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

by Gene Wolfe

  “What you said was not what Ignacio would have said. He was going to tell you about a fish.”

  “Where is it?” Nicholas asked, thinking of the fish Ignacio had been eating the night before, and imagining another such fish, caught while he had been coming back, perhaps, from the Point, and now concealed somewhere awaiting the fire. “Is it a big one?”

  “It is gone now,” Ignacio said, “but it was only as long as a man’s hand. I caught it in the big river.”

  Huckleberry— “I know, the Mississippi; it was a catfish. Or a sunfish.” — Finn.

  “Possibly that is what you call them; for a time he was as the sun to a certain one.” The light from nowhere danced on the water. “In any event he was kept on that table in the salon in the house where life was lived. In a tank, but not the old kind in which one sees the glass, with metal at the corner. But the new kind in which the glass is so strong, but very thin, and curved so that it does not reflect, and there are no corners, and a clever device holds the water clear.” He dipped up a handful of sparkling water, still not meeting Nicholas’s eyes. “As clear even as this, and there were no ripples, and so you could not see it at all. My fish floated in the center of my table above a few stones.”

  Nicholas asked, “Did you float on the river on a raft?”

  “No, we had a little boat. Ignacio caught this fish in a net, of which he almost bit through the strands before he could be landed; he possessed wonderful teeth. There was no one in the house but him and the other, and the robots, but each morning someone would go to the pool in the patio and catch a goldfish for him. Ignacio would see this goldfish there when he came down for his breakfast, and would think, Brave goldfish, you have been cast to the monster; will you be the one to destroy him? Destroy him and you shall have his diamond house forever. And then the fish, who had a little spot of red beneath his wonderful teeth, a spot like a cherry, would rush upon that young goldfish, and for an instant the water would be all clouded with blood.”

  “And then what?” Nicholas asked.

  “And then the clever machine would make the water clear once more, and the fish would be floating above the stones as before, the fish with the wonderful teeth, and Ignacio would touch the little switch on the table, and ask for more bread, and more fruit.”

  “Are you hungry now?”

  “No, I am tired and lazy now; if I pursue you I will not catch you, and if I catch you—through your own slowness and clumsiness—I will not kill you, and if I kill you I will not eat you.”

  Nicholas had begun to back away, and at the last words, realizing that they were a signal, he turned and began to run, splashing through the shallow water. Ignacio ran after him, much helped by his longer legs; his hair flying behind his dark young face, his square teeth—each white as a bone and as big as Nicholas’s thumbnail—showing like spectators who lined the railings of his lips.

  “Don’t run, Nicholas,” Dr. Island said with the voice of a wave. “It only makes him angry that you run.” Nicholas did not answer, but cut to his left, up the beach and among the trunks of the palms, sprinting all the way because he had no way of knowing Ignacio was not right behind him, about to grab him by the neck. When he stopped it was in the thick jungle, among the boles of the hardwoods, where he leaned, out of breath, the thumping of his own heart the only sound in an atmosphere silent and unwaked as Earth’s long, prehuman day. For a time he listened for any sound Ignacio might make searching for him; there was none. He drew a deep breath then and said, “Well, that’s over,” expecting Dr. Island to answer from somewhere; there was only the green hush.

  The light was still bright and strong and nearly shadowless, but some interior sense told Nicholas the day was nearly over, and he noticed that such faint shades as he could see stretched long, horizontal distortions of their objects. He felt no hunger, but he had fasted before and knew on which side of hunger he stood; he was not as strong as he had been only a day past, and by this time next day he would probably be unable to outrun Ignacio. He should, he now realized, have eaten the monkey he had killed; but his stomach revolted at the thought of the raw flesh, and he did not know how he might build a fire, although Ignacio seemed to have done so the night before. Raw fish, even if he were able to catch a fish, would be as bad or worse than raw monkey; he remembered his effort to open a coconut—he had failed, but it was surely not impossible. His mind was hazy as to what a coconut might contain, but there had to be an edible core, because they were eaten in books. He decided to make a wide sweep through the jungle that would bring him back to the beach well away from Ignacio; he had several times seen coconuts lying in the sand under the trees.

