The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

by Gene Wolfe

  “Ignacio. He comes here often.”

  “He’s not afraid, then? Diane’s afraid.”

  “Ignacio is afraid too, but he comes.”

  “Diane says Ignacio is important.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean by that? Is he important? More important than we are?”

  “Do you remember that I told you I was the surrogate of society? What do you think society wants, Nicholas?”

  “Everybody to do what it says.”

  “You mean conformity. Yes, there must be conformity, but something else too—consciousness.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Without consciousness, which you may call sensitivity if you are careful not to allow yourself to be confused by the term, there is no progress. A century ago, Nicholas, mankind was suffocating on Earth; now it is suffocating again. About half of the people who have contributed substantially to the advance of humanity have shown signs of emotional disturbance.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to hear about it. I asked you an easy question—is Ignacio more important than Diane and me—and you won’t tell me. I’ve heard all this you’re saying. I’ve heard it fifty, maybe a hundred times from everybody, and it’s lies; it’s the regular thing, and you’ve got it written down on a card somewhere to read out when anybody asks. Those people you talk about that went crazy, they went crazy because while they were ‘advancing humanity,’ or whatever you call it, people kicked them out of their rooms because they couldn’t pay, and while they were getting thrown out you were making other people rich that had never done anything in their whole lives except think about how to get that way.”

  “Sometimes it is hard, Nicholas, to determine before the fact—or even at the time—just who should be honored.”

  “How do you know if you’ve never tried?”

  “You asked if Ignacio was more important than Diane or yourself. I can only say that Ignacio seems to me to hold a brighter promise of a full recovery coupled with a substantial contribution to human progress.”

  “If he’s so good, why did he crack up?”

  “Many do, Nicholas. Even among the inner planets space is not a kind environment for mankind; and our space, trans-Martian space, is worse. Any young person here, anyone like yourself or Diane who would seem to have a better-than-average chance of adapting to the conditions we face, is precious.”

  “Or Ignacio.”

  “Yes, or Ignacio. Ignacio has a tested IQ of two hundred and ten, Nicholas. Diane’s is one hundred and twenty. Your own is ninety-five.”

  “They never took mine.”

  “It’s on your records, Nicholas.”

  “They tried to and I threw down the helmet and it broke; Sister Carmela—she was the nurse—just wrote down something on the paper and sent me back.”

  “I see. I will ask for a complete investigation of this, Nicholas.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I don’t think you believed me.”

  “Nicholas, Nicholas …” The long tongues of grass now beginning to appear beneath the immense trees sighed. “Can’t you see that a certain measure of trust between the two of us is essential?”

  “Did you believe me?”

  “Why do you ask? Suppose I were to say I did; would you believe that?”

  “When you told me I had been reclassified.”

  “You would have to be retested, for which there are no facilities here.”

  “If you believed me, why did you say retested? I told you I haven’t ever been tested at all—but anyway you could cross out the ninety-five.”

  “It is impossible for me to plan your therapy without some estimate of your intelligence, Nicholas, and I have nothing with which to replace it.”

  The ground was sloping up more sharply now, and in a clearing the boy halted and turned to look back at the leafy film, like algae over a pool, beneath which he had climbed, and at the sea beyond. To his right and left his view was still hemmed with foliage, and ahead of him a meadow on edge (like the square of sand through which he had come, though he did not think of that), dotted still with trees, stretched steeply toward an invisible summit. It seemed to him that under his feet the mountainside swayed ever so slightly. Abruptly he demanded of the wind, “Where’s Ignacio?”

  “Not here. Much closer to the beach.”

  “And Diane?”

  “Where you left her. Do you enjoy the panorama?”

  “It’s pretty, but it feels like we’re rocking.”

  “We are. I am moored to the temperglass exterior of our satellite by two hundred cables, but the tide and the currents none the less impart a slight motion to my body. Naturally this movement is magnified as you go higher.”

  “I thought you were fastened right onto the hull; if there’s water under you, how do people get in and out?”

  “I am linked to the main air lock by a communication tube. To you when you came, it probably seemed an ordinary companionway.”

  Nicholas nodded and turned his back on leaves and sea and began to climb again.

  “You are in a beautiful spot, Nicholas; do you open your heart to beauty?” After waiting for an answer that did not come, the wind sang:

  The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns

  And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,

  The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,

  The lightning flash of insect and of bird,

  The lustre of the long convolvuluses

  That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran

  Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows

  And glories of the broad belt of the world,

  All these he saw.

  “Does this mean nothing to you, Nicholas?”

  “You read a lot, don’t you?”

  “Often, when it is dark, everyone else is asleep and there is very little else for me to do.”

  “You talk like a woman; are you a woman?”

  “How could I be a woman?”

  “You know what I mean. Except, when you were talking mostly to Diane, you sounded more like a man.”

  “You haven’t yet said you think me beautiful.”

  “You’re an Easter egg.”

  “What do you mean by that, Nicholas?”

  “Never mind.” He saw the egg as it had hung in the air before him, shining with gold and covered with flowers.

