The Best of Gene Wolfe

by Gene Wolfe

  “We didn’t know you had to pay,” Little Tib said. He was worried because Nitty had told him that he and Mr. Parker had no money in their accounts.

  “No one must pay—that is the beauty. Those who desire to buy near diesel for the god may imprint their cards here, but all is voluntary and other things we accept too.”

  “Sure is dark back there,” Nitty said.

  “Let me show you. You see we are approaching a roadside park? So well is the universe regulated. There we will stop and recreate ourselves, and I will show you the god before proceeding again.”

  Little Tib felt the bus swerve with breathtaking suddenness. During the last year that they had lived at the old place, he had ridden a bus to school. He remembered how hot it had been, and how ordinary it had seemed after the first week; now he was dreaming of riding this strange-smelling old bus in the dark, but soon he would wake and be on that other bus again; then, when the doors opened, he would run through the hot, bright sunshine to the school.

  The doors opened, clattering and grinding. “Let us go out,” Dr. Prithivi said. “Let us recreate ourselves and see what is to be seen here.”

  “It’s a lookout point,” Mr. Parker told him. “You can see parts of seven counties from here.”

  Little Tib felt himself lifted down the steps. There were other people around; he could hear their voices, though they were not close.

  “It is so very beautiful,” Dr. Prithivi said. “We have also beautiful mountains in India—‘the Himalayas,’ they are called. This fine view makes me think of them. When I was just a little boy, my father rented a house for summer in the Himalayas. Rhododendrons grew wild there, and once I saw a leopard in our garden.”

  A strange voice said, “You see mountain lions here. Early in the morning is the time for it—look up on the big rocks as you drive along.”

  “Exactly so!” Dr. Prithivi sounded excited. “It was very early when I saw the leopard.”

  Little Tib tried to remember what a leopard looked like, and found that he could not. Then he tried a cat, but it was not a very good cat. He felt hot and tired, and reminded himself that it had only been a little while ago that Nitty had washed his clothes. The seam at the front of his shirt, where the buttons went, was still damp. When he had been able to see, he had known precisely what a cat looked like. He felt now that if only he could hold a cat in his arms he would know again. He imagined such a cat, large and long-haired. It was there, unexpectedly, standing in front of him. Not a cat, but a lion, standing on its hind feet. It had a long tail with a tuft at the end, and a red ribbon knotted in its mane. Its face was a kindly blur and it was dancing—dancing to the remembered flute music of Dr. Prithivi’s laughter—just out of reach.

  Little Tib took a step toward it and found his way barred by two metal pipes. He slipped between them. The lion danced, hopping and skipping, striking poses without stopping; it bowed and jigged away, and Little Tib danced too, after it. It would be cheating to run or walk—he would lose the game, even if he caught the lion. It high-stepped, far away then back again almost close enough to touch, and he followed it.

  Behind him he heard the gasp of the people, but it seemed dim and distant compared to the piping to which he danced. The lion jigged nearer and he caught its paws and the two of them romped up and down, its face growing clearer and clearer as they whirled and turned—it was a funny, friendly, frightening face.

  It was as though he had backed into a bush whose leaves were hands. They clasped him everywhere, drawing him backward against hard metal bars. He could hear Nitty’s voice, but Nitty was crying so that he could not tell what he said. A woman was crying too—no, several women—and a man whose voice Little Tib did not know was shouting: “We’ve got him! We’ve got him!” Little Tib was not sure who he was shouting to, perhaps to nobody.

  A voice he did recognize, it was Dr. Prithivi’s, was saying, “I have him. You must let go of him so that I may lift him over.”

  Little Tib’s left foot reached out as if it were moving itself and felt in front of him. There was nothing there, nothing at all. The lion was gone, and he knew, now, where he was, on the edge of a mountain, and it went down and down for a long way. Fear came.

  “Let go and I will lift him over,” Dr. Prithivi told someone else. Little Tib thought of how small and boneless Dr. Prithivi’s hands had felt. Then Nitty’s big ones took him on one side, an arm and a leg, and the medium-sized hands of Mr. Parker (or someone like him) on the other. Then Little Tib was lifted up and back, and put down on the ground.

