by Gene Wolfe
“Have you got anything to eat?”
“Not now. I had a thing a while ago.”
“What kind of thing?”
“A bird.” The girl made a vague little gesture, not looking at Nicholas. “I’m a memory that has swallowed a bird.”
“Do you want to walk down by the water?” They were moving in the direction of the beach already.
“I was just going to get a drink. You’re a nice tot.”
Nicholas did not like being called a tot. He said, “I set fire to places.”
“You won’t set fire to this place; it’s been nice the last couple of days, but when everyone is sad, it rains.”
Nicholas was silent for a time. When they reached the sea, the girl dropped to her knees and bent forward to drink, her long hair falling over her face until the ends trailed in the water, her nipples, then half of each breast, in the water. “Not there,” Nicholas said. “It’s sandy, because it washes the beach so close. Come on out here.” He waded out into the sea until the lapping waves nearly reached his armpits, then bent his head and drank.
“I never thought of that,” the girl said. “Mum says I’m stupid. So does Dad. Do you think I’m stupid?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“What’s your name?”
“Nicholas Kenneth de Vore. What’s yours?”
“Diane. I’m going to call you Nicky. Do you mind?”
“I’ll hurt you while you sleep,” Nicholas said.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Yes, I would. At St. John’s where I used to be, it was zero G most of the time, and a girl there called me something I didn’t like, and I got loose one night and came into her cubical while she was asleep and nulled her restraints, and then she floated around until she banged into something, and that woke her up and she tried to grab, and then that made her bounce all around inside and she broke two fingers and her nose and got blood all over. The attendants came, and one told me—they didn’t know then I did it—when he came out his white suit was, like, polka-dot red all over because wherever the blood drops had touched him they soaked right in.”
The girl smiled at him, dimpling her thin face. “How did they find out it was you?”
“I told someone and he told them.”
“I bet you told them yourself.”
“I bet I didn’t!” Angry, he waded away, but when he had stalked a short way up the beach he sat down on the sand, his back toward her.
“I didn’t mean to make you mad, Mr. de Vore.”
“I’m not mad!”
She was not sure for a moment what he meant. She sat down beside and a trifle behind him, and began idly piling sand in her lap.
Dr. Island said, “I see you’ve met.”
Nicholas turned, looking for the voice. “I thought you saw everything.”
“Only the important things, and I have been busy on another part of myself. I am happy to see that you two know one another; do you find you interact well?”
Neither of them answered.
“You should be interacting with Ignacio; he needs you.”
“We can’t find him,” Nicholas said.
“Down the beach to your left until you see the big stone, then turn inland. Above five hundred meters.”
Nicholas stood up and, turning to his right, began to walk away. Diane followed him, trotting until she caught up.
“I don’t like,” Nicholas said, jerking a shoulder to indicate something behind him.
“Ignacio?”
“The doctor.”
“Why do you move your head like that?”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“No one told me anything about you.”
“They opened it up”—Nicholas touched his scars—“and took this knife and cut all the way through my corpus . . . corpus . . .”
“Corpus callosum,” muttered a dry palm frond.
“—corpus callosum,” finished Nicholas. “See, your brain is like a walnut inside. There are two halves, and then right down in the middle a kind of thick connection of meat from one to the other. Well, they cut that.”
“You’re having a bit of fun with me, aren’t you?”
“No, he isn’t,” a monkey who had come to the waterline to look for shellfish told her. “His cerebrum has been surgically divided; it’s in his file.” It was a young monkey, with a trusting face full of small, ugly beauties.
Nicholas snapped, “It’s in my head.”
Diane said, “I’d think it would kill you, or make you an idiot or something.”
“They say each half of me is about as smart as both of us were together. Anyway, this half is . . . the half . . . the me that talks.”
“There are two of you now?”
“If you cut a worm in half and both parts are still alive, that’s two, isn’t it?
What else would you call us? We can’t ever come together again.”
“But I’m talking to just one of you?”
“We both can hear you.”
“Which one answers?”
Nicholas touched the right side of his chest with his right hand. “Me, I do. They told me it was the left side of my brain, that one has the speech centers, but it doesn’t feel that way; the nerves cross over coming out, and it’s just the right side of me, I talk. Both my ears hear for both of us, but out of each eye we only see half and half—I mean, I only see what’s on the right of what I’m looking at, and the other side, I guess, only sees the left, so that’s why I keep moving my head. I guess it’s like being a little bit blind; you get used to it.”
The girl was still thinking of his divided body. She said, “If you’re only half, I don’t see how you can walk.”
“I can move the left side a little bit, and we’re not mad at each other. We’re not supposed to be able to come together at all, but we do: down through the legs and at the ends of the fingers and then back up. Only I can’t talk with my other side because he can’t, but he understands.”
“Why did they do it?”
Behind them the monkey, who had been following them, said, “He had uncontrollable seizures.”
