by Gene Wolfe
When he woke it was not yet light, but the night was fading to a gentle gray. Headless, the palms stood like tall ghosts up and down the beach, their tops lost in fog and the lingering dark. He was cold. His hands rubbed his sides; he danced on the sand and sprinted down the edge of the lapping water in an effort to get warm; ahead of him a pinpoint of red light became a fire, and he slowed.
A man who looked about twenty-five crouched over the fire. Tangled black hair hung over this man’s shoulders, and he had a sparse beard; otherwise he was as naked as Nicholas himself. His eyes were dark, and large and empty, like the ends of broken pipes; he poked at his fire, and the smell of roasting fish came with the smoke. For a time Nicholas stood at a distance, watching.
Saliva ran from a corner of the man’s mouth, and he wiped it away with one hand, leaving a smear of ash on his face. Nicholas edged closer until he stood on the opposite side of the fire. The fish had been wrapped in broad leaves and mud, and lay in the center of the coals. “I’m Nicholas,” Nicholas said. “Who are you?” The young man did not look at him, had never looked at him.
“Hey, I’d like a piece of your fish. Not much. All right?”
The young man raised his head, looking not at Nicholas but at some point far beyond him; he dropped his eyes again. Nicholas smiled. The smile emphasized the disjointed quality of his expression, his mouth’s uneven curve.
“Just a little piece? Is it about done?” Nicholas crouched, imitating the young man, and as though this were a signal, the young man sprang for him across the fire. Nicholas jumped backward, but the jump was too late—the young man’s body struck his and sent him sprawling on the sand; fingers clawed for his throat. Screaming, Nicholas rolled free, into the water; the young man splashed after him; Nicholas dove.
He swam underwater, his belly almost grazing the wave-rippled sand until he found deeper water; then he surfaced, gasping for breath, and saw the young man, who saw him as well. He dove again, this time surfacing far off, in deep water. Treading water, he could see the fire on the beach, and the young man when he returned to it, stamping out of the sea in the early light. Nicholas then swam until he was five hundred meters or more down the beach, then waded in to shore and began walking back toward the fire.
The young man saw him when he was still some distance off, but he continued to sit, eating pink-tinted tidbits from his fish, watching Nicholas. “What’s the matter?” Nicholas said while he was still a safe distance away. “Are you mad at me?”
From the forest, birds warned, “Be careful, Nicholas.”
“I won’t hurt you,” the young man said. He stood up, wiping his oily hands on his chest, and gestured toward the fish at his feet. “You want some?”
Nicholas nodded, smiling his crippled smile.
“Come then.”
Nicholas waited, hoping the young man would move away from the fish, but he did not; neither did he smile in return.
“Nicholas,” the little waves at his feet whispered, “this is Ignacio.”
“Listen,” Nicholas said, “is it really all right for me to have some?”
Ignacio nodded, unsmiling.
Cautiously Nicholas came forward; as he was bending to pick up the fish, Ignacio’s strong hands took him; he tried to wrench free but was thrown down, Ignacio on top of him. “Please!” he yelled. “Please!” Tears started into his eyes. He tried to yell again, but he had no breath; the tongue was being forced, thicker than his wrist, from his throat.
Then Ignacio let go and struck him in the face with his clenched fist. Nicholas had been slapped and pummeled before, had been beaten, had fought, sometimes savagely, with other boys; but he had never been struck by a man as men fight. Ignacio hit him again and his lips gushed blood.
He lay a long time on the sand beside the dying fire. Consciousness returned slowly; he blinked, drifted back into the dark, blinked again. His mouth was full of blood, and when at last he spit it out onto the sand, it seemed a soft flesh, dark and polymerized in strange shapes; his left cheek was hugely swollen, and he could scarcely see out of his left eye. After a time he crawled to the water; a long time after that, he left it and walked shakily back to the ashes of the fire. Ignacio was gone, and there was nothing left of the fish but bones.
“Ignacio is gone,” Dr. Island said with lips of waves.
Nicholas sat on the sand, cross-legged.
“You handled him very well.”
“You saw us fight?”
“I saw you; I see everything, Nicholas.”
“This is the worst place,” Nicholas said; he was talking to his lap.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ve been in bad places before—places where they hit you or squirted big hoses of ice water that knocked you down. But not where they would let someone else—”
“Another patient?” asked a wheeling gull.
“—do it.”
“You were lucky, Nicholas. Ignacio is homicidal.”
“You could have stopped him.”
“No, I could not. All this world is my eye, Nicholas, my ear and my tongue; but I have no hands.”
“I thought you did all this.”
“Men did all this.”
“I mean, I thought you kept it going.”
“It keeps itself going, and you—all the people here—direct it.”
Nicholas looked at the water. “What makes the waves?”
