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

by Gene Wolfe

  “No, upon my oath,” the baron declared. “It will teach my son to be less free with his tongue in the company of armed men. He has been raised at the hall, Captain, where everyone bends the knee to him. He must learn not to expect that of strangers.”

  The cart rolled up just then, drawn by two fine mules—either of them would have been worth my father’s holding, I judged—and at the baron’s urging we loaded our balloon into it and climbed in after it ourselves, sitting on the fabric. The horsemen galloped off, and the cart driver cracked his lash over the mules’ backs.

  “Quite a place,” Miles remarked. He was looking up at the big house toward which we were making.

  I whispered to Clow, “A palace, I should say,” and Miles overheard me, and said, “It’s a villa, Jerr—the unfortified country property of a gentleman. If there were a wall and a tower, it would be a castle, or at least a castellett.”

  T

  here were gardens in front, very beautiful as I remember, and a fountain. The road looped up before the door, and we got out and trooped into the hall, while the baron’s man—he was richer dressed than anybody I had ever seen up till then, a fat man with white hair—set two of the hostlers to watch our balloon while it was taken back to the stable yard.

  Venison and beef were on the table, and even a pheasant with all his feathers put back, and the baron and his sons sat with us and drank some wine and ate a bit of bread each for hospitality’s sake. Then the baron said, “Surely you don’t fly in the dark, Captain?”

  “Not unless we must, Lord.”

  “Then with the day drawing to a close, it’s just as well for you that we’ve no straw. You can pass the night with us, and in the morning I’ll send my bailiff to the village with the cart. You’ll be able to ascend at midmorning, when the ladies can have a clear view of you as you go up.”

  “No straw?” our captain asked.

  “None, I fear, here. But they’ll have aplenty in the village, never doubt it. They lay it in the road to silence the horses’ hoofs when a woman’s with child, as I’ve seen many a time. You’ll have a cartload as a gift from me, if you can use that much.” The baron smiled as he said that; he had a friendly face, round and red as an apple. “Now tell me” (he went on) “how it is to be a floating sword. I always find other men’s trades of interest, and it seems to me you follow one of the most fascinating of all. For example, how do you gauge the charge you will make your employer?”

  “We have two scales, Lord,” Miles began.

  I had heard all of that before, so I stopped listening. Bracata was next to me at table, so I had all I could do to get something to eat for myself, and I doubt I ever got a taste of the pheasant. By good luck, a couple of lasses—the baron’s daughters—had come in, and one of them started curling a lock of Derek’s hair around her finger, so that distracted him while he was helping himself to the venison, and Bracata put an arm around the other and warned her of Men. If it had not been for that I would not have had a thing; as it was, I stuffed myself on deer’s meat until I had to loose my waistband. Flesh of any sort had been a rarity where I came from.

  I had thought that the baron might give us beds in the house, but when we had eaten and drunk all we could hold, the white-haired fat man led us out a side door and over to a wattle-walled building full of bunks—I suppose it was kept for the extra laborers needed at harvest. It was not the palace bedroom I had been dreaming of, but it was cleaner than home, and there was a big fireplace down at one end with logs stacked ready by, so it was probably more comfortable for me than a bed in the big house itself would have been.

  Clow took out a piece of cherrywood, and started carving a woman in it, and Bracata and Derek lay down to sleep. I made shift to talk to Miles, but he was full of thoughts, sitting on a bench near the hearth and chinking the purse ( just like this one, it was) he had gotten from the baron, so I tried to sleep too. But I had had too much to eat to sleep so soon, and since it was still light out, I decided to walk around the villa and try to find somebody to chat with. The front looked too grand for me; I went to the back, thinking to make sure our balloon had suffered no hurt, and perhaps have another look at those mules.

  T

  here were three barns behind the house, built of stone up to the height of my waist, and wood above that, and whitewashed. I walked into the nearest of them, not thinking about anything much besides my full belly until a big warhorse with a white star on his forehead reached his head out of his stall and nuzzled at my cheek. I reached out and stroked his neck for him the way they like. He nickered, and I turned to have a better look at him. That was when I saw what was in his stall. He was standing on a span or more of the cleanest, yellowest straw I had ever seen. I looked up over my head then, and there was a loft full of it up there.

  In a minute or so, I suppose it was, I was back in the building where we were to sleep, shaking Miles by the shoulder and telling him I had found all the straw anyone could ask for.

  He did not seem to understand, at first. “Wagonloads of straw, Captain,” I told him. “Why, every horse in the place has as much to lay him on as would carry us a hundred leagues.”

  “All right,” Miles told me.

  “Captain—”

  “There’s no straw here, Jerr. Not for us. Now be a sensible lad and get some rest.”

  “But there is, Captain. I saw it. I can bring you back a helmetful.”

  “Come here, Jerr,” he said, and got up and led me outside. I thought he was going to ask me to show him the straw, but instead of going back to where the barns were, he took me away from the house to the top of a grassy knoll. “Look out there, Jerr. Far off. What do you see?”

