Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I’m sorry,” says Roger-Prime. “I understand what you’re saying. But it’s not enough.” The rogue’s eyes widen; Roger hears a sound behind him. He glances over his shoulder. It is Catherine, dressed in a blue jumpsuit, looking no older than he remembers her. “Well, hello,” he says. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  “Good work, Roger.” Her left hand smooths an antimacassar, and her right keeps her gun trained on the rogue’s chest. “You can lower your weapon. Doctor Shapiro, if your present circumstances are as melancholy as you indicate, you’re lucky we caught up with you when we did.”

  “It would be so simple if you’d just shoot me,” says the rogue.

  “What are you going to do?” Roger asks her.

  “Shift him back to his home sequence. My base and his have linked equipment: our sensors isolate and amplify his signal, and they do the actual recalling. When he gets home, he’ll have some minor surgery.”

  “I assumed that. I meant, what are you going to do with him after they’ve removed his portable shifter? What happens then?” She looks blank. “Catherine, he’s a murderer. He has to be tried.”

  “Of course,” she says. She is thumbing her left palm. The chips embedded in the rogue’s neck have begun to glow a deeper color, an almost-peach.

  “Wait,” pleads Roger-Rogue. He points. Slowly Roger-Prime picks up the photograph of the happy newlyweds and hands it to the scientist. “Thank you,” says the older man. He looks at the picture as if he has never seen it before. The blood trickling down his neck turns orange-red in the glow from the chips. The rogue looks at his dead wife, then at Catherine. “You’re nothing alike,” he pronounces. “You looked exactly alike, and you’re nothing alike.” Puzzled, she frowns. Roger looks again at his older persona, and sees his face begin to crumble from the forehead down, wrinkle and crumble and twist with anguish. All at once, Roger-Prime feels the way he felt facing the skeletons in the cataclysm sequence. He backs off, awash with dread. It’s me, he thinks, knowing it with a certainty with which he has known nothing else. It’s me, dear Christ, it really is me. Everything squandered. All the richness.

  He hears Catherine say, “They’re transferring him—now.” The peach light spreads suddenly over the rogue and swallows him. An instant later, he is gone. “Are you all right?” the woman asks him. “I drifted; they had to recall me and send me out again after you. You’re all bloody; did you know that?”

  “My head’s empty,” he says.

  “Your base lost you when I transferred you out of the cataclysm sequence. I’m afraid you’re going to have to shift home with me; it’ll be easier to project you to your own sequence from our base. Is that all right?”

  “Sure, Company Lady.” He sticks the rogue’s burner into his pocket. Her eyes are narrowed, trying to fathom him. “Bravo for us, huh?” He grins. “We caught him. No more bartender-Shapiros biting the dust. He married us in this sequence, you know.”

  “That’s sick.” READY FOR TRANSFER, her base says in his head.

  “I think I understand it. I think he and I are a lot more alike than you and I.”

  But she surprises him. “We’ve all been beached and set adrift, Roger,” she says. “That, and hugged the coastline waiting for the perfect wind to blow. And he’s by no means the worst of us. I’ve sat at our scanners longer than you have, I think.” She pauses, then smiles back at him. “There are no safe harbors.”

  They both laugh. “Then we’d better get a move on,” he says. “New tide’s in. And I’m sick to death of the shallows.” He feels the pad in his back pocket. I’ll do it for you, Shep, he thinks. For you and Roj and Dodger and all of us. Who knows? Now that our three bases have started to work together, maybe we’ll find one of us who’s a publishers. The possibilities are endless.

  When the transfer comes, he is ready.

