by Gene Wolfe
“Maybe you ought to.”
“Sometimes they used to give me medication that was supposed to cheer me up; then I couldn’t sleep, and I walked and walked, you know, and ran into things and made a lot of trouble for everyone; but what good does it do?”
Nicholas shrugged. “Not doing it doesn’t do any good either—I mean, we’re both here. My way, I know I’ve made them jump; they shoot that stuff in me and I’m not mad any more, but I know what it is and I just think what I would do if I were mad, and I do it, and when it wears off I’m glad I did.”
“I think you’re still angry somewhere, deep down.”
Nicholas was already thinking of something else. “This island says Ignacio kills people.” He paused. “What does it look like?”
“Ignacio?”
“No, I’ve seen him. Dr. Island.”
“Oh, you mean when I was in the ship. The satellite’s round of course, and all clear except where Dr. Island is, so that’s a dark spot. The rest of it’s temperglass, and from space you can’t even see the water.”
“That is the sea up there, isn’t it?” Nicholas asked, trying to look up at it through the tree leaves and the rain. “I thought it was when I first came.”
“Sure. It’s like a glass ball, and we’re inside, and the water’s inside too, and just goes all around up the curve.”
“That’s why I could see so far out on the beach, isn’t it? Instead of dropping down from you like on Callisto it bends up so you can see it.”
The girl nodded. “And the water lets the light through, but filters out the ultraviolet. Besides, it gives us thermal mass, so we don’t heat up too much when we’re between the sun and the Bright Spot.”
“Is that what keeps us warm? The Bright Spot?”
Diane nodded again. “We go around in ten hours, you see, and that holds us over it all the time.”
“Why can’t I see it, then? It ought to look like Sol does from the Belt, only bigger; but there’s just a shimmer in the sky, even when it’s not raining.”
“The waves diffract the light and break up the image. You’d see the Focus, though, if the air weren’t so clear. Do you know what the Focus is?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“We’ll get to it pretty soon, after this rain stops. Then I’ll tell you.”
“I still don’t understand about the rain.”
Unexpectedly Diane giggled. “I just thought—do you know what I was supposed to be? While I was going to school?”
“Quiet,” Nicholas said.
“No, silly. I mean what I was being trained to do, if I graduated and all that. I was going to be a teacher, with all those cameras on me and tots from everywhere watching and popping questions on the two-way. Jolly time. Now I’m doing it here, only there’s no one but you.”
“You mind?”
“No, I suppose I enjoy it.” There was a black-and-blue mark on Diane’s thigh, and she rubbed it pensively with one hand as she spoke. “Anyway, there are three ways to make gravity. Do you know them? Answer, clerk.”
“Sure; acceleration, mass, and synthesis.”
“That’s right; motion and mass are both bendings of space, of course, which is why Zeno’s paradox doesn’t work out that way, and why masses move toward each other—what we call falling—or at least try to; and if they’re held apart it produces the tension we perceive as a force and call weight and all that rot. So naturally if you bend the space direct, you synthesize a gravity effect, and that’s what holds all that water up against the translucent shell—there’s nothing like enough mass to do it by itself.”
“You mean”—Nicholas held out his hand to catch a slow-moving globe of rain—“that this is water from the sea?”
“Right-o, up on top. Do you see, the temperature differences in the air make the winds, and the winds make the waves and surf you saw when we were walking along the shore. When the waves break they throw up these little drops, and if you watch you’ll see that even when it’s clear they go up a long way sometimes. Then if the gravity is less they can get away altogether, and if we were on the outside they’d fly off into space; but we aren’t, we’re inside, so all they can do is go across the center, more or less, until they hit the water again, or Dr. Island.”
“Dr. Island said they had storms sometimes, when people got mad.”
“Yes. Lots of wind, and so there’s lots of rain too. Only the rain then is because the wind tears the tops off the waves, and you don’t get light like you do in a normal rain.”
“What makes so much wind?”
“I don’t know. It happens somehow.”
They sat in silence, Nicholas listening to the dripping of the leaves. He remembered then that they had spun the hospital module, finally, to get the little spheres of clotting blood out of the air; Maya’s blood was building up on the grills of the purification intake ducts, spotting them black, and someone had been afraid they would decay there and smell. He had not been there when they did it, but he could imagine the droplets settling, like this, in the slow spin. The old psychodrama group had already been broken up, and when he saw Maureen or any of the others in the rec room they talked about Good Old Days. It had not seemed like Good Old Days then except that Maya had been there.
Diane said, “It’s going to stop.”
“It looks just as bad to me.”
“No, it’s going to stop—see, they’re falling a little faster now, and I feel heavier.”
Nicholas stood up. “You rested enough yet? You want to go on?”
“We’ll get wet.”
He shrugged.
“I don’t want to get my hair wet, Nicholas. It’ll be over in a minute.”
He sat down again. “How long have you been here?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t you count the days?”
“I lose track a lot.”
“Longer than a week?”
“Nicholas, don’t ask me, all right?”
“Isn’t there anybody on this piece of Dr. Island except you and me and Ignacio?”
