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

by Gene Wolfe

  Donovan, who had been standing a few feet away watching the screen, said, “In there, mister,” and pointed to the two outside bedrooms. “We can’t use the middle one—Lou’s on the private vidlink in there.”

  Tredgold feigned puzzlement and looked around the room. “I don’t even see one now.”

  “Two in each room,” Donovan said. “They’ll come out when they’re ready—that’s what most of the guys in the chairs are waiting for.”

  “How’s the attack going?” Peters asked. He was conscious of swaying a little and took hold of the back of a chair with one hand.

  “Great,” Donovan said. The door of the east bedroom opened and a short man in a wool suit too heavy for Portugal came out sweating; after a moment a man who had been smoking stinking Dutch cigarettes in a chair near the door got up and went in.

  “Great?” Peters asked.

  “We haven’t lost an inch of ground yet. Not an inch.”

  Peters looked at the screen. It showed a parking lot, apparently part of a shopping complex. Some broken glass lay on the asphalt, and several dead men, but nothing much seemed to be happening. Occasionally the whine of a shot came, its origin and its target equally unknowable.

  “This is our side,” Donovan explained. “The stuff near the screen. The hairies have still got those buildings over on the far side.”

  “We’re not supposed to be holding ground,” Peters said. “We’re supposed to be, you know, going forward.” He looked at his watch. “They ought to be almost to the lake shore by now.”

  “We’re regrouping,” Donovan said.

  “Listen. Will you listen to me for a minute?” Peters was aware that he was about to make some kind of fool out of himself, and that he could not prevent it. “We ought to be there, doing something, helping them. I mean we’re three men, we’re not just nothing.” He tried to make a joke of it: “Tredgold here’s smart, I’m strong and you’re Irish—we could do something.”

  Donovan looked at him blankly, then slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Yeah, sure,” and turned away. Tredgold drawled, “Another thing I forgot to tell you about l’ancien régime—the winners are those who don’t fight for it. Thought your mum would have put you wise to that already. The mums know.” After a second’s hesitation he added, “Only works while the chaps who do fight play the game, of course. No profit otherwise—no anything at all.”

  “Profit?” Peters said. “You said they didn’t really want profits, and I’ve been thinking about that and you’re right—for them profit above a certain point is just taking from each other. You said that.”

  “Did I? I suppose I did. It sounds familiar. Wait a sec, will you? All my bloody birds are nesting and I want a drink.”

  Peters called after him, “But what is it they do want?” and heard Tredgold mutter, “To hang onto their places, I should think.”

  “Ah.” Lowell Lewis put his hand on Peters’s shoulder. “You and Donovan taking care of things for us out here, Pete? How’s it going?”

  “Quiet,” Peters said.

  “You’re up on the battle, I assume?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. We’ve been getting quite a number of calls on the private link from other companies—they have a stake in this of one sort or another, and they want to know the situation. To keep from clogging General Virdon’s communications with that sort of thing I’ve arranged that we would handle them. Think you can hold down the hot seat for a while?”

  Peters nodded.

  “There’s one other thing. You remember the soldier we had on screen? The one that hippie-type boy from Philadelphia cut off?”

  “Hale,” Peters said.

  “Right. He was from the PR agency, of course; but when he had made the take that fool major who’s replacing Colonel Hopkins grabbed him; he seems to have put him in one of the combat outfits. Naturally the agency is very upset. Try to bail him out, will you?”

  Peters nodded again.

  “Fine. In an hour I’ll send in Donovan or Miss Morris, and you can bring yourself up to date.”

  Peters went into the center bedroom, trying to walk as steadily as he could, though he knew Lewis had already turned away to talk to someone else.

  The bedroom was empty and dark. The vidlink screen was flashing the identity of some caller—Peters did not bother to discover who. He drew the curtains at the far end of the room and looked out over the patio wall at the headlights of the cars on the street outside, and noted vaguely that a diagonal view showed him the same dark Atlantic that sometimes seemed ready to invade the big room from which he had come.

  There was a bathroom and he used it. He felt that he might have to vomit, but he did not.

  Communicating doors linked this bedroom with those to east and west. He tried them, and found (as he had expected) that they were locked on the other side. Outside each he listened for a moment and heard the creaking of springs and whispered words, but no laughter.

  At the vidlink he ignored the incoming calls and coded the Library of Congress, wondering if there was still anyone left there. There was, a plain-looking black girl of about twenty. He asked if she had a taped summary of American history for the last thirty years. She nodded and started to say something else, then asked, “Who is this calling, please?” and he said, “My name is Peters. I’m with United Services Corporation.”

  “Oh,” she said. And then, “Oh!” He asked her if something was the matter.

  “It’s just that I have this friend—not really a friend, someone I know—that works in the Pentagon. And he says they weren’t paid there at all for several months … but now they are getting paid again … only now the checks are from your company … . Do you know Mr. Lewis?” This was said with many pauses and hesitations.

  “I’m his assistant,” Peters said.

