The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

by Gene Wolfe

  “So should you,” the girl said. “You look tired.”

  “I’m drunk.”

  “Well, we’ve had so many requests for that tape that we just looped it, you know. We run it all the time. I’ll connect you.”

  She pushed buttons on her own vidlink, and her face faded until only her mouth and bright eyes were visible, overlaying the helmeted figure of an astronaut. “All right?” she said.

  Peters asked, “Is this the beginning or the end?”

  “Sir?”

  “I wanted to know—” He heard the door open behind him and hit the Cut button. “Later.” The screen filled at once with incoming calls. He turned.

  It was Clio Morris. She shut the door behind her and said, “Enough to drive you crazy, isn’t it?”

  He looked at her and made some commonplace reply, paying no more attention himself to what he had said than she would. She said, “Who do I remind you of?”

  “Was I staring?” he said. “I’m sorry. Did you come to relieve me?”

  “No, just to get away from the mess out there for a while. All right if I sit down?” She sat on the bed.

  He said, “You don’t remind me of anyone.”

  “That’s good, because you remind me of somebody. Mr. Peters. I’m going to have a drink—want me to bring you one?”

  “I’ll get them,” Peters said. He stood up.

  “No, I will. Back in a minute.”

  Automatically Peters seated himself at the vidlink again and pressed the first Ready button. A man appeared who said he wanted, quite frankly, to tell Peters his management was worried about the way things were going, and that they already had a great deal sunk in this thing and could not afford to lose more. Peters agreed that things were going poorly (which disconcerted the man) and asked for positive suggestions.

  “In what way?” the man said. “Just what do you mean?” “Well, we clearly need to apply greater force to Detroit than we have so far. The question, I suppose, is how we raise the force and how we can best apply it.”

  “You certainly don’t expect us to commit ourselves to any plan with this little preparation.”

  Peters said, “I just hoped you might have a few off-the-cuff suggestions.”

  The man shook his head. “I can take the question to my management, but that’s as far as I can go.”

  Peters told the man that he had heard certain foreign countries might have soldiers for hire, and that it would be possible for the man to ask among his own employees for volunteers to fight in Detroit. The man said that he would keep that in mind and signed off, and Clio came in with two old-fashioneds, one of which she handed to Peters. She asked him if he had gotten anywhere with Burglund.

  Peters shook his head. “Is that who I was talking to?”

  “Uh-huh. He works for ——.” She named a conglomerate, and Peters, suddenly curious, asked what they made.

  “They don’t make anything,” Clio said. “Not themselves. They own some companies that make things, I suppose, and some oil tankers and real estate. Pulp-wood holdings in Georgia.”

  Peters said, “I guess this is different from running pulpwood holdings in Georgia.”

  “Sure,” Clio said. She sat down on one of the beds. “That’s why Lowell is losing his war.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “Four or five months ago when he started all this I thought they could handle it—I really did.” When Peters looked at her questioningly she added, “The companies. I thought they could hold things together. So did Lou, I guess.”

  “So did I,” Peters said.

  “I know. You’re a lot like Lou—when he was younger. That’s what I meant when I said you reminded me of somebody: Lou when he was younger.”

  “You couldn’t have known him then,” Peters told her.

  “I didn’t. But about a year ago he showed me some tapes he had. They were training tapes he made twenty or twenty-five years ago. They showed him explaining some kind of machine; he was an engineer originally, you know. He looked a lot like you—he was a handsome man, and I guess he wanted me to see that he had looked like that once.”

  “You sleep with him, don’t you?”

  “I used to. Up until about six weeks ago. Now I’m trying to figure out why.”

  Peters said, “I wasn’t asking you for an explanation.”

  “I know,” the girl said. “You just wanted to find out if it was safe to fight with me, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “The formal business power structure and the informal one.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You still think there’s a chance we’ll win and you’ll have a career with U.S.”

