The giant, p.353
The Giant,
p.353
He did as she asked, sliding back the door, and they stepped into the gaslight era again.
“Mezzanine,” the woman said gaily, “lingerie and sheets.” She took his arm. “You’ll have a swell time. You really will. Here’s the one he’s fixing.”
She led him into what appeared to be a small bedroom decorated in the same opulent style as the corridor and the waiting room downstairs. A strikingly beautiful brunette in a pink negligee sat on the bed, apparently watching a man in overalls who had removed a portion of the paneling from a wall and was tinkering with the maze of wiring thus revealed.
The woman with the gold tooth asked him, “How is she? Ready to go again yet?”
He shook his head, removing a card covered with printed circuitry and slipping another into its place. “We’ll try this.” Looking at the girl on the bed, he asked, “How is it now, sweetheart?”
The girl tossed her head. “Dull. When are you going to stop fiddling with that and pay some attention to me?”
“Right now,” the technician said. “Come over here and give me a kiss.”
The girl got up, but seemed unable to straighten her left leg fully; she took a grotesque, hopping step, then fell forward, catching herself on her hands.
Wearily the technician strode over to her, picked her up, and replaced her on the bed. The girl looked at him angrily. “I’d be fine if you’d stop trying to make me walk. I can work.” He ignored her and went back to the wiring panel in the wall.
The woman with the gold tooth said, “That’s very commendable, Gloria, but we have to make you well first.”
Miles asked, “The circuits in the wall control her?”
The technician nodded. “They’re her brains, and what we call the motor functions are in there too. The things that decide how much each of the little electric servos in her ought to turn to make her move. Output to the body is UHF, but we keep the power low so the various units don’t interfere with each other.” He grinned and jerked his head. “Now, you take the layout right next door—the Lincoln exhibit. How would the tourists like it if they took their kids to see him and he started talking and acting like her? So, we keep the range down to fifteen feet. You try to take them farther than that, they lose their signal.”
The woman with the gold tooth nudged Miles and said, “You ready to go now?” Miles nodded, and she led him out into the hall again.
He looked at the rows of doors; there seemed to be at least twenty on each side. “Do I get my choice?” he asked. It sounded more confident than he felt.
“Oh, no. I got customers in most of those. You come with me, though; I’ve got one that’ll be perfect for you.” Almost at the end of the hall she stopped in front of a door which stood open about two inches. “You’ll like Jill,” she said. “You want to use a script?”
“A script?”
“They used to have to use them before we got the programming so good. It still makes some customers feel more comfortable to have one. Mostly, you know, the older men.”
“No,” Miles said. “I don’t think I want one.”
“It’s up to you. When you go inside, swinging the door back activates the girl. When it shuts, besides ensuring your privacy, it starts a timer, and you get a half-hour with her before she turns off. If you want more after that, you’ll have to come downstairs and pay me for it. For the first time, you pay me now.”
He knew but asked “How much?” anyway, for a moment hoping that the price had changed, that it would be more than he had, that he could leave without feeling he had backed down.
“Ten,” the woman said. “Ten, Mondays through Thursdays; fifteen, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; after one in the morning is by appointment only, and come into the park by the side entrance.”
He handed her the money, and she tore a yellow ticket from a roll in her pocket and gave it to him. He stared at it, reflecting on what it might have been instead: a new jacket, or the uniform paperback edition of Gunter Grass. He had saved the money coin by coin.
The woman was watching him. She said, “You just go inside now. That’s all there is to it.”
“Aren’t you going to leave now? To tell the truth, I think I’d rather you did.”
“I’ll go as soon as you shut the door. Sometimes my customers, especially young guys like you, try to cheat by leaving it open. You go in now and just pretend like I’m not here.”
He went in quickly, closing the door firmly behind him. This room was furnished just as the first had been, but was somewhat less brightly lit. The girl on the bed was red-haired and plump in a way he found attractive. There was a moment—only a fraction of a second, but he was sure he had seen it—before something like life animated her and she moved her head to look at him, brushing a stray lock of hair from her eyes. He smiled to himself.
“Hi,” the girl said. “My name’s Jill; come on in.”
“Hello, Jill.” He walked over to her, stood staring for a moment, then sat down beside her. She seemed perfect except for a smoothness of complexion that was almost too flawless, a doll-like roundness and conventional cuteness about her pert face.
“What do I call you, handsome?”
“Miles.”
With small, white teeth like little bathroom tiles she nipped him lightly on the ear. “Okay, Miles, what do you want to do? I mean first?”
He stroked her hair, but she caught his hand and drew it through some opening in the gauzy robe she wore. “You’re warm,” he said.
“Of course I am. You wouldn’t like it if I weren’t, would you?”
“No. But don’t do that.” Her free hand had slipped into his lap, and when he pushed it aside, she began unfastening the buttons of his shirt. “Don’t do that,” he said again. “I thought you’d just, you know, lie there. Maybe kiss me.”
She kissed him with lips as warm as blood and as smooth as rayon, and when she had finished, opened a drawer of her bedside table and offered him a script. “This one’s called ‘Passive,’” she said. “It’s very good.”
