by Gene Wolfe
Eight days we searched the desert for my scout and found it on the ninth. I leaped from the back of his beast and would have run to it ahead of him; but he lashed it to a gallop, though it was so near death, and we arrived together. I had promised him that he would live forever if we found my scout. This I told tonight to those who had burned beasts on the stone table for us, at which their eyes grew wide.
He would be taller than other men, I had promised, and stronger than the beast he rode. He had believed me, and the others, tonight, believed me too.
For a time at least.
The truth is that I believed it myself. In the scout I would be able to correct or alter my own nucleic acids. The tiny machines I inserted beneath my shin for that purpose could, I thought, be inserted beneath his also. So inserted, they would achieve the changes I directed. There in the desert it had seemed so easy.
He questioned me once more when we reached the scout. How hard he tried to ingratiate himself! How many times he touched his face to the sand! I would not cheat him. No, not I. I would never cheat him, who had saved my life in the desert. He waited for me to assert (I could see this) that he had not. But it was true, and I acknowledged it.
The natives who fed us nodded to themselves when I recounted this. The larger sort cover their faces with hair as he did. They remind me of him, and the memory is not wholly unpleasant. How much I learned from him!
I pledged myself again and I took his body fluid. Have I already scribed this? I repeated all the promises I had made before. Better, more, and stronger, for I was starved and shrunken then and feared he would prevent me from boarding the scout. He sensed it, for he severed the head of his beast, and we cooked its flesh and ate it before I went into the scout. I had explained that he could not breathe inside, and I let him stand by me when I opened the lock. He coughed and backed away, and I—I!—achieved the goal of so many empty days.
It was a triumph, and I inspected every part of the scout glorying, and tested every instrument in every possible way, recalling my navigator. They functioned without a flaw, all of them. I was ecstatic.
And then, having grown so greatly in my own estimation, I attempted to reprogram the tiny machines. I would make my promises turn to truths.
The natives who had fed us grew restless when I spoke of this, and looked one to another. They are strange creatures, too simple for their own good; but because they are very simple, it is not easy to guess what they think or what they feel. Their thoughts will be simple thoughts, but without logic and without knowledge. Who can say where they will run? Their feelings know no truth.
It could not be done. I told them so again and again, that they might understand. For three days I labored, though by the third I knew. There was no hope.
And when this star had set (this I made as plain as I could) I restarted the engines and returned to this ship. He, waiting for the promises that could never come, died swiftly and in glory like their star.
I repeated it many times and in many ways, and it seemed to me they understood.
Calamity Warps
Calamity Jane is our dog, and she warps though space. I suppose I should say space-time, though that implies a level of expertise I haven’t actually got.
Still, she does. I told Bob Smith next door and he said, “Yep, she’s really, really fast.” And he may be right. Maybe that’s all it is. Maybe the laws of physics say that if a thing—a dog, in this case—moves a whole lot faster than other things of the same kind, she warps though space. I don’t know, and to tell you the truth, I don’t think anybody else does either.
I ought to go back to the beginning. Our old dog died, and my wife decided we should have a new dog. I didn’t think so. It wasn’t that I don’t like dogs. I do. It was just that I know how much trouble they can be and how much responsibility is involved. If it had been up to me, I would have contacted the breeder and gotten another cairn terrier. But I told my wife I didn’t think we ought to, and if she really wanted a dog she would have to get it herself.
So she did. Being on the frugal side, she went to Save-A-Pet and got one for the price of the shots. That was CalamityJane; she had been spayed and was housebroken, and that was all we really knew about her. The people at Save-A-Pet think she’s about eighteen months old.