  Peters shrugged. “With my education I don’t see anything else to shoot for— that’s something I didn’t understand until recently: you don’t get that degree; it gets you. Now, for me, it’s this or nothing.” He moved away from the vidlink and sat down beside her on the bed. The spread was satin, and he began to stroke it with his fingers.

  “You think people like Burglund are going to pull us through? I mean, really?”

  Peters was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “He won’t, but I still don’t know why not.”

  “I do,” Clio said. “I’ve been helping Lou deal with some of them. What do you think it takes to be a successful businessman? Enterprise, lots of guts, hard work, high intelligence—right?”

  “Roughly.”

  “You want to tell me how you use those things to manage a tree farm in Georgia?”

  “I don’t know,” Peters said. “I don’t know anything about the lumber business.”

  “Neither does he. Or if he does, it doesn’t do him any good. Look, they’ve got all this land, with pines growing on it. When it starts getting mature—ready to cut—anyplace, people make them offers for it: paper mills and lumber companies. And since some of it gets mature every year they know quite a bit about price—all they have to do is look up last year’s bids. When one comes in that looks good, they can tell that company to go ahead if it’s a cash deal, and if it isn’t they can look up their credit in Dun and Bradstreet. They’ve got a regular crew that comes around and replants when the cutting’s done.”

  “You make it sound easy,” Peters said.

  “No, it isn’t easy—but it isn’t your kind of hard either. It takes a special kind of men who can go year in and year out without rocking the boat in any way. People who never get so bored with it they get careless, and that know when they have to bow to the state legislatures and when they ought to threaten to fight a new law through the courts. But now you’re telling them to get out and recruit soldiers—well, most of them were in the army themselves at one time or another, they were majors and colonels and all that, at desks, but they don’t know anything about soldiers, or thinking, or running anything that doesn’t go by routine. We used to say that what we wanted was initiative and creativity and all those things, just like we said we wanted kindness and human values, and the American frontier, while it lasted, actually encouraged and rewarded them, but we’ve been paying off on something else for a hundred years or so now, and now that’s all we’ve got.” Peters had slipped his hand between her thighs, and she looked down at it and said, “That took you a long time.”

  He said, “I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

  And later, “We still might do it.” He took her hand in the dark. “If we can change things just a little before it’s too late we still might do it.” The girl’s body blossomed fire that engulfed and scarred and clung; naked and burning he reached the center of the room beyond, but he fell there, on the Moroccan carpet that covered the red tiles, and, though they poured tepid water on him from the spent ice buckets, died there.

  AFTERWORD

  This one taught me a lesson. I needed a story, lacked an idea, and resolved to steal one. Damon Runyon was good, and I had a Runyon collection; I would open the book at random, read the stor
y, and rewrite it as SF. (If this sounds desperate, it was.)

  Opened at random, the book palmed off on me “A Light in France,” which may well be the only bad story Runyon ever wrote. I clenched my teeth, swore a mighty swear, and plowed on— eventually throwing out just about everything in “A Light in France.” You have read the result. I hope you enjoyed it.

  THE DEATH OF DR. ISLAND

  I have desired to go

  Where springs not fail,

  To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

  And a few lilies blow

  And I have asked to be

  Where no storms come,

  Where the green swell is in the heavens dumb,

  And out of the swing of the sea.

  —GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  A

  grain of sand, teetering on the brink of the pit, trembled and fell in; the ant lion at the bottom angrily flung it out again. For a moment there was quiet. Then the entire pit, and a square meter of sand around it, shifted drunkenly while two coconut palms bent to watch. The sand rose, pivoting at one edge, and the scarred head of a boy appeared—a stubble of brown hair threatened to erase the marks of the sutures; with dilated eyes hypnotically dark he paused, his neck just where the ant lion’s had been; then, as though goaded from below, he vaulted up and onto the beach, turned, and kicked sand into the dark hatchway from which he had emerged. It slammed shut. The boy was about fourteen.

