by Gene Wolfe
They came that night at moonrise.
Afterword
Inventions and scientific discoveries seem to occur almost at random. The people who disagree with that statement say that when technology (or science) reaches a certain point, the same idea will occur to a dozen people. The shorthand for this is steam-engine time, the idea being that when it’s time for the steam engine to be invented, a bunch of people will start working on one.
It ain’t so.
They had indoor plumbing in Ancient Crete. It was lost with the fall of that civilization, and did not reappear until long after it was needed. A model airplane, carved from wood, has been found in an Egyptian tomb. (Don’t get me started on the Egyptian girl wearing sunglasses.) Electroplating seems to have been invented at least twice.
And so on. I decided to put the hot-air balloon in the Dark Ages, and I threw in a few other things too. Thus the story you have just read. Was there ever a time like that? No. Could there have been? Certainly.
The Eyeflash Miracles
I cannot call him to mind.
—Anatole France, The Procurator of Judea
Little Tib heard the train coming while it was still a long way away, and he felt it in his feet. He stepped off the track onto a prestressed concrete tie, listening. Then he put one ear to the endless steel and listened to that sing, louder and louder. Only when he began to feel the ground shake under him did he lift his head at last and make his way down the embankment through the tall, prickly weeds, probing the slope with his stick.
The stick splashed water. He could not hear it because of the noise the train made roaring by, but he knew the feel of it, the kind of drag it made when he tried to move the end of the stick. He laid it down and felt with his hands where his knees would be when he knelt, and it felt all right. A little soft, but no broken glass. He knelt then and sniffed the water, and it smelled good and was cool to his fingers, so he drank, bending down and sucking up the water with his mouth, then splashing it on his face and the back of his neck.
“Say!” an authoritative voice called. “Say, you boy!”
Little Tib straightened up, picking up his stick again. He thought, This could be Sugarland. He said, “Are you a policeman, sir?”
“I am the superintendent.”
That was almost as good. Little Tib tilted his head back so the voice could see his eyes. He had often imagined coming to Sugarland and how it would be there, but he had never considered just what it was he should say when he arrived. He said, “My card . . .” The train was still rumbling away, not too far off.
Another voice said, “Now don’t you hurt that child.” It was not authoritative. There was the sound of responsibility in it.
“You ought to be in school, young man,” the first voice said. “Do you know who I am?”
Little Tib nodded. “The superintendent.”
“That’s right, I’m the superintendent. I’m Mr. Parker himself. Your teacher has told you about me, I’m sure.”
“Now don’t hurt that child,” the second voice said again. “He never did hurt you.”
“Playing hooky. I understand that’s what the children call it. We never use such a term ourselves, of course. You will be referred to as an absentee. What’s your name?”
“George Tibbs.”
“I see. I am Mr. Parker, the superintendent. This is my valet; his name is Nitty.”
“Hello,” Little Tib said.
“Mr. Parker, maybe this absentee boy would like to have something to eat. He looks to me like he has been absentee a long while.”
“Fishing,” Mr. Parker said. “I believe that’s what most of them do.”
“You can’t see, can you?” A hand closed on Little Tib’s arm. The hand was large and hard, but it did not bear down. “You can cross right here. There’s a rock in the middle—step on that.”
Little Tib found the rock with his stick and put one foot there. The hand on his arm seemed to lift him across. He stood on the rock for a moment with his stick in the water, touching bottom to steady himself. “Now a great big step.” His shoe touched the soft bank on the other side. “We got a camp right over here. Mr. Parker, don’t you think this absentee boy would like a sweet roll?”
Little Tib said, “Yes, I would.”
“I would too,” Nitty told him.
“Now, young man, why aren’t you in school?”
“How is he going to see the board?”
“We have special facilities for the blind, Nitty. At Grovehurst there is a class tailored to make allowance for their disability. I can’t at this moment recall the name of the teacher, but she is an exceedingly capable young woman.”
Little Tib asked, “Is Grovehurst in Sugar Land?”
“Grovehurst is in Martinsburg,” Mr. Parker told him. “I am superintendent of the Martinsburg Public School System. How far are we from Martinsburg now, Nitty?”
“Two, three hundred kilometers, I guess.”
“We will enter you in that class as soon as we reach Martinsburg, young man.”
Nitty said, “We’re going to Macon—I keep on tellin’ you.”
“Your papers are all in order, I suppose? Your grade and attendance records from your previous school? Your withdrawal permit, birth certificate, and your retinal pattern card from the Federal Reserve?”
Little Tib sat mute. Someone pushed a sticky pastry into his hands, but he did not raise it to his mouth.
“Mr. Parker, I don’t think he’s got papers.”
“That is a serious—”
“Why he got to have papers? He ain’t no dog!”
Little Tib was weeping. “I see!” Mr. Parker said. “He’s blind; Nitty, I think his retinas have been destroyed. Why, he’s not really here at all.”
“Course he’s here.”
“A ghost. We’re seeing a ghost, Nitty. Sociologically he’s not real—he’s been deprived of existence.”
“I never in my whole life seen a ghost.”