My wife has various ideas about what kind of dog she might be, some kind of Belgian shepherd one day, and half this and half that the next. What’s for sure is that if you dropped her in a pack of coyotes the coyotes would roll out the welcome mat, and brag afterward about their new member. She’s the color of sand, her legs are so long it looks like she’s walking on stilts, and she has big, stiff wolf ears. She also has a long, long muzzle with teeth. Lots of them, and the big ones are really, really big. She knows who got her from Save-A-Pet and is my wife’s dog. She tolerates me except for late at night. Late at night she thinks I’m sneaking up with some villainous purpose in mind, like giving her a rabies shot, and she lets me know there’s no guarantee I’ll always have two arms. Boy, I hope she’s wrong about that.
Because she warps, like I said.
At first I thought she was just fast. Like, she’d be out in the back yard, and I’d go to the gate, and when my hand touched the latch she’d be right beside me—without ever having gotten there, if you know what I mean.
Then there was the rabbit. We’re pretty far out in the burbs, and we get deer and coons and whatnot now and then. It’s kind of nice, but the deer will eat your rosebushes unless Calamity’s around.
So here was this big cottontail, and the first thing I knew Calamity wasn’t in the back yard anymore. She was out in the street after that rabbit. Her legs are really, really long, like I told you, and she just flew.
But the rabbit could turn quicker. She would be snapping at its hind feet and it would make a hard right or a hard left and she’d overshoot it. She’d turn, of course, but the rabbit would have gotten a couple of yards. (I mean like Dawson’s yard or Smith’s.) When she caught up again, the rabbit would make another hard turn.
Then it did, but she didn’t overshoot. Or turn, either. They had been running straight downhill toward Hillside Drive, and the rabbit made a sharp right toward the house on the corner. And Calamity was running that way, too. It wasn’t that she had turned, she still had all her momentum, just a sandstorm. The rabbit turned again, and she was right on top of it and bit it in the neck.
She brought it to me after shaking it pretty good, and dropped it at my feet. Then she sort of stepped back and said, I know you don’t like me much, but look what I can do. Right there’s where I made my second big mistake. (My first one was not getting a cairn terrier.) I should have said bad dog and all that, but I picked up the rabbit and said thank you, good dog, and a lot more. What would you have done? Would you want a dog like Calamity mad at you?
Afterward I asked my wife why she’d named her CalamityJane, and she said she hadn’t, the people at Save-A-Pet had. That’s when I called them up. And the woman I talked to said they called her that because she was always getting into things and getting out of her run and showing up in places where she shouldn’t have been.
I’ll bet. I think they knew. They just didn’t want to tell us.
So that was that, and I tried chaining her up, but that didn’t work either. I think it really made things worse, because she got into the habit, if you know what I mean. She’d see another dog or something, and run to the end of her chain and be with that other dog. And her collar lying on the ground with the chain still on it. So I quit doing it.
Then she started bringing stuff home, and she would give it to me. Mostly it was stuff she could have gotten anywhere, but once it was a wallet with Japanese money in it and Japanese ID. I sent that to the Japanese consulate.
The next I remember was just a stick. Only it was heavy, and the harder you looked at it, the funnier it looked, if you know what I mean. The bark was kind of like skin, and warty, and the wood inside wasn’t really bone, but it made you think of th
at. Polished bone, and that hard and heavy.
After that a little animal, still alive. It was sort of cute, but Calamity had hurt it pretty bad catching it, and it had trouble breathing. It had pink fur. I read one time that they used to take white rabbits and dye them all sorts of colors for Easter and sell them for pets, and I thought maybe it had been dyed like that. But it looked really strange, and after it was dead and couldn’t bite I took it down in the basement and cut into it.
I took biology in high school, and it was about the only time in my life I ever got a B. But I had been good at that, and we had cut up dead frogs and studied the heart, the stomach, and so forth, and I thought I would just have a look inside that little pink animal. So I laid it on my workbench down there and put a new blade in my utility knife, and opened it up.
You talk about a shock. It wasn’t a vertebrate. It had fur—that pink fur—but it didn’t have a backbone. Maybe there’s something on this planet that has fur but no backbone, but I don’t know what it is. Even fish are vertebrates, and so are birds. Its blood was pink, too. So right then I was starting to get an inkling of what was going on.
