The Best of Gene Wolfe

by Gene Wolfe

  “Here,” Nitty said, “high step up. Watch out.”

  They were rough wooden stairs, seven steps. Little Tib climbed the last one, and . . .

  He could see.

  For a moment (though it was only a moment) he thought that he was no longer blind. He was in a village of mud houses, and there were people all around him, brown-skinned people with large soft brown eyes—men with red and yellow and blue cloths wrapped about their heads, women with beautiful black hair and colored dresses. There was a cow-smell and a dust-smell and a cooking-smell all at once, and just beyond the village a single mountain perfect and pure as an ice-cream cone, and beyond the mountain a marvelous sky full of palaces and chariots and painted elephants, and beyond the sky more faces than he could count.

  Then he knew that it was only imagination, only a dream, not his dream this time, but Dr. Prithivi’s dream. Perhaps Dr. Prithivi could dream the way he did, so strongly that the angels came to make the dreams true; perhaps it was only Dr. Prithivi’s dream working through him. He thought of what Indra had said—that his mother was not his real mother—and knew that that could not be so.

  A brown-skinned, brown-eyed woman with a pretty, heart-shaped face said, “Pipe for us,” and he remembered that he still had the wooden flute. He raised it to his lips, not certain that he could play it, and wonderful music began. It was not his, but he fingered the flute pretending that it was his, and danced. The women danced with him, sometimes joining hands, sometimes ringing little bells.

  It seemed to him that they had been dancing for only a moment when Indra came. He was bigger than Little Tib’s father, and his face was a carved, hooknosed mask. In his right hand he had a cruel sword that curved and recurved like a snake, and in his left a glittering eye. When Little Tib saw the eye, he knew why it was that Indra had not killed him while they were alone in the bus. Someone far away was watching through that eye, and until he had seen Little Tib do the things he was able, sometimes, to do, make things appear and disappear, bring the angels, Indra could not use his sword. I just won’t do it, Little Tib thought, but he knew he could not always stop what happened—that the happenings sometimes carried him with them.

  The thunder boomed then, and Dr. Prithivi’s voice said, “Play up to it! Up to the storm. That is ideal for what we are trying to do!”

  Indra stood in front of Little Tib and said something about bringing so much rain that it would drown the village; and Dr. Prithivi’s voice told Little Tib to lift the mountain.

  Little Tib looked and saw a real mountain, far off and perfect; he knew he could not lift it.

  Then the rain came, and the lights went out, and they were standing on the stage in the dark, with icy water beating against their faces. The lightning flashed and Little Tib saw hundreds of people running for their cars; among them were a man with a monkey’s head, and another with an elephant’s, and a man with nine faces.

  And then Little Tib was blind again, and there was nothing left but the rough feel of wood underfoot, and the beating of the rain, and the knowledge that Indra was still before him, holding his sword and the eye.

  And then a man made all of metal (so that the rain drummed on him) stood there too. He held an ax, and wore a pointed hat, and by the light that shown from his polished surface Little Tib could see Indra too, and the eye.

  “Who are you?” Indra said. He was talking to the Metal Man.

  “Who are you?” the Metal Man answered. “I can’t see your face behind that wooden mask—but wood has never stood for long against me.” He struck Indra’s mask with his ax; a big chip flew from it, and the string that held it in place broke, and it went clattering down.

  Little Tib saw his father’s face, with the rain running from it. “Who are you?” his father said to the Metal Man again.

  “Don’t you know me, Georgie?” the Metal Man said. “Why, we used to be old friends, once. I have, if I may say so, a very sympathetic heart, and when—”

  “Daddy!” Little Tib yelled.

  His father looked at him and said, “Hello, Little Tib.”

  “Daddy, if I had known you were Indra I wouldn’t have been scared at all. That mask made your voice sound different.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid any longer, Son,” his father said. He took two steps toward Little Tib, and then, almost too quickly to see, his sword blade came up and flashed down.

  The Metal Man’s ax was even quicker. It came up and stayed up; Indra’s sword struck it with a crash.

