The Best of Gene Wolfe

by Gene Wolfe

  After some gentle teasing about my age and inadequacies (the sort of thing that women always do, in my experience, as anticipatory vengeance for the contempt with which they expect to be treated when the sexual act is complete), we slept. In the morning, Eira wore her wedding band to breakfast, where I introduced her to the old woman as my wife, to the old man’s obvious relief. The demon sat opposite me at the table, wolfing down scrambled eggs, biscuits, and homemade sausage he did not require, and from time to time winking at me in an offensive manner that I did my best to tolerate.

  Outside I spoke to him in private while Eira was upstairs searching our room for the hairbrush that I had been careful to leave behind.

  “If you are here to reclaim her,” I told him, “I am your debtor. Thank you for waiting until morning.”

  He grinned like the trap he was. “Have a nice night?”

  “Very.”

  “Swell. You folks think we don’t want you to have any fun. That’s not the way it is at all.” He strove to stifle his native malignancy as he said this, with the result that it showed so clearly I found it difficult not to cringe. “I do you a favor, maybe you’ll do me one sometime. Right?”

  “Perhaps,” I hedged.

  He laughed. I have heard many actors try to reproduce the hollowness and cruelty of that laugh, but not one has come close. “Isn’t that what keeps you coming back here? Wanting favors? You know we don’t give anything away.”

  “I hope to learn, and to make myself a better man.”

  “Touching. You and Dr. Frankenstein.”

  I forced myself to smile. “I owed you thanks, as I said, and I do thank you. Now I’ll impose upon your good nature, if I may. Two weeks. You spoke of favors, of the possibility of accommodation. I would be greatly in your debt. I am already, as I acknowledge.”

  Grinning, he shook his head.

  “One week, then. Today is Thursday. Let us have—let me have her until next Thursday.”

  “Afraid not, pal.”

  “Three days, then. I recognize that she belongs to you, but you’ll have her for eternity, and she can’t be an important prisoner.”

  “Inmate. Inmate sounds better.” The demon laid his hand upon my shoulder, and I was horribly conscious of its weight and bone-crushing strength. “You think I let you jump her last night because I’m such a nice guy? You really believe that?”

  “I was hoping that was the case, yes.”

  “Bright. Real bright. Just because I got here a little after she did, you think I was trailing her like that flea-bitten dog and I followed her here.” He sniffed, and it was precisely the sniff of a hound on the scent. The hand that held my shoulder drew me to him until I stood with the almost insuperable weight of his entire arm on my shoulders. “Listen here. I don’t have to track anybody. Wherever they are, I am. See?”

  “I understand.”

  “If I’d been after her, I’d of had her away from you as soon as I saw her. Only she’s not why I came here, she’s not why I’m leaving, and if I was to grab her all it would do is get me in the soup with the big boys downstairs. I don’t want you either.”

  “I’m gratified to hear it.”

  “Swell. If I was to give you a promise, my solemn word of dishonor, you wouldn’t think that was worth shit-paper, would you.”

  “To the contrary.” Although I was lying in his teeth, I persevered. “I know an angel’s word is sacred, to him at least.”

  “Okay then. I don’t want her. You wanted a couple of weeks, and I said no deal because I’m letting you have her forever, and vice versa. You don’t know what forever means, whatever you think. But I do.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, and I meant it from the bottom of my soul. “Thank you very, very much.”

  The demon grinned and took his arm from my shoulders. “I wouldn’t mess around with you or her or a single thing the two of you are going to do together, see? Word of dishonor. The boys downstairs would skin me, because you’re her assignment. So be happy.” He slapped me on the back so hard that he nearly knocked me down.

  Still grinning, he walked around the corner of someone’s camper van. I followed as quickly as I could, but he had disappeared.

  * * *

  Little remains to tell. I drove Eira to St. Louis, as I had promised, and she left me with a quick kiss in the parking area of the Gateway Arch; we had stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch on the way, and I had scribbled my address and telephone number on a paper napkin there and watched her tuck it into a pocket of the denim shirt she wore. Since then I have had a week in which to consider my adventure, as I said on the first page of this account.

