The Best of Gene Wolfe

In the main room the first guests were already drifting in, staring at the wall screen on the east wall, talking in self-conscious groups; several of them carried newspapers. Clio was handing around cocktails, and Donovan was already deep in conversation with a man who looked so much like himself that he might almost be talking to a mirror. Watching them all, Peters had the sensation of having seen just this tableau of elaborate casualness and subdued, content-free speech before. It was only when a woman in a red dress—very obviously the secretary- mistress of the Danish shipbuilder whose arm she held—entered that Peters could place it: the operatic market scene into which, in a moment, one of the principal singers was sure to come, calling for the thrill of romance or (what is much the same thing) the defense of France. Surely, Peters thought, the curtains have just parted. He looked toward the west window and saw Clio moving toward the cord even as he formed the thought.

The gray velvet rolled back to show tossing Atlantic waves. Peters wanted to incline his head toward them, a very slight bow, but someone took him by the arm and said, “You are one of the Americans?”

“Oh, yes, and you are—” He tried, and failed, to attach a name, then a nationality, to the face. Oh, well, when in Rome . . . “Senhor . . .”

“Solomos.”

“Damn glad you could come,” Peters said, taking his hand.

“What is happening in your country is so interesting,” Solomos said. “Great art will come from it—have you thought of that? Great art. The blood of a great people is stirred by such things, and there will be so much of what was old blown away.”

Someone put an old-fashioned into Peters’s hand, and he sipped it. He said, “I suppose.” He thought of the Italian industrialist who collected art, but he was reasonably sure Solomos was not he.

“The armies—do they take pains to preserve such art as your country possesses?”

“Armies?” Peters had never thought of the radicals as an army.

“We soldiers like to loot,” Solomos said. “All, that is, except the soldiers of my own country—we regard any art save our own as an aberration.” He laughed.

There was a cherry in the bottom of Peters’s glass, and he ate it. He said to Solomos, “You’re a soldier, then?”

“Oh, no. No more.”

A third man joined them; he was tall, and had a mustache. He said, “You are Mr. Peters, I take it. Where do you feel the sympathies of the American people lie, Mr. Peters?”

Peters said, “With the government, unquestionably.”

“But since May,” the tall man began, “there has been so little government left, and so little of the will to rule in what is left—”

“One knows what he intends,” Solomos said.

A fat man who had been talking to another group turned (it was a little, Peters thought, like watching a globe revolve in a library) and said, “In the science of realpolitik the sympathies of the population do not matter except insofar as they are nationalistic sympathies. In the event of a civil war the concept of nationalistic sympathy is inapplicable because to the popular mind the nation claiming allegiance is perceived to have vanished. A charismatic leader—”

Peters said, “In the Civil War regional sympathies—”

“Wait,” the tall man said. “Something is happening.”

Peters turned around and saw that Lowell Lewis was now standing facing the dark screen and rapping (though the sound was inaudible over the hum of talk) with a long pointer on the glass surface.

“He should shoot off a gun, hahaha,” Solomos said. “That would quiet them.” Peters said, “I think he’s afraid of guns,” then realized he should not have, then that no one had heard him anyway. A beautiful dark-haired girl in an evening gown, one of Tredgold’s girls, gave him a martini.

The fifteen-by-thirty-five-foot screen behind Lewis flashed with light, showing Lewis’s own face, immensely magnified so that every pore could be seen as though through a microscope. It glowered at them, all eyes and nose and mouth, the forehead and chin lost in ceiling and carpet; so magnified it assumed a new quality, like the giants in fairy tales, who are not merely big men but monsters. “Gentlemen,” Lewis said. “Your attention, please.”

The room fell silent.

“I’m afraid we are not quite all here yet, but we have a definite appointment with General Virdon, and it would be best if I began your orientation now.”

Someone said, “Will there be a period for questions?”

The giant answered, “There will be all evening for questions—I want that understood. You may interrupt any speaker—including myself—whenever you have questions. We’re not trying to sell you a pig in a poke.”

“If the attack tonight succeeds, what benefits do you anticipate?”

“I should think the benefits are obvious.”

“I will put it in another way,” the questioner continued. “Do you not feel that the real struggle is taking place on your coasts? That they are the important theaters of operations?”

From beside Peters the tall man called, “Some believe we have been brought here to witness a show victory—a Potemkin village of war.” Peters had been trying to guess the tall man’s nationality, thus far without success.

Lewis disappeared, replaced by a map of America. The real Lewis, seeming suddenly diminutive, tapped Detroit with his wand. “This city may not be known to many of you,” he said, “as it is not a cosmopolitan city, but it is a manufacturing center of great importance. Please observe that it is virtually impossible to isolate it without infringing upon Canadian sovereignty.”

The man with the mustache said, “Canada cannot allow the passage of war materiel.”