  “Trees,” I said. “There might be a river at the bottom of the valley; then more trees on the other side.”

  “Beyond that.”

  I looked to the horizon, where he seemed to be pointing. There were little threads of black smoke rising there, looking as thin as spiderweb at that distance.

  “What do you see?”

  “Smoke.”

  “That’s straw burning, Jerr. House thatch. That’s why there’s no straw here. Gold, but no straw, because a soldier gets straw only where he isn’t welcome. They’ll reach the river there by sundown, and I’m told it can be forded at this season. Now do you understand?”

  They came that night at moonrise.

  AFTERWORD

  Inventions and scientific discoveries seem to occur almost at random. The people who disagree with that statement say that when technology (or science) reaches a certain point, the same idea will occur to a dozen people. The shorthand for this is steam-engine time, the idea being that when it’s time for the steam engine to be invented, a bunch of people will start working on one.

  It ain’t so.

  They had indoor plumbing in Ancient Crete. It was lost with the fall of that civilization, and did not reappear until long after it was needed. A model airplane, carved from wood, has been found in an Egyptian tomb. (Don’t get me started on the Egyptian girl wearing sunglasses.) Electroplating seems to have been invented at least twice.

  And so on. I decided to put the hot-air balloon in the Dark Ages, and I threw in a few other things too. Thus the story you have just read. Was there ever a time like that? No. Could there have been? Certainly.

  THE EYEFLASH MIRACLES

  I cannot call him to mind.

  —ANATOLE FRANCE,

  The Procurator of Judea

  L

  ittle Tib heard the train coming while it was still a long way away, and he felt it in his feet. He stepped off the track onto a prestressed concrete tie, listening. Then he put one ear to the endless steel and listened to that sing, louder and louder. Only when he began to feel the ground shake under him did he lift his head at last and make his way down the embankment through the tall, prickly weeds, probing the slope with his stick.

  The stick splashed water. He could not hear it because of the noise the train made roaring by, but he knew
the feel of it, the kind of drag it made when he tried to move the end of the stick. He laid it down and felt with his hands where his knees would be when he knelt, and it felt all right. A little soft, but no broken glass. He knelt then and sniffed the water, and it smelled good and was cool to his fingers, so he drank, bending down and sucking up the water with his mouth, then splashing it on his face and the back of his neck.

  “Say!” an authoritative voice called. “Say, you boy!”

  Little Tib straightened up, picking up his stick again. He thought, This could be Sugarland. He said, “Are you a policeman, sir?”

  “I am the superintendent.”

  That was almost as good. Little Tib tilted his head back so the voice could see his eyes. He had often imagined coming to Sugarland and how it would be there, but he had never considered just what it was he should say when he arrived. He said, “My card . . .” The train was still rumbling away, not too far off.

  Another voice said, “Now don’t you hurt that child.” It was not authoritative. There was the sound of responsibility in it.

  “You ought to be in school, young man,” the first voice said. “Do you know who I am?”

  Little Tib nodded. “The superintendent.”

  “That’s right, I’m the superintendent. I’m Mr. Parker himself. Your teacher has told you about me, I’m sure.”

  “Now don’t hurt that child,” the second voice said again. “He never did hurt you.”

  “Playing hooky. I understand that’s what the children call it. We never use such a term ourselves, of course. You will be referred to as an absentee. What’s your name?”

  “George Tibbs.”

  “I see. I am Mr. Parker, the superintendent. This is my valet; his name is Nitty.”

  “Hello,” Little Tib said.

  “Mr. Parker, maybe this absentee boy would like to have something to eat. He looks to me like he has been absentee a long while.”

  “Fishing,” Mr. Parker said. “I believe that’s what most of them do.”

  “You can’t see, can you?” A hand closed on Little Tib’s arm. The hand was large and hard, but it did not bear down. “You can cross right here. There’s a rock in the middle—step on that.”

  Little Tib found the rock with his stick and put one foot there. The hand on his arm seemed to lift him across. He stood on the rock for a moment with his stick in the water, touching bottom to steady himself. “Now a great big step.” His shoe touched the soft bank on the other side. “We got a camp right over here. Mr. Parker, don’t you think this absentee boy would like a sweet roll?”

  Little Tib said, “Yes, I would.”

  “I would too,” Nitty told him.

  “Now, young man, why aren’t you in school?”

  “How is he going to see the board?”

  “We have special facilities for the blind, Nitty. At Grovehurst there is a class tailored to make allowance for their disability. I can’t at this moment recall the name of the teacher, but she is an exceedingly capable young woman.”

  Little Tib asked, “Is Grovehurst in Sugar Land?”

  “Grovehurst is in Martinsburg,” Mr. Parker told him. “I am superintendent of the Martinsburg Public School System. How far are we from Martinsburg now, Nitty?”

  “Two, three hundred kilometers, I guess.”

  “We will enter you in that class as soon as we reach Martinsburg, young man.”

  Nitty said, “We’re going to Macon—I keep on tellin’ you.”

