She put her fingers in his eyes and then, taking advantage of his pain and blindness, took the cube from him and bent him over the edge of a table in such a way as to break his back. This all took place inside the body. His face worked spasmodically, one eye closed and unclosed in a hideous parody of a wink, his fingers paddled feebly on the tabletop and he fell to the floor.
“My dear!” he gasped.
She looked at him expressionlessly.
“Help me,” he whispered, “eh?” His fingers fluttered. “Over there,” he said eagerly, “medicines. Make me well, eh? Good and fast. I’ll give you half.”
“All,” she said.
“Yes, yes, all,” he said breathlessly, “all—explain all —fascinating hobby—spend most of my time in this room—get the medicine—”
“First show me,” she said, “how to turn it off.”
“Off?” he said. He watched her, bright-eyed.
“First,” she said patiently, “I will turn it all off. And then I will cure you.”
“No,” he said, “no, no! Never!” She knelt down beside him.
“Come,” she said softly, “do you think I want to destroy it? I am as fascinated by it as you are. I only want to make sure you can’t do anything to me, that’s all. You must explain it all first until I am master of it, too, and then we will turn it on.”
“No, no,” he repeated suspiciously.
“You must,” she said, “or you’ll die. What do you think I plan to do? I have to cure you, because otherwise how can I learn to work all this? But I must be safe, too. Show me how to turn it off.”
He pointed, doubtfully.
“Is that it?” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “but—”
“Is that it?”
“Yes, but—no—wait!” for Alyx sprang to her feet and fetched from his stool the pillow on which he had been sitting, the purpose of which he did not at first seem to comprehend, but then his eyes went wide with horror, for she had got the pillow in order to smother him, and that is just what she did.
When she got to her feet, her legs were trembling. Stumbling and pressing both hands together as if in prayer to subdue their shaking, she took the cube that held her husband’s picture and carefully—oh, how carefully!—turned the lever to the right. Then she began to sob. It was not the weeping of grief, but a kind of reaction and triumph, all mixed; in the middle of that eerie room she stood, and threw her head back and yelled. The light burned steadily on. In the shadows she found the fat man’s master switch, and leaning against the wall, put one finger—only one—on it and caught her breath. Would the world end? She did not know. After a few minutes’ search she found a candle and flint hidden away in a cupboard and with this she made herself a light; then, with eyes closed, with a long shudder, she leaned—no, sagged —against the switch, and stood for a long moment, expecting and believing nothing.
But the world did not end. From outside came the wind and the sound of the sea-wash (though louder now, as if some indistinct and not quite audible humming had just ended) and inside fantastic shadows leapt about the candle—the lights had gone out. Alyx began to laugh, catching her breath. She set the candle down and searched until she found a length of metal tubing that stood against the wall, and then she went from machine to machine, smashing, prying, tearing, toppling tables and breaking controls. Then she took the candle in her unsteady hand and stood over the body of the fat man, a phantasmagoric lump on the floor, badly lit at last. Her shadow loomed on the wall. She leaned over him and studied his face, that face that had made out of agony and death the most appalling trivialities. She thought:
Make the world? You hadn’t the imagination. You didn’t even make these machines; that shiny finish is for customers, not craftsmen, and controls that work by little pictures are for children. You are a child yourself, a child and a horror, and I would ten times rather be subject to your machinery than master of it.
Aloud she said:
“Never confuse the weapon and the arm,” and taking the candle, she went away and left him in the dark.
* * * *
She got home at dawn and, as her man lay asleep in bed, it seemed to her that he was made out of the light of the dawn that streamed through his fingers and his hair, irradiating him with gold. She kissed him and he opened his eyes.
“You’ve come home,” he said.
“So I have,” said she.
“I fought all night,” she added, “with the Old Man of the Mountain,” for you must know that this demon is a legend in Ourdh; he is the god of this world who dwells in a cave containing the whole world in little, and from his cave he rules the fates of men.
“Who won?” said her husband, laughing, for in the sunrise when everything is suffused with light it is difficult to see the seriousness of injuries.
“I did!” said she. “The man is dead.” She smiled, splitting open the wound on her cheek, which began to bleed afresh. “He died,” she said, “for two reasons only: because he was a fool. And because we are not.”
And all the birds in the courtyard broke out shouting at once.
<
* * * *
Like the late Harold Ross ofThe New Yorker and most other editors, I am reluctant to print any story I don’t understand. “The Changeling” appears here, nevertheless.
In my book of critical essays, In Search of Wonder, I made a distinction between stories that make sense and those that mean something. I am unable to “make sense” out of this one—to make it add up neatly and come out even—but I strongly feel that it means something, just as Kafka’s The Trialor Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” does.
This haunting story is Gene Wolfe’s second forOrbit; his first was “Trip, Trap,” in Orbit 2.