Only I didn’t know where Calamity was going to get this stuff. I thought Mars, so I read up on Mars and it could be there were little pink animals there, but the stick didn’t fit, and neither did some of the other stuff.
After that came the real mindblower. There’s no way I can make you believe it, so I’ll just tell it. She brought home a shadow.
I don’t mean her own shadow. I mean another shadow that she carried in her mouth and dropped at my feet. Of course it tried to stick onto me then. I jumped away and kicked at it, and for a while it was off by itself.
If you shine a light on it, it sort of disappears, and if there are a bunch of lights all around, like in the living room with all the lights on, you can’t see it very good at all. But if you take it outside late in the day, when the sun’s pretty low, you can see it really well. It’s the shadow of a big man with wide shoulders and four arms. He’s got on a helmet with horns on it, too, or that’s what it looks like—the kind of thing you see in pictures of Vikings.
It would try to stick to me, and I’d get rid of it by jumping and kicking, and at first that worked pretty well. Or I thought it did. And I would try to get rid of it by losing it or shining lights on it, which didn’t work at all.
Then I noticed I didn’t have my regular shadow anymore. I could stand right beside my wife in the sunshine, and she’d have a shadow, and you could see the shadow of the birdbath or whatever as plain as day. But not mine. You couldn’t see my shadow at all. So I thought, pretty soon somebody’s going to notice this.
And I let the shadow Calamity had brought stick to my feet the way it wanted. Now I can’t get rid of it when I try, and it’s a man a lot bigger than I am, with horns and four arms.
Which is fine if we’re standing in high grass or something that breaks the shadow up. I look perfectly normal then. But if we’re on concrete, like the driveway, and the sun is low and bright. Well, you can imagine.
A lucky thing is that I work in an office where there are a lot of bright fluorescent lights up in the ceiling. Nobody notices. But the other thing is that we’ve got these emergency lights that come on if the power fails. That happened about two years ago, and they were really bright. Everybody was casting hard, sharp shadows. If it ever happens again, I’m going to hide under my desk until everybody else has left.
So that’s pretty bad. But what really worries me is this new thing Calamity’s given me. It’s not exactly like a sword, and it’s not exactly like an ax, and there’s little dashes of other stuff in there, too, maybe a baseball bat with a big nail through it and a machine gun. Stuff like that. If you saw it, you’d say, “What’s that?”
You’re supposed to hold it with two hands. Or maybe three. It’s hard to tell. It’s pretty, too.
No, let me be up front here. Mrs. Smith’s an art teacher and I showed it to her yesterday. It was a cloudy day and she was weeding her annuals. I just carried it over and said, “Have a look at this.”
She said, “My God, how ugly!” Then, “No. No … Yes, it is. It’s terribly ugly, but it’s beautiful, isn’t it? It’s too beautiful to be bothered with looking pretty. Can I hold it?”
So I gave it to her, and she almost dropped it, it was so heavy. Only it doesn’t feel heavy to me. It feels about like a broom handle. I guess it feels like that to Calamity, too. But I set the sharp end on the bathroom scale and sort of balanced it, and the scale said thirty-seven pounds.
The funny thing is that when I hold it, my shadow holds it, pretty much the same as me. I can pick up a book or my attaché case and my shadow doesn’t have it. But when I pick up the sword or whatever it is, it does. Sometimes with three hands.
Now it’s started talking to me at night. Is that what they call runes? It whispers, late at night when I’m in bed, and that’s why I’m telling you this now.
Graylord Man’s Last Words
Tell us a story,” the young said, and so the old one downloaded this tale of his youth. But for you to understand it as they did, I must cast it in our own terms. Think of them gathered about a fire, although they were not gathered about a fire. Think of the old one as an old man, although he was not, and the young as so many children, although they were not. He stretches out his legs, puffs the charred old briar he has not got thoughtfully, and begins.
