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

by Gene Wolfe

  He did not dare to take the last fish to her, but he looked covertly at Ignacio, and began edging away from the fire. The Brazilian seemed not to have noticed him. When he was well into the shadows he stood, backed a few steps, then—slowly, as his instincts warned him—walked away, not beginning to trot until the distance between them was nearly a hundred meters.

  He found Diane sitting apathetic and silent at the margin of the cold pool, and had some difficulty persuading her to stand. At last he lifted her, his hands under her arms pressing against her thin ribs. Once on her feet she stood steadily enough, and followed him when he took her by the hand. He talked to her, knowing that although she gave no sign of hearing she heard him, and that the right words might wake her to response. “We went fishing—Ignacio showed me how. And he’s got a fire, Diane; he got it from a kind of robot that was supposed to be fixing one of the cables that holds Dr. Island, I don’t know how. Anyway, listen, we caught three big fish, and I ate one and Ignacio ate a great big one, and I don’t think he’d mind if you had the other one, only say, ‘Yes, Patrão,’ and, ‘No, Patrão,’ to him—he likes that, and he’s only used to machines. You don’t have to smile at him or anything—just look at the fire; that’s what I do, just look at the fire.”

  To Ignacio, perhaps wisely, he at first said nothing at all, leading Diane to the place where he had been sitting himself a few minutes before and placing some scraps from his fish in her lap. When she did not eat he found a sliver of the tender, roasted flesh and thrust it into her mouth. Ignacio said, “Ignacio believed that one dead,” and Nicholas answered, “No, Patrão.”

  “There is another fish. Give it to her.”

  Nicholas did, raking the gob of baked mud from the coals to crack with the heel of his hand, and peeling the broken and steaming fillets from the skins and bones to give to her when they had cooled enough to eat; after the fish had lain in her mouth for perhaps half a minute she began to chew and swallow, and after the third mouthful she fed herself, though without looking at either of them.

  “Ignacio believed that one dead,” Ignacio said again.

  “No, Patrão,” Nicholas answered, and then added, “Like you can see, she’s alive.”

  “She is a pretty creature, with the firelight on her face—no?”

  “Yes, Patrão, very pretty.”

  “But too thin.” Ignacio moved around the fire until he was sitting almost beside Diane, then reached for the fish Nicholas had given her. Her hands closed on it, though she still did not look at him.

  “You see, she knows us after all,” Ignacio said. “We are not ghosts.”

  Nicholas whispered urgently, “Let him have it.”

  Slowly Diane’s fingers relaxed, but Ignacio did not take the fish. “I was only joking, little one,” he said. “And I think not such good joke after all.” Then when she did not reply, he turned away from her, his eyes reaching out across the dark, tossing water for something Nicholas could not see.

  “She likes you, Patrão,” Nicholas said. The words were like swallowing filth, but he thought of the bird ready to tear through Diane’s skin, and Maya’s blood soaking in little round dots in the white cloth, and continued. “She is only shy. It is better that way.”

  “You. What do you know?”

  At least Ignacio was no longer looking at the sea. Nicholas said, “Isn’t it true, Patrão?”

  “Yes, it is true.”

  Diane was picking at the fish again, conveying tiny flakes to her mouth with delicate fingers; distinctly but almost absently she said, “Go, Nicholas.”

  He looked at Ignacio, but the Brazilian’s eyes did not turn toward the girl, nor did he speak.

  “Nicholas, go away. Please.”

  In a voice he hoped was pitched too low for Ignacio to hear, Nicholas said, “I’ll see you in the morning. All right?”

  Her head moved a fraction of a centimeter.

  O

  nce he was out of sight of the fire, one part of the beach was as good to sleep on as another; he wished he had taken a piece of wood from the fire to start one of his own and tried to cover his legs with sand to keep off the cool wind, but the sand fell away whenever he moved, and his legs and his left hand moved without volition on his part.

  The surf, lapping at the rippled shore, said, “That was well done, Nicholas.”