“The wind and the tide.”
“Are we on Earth?”
“Would you feel more comfortable on Earth?”
“I’ve never been there; I’d like to know.”
“I am more like Earth than Earth now is, Nicholas. If you were to take the best of all the best beaches of Earth, and clear them of all the poisons and all the dirt of the last three centuries, you would have me.”
“But this isn’t Earth?”
There was no answer. Nicholas walked around the ashes of the fire until he found Ignacio’s footprints. He was no tracker, but the depressions in the soft beach sand required none; he followed them, his head swaying from side to side as he walked, like the sensor of a mine detector.
For several kilometers Ignacio’s trail kept to the beach; then, abruptly, the footprints swerved, wandered among the coconut palms, and at last were lost on the firmer soil inland. Nicholas lifted his head and shouted, “Ignacio? Ignacio!” After a moment he heard a stick snap, and the sound of someone pushing aside leafy branches. He waited.
“Mum?”
A girl was coming toward him, stepping out of the thicker growth of the interior. She was pretty, though too thin, and appeared to be about nineteen ; her hair was blond where it had been most exposed to sunlight, darker elsewhere. “You’ve scratched yourself,” Nicholas said. “You’re bleeding.”
“I thought you were my mother,” the girl said. She was a head taller than Nicholas. “Been fighting, haven’t you. Have you come to get me?”
Nicholas had been in similar conversations before and normally would have preferred to ignore the remark, but he was lonely now. He said, “Do you want to go home?”
“Well, I think I should, you know.”
“But do you want to?”
“My mum always says if you’ve got something on the stove you don’t want to burn—she’s quite a good cook. She really is. Do you like cabbage with bacon?”
“Have you got anything to eat?”
“Not now. I had a thing a while ago.”
“What kind of thing?”
“A bird.” The girl made a vague little gesture, not looking at Nicholas. “I’m a memory that has swallowed a bird.”
“Do you want to walk down by the water?” They were moving in the direction of the beach already.
“I was just going to get a drink. You’re a nice tot.”
Nicholas did not like being called a “tot.” He said, “I set fire to places.”
“You won’t set fire to this place; it’s been nice the last couple of days, but when everyone
is sad, it rains.”
Nicholas was silent for a time. When they reached the sea, the girl dropped to her knees and bent forward to drink, her long hair falling over her face until the ends trailed in the water, her nipples, then half of each breast, in the water. “Not there,” Nicholas said. “It’s sandy, because it washes the beach so close. Come on out here.” He waded out into the sea until the lapping waves nearly reached his armpits, then bent his head and drank.
“I never thought of that,” the girl said “Mum says I’m stupid. So does Dad. Do you think I’m stupid?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“What’s your name?”
“Nicholas Kenneth de Vore. What’s yours?”
“Diane. I’m going to call you Nicky. Do you mind?”
“I’ll hurt you while you sleep,” Nicholas said.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Yes I would. At St. John’s where I used to be, it was zero G most of the time, and a girl there called me something I didn’t like, and I got loose one night and came into her cubical while she was asleep and nulled her restraints, and then she floated around until she banged into something, and that woke her up and she tried to grab, and then that made her bounce all around inside and she broke two fingers and her nose and got blood all over. The attendants came, and one told me—they didn’t know then I did it—when he came out his white suit was, like, polka-dot red all over because wherever the blood drops had touched him they soaked right in.”
The girl smiled at him, dimpling her thin face. “How did they find out it was you?”
“I told someone and he told them.”
“I bet you told them yourself.”
“I bet I didn’t!” Angry, he waded away, but when he had stalked a short way up the beach he sat down on the sand, his back toward her.
“I didn’t mean to make you mad, Mr. de Vore.”
“I’m not mad!”
She was not sure for a moment what he meant. She sat down beside and a trifle behind him, and began idly piling sand in her lap.
Dr. Island said, “I see you’ve met.”
Nicholas turned, looking for the voice. “I thought you saw everything.”
“Only the important things, and I have been busy on another part of myself. I am happy to see that you two know one another; do you find you interact well?”
Neither of them answered.
“You should be interacting with Ignacio; he needs you.”
“We can’t find him,” Nicholas said.
“Down the beach to your left until you see the big stone, then turn inland. Above five hundred meters.”
Nicholas stood up, and turning to his right, began to walk away. Diane followed him, trotting until she caught up.
“I don’t like,” Nicholas said, jerking a shoulder to indicate something behind him.
“Ignacio?”
“The doctor.”
“Why do you move your head like that?”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“No one told me anything about you.”
“They opened it up”—Nicholas touched his scars—“and took this knife and cut all the way through my corpus … corpus …”
“Corpus callosum,” muttered a dry palm frond.
