by Gene Wolfe
Maureen/Maya’s mother said, “Maya, don’t. You’ll run into something and break your teeth, and you know how much they cost.”
“You don’t want me to have any fun.”
“We do, dear, but nice fun. A girl has to be so much more careful—oh, Maya, I wish I could make you understand, really, how careful a girl has to be.”
Nobody said anything, so Nicholas/Jerry filled in with, “It has a three-bladed prop, and I’m going to tape streamers to them with little weights at the ends, an’ when I go down old thirty-seven B passageway, look out, here comes that old coleslaw grater!”
“Like this,” Maya said, and held her legs together and extended her arms, to make a three-bladed bike prop or a crucifix. She had thrown herself into a spin as she made the movement, and revolved slowly, stage center—red shorts, white blouse, red shorts, white blouse, red shorts, no shoes.
Diane asked, “And you saw that she was never going home, she was going to hospital instead, she was going to cut her wrist there, she was going to die?”
Nicholas nodded.
“Did you tell her?”
“Yes,” Nicholas said. “No.”
“Make up your mind. Didn’t you tell her? Now, don’t get mad.”
“Is it telling, when the one you tell doesn’t understand?”
Diane thought about that for a few steps while Nicholas dashed water on the hot bruises Ignacio had left upon his face. “If it was plain and clear and she ought to have understood—that’s the trouble I have with my family.”
“What is?”
“They won’t say things—do you know what I mean? I just say look, just tell me, just tell me what I’m supposed to do, tell me what it is you want, but it’s different all the time. My mother says, ‘Diane, you ought to meet some boys, you can’t go out with him, your father and I have never met him, we don’t even know his family at all, Douglas, there’s something I think you ought to know about Diane, she gets confused sometimes, we’ve had her to doctors, she’s been in a hospital, try—’”
“Not to get her excited,” Nicholas finished for her.
“Were you listening? I mean, are you from the Trojan Planets? Do you know my mother?”
“I only live in these places,” Nicholas said, “that’s for a long time. But you talk like other people.”
“I feel better now that I’m with you; you’re really nice. I wish you were older.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to get much older.”
“It’s going to rain—feel it?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“Look.” Diane jumped, bunnyrabbit-clumsy, three meters into the air. “See how high I can jump? That means people are sad and it’s going to rain. I told you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did, Nicholas.”
He waved the argument away, struck by a sudden thought. “You ever been to Callisto?”
The girl shook her head, and Nicholas said, “I have; that’s where they did the operation. It’s so big the gravity’s mostly from natural mass, and it’s all domed in, with a whole lot of air in it.”
“So?”
“And when I was there it rained. There was a big trouble at one of the generating piles, and they shut it down and it got colder and colder until everybody in the hospital wore their blankets, just like Amerinds in books, and they locked the switches off on the heaters in the bathrooms, and the nurses and the comscreen told you all the time it wasn’t dangerous, they were just rationing power to keep from blacking out the important stuff that was still running. And then it rained, just like on Earth. They said it got so cold the water condensed in the air, and it was like the whole hospital was right under a shower bath. Everybody on the top floor had to come down because it rained right on their beds, and for two nights I had a man in my room with me that had his arm cut off in a machine. But we couldn’t jump any higher, and it got kind of dark.”
“It doesn’t always get dark here,” Diane said. “Sometimes the rain sparkles. I think Dr. Island must do it to cheer everyone up.”
“No,” the waves explained, “or at least not in the way you mean, Diane.”
Nicholas was hungry and started to ask them for something to eat, then turned his hunger in against itself, spat on the sand, and was still.
“It rains here when most of you are sad,” the waves were saying, “because rain is a sad thing, to the human psyche. It is that, that sadness, perhaps because it recalls to unhappy people their own tears, that palliates melancholy.”
Diane said, “Well, I know sometimes I feel better when it rains.”
“That should help you to understand yourself. Most people are soothed when their environment is in harmony with their emotions, and anxious when it is not. An angry person becomes less angry in a red room, and unhappy people are only exasperated by sunshine and birdsong. Do you remember:
And, missing thee, I walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven green
To behold the wandering moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven’s wide pathless way?
The girl shook her head.
Nicholas said, “No. Did somebody write that?” and then “You said you couldn’t do anything.”
The waves replied, “I can’t—except talk to you.”
“You make it rain.”
“Your heart beats; I sense its pumping even as I speak—do you control the beating of your heart?”
“I can stop my breath.”
“Can you stop your heart? Honestly, Nicholas?”
“I guess not.”
“No more can I control the weather of my world, stop anyone from doing what he wishes, or feed you if you are hungry; with no need of volition on my part your emotions are monitored and averaged, and our weather responds. Calm and sunshine for tranquillity, rain for melancholy, storms for rage, and so on. This is what mankind has always wanted.”
