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

by Gene Wolfe

  “When you told me I had been reclassified.”

  “You would have to be retested, for which there are no facilities here.”

  “If you believed me, why did you say ‘retested’? I told you I haven’t ever been tested at all—but anyway you could cross out the ninety-five.”

  “It is impossible for me to plan your therapy without some estimate of your intelligence, Nicholas, and I have nothing with which to replace it.”

  T

  he ground was sloping up more sharply now, and in a clearing the boy halted and turned to look back at the leafy film, like algae over a pool, beneath which he had climbed, and at the sea beyond. To his right and left his view was still hemmed with foliage, and ahead of him a meadow on edge (like the square of sand through which he had come, though he did not think of that), dotted still with trees, stretched steeply toward an invisible summit. It seemed to him that under his feet the mountainside swayed ever so slightly. Abruptly he demanded of the wind, “Where’s Ignacio?”

  “Not here. Much closer to the beach.”

  “And Diane?”

  “Where you left her. Do you enjoy the panorama?”

  “It’s pretty, but it feels like we’re rocking.”

  “We are. I am moored to the temperglass exterior of our satellite by two hundred cables, but the tide and the currents nonetheless impart a slight motion to my body. Naturally this movement is magnified as you go higher.”

  “I thought you were fastened right on to the hull; if there’s water under you, how do people get in and out?”

  “I am linked to the main air lock by a communication tube. To you when you came, it probably seemed an ordinary companionway.”

  Nicholas nodded and turned his back on leaves and sea and began to climb again.

  “You are in a beautiful spot, Nicholas; do you open your heart to beauty?” After waiting for an answer that did not come, the wind sang:

  The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns

  And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,

  The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,

  The lightning flash of insect and of bird,

  The lustre of the long convolvuluses

  That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran

  Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows

  And glories of the broad belt of the world,

  All these he saw.

  “Does this mean nothing to you, Nicholas?”

  “You read a lot, don’t you?”

  “Often, when it is dark, everyone else is asleep and there is very little else for me to do.”

  “You talk like a woman; are you a woman?”

  “How could I be a woman?”

  “You know what I mean. Except, when you were talking mostly to Diane, you sounded more like a man.”

  “You haven’t yet said you think me beautiful.”

  “You’re an Easter egg.”

  “What do you mean by that, Nicholas?”

  “Never mind.” He saw the egg as it had hung in the air before him, shining with gold and covered with flowers.

  “Eggs are dyed with pretty colors for Easter, and my colors are beautiful—is that what you mean, Nicholas?”

  His mother had brought the egg on visiting day, but she could never have made it. Nicholas knew who must have made it. The gold was that very pure gold used for shielding delicate instruments; the clear flakes of crystallized carbon that dotted the egg’s surface with tiny stars could only have come from a laboratory high-pressure furnace. How angry he must have been when she told him she was going to give it to him.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it, Nicky?”

  It hung in the weightlessness between them, turning very slowly with the memory of her scented gloves.

  “The flowers are meadowsweet, fraxinella, lily of the valley, and moss rose—though I wouldn’t expect you to recognize them, darling.” His mother had never been below the orbit of Mars, but she pretended to have spent her girlhood on Earth; each reference to the lie filled Nicholas with inexpressible fury and shame. The egg was about twenty centimeters long and it revolved, end over end, in some small fraction more than eight of the pulse beats he felt in his cheeks. Visiting time had twenty-three minutes to go.

  “Aren’t you going to look at it?”

  “I can see it from here.” He tried to make her understand. “I can see every part of it. The little red things are aluminum oxide crystals, right?”

  “I mean, look inside, Nicky.”

  He saw then that there was a lens at one end, disguised as a dewdrop in the throat of an asphodel. Gently he took the egg in his hands, closed one eye, and looked. The light of the interior was not, as he had half-expected, gold tinted, but brilliantly white, deriving from some concealed source. A world surely meant for Earth shone within, as though seen from below the orbit of the moon—indigo sea and emerald land. Rivers brown and clear as tea ran down long plains.

  His mother said, “Isn’t it pretty?”

  Night hung at the corners in funereal purple, and sent long shadows like cold and lovely arms to caress the day; and while he watched and it fell, long-necked birds of so dark a pink that they were nearly red trailed stilt legs across the sky, their wings making crosses.

  “They are called flamingos,” Dr. Island said, following the direction of Nicholas’s eyes. “Isn’t it a pretty word? For a pretty bird, but I don’t think we’d like them as much if we called them sparrows, would we?”

  Nicholas’s mother said, “I’m going to take it home and keep it for you. It’s too nice to leave with a little boy, but if you ever come home again it will be waiting for you. On your dresser, beside your hairbrushes.”

  Nicholas said, “Words just mix you up.”

  “You shouldn’t despise them, Nicholas. Besides having great beauty of their own, they are useful in reducing tension. You might benefit from that.”

  “You mean you talk yourself out of it.”

  “I mean that a person’s ability to verbalize his feelings, if only to himself, may prevent them from destroying him. Evolution teaches us, Nicholas, that the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later. Words can be a safety valve.”