  GENE WOLFE

  The Cat

  Gene Wolfe is perceived by many critics to be one of the best—perhaps the best—SF and fantasy writers working today. His tetralogy The Book of the New Sun—consisting of The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch—is being hailed as a masterpiece, quite probably the standard against which all subsequent science-fantasy books of the ’80s will be judged; ultimately, it may prove to be as influential as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. The Shadow of the Torturer won the World Fantasy Award. The Claw of the Conciliator won the Nebula Award. Wolfe also won a Nebula Award for his story “The Death of Doctor Island.” His other books include Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and The Devil in a Forest. His short fiction—including many of the best stories of the seventies—has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories and Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days. His most recent book is The Castle of the Otter, a book about the writing of The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe lives in Barrington, Illinois, with his wife and family, where he is the editor of the trade publication Plant Engineering.

  Here—in the first and (so far) only short story set in the universe of Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun—he takes us to the mysterious House Absolute, home of the Autarch Severian and of the sinister and enigmatic Father Inire, for a strange tale of stalking impalpable creatures and a revenge that reaches from beyond the stars …

  I am Odilo the Steward, the son of Odilo the Steward. I am he who is charged by our Autarch Severian the Great—whose desires are the dreams of his subjects—with the well-being of the Hypogeum Apotropaic. It is now the fifth year of his reign.

  As all who know the ways of our House Absolute (and I may say here that I neither hope nor wish for other readers) are aware, our Hypogeum Apotropaic is that part devoted to the needs and comforts of Father Inire; and in the twenty years in which I have given satisfaction (as I hope) at my post, and in the years before them when I assisted my father, also Odilo the Steward, I have seen and heard many a strange thing. My father likewise.

  This evening, when I had reached a respite in the unending tasks entailed by such a position as mine, I took myself, as my custom is, to the culina magna of our hypogeum to obtain some slight refreshment. The cooks’ labors too were ended or nearly; and half or more, with a kitchen boy or three and a gaggle of scullery maids, sat about the dying fire, seeking, as such people will, to amuse one another by diverse boasts and recitals.

  Having little better to do and being eager to rest, I bid the chief cook surrender his chair to me and heard them as I ate. It is now Hallowmas Eve (which is to say, the full of the Spading Moon) and their talk had turned to all manner of ghosts and bogeys. In the brief time required for me to chew my bread and beef and sluice them down with hot spiced ale, I heard such recountings of larva, lemures, and the like as would terrify every child in the Commonwealth—and make every man in it laugh most heartily.

  So I myself laughed when I returned here to my study, where I will scrutinize and doubtless approve the bills of fare for Hallowmas; and yet I find I am bemused by these tales and lost amid many wondering speculations. As every thinking man acknowledges, mighty powers move through this dark universe of Briah, though for the most part hidden from us by its infinite night. Is it not every man’s duty to record what little he has glimpsed that may give light to it? And do not such idle tales as I heard by the fire but serve to paint yet blacker that gloom through which we grope? I am therefore determined to set down here, for the enlightenment (as it may be) of my successors and whoever else may read, the history, whole and in entire in so far as I know it, of a series of incidents that culminated (as I believe) this night ten years gone. For the earlier events, I give the testimony of my father, Odilo the Steward also, a contemporary of the Chatelaine Sancha.

  She was (so my father said) an extraordinarily charming child, with the face of a peri and eyes that were always laughing, darker than most exulted children but so tall that she might have been supposed, at the age of seven or eight, to be a young woma
n of sixteen.

  That such a child should have attracted the attention of Father Inire is scarcely to be wondered at. He has always been fond of children (and particularly of girls), as the oldest records of our hypogeum shows; and I sometimes think that he has chosen to remain on Urth as a tutor to our race because he finds even the wisest of us to be children in his sight. Permit me to say at once that these children have often benefited from his attention. It is true, perhaps, that they have sometimes suffered for it, but that has been seldom and I think by no means by his wish.

  It has ever been the custom of the exultants resident in our House Absolute to keep their children closely confined to their own apartments and to permit them to travel the ten thousand corridors that wind such distances beneath the surface of the land (even so far as the Old Citadel of Nessus, some say) only under the watchful eyes of some trustworthy upper servant. And it has ever been the custom of those children to escape the upper servants charged with their supervision whenever they can, to join in the games of the children of the staff, so much more numerous, and to wander at will through the numberless leagues of the ten thousand corridors, by which frolic many have been lost at one time or another, and some forever.

