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Gene Wolfe - The Ziggurat
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
 

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