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

by Gene Wolfe

  “All right, I’ll keep my eyes open, and maybe someday the Agency will send me someplace where I’m needed.”

  “Back to Uganda?”

  I explained that the A.O.A.A. almost never sends anyone to the same area twice. “That wasn’t really what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s my personal life. Well, really two things, but that’s one of them. I’d like to get back together with my ex-wife. You’re going to advise me to forget it, because I’m here and she’s in Chicago, but I can send e-mail, and I’d like to put the bitterness behind us.”

  “Were there children? Sorry, Baden. I didn’t intend it to hurt.”

  I explained how Mary had wanted them and I had not, and he gave me some advice. I have not e-mailed yet, but I will tonight after I write it out here.

  “You’re afraid that you were hallucinating. Did you feel feverish?” He got out his thermometer and took my temperature, which was nearly normal. “Let’s look at it logically, Baden. This island is a hundred miles long and about thirty miles at the widest point. There are eight villages I know of. The population of Kololahi is over twelve hundred.”

  I said I understood all that.

  “Twice a week, the plane from Cairns brings new tourists.”

  “Who almost never go five miles from Kololahi.”

  “Almost never, Baden. Not never. You say it wasn’t one of the villagers. All right, I accept that. Was it me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then it was someone from outside the village, someone from another village, from Kololahi, or a tourist. Why shake your head?”

  I told him.

  “I doubt there’s a leprosarium nearer than the Marshalls. Anyway, I don’t know of one closer. Unless you saw something else, some other sign of the disease, I doubt that this little man you saw had leprosy. It’s a lot more likely that you saw a tourist with pasty white skin greased with sun blocker. As for his disappearing, the explanation seems pretty obvious. He dived off the rocks into the bay.”

  “There wasn’t anybody there. I looked.”

  “There wasn’t anybody there you saw, you mean. He would have been up to his neck in water, and the sun was glaring on the water, wasn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It must have been. The weather’s been clear.” Rob drained his Coke and pushed it away. “As for his not leaving footprints, stop playing Sherlock Holmes. That’s harsh, I realize, but I say it for your own good. Footprints in soft sand are shapeless indentations at best.”

  “I could see mine.”

  “You knew where to look. Did you try to backtrack yourself? I thought not. May I ask a few questions? When you saw him, did you think he was real?”

  “Yes, absolutely. Would you like another one? Or something to eat?”

  “No, thanks. When was the last time you had an attack?”

  “A bad one? About six weeks.”

  “How about a not-bad one?”

  “Last night, but it didn’t amount to much. Two hours of chills, and it went away.”

  “That must have been a relief. No, I see it wasn’t. Baden, the next time you have an attack, severe or not, I want you to come and see me. Understand?”

  I promised.

  T

  his is Bad. I still love you. That’s all I have to say, but I want to say it. I was wrong, and I know it. I hope you’ve forgiven me. And sign off.

  4

  Feb. Saw him again last night, and he has pointed teeth. I was shaking under the netting, and he looked through the window and smiled. Told Rob, and said I read somewhere that cannibals used to file their teeth. I know these people were cannibals three or four generations back, and I asked if they had done it. He thinks not but will ask the king.

  I

  have been very ill, Mary, but I feel better now. It is evening here, and I am going to bed. I love you. Good night, I love you. Sign off.

  5

  Feb. Two men with spears came to take me to the king. I asked if I was under arrest, and they laughed. No ha, ha, ha from His Majesty this time, though. He was in the big house, but he came out and we went some distance among hardwoods the size of office buildings smothered in flowering vines, stopping in a circle of stones: the king, the men with spears, and an old man with a drum. The men with spears built a fire, and the drum made soft sounds like waves while the king made a speech or recited a poem, mocked all the while by invisible birds with eerie voices.

  When the king was finished, he hung this piece of carved bone around my neck. While we were walking back to the village, he put his arm around me, which surprised me more than anything. He is bigger than a tackle in the NFL, and must weigh four hundred pounds. It felt like I was carrying a calf.

  H

  orrible, horrible dreams! Swimming in boiling blood. Too scared to sleep anymore. Logged on and tried to find something on dreams and what they mean. Stumbled onto a witch in L.A.—her home page, then the lady herself. (“I’ll get you and your little dog too!”) Actually, she seemed nice.

  Got out the carved-bone thing the king gave me. Old, and probably ought to be in a museum, but I suppose I had better wear it as long as I stay here, at least when I go out. Suppose I were to offend him? He might sit on me! Seems to be a fish with pictures scratched into both sides. More fish, man in a hat, etc. Cord through the eye. Wish I had a magnifying glass.

  6

  Feb. Still haven’t gone back to bed, but my watch says Wednesday. Wrote a long e-mail, typing it in as it came to me. Told her where I am and what I’m doing, and begged her to respond. After that I went outside and swam naked in the moonlit sea. Tomorrow I want to look for the place where the king hung this fish charm on me. Back to bed.

  M

  orning, and beautiful. Why has it taken me so long to see what a beautiful place this is? (Maybe my heart just got back from Africa.) Palms swaying forever in the trade winds, and people like heroic bronze statues. How small, how stunted and pale, we have to look to them!

