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

by Gene Wolfe

  “If we were of your kind, what then?”

  I said, “But you are not.” I think, however, that a sort of understanding of what they were had already come to me, and I said nothing more on the subject.

  We began to walk again. “You are male,” one of them said.

  I nodded.

  “Do you have knowledge of any who are not?”

  I said, “You have already taken a woman I know—Cim Glowing.”

  Several shook their heads, and the one I had addressed said, “She is no human woman.”

  “She appeared so to me.”

  “You were deceived.”

  As we spoke, we were making our way down a long corridor with many turns. There had been windows on one side for the first few meters, but these ended as it threaded its way inward, and there remained only the dark walls, to which lamps of the kind used on the buildings outside had been affixed. Behind me I heard one of the creatures, talking to another, say, “There will be two now.”

  Then we entered a wide, dark, low-ceilinged room whose floor was scattered with crimson cushions. A little dais, not more than six centimeters high, ran about the walls; there were chairs placed arm to arm around it. Though all the others were empty, a man was seated in the one opposite the entrance we had used. He held a homed staff like mine, and Cim Glowing was chained to his chair. When he rose and came forward to meet us, I saw that he was a dwarf and very fat.

  The creatures who had brought me to him dropped to their knees as he approached. He looked me over carefully, leaning on his staff, and then said: “Don’t you see that he will die? He has a chest wound.”

  “He still walks,” one of the kneeling creatures answered. “He may yet live, if we treat him.”

  “He will die,” the dwarf said again. Cim Glowing said nothing, but looked at me in a way that broke my heart. I saw then what they had meant when they said she was not a human woman. The chain that bound her to the dwarf’s throne went to her neck.

  “Take him, then,” the dwarf said. “Treat his wound and tell me when he dies.”

  I told him that if I was going somewhere for medical treatment, I wanted to take Cim with me.

  He started to refuse; then, seeing that I was not going to leave without her, he turned on his heel and reached up to her collar. I could not see how he loosed it—it seemed to fly off at his touch. Cim ran across the room and embraced me, and I asked if she was all right.

  “Yes,” she said, “now. But they have taken my tunic. We’ll have to find it before we can leave, or I’ll freeze. How were you hurt?”

  “I don’t know. They did it when they took you.”

  “Come,” one of the creatures said. “We will treat you now. Make you well.”

  I asked him what he would do.

  “Repair your body. Some parts of you are damaged—I think it likely that one lung has been punctured. We will give you a new one, not made of weak flesh.”

  “And when I get enough parts like that, I will be like you. You said you wanted me because I was ‘complete and whole.’”

  Something like amusement twisted the thing’s face. “You think that that is how we came to be as we are. No, not at all.”

  Cim said: “I’ve been listening to them. I think there used to be far fewer of them—but they divided themselves and filled the gaps with those things that are unliving.”

  The creature said, “An interesting idea. But that too is false.”

  The dwarf, who had taken his seat again, his little legs folded beneath him, sneered, “You know nothing. You are like a child who has wandered by accident into a theater half a minute before the final curtain. You see people moving about, some masked; you hear music, observe actions you do not understand. But you do not know if the play is a tragedy or a comedy, or even know whether those you see are the actors or the audience.”

  When he spoke, all the creatures except the one who had been talking to us pressed their faces to the floor. This one motioned to us, and we followed him out of the room of thrones by another door. I asked him why everyone bowed to the dwarf.

  “He is a man,” he said. “A human. Before you came, we believed him to be the last.”

  “Then you should be concerned,” I said, “about where I came from. How do you know that there is not a community of men outside? Men, women, and children, all human, all living in a place far from you?”

  “Is there?” he asked.

  “No.” I was suddenly ashamed.

  “Then why should we be concerned? Where did you come from, if you left no thriving city of men?”

  “I don’t know; I have forgotten. A few days ago the Wiggikki found me lying in the snow—that is all I know.”

  Cim Glowing said, “You don’t have to tell him this.”

  I tried to explain what I felt. “I have no memory. But there is something behind the no-memory. I know words for many things I cannot remember ever having seen. I think of a certain thing, and begin to look for it, and then I realize that I have never possessed such a thing—that the shelves and cabinets and drawers I find in my mind do not exist. I think of other people around me; but they are not there.”

  “You do not know where you came from,” the creature said. “But I will tell you. Somewhere, far away from here, in some little valley in the hills, you were born among humans who remembered the old years and the high estate that once was man’s. There you grew, but as you grew, your people dwindled—until at last it came to you that all were older than yourself, that you were the only member of your generation. Then you watched them die, one by one, and knew that when the last was gone you would be alone, ringed by the beastmen who grub roots or gorge themselves on blood. And at length, when that day came, your mind failed you, and you wandered away from your valley and the old woman dead by her fire. Then the Wiggikki found you. Now you are happy, because you see no difference between the beasts and yourself. But we will make you whole again.”

  I said, “I know that I am not one of the Wiggikki, or the Pamigaka, or one of Cim Growing’s people But—”

  “They are filth under your feet. Or less. Look at that one who stands so near you now. If you would kill her for the joy it gives you, do so.”