  Whenever Father Inire encounters such a child not already known to him, he speaks to her, and if her face and her answers please him, he may pause in the conduct of great affairs to tell her some tale of the worlds beyond Dis. (No person grown has heard these tales, for the children do not recall them well enough to recount them afterward, though they are often quite charmed by them; and before they are grown themselves they have forgotten them, as indeed I have forgotten all but a few scraps of the tale Father Inire once told me.) If he cannot take the time for that, he often confers upon the child some many-hued toy of the kind that wise men and humble men such as I, and all women and children, call magical.

  Should he encounter that child a second time, as often happens, he asks her what has become of the toy, or whether she wishes to hear some other story from his store. Should he find that the toy remains unbroken and that it is still in the possession of the child, he may give another, and should the child ask politely (for Father Inire values courtesy above all knowledge) he may tell another. But if, as only very rarely happens, the child has received a toy and exhibits it still whole, but asks on this occasion for a tale of the worlds beyond Dis instead of a second toy, then Father Inire takes that child as a particular friend and pupil for so long as she—or more rarely he—may live. (I boast no scholarship of words, as you that have read this account do already well know; but once I heard a man who was such a scholar say that this word pupil in its most ancient and purest state denominates the image of oneself one sees in another’s eyes.)

  Such a pupil Sancha became, one winter morning when she was of seven years or thereabout and my father much the same. All her replies must have pleased Father Inire; and he was doubtless returning to his apartments in our Hypogeum Apotropaic from some night-long deliberation with the Autarch. He took her with him; and so my father met them, as he often told me, in that white corridor we call the Luminary Way. Even then, when my father was only a child himself, he was struck by the sight of them walking and chatting together, Father Inire bent nearly double, like a gnome in a nursery book, with no more nose than an alouatte; Sancha already towering over him, straight as a sapling, sable of hair and bright of eye, with her cat in her arms.

  Of what passed between them in Father Inire’s apartments, I can only relay what Sancha herself told a maid called Aude, many years later. Father Inire showed the girl many wonderful and magical appurtenances, and at last that marvelous circle of specula by whose power a living being may be coalesced from the ethereal waves, or, should such a being boldly enter them, circumfused to the borders of Briah. Then Sancha, doubtless thinking it but a toy, cast her cat into the circle. It was a gray cat, so my father told me, with many stripes of a darker gray.

  Knowing Father Inire as I have been privileged to know him these many years, I feel certain he must have promised poor Sancha that he would do all that lay in his power to retrieve her pet, and that he must have kept faithfully to that promise. As for Sancha, Aude said she believed the cat the only creature Sancha was ever to love, beyond herself; but that, I think, was spite; and Aude was but a giddypate, who knew the Chatelaine only when she was old.

  As I have often observed, rumor in our House Absolute is a self-willed wind. Ten thousand corridors there well may be (though I, with so many more immediate concerns, have forborne to count them), and a million chambers or more; and in truth no report reaches them all. And yet in a day or less, the least gossip comes to a thousand ears. So it became known, and quickly, that the girl Sancha was attended by some fey thing. When she and some friend sat alone at play, a pochette was knocked from a table and broken, or so it was said. On another occasion, a young man who sat conversing with Sancha (who must, I should think, have been somewhat older then) observed the ruffled body of a sparrow lying on the carpet at her feet, though she could scarcely have sat where she did without stepping upon it, had it been present when they began their talk.

  Of the scandal concerning the Sancha and a certain Lomer, then seneschal to the Chatelaine Nympha, I shall say nothing—or at least very little, although the matter was only too well known at the time. She was still but a child, being then fourteen years of age, or as some alleged, fifteen. He was a man of nearly thirty. They were discovered together in that state which is too easily imagined. Sancha’s rank and age equally exempted her from formal punishment; her age and her rank equally ensured that the the disrepute would cling to her for life. Lomer was sentenced to die; he appealed to the Autarch, and as the Chatelaine Nympha exerted herself on his behalf, his appeal was accepted. He was sent to the antechamber to await a hearing; but if his case was ever disposed of, I do not recall it. The Chatelaine Leocadia, who was said to have concocted the affair to injure Nympha, suffered nothing.