I was new made in those days, boys and girls, and there wasn’t much for me to do up on AT-111 where I was born. My family was long on children and short on money, somethin’ I’ve heard of a time or two even in this enlightened period we got right now.
Well, sir, a relation that I’d never seen back on E-1 wrote to my ma. Said you send him and we’ll feed him and give him a place to sleep. Even doctorin’ if he needs it. No money now, you understand, but there might be some later. Only you got to send him first.
She had to borrow. I never did know what she found to take to the hock shop, but she raised the money somehow, and kissed me, and pushed me onto the next shuttle for E-1. And me only just learnin’ to use my jets, so to speak.
Well, sir, we didn’t go in E-1 at all like I was expectin’. Set her down on the hull, and you never seen the like. Big yellow star right up overhead, and nothin’ but space between you and it. Space and gas, I ought to have said, for there was a world of gas there. Nitrogen, mostly. Nitrogen and water vapor. I won’t tell you about the trees there was, because you wouldn’t believe me. You look in a book and you’ll see.
“I got to go to Area Nine Hundred,” I told a man in the terminal. “You’re there,” he says. “This right here’s Area Nine Hundred, and smackdab in the middle, too.”
“Then I got to go to Mr. Graylord Man’s place,” I says.
I showed him the address, and he looked it up for me in his big book. “You got to take a plane,” he says. “I got no money,” I tells him. “Then you got to walk,” he says, “or else beg a ride.”
Well, I tried. Every time I saw a pilot I’d stop him and explain. And he’d say he wasn’t goin’ anywhere near there, every time. Boys and girls, that went on for a lot longer than it’s taken me to tell you about it. Sky’d get dark, then bright. Bright, then dark. But I kept tryin’.
Finally one said he was goin’ pretty close, only he wouldn’t let me ride without payin’. It was contrary to regulations, he said. When I heard that, I was about ready to shut down for good. He seen it, and sort of got me off into the corner.
“Now I’m not supposed to,” he says, “but I’ll tell you a little somethin’ that might help. They’re expectin’ you where you’re goin’?”
My aunt Esmerelda was. It was her that had wrote Ma, and I said so.
“Then here’s what you do. You go down to Level Neg Twelve, you hear? There’s boxes down there, plenty of them if you’ll just scout around. Pick out one big enough to hold you good, only not so big you’ll rattle inside. Or else get some nice soft packin’ to put
in there with you. Address it to your aunt, and figure out some way you can close and seal it from inside. Or else find somebody to help you.”
I says, “I got stapler capability built right in. Triple-O to Number Fifteen.”
“Them big ones will do fine,” he says. “There’s a UPX up on Level Five Fifty-five. You carry your box up there. Soon as you’re there,’fore anybody sees you, you climb inside and seal her up. They’ll stick you on my plane, and once you’re delivered, UPX’ll get your aunt to pay.”
You may guess I did it. Fast too. Sure I was scared in there in the dark, and got pretty cold. But I turned everythin’ down, you know how you do, and waited. Suppose I was driftin’ out in space, I said to myself. Waitin’ for somebody to see me and pull me down. That might go on for quite a while, so …
About then she ripped the old box open and seen me. Well, she was fit to be tied. She’d had to pay, you see, to get me delivered. I owed her, she said, and I admitted I did.
“You’ll work, Youngone. You’ll wash and scrub and fetch and carry. Cook and clean and anythin’ I say. Or you’re out of this house. First time you shirk, you’re out, and good riddance, whatever becomes of you.”
Well, there was a big old woman there about the age I am now, boys and girls. Mrs. Brassbound, her name was. “Don’t be so hard on the boy,” she says. “Just kick him when you need to get him movin’.” They were goodhearted women, both of’em, and thought they had to lay the law down or else I wouldn’t lift a finger, you know. Only I was eager to work, and earn a upgrade if I could.