  “Your papers are all in order, I suppose? Your grade and attendance records from your previous school? Your withdrawal permit, birth certificate, and your retinal pattern card from the Federal Reserve?”

  Little Tib sat mute. Someone pushed a sticky pastry into his hands, but he did not raise it to his mouth.

  “Mr. Parker, I don’t think he’s got papers.”

  “That is a serious—”

  “Why he got to have papers? He ain’t no dog!”

  Little Tib was weeping. “I see!” Mr. Parker said. “He’s blind; Nitty, I think his retinas have been destroyed. Why, he’s not really here at all.”

  “Course he’s here.”

  “A ghost. We’re seeing a ghost, Nitty. Sociologically he’s not real—he’s been deprived of existence.”

  “I never in my whole life seen a ghost.”

  “You dumb bastard,” Mr. Parker exploded.

  “You don’t have to talk to me like that, Mr. Parker.”

  “You dumb bastard. All my life there’s been nobody around but dumb bastards like you.” Mr. Parker was weeping too. Little Tib felt one of his tears, large and hot, fall on his hand. His own sobbing slowed, then faded away. It was outside his experience to hear grown people—men—cry. He took a bite from the roll he had been given, tasting the sweet, sticky icing and hoping for a raisin.

  “Mr. Parker,” Nitty said softly. “Mr. Parker.”

  After a time, Mr. Parker said, “Yes.”

  “He—this boy George—might be able to get them, Mr. Parker. You recall how you and me went to the building that time? We looked all around it a long while. And there was that window, that old window with the iron over it and the latch broken. I pushed on it and you could see the glass move in a little. But couldn’t either of us get between those bars.”

  “This boy is blind, Nitty,” Mr. Parker said.

  “Sure he is, Mr. Parker. But you know how dark it was in there. What is a man going to do? Turn on the lights? No, he’s goin’ to take a little bit of a flashlight and put tape or something over the end till it don’t make no more light than a lightnin’ bug. A blind person could do better with no light than a seeing one with just a little speck like that. I guess he’s used to bein’ blind by now. I guess he knows how to find his way around without eyes.”

  A hand touched Little Tib’s shoulder. It seemed smaller and softer than the hand that had helped him across the creek. “He’s crazy,” Mr. Parker’s voice said. “That Nitty. He’s crazy. I’m crazy, I’m the one. But he’s crazier than I am.”

  “He could do it, Mr. Parker. See how thin he is.”

  “Would you do it?” Mr. Parker asked.

  Little Tib swallowed a wad of roll. “Do what?”

  “Get something for us.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Nitty, build a fire,” Mr. Parker said. “We won’t be going any farther tonight.”

  “Won’t be goin’ this way at all,” Nitty said.

  “You see, George,” Mr. Parker said. “My authority has been temporarily abrogated. Sometimes I forget that.”

  Nitty chuckled somewhere farther away than Little Tib had thought he was. He must have left very silently.

  “But when it is restored, I can do all the things I said I would do for you: get you into a special class for the blind, for example. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, George?”

  “Yes.” A whip-poor-will called far off to Little Tib’s left, and he could hear Nitty breaking sticks.

  “Have you run away from home, George?”

  “Yes,” Little Tib said again.

  “Why?”

  Little Tib shrugged. He was ready to cry again. Something was thickening and tightening in his throat, and his eyes had begun to water.

  “I think I know why,” Mr. Parker said. “We might even be able to do something about that.”

  “Here we are,” Nitty called. He dumped his load of sticks, rattling, more or less in front of Little Tib.

  Later that night Little Tib lay on the ground with half of Nitty’s blanket over him, and half under him. The fire was crackling not too far away. Nitty said the smoke would help to drive the mosquitoes off. Little Tib pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes and saw red and yellow flashes like a real fire. He did it again, and there was a gold nugget against a field of blue. Those were the last things he had been able to see for a long time, and he was afraid, each time he summoned them up, that they would not come. On the other side of the fire Mr. Parker breathed th
e heavy breath of sleep.

  Nitty bent over Little Tib, smoothing his blanket, then pressing it in against his sides. “It’s okay,” Little Tib said.

  “You’re goin’ back to Martinsburg with us,” Nitty said.

  “I’m going to Sugar Land.”

  “After. What you want to go there for?”

  Little Tib tried to explain about Sugar Land, but could not find words. At last he said, “In Sugar Land they know who you are.”

  “Guess it’s too late then for me. Even if I found somebody who knew who I was I wouldn’t be them no more.”

  “You’re Nitty,” Little Tib said.

  “That’s right. You know I used to go out with those gals a lot. Know what they said? Said, ‘You’re the custodian over at the school, aren’t you?’ Or, ‘You’re the one that did for Buster Johnson.’ Didn’t none of them know who I was. Only ones that did was the little children.”

  Little Tib heard Nitty’s clothes rustle as he stood up, then the sound his feet made walking softly away. He wondered if Nitty was going to stay awake all night; then he heard him lie down.