by Gene Wolfe
Nicholas’s mother said, “I’m going to take it home and keep it for you. It’s too nice to leave with a little boy, but if you ever come home again it will be waiting for you. On your dresser, beside your hairbrushes.”
Nicholas said, “Words just mix you up.”
“You shouldn’t despise them, Nicholas. Besides having great beauty of their own, they are useful in reducing tension. You might benefit from that.”
“You mean you talk yourself out of it.”
“I mean that a person’s ability to verbalize his feelings, if only to himself, may prevent them from destroying him. Evolution teaches us, Nicholas, that the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later. Words can be a safety valve.”
Nicholas said, “I want to be a bomb; a bomb doesn’t need a safety valve.” To his mother, “Is that South America, Mama?”
“No, dear, India. The Malabar Coast on your left, the Coromandel coast on your right, and Ceylon below.” Words.
“A bomb destroys itself, Nicholas.”
“A bomb doesn’t care.”
He was climbing resolutely now, his toes grabbing at tree roots and the soft, mossy soil, his physician was no longer the wind but a small brown monkey that followed a stone’s throw behind him. “I hear someone coming,” Nicholas said.
“Yes.”
“Is it Ignacio?”
“No, it is Nicholas. You are close now.”
“Close to the Point?”
“Yes.”
He stopped and looked around him. The sounds he had heard, the naked feet padding on soft ground, stopped as well. Nothing seemed strange; the land still rose, and there were large trees, widely spaced, with moss growing in their deepest shade, grass where there was more light. “The three big trees,” Nicholas said, “they’re just alike. Is that how you know where we are?”
“Yes.”
In his mind he called the one before him Ceylon; the others were Coromandel and Malabar. He walked toward Ceylon, studying its massive, twisted limbs; a boy naked as himself walked out of the forest to his left, toward Malabar—this boy was not looking at Nicholas, who shouted and ran toward him.
The boy disappeared. Only Malabar, solid and real, stood before Nicholas; he ran to it, touched its rough bark with his hand, and then saw beyond it a fourth tree, similar too to the Ceylon tree, around which a boy peered with averted head. Nicholas watched him for a moment, then said, “I see.”
“Do you?” the monkey chattered.
“It’s like a mirror, only backward. The light from the front of me goes out and hits the edge, and comes in the other side, only I can’t see it because I’m not looking that way. What I see is the light from my back, sort of, because it comes back this way. When I ran, did I get turned around?”
“Yes, you ran out the left side of the segment, and of course returned immediately from the right.”
“I’m not scared. It’s kind of fun.” He picked up a stick and threw it as hard as he could toward the Malabar tree. The stick vanished, whizzed over his head, vanished again, slapped the back of his legs. “Did this scare Diane?”
There was no answer. He strode farther, palely naked boys walking to his left and right, but always looking away from him, gradually coming closer.
* * *
Don’t go farther,” Dr. Island said behind him. “It can be dangerous if you try to pass through the Point itself.”
“I see it,” Nicholas said. He saw three more trees, growing very close together, just ahead of him; their branches seemed strangely intertwined as they danced together in the wind, and beyond them there was nothing at all.
“You can’t actually go through the Point,” Dr. Island Monkey said. “The tree covers it.”
“Then why did you warn me about it?” Limping and scarred, the boys to his right and left were no more than two meters away now; he had discovered that if he looked straight ahead he could sometimes glimpse their bruised profiles.
“That’s far enough, Nicholas.”
“I want to touch the tree.”
He took another step, and another, then turned. The Malabar boy turned too, presenting his narrow back, on which the ribs and spine seemed welts. Nicholas reached out both arms and laid his hands on the thin shoulders and, as he did, felt other hands—the cool, unfeeling hands of a stranger, dry hands too small—touch his own shoulders and creep upward toward his neck.
“Nicholas!”
He jumped sidewise away from the tree and looked at his hands, his head swaying. “It wasn’t me.”