  He moved quietly, still a little afraid, trying to think of ways to open the coconut when he found it. He imagined himself standing before a large and raggedly faceted stone, holding the coconut in both hands. He raised it and smashed it down, but when it struck it was no longer a coconut but Maya’s head; he heard her nose cartilage break with a distinct, rubbery snap. Her eyes, as blue as the sky above Madhya Pradesh, the sparkling blue sky of the egg, looked up at him, but he could no longer look into them, they retreated from his own, and it came to him quite suddenly that Lucifer, in falling, must have fallen up, into the fires and the coldness of space, never again to see the warm blues and browns and greens of Earth: I was watching Satan fall as lightning from heaven. Nicholas had heard that on tape somewhere, but he could not remember where. He had read that on Earth lightning did not come down from the clouds but leaped up from the planetary surface toward them, never to return.

  “Nicholas.”

  He listened, but did not hear his name again. Faintly water was babbling; had Dr. Island used that sound to speak to him? He walked toward it and found a little rill that threaded a way among the trees, and followed it. In a hundred steps it grew broader, slowed, and ended in a long blind pool under a dome of leaves. Diane was sitting on moss on the side opposite him; she looked up as she saw him, and smiled.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello, Nicholas. I thought I heard you. I wasn’t mistaken after all, was I?”

  “I didn’t think I said anything.” He tested the dark water with his foot and found that it was very cold.

  “You gave a little gasp, I fancy. I heard it, and I said to myself, ‘That’s Nicholas,’ and I called you. Then I thought I might be wrong, or that it might be Ignacio.”

  “Ignacio was chasing me. Maybe he still is, but I think he’s probably given up by now.”

  The girl nodded, looking into the dark waters of the pool, but did not seem to have heard him. He began to work his way around to her, climbing across the snakelike roots of the crowding trees. “Why does Ignacio want to kill me, Diane?”

  “Sometimes he wants to kill me too,” the girl said.

  “But why?”

  “I think he’s a bit frightened of us. Have you ever talked to him, Nicholas?”

  “Today I did a little. He told me a story about a pet fish he used to have.”

  “Ignacio grew up all alone; did he tell you that? On Earth. On a plantation in Brazil, way up the Amazon—Dr. Island told me.”

  “I thought it was crowded on Earth.”

  “The cities are crowded, and the countryside closest to the cities. But there are places where it’s emptier than it used to be. Where Ignacio was, there would have been Red Indian hunters two or three hundred years ago; when he was there, there wasn’t anyone, just the machines. Now he doesn’t want to be looked at, doesn’t want anyone around him.”

  Nicholas said slowly, “Dr. Island said lots of people wouldn’t be sick if only there weren’t other people around all the time. Remember that?”

  “Only there are other people around all the time; that’s how the world is.”

  “Not in Brazil, maybe,” Nicholas said. He was trying to remember something about Brazil, but the only thing he could think of was a parrot singing in a straw hat from the comview cartoons, and then a turtle and a hedgehog that
turned into armadillos for the love of God, Montresor. Nicholas said, “Why didn’t he stay here?”

  “Did I tell you about the bird, Nicholas?” She had been not listening again.

  “What bird?”

  “I have a bird. Inside.” She patted the flat stomach below her small breasts, and for a moment Nicholas thought she had really found food. “She sits in here. She has tangled a nest in my entrails, where she sits and tears at my breath with her beak. I look healthy to you, don’t I? But inside I’m hollow and rotten and turning brown, dirt and old feathers, oozing away. Her beak will break through soon.”

  “Okay.” Nicholas turned to go.

  “I’ve been drinking water here, trying to drown her. I think I’ve swallowed so much I couldn’t stand up now if I tried, but she isn’t even wet, and do you know something, Nicholas? I’ve found out I’m not really me, I’m her.”

  Turning back, Nicholas asked, “When was the last time you had anything to eat?”

  “I don’t know. Two, three days ago. Ignacio gave me something.”

  “I’m going to try to open a coconut. If I can I’ll bring you back some.”