  “That won’t help him,” Little Tib’s father said. “They’ve seen him, and they’ve seen you. I wanted to get it over with.”

  “They haven’t seen me,” the Metal Man said. “It’s darker here than you think.”

  At once it was dark. The rain stopped—or if it continued, Little Tib was not conscious of it. He did not know why he knew, but he knew where he was: he was standing, still standing, in front of the computer, with the devils not yet driven out.

  Then the rain was back and his father was there again, but the Metal Man was gone, and the dark came back with a rush until Little Tib was blind again. “Are you still going to kill me, Father?” he asked.

  There was no reply, and he repeated his question.

  “Not now,” his father said.

  “Later?”

  “Come here.” Little Tib felt his father’s hand on his arm, the way it used to be. “Let’s sit down.” It drew him to the edge of the platform and helped him to seat himself with his legs dangling over.

  “Are you all right?” Little Tib asked.

  “Yes,” his father told him.

  “Then why do you want to kill me?”

  “I don’t want to.” Suddenly his father sounded angry. “I never said I wanted to. I have to do it, that’s all. Look at us; look at what we’ve been. Moving from place to place, working construction, working the land, worshiping the Lord like it was a hundred years ago. You know what we are? We’re jackrabbits. You recall jackrabbits, Little Tib?”

  “No.”

  “That was before your day. Big old long-legg’d rabbits with long ears like a jackass’s. Back before you were born they decided they weren’t any good, and they all died. For about a year I’d find them on the place, dead, and then there wasn’t any more. They waited to join until it was too late, you see. Or maybe they couldn’t. That’s what’s going to happen to people like us. I mean our family. What do you suppose we’ve been?”

  Little Tib, who did not understand the question, said nothing.

  “When I was a boy and used to go to school I would hear about all these great men and kings and queens and presidents, and I liked to think that maybe some were family. That isn’t so, and I know it now. If you could go back to Bible times, you’d find our people living in the woods like Indians.”

  “I’d like that,” Little Tib said.

  “Well, they cut down those woods so we couldn’t do that anymore, and we began scratching a living out of the ground. We’ve been doing that ever since and paying taxes, do you understand me? That’s all we’ve ever done. And pretty soon now there won’t be any call at all for people to do that. We’ve got to join them before it’s too late—do you see?”

  “No,” Little Tib said.

  “You’re the one. You’re a prodigy and a healer, and so they want you dead. You’re our ticket. Everybody was born for something, and that was what you were born for, Son. Just because of you, the family is going to get in before it’s too late.”

  “But if I’m dead . . .” Little Tib tried to get his thoughts in order. “You and Mama don’t have any other children.”

  “You don’t understand, do you?”

  Little Tib’s father had put his arm around Little Tib, and now he leaned down until their faces touched. But when they did, it seemed to Little Tib that his father’s face did not feel as it should. Little Tib reached up and felt it with both hands, and it came off in his hands, feeling like the plastic vegetables came in at the new place; perha
ps this was Big Tib’s dream.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  Little Tib reached up to find out who had been pretending to be his father. The new face was metal, hard and cold.

  “I am the president’s man now. I didn’t want you to know that, because I thought that it might upset you. The president is handling the situation personally.”

  “Is Mama still at home?” Little Tib asked. He meant the new place.

  “No. She’s in a different division—gee-seven. But I still see her sometimes. I think she’s in Atlanta now.”

  “Looking for me?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me.”

  Something inside Little Tib, just under the hard place in the middle of his chest where all the ribs came together, began to get tighter and tighter, like a balloon being blown up too far. He felt that when it burst, he would burst too. It made it impossible to take more than tiny breaths, and it pressed against the voice thing in his neck so he could not speak. Inside himself he said forever that that was not his real mother and this was not his real father, that his real mother and father were the mother and father he had had at the old place; he would keep them inside for always, his real mother and father. The rain beat against his face; his nose was full of mucus; he had to breathe through his mouth, but his mouth was filling with saliva, which ran down his chin and made him ashamed.

