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

by Gene Wolfe

  By the time I threaded my way above those cold pools, the wall-less towers loomed above me, and the light seemed pitiless. I continued on, only, I think, because I was driven by a kind of fatalism: I would not go back without having attempted the rescue of Cim Glowing; also, if I did not soon find food I would die. The city held Cim Glowing, and perhaps food as well; it had no night, and so this time was as favorable as any other to approach it.

  As it was, I believe I was not seen. There were no sentries; and if there had ever been, they must have died and their bodies rotted away a thousand years ago. There were only the wide streets, and the smooth frames of the buildings, rising floor above floor in stacks of geometric planes. The streets seemed too open, too naked, too undefended to be left unplundered; the lowest floor of a building near me was only a meter or so above the level of the paving around it. I climbed onto it and entered the building.

  There is no point in my recording all my wanderings among the machines there, and I don’t remember everything I saw in enough detail to do justice to it. Most were quite incomprehensible to me; all seemed very old. Some had windows of glass, but these were dead and dark. Some were shaped like travesties of men; others like strange animals, with jointed bodies.

  I was not going to tell, when I began to tell about this, what I did with one of the man-shaped machines—but it may be important, and, however foolish I was, no immediate harm seems to have come of it.

  I had crossed a street, leaving the building I had originally entered and going into another. The machine stood toward the back of an alcove that branched from a secondary corridor. I have been thinking about it, and I wonder if it is not possible that almost all the machines are broken, and that this one, which is not broken (or at least not so badly broken as the others), was overlooked long ago because of its obscure position.

  For an instant, it looked so much like an enormous man that I was astonished—that was what made me turn and walk toward it. Yet it was not like a man at all. Its arms were too long, and its hands were hooked and toothed. I never found its eyes—the things I had taken for eyes were only lights—and its legs were two wheels, on which it balanced. (The fact that it had not tipped over, as had the others, may have been what drew my attention to it originally; it seemed to be a living thing, standing among dead metal.) I walked toward it, and it spoke to me.

  I do not believe that I shall ever forget that instant. It was as though a stone had spoken; yet, after having been alone since Cim Glowing was taken, quite suddenly there were two of us again. The tone was harsh but not unfriendly, and though it spoke the same language I am using now, there were complexities in the pronunciation of certain words that I will not try to reproduce. I was so startled at first that I did not understand what it had said. It repeated the phrase for me: “Prepared to receive instructions.”

  The second time, I was able to say, “I have no instructions to give you.”

  It made no reply. My first impulse was to run; my second was to hide. And yet, it did not seem strange to me to talk to a machine, although I am sure that Longknife (to choose an example at random) would have been terrified at such a thing, if he had understood what was happening at all. After a time, when the machine said nothing else and there was no other sound in all the silent cavern, I got courage enough to say, “How long have you stood here?”

  “I have no mechanism for recording the passage of time.”

  “But you are aware of it?”

  “I am aware that others possess such mechanisms.”

  “Where can I find something to eat?”

  “At the cart.”

  One of the vampires—attracted, I suppose, by the sound of our voices—had come flittering into the building; now it was darting in broken lines among the motionless machines. I was afraid we would draw more if we continued to talk, but I said, “Where is that?”

  “There.” One of his arms lifted to point the way. I suppose it had been hundreds of years, if not thousands, since he had moved it last. It trembled at the beginning of the motion as though some control mechanism were sticking; but by the time it had completed its gesture the trembling was gone, and it returned to his side as smoothly as though it had been assembled yesterday.

  The direction to which he had pointed coincided with no corridor. I was afraid that I would miss the place he meant (if it existed at all). I asked him if he could take me there.

  He said, “Yes,” and before I could protest, he had seized me in his great metal hands and lifted me to the top of the structure I had considered his head. There was a low railing around it, like a coronet—enough to keep me from falling off if I remained seated.

  I would have lost the endieva wand had it not been for the thong. As it was, by the time I pulled it up to me, he had begun to roll forward. The vampire fled screaming. We left the corridor outside the alcove and entered another, and after traversing that for a kilometer or more we entered a third; by that time we were so deep in the shadowy interior of the building that I had lost all sense of direction. At last we stopped at a point that looked no different from any other. Before I could ask him to do so, he lifted me from his head and and placed me gently on the floor. A closed and enigmatic structure, without wheels or—so far as I could see—any other means of motion, stood before me. There was a door in its side, but no handle. I touched it, and after a moment I tried to pull it open with my fingernails, but it remained tightly closed.

  “It should have admitted you,” the machine said behind me. I had a sudden, irrational feeling that the faceless, boxlike thing had identified me as an imposter and that it was about to tell him. Instead, he reached over my head and caught the edge of the door with the tip of his hand.

  Something in the door snapped, and it slid open. Inanely I said, “You broke it.”

  “It was already inoperative or it would have admitted you.”