It was dogeared and stained, and he knocked it away and said, “Let’s get it over with.”
“Listen, it’s fun. Just relax and enjoy it.” She lay down, her round face smiling mechanically up at him from the big, plump pillow. He wanted to turn off the lights or to close her eyes, but caught himself. They were doll’s eyes, blue as the blue-glass chicken in which his grandmother had kept pins, and they were looking at the ceiling, not at him. He undressed slowly, hanging his clothes on a chair and reminding himself that he must keep track of the time.
“At my neck,” she said when he sat down on the bed, and he found a ribbon there and pulled it, so that her robe fell away.
When it was over, he rested, chest heaving.
His watch, when he looked at it, showed he had eight minutes left; and somehow he did not want to be in the room when the time ran out. He sat up. “Towels in the closet there,” the girl said.
He dried himself and dropped the towel to the floor. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t suppose it matters to you, but you were just great.” He tried to think of something further to say. “Really good. I feel like the pressure’s off me—you know? I mean, I’m going to tell my friends.”
The girl said, “Of course it matters to me. It’s my work; I care.”
“It was my first time. I mean, not my first time, you know, but my first with any kind of girl or someone like you. I wanted you to know.”
“Your first time?” She sat up, the sheet drawn over her legs, and he saw the small, very white teeth scraping the top of her full lower lip. She said, “Miles, don’t ever come back here.”
He stared at her.
“It’s not good for you. Not good for what you’ll be like when you’re older; I see them all the time. Do you understand?”
Near the door was a knob that controlled the lights. He turned them up until the room was as bright as a stage. “You’re real,” he said. “A real girl.”
She said, “No, I’m not,” but he had seen the look of fear.
“You’re a real girl. They’d never program you to say something like that.” He slapped her sharply, and her full cheek flushed red.
“Don’t tell,” she gasped, and he realized suddenly that he was not alone, naked in the brightly lit room. He covered himself with one hand, groping on the floor for the soiled towel with the other. The girl’s eyes were filling with tears, and she choked on words. “I… I…”
“You what?”
“I… I only fill in. Just fill in. Only when some of the others are broken. I get half the money, but if you tell her, she won’t ever let me work anymore. Please don’t tell.”
He was shaking with anger. “You bet your sweet life I’m going to tell,” he said. She turned off the lights so that he could dress, and when he stalked out, she followed almost to the top of the stairs, pleading while the others mocked her from their doorways; but he never looked back.
To Melville
Light is the soul of a star,
The Shadow of God.
What then is darkness, is night?
Is not that black in its way bright?
How bright the midnight wave!
The breath of God?
No. But of the angel of this earth,
Coleridge-caught between the Pole and Perth.
His wings are streaming cloud.
His feet have trod
The paths of Luck, his leman.
Her wails whales; his semen, seamen.
Riddle
Across the sea, across the land
Across a lady’s lily hand
Traveling Golden without feet,
By wind, by wave, buy farm, buy wheat.
British Soldier Near Rapier Antiaircraft Missile Battery Scans for the Enemy
I know you, my old friend! My God, to see you now…
Buck? Buck, is this the end? Why, I remember how
Poor Grandma saved you every Sunday,
Knowing her son would bring me someday;
How she would laugh her gentle cookie laughter,
To see me jump around and holler after
I’d finished you and Flash—the way I’d dash
In spaceships only I could see.
I mean, of course, that only I could see
Them then. Buck, my old friend,
It’s good to see you, end or no.
We all must go
Into the trash at last.
(Gosh, didn’t we go fast!)
How was the climb, from Grandma’s to a page in Time?
Last Night in the Garden of Forking Tongues
Old blind brick poet
Telling of his journey:
“I feel it, I know it,
Though I cannot see
Rhine or Nile. All the while,
The waters seep to me.
You see?”
We see, or say we see.
Mocking his politics,
Playing word tricks.
(Oh, God! Please banish
Forever high-school Spanish.)
Me? I see
Him tease with Heine.
The Nile, the Rhine
Grow watery mazes,
As when he praises
Our English. (Dim’s
A lovely word, according to him.)
Clearer and clearer
Is his mocking mirror;
Mirror-mocking’s his, si,
Clearer and clearer.
So famous for his
Mazes is Senior Borges.
Gene Wolfe was born in New York in 1931 and raised in Texas. After serving in the Korean War he graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston and worked in engineering until becoming an editor of a trade periodical, Plant Engineering, in 1972. Since retiring from this post in 1984, he has written full-time. The author of over three dozen award-wining novels and story collections, he is regarded as one of modern fantasy’s most important writers. His best-known work, the four volume far-future Book of the New Sun, won the World Fantasy, BSFA, Nebula, British Fantasy and John W. Campbell memorial Awards. He has won the World Fantasy Award four times for his novels and collections and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award for his extraordinary body of work. Gene Wolfe passed away on Sunday, April 14, 2019 after his long battle with heart disease. He was 87.
Gene Wolfe, The Giant