  W

  hen he reached the beach, Nicholas turned and walked slowly back in the direction of the dead fire, this time along the rim of dampened sand between the sea and the palms. He was thinking about machines.

  There were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of machines out beyond the belt, but few or none of the sophisticated servant robots of Earth—those were luxuries. Would Ignacio, in Brazil (whatever that was like), have had such luxuries? Nicholas thought not; those robots were almost like people, and living with them would be like living with people. Nicholas wished that he could speak Brazilian.

  There had been the therapy robots at St. John’s; Nicholas had not liked them, and he did not think Ignacio would have liked them either. If Nicholas had liked his therapy robot he probably would not have had to be sent here. He thought of the chipped and rusted old machine that had cleaned the corridors—Maya had called it Corradora, but no one else ever called it anything but “Hey!” It could not (or at least did not) speak, and Nicholas doubted that it had emotions, except possibly a sort of love of cleanness that did not extend to its own person. “You will understand,” someone was saying inside his head, “that motives of all sorts can be divided into two sorts.” A doctor? A therapy robot? It did not matter. “Extrinsic and intrinsic. An extrinsic motive has always some further end in view, and that end we call an intrinsic motive. Thus when we have reduced motivation to intrinsic motivation we have reduced it to its simplest parts. Take that machine over there.”

  What machine?

  “Freud would have said that it was fixated at the latter anal stage, perhaps due to the care its builders exercised in seeing that the dirt it collects is not released again. Because of its fixation it is, as you see, obsessed with cleanliness and order; compulsive sweeping and scrubbing palliate its anxities. It is a strength of Freud’s theory, and not a weakness, that it serves to explain many of the activities of machines as well as the acts of persons.”

  Hello there, Corradora.

  And hello, Ignacio.

  My head, moving from side to side, must remind you of a radar scanner. My steps are measured, slow, and precise. I emit a scarcely audible humming as I walk, and my eyes are fixed, as I swing my head, not on you, Ignacio, but on the waves at the edge of sight, where they curve up into the sky. I stop ten meters short of you, and I stand.

  You go, I follow, ten meters behind. What do I want? Nothing.

  Yes, I will pick up the sticks, and I will follow—five meters behind.

  “Break them, and put them on the fire. Not all of them, just a few.”

  Yes.

  “Ignacio keeps the fire here burning all the time. Sometimes he takes the coals of fire from it to start others, but here, under the big palm log, he has a fire always. The rain does not strike it here. Always the fire. Do you know how he made it the first time? Reply to him!”

  “No.”

  “No, Patrão!”

  “‘No, Patrão.’”

  “Ignacio stole it from the gods, from Poseidon. Now Poseidon is dead, lying at the bottom of the water. Which is the top. Would you like to see him?”

  “If you wish it, Patrão.”

  ” “It will soon be dark, and that is the time to fish; do you have a spear?”

  “No, Patrão.”

  “Then Ignacio will get you one.”

  Ignacio took a handful of the sticks and thrust the ends into the fire, blowing on them. After a moment Nicholas leaned over and blew too, until all the sticks were blazing.

  “Now we must find you some bamboo, and there is some back here. Follow me.”

  The light, still nearly shadowless, was dimming now, so that it seemed to Nicholas that they walked on insubstantial soil, though he could feel it beneath his feet. Ignacio stalked ahead, holding up the burning sticks until the fire seemed about to die, then pointing the ends down, allowing it to lick upward toward his hand and come to life again. There was a gentle wind blowing out toward the sea, carrying away the sound of the surf and bringing a damp coolness; and when they had been walking for several minutes, Nicholas heard in it a faint, dry, almost rhythmic rattle.

  Ignacio looked back at him and said, “The music. The big stems talking, hear it?”

  They found a cane a little thinner than Nicholas’s wrist and piled the burning sticks around its base, then added more. When it fell, Ignacio burned through the upper end too, making a pole about as long as Nicholas was tall, and with the edge of a seashell scraped the larger end to a point. “Now you are a fisherman,” he said. Nicholas said, “Yes, Patrão,” still careful not to meet his eyes.