“Yes, it was, Nicholas,” the monkey said.
“It was one of them.”
“You are all of them.”
In one quick motion Nicholas snatched up an arm-long section of fallen limb and hurled it at the monkey. It struck the little creature, knocking it down, but the monkey sprang up and fled on three legs. Nicholas sprinted after it.
He had nearly caught it when it darted to one side; as quickly, he turned toward the other, springing for the monkey he saw running toward him there. In an instant it was in his grip, feebly trying to bite. He slammed its head against the ground, then catching it by the ankles swung it against the Ceylon tree until at the third impact he heard the skull crack, and stopped.
He had expected wires, but there were none. Blood oozed from the battered little face, and the furry body was warm and limp in his hands. Leaves above his head said, “You haven’t killed me, Nicholas. You never will.”
“How does it work?” He was still searching for wires, tiny circuit cards holding micro-logic. He looked about for a sharp stone with which to open the monkey’s body, but could find none.
“It is just a monkey,” the leaves said. “If you had asked, I would have told you.”
“How did you make him talk?” Nicholas dropped the monkey, stared at it for a moment, then kicked it. His fingers were bloody, and he wiped them on the leaves of the tree.
“Only my mind speaks to yours, Nicholas.”
“Oh,” he said. And then, “I’ve heard of that. I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought it would be in my head.”
“Your record shows no auditory hallucinations, but haven’t you ever known someone who had them?”
“I knew a girl once. . . .” He paused.
“Yes?”
“She twisted noises—you know?”
“Yes.”
“Like, it would just be a service cart out in the corridor, but she’d hear the fan, and think . . .”
“What?”
“Oh, different things. That it was somebody talking, calling her.”
“Hear them?”
“What?” He sat up in his bunk. “Maya?”
“They’re coming after me.”
“Maya?”
Dr. Island, through the leaves, said, “When I talk to you, Nicholas, your mind makes any sound you hear the vehicle for my thoughts’ content. You may hear me softly in the patter of rain, or joyfully in the singing of a bird—but if I wished I could amplify what I say until every idea and suggestion I wished to give would be driven like a nail into your consciousness. Then you would do whatever I wished you to.”
“I don’t believe it,” Nicholas said. “If you can do that, why don’t you tell Diane not to be catatonic?”
“First, because she might retreat more deeply into her disease in an effort to escape me; and second, because ending her catatonia in that way would not remove its cause.”
“And thirdly?”
“I did not say ‘thirdly,’ Nicholas.”
“I thought I heard it—when two leaves touched.”
“Thirdly, Nicholas, because both you and she have been chosen for your effect on someone else; if I were to change her—or you—so abruptly, that effect would be lost.” Dr. Island was a monkey again now, a new monkey that chattered from the protection of a tree twenty meters away. Nicholas threw a stick at him.
�
�The monkeys are only little animals, Nicholas; they like to follow people, and they chatter.”
“I bet Ignacio kills them.”
“No, he likes them; he only kills fish to eat.”
Nicholas was suddenly aware of his hunger. He began to walk.
* * *
He found Ignacio on the beach, praying. For an hour or more, Nicholas hid behind the trunk of a palm watching him, but for a long time he could not decide to whom Ignacio prayed. He was kneeling just where the lacy edges of the breakers died, looking out toward the water, and from time to time he bowed, touching his forehead to the damp sand; then Nicholas could hear his voice, faintly, over the crashing and hissing of the waves. In general, Nicholas approved of prayer, having observed that those who prayed were usually more interesting companions than those who did not; but he had also noticed that though it made no difference what name the devotee gave the object of his devotions, it was important to discover how the god was conceived. Ignacio did not seem to be praying to Dr. Island—he would, Nicholas thought, have been facing the other way for that—and for a time Nicholas wondered if he was not praying to the waves. From Nicholas’s position behind him he followed Ignacio’s line of vision out and out, wave upon wave into the bright, confused sky, up and up until at last it curved completely around and came to rest on Ignacio’s back again, and then it occurred to Nicholas that Ignacio might be praying to himself. Nicholas left the palm trunk then and walked about halfway to the place where Ignacio knelt, and sat down. Above the sounds of the sea and the murmuring of Ignacio’s voice hung a silence so immense and fragile that it seemed that at any moment the entire crystal satellite might ring like a gong.