  In the beginning (especially Friday night), I hoped for a telephone call or a midnight summons from my doorbell. Neither came.

  On Monday I went to the library, where I perused the back issues of newspapers; and this evening, thanks to a nephew at an advertising agency, I researched the matter further, viewing twenty-five-and thirty-year-old tapes of news broadcasts. The woman’s name was not Eira, a name that means “snow,” and the name of the husband she had slain with his own shotgun was not Tom, Dick, Harry, or even Mortimer, but I was sure I had found her. (Fairly sure, at least.) She took her own life in jail, awaiting trial.

  She has been in Hell. That, I feel, is the single solid fact, the one thing on which I can rely. But did she escape? Or was she vomited forth?

  All this has been brought to a head by the card I received today in the mail. It was posted on Monday from St. Louis, and has taken a disgraceful four days to make a journey that the most cautious driver can complete in a few hours. On its front, a tall, beautiful, and astonishingly busty woman is crowding a fearful little man. The caption reads: I want to impress one thing on you.

  Inside the card: My body.

  Beneath that is the scrawled name Eira, and a telephone number. Should I call her? Dare I?

  Bear in mind (as I must constantly remind myself to) that nothing the demon said can be trusted. Neither can anything that she herself said. She would have had me take her for a living woman, if she could.

  Has the demon devised an excruciating torment for us both?

  Or for me alone?

  The telephone is at my elbow as I write. Her card is on my desk. If I dial the number, will I be blundering into the snare, or will I have torn the snare to pieces?

  Should I call her?

  A final possibility remains, although I find it almost impossible to write of it.

  What if I am mad?

  What if Foulweather the salesman merely played up to what he assumed was an elaborate joke? What if my last conversation with him (that is to say, with the demon) was a delusion? What if Eira is in fact the living woman that almost every man in the world would take her for, save I?

  She cannot have much money and may well be staying for a few days with some chance acquaintance.

  Am I insane? Deluded?

  Tomorrow she may be gone. One dash three one four—

  Should I call?

  Perhaps I may be a man of courage after all, a man who has never truly understood his own character.

  Will I call her? Do I dare?

  Afterword

  Because its demons are evil, this story is a favorite of Kathe Koja’s.

  I know how she feels. The first writer who presented Satan as a cheerful companion with supernatural powers was giving us an interesting novelty; that novelty has become the norm. Speaking not for Kathe but for myself alone, I have had it with little giants, chatty dragons, bumbling invaders, and their ilk. If you enjoyed this story, I hope you’ll look into The Knight, a book that tries to return giants, dragons, and invaders to their roots—a book in which the knights who wage war on all three are hard-bitten fighting men.

  Petting Zoo

  Roderick looked up at the sky. It was indeed blue, but almost cloudless. The air was hot and smelled of dust.

  “Here, children. . . .” The teaching cyborg was pointedly not addressing him. “Tyranno
saurus rex. Rex was created by an inadequately socialized boy who employed six Build-a-Critter kits . . .”

  Sixteen.

  “. . . which he duped on his father’s Copystuff. With that quantity of Gro-Qik . . .”

  It had taken a day over two weeks, two truckloads of pigs that he had charged to Mother’s account, and various other things that had become vague. For the last week, he had let Rex go out at night to see what he could find, and people would—people were bound to—notice the missing cattle soon. Had probably noticed them already.

  Rex had looked out through the barn window while he was mooring his air-bike and said, “I’m tired of hiding all day.”

  And he himself had said . . .

  “Let’s go for a ride.” One of the little girls had raised her hand.

  From the other side of the token barrier that confined him, Rex himself spoke for the first time, saying, “You will, kid. She’s not quite through yet.” His voice was a sort of growling tenor now, clearly forced upward as high as he could make it so as to seem less threatening. Roderick pushed on his suit’s AC and shivered a little.