  Then the tears came in a hot flood on his cold cheeks, and the metal face fell off Indra like an old pie pan from a shelf, and went rattling and clanging across the blacktop under the stage.

  He reached up to his father’s face again, and it was his face, but he said, “Little Tib, can’t you understand? It’s the Federal Reserve Card. It’s the goddamned card. It’s having no money, and nothing to do, and spending your whole life like a goddamn whipped dog. I only got in because of you—saying I’d hunt for you. We had training and all that, Skinnerian conditioning and deep hypnosis; they saw to that—but in the end it’s the damn card.” And while he said that, Little Tib could hear Indra’s sword, scraping and scraping, ever so slowly, across the boards of the stage. Little Tib jumped down and ran, not knowing or caring whether he was going to run into something.

  In the end, he ran into Nitty. Nitty no longer had his sweat and wood-smoke smell, because of the rain, but he still had the same feel, and the same voice when he said, “There you are. I been lookin’ just everyplace for you. I thought somebody had run off with you to get you out of the wet. Where you been?” He raised Little Tib on his shoulders.

  Little Tib plunged his hands into the thick, wet hair and hung on. “On the stage,” he said.

  “On the stage still? Well, I swear.” Nitty was walking fast, taking big, long strides. Little Tib’s body rocked with the swing of them. “That was the one place I never thought to look for you. I thought you would have come off there fast, looking for me, or someplace dry. But I guess you were afraid of falling off.”

  “Yes,” Little Tib said, “I was afraid of falling off.” Running in the rain had let all the air out of the balloon; he felt empty inside, and like he had no bones at all. Twice he nearly slid from Nitty’s shoulders, but each time Nitty’s big hands reached up and caught him.

  The next morning a good-smelling woman came from the school for him. Little Tib was still in bed when she knocked on the door, but he heard Nitty open it, and her say, “I believe you have a blind child here.”

  “Yes’m,” Nitty said.

  “Mr. Parker—the new acting superintendent?—asked me to come over and escort him myself the first day. I’m Ms. Munson. I teach the blind class.”

  “I’m not sure he’s got clothes fit for school,” Nitty told her.

  “Oh, they come in just anything these days,” Ms. Munson said, and then she saw Little Tib, who had gotten out of bed when he heard the door open, and said, “I see what you mean. Is he dressed for a play?”

  “Last night,” Nitty told her.

  “Oh. I heard about it, but I wasn’t there.”

  Then Little Tib knew he still had the skirt thing on that they had given him—but it was not; it was a dry, woolly towel. But he still had beads on, and metal bracelets on his arm.

  “His others are real ragged.”

  “I’m afraid he’ll have to wear them anyway,” Ms. Munson said. Nitty took him into the bathroom and took the beads and bracelets and towel off, and dressed him in his usual clothes. Then Ms. Munson led him out of the motel and opened the door of her little electric car for him.

  “Did Mr. Parker get his job again?” Little Tib asked when the car bounced out of the motel lot and onto the street.

  “I don’t know about again,” Ms. Munson said. “Did he have it before? But I understand he’s extremely well qualified in educational programming; and when they found out this morning that the computer was inoperative, he presented his credentials and offered to help. He called me about ten o’clock and asked me to go for you, but I couldn’t get away from the school until now.”

  “It’s noon, isn’t it,” Little Tib said. “It’s too hot for morning.”

  That afternoon he sat in Ms. Munson’s room with eight other blind children while a machine moved his hand over little dots on paper and told him what they were. When school was over and he could hear the seeing children milling in the hall outside, a woman older and thicker than Ms. Munson came for him and took him to a house where other, seeing, children larger than he lived. He ate there; the thick woman was angry once because he pushed his beets, by accident, off his plate. That night he slept in a narrow bed.

  The next three days were all the same. In the morning the thick woman took him to school. In the evening she came for him. There was a television at the thick woman’s house—Little Tib could never remember her name afterward—and when supper was over, the children listened to television.

  On the fifth day of school he heard his father’s voice in the corridor outside, and then he came into Ms. Munson’s room with a man from the school, who sounded important.