  “I can feel you move,” Nicholas said. “I don’t think I ever could before except when I was high up.”

  “I doubt that you can now; my roll is less than one one-hundredth of a degree.”

  “Yes, I can. You wanted me to do that, didn’t you? About Ignacio.”

  “Do you know what the Harlow effect is, Nicholas?”

  Nicholas shook his head.

  “About a hundred years ago Dr. Harlow experimented with monkeys who had been raised in complete isolation—no mothers, no other monkeys at all.”

  “Lucky monkeys.”

  “When the monkeys were mature he put them into cages with normal ones; they fought with any that came near them, and sometimes they killed them.”

  “Psychologists always put things in cages; did he ever think of turning them loose in the jungle instead?”

  “No, Nicholas, though we have . . . Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Dr. Harlow tried, you see, to get the isolate monkeys to breed—sex is the primary social function—but they wouldn’t. Whenever another monkey of either sex approached they displayed aggressiveness, which the other monkeys returned. He cured them finally by introducing immature monkeys—monkey children—in place of the mature, socialized ones. These needed the isolate adults so badly that they kept on making approaches no matter how often or how violently they were rejected, and in the end they were accepted, and the isolates socialized. It’s interesting to note that the founder of Christianity seems to have had an intuitive grasp of the principle—but it was almost two thousand years before it was demonstrated scientifically.”

  “I don’t think it worked here,” Nicholas said. “It was more complicated than that.”

  “Human beings are complicated monkeys, Nicholas.”

  “That’s about the first time I ever heard you make a joke. You like not being human, don’t you?”

  “Of course. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I always thought I would, but now I’m not sure. You said that to help me, didn’t you? I don’t like that.”

  A wave higher than the others splashed chill foam over Nicholas’s legs, and for a moment he wondered if this was Dr. Island’s reply. Half a minute later another wave wet him, and another, and he moved farther up the beach to avoid them. The wind was stronger, but he slept despite it, and was awakened only for a moment by a flash of light from the direction from which he had come; he tried to guess what might have caused it, thought of Diane and Ignacio throwing the burning sticks into the air to see the arcs of fire, smiled—too sleepy now to be angry—and slept again.

  Morning came cold and sullen; Nicholas ran up and down the beach, rubbing himself with his hands. A thin rain, or spume (it was hard to tell which), was blowing in the wind, clouding the light to gray radiance. He wondered if Diane and Ignacio would mind if he came back now and decided to wait, then thought of fishing so that he would have something to bring when he came; but the sea was very cold and the waves so high they tumbled him, wrenching his bamboo spear from his hand. Ignacio found him dripping with water, sitting with his back to a palm trunk and staring out toward the lifting curve of the sea.

  “Hello, you,” Ignacio said.

  “Good morning, Patrão.”

  Ignacio sat down. “What is your name? You told me, I think, when we first met, but I have forgotten. I am sorry.”

  “Nicholas.”

  “Yes.”

  “Patrão, I am very cold. Would it be possible for us to go to your fire?”

  “My name is Ignacio; call me that.”

  Nicholas nodded, frightened.

  “But we
cannot go to my fire, because the fire is out.”

  “Can’t you make another one, Patrão?”

  “You do not trust me, do you? I do not blame you. No, I cannot make another—you may use what I had, if you wish, and make one after I have gone. I came only to say good-bye.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  The wind in the palm fronds said, “Ignacio is much better now. He will be going to another place, Nicholas.”

  “A hospital?”

  “Yes, a hospital, but I don’t think he will have to stay there long.”

  “But . . .” Nicholas tried to think of something appropriate. At St. John’s and the other places where he had been confined, when people left, they simply left, and usually were hardly spoken of once it was learned that they were going and thus were already tainted by whatever it was that froze the smiles and dried the tears of those outside. At last he said, “Thanks for teaching me how to fish.”

  “That was all right,” Ignacio said. He stood up and put a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder, then turned away. Four meters to his left the damp sand was beginning to lift and crack. While Nicholas watched, it opened on a brightly lit companion-way walled with white. Ignacio pushed his curly black hair back from his eyes and went down, and the sand closed with a thump.