After a time Nicholas felt his left side trembling. With his right hand he began to stroke it, running his fingers down his left arm, and from his left shoulder to the thigh. It worried him that his left side should be so frightened, and he wondered if perhaps that other half of his brain, from which he was forever severed, could hear what Ignacio was saying to the waves. Nicholas began to pray himself, so that the other (and perhaps Ignacio too) could hear, saying not quite beneath his breath, “Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, he’s not going to hurt us, he’s nice, and if he does we’ll get him; we’re only going to get something to eat; maybe he’ll show us how to catch fish, I think he’ll be nice this time.” But he knew, or at least felt he knew, that Ignacio would not be nice this time.
Eventually Ignacio stood up; he did not turn to face Nicholas, but waded out to sea; then, as though he had known Nicholas was behind him all the time (though Nicholas was not sure he had been heard—perhaps, so he thought, Dr. Island had told Ignacio), he gestured to indicate that Nicholas should follow him.
The water was colder than Nicholas remembered, the sand coarse and gritty between his toes. He thought of what Dr. Island had told him—about floating—and that a part of her must be this sand, under the water, reaching out (how far?) into the sea; when she ended there would be nothing but the clear temperglass of the satellite itself, far down.
“Come,” Ignacio said. “Can you swim?” Just as though he had forgotten the night before. Nicholas said yes, he could, wondering if Ignacio would look around at him when he spoke. He did not.
“And do you know why you are here?”
“You told me to come.”
“Ignacio means here. Does this not remind you of any place you have seen before, little one?”
Nicholas thought of the crystal gong and the Easter egg, then of the microthin globes of perfumed vapor that, at home, were sometimes sent floating down the corridors at Christmas to explode in clean dust and a cold smell of pine forests when the children stuck them with their hopping canes, but he said nothing.
Ignacio continued, “Let Ignacio tell you a story. Once there was a man, a boy, actually, on the Earth, who—”
Nicholas wondered why it was always men (most often doctors and clinical psychologists, in his experience) who wanted to tell you stories. Jesus, he recalled, was always telling everyone stories, and the Virgin Mary almost never, though a woman Nicholas had once known who thought she was the Virgin Mary had always been talking about her son. Nicholas thought Ignacio looked a little like Jesus. He tried to remember if his mother had ever told him stories when he was at home, and decided that she had not; she just turned on the comscreen to the cartoons.
“—wanted to—”
“—tell a story,” Nicholas finished for him.
“How did you know?” Angry and surprised.
“It was you, wasn’t it? And you want to tell one now.”
“What you said was not what Ignacio would have said. He was going to tell you about a fish.”
“Where is it?” Nicholas asked, thinking of the fish Ignacio had been eating the night before, and imagining another such fish, caught while he had been coming back, perhaps, from the Point, and now concealed somewhere awaiting the fire. “Is it a big one?”
“It is gone now,” Ignacio said, “but it was only as long as a man’s hand. I caught it in the big river.”
Huckleberry— “I know, the Mississippi; it was a catfish. Or a sunfish.” — Finn.
“Possibly that is what you call them; for a time he was as the sun to a certain one.” The light from nowhere danced on the water. “In any event he was kept on that table in the salon in the house where life was lived. In a tank, but not the old kind in which one sees the glass, with metal at the corner. But the new kind in which the glass is so strong, but very thin, and curved so that it does not reflect, and there are no corners, and a clever device holds the water clear.” He dipped up a handful of sparkling water, still not meeting Nicholas’s eyes. “As clear even as this, and there were no ripples, and so you could not see it at all. My fish floated in the center of my table above a few stones.”
