The Land Across by Gene Wolfe Page A

did. I was broadcasting from an old factory down by the river, and by that time I knew what had been made there. So in the middle of my next I said, “We here where so many women once sewed shirts are sewing the shroud that will wrap all those who oppose the Light of Stability. For them to perish is change, but having perished they will change no more. You in America who hear my words must think on this. Listen again.”
    After that I waited, wondering how long it would be and telling myself it might be an hour or even a couple of hours. It took me a long time to go to sleep that night, only when I woke up nothing had changed.
    They had given me a book in English to read. It was called the Code of Unchanging and nothing in it made a whole lot of sense, but I had learned early on that the way to do it was to pick up phrases from it and drop them into my broadcasts. So I got them to give me a notebook and a ballpoint and wrote down some things I thought I might use. It would be interesting to know who had translated that book for them, but from the way it read I thought it had to be machine translation.
    Like I said, it did not make much sense, but looking for good phrases gave me something to do, and having the pen and notebook I started making notes for this book.
    One thing I came on straight off was the staircase. I had gone up it to take some pictures of the upstairs rooms, and Martya had climbed it so I could take pictures of her coming down. Only it had always seemed colder than the rest of the house—colder than it was outside, too.
    Also it was too long. The first-floor rooms had really high ceilings. I think I have written about that before, and it is true. But that stairway seemed like it had too many steps. I wanted to get back to the Willows and count them, but I could not.
    The next night I never got to sleep. They had given me a bed that had ARMY written all over it, a steel-frame bed with flat wire springs and a thin mattress. It was not as good as my bed at Kleon’s had been, but a ton better than sleeping on deck, which I had done out on the lake. I undressed and washed up as well as I could, then put on my clothes—the jeans and cool shirt I had been so happy to take out of my suitcase—and lay down and pulled the thin cotton blanket they had given me over me. I was thinking of the big dining room at the Hotel Sacher and how nice it would be to eat there again when I heard shots.
    I jumped up and ran to the door of my room. It was locked and there was wire over the windows, which would not open anyway. The door was old and I had always thought it probably was not as strong as it looked. I kicked it a couple of times, knowing that would bring Vest in if he was still out there. Nobody came, so I hit it three or four times with my shoulder and it flew open.
    The first thing I saw was a cop with a gun. He fired, and right then I thought he had missed me. Later I found out he had not.
    I turned and ran, only not back into the room where they had kept me locked up. I got out into a big, dark place where they must have had a couple of hundred sewing machines in the old days. It would have been a good place to hide in, only getting shot at like that had put a real scare into me and I just wanted to get away.
    Which I did. The cops had the place surrounded, or thought they did, but I guess they had not seen the door I found. It opened on a stack of old steel drums like you might ship diesel in, with just room enough for me to wiggle between the drums and the wall. When I got out of there, I saw a couple of police cars with searchlights aimed at the building, and soldiers, too, holding the kind of rifles soldiers have.
    You can guess what I did next. I got out of there as fast as I could, you know it! I had not gone far when I saw a poster. It was half torn off and somebody had spray painted a short word I could not read on what was left. But it was a picture of the third border guard wearing a suit. Part of the