  “He won’t be coming back, will he?” Nicholas said.

  “No.”

  “He said I could use his stuff to start another fire, but I don’t even know what it is.”

  Dr. Island did not answer. Nicholas got up and began to walk back to where the fire had been, thinking about Diane and wondering if she was hungry; he was hungry himself.

  H

  e found her beside the dead fire. Her chest had been burned away, and lying close by, near the hole in the sand where Ignacio must have kept it hidden, was a bulky nuclear welder. The power pack was too heavy for Nicholas to lift, but he picked up the welding gun on its short cord and touched the trigger, producing a two-meter plasma discharge which he played along the sand until Diane’s body was ash. By the time he had finished, the wind was whipping the palms and sending stinging rain into his eyes, but he collected a supply of wood and built another fire, bigger and bigger until it roared like a forge in the wind. “He killed her!” he shouted to the waves.

  “YES.” Dr. Island’s voice was big and wild.

  “You said he was better.”

  “HE IS,” howled the wind. “YOU KILLED THE MONKEY THAT WANTED TO PLAY WITH YOU, NICHOLAS—AS I BELIEVED IGNACIO WOULD EVENTUALLY KILL YOU, WHO ARE SO EASILY HATED, SO DIFFERENT FROM WHAT IT IS THOUGHT A BOY SHOULD BE. BUT KILLING THE MONKEY HELPED YOU, REMEMBER? MADE YOU BETTER. IGNACIO WAS FRIGHTENED BY WOMEN; NOW HE KNOWS THAT THEY ARE REALLY VERY WEAK, AND HE HAS ACTED UPON CERTAIN FANTASIES AND FINDS THEM BITTER.”

  “You’re rocking,” Nicholas said. “Am I doing that?”

  “YOUR THOUGHT.”

  A palm snapped in the storm; instead of falling, it flew crashing among the others, its fronded head catching the wind like a sail. “I’m killing you,” Nicholas said. “Destroying you.” The left side of his face was so contorted with grief and rage that he could scarcely speak.

  Dr. Island heaved beneath his feet. “NO.”

  “One of your cables is already broken—I saw that. Maybe more than one. You’ll pull loose. I’m turning this world, isn’t that right? The attitude rockets are tuned to my emotions, and they’re spinning us around, and the slippage is the wind and the high sea, and when you come loose nothing will balance anymore.”

  “NO.”

  “What’s the stress on your cables? Don’t you know?”

  “THEY ARE VERY STRONG.”

  “What kind of talk is that? You ought to say something like ‘The D-twelve cable tension is twenty billion kilograms’ force. warning! warning! Expected time to failure is ninety-seven seconds! warning! Don’t you even know how a machine is supposed to talk?” Nicholas was screaming now, and every wave reached farther up the beach than the last, so that the bases of the most seaward palms were awash.

  “GET BACK, NICHOLAS, FIND HIGHER GROUND. GO INTO THE JUNGLE.” It was the crashing waves themselves that spoke.

  “I won’t.”

  A long serpent of water reached for the fire, which hissed and sputtered.

  “GET BACK!”

  “I won’t!”

  A second wave came, striking Nicholas calf high and nearly extinguishing the fire.

  “ALL THIS WILL BE UNDERWATER SOON. GET BACK!”

  Nicholas picked up some of the still-burning sticks and tried to carry them, but the wind blew them out as soon as he lifted them from the fire. He tugged at the welder, but it was too heavy for him to lift.

  “GET BACK!”

  He went into the jungle, where the trees lashed themselves to leafy rubbish in the wind and broken branches flew through the air like debris from an explosion; for a while he heard Diane’s voice crying in the wind; it became Maya’s, then his mother’s or Sister Carmela’s, and a hundred others’; in time the wind grew less, and he could no longer feel the ground rocking. He felt tired. He said, “I didn’t kill you after all, did I?” but there was no answer. On the beach, when he returned to it, he found the welder half-buried in sand. No trace of Diane’s ashes, nor of his fire. He gathered more wood and built another, lighting it with the welder.