* * * *
The Changeling
by Gene Wolfe
I suppose whoever finds these papers will be amazed at the simplicity of their author, who put them under a stone instead of into a mailbox or a filing cabinet or even a cornerstone—these being the places where most think it wise to store up their writings. But consider, is it not wiser to put papers like these into the gut of a dry cave as I have done?
For if a building is all it should be, the future will spare it for a shrine; and if your children’s sons think it not worth keeping, will they think the letters of the builders worth reading? Yet that would be a surer way than a filing cabinet. Answer truly: Did you ever know of papers to be read again once they entered one of these, save when some clerk drew them out by number? And who would seek for these?
There is a great, stone-beaked, hook-billed snapping turtle living under the bank here, and in the spring, when the waterfowl have nested and brooded, he swims beneath their chicks more softly than any shadow. Sometimes they peep once when he takes their legs, and so they have more of life than these sheets would have once the clacking cast iron jaw of a mailbox closed on them.
Have you ever noted how eager it is to close when you have pulled out your hand? You cannot write The Future on the outside of an envelope; the box would cross that out and stamp Dead Letter Office in its place.
Still, I have a tale to tell; and a tale untold is one sort of crime:
I was in the army, serving in Korea, when my father died. That was before the North invaded, and I was supposed to be helping a captain teach demolition to the ROK soldiers. The army gave me compassionate leave when the hospital in Buffalo sent a telegram saying how sick he was. I suppose everyone moved as fast as they could, I know I did, but he died while I was flying across the Pacific. I looked into his coffin where the blue silk lining came up to his hard, brown cheeks and crowded his working shoulders; and went back to Korea. He was the last family I had, and things changed for me then.
There isn’t much use in my making a long story of what happened afterward; you can read it all in the court-martial proceedings. I was one of the ones who stayed behind in China, neither the first nor the last to change his mind a second time an
d come home. I was also one of the ones who had to stand trial; let’s say that some of the men who had been in the prison camp with me remembered things differently. You don’t have to like it.
While I was in Ft. Leavenworth I started thinking about how it was before my mother died, how my father could bend a big nail with his fingers when we lived in Cassonsville and I went to the Immaculate Conception School five days a week. We left the month before I was supposed to start the fifth grade, I think.
When I got out I decided to go back there and look around before I tried to get a job. I had four hundred dollars I had put in Soldier’s Deposit before the war, and I knew a lot about living cheap. You learn that in China.
I wanted to see if the Kanakessee River still looked as smooth as it used to, and if the kids I had played softball with had married each other, and what they were like now. Somehow the old part of my life seemed to have broken away, and I wanted to go back and look at that piece. There was a fat boy who was tongue-tied and laughed at everything, but I had forgotten his name. I remembered our pitcher, Ernie Cotha, who was in my grade at school and had buck teeth and freckles; his sister played center field for us when we couldn’t get anybody else, and closed her eyes until the ball thumped the ground in front of her. Peter Palmieri always wanted to play Vikings or something like that, and pretty often made the rest of us want to too. His big sister Maria bossed and mothered us all from the towering dignity of thirteen. Somewhere in the background another Palmieri, a baby brother named Paul, followed us around watching everything we did with big, brown eyes. He must have been about four then; he never talked, but we thought he was an awful pest.
I was lucky in my rides and moved out of Kansas pretty well. After a couple of days I figured I would be spending the next night in Cassonsville, but it seemed as though I had run out of welcomes outside a little hamburger joint where the state route branched off the federal highway. I had been holding out my thumb nearly three hours before a guy in an old Ford station wagon offered me a lift. I’d mumbled, “Thanks,” and tossed my AWOL bag in back before I ever got a good look at him. It was Ernie Cotha, and I knew him right away—even though a dentist had done something to his teeth so they didn’t push his lip out any more. I had a little fun with him before he got me placed, and then we got into a regular school reunion mood talking about the old times.
I remember we passed a little barefoot kid standing alongside the road, and Ernie said, “You recollect how Paul always got in the way, and one time we rubbed his hair with a cow pile? You told me next day how you caught blazes from Mama Palmieri about it.”
I’d forgotten, but it all came back as soon as he mentioned it. “You know,” I said, “it was a shame the way we treated that boy. He thought we were big shots, and we made him suffer for it.”
“It didn’t hurt him any,” Ernie said. “Wait till you see him; I bet he could lick us both.”
“The family still live in town?”
“Oh sure.” Ernie let the car drift off the blacktop a little, and it threw up a spurt of dust and gravel before he got it back on. “Nobody leaves Cassonsville.” He took his eyes from the road for a moment to look at me. “You knew Maria’s old Doc Witte’s nurse now? And the old people have a little motel on the edge of the fairgrounds. You want me to drop you there, Pete?”
I asked him how the rates were, and he said they were low enough, so, since I’d have to bunk down somewhere, I told him that would be all right. We were quiet then for five or six miles, before Ernie started up again.