“You dumb bastard,” Mr. Parker exploded.
“You don’t have to talk to me like that, Mr. Parker.”
“You dumb bastard. All my life there’s been nobody around but dumb bastards like you.” Mr. Parker was weeping too. Little Tib felt one of his tears, large and hot, fall on his hand. His own sobbing slowed, then faded away. It was outside his experience to hear grown people—men—cry. He took a bite from the roll he had been given, tasting the sweet, sticky icing and hoping for a raisin.
“Mr. Parker,” Nitty said softly. “Mr. Parker.”
After a time, Mr. Parker said, “Yes.”
“He—this boy George—might be able to get them, Mr. Parker. You recall how you and me went to the building that time? We looked all around it a long while. And there was that window, that old window with the iron over it and the latch broken. I pushed on it and you could see the glass move in a little. But couldn’t either of us get between those bars.”
“This boy is blind, Nitty,” Mr. Parker said.
“Sure he is, Mr. Parker. But you know how dark it was in there. What is a man going to do? Turn on the lights? No, he’s goin’ to take a little bit of a flashlight and put tape or something over the end till it don’t make no more light than a lightnin’ bug. A blind person could do better with no light than a seeing one with just a little speck like that. I guess he’s used to bein’ blind by now. I guess he knows how to find his way around without eyes.”
A hand touched Little Tib’s shoulder. It seemed smaller and softer than the hand that had helped him across the creek. “He’s crazy,” Mr. Parker’s voice said. “That Nitty. He’s crazy. I’m crazy, I’m the one. But he’s crazier than I am.”
“He could do it, Mr. Parker. See how thin he is.”
“Would you do it?” Mr. Parker asked.
Little Tib swallowed a wad of roll. “Do what?”
“Get something for us.”
“I guess so.”
“Nitty, build a fire,” Mr. Parker said. “We won’
t be going any farther tonight.”
“Won’t be goin’ this way at all,” Nitty said.
“You see, George,” Mr. Parker said. “My authority has been temporarily abrogated. Sometimes I forget that.”
Nitty chuckled somewhere farther away than Little Tib had thought he was. He must have left very silently.
“But when it is restored, I can do all the things I said I would do for you: get you into a special class for the blind, for example. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, George?”
“Yes.” A whip-poor-will called far off to Little Tib’s left, and he could hear Nitty breaking sticks.
“Have you run away from home, George?”
“Yes,” Little Tib said again.
“Why?”
Little Tib shrugged. He was ready to cry again. Something was thickening and tightening in his throat, and his eyes had begun to water.
“I think I know why,” Mr. Parker said. “We might even be able to do something about that.”
“Here we are,” Nitty called. He dumped his load of sticks, rattling, more or less in front of Little Tib.
Later that night Little Tib lay on the ground with half of Nitty’s blanket over him, and half under him. The fire was crackling not too far away. Nitty said the smoke would help to drive the mosquitoes off. Little Tib pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes and saw red and yellow flashes like a real fire. He did it again, and there was a gold nugget against a field of blue. Those were the last things he had been able to see for a long time, and he was afraid, each time he summoned them up, that they would not come. On the other side of the fire Mr. Parker breathed the heavy breath of sleep.
Nitty bent over Little Tib, smoothing his blanket, then pressing it in against his sides. “It’s okay,” Little Tib said.
“You’re goin’ back to Martinsburg with us,” Nitty said.
“I’m going to Sugar Land.”
“After. What you want to go there for?”
Little Tib tried to explain about Sugar Land, but could not find words. At last he said, “In Sugar Land they know who you are.”
“Guess it’s too late then for me. Even if I found somebody who knew who I was I wouldn’t be them no more.”
“You’re Nitty,” Little Tib said.
“That’s right. You know I used to go out with those gals a lot. Know what they said? Said, ‘You’re the custodian over at the school, aren’t you?’ Or, ‘You’re the one that did for Buster Johnson.’ Didn’t none of them know who I was. Only ones that did was the little children.”
Little Tib heard Nitty’s clothes rustle as he stood up, then the sound his feet made walking softly away. He wondered if Nitty was going to stay awake all night; then he heard him lie down.
Little Tib’s father had him by the hand. They had left the hanging-down train, and were walking along one of the big streets. He could see. He knew he should not have been noticing that particularly, but he did, and far behind it somewhere was knowing that if he woke up he would not see. He looked into store windows, and he could see big dolls like girls’ dolls wearing fur coats. Every hair on every coat stood out drenched with light. He looked at the street and could see all the cars like big, bright-colored bugs.
“Here,” Big Tib said; they went into a glass thing that spun them around and dumped them out inside a building, then into an elevator all made of glass that climbed the inside wall almost like an ant, starting and stopping like an ant did.
“We should buy one of these,” Little Tib said. “Then we wouldn’t have to climb the steps.”
He looked up and saw that his father was crying. He took out his, Little Tib’s, own card and put it in the machine, then made Little Tib sit down in the seat and look at the bright light. The machine was a man in a white coat who took off his glasses and said, “We don’t know who this child is, but he certainly isn’t anyone.”