  “Eggs are dyed with pretty colors for Easter, and my colors are beautiful—is that what you mean, Nicholas?”

  His mother had brought the egg on visiting day, but she could never have made it. Nicholas knew who must have made it. The gold was that very pure gold used for shielding delicate instruments; the clear flakes of crystallized carbon that dotted the egg’s surface with tiny stars could only have come from a laboratory high-pressure furnace. How angry he must have been when she told him she was going to give it to him.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it, Nicky?”

  It hung in the weightlessness between them, turning very slowly with the memory of her scented gloves.

  “The flowers are meadowsweet, fraxinella, lily of the valley, and moss rose—though I wouldn’t expect you to recognize them, darling.” His mother had never been below the orbit of Mars, but she pretended to have spent her girlhood on Earth; each reference to the lie filled Nicholas with inexpressible fury and shame. The egg was about twenty centimeters long and it revolved, end over end, in some small fraction more than eight of the pulse beats he felt in his cheeks. Visiting time had twenty-three minutes to go.

  “Aren’t you going to look at it?”

  “I can see it from here.” He tried to make her understand. “I can see every part of it. The little red things are aluminum oxide crystals, right?”

  “I mean, look inside, Nicky.”

  He saw then that there was a lens at one end, disguised as a dewdrop in the throat of an asphodel. Gently he took the egg in his hands, closed o
ne eye, and looked. The light of the interior was not, as he had half expected, gold tinted, but brilliantly white, deriving from some concealed source. A world surely meant for Earth shone within, as though seen from below the orbit of the moon—indigo sea and emerald land. Rivers brown and clear as tea ran down long plains.

  His mother said, “Isn’t it pretty?”

  Night hung at the corners in funereal purple, and sent long shadows like cold and lovely arms to caress the day; and while he watched and it fell, long-necked birds of so dark a pink that they were nearly red trailed stilt legs across the sky, their wings making crosses.

  “They are called flamingos,” Dr. Island said, following the direction of his eyes. “Isn’t it a pretty word? For a pretty bird, but I don’t think we’d like them as much if we called them sparrows, would we?”

  His mother said, “I’m going to take it home and keep it for you. It’s too nice to leave with a little boy, but if you ever come home again it will be waiting for you. On your dresser, beside your hairbrushes.”

  Nicholas said, “Words just mix you up.”

  “You shouldn’t despise them, Nicholas. Besides having great beauty of their own, they are useful in reducing tension. You might benefit from that.”

  “You mean you talk yourself out of it.”

  “I mean that a person’s ability to verbalize his feelings, if only to himself, may prevent them from destroying him. Evolution teaches us, Nicholas, that the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later. Words can be a safety valve.”

  Nicholas said, “I want to be a bomb; a bomb doesn’t need a safety valve.” To his mother, “Is that South America, Mama?”

  “No, dear, India. The Malabar Coast on your left, the Coromandel Coast on your right, and Ceylon below.” Words.

  “A bomb destroys itself, Nicholas.”

  “A bomb doesn’t care.”

  He was climbing resolutely now, his toes grabbing at tree roots and the soft, mossy soil; his physician was no longer the wind but a small brown monkey that followed a stone’s throw behind him. “I hear someone coming,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it Ignacio?”

  “No, it is Nicholas. You are close now.”

  “Close to the Point?”

  “Yes.”

  He stopped and looked around him. The sounds he had heard, the naked feet padding on soft ground, stopped as well. Nothing seemed strange; the land still rose, and there were large trees, widely spaced, with moss growing in their deepest shade, grass where they was more light. “The three big trees,” Nicholas said, “they’re just alike. Is that how you know where we are?”

  “Yes.”

  In his mind he called the one before him “Ceylon”; the others were “Coromandel” and “Malabar.” He walked toward Ceylon, studying its massive, twisted limbs; a boy naked as himself walked out of the forest to his left, toward Malabar—this boy was not looking at Nicholas, who shouted and ran toward him.

  The boy disappeared. Only Malabar, solid and real, stood before Nicholas; he ran to it, touched its rough bark with his hand, and then saw beyond it a fourth tree, similar too to the Ceylon tree, around which a boy peered with averted head Nicholas watched him for a moment, then said, “I see.”

  “Do you?” the monkey chattered.

  “It’s like a mirror, only backwards. The light from the front of me goes out and hits the edge, and comes in the other side, only I can’t see it because I’m not looking that way. What I see is the light from my back, sort of, because it comes back this way. When I ran, did I get turned around?”

  “Yes, you ran out the left side of the segment, and of course returned immediately from the right.”

  “I’m not scared. It’s kind of fun.” He picked up a stick and threw it as hard as he could toward the Malabar tree. It vanished, whizzed over his head, vanished again, slapped the back of his legs. “Did this scare Diane?”

  There was no answer. He strode farther, palely naked boys walking to his left and right, but always looking away from him, gradually coming closer.

  “Don’t go farther,” Dr. Island said behind him. “It can be dangerous if you try to pass through the Point itself.”

  “I see it,” Nicholas said. He saw three more trees, growing very close together, just ahead of him; their branches seemed strangely intertwined as they danced together in the wind, and beyond them there was nothing at all.