  “He walked . . . ,” a woman said. “Danced.”

  “This boy must come with me,” Dr. Prithivi piped. “Get out of the way, please.” He had Little Tib’s left hand. Nitty was lifting him up again, and he felt Nitty’s big head come up between his legs and he settled on his shoulders. Little Tib plunged his hands into Nitty’s thick hair and held on. Other hands were reaching for him; when they found him, they only touched, as though they did not want to do anything more.

  “Got to set you down,” Nitty said, “or you’ll hit your head.” The steps of the bus were under Little Tib’s feet, and Dr. Prithivi was helping him up.

  “You must be presented to the god,” said Dr. Prithivi. The inside of the bus was stuffy and hot, with a strange, spicy, oppressive smell. “Here. Now you must pray. Have you anything with which to make an offering?”

  “No,” Little Tib said. People had followed them into the bus.

  “Then only pray.” Dr. Prithivi must have had a cigarette lighter—Little Tib heard the scratching sound it made. There was a soft oooah sound from the people.

  “Now you see Deva,” Dr. Prithivi told them. “Because you are not accustomed to such things, the first thing you have noticed is that he has six arms. It is for that reason that I wear this cross, which has six arms also. You see, I wish to relate Deva to Christianity here. You will note that one of Deva’s hands holds a two-armed cross. The others—I will begin here and go around—hold the crescent of Islam, the Star of David, a figure of the Buddha, a phallus, and a katana sword, which I have chosen to represent the faith of Shintoism.”

  Little Tib tried to pray, as Dr. Prithivi had directed. In one way Little Tib knew what he had been doing when he had been dancing with the lion, and in another he did not. Why hadn’t he fallen? He thought of how the stones at the bottom would feel when they hit his face, and shivered.

  Stones he remembered very well. Potato shaped but much larger, hard and gray. He was lost in a rocky land where frowning walls of stone were everywhere and no plant grew. He stood in the shadow of one of these walls to escape the heat; he could see the opposite wall, and the rubble of jumbled stones between, but this time the knowledge that he could see again gave him no pleasure. He was thirsty, and pressed farther back into the shadow, and found that there was no wall there. The shadow went back and back, farther and farther into the mountain. He followed it and, turning, saw the little wedge of daylight disappear behind him, and was blind again.

  The cave—for he knew it was a cave now—went on and on into the rock. Despite the lack of sunlight, it seemed to Little Tib that the cave grew hotter and hotter. Then from somewhere far ahead he heard a tapping and rapping, as though an entire bag of marbles had been poured onto a stone floor and were bouncing up and down. The noise was so odd, and Little Tib was so tired, that he sat down to listen to it.

  As if his sitting had been a signal, torches kindled—first one on one side of the cave, then another on the opposite side. Behind him a gate of close-set bars banged down, and toward him, like spiders, came two grotesque figures. Their bodies were small, yet fat; their arms and legs were long and thin; their faces were the faces of mad old men, pop-eyed and choleric and adorned with towering peaks of fantastic hair, and spreading mustaches like the feelers of night-crawling insects, and curling three-pointed beards that seemed to have a life of their own so that they twisted and twined like snakes. These men carried long-handled axes, and wore re
d clothes and the widest leather belts Little Tib had ever seen. “Halt,” they cried. “Cease, hold, stop, and arrest yourself. You are trespassing in the realm of the Gnome King!”

  “I have stopped,” Little Tib said. “And I can’t arrest myself because I’m not a policeman.”

  “That wasn’t why we asked you to do it,” one of the angry-faced men pointed out.

  “But it is an offense,” added the other. “We’re a Police State, you know, and it’s up to you to join the force.”

  “In your case,” continued the first gnome, “it will be the labor force.”

  “Come with us!” both of them exclaimed, and they seized him by the arms and began to drag him across the pile of rocks.

  “Stop,” Little Tib demanded. “You don’t know who I am.”

  “We don’t care who you am either.”

  “If Nitty were here, he’d fix you. Or Mr. Parker.”

  “Then he’d better fix Mr. Parker, because we’re not broken, and we’re taking you to see the Gnome King.”

