Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors.pdf - fantasy - rhea137

There Are Doors

Gene Wolfe

a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

Back Cover:

"Sentence by sentence, Mr. Wolfe writes as well as anyone in science fiction today." -- The New York

Times

There Are Doors is the story of a man who falls in love with a goddess from an alternate

universe. She flees him, but he pursues her through doorways -- interdimensional gateways -- to the

other place, determined to sacrifice his life, if necessary, for her love. For in her world, to be her mate. . .

is to die.

"Intricate, glowing, fascinating work." -- Kirkus Reviews

Gene Wolfe: Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, as well as two Nebula

Awards, two World Fantasy Awards, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy

Award, and the Prix Apollo

Inside Blurbs:

A chilling and moving novel of romantic

obsession across the inter-dimensional barrier

"There Are Doors is different from anything else Wolfe has ever done. This is a romance, a love story. .

. It's nice to read science fiction that has as many echoes of Pasternak as of Asimov. . . While There Are

Doors does not attempt to plow up secrets of the cosmos in the mode of Wolfe's more operatic works,

it may well be Wolfe's most perfect story." -- Orson Scott Card

"There Are Doors is another splendid example. . . [Wolfe's] works are always singular and brilliant, the

rare kind you read until you're at the end, and everything else is going to hell while you read." -- Philip

José Farmer

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THERE ARE DOORS

book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

An Orb Edition

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolfe, Gene

There are doors / Gene Wolfe.

p. cm.

"A Tom Doherty Associates book."

ISBN 0-312-93099-2 (hc)

ISBN 0-312-87230-5 (pbk)

I. Title.

PS3573.O52T47 1988

813'.54 -- dc19 88-19717 CIP

First Tor Hardcover Edition: November 1988

First Orb Edition: October 2001

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

NOTE

Indoor moopsball, as played by the patients and staff of United General Psychiatric Hospital, is

taken from "Rules of Moopsball," by Gary Cohn, and used with his permission. "Rules of Moopsball"

originally appeared in Orbit 18, edited by Damon Knight.

Lara

"Do you believe in love?" he asked her.

"Yes," Lara replied. "And I hate it."

He did not know what to say. It all stuck in his throat, everything he had planned that afternoon

walking home from the store.

"We use it, you see," she told him. "My women and I. We must."

He nodded. "Women do use love, of course. But so do men, and men usually use it worse. Don't

you think that only proves it's real? If it wasn't, nobody could use it." The brandy had gone to his head;

by the time he had finished speaking, he was no longer quite sure what they had been talking about.

"It's real, all right," Lara told him. "But I am not a woman."

"A girl --" He was groping.

So was she, a hand in his pajamas.

"A lady." His glass was at his lips. He took it from her hand and drank.

". . . and then the men die. Always. She holds his sperm, saves it, and bears his children, one

after another for the rest of her life. Perhaps three children. Perhaps three dozen."

"I love you," he said thickly. "I'd die for you, Lara."

"But this is better -- your way is so much better. Now I'll go back. Listen. There are doors --"

She did not go back at once. They embraced again, on the floor in front of the gas log. For the

second time that evening he poured himself into her.

And afterward he held her to him, tightly, oh, so tightly, feeling as though the two of them were in

a boat upon the sea, a little boat that rocked and spun with every billow; that only his body against hers,

her body against his could save them both from freezing in the freezing spume.

"You must be careful," she said when he was almost asleep. "Because we've been so close."

He woke up with a throbbing headache. Sunlight was pouring through the window; from its angle

he knew that he had missed work that day. He got up and made himself drink three glasses of water.

Lara was gone, but that was to be expected; it was nearly eleven. She had probably gone out to

look for a job, or to get some clothes, maybe even to get some lunch.

He called the store. "Flu -- came on last night. Sorry, so sorry I didn't call in sooner." I sound like

a Jap, he thought. Too long selling Sonys.

Ella in Personnel said, "I'll mark you down. Don't feel bad -- it's your first sick day this year."

Aspirin, he thought. You're supposed to take aspirin. He swallowed three.

There was a note on the coffee table, a note in Lara's angular writing.

Darling,

I tried to say good-bye last night, but you wouldn't listen. I'm not a coward, really I'm not.