  Nicholas said, “I want to be a bomb; a bomb doesn’t need a safety valve.” To his mother, “Is that South America, Mama?”

  “No, dear, India. The Malabar Coast on your left, the Coromandel coast on your right, and Ceylon below.” Words.

  “A bomb destroys itself, Nicholas.”

  “A bomb doesn’t care.”

  He was climbing resolutely now, his toes grabbing at tree roots and the soft, mossy soil, his physician was no longer the wind but a small brown monkey that followed a stone’s throw behind him. “I hear someone coming,” Nicholas said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it Ignacio?”

  “No, it is Nicholas. You are close now.”

  “Close to the Point?”

  “Yes.”

  He stopped and looked around him. The sounds he had heard, the naked feet padding on soft ground, stopped as well. Nothing seemed strange; the land still rose, and there were large trees, widely spaced, with moss growing in their deepest shade, grass where there was more light. “The three big trees,” Nicholas said, “they’re just alike. Is that how you know where we are?”

  “Yes.”

  In his mind he called the one before him Ceylon; the others were Coromandel and Malabar. He walked toward Ceylon, studying its massive, twisted limbs; a boy naked as himself walked out of the forest to his left, toward Malabar—this boy was not looking at Nicholas, who shouted and ran toward him.

  The boy disappeared. Only Malabar, solid and real, stood before Nicholas; he ran to it, touched its rough bark with his hand, and then saw beyond it a fourth tree, similar too to the Ceylon tree, around which a boy peered with averted head. Nicholas watched him for a moment, then said, “I see.”


  “Do you?” the monkey chattered.

  “It’s like a mirror, only backward. The light from the front of me goes out and hits the edge, and comes in the other side, only I can’t see it because I’m not looking that way. What I see is the light from my back, sort of, because it comes back this way. When I ran, did I get turned around?”

  “Yes, you ran out the left side of the segment, and of course returned immediately from the right.”

  “I’m not scared. It’s kind of fun.” He picked up a stick and threw it as hard as he could toward the Malabar tree. The stick vanished, whizzed over his head, vanished again, slapped the back of his legs. “Did this scare Diane?”

  There was no answer. He strode farther, palely naked boys walking to his left and right, but always looking away from him, gradually coming closer.

  D

  on’t go farther,” Dr. Island said behind him. “It can be dangerous if you try to pass through the Point itself.”

  “I see it,” Nicholas said. He saw three more trees, growing very close together, just ahead of him; their branches seemed strangely intertwined as they danced together in the wind, and beyond them there was nothing at all.

  “You can’t actually go through the Point,” Dr. Island Monkey said. “The tree covers it.”

  “Then why did you warn me about it?” Limping and scarred, the boys to his right and left were no more than two meters away now; he had discovered that if he looked straight ahead he could sometimes glimpse their bruised profiles.

  “That’s far enough, Nicholas.”

  “I want to touch the tree.”

  He took another step, and another, then turned. The Malabar boy turned too, presenting his narrow back, on which the ribs and spine seemed welts. Nicholas reached out both arms and laid his hands on the thin shoulders and, as he did, felt other hands—the cool, unfeeling hands of a stranger, dry hands too small—touch his own shoulders and creep upward toward his neck.

  “Nicholas!”

  He jumped sidewise away from the tree and looked at his hands, his head swaying. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Yes, it was, Nicholas,” the monkey said.

  “It was one of them.”

  “You are all of them.”

  In one quick motion Nicholas snatched up an arm-long section of fallen limb and hurled it at the monkey. It struck the little creature, knocking it down, but the monkey sprang up and fled on three legs. Nicholas sprinted after it.

  He had nearly caught it when it darted to one side; as quickly, he turned toward the other, springing for the monkey he saw running toward him there. In an instant it was in his grip, feebly trying to bite. He slammed its head against the ground, then catching it by the ankles swung it against the Ceylon tree until at the third impact he heard the skull crack, and stopped.

  He had expected wires, but there were none. Blood oozed from the battered little face, and the furry body was warm and limp in his hands. Leaves above his head said, “You haven’t killed me, Nicholas. You never will.”

  “How does it work?” He was still searching for wires, tiny circuit cards holding micro-logic. He looked about for a sharp stone with which to open the monkey’s body, but could find none.

  “It is just a monkey,” the leaves said. “If you had asked, I would have told you.”

  “How did you make him talk?” Nicholas dropped the monkey, stared at it for a moment, then kicked it. His fingers were bloody, and he wiped them on the leaves of the tree.

  “Only my mind speaks to yours, Nicholas.”

  “Oh,” he said. And then, “I’ve heard of that. I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought it would be in my head.”

  “Your record shows no auditory hallucinations, but haven’t you ever known someone who had them?”

  “I knew a girl once. . . .” He paused.

  “Yes?”

  “She twisted noises—you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like, it would just be a service cart out in the corridor, but she’d hear the fan, and think . . .”

  “What?”

  “Oh, different things. That it was somebody talking, calling her.”

  “Hear them?”

  “What?” He sat up in his bunk. “Maya?”

