by Gene Wolfe
Audrey wanted to know how cold it was in the ice caves. Dr. Fevre said it was colder than outside; but there was no wind, so it seemed warmer. Tricky cold, in other words. Maybe that made Audrey feel better, but I decided I could take it or leave it. From what they said, I caught on that Millie and Rose would be staying right here in the village; and to tell the truth, I was tempted to say I’d stay there too and keep them company.
When we left in the sleigh, four bales were barely enough. Dr. Fevre rode up front beside the driver like Audrey had, and Audrey, our patron, Chandra, and I sat on the hay bales in back. After the first mile or two, Adah laid her head on Audrey’s shoulder and went to sleep. I smiled, and Chandra whispered, “She was going to stay where we were and go back to bed. Only then she said it would be too cold with nobody to tend the fire or sleep with her.”
I said, “Audrey and I took care of the fire. I suppose she’s forgotten.”
Chandra nodded.
Audrey said softly, “If I keep my voice down, is it going to wake her up?”
I shook my head and kept my own voice low. “I doubt it.”
“You look pleased.” It was a whisper, but Audrey grinned as she said it.
“I feel pleased,” I told her. “Chandra and her mother had separate problems when her mother checked me out, and I said I’d work on both of them. I’ll take care of Chandra’s as soon as we get back to Polly’s Cove. Her mother’s was a hand-drawn map she had found tipped into one of the doctor’s books. She wanted to know what the island was, and what the square thing in the middle was.” I took a deep breath, recalling what had happened when I had touched that square, and shivered.
“Now I think we know the name of the island,” I said, “and I believe we’re trotting straight toward the square on the map. Dr. Fevre”—I waved at his back—“must have drawn the map soon after he discovered this place. He’d turned up something important here, a thing that the local people didn’t like to talk about, and he wanted to make sure he could find it again anytime he came back.”
“People here want to keep the ice caves secret?” Audrey sounded doubtful.
“Wouldn’t you, if your parents and grandparents, and maybe a child or two, were lying on the ice in there? The first boy you ever kissed, and the little girl you played with when you were her age? Would you want a bunch of tourists swarming around, touching their bodies, leaving candy wrappers and cigar butts in the cave, and taking pictures? I wouldn’t.”
“They’ve been pretty open about it while we’ve been here.” Audrey sounded more doubtful.
“You and I are Dr. Fevre’s guests. Clearly we know about the ice caves already.” When she kept quiet, I added, “Besides, it looks as if he’s won their confidence.”
“He doctors the sick people here,” Chandra told me. “Just because he teaches anatomy people think he isn’t a real doctor, but he is. He writes prescriptions and does surgery.”
I nodded. “No doubt he does.”
Chandra had more to say. “Like, if somebody’s got a broken arm or something. He has a place in town. A clinic, like. They just call it the doctor’s office, but he brought a full-body scanner. Lots of stuff.”
“Good for him.”
“He doesn’t charge anybody, either. As long as there’s something really wrong with them, it’s free, like at home. Only fakers have to pay. He told me.”
Adah stirred at the sound of her daughter’s voice, and Audrey’s gesture warned Chandra to be quiet.
There was not much said after that. Mainly, I stewed over the old Ern A. Smithe, his cut throat, and the scalpel I was sure I had seen when the ’bots were cleaning up. I had been just about certain Dr. Fevre had done that, and now he looked worse and worse for it. So who? When? And why? Who else might have a scalpel?
I hope that I have already made it clear that the whole interior of the island was pretty much one big mountain. If I have not, well, it was. There were steep ravines and some side crags and various other details, but basically the ground sloped up and up. The top was snowcapped, like people talk about; but heck, when we were there everything on the island was covered with snow. So that mountain had snow pants on, too, down below its snow shirt.
Being covered with snow pretty much included us; we had been sitting in an open sleigh for almost two hours. When the doctor got down, we got down too and sort of brushed each other off. The sleigh turned around with a silvery jingle of bells, and the whip stirred the horses into a trot. Dr. Fevre started up what might have been a path if it had not been covered with new snow. I followed him, and pretty soon saw a black hole in the snowy side of a cliff, a hole big enough to take both horses and the sleigh. When I saw that, I thought I was looking at the square on the map. I told myself it was a shame we had no shining rectangle here—and then that we might have one after all, a light deep inside that twinkled and seemed to move. After a minute or two, I caught on that what I was seeing was a reflection of our pale sunshine in the ice. Hey, our sun, Sol, is an ordinary yellow-white star, right?
“Careful here,” Dr. Fevre called over his shoulder. “There’s ice underneath this snow.”
There was, but my new boots handled it pretty well. Audrey was used to decks that danced under her feet and could probably have walked up a wall, but Chandra and her mother held on to each other and fell down into the snow twice. I would have helped them up if they had accepted my help. They didn’t.
That snow ended two or three steps into the cave. There was nothing but bare ice underfoot from there on in. The cave floor was nearly level though, and we got up onto that as soon as we could. It was ice, too, but the ice was dark and gritty with dirt that had been tracked in over the years. Village people—I could picture them—carrying in their dead on stretchers made of old spars and sailcloth.
I asked Dr. Fevre when we would see bodies, and he pointed back toward the entrance. “You’ll see them as soon as the sunlight’s gone, more bodies than you’ll like.”
