A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page A

it?”
    â€œNot as much as Mother did. My father really bought it for her. She was … not social. Not a bad person or even an unfriendly one; but other people, even people she knew and liked, stressed her out.” Colette paused. “Do you understand what I mean?”
    I had to admit that she had lost me.
    â€œWell, after dinner the men would generally sit around the table, have another glass of wine, and talk. And the women would clear things away and feed the dishes to the washer. Sometimes Cob and I would help with that. Then they’d go into the music room or in nice weather out into the garden. Only Mother wouldn’t be there. It would generally be half an hour or so before anybody noticed. Nobody’d know where she’d gone or when, but she wouldn’t be with the others.”
    â€œWhat about you?” I was trying to picture it. “Would you stay with the women?”
    Slowly, Colette nodded. “Pretty often I did, or else go up to my room to watch some show or do my homework. My room was on the second floor. So was Cob’s, and I’ve been trying to decide whether I could bear seeing it again. All right if I land now?”
    She did. The little red flitter’s cabin split, spreading its little red wing; and we drifted down on the wind like a maple leaf in the fall. I had never flown a flitter or even flown in one back then, and I had a hunch that I was going to have to fly that one before long; so I had been watching everything Colette was doing and trying to learn, following every motion. Once we had landed and recombined, and were taxiing over to the hangar, I asked, “Wouldn’t the autopilot do all that for you?”
    â€œThe screen? Yes, of course. But if you only do the easy parts, it takes a lot of fun out of flying. I like knowing that if the screen failed, I could do everything myself. I—well, sometimes I teach my students myself, Ern. The eds could do everything for me, all the teaching, but my job is to make them want to learn, and sometimes my own teaching helps. Then they know I know it—or that’s how it seems to me. Since I’ve learned it, they can, too, and they should. Do you understand? Understand a little bit at least?”
    I said, “We’re like that, I believe. I mean people like me, people who belong to libraries or museums, or to you fully humans.” For a minute I shut up, trying to spit my foot out of my mouth. “Does it bother you when I call us ‘people’? If it does, I apologize.”
    â€œNot in the slightest.” She stopped our flitter in front of the hangar, and its engine ceased to purr. “What are you getting at?”
    â€œYou fully humans have our books already, and our books are better than we are. Better than we can be, really. But what the books give you is one thing and what we can give you is another. You’ve got A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist , The Old Curiosity Shop, and a lot more. David Copperfield and Bleak House and in fact just about everything Charles Dickens wrote. But you don’t have Charles Dickens. You would spend a lot now if you could get his DNA and one scan, but if you were willing to spend a hundred times that much you still couldn’t get them. You’d like to ask him how he really felt about Kate, and about that actress. How he had intended to finish Edwin Drood —and so would I.”
    She grinned at me as she pulled up in front of the hangar. “You understand what I mean, or at least I think you do. I could make love to a joyboy. It would be warm and handsome and do everything I wanted, and it would tell me over and over how beautiful I am and how much it loved me. But they’re not the same as a real lover.” She got out easily and skillfully, and I followed. “They’re for women who can’t get a real lover, or at least can’t get one they like.”
    I had heard of joyboys, and I nodded.