  “You are hungry?”

  “Yes, Patrão.”

  “Then let me tell you something. Whatever you get is Ignacio’s, you understand? And what he catches, that is his too. But when he has eaten what he wants, what is left is yours. Come on now, and Ignacio will teach you to fish or drown you.”

  Ignacio’s own spear was buried in the sand not far from the fire; it was much bigger than the one he had made for Nicholas. With it held across his chest he went down to the water, wading until it was waist high, then swimming, not looking to see if Nicholas was following. Nicholas found that he could swim with the spear by putting all his effort into the motion of his legs, holding the spear in his left hand and stroking only occasionally with his right. “You breathe,” he said softly, “and watch the spear,” and after that he had only to allow his head to lift from time to time.

  He had thought Ignacio would begin to look for fish as soon as they were well out from the beach, but the Brazilian continued to swim, slowly but steadily, until it seemed to Nicholas that they must be a kilometer or more from land. Suddenly, as though the lights in a room had responded to a switch, the dark sea around them became an opalescent blue. Ignacio stopped, treading water and using his spear to buoy himself.

  “Here,” he said. “Get them between yourself and the light.”

  Open-eyed, he bent his face to the water, raised it again to breathe deeply, and dived. Nicholas followed his example, floating belly down with open eyes.

  All the world of dancing glitter and dark island vanished as though Nicholas had plunged his face into a dream. Far, far below him Jupiter displayed its broad, striped disk, marred with the spreading Bright Spot where man-made silicone enzymes had stripped the hydrogen from methane for kindled fusion: a cancer and a burning infant sun. Between that sun and his eyes lay invisible a hundred thousand kilometers of space, and the temperglass shell of the satellite; hundreds of meters of illuminated water, and in it the spread body of Ignacio, dark against the light, still kicking downward, his spear a pencil line of blackness in his hand.

  Involuntarily Nicholas’s head came up, returning to the universe of sparkling waves, aware now that what he had called night was only the shadow cast by Dr. Island when Jupiter and the
Bright Spot slid beneath her. That shadow line, indetectable in air, now lay sharp across the water behind him. Nicholas took breath and plunged.

  Almost at once a fish darted somewhere below, and his left arm thrust the spear forward, but it was far out of reach. He swam after it, then saw another, larger, fish farther down and dived for that, passing Ignacio surfacing for air. The fish was too deep, and Nicholas had used up his oxygen; his lungs aching for air, he swam up, wanting to let go of his spear, then realizing at the last moment that he could, that it would only bob to the surface if he released it. His head broke water and he gasped, his heart thumping; water struck his face and he knew again, suddenly, as though they had ceased to exist while he was gone, the pulse-beat pounding of the waves.

  Ignacio was waiting for him. He shouted, “This time you will come with Ignacio, and he will show you the dead sea god. Then we will fish.”

  Unable to speak, Nicholas nodded. He was allowed three more breaths; then Ignacio dived and Nicholas had to follow, kicking down until the pressure sang in his ears. Then through blue water he saw, looming at the edge of the light, a huge mass of metal anchored to the temperglass hull of the satellite itself; above it, hanging lifelessly like the stem of a great vine severed from the root, a cable twice as thick as a man’s body; and on the bottom, sprawled beside the mighty anchor, a legged god that might have been a dead insect save that it was at least six meters long. Ignacio turned and looked back at Nicholas to see if he understood; he did not, but he nodded and with the strength draining from his arms surfaced again.

  After Ignacio brought up the first fish, they took turns on the surface guarding their catch, and while the Bright Spot crept beneath the shelving rim of Dr. Island they speared two more, one of them quite large. Then when Nicholas was so exhausted he could scarcely lift his arms, they made their way back to shore, and Ignacio showed him how to gut the fish with a thorn and the edge of a shell, and reclose them and pack them in mud and leaves to be roasted by the fire. After Ignacio had begun to eat the largest fish, Nicholas timidly drew out the smallest, and ate for the first time since coming to Dr. Island. Only when he had finished did he remember Diane.