  “This is Mr. Jefferson,” the man from the school told Ms. Munson. “He’s from the Government. You are to release one of your students to his care. Do you have a George Tibbs here?”

  Little Tib felt his father’s hand close on his shoulder. “I have him,” his father said. They went out the front door, and down the steps, and then along the side. “There’s been a change in orders, Son; I’m to bring you to Niagara for examination.”

  “All right.”

  “There’s no place to park around this damn school. I had to park a block away.”

  Little Tib remembered the rattly truck his father had when they lived at the old place, but he knew somehow that the truck was gone like the old place itself, belonging to the real father locked in his memory. The father of now would have a nice car.

  He heard footsteps, and then there was a man he could see walking in front of them—a man so small he was hardly taller than Little Tib himself. He had a shiny bald head with upcurling hair at the sides of it, and a bright green coat with two long coattails and two sparkling green buttons. When he turned around to face them (skipping backward to keep up), Little Tib saw that his face was all red and white except for two little, dark eyes that almost seemed to shoot out sparks. He had a big, hooked nose like Indra’s, but on him it did not look cruel. “And what can I do for you?” he asked Little Tib.

  “Get me loose,” Little Tib said. “Make him let go of me.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know,” Little Tib confessed.

  The man in the green coat nodded to himself as if he had guessed that all along, and took an envelope of silver paper out of his inside coat pocket. “If you are caught again,” he said, “it will be for good. Understand? Running is for people who are not helped.” He tore one end of the envelope open. It was full of glittering powder, as Little Tib saw when he poured it out into his hand. “You remind me,” he said, “of a friend of mine named Tip. Tip with a p. A b is just
a p turned upside down.” He threw the glittering powder into the air, and spoke a word Little Tib could not quite hear.

  For just a second there were two things at once. There was the sidewalk and the row of cars on one side and the lawns on the other, and there was Ms. Munson’s room, with the sounds of the other children, and the mopped-floor smell. He looked around at the light on the cars, and then it was gone and there was only the sound of his father’s voice in the hall outside, and the feel of the school desk and the paper with dots in it. The voice of the man in the green coat (as if he had not gone away at all) said, “Tip turned out to be the ruler of all of us in the end, you know.” Then there was the beating of big wings. And then it was all gone, gone completely.

  The classroom door opened, and a man from the school who sounded important said, “Ms. Munson, I have a gentleman here who states that he is the father of one of your pupils.

  “Would you give me your name again, sir?”

  “George Tibbs. My boy’s name is George Tibbs too.”

  “Is this your father, George?” Ms. Munson said.

  “How would he know? He’s blind.”

  Little Tib said nothing, and the Important Man said, “Perhaps we’d better all go up to the office. You say that you’re with the Federal Government, Mr. Tibbs?”

  “The Office of Biogenetic Improvement. I suppose you’re surprised, seeing that I’m nothing but a dirt farmer—but I got into it through the Agricultural Program.”

  “Ah.”

  Ms. Munson, who was holding Little Tib’s hand, led him around a corner.

  “I’m working on a case now. . . . Perhaps it would be better if the boy waited outside.”

  A door opened. “We haven’t been able to identify him, you understand,” the Important Man said. “His retinas are gone. That’s the reason for all this red tape.”

  Ms. Munson helped Little Tib find a chair, and said, “Wait here.”

  Then the door closed and everyone was gone. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, and for an instant there were points of light like the glittering dust the man in the green coat had thrown. Little Tib thought about what he was going to do, and not running. Then about Krishna, because he had been Krishna. Had Krishna run? Or had he gone back to fight the king who had wanted to kill him? Little Tib could not be sure, but he did not think Krishna had run. Jesus had fled into Egypt; he remembered that. But Jesus had come back. Not to Bethlehem, where he had run from, but to Nazareth, because that was his real home. Little Tib remembered talking about the Jesus story to his father, when they were sitting on the stage. His father had brushed it aside; but Little Tib felt it might be important somehow. He put his chin on his hands to think about it.