  “You can’t actually go through the Point,” Dr. Island Monkey said. “The tree covers it.”

  “Then why did you warn me about it?” Limping and scarred, the boys to his right and left were no more than two meters away now; he had discovered that if he looked straight ahead he could sometimes glimpse their bruised profiles.

  “That’s far enough, Nicholas.”

  “I want to touch the tree.”

  He took another step, and another, then turned. The Malabar boy turned too, presenting his narrow back, on which the ribs and spine seemed welts. Nicholas reached out both arms and laid his hands on the thin shoulders, and as he did, felt other hands—the cool, unfeeling hands of a stranger, dry hands too small—touch his own shoulders and creep upward toward his neck.

  “Nicholas!”

  He jumped sidewise away from the tree and looked at his hands, his head swaying. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Yes, it was, Nicholas,” the monkey said.

  “It was one of them.”

  “You are all of them.”

  In one quick motion Nicholas snatched up an arm-long section of fallen limb and hurled it at the monkey. It struck the little creature, knocking it down, but the monkey sprang up and fled on three legs. Nicholas sprinted after it.

  He had nearly caught it when it darted to one side; as quickly, he turned toward the other, springing for the monkey he saw running toward him there. In an instant it was in his grip, feebly trying to bite. He slammed its head against the ground, then catching it by the ankles swung it against the Ceylon tree until at the third impact he heard the skull crack, and stopped.

  He had expected wires, but there were none. Blood oozed from the battered little face, and the furry body was warm and limp in his hands. Leaves above his head said, “You haven’t killed me, Nicholas. You never will.”

  “How does it work?” He was still searching for wires, tiny circuit cards holding micro-logic. He looked about for a sharp stone with which to open the monkey’s body, but could find none.

  “It is just a monkey,” the leaves said. “If you had asked, I would have told you.”

  “How did you make him talk?” He dropped the monkey, stared at it for a moment, then kicked it. His fingers were bloodly, and he wiped them on the leaves of the tree.

  “Only my mind speaks to yours, Nicholas.”

  “Oh,” he said. And then, “I’ve heard of that. I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought it would be in my head.”

  “Your record shows no auditory hallucinations, but haven’t you ever known someone who had them?”

  “I knew a girl once …” He paused.

  “Yes?”

  “She twisted noises—you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like, it would just he a service cart out in the corridor, but she’s hear the fan, and think …”

  “What?”

  “Oh, different things. That it was somebody talking, calling her.”

  “Hear them?”

  “What?” He sat up in his bunk. “Maya?”

  “They’re coming after me.”

  “Maya?”

  Dr. Island, through the leaves, said, “When I talk to you, Nicholas, your mind makes any sound you hear the vehicle for my thoughts’ content. You may hear me softly in the patter of rain, or joyfully in the singing of a bird—but if I wished I could amplify what I say until every idea and suggestion I wished to give would be driven like a nail into your consciousness. Then you would do whatever I
wished you to.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Nicholas said. “If you can do that, why don’t you tell Diane not to be catatonic?”

  “First, because she might retreat more deeply into her disease in an effort to escape me; and second, because ending her catatonia in that way would not remove its cause.”

  “And thirdly?”

  “I did not say ‘thirdly,’ Nicholas.”

  “I thought I heard it—when two leaves touched.”

  “Thirdly, Nicholas, because both you and she have been chosen for your effect on someone else; if I were to change her—or you—so abruptly, that effect would be lost.” Dr. Island was a monkey again now, a new monkey that chattered from the protection of a tree twenty meters away. Nicholas threw a stick at him.

  “The monkeys are only little animals, Nicholas; they like to follow people, and they chatter.”

  “I bet Ignacio kills them.”

  “No, he likes them; he only kills fish to eat.”

  Nicholas was suddenly aware of his hunger. He began to walk.

  He found Ignacio on the beach, praying. For an hour or more, Nicholas hid behind the trunk of a palm watching him, but for a long time he could not decide to whom Ignacio prayed. He was kneeling just where the lacy edges of the breakers died, looking out toward the water; and from time to time he bowed, touching his forehead to the damp sand; then Nicholas could hear his voice, faintly, over the crashing and hissing of the waves. In general, Nicholas approved of prayer, having observed that those who prayed were usually more interesting companions than those who did not; but he had also noticed that though it made no difference what name the devotee gave the object of his devotions, it was important to discover how the god was conceived. Ignacio did not seem to be praying to Dr. Island—he would, Nicholas thought, have been facing the other way for that—and for a time he wondered if he were not praying to the waves. From his position behind him he followed Ignacio’s line of vision out and out, wave upon wave into the bright, confused sky, up and up until at last it curved completely around and came to rest on Ignacio’s back again; and then it occurred to him that Ignacio might be praying to himself. He left the palm trunk then and walked about halfway to the place where Ignacio knelt, and sat down. Above the sounds of the sea and the murmuring of Ignacio’s voice hung a silence so immense and fragile that it seemed that at any moment the entire crystal satellite might ring like a gong.