  “They’re coming after me.”

  “Maya?”

  Dr. Island, through the leaves, said, “When I talk to you, Nicholas, your mind makes any sound you hear the vehicle for my thoughts’ content. You may hear me softly in the patter of rain, or joyfully in the singing of a bird—but if I wished I could amplify what I say until every idea and suggestion I wished to give would be driven like a nail into your consciousness. Then you would do whatever I wished you to.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Nicholas said. “If you can do that, why don’t you tell Diane not to be catatonic?”

  “First, because she might retreat more deeply into her disease in an effort to escape me; and second, because ending her catatonia in that way would not remove its cause.”

  “And thirdly?”

  “I did not say ‘thirdly,’ Nicholas.”

  “I thought I heard it—when two leaves touched.”

  “Thirdly, Nicholas, because both you and she have been chosen for your effect on someone else; if I were to change her—or you—so abruptly, that effect would be lost.” Dr. Island was a monkey again now, a new monkey that chattered from the protection of a tree twenty meters away. Nicholas threw a stick at him.

  “The monkeys are only little animals, Nicholas; they like to follow people, and they chatter.”

  “I bet Ignacio kills them.”

  “No, he likes them; he only kills fish to eat.”

  Nicholas was suddenly aware of his hunger. He began to walk.

  H

  e found Ignacio on the beach, praying. For an hour or more, Nicholas hid behind the trunk of a palm watching him, but for a long time he could not decide to whom Ignacio prayed. He was kneeling just where the lacy edges of the breakers died, looking out toward the water, and from time to time he bowed, touching his forehead to the damp sand; then Nicholas could hear his voice, faintly, over the crashing and hissing of the waves. In general, Nicholas approved of prayer, having observed that those who prayed were usually more interesting companions than those who did not; but he had also noticed that though it made no difference what name the devotee gave the object of his devotions, it was important to discover how the god was conceived. Ignacio did not seem to be praying to Dr. Island—he would, Nicholas thought, have been facing the other way for that—and for a time Nicholas wondered if he was not praying to the waves. From Nicholas’s position behind him he followed Ignacio’s line of vision out and out, wave upon wave into the bright, confused sky, up and up until at last it curved completely around and came to rest on Ignacio’s back again, and then it occurred to Nicholas that Ignacio might be praying to himself. Nicholas left the palm trunk then and walked about halfway to the place where Ignacio knelt, and sat down. Above the sounds of the sea and the murmuring of Ignacio’s voice hung a silence so immense and fragile that it seemed that at any moment the entire crystal satellite might ring like a gong.

  After a time Nicholas felt his left side trembling. With his right hand he began to stroke it, running his fingers down his left arm, and from his left shoulder to the thigh. It worried him that his left side should be so frightened, and he wondered if perhaps that other half of his brain, from which he was forever severed, could hear what Ignacio was saying to the waves. Nicholas began to pray himself, so that the other (and perhaps Ignacio too) could hear, saying not quite beneath his breath, “Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, he’s not going to hurt us, he’s nice, and if he does we’ll get him; we’re only going to get something to eat; maybe he’ll show us how to catch fish, I think he’ll be nice this time.” But he knew, or at least felt he knew, that Ignacio would not be nice this time.

  Eventually Ignacio stood up; he did not turn to face Nicholas, but waded out to sea; then, as
though he had known Nicholas was behind him all the time (though Nicholas was not sure he had been heard—perhaps, so he thought, Dr. Island had told Ignacio), he gestured to indicate that Nicholas should follow him.

  The water was colder than Nicholas remembered, the sand coarse and gritty between his toes. He thought of what Dr. Island had told him—about floating—and that a part of her must be this sand, under the water, reaching out (how far?) into the sea; when she ended there would be nothing but the clear temperglass of the satellite itself, far down.

  “Come,” Ignacio said. “Can you swim?” Just as though he had forgotten the night before. Nicholas said yes, he could, wondering if Ignacio would look around at him when he spoke. He did not.

  “And do you know why you are here?”

  “You told me to come.”

  “Ignacio means here. Does this not remind you of any place you have seen before, little one?”

  Nicholas thought of the crystal gong and the Easter egg, then of the microthin globes of perfumed vapor that, at home, were sometimes sent floating down the corridors at Christmas to explode in clean dust and a cold smell of pine forests when the children stuck them with their hopping canes, but he said nothing.

  Ignacio continued, “Let Ignacio tell you a story. Once there was a man, a boy, actually, on the Earth, who—”

  Nicholas wondered why it was always men (most often doctors and clinical psychologists, in his experience) who wanted to tell you stories. Jesus, he recalled, was always telling everyone stories, and the Virgin Mary almost never, though a woman Nicholas had once known who thought she was the Virgin Mary had always been talking about her son. Nicholas thought Ignacio looked a little like Jesus. He tried to remember if his mother had ever told him stories when he was at home, and decided that she had not; she just turned on the comscreen to the cartoons.

  “—wanted to—”

  “—tell a story,” Nicholas finished for him.

  “How did you know?” Angry and surprised.

  “It was you, wasn’t it? And you want to tell one now.”