Diane asked, “What is?”
“That the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind; and here, on me, it is fact.”
“So that we’ll be well?”
Nicholas said angrily, “You’re not sick!”
Dr. Island said, “So that some of you, at least, can return to society.”
Nicholas threw a sea shell into the water as though to strike the mouth that spoke. “Why are we talking to this thing?”
“Wait, tot, I think it’s interesting.”
“Lies and lies.”
Dr. Island said, “How do I lie, Nicholas?”
“You said it was magic—”
“No, I said that when humankind has dreamed of magic, the wish behind that dream has been the omnipotence of thought. Have you never wanted to be a magician, Nicholas, making palaces spring up overnight, or riding an enchanted horse of ebony to battle with the demons of the air?”
“I am a magician—I have preternatural powers, and before they cut us in two—”
Diane interrupted him. “You said you averaged emotions. When you made it rain.”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t that mean that if one person was really, terribly sad, he’d move the average so much he could make it rain all by himself? Or whatever? That doesn’t seem fair.”
The waves might have smiled. “That has never happened. But if it did, Diane, if one person felt such deep emotion, think how great her need would be. Don’t you think we should answer it?”
Diane looked at Nicholas, but he was walking again, his head swinging, ignoring her as well as the voice of the waves. “Wait,” she called. “You said I wasn’t sick; I am, you know.”
“No, you’re not.”
She hurried after him. “Everyone says so, and sometimes I’m so confused, and other times I’m boiling inside, just boiling. Mum says if you’ve got something on the stove you don’t want to have burn, you just have to keep one finge
r on the handle of the pan and it won’t, but I can’t, I can’t always find the handle or remember.”
Without looking back the boy said, “Your mother is probably sick; maybe your father too, I don’t know. But you’re not. If they’d just let you alone you’d be all right. Why shouldn’t you get upset, having to live with two crazy people?”
“Nicholas!” She grabbed his thin shoulders. “That’s not true!”
“Yes, it is.”
“I am sick. Everyone says so.”
“I don’t; so ‘everyone’ just means the ones that do—isn’t that right? And if you don’t either, that will be two; it can’t be everyone then.”
The girl called, “Doctor? Dr. Island?”
Nicholas said, “You aren’t going to believe that, are you?”
“Dr. Island, is it true?”
“Is what true, Diane?”
“What he said. Am I sick?”
“Sickness—even physical illness—is relative, Diane; and complete health is an idealization, an abstraction, even if the other end of the scale is not.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You are not physically ill.” A long, blue comber curled into a line of hissing spray reaching infinitely along the sea to their left and right. “As you said yourself a moment ago, you are sometimes confused, and sometimes disturbed.”
“He said if it weren’t for other people, if it weren’t for my mother and father, I wouldn’t have to be here.”
“Diane …”
“Well, is that true or isn’t it?”
“Most emotional illness would not exist, Diane, if it were possible in every case to separate oneself—in thought as well as circumstance—if only for a time.”
“Separate oneself?”
“Did you ever think of going away, at least for a time?”
The girl nodded, then as though she were not certain Dr. Island could see her, said, “Often, I suppose; leaving the school and getting my own compartment somewhere—going to Achilles. Sometimes I wanted to so badly.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“They would have worried. And anyway, they would have found me, and made me come home.”
“Would it have done any good if I—or a human doctor—had told them not to?”
When the girl said nothing Nicholas snapped, “You could have locked them up.”
“They were functioning, Nicholas. They bought and sold; they worked, and paid their taxes—”
Diane said softly, “It wouldn’t have done any good anyway, Nicholas; they are inside me.”
“Diane was no longer functioning: she was failing every subject at the university she attended, and her presence in her classes, when she came, disturbed the instructors and the other students. You were not functioning either, and people of your own age were afraid of you.”
“That’s what counts with you, then. Functioning.”
“If I were different from the world, would that help you when you got back into the world?”
“You are different.” Nicholas kicked the sand. “Nobody ever saw a place like this.”
“You mean that reality to you is metal corridors, rooms without windows, noise.”
“Yes.”
“That is the unreality, Nicholas. Most people have never had to endure such things. Even now, this—my beach, my sea, my trees—is more in harmony with most human lives than your metal corridors; and here, I am your social environment—what individuals call ‘they.’ You see, sometimes if we take people who are troubled back to something like me, to an idealized natural setting, it helps them.”
“Come on,” Nicholas told the girl. He took her arm, acutely conscious of being so much shorter than she.
“A question,” murmured the waves. “If Diane’s parents had been taken here instead of Diane, do you think it would have helped them?”
Nicholas did not reply.