  It had been cool, that day. Cool, with a little breeze he had fought the whole way over, keeping his airbike below the treetops and following groundtrucks when he could, pulled along by their wake.

  Cold in the old barn, then—cold, and dusty—dust motes dancing in the sunbeams that stabbed between its old, bent, and battered aluminum panels.

  Rex had crouched as he had before, but he was bigger now, bigger than ever, and his smooth reptilian skin had felt like glass, like ice under which oiled muscles stirred like snakes. He had fallen, and Rex had picked him up in the arms that looked so tiny on Rex but were bigger and stronger than a big man’s arms, saying, “That’s what these are for,” and set him on Rex’s shoulders with his legs—his legs—trying to wrap around Rex’s thick, throbbing neck . . .

  Had opened the big doors from inside, had gone out almost crawling and stood up.

  It had not been the height. He had been higher on his airbike almost every day. It had not been his swift, swaying progress above the treetops, treetops arrayed in red, gold, and green so that it seemed that he followed Rex’s floating head over a lawn deep in fallen leaves.

  It had been—

  He shrugged the thought away. There were no adequate words. Power? You bought it at a drugstore, a shiny little disk that would run your house-bot for three or four more years or your drill forever. Mastery? It was what people had held over dogs while private ownership had still been legal.

  Dogs had four fangs in front, and that was it, fangs so small they did not even look dangerous. Rex had a mouthful, every one as long as Roderick’s arm, in a mouth that could have chewed up an aircar.

  No, it had not been the height. He had ridden over woods—this wood among them—often. Had ridden higher than this, yet heard the rustling of the leaves below him, the sound of a brook, an invisible brook of air. It had been the noise.

  That was not right either, but it was closer than the others. It had been the snapping of the limbs and the crashing of the trees falling, or at least that had been a lot of it, the sound of their progress, the shattering, splintering wood. In part, at least, it had been the noise.

  “He did a great deal of damage,” the teaching cyborg was saying, as her female attendant nodded confirmation. “Much worse, he terrified literally hundreds of persons. . . .”

  Sitting on Rex’s shoulders, he had been able to talk almost directly into Rex’s ear. “Roar.”

  And Rex had roared to shake the earth.

  “Keep on roaring.”

  And Rex had.

  The red and white cattle Rex ate sometimes, so short legged they could scarcely move, had run away slowly only because they were too fat to run any faster, and one had gotten stepped on. People had run too, and Rex had kicked over a little prefab shed for the fun of it, and a tractor-bot. Had waded hip deep through the swamp without even slowing down, and had forded the river. There were fewer building restrictions on the north side of the river, and the people there had really run.

  Had run except for one old man with a bushy mustache, who had only stood and stared pop-eyed, too old to run, Roderick thought, or maybe too scared. He had looked down at the old man and waved, and their eyes had met, and suddenly—just as if the top of the old man’s head had popped up so Roderick could look around inside it—he had known what the old man was thinking.

  Not guessed, known.

  And the old man had been thinking that when he had been Roderick’s age he had wanted to do exactly what Roderick was doing now. He had never been able to, and had never thought anybody would be. But somebody was; that kid up there in the polka-dot shirt was. So he, the old man, had been wrong about the whole world all his life. It was much more wonderful, this old world, than he, the old man, had ever supposed. So maybe there was hope after all. Some kind of a hope anyhow, in a world where things like this could go on, on a Monday right here in Libertyberg.

  Before the old man could draw his breath to cheer, he had been gone, and there had been woods and cornfields. (Roderick’s suit AC shuddered and quit.) And after lots of corn, some kind of a big factory. Rex had stepped on its fence, which sputtered and shot sparks without doing anything much, and then the air-car had started diving at them.

  It had been red and fast, and Roderick remembered it as clearly as if he had seen it yesterday. It would dive, trying to hit Rex’s head, and then the override would say, “My gosh, that’s a great big dinosaur! You’re trying to crash us into a great big dinosaur, you jerk!” The override would pull the aircar up and miss, and then it would give it back to the driver, and he would try the same thing all over.