If it weren't for the doors I wouldn't tell you a thing -- that would be the best way. You may see one,

perhaps more than one, at least for a little while. It will be closed all around. (They must be closed on all

sides.) It may be a real door, or just something like a guy-wire supporting a phone pole, or an arch in a

garden. Whatever it is, it will look significant.

Please read carefully. Please remember everything I'm saying. You must not go through.

If you go through before you realize it, don't turn around. If you do it will be gone. Walk backward at

once.

Lara

PS: You always put these on, don't you? At the end. At the end, I loved you. I really did. (Do.)

He read it three times and put it down, feeling that it was wrong, that something important had

been left out, that his eyes had followed four smokestacks down to three chimneys. Was that underlined

word really significant, and if so, just what did it signify? It might be signature.

He stuck his head under the shower and let the icy water beat his hair and the back of his neck

full force. When he had stood there (bent, a hand braced against the tile) for so long that the slow drain

had allowed the tub to fill, he washed his face seven times, shaved, and felt better.

If he went out, there was a chance that somebody from the store would see him; but it was a

chance he would have to take. Knotting his brown tie, he studied the door of the apartment. It did not

look significant, though perhaps it was.

Capini's was only a block and a half. He had a glass of red wine with his linguine, and either the

wine or the linguine made him feel almost normal.

But Mama Capini was gone or back in the kitchen, and it was Mama Capini he would have to

talk to. There were three or four sons -- he had never learned their names -- but they were not likely to

tell him anything. Mama Capini might, and he decided to come back for dinner. Meanwhile, the police,

the morgue. . .

"I'm looking for a woman," he told the gray-haired, buck-toothed woman at the Downtown

Mental Health Center who saw him at last. And then, because that sounded so dirty, he added, "A

particular woman."

"And you think we might know where she is?"

He nodded.

"What was her name?"

"Lara Morgan." He spelled it. "I don't know if that was her real name or not. I never saw any

identification."

"Then we'll hold off running it through the computer for a moment. Can you describe her?"

"About five foot nine. Red hair to her shoulder blades. Dark red. Auburn, is that what you call

it?"

The buck-toothed woman nodded.

"Very pretty -- beautiful, in fact. Viridian eyes. A lot of little freckles. A buttermilk complexion,

you know what I mean? I doubt if I'm much good at estimating women's weight, but maybe a hundred

and twenty pounds."

"Viridian, Mr. . . ?"

"Green -- viridian's a bluish green. You'll have to excuse it. I sell tape decks and so on now, but I

used to be in small appliances. Viridian has more blue than avocado."

"I see. And how was this woman dressed the last time you saw her?"

He bit back the impulse to say she wasn't. "A green dress. Silk I guess, or maybe it was nylon.

High-heeled boots, I think lizard, though they might have been snake. A gold necklace and a couple of

gold bracelets -- she wore a lot of gold jewelry. A black fur coat with a hood. Maybe it was fake, but it

looked and felt real to me."

The buck-toothed woman said, "We haven't seen her, Mr. Green. If someone who looked and

dressed like that had come here, I'd know about her. If she's seeing someone, which I doubt, it's a

private psychiatrist. What makes you think she may be disturbed?"

"The way she acted. Things she said."

"And how did she act, Mr. Green?"

He considered. "Like, she didn't know about ice-makers. She went to the refrigerator one time

to get ice -- she was going to make lemonade -- and she came back and said there wasn't any. So I

went and showed her how it worked, and she said, 'How nice, all these little blocks.' "

The buck-toothed woman frowned, putting her hands together fingertip to fingertip like a man.

"Surely there must have been something more than that."

"Well, she was afraid that somebody was going to take her back. That's what she told me."

The buck-toothed woman's expression said now we're getting someplace. She leaned toward

him as she spoke. "Take her back where, Mr. Green?"

He started to ask how she knew his name (he had refused to give it to the temporary

receptionist) but he thought better of it. "She didn't say, Doctor. Through the doors, I guess."

"The doors?"

"She talked about doors. This was just before she left -- the doors, or one door anyway, that

was how she got here. If they came to take her back, they'd pull her through a door, so she was going to

go on her own first." When the buck-toothed woman offered no comment, he added, "At least, that was

the way it seemed to me."