  They went down twisted sidewise caves with no lights but the eyes of the gnomes. And through big, echoing caves with mud floors, and streams of steaming water in the middle. Little Tib thought, at first, that it was rather fun, but it became realer and realer as they went along, as though the gnomes drew strength and realness from the heat, and at last he forgot that there had ever been anyplace else, and the things the gnomes said were no longer funny.

  The Gnome King’s throne cavern was brilliantly lit, and crammed with gold and jewels. The curtains were gold—not gold-colored cloth, but real gold—and the king sat on a bed covered with a spread of linked diamonds, cross-legged. “You have trespassed my dominions,” he said. “How do you plead?” He looked like the other gnomes, but thinner and meaner.

  “For mercy,” Little Tib said.

  “Then you are guilty?”

  Little Tib shook his head.

  “You have to be. Only the guilty can plead for mercy.”

  “You are supposed to forgive trespasses,” Little Tib said, and as soon as he had said that, all the bright lamps in the throne room went out. His guards began to curse, and he could hear the whistle of their axes as they swung them in the dark, looking for him.

  He ran, thinking he could hide behind one of the gold curtains, but his outstretched arms never found it. He ran on and on until at last he felt sure that he was no longer in the throne room. He was about to stop and rest then when he saw a faint light—so faint a light that for a long time he was afraid it might be no more than a trick of his eyes, like the lights he saw when he ground his hands against them. This is my dream, he thought, and I can make the light to be whatever I want it to be. All right, it will be sunlight, and when I get out into it, it will be Nitty and Mr. Parker and me camped someplace—a pretty place next to a creek of cold water—and I’ll be able to see.

  The light grew brighter and brighter; it was gold colored, like sunlight.

  Then Little Tib saw trees, and he began to run. He was actually running among the trees before he realized that they were not real trees, and that the light he had seen came from them—the sky overhead was a vault of cold stone. He stopped, then. The trunks and branches of the trees were silver; the leaves were gold; the grass under his feet was not grass but a carpet of green gems, and birds with real rubies in their breasts twittered and flew among the trees—but they were not real birds, only toys. There was no Nitty and no Mr. Parker and no water.

  Little Tib was about to cry when he noticed the fruit. It hung under the leaves, and was gold, as they were, but for fruit that did not look so unnatural. Each was about the size of a grapefruit. Little Tib wondered if he could pull them from the trees, and the first he touched fell into his hands. It was not heavy enough to be solid. After a moment he saw that it unscrewed in the center. He sat down on the grass (which had become real grass in some way, or perhaps a carpet or a bedspread) and opened it. There was a meal inside, but all the food was too hot to eat. He looked and looked, hoping for a salad that would be wet and cool, but there was nothing but hot meat and gravy, and smoking hot cornmeal muffins, and boiled greens so hot and dry he did not even try to put them in his mouth.

  At last he found a small cup with a lid on it. It held hot tea—tea so hot it seemed to blister his lips—but he managed to drink a little of it. He put down the cup and stood up to go on through the forest of gold and silver trees, and perhaps find a better place. But all the trees had vanished, and he was in the dark again. My eyes are gone, he thought. I’m waking up. Then he saw a circle of light ahead and heard the pounding; and he knew that it was not marbles dropped on a floor he heard, but the noise of hundreds and hundreds of picks, digging gold in the mines of the gnomes.

  The light grew larger—but dimmed at the same time, as a star-shaped shadow grew in it. Then it was not a star at all, but a gnome coming after him. And then it was a whole army of gnomes, one behind the other, with their arms sticking out at every angle, so that it looked like one gnome with a hundred arms, all reaching for him.

  Then he woke, and everything was dark.

  He sat up. “You’re awake now,” Nitty said.

  “Yes.”

  “How you feel?”

  Little Tib did not answer. He was trying to find out where he was. It was a bed. There was a pillow behind him, and there were clean, starched sheets. He remembered what the doctor had said about the hospital, and asked, “Am I in the hospital?”

  “No, we’re in a motel. How do you feel?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  “You remember about dancing out there on the air?”

  “I thought I dreamed it.”