  Roderick had followed it with his eyes, especially after Rex started snapping at it, and the sky had been a wonderful cool blue with little white surgical-ball clouds strolling around in it. He had never seen a better sky—and he never would, because skies did not get any better than that one. After a while he had spotted the channel copter, flying around up there and taking his picture to run on everybody’s threedeevid, and had made faces at it.

  Another child, a scrubbed little girl with long, straight, privileged-looking yellow hair, had her hand up. “Did he kill a whole lot of people?”

  The teaching cyborg interrupted her own lecture. “Certainly not, since there were no people in North America during the Upper Cretaceous. Human evolution did not begin—”

  “This one.” The scrubbed little girl pointed to Rex. “Did he?”

  Rex shook his head.

  “That was not the point at issue,” the teaching cyborg explained. “Disruption is disrupting, and he and his maker disrupted. He disrupted, I should say, and his maker still more, since Rex would not have been in existence to disrupt had he not been made in violation of societal standards. No one of sensitivity would have done what he did. Someone of sensitivity would have realized at once that their construction of a large dinosaur, however muted in coloration—”

  Rex interrupted her. “I’m purple. It’s just that it’s gotten sort of dull lookin’ now that I’m older. Looky here.” He bent and slapped at his water trough with his disproportionately small hands. Dust ran from his hide in dark streaks, leaving it a faded mulberry.

  “You are not purple,” the teaching cyborg admonished Rex, “and you should not say you are. I would describe that shade as a mauve.” She spoke to her female attendant. “Do you think that they would mind very much if I were to start over? I’ve lost my place, I fear.”

  “You mustn’t interrupt her,” the female attendant cautioned the little girl. “Early Tertiary-in-the-Upper-Eocene-was-the-Moeritherium-the-size-of-a-tuber-but-more-like-a-hippopotamus.”

  “Yum,” Rex mumbled. “Yum-yum!”

  A small boy waved his hand wildly. “What do you feed him?”

  “Tofu, mostly. It’s good for him.” The teaching cyborg looked at Rex as she spoke, clearly displeased at his thriving upon tofu. �
�He eats an airtruckload of it every day. Also a great deal of soy protein and bean curd.”

  “I’d like to eat the hippos,” Rex told the small boy. “We go right past them every time I take you kids for a ride, and wow! Do they ever look yummy!”

  “He’s only joking,” the teaching cyborg told the children. She caught her female attendant’s left arm and held it up to see her watch. “I have a great deal more to tell you, children, but I’ll have to do it while we’re taking our ride, or we’ll fall behind schedule.”

  She and her female attendant opened the gate to Rex’s compound and went in, preceded, accompanied, and followed by small girls and boys. While most of the children gathered around him, stroking his rough, thick hide with tentative fingers, the teaching cyborg and her female attendant wrestled a stepladder and a very large howdah of white pentastyrene Wicked wicker from behind Rex’s sleeping shed. For five minutes or more they struggled to hook the howdah over his shoulders and fasten the Velcro cinch, obstructed by the well-intended assistance of four little boys.

  Roderick joined them, lifted the howdah into place, and released and refastened the cinch, getting it tight enough that the howdah could not slip to one side.

  “Thank you,” the female attendant said. “Haven’t I seen you here before?”

  Roderick shook his head. “It’s the first time I’ve ever come.”

  “Well, a lot of men do. I mean it’s always just one man all by himself, but there’s almost always one.”

  “He used to lie down so that we could put it on him,” the teaching cyborg said severely, “and lie down again so that the children didn’t have to use the ladder. Now he just sits.”

  “I’m too fat,” Rex muttered. “It’s all that good tofu I get.”

  One by one, the children climbed the ladder, the teaching cyborg’s female attendant standing beside it to catch each if he or she fell, cautioning each to grasp the railings and urging each to belt himself or herself in once he or she had chosen a seat. The teaching cyborg and her female attendant boarded last of all, the teaching cyborg resumed her lecture, and Rex stood up with a groan and began yet again the slow walk around the zoo that he took a dozen times a day.