  When Sancha came of age, she received a villa in the south by her father’s will, so becoming the Chatelaine Sancha. The Autarch Appian permitted her to leave our House Absolute at once; and no one was surprised, my father said, to hear soon after that she had wed the heir of Fors—it was a country family not liable to know much of the gossip of the court, nor apt to care greatly for what it heard, while the Chatelaine was a young woman of some fortune, excellent family, and extraordinary beauty. Insofar as we interested ourselves in her doings, she then vanished for the space of fifty years.

  During the third year in which I performed the consequential charge that had once been my father’s, she returned and requested a suite in this hypogeum, which Father Inire granted in observance of their old friendship. At that time, I conversed with her at length, it being necessary to arrange a thousand details to her satisfaction.

  Of the celebrated beauty that had been hers, only the eyes remained. Her back was as bent as Father Inire’s, her teeth had been made for her by a provincial ivory-turner, and her nose had become the hooked beak of a carrion bird. For whatever reason, her person now carried a disagreeable odor; she must have been aware of it, for she had ordered fires of sandalwood to counter it.

  Although she never mentioned her unfortunate adventure in our hypogeum, she described to me, in much greater detail than I shall give here, her career at Fors. Suffice it to say that she had borne several children, that her husband was dead, and that her elder son now directed the family estate. The Chatelaine did not get along well with his wife and had many disagreeable ancedotes to relate of her, of which the worst was that she had once denounced the Chatelaine as a gligua, such being the name the autochthons of the south employ for one who has traffic with diakka, casts spells, and the like.

  Till that time, no thought of the impalpable cat said to accompany this old woman had crossed my mind; but the odd word suggested the odd story, and from that moment I kept the most careful watch, though I neither saw nor heard the least sign of the phantom. Several times I soug
ht to lead our talk to her former relations with Father Inire or to the subject of felines per se—remarking, for example, that such an animal might be a source of comfort to one now separated by some many leagues from her family. The first evoked only general praises of Father Inire’s goodness and learning, and the latter talk of birds, marmosets, and similar favorites.

  As I was about to go, Aude (whom I had assigned to the Chatelaine Sancha’s service already, for the Chatelaine had brought but little staff with her from Fors) entered to complain that she had not been told the Chatelaine had a pet, and that it would be necessary to arrange for its food and the delivery of clean sand. The Chatelaine quite calmly denied she possessed such an animal and demanded that the one Aude reported be expelled from the suite.

  As the years passed, the Chatelaine Sancha had little need of birds or marmosets. The scandal was revived by doddering women who recollected it from childhood, and she attracted to herself a host of protégée, the daughters of armigers and exultants, eager to exhibit their tolerance and bathe in a notoriety that was without hazard. Rumors of a spectral cat persisted—it being said to walk upon the keyboard of the choralcelo—but there are many rumors in our hypogeum, and they were not the strangest.

  It is one of my duties to pay my respects, as the prolocutor of all Father Inire’s servants, to those who endure their mortal illness here. Thus I called upon the Chatelaine Sancha as she lay dying, and thus I came to be in her bedchamber when, after having spoken with me only a moment before, she cried out with her final breath.

  Having now carried my account to its conclusion, I scarcely know how to end it, save by an unembellished recitation of the facts.

  At the dying Chatelaine’s cry, all turned to look at her. And all saw, as did I, that upon the snowy counterpane covering her withered body there had appeared the dark pawprint of some animal, and beside it a thing not unlike a doll. This was no longer than my hand, and yet it seemed in each detail a lovely child just become a woman. Nor was it of painted wood, or any other substance of which such toys are made; for when the physician pricked it with his lancet, a ruby drop shone forth.