“Say, you remember the big fight you two had? Down by the river. You wanted to tie a rock to a frog and throw him in, and Maria wouldn’t let you. That was a real scrap.”
“It wasn’t Maria,” I told him, “that was Peter.”
“You’re nuts,” Ernie said. “That must have been twenty years ago. Peter wasn’t even born then.”
“You must be thinking of another Peter,” I said. “I mean Peter Palmieri, Maria’s brother.”
Ernie stared at me until I thought he was going to run us into the ditch. “That’s who I mean too,” he said, “but little Peter’s only a kid eight, maybe nine.” He glanced back at the road. “You’re thinking of Paul, only it was Maria you had the fight with; Paul was just a toddler.”
We were quiet again for a few minutes after that, and it gave me time to remember that tussle on the river bank. I recalled that four or five of us had walked up to the point where we always tied the skiff we used to cross over to our rocky, useless island in the middle of the channel. We meant to play pirates or something, but the skiff had dragged loose from its moorings and was gone. Peter had tried to get the rest of us to search downstream for it, but everyone was too lazy. It was one of those hot, still summer days when the dust floats in the air; the days that make you think of threshing. I caught a frog somehow and hit upon the idea for an experiment.
Then I remembered that Ernie was at least partially right. Maria had tried to stop me and I had hit her in the eye with a stone. But that wasn’t the big fight. It was Peter who came to avenge Maria then, Peter with whom I rolled snarling and scratching, trying to get a grip on his sweat-slick body in the prickly weeds. Ernie was right about Paul’s being no more than an infant, and there had been a scrap with Maria; but it was Peter who’d finally made me cut the string from the frog’s leg and let it go. Side by side we had watched the little green animal hop back toward the water, and then, when it was only one jump away from dear safety, I had lashed out and suddenly, swiftly, driven the broad blade of my scout knife through him and pinned him to the mud.
The Palmieris’ place was called The Cassonsville Tourist Lodge. There were ten white cottages and a house with a cafe jutting out of the front to support a big sign that said EAT like Buddha commanding the grasshopper.
Mama Palmieri surprised me by recognizing me at once and smothering me with kisses. She herself had hardly changed at all. Her hair had gone gray at the temples, but most of it was still the glossy black it had been; and while she had always been fat, she was no fatter now. Maybe not quite so solid looking. I don’t think Papa really remembered me, but he gave me one of his rare smiles.
He was a small, dark, philosophical man who seldom spoke, and I suppose people meeting the two of them for the first time would assume that Mama dominated her husband. The truth was that she regarded him as infallible in every crisis. And for practical purposes Mama was almost right; he had the inexhaustible patience and rock-bound common sense of a Sicilian burro—all the qualities that have made that tough, diminutive animal the traditional companion of wandering friars and desert rats.
The Palmieris wanted me to stay in Maria’s room (she had gone to Chicago to attend some sort of nurses’ convention and was not due back until the end of the week) as a guest, and insisted that I eat with the family. I made them rent me a cabin instead at five dollars a night— which they swore was the full rate—but I gave in on the eating. We were still talking in that disjointed way people do on these occasions when Paul came in.
I would not have recognized him if I’d met him on the street, but I liked him at first sight; a big, dark, solemn kid with a handsome profile he had never discovered and probably never would.
After Mama made the introductions she started worrying about dinner and wondering when Peter would get home. Paul reassured her by saying he’d driven past Peter walking with a gang of kids as he’d come out from town. He said he’d offered his brother a lift but had been turned down.
Something about the way he said it gave me the willies. I remembered what Ernie had said about Peter being younger than Paul, and somehow Paul gave the same impression. He was wearing a college sweater and had the half cocky, half unsure mannerisms of a boy trying to be a man, yet he seemed to be talking about someone much younger.
After a while we heard the screen door slam and light, quick steps coming in. When I saw him I knew I had been expecting it all along. It was Peter, and he was perhaps eight years old. Not j
ust another Italian-looking kid; but Peter, with his sharp chin and black eyes. He didn’t seem to recall me at all, and Mama bragged about how not many women could bear healthy sons at fifty like she had. I went to bed early that night.
Naturally I had been keyed up all evening waiting to hear something that would show they knew about me; but when I fell asleep I was thinking about Peter, and I hadn’t been thinking about anything else for a long time.
The next day was Saturday, and since Paul had the day off from his summer job he offered to drive me around town. He had a ‘54 Chevy he had pretty much rebuilt himself, and he was very proud of it.
After we had seen all the usual things, which didn’t take long in Cassonsville, I asked him to take me to the island in the river where we had played as boys. We had to walk about a mile because the road doesn’t come close to the river at that point, but there was a path the kids had made. Grasshoppers fled in waves before us through the dry grass.
Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Page 11