  “You are right,” I said, “I could. But that is because I still have something that belongs to her.” I untied my long thong, then, from the short wrist thong of the endieva wand, and gave the wand to Cim Glowing.

  “I am speaking of moral force,” the creature continued. We turned down a narrow, dark corridor and descended a flight of steps. “If you, or He Who Rules, were to destroy her, there could be no wrong. Do you know how to use the staff you carry? A touch of the horns is death.”

  “If you expect me to kill Cim with it, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  Cim said, “I don’t believe this place he has brought us to is a place of healing.” In point of fact, it had grown so dark, as the feeble lamps grew dimmer still and were farther apart, that I could not see anything beyond the lights and shadows of Cim’s lovely face, and the flashing and glasslike eyes of the creature who had undertaken to guide us here.

  “There are various types of healing,” he said. “Physical, mental, moral.” Abruptly, he stepped away from us, and I heard a door open and close.

  Then glaring lights cut away the darkness. From its size and shape, I guessed that the room in which we found ourselves was beneath the room of thrones where the fat dwarf sat. But instead of being surrounded by a dais and ringed with shining chairs, this room was wholly empty, with a floor like the pavement of the streets of the city.

  Faintly, from the opposite side, we heard a dull click, as though a door bolt had been drawn back. Cim pressed herself against me. “He is sending someone in to kill us,” she said. Then a door, one of three that faced us across the wide expanse of gritty floor, swung back.

  The man who entered was not as large as Nashhwonk, but he had to stoop to get through the doorway. He had a wild yellow beard and long, tangled h
air that stood out from his head in a way that made it seem too large for his shoulders, though they were twice the width of mine.

  But these were not the things I noticed first. Nor, I think, the things that anyone would notice first. Before anything else, I saw his eyes: They were huge, and yellow as gold. And after that, I saw the way he moved. Cim Glowing is beautiful, and walks with liquid grace; but sometimes she looks clumsy beside him.

  I think I had guessed who he was before she called his name. “Ketin,” she said, and raised the endieva wand as though to strike, backing away until her shoulders were against the wall.

  “Yes, Ketin,” the bearded man said. His voice was like a storm five kilometers off. He shook the door beside the one through which he had come, and the muscles of his back knotted until they looked like tawny boulders swept bare by the wind.

  I was frightened—but, in a way, unafraid too. That is to say, I felt my physical weakness, and I knew that Ketin would be a deadly antagonist. But at the same time, I knew, or thought I knew, that Cim had been wrong when she had said, “He is sending someone in to kill us.”

  I told Ketin, “I feel certain you’ll find all the others locked as well.”

  “Ah,” said Ketin, and he turned as though he were made of smoke. “You know this place, then.”

  “No, but I understand it.”

  For an instant, that stopped him. I saw doubt cross his face like a shadow. “And who are you?” he said. And then, “You are the one who is tracking the Great Sleigh.”

  “I was.”

  “I heard of you just before they took me. My friend—I had him under my hand, you see, like this, and I tickled him for a moment before I killed him, and asked him to tell me the news—my friend told me you had spent the night among his people, then set out again on the track of the Great Sleigh. I could kill you—or her—as I killed him, and if you do not tell me the way out, I will play small games with you until you do.”

  “You could not kill me, Ketin.”

  Ketin smiled, very slightly, and began to cross the room to us.

  “Wait for a moment, and listen. The whole object in putting us in here was that I should kill you. I could never do it in a fair fight, of course. But this staff is a deadly weapon—in some way that I do not understand. For me to kill you would be self-defense, but I would be proud of it soon, and I would begin to see people like you and Cim as different from myself.”

  “You would be right to be proud,” Ketin said, “if you killed Ketin.”

  “I am prouder of not having killed you thus far. And I think I know how we may escape from here. Look upward. The lights don’t illuminate the ceiling, but I suspect your night vision is better than mine. What do you see?”

  “Log supporting the roof.”

  “There will be a door in the roof somewhere. A door that swings down.”

  “I see none.” Ketin shifted his position, his face turned upward.

  Cim said, “Cutthroat, how do you know?” She was looking too.

  “There has to be. This room is under the throne room. It is large, and yet it has no furnishings; and Ketin was kept in an adjoining room ready to be loosed on whoever might find themselves in here. The kind of mind that would want such a room would also want to be able to drop its enemies into here. It agrees with the nature of this whole shoddy palace—pretentious, unplanned, seemingly built on whim, of parts stripped from better buildings put up long before it. Childish.”

  “Are you sure? Then why didn’t they drop us down?”

  “I would guess that the control is built into the dwarf’s chair. He would be the one who ordered this place built, but he wasn’t the person who wanted us down here. For one thing, I have the staff and could use it to kill Ketin. Was he cruel to you?”

  “Sometimes,” Cim said. “But not in the way I expected—not like Fishcatcher would have been.”

  Ketin rumbled, “I think you deceive me—or are deceived yourself.”

  I shook my head and pointed with the staff. “There it is.”