  I entered. The “cart” had once been filled with foodstuffs, perhaps. But most of it had spoiled so long ago that no odor of rot remained, and even the gray dust that lay where it had once been no longer smelled of mold. After twenty minutes of rummaging, I found a metal box of hard white cubes which showed no sign of decay. I licked one: it tasted acid, but with a mingling of salt—a taste much too strong, but I had already half-guessed that the cubes were meant to be dissolved. I slipped the box into my pocket and went out, asking the machine, which I found waiting patiently outside, to return us to the point at which I had discovered him.

  I left him there and made my way to the crevice where I spent last night. There I emptied the cubes from the box and melted one in water dipped from the stream. It made a wonderfully strengthening drink, like nothing else I can remember having tasted. When I finished it, I was no longer hungry. I dried the box and repacked the remainder of the cubes in it; then, feeling somewhat insecure so near the floor of the cavern, I climbed up to this ledge, where I will sleep tonight.

  The tenth day. With three of the machines, we made our way out; now I have asked them to halt for the night where they will give us shelter from the wind. We have set up our camp about three kilometers from the mouth of the cave. Tomorrow we will go south looking for the track.

  The wound in my side is better, I think, though it still bothers me more or less constantly and sometimes is excruciatingly painful.

  This morning when I awoke, I climbed down the cave wall and went into the city, determined to find Cim Glowing. I was two streets past the building in which yesterday I discovered the first machine—which I have named “Roller,” from its wheels—when I almost collided with a creature of the kind that took Cim. In retrospect, the incident is more than a little ridiculous, since I was trying to be exceedingly cautious; I cannot, however, say I thought it amusing at the time.

  I was about to turn a corner when he stepped around it. Recalling the weapon that wounded me three days ago, I did not run from him—I do not know what he would have done if I had—only back-pedaled and threw the endieva wand up at him. It st
ruck his left shoulder, where he seemed to be wholly machine, and dropped to the ground. He rushed for me then, but I was able to duck under one outstretched arm and reel in the wand on its cord—enough to get it whirling—and cast it at him as he turned. I aimed at his face and hit the wrong side; but I had the wand under control now and was able to pull it back immediately and cast again. It grazed his left cheek. That was all that was necessary; I saw a thin line of blood form there, and his left eye lost its focus. He fell to his knees—in that position he was not much taller than I—and I watched the human part of him die.

  I think that half or more of his brain was mechanical, because it was a long time before he stopped moving. For several minutes after the flesh was dead his arms still reached for me, and he tried to crawl after me. He could not walk—that saved me. I suppose that was because his organs of balance were still pieces of what had once been his living body, and when they died as the poison spread, he could not stand.

  For a time I waited for the machinery to die as well, but it was very tenacious of life—or whatever it was that it could be said to have. I dodged his hands and kicked at his head several times, but the sound, like the ringing of a dull gong, was too loud in the empty streets, and I stopped. After a time I left him, still twitching and trying to drag himself along. I was very warm in these coveralls after the activity. I thought of taking them off altogether, but I did not want to carry them, or to leave them—with this recorder and the firemaker, my shaver, knife, and so forth—behind. Eventually I settled on opening the front and slipping the upper half of my body out to cool off. I was able to knot the arms around my waist to form a belt, and this made quite a comfortable arrangement, well suited to the temperature of the cave. Now I believe that this was extremely important.

  I do not think I will ever forget walking through the city. The streets were very wide (though I stayed close to the buildings, and frequently cut through them), and there were more streets curving overhead at times. The builders had developed, so it seemed, an almost unfailing light, and lamps still burned dimly from the underside of the overstreets and from the entrances, cornices, and interiors of all the skeletal buildings.

  I had gone several kilometers when I noticed a change in the appearance of the pavement on which I walked. For a time, I could not imagine what it might be. I cast my mind back over the distance I had traversed and found I could visualize the streets quite well, and that I had a vivid memory of the one in which I had fought the creature whose mechanical elements refused to die; nevertheless, it was some time before I understood the difference between what I had seen then and the darker shade I noticed now. At last I reached down and touched the stony material on which I walked. It was slightly damp.

  In the dryness of the cave, that seemed impossible. The ledge on which I slept last night had been perfectly dry, and so had the level cave floor stretching between the walls and the city. And I felt certain that the street where I had fought the man-machine had been dry. I touched the supports of a building, thinking vaguely that some underground analogue to rain had taken place; but, though smooth, they felt quite dry. But the street itself might have just been washed.

  Then I saw the kluy. It was lying on the opposite side of the street, just in the corner formed by the base of the building there, and made a splash of scarlet against the dark gray of the damp pavement and the lighter gray of the building’s metal. My first thought was that it had been placed there to bait a trap for me, but there was nothing around it to indicate that—it was simply the red flower of the kluy, with a few centimeters of stem and half a dozen leaves, just as I had found it several times blooming under the snow.