  “Well, would it be possible … The staff here hasn’t been paid since January … . Most of them are gone, and you wouldn’t have to pay them, of course; I live with my mother, and anything you could get for us …”

  “I don’t—” Peters began, then changed it to: “I don’t see why we couldn’t put you under military administration. I mean, nominally. Then you’d be civilian employees of the Department of Defense.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, and then, “Oh, thank you.” And then, “I—I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten what it was you wanted. I’m a graduate of Maryland—I really am. Library science.”

  “The history tape,” Peters said. “You ought to get more rest.”

  “So should you,” the girl said. “You look tired.”

  “I’m drunk.”

  “Well, we’ve had so many requests for that tape that we just looped it, you know. We run it all the time. I’ll connect you.”

  She pushed buttons on her own vidlink, and her face faded until only her mouth and bright eyes were visible, overlaying the helmeted figure of an astronaut. “All right?” she said. Peters asked, “Is this the beginning or the end?”

  “Sir?”

  “I wanted to know—” He heard the door open behind him and hit the Cut button. “Later.” The screen filled at once with incoming calls. He turned.

  It was Clio Morris. She shut the door behind her and said, “Enough to drive you crazy, isn’t it?”

  He looked at her and made some commonplace reply, paying no more attention himself to what he had said than she would. She said, “Who do I remind you of?”

  “Was I staring?” he said. “I’m sorry. Did you come to relieve me?”

  “No, just to get away from the mess out there for a while. All right if I sit down?” She sat on the bed.

  He said, “You don’t remind me of anyone.”

  “That’s good, because you remind me of somebody. Mr. Peters. I’m going to have a drink—want me to bring you one?”

  “I’ll get them,” Peters said. He stood up.

  “No, I will. Back in a minute.”

  Automatically Peters seated himself at the vidlink again and
pressed the first Ready button. A man appeared who said he wanted, quite frankly, to tell Peters his management was worried about the way things were going, and that they already had a great deal sunk in this thing and could not afford to lose more. Peters agreed that things were going poorly (which disconcerted the man) and asked for positive suggestions.

  “In what way?” the man said. “Just what do you mean?”

  “Well, we clearly need to apply greater force to Detroit than we have so far. The question, I suppose, is how do we raise the force and how we can best apply it.”

  “You certainly don’t expect us to commit ourselves to any plan with this little preparation.”

  Peters said, “I just hoped you might have a few off-the-cuff suggestions.”

  The man shook his head. “I can take the question to my management, but that’s as far as I can go.”

  Peters told the man that he had heard certain foreign countries might have soldiers for hire, and that it would be possible for the man to ask among his own employees for volunteers to fight in Detroit. The man said that he would keep that in mind and signed off, and Clio came in with two Old Fashioneds, one of which she handed to Peters. She asked him if he had got anywhere with Burglund.

  Peters shook his head. “Is that who I was talking to?”

  “Uh huh. He works for————” She named a conglomerate, and Peters, suddenly curious, asked what they made.

  “They don’t make anything,” Clio said. “Not themselves. They own some companies that make things, I suppose, and some oil tankers and real estate. Pulpwood holdings in Georgia.”

  Peters said, “I guess this is different from running pulpwood holdings in Georgia.”

  “Sure,” Clio said. She sat down on one of the beds. “That’s why Lowell is losing his war.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “Four or five months ago when he started all this I thought they could handle it—I really did.” When Peters looked at her questioningly she added, “The companies. I thought they could hold things together. So did Lou, I guess.”

  “So did I,” Peters said.

  “I know. You’re a lot like Lou—when he was younger. That’s what I meant when I said you reminded me of somebody: Lou when he was younger.”

  “You couldn’t have known him then,” Peters told her.

  “I didn’t. But about a year ago he showed me some tapes he had. They were training tapes he made twenty or twenty-five years ago. They showed him explaining some kind of machine; he was an engineer originally, you know. He looked a lot like you—he was a handsome man, and I guess he wanted me to see that he had looked like that once.”

  “You sleep with him, don’t you?”

  “I used to. Up until about six weeks ago. Now I’m trying to figure out why.”

  Peters said, “I wasn’t asking you for an explanation.”

  “I know,” the girl said. “You just wanted to find out if it was safe to fight with me, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “The formal business power structure and the informal one.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You still think there’s a chance we’ll win and you’ll have a career with U.S.”

  Peters shrugged. “With my education I don’t see anything else to shoot for—that’s something I didn’t understand until recently: you don’t get that degree, it gets you. Now, for me, it’s this or nothing.” He moved away from the vidlink and sat down beside her on the bed. The spread was satin, and he began to stroke it with his fingers.

  “You think people like Burglund are going to pull us through? I mean, really?”

  Peters was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “He won’t, but I still don’t know why not.”

  “I do,” Clio said. “I’ve been helping Lou deal with some of them. What do you think it takes to be a successful businessman? Enterprise, lots of guts, hard work, high intelligence—right?”

  “Roughly.”

  “You want to tell me how you use those things to manage a tree farm in Georgia?”

  “I don’t know,” Peters said. “I don’t know anything about the lumber business.”