“—corpus callosum,” finished Nicholas. “See, your brain is like a walnut inside. There are two halves, and then right down in the middle a kind of thick connection of meat from one to the other. Well, they cut that.”
“You’re having a bit of fun with me, aren’t you?”
“No, he isn’t,” a monkey who had come to the water line to look for shellfish told her. “His cerebrum has been surgically divided; it’s in his file.” It was a young monkey, with a trusting face full of small, ugly beauties.
Nicholas snapped, “It’s in my head.”
Diane said, “I’d think it would kill you, or make you an idiot or something.”
“They say each half of me is about as smart as both of us were together. Anyway, this half is … the half … the me that talks.”
“There are two of you now?”
“If you cut a worm in half and both parts are still alive, that’s two, isn’t it? What else would you call us? We can’t ever come together again.”
“But I’m talking to just one of you?”
“We both can hear you.”
“Which one answers?”
Nicholas touched the right side of his chest with his right hand. “Me; I do. They told me it was the left side of my brain, that one has the speech centers, but it doesn’t feel that way; the nerves cross over coming out, and it’s just the right side of me, I talk. Both my ears hear for both of us, but out of each eye we only see half and half—I mean, I only see what’s on the right of what I’m looking at, and the other side, I guess, only sees the left, so that’s why I keep moving my head. I guess it’s like being a little bit blind; you get used to it.”
The girl was still thinking of his divided body. She said, “If you’re only half, I don’t see how you can walk.”
“I can move the left side a little bit, and we’re not mad at each other. We’re not supposed to be able to come together at all, but we do: down through the legs and at the ends of the fingers and then back up. Only I can’t talk with my other side because he can’t, but he understands.”
“Why did they do it?”
Behind them the monkey, who had been following them, said, “He had uncontrollable seizures.”
“Did you?” the girl asked. She was watching a sea bird swooping low over the water and did not seem to care.
Nicholas picked up a shell and shied it at the monkey, who skipped out of the way. After half a minute’s silence he said, “I had visions.”
“Ooh, did you?”
“They didn’t like that. They said I would fall down and jerk around horrible, and sometimes I guess I would hurt myself when I fell, and sometimes I’d bite my tongue and it would bleed. But that wasn’t what it felt like to me; I wouldn’t know about any of those things until afterward. To me it was like I had gone way far ahead, and I had to come back. I didn’t want to.”
The wind swayed Diane’s hair, and she pushed it back from her face. “Did you see things that were going to happen?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Really? Did you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Tell me about it. When you saw what was going to happen.”
“I saw myself dead. I was all black and shrunk up like the dead stuff they cut off in the pontic gardens; and I was floating and turning, like in water but it wasn’t water—just floating and turning out in space, in nothing. And there were lights on both sides of me, so both sides were bright but black, and I could see my teeth because the stuff”—he pulled at his cheeks—“had fallen off there, and they were really white.”
“That hasn’t happened yet.”
“Not here.”
“Tell me something you saw that happened.”
“You mean, like somebody’s sister was going to get married, don’t you? That’s what the girls where I was mostly wanted to know. Or were they going to go home; mostly it wasn’t like that.”
“But sometimes it was?”
“I guess.”
“Tell me one.”
Nicholas shook his head. “You wouldn’t like it, and anyway it wasn’t like that. Mostly it was lights like I never saw anyplace else, and voices like I never heard any other time, telling me things there aren’t any words for; stuff like that, only now I can’t ever go back. Listen, I wanted to ask you about Ignacio.”
“He isn’t anybody,” the girl said.
“What do you mean, he isn’t anybody? Is there anybody here besides you and me and Ignacio and Dr. Island?”
“Not that we can see or touch.”
The monkey called, “There are other patients, but for the present, Nicholas, for your own well-being as well as theirs, it is best for you to remain by yourselves.” It was a long sentence for a
monkey.
“What’s that about?”
“If I tell you, will you tell me about something you saw that really happened?”
“All right.”
“Tell me first.”
“There was this girl where I was—her name was Maya. They had, you know, boys’ and girls’ dorms, but you saw everybody in the rec room and the dining hall and so on, and she was in my psychodrama group.” Her hair had been black, and shiny as the lacquered furniture in Dr. Hong’s rooms, her skin white like the mother-of-pearl, her eyes long and narrow (making him think of cats’ eyes) and darkly blue. She was fifteen, or so Nicholas believed—maybe sixteen. “I’m going home,” she told him. It was psychodrama, and he was her brother, younger than she, and she was already at home; but when she said this the floating ring of light that gave them the necessary separation from the small doctor-and-patient audience, ceased, by instant agreement, to be Maya’s mother’s living room and became a visiting lounge. Nicholas/Jerry said: “Hey, that’s great! Hey, I got a new bike—when you come home you want to ride it?”