“I don’t think there was anyone but Ignacio before you came.”
“Who is he?”
She looked at him.
“Well, who is he? You know me—us—Nicholas Kenneth de Vore; and you’re Diane who?”
“Phillips.”
“And you’re from the Trojan Planets, and I was from the Outer Belt, I guess, to start with. What about Ignacio? You talk to him sometimes, don’t you? Who is he?”
“I don’t know. He’s important.”
For an instant, Nicholas froze. “What does that mean?”
“Important.” The girl was feeling her knees, running her hands back and forth across them.
“Maybe everybody’s important.”
“I know you’re just a tot, Nicholas, but don’t be so stupid. Come on, you wanted to go, let’s go now. It’s pretty well stopped.” She stood, stretching her thin body, her arms over her head. “My knees are rough—you made me think of that. When I came here they were still so smooth, I think. I used to put a certain lotion on them. Because my Dad would feel them, and my hands and elbows too, and he’d say if they weren’t smooth nobody’d ever want me; Mum wouldn’t say anything, but she’d be cross after, and they used to come and visit, and so I kept a bottle in my room and I used to put it on. Once I drank some.”
Nicholas was silent.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I died?” She stepped ahead of him, pulling aside the dripping branches. “See here, I’m sorry I said you were stupid.”
“I’m just thinking,” Nicholas said. “I’m not mad at you. Do you really know anything about him?”
“No, but look at it.” She gestured. “Look around you; someone built all this.”
“You mean it cost a lot.”
“It’s automated, of course, but still … well, the other places where you were before—how much space was there for each patient? Take the total volume and divide it by the numbe
r of people there.”
“Okay, this is a whole lot bigger, but maybe they think we’re worth it.”
“Nicholas …” She paused. “Nicholas, Ignacio is homicidal. Didn’t Dr. Island tell you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re fourteen and not very big for it, and I’m a girl. Who are they worried about?”
The look on Nicholas’s face startled her.
After an hour or more of walking they came to it. It was a band of withered vegetation, brown and black and tumbling, and as straight as if it had been drawn with a ruler. “I was afraid it wasn’t going to be here,” Diane said. “It moves around whenever there’s a storm. It might not have been in our sector any more at all.”
Nicholas asked, “What is it?”
“The Focus. It’s been all over, but mostly the plants grow back quickly when it’s gone.”
“It smells funny—like the kitchen in a place where they wanted me to work in the kitchen once.”
“Vegetables rotting, that’s what that is. What did you do?”
“Nothing—put detergent in the stuff they were cooking. What makes this?”
“The Bright Spot. See, when it’s just about overhead the curve of the sky and the water up there make a lens. It isn’t a very good lens—a lot of the light scatters. But enough is focused to do this. It wouldn’t fry us if it came past right now, if that’s what you’re wondering, because it’s not that hot. I’ve stood right in it, but you want to get out in a minute.”
“I thought it was going to be about seeing ourselves down the beach.”
Diane seated herself on the trunk of a fallen tree. “It was, really. The last time I was here it was further from the water, and I suppose it had been there a long time, because it had cleared out a lot of the dead stuff. The sides of the sector are nearer here, you see; the whole sector narrows down like a piece of pie. So you could look down the Focus either way and see yourself nearer than you could on the beach. It was almost as if you were in a big, big room, with a looking-glass on each wall, or as if you could stand behind yourself. I thought you might like it.”
“I’m going to try it here,” Nicholas announced, and he clambered up one of the dead trees while the girl waited below, but the dry limbs creaked and snapped beneath his feet, and he could not get high enough to see himself in either direction. When he dropped to the ground beside her again, he said, “There’s nothing to eat here either, is there?”
“I haven’t found anything.”
“They—I mean, Dr. Island wouldn’t just let us starve, would he?”
“I don’t think he could do anything; that’s the way this place is built. Sometimes you find things, and I’ve tried to catch fish, but I never could. A couple of times Ignacio gave me part of what he had, though; he’s good at it. I bet you think I’m skinny, don’t you? But I was a lot fatter when I came here.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“Keep walking, I suppose, Nicholas. Maybe go back to the water.”
“Do you think we’ll find anything?”
From a decaying log, insect stridulations called, “Wait.”
Nicholas asked, “Do you know where anything is?”
“Something for you to eat? Not at present. But I can show you something much more interesting, not far from here, than this clutter of dying trees. Would you like to see it?”
Diane said, “Don’t go, Nicholas.”
“What is it?”
“Diane, who calls this ‘the Focus,’ calls what I wish to show you ‘the Point.’”
Nicholas asked Diane, “Why shouldn’t I go?”
“I’m not going. I went there once anyway.”
“I took her,” Dr. Island said. “And I’ll take you. I wouldn’t take you if I didn’t think it might help you.”
“I don’t think Diane liked it.”
“Diane may not wish to be helped—help may be painful, and often people do not. But it is my business to help them if I can, whether or not they wish it.”
“Suppose I don’t want to go?”