  “Neither does he. Or if he does, it doesn’t do him any good. Look, they’ve got all this land, with pines growing on it. When it starts getting mature—ready to cut—anyplace, people make them offers for it: paper mills and lumber companies. And since some of it gets mature every year they know quite a bit about price—all they have to do is look up last year’s bids. When one comes in that looks good, they can tell that company to go ahead if it’s a cash deal, and if it isn’t they can look up their credit in Dun and Bradstreet. They’ve got a regular crew that comes around and replants when the cutting’s done.”

  “You make it sound easy,” Peters said.

  “No, it isn’t easy—but it isn’t your kind of hard, either. It takes a special kind of men who can go year in and year out without rocking the boat in any way. People who never get so bored with it they get careless, and that know when they have to bow to the state legislatures and when they ought to threaten to fight a new law through the courts. But now you’re telling them to get out and recruit soldiers—well, most of them were in the army themselves at one time or another, they were majors and colonels and all that, at desks, but they don’t know anything about soldiers, or thinking, or running anything that doesn’t go by routine. We used to say that what we wanted was initiative and creativity and all those things, just like we said we wanted kindness and human values, and the American frontier, while it lasted, actually encouraged and rewarded them; but we’ve been paying off on something else for a hundred years or so now, and now that’s all we’ve got.” Peters had slipped his hand between her thighs, and she looked down at it and said, “That took you a long time.”

  He said, “I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

  And later, “We still might do it.” He took her hand in the dark. “If we can change things just a little before it’s too late we still might do it.” The girl’s body blossomed fire that engulfed and scared and clung; naked and burning he reached the center of the room beyond; but he fell there, on the Moroccan carpet that covered the red tiles; and, though they poured tepid water on him from the spent ice buckets, died there.

  TRACKING SONG

  Now is the seventh winter since Troy fell, and we

  Still search beneath unfriendly stars, through every sea

  And desert isle, for Italy’s retreating strand.

  —VIRGIL

  I have found that this little device takes in my words, and then, by some mechanism I do not understand, speaks them back to me. A few moments ago I tried to discover how much it would hold, talking for a long time. It held it all. Now I have wiped all that away—there is a button for it—and begun again. I want to leave a record of what has happened to me, so that if someone comes for me, and finds me dead, he will understand. I feel that someone may, though I do not know why. And I want him to understand.

  I do not know my name. The people among whom I find myself, who have been kind to me thus far, call me Cutthroat. This is because I have a reddish-brown birthmark on my throat from one side of the hair behind my neck to the other.

  Each day shall begin with its number. This is the first day.

  These people are taller than I—my head comes only to the shoulders of their men. They say they found me in the snow an hour after the Great Sleigh passed, but what the Great Sleigh is I cannot clearly learn. I thought at first it was a nature symbol (perhaps for a snowstorm); but they say this was the first time they had ever seen it, and that they hid from it in the beginning.

  They carried me here to their camp; since then I have been able to stand up and walk a little, and I find that I can speak their language, though badly. They dress in furs, and their huts are of hides stretched over saplings and plastered with snow. Outside, the wind is blowing more snow, building drifts around the huts. I am lying on furs
; the light is a luminous fungus suspended from a rawhide thong and is very dim.

  This is the second day. I woke when one of the women came to me with a stone bowl containing a kind of soup, which may have been intended as a medicine. I asked her about it, and she said they make it by boiling the twigs of a certain tree. It is thin and rather too spicy for my taste, but invigorating. I got up and went outside, and the woman showed me where the men relieve themselves—a sheltered spot about a hundred meters from the camp.

  When I came back the men were gone—hunting, the women said. I told them I would like to have gone with them, saying that I did not want to live on their charity, and would try to contribute more food to the group than I ate. They laughed at me and said that I was too young and small to hunt with the men: This was not malicious, but very jolly and good-natured, so that I felt that I was at a party (even though I cannot remember any specific party, or in fact anything at all before last night) despite the fact that we were standing in the snow and wind, and it was intensely cold. They also laughed at my coveralls, which are very different from their fur clothes.

  Then they told me they were going to gather food, and I said I would go with them and help them; they thought this was very funny, and made up a kind of song about it, telling how I would step on the various food plants, and complain before the sun was high of the pains in my back. But when they had enjoyed themselves, Red Kluy, who I think is the headman’s mother and seems to be the chief woman of the tribe, went into one of the huts and brought out a weapon, saying that I should come with the women and protect them, and kill any game I might see while they were gathering food.

  The weapon, which I still have, consists of a wooden stock, three flat, springy lengths of bonelike (or perhaps hornlike) material, and a thong sling. It can be used to throw stones or chunks of ice, but the proper missile is a sort of bent, double-headed club of very heavy wood, some having both heads studded with points of bone or sharp chips of rock.

  We walked about three kilometers through the snow, which was somewhat less than knee-deep in most places, going in single file and taking turns at breaking the trail. The women’s feet are wrapped in hides and bound with thongs, while I have boots of some black synthetic that is warm and keeps my feet dry. Several times, we passed near trees, since Red Kluy directed us, whenever possible, to the spots where the snow was thinnest, and that most often meant the lee side of thickets.