  “Well, I thought I dreamed it too—but you were really out there. Everybody saw it, everybody who was around there when you did it. And then when we got you to come in close enough that we could grab hold of you and pull you in, Dr. Prithivi got you to come back to his bus.”

  “I remember that,” Little Tib said.

  “And he explained about his work and all that, and he took up a collection for it and you went to sleep. You were running that fever again, and Mr. Parker and me couldn’t wake you up much.”

  “I had a dream,” Little Tib said, and then he told Nitty all about his dream.

  “When you thought you were drinking that tea, that was me giving you your medicine, is what I think. Only it wasn’t hot tea; it was ice water. And that wasn’t a dream you had; it was a nightmare.”

  “I thought it was kind of nice,” Little Tib said. “The king was right there, and you could talk to him and explain what had happened.” His hands found a little table next to the bed. There was a lamp on it. He knew he could not see when the bulb lit, but he made the switch go click with his fingers anyway. “How did we get here?” he asked.

  “Well, after the collection, when everybody had left, that Dr. Prithivi was hot to talk to you. But me and Mr. Parker said you were with us and we wouldn’t let him unless you had a place to sleep. We told him how you were sick, and all that. So he transferred some money to Mr. Parker’s account, and we rented this room. He says he always sleeps in his bus to look after that Deva.”

  “Is that where he is now?”

  “No, he’s downtown talking to the people. Probably I should have told you, but it’s the day after you did that, now. You slept a whole day full, and a little more.”

  “Where’s Mr. Parker?”

  “He’s looking around.”

  “He wants to see if that latch on that window is still broken, doesn’t he? And if I’m really little enough to get between those bars.”

  “That’s one thing, yes.”

  “It was nice of you to stay with me.”

  “I’m supposed to tell Dr. Prithivi when you’re awake. That was part of our deal.”

  “Would you have stayed anyway?” Little Tib was climbing out of bed. He had never been in a motel before, though he did not want to say so, and he was eager to explore this one.

/>   “Somebody would have had to stay with you.” Little Tib could hear the faint whistles of the numbers on the telephone.

  Later, when Dr. Prithivi came, he made Little Tib sit in a big chair with puffy arms. Little Tib told him about the dancing and how it had felt.

  “You can see a bit, I think. You are not entirely blind.”

  Little Tib said, “No,” and Nitty said, “The doctor in Howard told us he didn’t have any retinas. How is anybody going to see if they don’t have retinas?”

  “Ah, I understand, then. Someone told you, I think, about my bus—the pictures I have made on the sides of it. Yes, that must be it. Did they tell you?”

  “Tell me about what?” Little Tib asked.

  Talking to Nitty, Dr. Prithivi said, “You have described the paintings on the side of my bus to this child?”

  “No,” Nitty said. “I looked at them when I got in, but I never talked about them.”

  “Yes, indeed, I did not think so. It was not likely, I think, that you had seen it before I stopped for you on the road, and you were in my presence after that. Nevertheless, there is a picture on the left side of my bus that is a picture of a man with a lion’s head. It is Vishnu destroying the demon Hiranyakasipu. Is it not interesting that this boy, arriving in a vehicle with such a picture, should be led to dance on air by a lion-headed figure? It was Vishnu also who circled the universe in two strides; this is a kind of dancing on air, perhaps.”

  “Uh-huh,” Nitty said. “But George here couldn’t have seen that picture.”

  “But perhaps the picture saw him—that is the point you are missing. Still, the lion has many significations. Among the Jews, it is the emblem of the tribe of Judah. For this reason the Emperor of Ethiopia is styled Lion of Judah. Also the son-in-law of Mohammed, whose name I cannot recall now when I need it, was styled Lion of God. Christianity too is very rich in lions. You noticed perhaps that I asked the boy particularly if the lion he saw had wings. I did that because a winged lion is the badge of Saint Mark. But a lion without wings indicates the Christ—this is because of the old belief that the cubs of the lion are dead at birth, and are licked to life afterward by the lioness. In the writings of Sir C. S. Lewis a lion is used in that way, and in the prayers revealed to Saint Bridget of Sweden the Christ is styled ‘Strong Lion, immortal and invincible King.’ ”