  Ketin walked toward me; and though, when he was close, I realized that he was even bigger than he seemed, I was no longer afraid of him. “I see him now,” he said. He crouched, then sprang and grasped the beams that supported the throne-room floor.

  “I missed it,” Cim admitted, “and it was right there in the center where all of us should have seen it.”

  “It had to be—the dwarf would want to drop people who were standing before his chair. But people like you and Ketin—and the Wiggikki, so I noticed—always stay toward the edge of any enclosure. You were even running at one side of the track of the Great Sleigh when I found you. You want to see without being seen, and to have some kind of wall against which to put your backs if you are attacked.”

  “And you go out in the middle,” Cim said. “That bothers me sometimes. In that way you are more like the dwarf—Mantru is his name—than like us. While I was his captive, I noticed that he walked in the middle too.”

  Overhead, the latch that held the trap in the throne-room floor creaked, then broke with a bang and came clattering down. The trap door swung down behind it, and Ketin, for all his size, was through it almost faster than my eyes could follow him. Above, someone screamed.

  “Can you jump up there, Cutthroat?” Cim asked. “I doubt that Ketin will come back for us.”

  Before I got the wound, it would have been easy. Now it took all my strength; it was all I could do to cling to the edge of the opening. I swung my feet, but could not get them high enough to catch the other side. I felt something pull loose, and blood began to seep from under my leather bandage. Then Ketin appeared and, grasping the knotted coveralls around my waist, pulled me up.

  The hall was deserted save for four crablike red things that slipped in blood as they scuttled blindly along the floor. I looked at them more closely and saw that they were two of the Min. The mechanical parts of their bodies still lived, though Ketin had torn them apart at the waist. Now he was roving the room as if he expected to find someone hidden behind the chairs. When I got my breath, I told him that I thought I remembered the route by which Cim and I had been taken to the room under the throne room, and that I would follow it and release her.

  He said, “No need,” and jumped into the trap doorway. In a moment he was back, with Cim tucked under his arm like a parcel. She looked frightened when he put her down, but she had held onto my staff and the endieva wand. “Now we can go,” Ketin grunted.

  I said, “We have to find Cim’s coat.”

  “Mine too. They took it from me.” For the first time, it struck me that Ketin was nearly naked; I remembered that his mate had worn a smock of tattered furs.

  We set off down the first corridor we found, but we had not gone twenty meters when a projectile of some sort—I suppose one of the type that had wounded me the night Cim was taken—passed between Ketin’s head and my own and thudded into the wall behind us. He wanted to push forward, but I stopped him, telling him that we would certainly be killed.

  “I am not afraid.”

  “All right, then, I’m afraid enough for both of us. And they’ll kill us both whether we’re afraid or not. We’re going back.”

  “But Ketin and I can’t go outside like this,” Cim said. “We’ll die that way too.”

  “There’s a whole city out there—inside the cave where it’s warm. There’s certain to be something in there you can use for clothing.” I had already drawn them back with me as I spoke; in a few seconds we were in the circular throne room again.

  As we threaded the crooked corridor down which I had been led only a short time before, I thought I had lost my way. Then we were outside in cleaner air, where the towering, naked skeletons of the ancient buildings reared proud heads above the jumbled heap of the dwarf’s castle.

  The Min did not pursue us; for hours we tramped down endless aisles of silent mechanisms. For a long time I wondered where the builders of the buildings had lived. There should have been comfortable r
ooms somewhere, places for eating and sleeping and perhaps for recreation. But we found nothing but the stark rows of metal arms and hands, and wheels and strange tools and lights. At last I realized that the “city”—as I had become accustomed to calling it—was not really a city at all, only a vast complex of storage buildings, located here underground where the machines would be protected from the weather for all time. The builders, whoever they had been, had lived on the surface, and all—or nearly all—had perished there long ago. I remembered the cart to which the machine I had found still operating had directed me, and in which I had found the white cubes of concentrated food I still carried, and I realized that it must have served the construction workers—or rather, their masters, because the workers must have been the machines themselves.

  This thought had no sooner entered my mind than I realized that we were near the place where I had stumbled upon the great mechanism that had carried me to the cart. I told Cim Glowing and Ketin to follow me and led them to him.

  He was standing just as I had left him. Perhaps he recognized me—his head moved, dully gleaming, as we came down the aisle. I could have imagined that there was an expression of welcome in the blind eyes that are only lights, but that is impossible. When I asked him if he would do as I said, his huge, toothed claw of a hand came up to touch his chin. I told him to search the city for more machines that, like himself, were still operable.

  He found two. One has no arms or hands but a long flexible neck and three-meter jaws. It crawls like a snail, and I have named it “Dragon.” The other walks on six legs, lifting three and then the second three. It has four arms, of which two are large and two smaller. I call this machine “Bug.” With these, Roller and I returned to the ramshackle palace.

  For some reason, I had expected to find the Min outside, ready to defend it, but there were none in sight. I explained to the three machines that we were looking for warm clothing; I made certain they understood what clothing was. Then I ordered them to begin disassembling the dwarf’s building, and to continue until they found it.