Nicholas asked, “Did you float on the river on a raft?”
“No, we had a little boat. Ignacio caught this fish in a net, of which he almost bit through the strands before he could be landed; he possessed wonderful teeth. There was no one in the house but him and the other, and the robots, but each morning someone would go to the pool in the patio and catch a goldfish for him. Ignacio would see this goldfish there when he came down for his breakfast, and would think, Brave goldfish, you have been cast to the monster; will you be the one to destroy him? Destroy him and you shall have his diamond house forever. And then the fish, who had a little spot of red beneath his wonderful teeth, a spot like a cherry, would rush upon that young goldfish, and for an instant the water would be all clouded with blood.”
“And then what?” Nicholas asked.
“And then the clever machine would make the water clear once more, and the fish would be floating above the stones as before, the fish with the wonderful teeth, and Ignacio would touch the little switch on the table, and ask for more bread, and more fruit.”
“Are you hungry now?”
“No, I am tired and lazy now; if I pursue you I will not catch you, and if I catch you—through your own slowness and clumsiness—I will not kill you, and if I kill you I will not eat you.”
Nicholas had begun to back away, and at the last words, realizing that they were a signal, he turned and began to run, splashing through the shallow water. Ignacio ran after him, much helped by his longer legs; his hair flying behind his dark young face, his square teeth—each white as a bone and as big as Nicholas’s thumbnail—showing like spectators who lined the railings of his lips.
“Don’t run, Nicholas,” Dr. Island said with the voice of a wave. “It only makes him angry that you run.” Nicholas did not answer, but cut to his left, up the beach and among the trunks of the palms, sprinting all the way because he had no way of knowing Ignacio was not right behind him, about to grab him by the neck. When he stopped it was in the thick jungle, among the boles of the hardwoods, where he leaned, out of breath, the thumping of his own heart the only sound in an atmosphere silent and unwaked as Earth’s long, prehuman day. For a time he listen
ed for any sound Ignacio might make searching for him; there was none. He drew a deep breath then and said, “Well, that’s over,” expecting Dr. Island to answer from somewhere; there was only the green hush.
The light was still bright and strong and nearly shadowless, but some interior sense told Nicholas the day was nearly over, and he noticed that such faint shades as he could see stretched long, horizontal distortions of their objects. He felt no hunger, but he had fasted before and knew on which side of hunger he stood; he was not as strong as he had been only a day past, and by this time next day he would probably be unable to outrun Ignacio. He should, he now realized, have eaten the monkey he had killed; but his stomach revolted at the thought of the raw flesh, and he did not know how he might build a fire, although Ignacio seemed to have done so the night before. Raw fish, even if he were able to catch a fish, would be as bad or worse than raw monkey; he remembered his effort to open a coconut—he had failed, but it was surely not impossible. His mind was hazy as to what a coconut might contain, but there had to be an edible core, because they were eaten in books. He decided to make a wide sweep through the jungle that would bring him back to the beach well away from Ignacio; he had several times seen coconuts lying in the sand under the trees.
He moved quietly, still a little afraid, trying to think of ways to open the coconut when he found it. He imagined himself standing before a large and raggedly faceted stone, holding the coconut in both hands. He raised it and smashed it down, but when it struck it was no longer a coconut but Maya’s head; he heard her nose cartilage break with a distinct, rubbery snap. Her eyes, as blue as the sky above Madhya Pradesh, the sparkling blue sky of the egg, looked up at him, but he could no longer look into them, they retreated from his own, and it came to him quite suddenly that Lucifer, in falling, must have fallen up, into the fires and the coldness of space, never again to see the warm blues and browns and greens of Earth: I was watching Satan fall as lightning from heaven. Nicholas had heard that on tape somewhere, but he could not remember where. He had read that on Earth lightning did not come down from the clouds but leaped up from the planetary surface toward them, never to return.