  For a time he squatted, pushing the sand aside and trying to find the door. A few centimeters down, his hands met a gritty, solid material which, though neither concrete nor sandstone, shared the qualities of both—a sand-filled organic plastic. On it he scraped his fingers raw, but he could not locate the edges of the hatch.

  Then he stood and looked about him, his head moving continually as the heads of certain reptiles do—back and forth, with no pauses at the terminations of the movements. He did this constantly, ceaselessly—always—and for that reason it will not often be described again, just as it will not be mentioned that he breathed. He did, and as he did, his head, like a rearing snake’s, turned from side to side. The boy was thin, and naked as a frog.

  Ahead of him the sand sloped gently down toward sapphire water; there were coconuts on the beach, and seashells, and a scuttling crab that played with the finger-high edge of each dying wave. Behind him there were only palms and sand for a long distance, the palms growing ever closer together as they moved away from the water until the forest of their columniated trunks seemed architectural, like some palace maze becoming as it progressed more and more draped with creepers and lianas with green, scarlet, and yellow leaves, the palms interspersed with bamboo and deciduous trees dotted with flaming orchids until almost at the limit of his sight the whole ended in a spangled wall whose predominant color was black-green.

  The boy walked toward the beach, then down the beach until he stood in kneedeep water as warm as blood. He dipped his fingers and tasted it—it was fresh, with no hint of the disinfectants to which he was accustomed. He waded out again and sat on the sand about five meters up from the high-water mark, and after ten minutes, during which he heard no sound but the wind and the murmuring of the surf, he threw back his head and began to scream. His screaming was high-pitched, and each breath ended in a gibbering, ululant note, after which came the hollow, iron gasp of the next indrawn breath. On one occasion he had screamed in this way, without cessation, for fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes, at the end of which a nursing nun with an exemplary record stretching back seventeen years had administered an injection without the permission of the attending physician.

  After a time the boy paused—not because he was tired, but in order to listen better. There was, still, only the sound of the wind in the palm fronds and the murmuring surf, yet he felt that he had heard a voice. The boy could be quiet as well as noisy, and he was quiet now, his left hand sifting white sand as clean as salt between its fingers while his right tossed tiny pebbles like beach-glass beads into the surf.

  “Hear me,” said the surf. “Hear me. Hear me.”

  “I hear you,” the boy said.

  “Good,” said the surf, and it faintly echoed itself: “Good, good, good.”

  The boy shrugged.

  “What shall I call you?” asked the surf.

  “My name is Nicholas Kenneth de Vore.”

  “Nick, Nick . . . Nick?”

  The boy stood and, turning his back on the sea, walked inland. When he was out of sight of the water he found a coconut palm growing sloped and angled, leaning and weaving among its companions like the plume of an ascending jet blown by the wind. After feeling its rough exterior with both hands, the boy began to climb; he was inexpert and climbed slowly and a little clumsily, but his body was light and he was strong. In time he reached the top, and disturbed the little brown plush monkeys there, who fled chattering into other palms, leaving him to nestle alone among the stems of the fronds and the green coconuts. “I am here also,” said a voice from the palm.

  “Ah,” said the boy, who was watching the tossing, sapphire sky far over his head.

  “I will call you Nicholas.”

  The boy said, “I can see the sea.”

  “Do you know my name?”

  The boy did not reply. Under him the long, long stem of the twisted palm swayed faintly.

  “My friends all call me Dr. Island.”

  “I will not call you that,” the boy said.

  “You mean that you are not my friend.”

  A gull screamed.

  “But you see, I take you for my friend. You may say that I am not yours, but I say that you are mine. I like you, Nicholas, and I will treat you as a friend.”

  “Are you a machine or a person or a committee?” the boy asked.

  “I am all those things and more. I am the spirit of this island, the tutelary genius.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Now that we have met, would you rather I leave you alone?”

  Again the boy did not reply.