"These doors would appear to indicate an institution of some kind, then," the buck-toothed

woman said.

"That's how they sounded to me."

"Has it struck you that the institution might be a prison, Mr. Green?"

He shook his head. "She didn't seem that way. She seemed, well, smart. But a little

disconnected."

"Intelligent people who've been institutionalized often do. I take it she was about your own age?"

He nodded.

"And you are. . . ?"

"Thirty."

"Then let us say this beautiful woman who calls herself Lara Morgan is thirty also. If she had

committed a serious offense in her teens -- a murder, perhaps, or if she'd had some complicity in a

murder -- she would have been sent to a girls' correctional center until she was of age, and then

transferred to a women's prison to complete her sentence. Thus she might easily have spent the last ten or

twelve years in one or the other, Mr. Green."

He began, "I don't think --"

"You see, Mr. Green, escapees from our mental hospitals are not punished. They are ill, and one

does not punish illness. But prisoners -- criminals -- who escape are punished. I'm glad that you've come

back to us, Mr. Green. I was getting rather worried about you."

He was shaking when he left the Center; he had not really known he cared about Lara so much.

The Downtown Mental Health Center stood on one corner of a five-way intersection. The five

streets were all congested, and when he looked down each they seemed to spin around him like the

spokes of a wheel, each thronged, each noisy, each straight and running to infinity, thronged, noisy, and

congested. None was like the rest; nor were any -- when he looked again -- exactly the way they had

been when he had come in. Hadn't that theater been a bowling alley? And weren't fire trucks supposed

to be red, buses yellow, or maybe orange?

Were the doors here? "It may be something like a guy-wire supporting a telephone pole." That

was what Lara had written. Looking up, he saw that he stood under a maze of wires. There were wires

to hold traffic signals, thin black wires going from building to building, wires for the clanging trolleys.

There were buildings on the sides, streets and sidewalks below, the wires above. A dozen -- no, two

dozen at least -- two dozen doors, and all of them looked significant. Had there been a hospital for dolls

there before? Had there ever been such a shop in the world? Feeling rather like a broken doll himself, he

started toward it.

Hell or Paradise, Who Say?

The room was lined with shelves eight or nine inches apart, and upon all these shelves stood little

beds, dolls' beds. In each bed lay a doll.

"Yes, sir. Have you come for a doll?"

He ducked the question. "What an interesting place you've got here. I don't think I've ever seen a

shop quite like this." Lara would like it, he thought; aloud he added, "Are all these broken?"

"Why, no," the shopkeeper said. He was about his own age, a stooped man who did not seem to

know that the long hair that spilled to his thin shoulders was retreating.

"Then why --"

"All of them were broken when they came," the shopkeeper explained. He pulled down the

blanket and sheet of the nearest doll. "They're fine now."

"I see."

"You've got a doll to be fixed? We need a deposit. It'll be refunded when you come back for

your doll."

"You're holding deposits on all these?"

The shopkeeper spread his lean hands. "We've got to make money someway. We've got to keep

the place going. We used to charge for the repairs, but hardly anyone came back when their doll was

fixed. So now we take a pretty big deposit and charge nothing for the treatment. If the owner does come

back for his doll -- or like it is usually, the owner's mother -- we gain shelf space, and he gets his deposit

back in full. If he doesn't. . ." The shopkeeper shrugged.

"Don't you ever sell the dolls?"

The shopkeeper nodded. "When the owner's dead."

"Then you must keep some of them for a long time."

The shopkeeper nodded again. "There's a few we've had ever since we opened. But see,

sometimes when a boy gets older, he remembers about his doll. Sometimes he finds the receipt in his

mother's old papers. But we get the name of each owner when we accept his doll, and we watch the

obituaries." The shopkeeper reached up to the highest shelf behind him and took down a small bed.

"Here's one that's for sale now. If there's somebody you know. . ."

It was Lara.

Lara in miniature, ten inches high. But unmistakably Lara -- her darkly red hair, her freckles, her

eyes and nose and mouth and chin.

He managed to say, "Yes," and reached for his wallet.

Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors.pdf

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