“We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.” Diane and the boy had turned away, and the waves’ hissing and slapping ceased to be speech. Gulls wheeled overhead, and once a red-and-yellow parrot fluttered from one palm to another. A monkey running on all fours like a little dog approached them, and Nicholas chased it, but it escaped.
“I’m going to take one of those things apart someday,” he said, “and pull the wires out.”
“Are we going to walk all the way ‘round?” Diane asked. She might have been talking to herself.
“Can you do that?”
“Oh, you can’t walk all around Dr. Island; it would be too long, and you can’t get there anyway. But we could walk until we get back to where we started—we’re probably more than halfway now.”
“Are there other islands you can’t see from here?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so; there’s just this one big island in this satellite, and all the rest is water.”
“Then if there’s only the one island, we’re going to have to walk all around it to get back to where we started. What are you laughing at?”
“Look down the beach, as far as you can. Never mind how it slips off to the side—pretend it’s straight.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Don’t you? Watch.” Diane leaped into the air, six meters or more this time, and waved her arms.
“It looks like there’s somebody ahead of us, way down the beach.”
“Uh-huh. Now look behind.”
“Okay, there’s somebody there too. Come to think of it, I saw someone on the beach when I first got here. It seemed funny to see so far, but I guess I thought they were other patients. Now I see two people.”
“They’re us. That was probably yourself you saw the other time, too. There are just so many of us to each strip of beach, and Dr. Island only wants certain ones to mix. So the space bends around. When we get to one end of our strip and try to step over, we’ll be at the other end.”
“How did you find out?”
“Dr. Island told me about it when I first came here.” The girl was silent for a moment, and her smile vanished. “Listen, Nicholas, do you want to see something really funny?”
Nicholas asked, “What?” As he spoke, a drop of rain struck his face.
“You’ll see. Come on, though. We have to go into the middle instead of following the beach, and it will give us a chance to get under the trees and out of the rain.”
When they had left the sand and the sound of the surf, and were walking on solid ground under green-leaved trees, Nicholas said, “Maybe we can find some fruit.” They were so light now that he had to be careful not to bound into the air with each step. The rain fell slowly around them, in crystal spheres.
“Maybe,” the girl said doubtfully. “Wait, let’s stop here.” She sat down where a huge tree sent twenty-meter wooden arches over dark, mossy ground. “Want to climb up there and see if you can find us something?”
“All right,” Nicholas agreed. He jumped, and easily caught hold of a branch far above the girl’s head. In a moment he was climbing in a green world, with the rain pattering all around him; he followed narrowing limbs into leafy wilderness where the cool water ran from every twig he touched, and twice found the empty nests of birds, and once a slender snake, green as any leaf with a head as long as his thumb; but there was no fruit. “Nothing,” he said, when he dropped down beside the girl once more.
“That’s all right, we’ll find something.”
He said, “I hope so,” and noticed that she was looking at him oddly, then realized that his left hand had lifted itself to touch her right breast. It dropped as he looked, and he felt his face grow hot. He said, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
“We like you. He—over there—he can’t talk, you see. I guess I can’t talk either.”
“I think it’s just you—in two pieces. I don’t care.”
“Thanks.” He had picked up a leaf, dead and damp, and was teari
ng it to shreds; first his right hand tearing while the left held the leaf, then turnabout. “Where does the rain come from?” The dirty flakes clung to the fingers of both.
“Hmm?”
“Where does the rain come from? I mean, it isn’t because it’s colder here now, like on Callisto; it’s because the gravity’s turned down some way, isn’t it?”
“From the sea. Don’t you know how this place is built?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“Didn’t they show it to you from the ship when you came? It’s beautiful. They showed it to me—I just sat there and looked at it, and I wouldn’t talk to them, and the nurse thought I wasn’t paying any attention, but I heard everything. I just didn’t want to talk to her. It wasn’t any use.”
“I know how you felt.”
“But they didn’t show it to you?”
“No, on my ship they kept me locked up because I burned some stuff. They thought I couldn’t start a fire without an igniter, but if you have electricity in the wall sockets it’s easy. They had a thing on me—you know?” He clasped his arms to his body to show how he had been restrained. “I bit one of them, too—I guess I didn’t tell you that yet: I bite people. They locked me up, and for a long time I had nothing to do, and then I could feel us dock with something, and they came and got me and pulled me down a regular companionway for a long time, and it just seemed like a regular place. Then they stuck me full of Tranquil-C—I guess they didn’t know it doesn’t hardly work on me at all—with a pneumogun, and lifted a kind of door thing and shoved me up.”
“Didn’t they make you undress?”
“I already was. When they put the ties on me I did things in my clothes and they had to take them off me. It made them mad.” He grinned unevenly. “Does Tranquil-C work on you? Or any of that other stuff?”
“I suppose they would, but then I never do the sort of thing you do anyway.”