  Took a real swim to get the screaming out of my ears. Will I laugh in a year when I see that I said my midnight swim made me understand these people better? Maybe I will. But it did. They have been swimming in the moon like that for hundreds of years.

  * * *

  E

  -mail! God bless e-mail and whoever invented it! Just checked mine and found I had a message. Tried to guess who it might be. I wanted Mary, and was about certain it would be from the witch, from Annys. Read the name and it was Julius R. Christmas. Pops! Mary’s Pops! Got up and ran around the room, so excited I could not read it. Now I have printed it out, and I am going to copy it here.

  She went to Uganda looking for you, Bad. Coming back tomorrow, Kennedy, AA 47 from Heathrow. I’ll tell her where you are. Watch out for those hula-hula girls.

  SHE WENT TO UGANDA LOOKING FOR ME

  7

  Feb. More dreams—little man with pointed teeth smiling through the window. I doubt that I should write it all down, but I knew (in the dream) that he hurt people, and he kept telling me he would not hurt me. Maybe the first time was a dream too. More screams.

  Anyway, I talked to Rob again yesterday afternoon, although I had not planned on it. By the time I got back here I was too sick to do anything except lie on the bed. The worst since I left the hospital, I think.

  Went looking for the place the king took me to. Did not want to start from the village, kids might have followed me, so I tried to circle and come at it from the other side. Found two old buildings, small and no roofs, and a bone that looked human. More about that later. Did not see any marks, but did not look for them either. It was black on one end like it had been in a fire, though.

  Kept going about three hours and wore myself out. Tripped on a chunk of stone and stopped to wipe off the sweat, and blam! I was there! Found the ashes and where the king and I stood. Looked around wishing I had my camera, and there was Rob, sitting up on four stones that were still together and looking down at me. I said, “Hey, why didn’t you
say something?”

  And he said, “I wanted to see what you would do.” So he had been spying on me; I did not say it, but that was what it was.

  I told him about going there with the king, and how he gave me a charm. I said I was sorry I had not worn it, but anytime he wanted a Coke I would show it to him.

  “It doesn’t matter. He knows you’re sick, and I imagine he gave you something to heal you. It might even work, because God hears all sorts of prayers. That’s not what they teach in the seminary, or even what it says in the Bible. But I’ve been out in the missions long enough to know. When somebody with good intentions talks to the God Who created him, he’s heard. Pretty often the answer is yes. Why did you come back here?”

  “I wanted to see it again, that’s all. At first I thought it was just a circle of rocks; then when I thought about it, it seemed like it must have been more.”

  Rob kept quiet, so I explained that I had been thinking of Stonehenge. Stonehenge was a circle of big rocks, but the idea had been to look at the positions of certain stars and where the sun rose. But this could not be the same kind of thing, because of the trees. Stonehenge is out in the open on Salisbury Plain. I asked if it was some kind of a temple.

  “It was a palace once, Baden.” Rob cleared his throat. “If I tell you something about it in confidence, can you keep it to yourself?”

  I promised.

  “These are good people now. I want to make that clear. They seem a little childlike to us, as all primitives do. If we were primitives ourselves—and we were, Bad, not so long ago—they wouldn’t. Can you imagine how they’d seem to us if they didn’t seem a little childlike?”

  I said, “I was thinking about that this morning before I left the bungalow.”

  Rob nodded. “Now I understand why you wanted to come back here. The Polynesians are scattered all over the South Pacific. Did you know that? Captain Cook, a British naval officer, was the first to explore the Pacific with any thoroughness, and he was absolutely astounded to find that after he’d sailed for weeks his interpreter could still talk to the natives. We know, for example, that Polynesians came down from Hawaii in sufficient numbers to conquer New Zealand. The historians hadn’t admitted it the last time I looked, but it’s a fact, recorded by the Maori themselves in their own history. The distance is about four thousand miles.”

  “Impressive.”

  “But you wonder what I’m getting at. I don’t blame you. They’re supposed to have come from Malaya originally. I won’t go into all the reasons for thinking that they didn’t, beyond saying that if it were the case they should be in New Guinea and Australia and they’re not.”

  I asked where they had come from, and for a minute or two he just rubbed his chin; then he said, “I’m not going to tell you that either. You wouldn’t believe me, so why waste breath on it? Think of a distant land, a mountainous country with buildings and monuments to rival Ancient Egypt’s, and gods worse than any demon Cotton Mather could have imagined. The time . . .” He shrugged. “After Moses but before Christ.”

  “Babylon?”

  He shook his head. “They developed a ruling class, and in time those rulers, their priests and warriors, became something like another race, bigger and stronger than the peasants they treated like slaves. They drenched the altars of their gods with blood, the blood of enemies when they could capture enough, and the blood of peasants when they couldn’t. Their peasants rebelled and drove them from the mountains to the sea, and into the sea.”

  I think he was waiting for me to say something, but I kept quiet, thinking over what he had said and wondering if it was true.