“Did you?” the girl asked. She was watching a seabird swooping low over the water and did not seem to care.
Nicholas picked up a shell and shied it at the monkey, who skipped out of the way. After half a minute’s silence he said, “I had visions.”
“Ooh, did you?”
“They didn’t like that. They said I would fall down and jerk around horrible, and sometimes I guess I would hurt myself when I fell, and sometimes I’d bite my tongue and it would bleed. But that wasn’t what it felt like to me; I wouldn’t know about any of those things until afterward. To me it was like I had gone way far ahead, and I had to come back. I didn’t want to.”
The wind swayed Diane’s hair, and she pushed it back from her face. “Did you see things that were going to happen?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Really? Did you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Tell me about it. When you saw what was going to happen.”
“I saw myself dead. I was all black and shrunk up like the dead stuff they cut off in the Pontic gardens, and I was floating and turning, like in water but it wasn’t water—just floating and turning out in space, in nothing. And there were lights on both sides of me, so both sides were bright but black, and I could see my teeth because the stuff”—he pulled at his cheeks—“had fallen off there, and they were really white.”
“That hasn’t happened yet.”
“Not here.”
“Tell me something you saw that happened.”
“You mean, like somebody’s sister was going to get married, don’t you? That’s what the girls where I was mostly wanted to know. Or were they going to go home; mostly it wasn’t like that.”
“But sometimes it was?”
“I guess.”
“Tell me one.”
Nicholas shook his head. “You wouldn’t l
ike it, and anyway it wasn’t like that. Mostly it was lights like I never saw anyplace else, and voices like I never heard any other time, telling me things there aren’t any words for, stuff like that, only now I can’t ever go back. Listen, I wanted to ask you about Ignacio.”
“He isn’t anybody,” the girl said.
“What do you mean, he isn’t anybody? Is there anybody here besides you and me and Ignacio and Dr. Island?”
“Not that we can see or touch.”
The monkey called, “There are other patients, but for the present, Nicholas, for your own well-being as well as theirs, it is best for you to remain by yourselves.” It was a long sentence for a monkey.
“What’s that about?”
“If I tell you, will you tell me about something you saw that really happened?”
“All right.”
“Tell me first.”
“There was this girl where I was—her name was Maya. They had, you know, boys’ and girls’ dorms, but you saw everybody in the rec room and the dining hall and so on, and she was in my psychodrama group.” Her hair had been black, and shiny as the lacquered furniture in Dr. Hong’s rooms, her skin white like the mother-of-pearl, her eyes long and narrow (making him think of cats’ eyes) and darkly blue. She was fifteen, or so Nicholas believed—maybe sixteen. “I’m going home,” she told him. It was psychodrama and he was her brother, younger than she, and she was already at home, but when she said this the floating ring of light that gave them the necessary separation from the small doctor-and-patient audience, ceased, by instant agreement, to be Maya’s mother’s living room and became a visiting lounge. Nicholas/Jerry said, “Hey, that’s great! Hey, I got a new bike—when you come home you want to ride it?”
Maureen/Maya’s mother said, “Maya, don’t. You’ll run into something and break your teeth, and you know how much they cost.”
“You don’t want me to have any fun.”
“We do, dear, but nice fun. A girl has to be so much more careful—oh, Maya, I wish I could make you understand, really, how careful a girl has to be.”
Nobody said anything, so Nicholas/Jerry filled in with, “It has a three-bladed prop, and I’m going to tape streamers to them with little weights at the ends, an’ when I go down old thirty-seven B passageway, look out, here comes that old coleslaw grater!”
“Like this,” Maya said, and held her legs together and extended her arms, to make a three-bladed bike prop or a crucifix. She had thrown herself into a spin as she made the movement, and revolved slowly, stage center—red shorts, white blouse, red shorts, white blouse, red shorts, no shoes.
Diane asked, “And you saw that she was never going home, she was going to hospital instead, she was going to cut her wrist there, she was going to die?”
Nicholas nodded.
“Did you tell her?”
“Yes,” Nicholas said. “No.”
“Make up your mind. Didn’t you tell her? Now, don’t get mad.”
“Is it telling, when the one you tell doesn’t understand?”
Diane thought about that for a few steps while Nicholas dashed water on the hot bruises Ignacio had left upon his face. “If it was plain and clear and she ought to have understood—that’s the trouble I have with my family.”
“What is?”
“They won’t say things—do you know what I mean? I just say, ‘Look, just tell me, just tell me what I’m supposed to do, tell me what it is you want,’ but it’s different all the time. My mother says, ‘Diane, you ought to meet some boys; you can’t go out with him; your father and I have never met him; we don’t even know his family at all; Douglas, there’s something I think you ought to know about Diane; she gets confused sometimes; we’ve had her to doctors; she’s been in a hospital; try—’ ”
“Not to get her excited,” Nicholas finished for her.