“Look at the bright light again, Little Tib,” his father said, and something in the way he said it told Little Tib that the man in the white coat was much stronger than he was. He looked at the bright light and tried to catch himself from falling.
And woke up. It was so dark that he wondered for a minute where the bright light went. Then he remembered. He rolled over a little and put his hand out toward the fire until he could feel some heat. He could hear it too when he listened. It crackled and snapped, but not very much. He lay the way he had been before, then turned over on his back. A train went past, and after a while an owl hooted.
He could see here too. Something inside him told him how lucky he was, seeing twice in one night. Then he forgot about it, looking at the flowers. They were big and round, growing on long stalks, and had yellow petals and dark brown centers, and when he was not looking at them, they whirled around and around. They could see him, because they all turned their faces toward him, and when he looked at them they stopped.
For a long way he walked through them. They came a little higher than his shoulder.
Then the city came down like a cloud and settled on a hill in front of him. As soon as it was there it pretended that it had been there all the time, but Little Tib could feel it laughing underneath. It had high, green walls that sloped in as they went up. Over the top of them were towers, much taller, that belonged to the city. Those were green too, and looked like glass.
Little Tib began to run, and was immediately in front of the gates. These were very high, but there was a window in them, just over his head, that the gate man talked through. “I want to see the king,” Little Tib said, and the gate man reached down with a long, strong arm and picked him up and pulled him through the little window and set him down again inside. “You have to wear these,” he said, and took out a pair of toy glasses like the ones Little Tib had once had in his doctor set. But when the gate man put them on Little Tib, they were not glasses at all, only lines painted on his face, circles around his eyes joined over his nose. The gate man held up a mirror to show him, and he had the sudden, dizzying sensation of looking at his own face.
A moment later he was walking through the city. The houses had their gardens sidewise—running up the walls so that the trees thrust out like flagpoles. The water in the birdbaths never ran out until a bird landed in it. Then a fine spray of drops fell to the street like rain.
The palace had a wall too, but it was made by trees holding hands. Little Tib went through a gate of bowing elephants and saw a long, long stairway. It was so long and so high that it seemed that there was no palace at all, only the steps going up and up forever into the clouds, and then he remembered that the whole city had come down out of the clouds. The king was coming down those stairs, walking very slowly. She was a beautiful woman, and although she did not look at all like her, Little Tib knew that she was his mother.
He had been seeing so much while he was asleep that when he woke up he had to remember why it was so dark. Somewhere in the back of his mind there was still the idea that waking should be light and sleep dark, and not the other way around.
Nitty said, “You ought to wash your face. Can you find the water all right?”
Little Tib was still thinking of the king, with her dress all made of Christmastree stuff, but he could. He splashed water on his face and arms while he thought about how to tell Nitty about his dream. By the time he had finished, everything in the dream was gone except for the king’s face.
Most of the time Mr. Parker sounded like he was important and Nitty was not, but when he said, “Are we going to eat this morning, Nitty?” it was the other way around.
“We eat on the train,” Nitty told him.
“We are going to catch a train, George, to Martinsburg,” Mr. Parker told Little Tib.
Little Tib thought that the trains went too fast to be caught, but he did not say that.
“Should be one by here pretty soon,” Nitty said. “They got to be going slow because there’s a road crosses the tracks down there a way. They won’t have no time to get the speed up again before they get here
. You won’t have to run—I’ll just pick you up an’ carry you.”
A rooster crowed way off somewhere.
Mr. Parker said, “When I was a young man, George, everyone thought all the trains would be gone soon. They never said what would replace them, however. Later it was believed that it would be all right to have trains, provided they were extremely modern in appearance. That was accomplished, as I suppose you learned last year, by substituting aluminum, fiberglass, and magnesium for much of the steel employed previously. That not only changed the image of the trains to something acceptable, but saved a great deal of energy by reducing the weight—the ostensible purpose of the cosmetic redesign.” Mr. Parker paused, and Little Tib could hear the water running past the place where they were sitting, and the sound the wind made blowing the trees.
“There only remained the awkward business of the crews,” Mr. Parker continued. “Fortunately it was found that mechanisms of the same type that had already displaced educators and others could be substituted for railway engineers and brakemen. Who would have believed that running a train was as routine and mechanical a business as teaching a class? Yet it proved to be so.”
“Wish they would do away with those railroad police,” Nitty said.
“You, George, are a victim of the same system,” Mr. Parker continued. “It was the wholesale displacement of labor, and the consequent nomadism, that resulted in the present reliance on retinal patterns as means of identification. Take Nitty and me, for example. We are going to Macon—”
“We’re goin’ to Martinsburg, Mr. Parker,” Nitty said. “This train we’ll be catching will be going the other way. We’re goin’ to get into that building and let you program, you remember?”
“I was hypothesizing,” Mr. Parker said. “We are going—say—to Macon. There we can enter a store, register our retinal patterns, and receive goods to be charged to the funds which will by then have accumulated in our social relief accounts. No other method of identification is so certain, or so adaptable to data-processing techniques.”