  “They sailed away in terror of the thing they had awakened in the hearts of the nation that had been their own. I doubt very much if there were more than a few thousand, and there may well have been fewer than a thousand. They learned seamanship, and learned it well. They had to. In the Ancient World they were the only people to rival the Phoenicians, and they surpassed even the Phoenicians.”

  I asked whether he believed all that, and he said, “It doesn’t matter whether I believe it, because it’s true.”

  He pointed to one of the stones. “I called them primitives, and they are. But they weren’t always as primitive as they are now. This was a palace, and there are ruins like this all over Polynesia, great buildings of coral rock falling to pieces. A palace and thus a sacred place, because the king was holy, the gods’ representative. That was why he brought you here.”

  Rob was going to leave, but I told him about the buildings I found earlier and he wanted to see them. “There is a temple too, Baden, although I’ve never been able to find it. When it was built, it must have been evil beyond our imagining. . . .” He grinned then, surprising the hell out of me. “You must get teased about your name.”

  “Ever since elementary school. It doesn’t bother me.” But the truth is it does, sometimes.

  More later.

  W

  ell, I have met the little man I saw on the beach, and to tell the truth (what’s the sense of one of these if you are not going to tell the truth?), I like him. I am going to write about all that in a minute.

  Rob and I looked for the buildings I had seen when I was looking for the palace but could not find them. Described them, but Rob did not think they were the temple he has been looking for since he came. “They know where it is. Certainly the older people do. Once in a while I catch little oblique references to it. Not jokes. They joke about the place you found, but not about that.”

  I asked what the place I had found had been.

  “A Japanese camp. The Japanese were here during World War Two.”

  I had not known that.

  “There were no battles. They built those buildings you found, presumably, and they dug caves in the hills from which to fight. I’ve found some of those myself. But the Americans and Australians simply bypassed this island, as they did many other islands. The Japanese soldiers remained here, stranded. There must have been about a company, originally.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Some surrendered. Some came out of the jungle to surrender and were killed. A few held out, twenty or twenty-five from what I’ve heard. They left their caves and went back to the camp they had built when they thought Japan would win and control the entire Pacific. That was what you found, I believe, and that’s why I’d like to see it.”

  I said I could not understand how we could have missed it, and he said, “Look at this jungle, Baden. One of those buildings could be within ten feet of us.”

  After that we went on for another mile or two and came out on the beach. I did not know where we were, but Rob did. “This is where we separate. The village is that way, and your bungalow the other way, beyond the bay.”

  I had been thinking about the Japs, and asked if they were all dead, and he said they were. “They were older every year and fewer every year, and a time came when the rifles and machine guns that had kept the villages in terror no longer worked. And after that, a time when the people realized they didn’t. They went to the Japanese camp one night with their spears and war clubs. They killed the remaining Japanese and ate them, and sometimes they make sly little jokes about it when they want to get my goat.”

  I was feeling rocky and knew I was in for a bad time, so I came back here. I was sick the rest of the afternoon and all night, chills, fever, headache, the works. I remember watching the little vase on the bureau get up and walk to the other side, and sit back down, and seeing an American in a baseball cap float in. He took off his cap and combed his hair in front of the mirror, and floated back out. It was a Cardinals cap.

  Now about Hanga, the little man I see on the beach.

  After I wrote all that about the palace, I wanted to ask Rob a couple of questions and tell him Mary was coming. All right, no one has actually said she was, and so far I have heard nothing from her directly, only the one e-mail from Pops. But she went to Africa, so why not here? I thanked Pops and told him where I am
again. He knows how much I want to see her. If she comes, I am going to ask Rob to remarry us, if she will.

  Started down the beach, and I saw him, but after half a minute or so he seemed to melt into the haze. I told myself I was still seeing things, and I was still sick, and I reminded myself that I promised to go by Rob’s mission next time I felt bad. But when I got to the end of the bay, there he was, perfectly real, sitting in the shade of one of the young palms. I wanted to talk to him, so I said, “Okay if I sit down too? This sun’s frying my brains.”

  He smiled (the pointed teeth are real) and said, “The tree is my hat.”

  I thought he just meant the shade, but after I sat he showed me, biting off a palm frond and peeling a strip from it, then showing me how to peel them and weave them into a rough sort of straw hat, with a high crown and a wide brim.

  We talked a little, although he does not speak English as well as some of the others. He does not live in the village, and the people who do, do not like him although he likes them. They are afraid of him, he says, and give him things because they are. They prefer he stay away. “No village, no boat.”

  I said it must be lonely, but he only stared out to sea. I doubt that he knows the word.

  He wanted to know about the charm the king gave me. I described it and asked if it brings good luck. He shook his head. “No malhoi.” Picking up a single palm fiber, “This malhoi.” Not knowing what malhoi meant, I was in no position to argue.

  That is pretty much all, except that I told him to visit when he wants company and he told me I must eat fish to restore my health. (I have no idea who told him I am ill sometimes, but I never tried to keep it a secret.) Also that I would never have to fear an attack (I think that must have been what he meant) while he was with me.