Don't read it out loud. Just tell me what
it says."
"Emery, you're doing this to get even!"
He shook his head. "This is Brook's inheritance that our lawyers are arguing
about."
Brook stared.
"I've lost my company," Emery told him. "Basically, we're talking about the
money and stock I got as a consolation prize. You're the only child I've got, probably
the only one I'll ever have. So read it. What does it say?"
Brook unfolded the letter; it seemed quieter to Emery now, with all five of them in
the cabin, than it ever had during all the months he had lived there alone.
Jan said, "What they did was perfectly legal, Brook. You should understand that.
They bought up a controlling interest and merged our company with theirs. That's all
that happened."
The stiff, parchment-like paper rattled in Brook's hands. Unexpectedly Alayna
whispered, "I'm sorry, Daddy."
Emery grinned at her. "I'm still here, honey."
Brook glanced from him to Jan, then back to him. "He says -- it's Mister
Gluckman. You introduced me one time."
Emery nodded.
"He says this is the best arrangement he's been able to work out, and he thinks it
would be in your best interest to take it."
Jan said, "You keep this place and your Jeep, and all your personal belongings,
naturally. I'll give you back my wedding and engagement rings--"
"You can keep them," Emery told her.
"No, I want to be fair about this. I've always tried to be fair, even when you didn't
come to the meetings between our attorneys. I'll give them back, but I get to keep all
the rest of the gifts you've given me, including my car."
Emery nodded.
"No alimony at all. Naturally no child support. Brook stays with you, Aileen and
Alayna with me. My attorney says we can force Al to pay child support."
Emery nodded again.
"And I get the house. Everything else we divide equally. That's the stock and any
other investments, the money in my personal accounts, your account, and our joint
account." She had another paper. "I know you'll want to read it over, but that's what it
is. You can follow me into Voylestown in your Jeep. There's a notary there who can
witness your signature."
"I had the company when we were married."
"But you don't have it anymore. We're not talking about your company. It's not
involved at all."
He picked up the telephone, a diversion embraced at random that might serve until
the pain ebbed. "Will you excuse me? This is liable to go on awhile, and I should
report the break-in." He entered the sheriff's number from the sticker on the
telephone.
The distant clamor -- it was not the actual ringing of the sheriffs telephone at all,
he knew -- sounded empty as well as artificial, as if it were not merely far away but
high over the earth, a computer-generated instrument that jangled and buzzed for his
ears alone upon some airless asteroid beyond the moon.
Brook laid Phil Gluckman's letter on the table where he could see it.
"Are you getting through?" Jan asked. "There's a lot of ice on the wires. Brook was
talking about it on the way up."
"I think so. It's ringing."
Brook said, "They've probably got a lot of emergencies, because of the storm."
The twins stirred uncomfortably, and Alayna went to a window to look at the falling
snow.
"I should warn you," Jan said, "that if you won't sign, it's war. We spent hours and
hours--"
A voice squeaked, "Sheriff Ron Wilber's Office."
"My name is Emery Bainbridge. I've got a cabin on Route Eighty-five, about five
miles from the lake."
The tinny voice spoke unintelligibly.
"Would you repeat that, please?"
"It might be better from the cellular phone in my car," Jan suggested.
"What's the problem, Mister Bainbridge?"
"My cabin was robbed in my absence." There was no way in which he could tell
the sheriff's office that he had been shot at without telling Jan and the twins as well;
he decided it was not essential. "They took a rifle and my ax. Those are the only
things that seem to be missing."
"Could you have mislaid them?"
This was the time to tell the sheriff about the boy on the hill; he found that he
could not.
摘要:

THEZIGGURATbyGENEWOLFE[VERSION1.1(Dec0803).Ifyoufindandcorrecterrorsinthetext,pleaseupdatetheversionnumberby0.1andredistribute.]FirstpublishedinFullSpectrum5,editedbyJenniferHersh,TomDupreeandJannaSilverstein,1995.Ithadbeguntosnowaboutone-thirty.EmeryBainbridgestoodonthefrontporchtowatchitbeforegoin...

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分类:外语学习 价格:5.9玖币 属性:59 页 大小:135.33KB 格式:PDF 时间:2024-11-29

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