  When I crossed the street and picked it up, I found that it was not a real flower at all. It was made of stone, of thin petals of stone like the stone of the stalactites, dyed scarlet. The leaves were of the same material, though they had been notched to approximate the leaves of the kluy and stained to a translucent green. The stem was a cave formation, a thin tube of stone, and in the center of the petals was a gem.

  Looking farther down the street, I saw several more of these flowers: not only red, but yellow, white, and blue—all lying on the pavement as though they had been scattered there by the wind—though that was impossible: there was no wind, and the slightest drop would have smashed them to bits. Wondering, I walked on, and found that they lay closer and closer together as I advanced. Then, on an impulse, I entered one of the buildings, and running down long, dim corridors lined with silent machines, I crossed to the opposite side, fronting on the next street. It had not been washed, and there were no flowers there.

  After resting for a few minutes (the running had made my wound ache), I went back to the street of stone flowers. It was possible—indeed it seemed likely—that someone knew I was coming. But if this was the case, it was unreasonable to suppose that I would deceive them for long by shifting to another street. On the other hand, there was a chance that the flowers had no connection with me at all. For all I knew they might have lain there, in the unchanging air of the cavern, for hundreds, or even thousands, of years, and the dampness could be the result of some unrelated cause. If that was the case, the street must lead toward something of interest. Perhaps it was only fatalism, but I continued to walk toward the center of the city, at first keeping close to the margin of one of the wall-less buildings as I had before, but soon being forced to the center of the street by the flowers, which grew more thickly as I went forward, filling the area near the foundations of the buildings.

  Soon I saw, briefly, a living figure. Several hundred meters ahead, one of the tall, lurching creatures who had taken Cim Glowing darted into the street. In its exact center, he placed upright what appeared to be a pole topped with a pair of slender and nearly parallel horns. Then he dashed back into the building from which he had come.

  I was already holding Cim’s endieva wand, but I checked the coiled thong to make certain it would run free, made a few practice spins with the wand itself, and went slowly forward, expecting to be attacked with each step I took.

  Nothing happened. I felt sure I was being watched from the buildings to either side, but no assault was launched against me. As I came nearer the forked pole, I saw that it was not, as I had supposed, a plain wooden shaft, but was of some gray metal, lightly and intricately figured with geometric designs interspersed with faces. The horns were gracefully curved antennae. At first, their surfaces seemed rough. When I was close enough to touch the staff, I saw that they were actually covered with script so fine that it would be nearly impossible to read even in a good light, script of a form I felt certain I had never seen before. It seemed clear that I was intended to take the staff, though it would prevent my carrying the endieva wand at the ready. After considering for a moment, I shifted the thong to my right hand and took up the horned staff with my left.

  It felt as though I had touched a snake. My eyes told me that nothing had happened; the staff was still stiff and straight, with its antennae stretched upward. But my fingers felt a being: cold, living, and muscular. For a moment I nearly dropped it, and I am certain now that if I had, I would have been killed. But because, for all its sensation of living power, there was also a feeling of pliancy—of obedience, almost like the obedience of my own limbs—I did not. Although it was light, I set it on my shoulder.

  At once the street was no longer empty. Things of the kind that had taken Cim—I have learned that they call themselves the Min—came from every doorway, and even leaped from the floors above, landing, clanging and flat-footed, shattering the stone blossoms so that the gems from their centers skittered underfoot. I started to run, but they prostrated themselves in front of me.

  Seeing that, I stopped and waited for them to speak, but they did not. At last, when, seeing that they would not harm me, I bent to touch one, they rose until they were kneeling before me with open hands; and then, very gently and courteously, they took me by the arm and began to draw me farther down the flower-decked stre
et until we reached the point where all the streets converged. A monstrous building stood there—huge and sprawling, as unlike all the other structures in the city as it was possible for it to be: walled, and spiney with turrets and balconies. It was still under construction; the material that lay about it seemed all salvage, stolen from the silent, naked towers.

  We entered this place by stepping through what appeared to me to be a low, wide window. I had not been certain, until that moment, that the creatures who escorted me could speak; but as we went in I heard several muttering behind me. Though I could not make out what was said, it sounded like the speech of the Wiggikki and all the other peoples I had met. I turned to one of them and asked where they were taking me.

  “To the high seat, the place of judgment.”

  Another said, “To the abode of purity.”

  “Why?” I asked them.

  “You are complete and whole, perfect.”

  “And you are not?”

  The creature to whom I had been speaking halted and turned to face me. That was the first time, I think, that I realized that their faces were not simply horrors—that they were capable of expression, though in some ways it seemed, at times, that the mechanical parts were actually more responsive to their emotions than were the fragments of the original organism (which were, in any case, different in each individual) that remained. Something—at that time I thought it was anger, but it may have been despair—contorted the jumble of metal and plastic that was his features. He said: “We are as you see us!”

  “I apologize,” I said. “I am not accustomed to your appearance, and to me you seem perfect of your kind.”

  Another, standing behind me, said, “What of your kind?”

  My expression must have shown him that I did not understand what he meant.