“Then I cannot compel you; you know that. But you will be the only patient in this sector who has not seen it, Nicholas, as well as the youngest; both Diane and Ignacio have, and Ignacio goes there often.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“No. Are you afraid?”
Nicholas looked questioningly at Diane. “What is it? What will I see?”
She had walked away while he was talking to Dr. Island, and was now sitting cross-legged on the ground about five meters from where Nicholas stood, staring at her hands. Nicholas repeated, “What will I see, Diane?” He did not think she would answer.
She said, “A glass. A mirror.”
“Just a mirror?”
“You know how I told you to climb the tree here? The Point is where the edges come together. You can see yourself—like on the beach—but closer.”
Nicholas was disappointed. “I’ve seen myself in mirrors lots of times.”
Dr. Island, whose voice was now in the sighing of the dead leaves, whispered, “Did you have a mirror in your room, Nicholas, before you came here?”
“A steel one.”
“So that you could not break it?”
“I guess so. I threw things at it sometimes, but it just got puckers in it.” Remembering dimpled reflections, Nicholas laughed.
“You can’t break this one either.”
“It doesn’t sound like it’s worth going to see.”
“I think it is.”
“Diane, do you still think I shouldn’t go?”
There was no reply. The girl sat staring at the ground in front of her. Nicholas walked over to look at her and found a tear had washed a damp trail down each thin cheek, but she did not move when he touched her. “She’s catatonic, isn’t she,” he said.
A green limb just outside the Focus nodded. “Catatonic schizophrenia.”
“I had a doctor once that said those names—like that. They didn’t mean anything.” (The doctor had been a therapy robot, but a human doctor gave more status. Robots’ patients sat in doorless booths—two and a half hours a day for Nicholas: an hour and a half in the morning, an hour in the afternoon—and talked to something that appeared to be a small, friendly food freezer. Some people sat every day in silence, while others talked continually, and for such patients as these the attendants seldom troubled to turn the machines on.)
“He meant cause and treatment. He was correct.”
Nicholas stood looking down at the girl’s streaked, brown-blond head. “What is the cause? I mean for her.”
“I don’t know.”
“And what’s the treatment?”
“You are seeing it.”
“Will it help her?”
“Probably not.”
“Listen, she can hear you, don’t you know that? She hears everything we say.”
“If my answer disturbs you, Nicholas, I can change it. It will help her if she wants to be helped; if she insists on clasping her illness to her it will not.”
“We ought to go away from here,” Nicholas said uneasily.
“To your left you will see a little path, a very faint one. Between the twisted tree and the bush with the yellow flowers.”
Nicholas nodded and began to walk, looking back at Diane several times. The flowers were butterflies, who fled in a cloud of color when he approached them, and he wondered if Dr. Island had known. When he had gone a hundred paces and was well away from the brown and rotting vegetation, he said, “She was sitting in the Focus.”
“Yes.”
“Is she still there?”
“Yes.”
“What will happen when the Bright Spot comes?”
“Diane will become uncomfortable and move, if she is still there.”
“Once in one of the places I was in there was a man who was like that, and they said he wouldn’t get anything to eat if he didn’t get up and get it, they weren’t going to feed him with the nose tube
any more; and they didn’t, and he died. We told them about it and they wouldn’t do anything and he starved to death right there, and when he was dead they rolled him off onto a stretcher and changed the bed and put somebody else there.”
“I know, Nicholas. You told the doctors at St. John’s about all that, and it is in your file; but think: well men have starved themselves—yes, to death—to protest what they felt were political injustices. Is it so surprising that your friend killed himself in the same way to protest what he felt as a psychic injustice?”
“He wasn’t my friend. Listen, did you really mean it when you said the treatment she was getting here would help Diane if she wanted to be helped?”
“No.”
Nicholas halted in mid-stride. “You didn’t mean it? You don’t think it’s true?”
“No. I doubt that anything will help her.”
“I don’t think you ought to lie to us.”
“Why not? If by chance you become well you will be released, and if you are released you will have to deal with your society, which will lie to you frequently. Here, where there are so few individuals, I must take the place of society. I have explained that.”
“Is that what you are?”
“Society’s surrogate? Of course. Who do you imagine built me? What else could I be?”
“The doctor.”
“You have had many doctors, and so has she. Not one of them has benefited you much.”
“I’m not sure you even want to help us.”
“Do you wish to see what Diane calls ‘the Point’?”
“I guess so.”
“Then you must walk. You will not see it standing here.”
Nicholas walked, thrusting aside leafy branches and dangling creepers wet with rain. The jungle smelled of the life of green thing; there were ants on the tree trunks, and dragonflies with hot, red bodies and wings as long as his hands. “Do you want to help us?” he asked after a time.
“My feelings toward you are ambivalent. But when you wish to be helped, I wish to help you.”
The ground sloped gently upward, and as it rose became somewhat more clear, the big trees a trifle farther apart, the underbrush spent in grass and fern. Occasionally there were stone outcrops to be climbed, and clearings open to the tumbling sky. Nicholas asked, “Who made this trail?”