  “You may wish to be alone with your thoughts. I would like to say that we have made much more progress today than I anticipated. I feel that we will get along together very well.”

  After fifteen minutes or more, the boy asked, “Where does the light come from?” There was no answer. The boy waited for a time, then climbed back down the trunk, dropping the last five meters and rolling as he hit in the soft sand.

  He walked to the beach again and stood staring out at the water. Far off he could see it curving up and up, the distant combers breaking in white foam until the sea became white-flecked sky. To his left and his right the beach curved away, bending almost infinitesimally until it disappeared. He began to walk, then saw, almost at the point where perception was lost, a human figure. He broke into a run; a moment later, he halted and turned around. Far ahead another walker, almost invisible, strode the beach; Nicholas ignored him; he found a coconut and tried to open it, then threw it aside and walked on. From time to time fish jumped, and occasionally he saw a wheeling seabird dive. The light grew dimmer. He was aware that he had not eaten for some time, but he was not in the strict sense hungry—or rather, he enjoyed his hunger now in the same way that he might, at another time, have gashed his arm to watch himself bleed. Once he said, “Dr. Island!” loudly as he passed a coconut palm, and then later he began to chant, “Dr. Island, Dr. Island, Dr. Island,” as he walked, until the words had lost all meaning. He swam in the sea as he had been taught to swim in the great quartanary treatment tanks on Callisto to improve his coordination, and spluttered and snorted until he learned to deal with the waves. When it was so dark he could see only the white sand and the white foam of the breakers, he drank from the sea and fell asleep on the beach, the right side of his taut, ugly face relaxing first, so that it seemed asleep even while the left eye was open and staring, his head rolling from side to side, the left corner of his mouth preserving, like a death mask, his characteristic expression—angry, remote, tinged with that i
nhuman quality which is found nowhere but in certain human faces.

  W

  hen he woke it was not yet light, but the night was fading to a gentle gray. Headless, the palms stood like tall ghosts up and down the beach, their tops lost in fog and the lingering dark. He was cold. His hands rubbed his sides; he danced on the sand and sprinted down the edge of the lapping water in an effort to get warm; ahead of him a pinpoint of red light became a fire, and he slowed.

  A man who looked about twenty-five crouched over the fire. Tangled black hair hung over this man’s shoulders, and he had a sparse beard; otherwise he was as naked as Nicholas himself. His eyes were dark, and large and empty, like the ends of broken pipes; he poked at his fire, and the smell of roasting fish came with the smoke. For a time Nicholas stood at a distance, watching.

  Saliva ran from a corner of the man’s mouth, and he wiped it away with one hand, leaving a smear of ash on his face. Nicholas edged closer until he stood on the opposite side of the fire. The fish had been wrapped in broad leaves and mud, and lay in the center of the coals. “I’m Nicholas,” Nicholas said. “Who are you?” The young man did not look at him, had never looked at him.

  “Hey, I’d like a piece of your fish. Not much. All right?”

  The young man raised his head, looking not at Nicholas but at some point far beyond him; he dropped his eyes again. Nicholas smiled. The smile emphasized the disjointed quality of his expression, his mouth’s uneven curve.

  “Just a little piece? Is it about done?” Nicholas crouched, imitating the young man, and as though this were a signal, the young man sprang for him across the fire. Nicholas jumped backward, but the jump was too late—the young man’s body struck his and sent him sprawling on the sand; fingers clawed for his throat. Screaming, Nicholas rolled free, into the water; the young man splashed after him; Nicholas dived.

  He swam underwater, his belly almost grazing the wave-rippled sand until he found deeper water; then he surfaced, gasping for breath, and saw the young man, who saw him as well. He dived again, this time surfacing far off, in deep water. Treading water, he could see the fire on the beach, and the young man when he returned to it, stamping out of the sea in the early light. Nicholas then swam until he was five hundred meters or more down the beach, then waded in to shore and began walking back toward the fire.