A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe Read Free Book Online

touched my finger to my lips. Her mouth formed the words “the chute,” and I nodded. The woman’s robe she had loaned me had a big pocket on each side, each of them plenty big enough to hold the book.
    She shut her door that night, but she did not block it with furniture the way she had wanted to block the door of her apartment; doing it would have made a good deal of noise, and even though I listened for it I heard nothing. When I was dead certain she had gone to bed, I stripped again, took a shower, and moved the thin cushions from the couch onto the floor. That made it as much like my shelf in the library as anybody could want. Probably you know that after the library closes, we sleep on mats that we roll up and push to the back of the shelf during the day.
    Right here it would be handy to say that I was dog tired and fell asleep at once—handy but a big lie. This new softer mat, with me stretching from corner to corner, was too new. Ditto the long lending. Colette had checked me out for ten days, which I had thought hard-rock unlikely. I had never been checked out for more than a couple of days. I had heard a few of us talk about a week or even two weeks, but I had never more than half believed any of it. Rose Romain the romance writer once told me she had kept tabs on three of her friends, and none of them had ever been out for more than five days. Now it seemed like Colette’s estimate had been crazy short. I got up and got my jacket out of the closet to look at the card I had put in the pocket: July thirtieth. Right. Before six o’clock that day, I was supposed to say good-bye if I could get away and go back to the library.
    But tomorrow both of us would leave Spice Grove and flitter southeast to New Delphi to look at the Coldbrook house and quiz the expert who’d opened her father’s safe. Sooner or later we would come back here—or anyway, we had better.
    What if we were grabbed again? Would we ever get loose? Both of us? Alive?
    After worrying about all this and a couple of dozen other things for what seemed like an hour, I got up, got my book from the pocket of the robe Colette had loaned me, and read myself to sleep.
    Only to dream about wrestling a monster with a man’s head at one end and an ape’s at the other end, and one hell of a lot of arms. This desperate struggle was in a grave thinly disguised as a wormhole through Mars. A wormhole that was already starting to flood. I guess they have a lot of water on Mars, when you are dreaming.
    When I woke up it was nearly morning and I was soaked with sweat.

 
    4
    H ER F ATHER’S H OUSE
    Somehow I had assumed a city house. It may only have been that in my time—I mean in the time of the earlier me, in my first life—there was not much land where new building was allowed. Anyway this house where the Coldbrook family had lived was not even close to the actual city of New Delphi. When Colette pointed it out, I asked her to circle it a couple times so that I could get a better picture of the house and the countryside around it. The house was supermodern and shiny as a new ground car, but you could see it was not really all that new. Built forty-three years ago was what she said, and added to and altered ever since. I counted four floors in some places but only one or two in a couple of additions. Scattered around it were a hangar, a barn, a garage, and some other outbuildings that were anybody’s guess. There was a walled garden, too. Seeing it from the air like that I did not realize how badly the garden had been neglected.
    â€œYou and your brother grew up here?” I asked.
    â€œNot exactly.” She banked and dipped, bringing our racy little flitter closer to the house. “I was fourteen, I think, when we moved in. Conrad, Junior—we generally called him Cob or Cobby back then—would have been about sixteen, I suppose. Sixteen or seventeen.”
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