  “Now,” he said. He scooped aside the sand around the welder until he reached the rough understone beneath it, and turned the flame of the welder on that; it blackened and bubbled.

  “No,” Dr. Island said.

  “Yes.” Nicholas was bending intently over the flame, both hands locked on the welder’s trigger.

  “Nicholas, stop that.” When he did not reply, “Look behind you.” There was a splashing louder than the crashing of the waves, and a groaning of metal. He whirled and saw the great, beetlelike robot Ignacio had shown him on the seafloor. Tiny shellfish clung to its metal skin, and water, faintly green, still poured from its body. Before he could turn the welding gun toward it, it shot forward hands like clamps and wrenched the gun from him. All up and down the beach similar machines were smoothing the sand and repairing the damage of the storm.

  “That thing was dead,” Nicholas said. “Ignacio killed it.”

  It picked up the power pack, shook it clean of sand, and, turning, stalked back toward the sea.

  “That is what Ignacio believed, and it was better that he believed so.”

  “And you said you couldn’t do anything, you had no hands.”

  “I also told you that I would treat you as society will when you are released, that that was my nature. After that, did you still believe all I told you? Nicholas, you are upset now because Diane is dead—”

  “You could have protected her!”

  “—but by dying she made someone else, someone very important, well. Her prognosis was bad; she really wanted only death, and this was the death I chose for her. You could call it the death of Dr. Island, a death that would help someone else. Now you are alone, but soon there will be more patients in this segment, and you will help them too—if you can—and perhaps they will help you. Do you understand?”

  “No,” Nicholas said. He flung himself down on the sand. The wind had dropped, but it was raining hard. He thought of the vision he had once had, and of describing it to Diane the day before. “This isn’t ending the way I thought,” he whispered. It was only a squeak of sound far down in his throat. “Nothing ever turns out right.”

  The waves, the wind, the rustling palm fronds and the pattering rain, the monkeys who had come down to the beach to search for food washed ashore, answered, “Go away—go back—don’t move.”

  Nicholas pressed his scarred head against his knees, rocking back and forth.

  “Don’t move.”

  For a long time he sat still while the rain lashed his shoulders and the dripping monkeys frolicked and fought around him. When at last he lifted his face, there was in it some element of personality which had been
only potentially present before, and with this an emptiness and an expression of surprise. His lips moved, and the sounds were the sounds made by a deaf-mute who tries to speak.

  “Nicholas is gone,” the waves said. “Nicholas, who was the right side of your body, the left half of your brain, I have forced into catatonia; for the remainder of your life he will be to you only what you once were to him—or less. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded.

  “We will call you Kenneth, silent one. And if Nicholas tries to come again, Kenneth, you must drive him back—or return to what you have been.”

  The boy nodded a second time, and a moment afterward began to collect sticks for the dying fire. As though to themselves the waves chanted:

  Seas are wild tonight . . .

  Stretching over Sado island

  Silent clouds of stars.

  There was no reply.

  AFTERWORD

  I suspect that this is my most successful story. You already know how I came to write it. “Death,” as I saw it, could be handled in two ways: Dr. Island could die, or Dr. Island could decree a death. In the same way, I could have a doctor named Island (a cop-out) or I could have a doctor who was in fact an island. You know the decisions I made.

  The brain operation Nicholas suffered is perfectly real. It is (or was) done in cases of severe epilepsy that can be treated in no other way. It results in what appear to be two persons living in a single skull, a condition superficially similar to multiple personality.

  As prophesied, this story won a Nebula.

  LA BEFANA

  W

  hen Zozz, home from the pit, had licked his fur clean, he howled before John Bananas’ door. John’s wife, Teresa, opened it and let him in. She was a thin, stooped woman of thirty or thirty-five, her black hair shot with gray. She did not smile, but he felt somehow that she was glad to see him.