“Were you listening? I mean, are you from the Trojan Planets? Do you know my mother?”
“I only live in these places,” Nicholas said. “That’s for a long time. But you talk like other people.”
“I feel better now that I’m with you; you’re really nice. I wish you were older.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to get much older.”
“It’s going to rain—feel it?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“Look.” Diane jumped, bunny-rabbit clumsy, three meters into the air. “See how high I can jump? That means people are sad and it’s going to rain. I told you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did, Nicholas.”
He waved the argument away, struck by a sudden thought. “You ever been to Callisto?”
The girl shook her head, and Nicholas said, “I have; that’s where they did the operation. It’s so big the gravity’s mostly from natural mass, and it’s all domed in, with a whole lot of air in it.”
“So?”
“And when I was there it rained. There was a big trouble at one of the generating piles, and they shut it down and it got colder and colder until everybody in the hospital wore their blankets, just like Amerinds in books, and they locked the switches off on the heaters in the bathrooms, and the nurses and the comscreen told you all the time it wasn’t dangerous, they were just rationing power to keep from blacking out the important stuff that was still running. And then it rained, just like on Earth. They said it got so cold the water condensed in the air, and it was like the whole hospital was right under a shower bath. Everybody on the top floor had to come down because it rained right on their beds, and for two nights I had a man in my room with me that had his arm cut off in a machine. But we couldn’t jump any higher, and it got kind of dark.”
“It doesn’t always get dark here,” Diane said. “Sometimes the rain sparkles. I think Dr. Island must do it to cheer everyone up.”
“No,” the waves explained, “or at least not in the way you mean, Diane.” Nicholas was hungry and started to ask them for something to eat, then turned his hunger in against itself, spit on the sand, and was still.
“It rains here when most of you are sad,” the waves were saying, “because rain is a sad thing, to the human psyche. It is that, that sadness, perhaps because it recalls to unhappy people their own tears, that palliates melancholy.”
Diane said, “Well, I know sometimes I feel better when it rains.”
“That should help you to understand yourself. Most people are soothed when their environment is in harmony with their emotions, and anxious when it is not. An angry person becomes less angry in a red room, and unhappy people are only exasperated by sunshine and birdsong. Do you remember:
And, missing thee, I walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven green,
To behold the wandering moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven’s wide pathless way?
The girl shook her head.
Nicholas said, “No. Did somebody write that?” and then, “You said you couldn’t do anything.”
The waves replied, “I can’t—except talk to you.”
“You make it rain.”
“Your heart beats; I sense its pumping even as I speak—do you control the beating of your heart?”
“I can stop my breath.”
“Can you stop your heart? Honestly, Nicholas?”
“I guess not.”
“No more can I control the weather of my world, stop anyone from doing what he wishes, or feed you if you are hungry; with no need of volition on my part your emotions are monitored and averaged, and our weather responds. Calm and sunshine for tranquillity, rain for melancholy, storms for rage, and so on.
This is what mankind has always wanted.”
Diane asked, “What is?”
“That the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind, and here, on me, it is fact.”
“So that we’ll be well?”
Nicholas said a
ngrily, “You’re not sick!”
Dr. Island said, “So that some of you, at least, can return to society.”
Nicholas threw a seashell into the water as though to strike the mouth that spoke. “Why are we talking to this thing?”
“Wait, tot; I think it’s interesting.”
“Lies and lies.”
Dr. Island said, “How do I lie, Nicholas?”
“You said it was magic—”
“No, I said that when humankind has dreamed of magic, the wish behind that dream has been the omnipotence of thought. Have you never wanted to be a magician, Nicholas, making palaces spring up overnight, or riding an enchanted horse of ebony to battle with the demons of the air?”
“I am a magician. I have preternatural powers, and before they cut us in two—”
Diane interrupted him. “You said you averaged emotions. When you made it rain.”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t that mean that if one person was really, terribly sad, he’d move the average so much he could make it rain all by himself? Or whatever? That doesn’t seem fair.”
The waves might have smiled. “That has never happened. But if it did, Diane, if one person felt such deep emotion, think how great her need would be. Don’t you think we should answer it?”
Diane looked at Nicholas, but he was walking again, his head swinging, ignoring her as well as the voice of the waves. “Wait,” she called. “You said I wasn’t sick; I am, you know.”
“No, you’re not.”
She hurried after him. “Everyone says so, and sometimes I’m so confused, and other times I’m boiling inside, just boiling. Mum says if you’ve got something on the stove you don’t want to have burn, you just have to keep one finger on the handle of the pan and it won’t, but I can’t, I can’t always find the handle or remember.”
Without looking back the boy said, “Your mother is probably sick, maybe your father too; I don’t know. But you’re not. If they’d just let you alone you’d be all right. Why shouldn’t you get upset, having to live with two crazy people?”
“Nicholas!” She grabbed his thin shoulders. “That’s not true!”
“Yes, it is.”