For a minute it seemed to me that we could not possibly see them without daylight. Then it soaked through to me that there had to be some kind of lighting in there, or else that he had some.
It was the second one. When it was almost too dark for me to see him, he reached into a coat pocket and pulled out light sticks. I had heard of those, but I had never seen them before. You activate them and they put out plenty of light, a kind of pale white light that bleeds out colors. All light in every direction. No heat. Pretty cool, right?
Yeah, sure. Only before long I would have given my watch for some heat. The doctor had gloves, and so did Adah and Chandra. Not Audrey and not me. It wasn’t long before we turned off our light sticks and stuck them—and our hands—into our pockets.
Dr. Fevre cleared his throat. “The bodies nearest the entrance are the oldest. Most of them have suffered a good deal of damage over the years. You will laugh at me if I say they are the most dead, and yet I say it.”
Nobody laughed.
“I estimate their age at approximately nine hundred years. Many were originally interred with armor and weapons, or so I believe. Those were pillaged long ago.”
Adah Fevre murmured, “What a pity!”
“It is. As we go deeper into the caves, the caves themselves become lovely, and the dead more recent. To touch them without purpose would be discourteous to their descendants, the living islanders. Please do not.”
Audrey whispered, “I hadn’t planned on it.”
I nodded.
Dr. Fevre had started off. Audrey had her light stick out again and going, and it gave more than enough light for the two of us. Adah and Chandra brought up the rear, both with their sticks shining.
Here’s one of the things that are hard for me to describe. The cave kept getting bigger and bigger as we went in deeper and deeper, not steadily—there was nothing gradual about it—but by jumps. Think of it as a series of rooms, each bigger than the last, and each with a big open arch leading into the next. Maybe nobody would ever build a th
ing like that; but freezing cold and seeping water had, and it was impressive and inhuman.
Sheets of hard, clear ice hung from the ceiling in most of the caves, and the ceilings got higher and higher and the ice sheets bigger and bigger. Stalactites of ice hung from the ceilings, some of them way up there and some nearly reaching the pillars right under them on the floor; some of those pillars were towering columns of crystal-clear ice that looked as if they were holding up the ceiling.
All that, and all around us lay or sat or stood the dead. Some lay on couches carved from ice. Others stood in niches cut into the ice. Still others lay flat on the floor, just off the path—or two strides off the path, or fifty strides away from the path. Some lay with open eyes that stared at nothing, but most of them looked as though they were asleep.
So now you have some kind of a feel for what it was like for us to be in there. Listen up, this is important. There were side caves branching off from the caves we were going through. Some of those looked small, but some looked like they might be bigger than the one they branched from. The path got smaller and rougher all the time, and in places it branched off into what Dr. Fevre seemed to think were side caves. In a place like that, the worst thing that could happen to you was to get separated from the one guy who knew his way around. So I should have been really careful to keep that from happening—only it did.
Audrey went to look at one body that was way off to the side. It looked a lot like her, and she thought it might be an early copy.
“Have you noticed her profile, Ern? Most people don’t know what their own profile looks like, but I know how mine looks, and this is it. The exact same profile.”
I admitted it was close, but I pointed out that the corpse’s hair was lighter colored. Audrey’s was auburn; this was a pale red.
“It could have faded in here after death. Hair doesn’t stay the same when you’re dead. It loses color.”
I said, “How the hell do you know that?”
She started talking about some primitives she had run into once who shrunk the heads of their enemies and tied them to their belts by the hair. Like anyone would, I pointed out that the color of that hair did not mean a thing. For one thing, it might have been bleached by the shrinking process. And so on.
Audrey interrupted, “How did she die, anyway? She looks as healthy as I am.”
Knowing what Audrey herself was like, I said, “By violence, I imagine.”
“I don’t see any sign of that. No wounds, no neck bruises or anything. You’re way too used to assuming that every death is a murder.”
“No, I’m not. It’s just that I know that the people who prepared her to go in here would have fixed anything like that. Take off that wimple and you might find she’d been stabbed through the heart, or—”
Something touched my elbow, and I turned and stared.
Audrey was already staring. A tall man with washed-out gray eyes was standing there with a flat green box that he held like a tray, silent and expressionless. He had come out of the dark without making a sound. That hit me hard, and a minute later something else hit me quite a bit harder.
There was no one in sight save Audrey and this newcomer. The three of us stood in the circle of light from Audrey’s light stick. That lit up a quarter, maybe, of the cavern. The rest was blackness. No doctor, no patron, no Chandra. No one but Audrey and me, and this tall, silent man with his small, flat box.
“We’ve gotta go!” I was pulling Audrey’s arm.
“Which way did they go, Ern?”
The tall man pushed his flat, not quite square, metal box into my hands. At first I didn’t want to take it, but he pushed harder. Then I tried to turn it on edge so I could carry it under my arm.
Big mistake.
Everything started to change. Audrey disappeared. The ice pillars were almost trees, and there were small dark things swarming over the roof of the cave. I put the box level again and Audrey was back. She stared at me and rubbed her eyes.
The tall man had started off. He walked slowly, but he took long steps. I said, “Maybe he knows,” and started after him, holding his box the way he had.
Audrey said, “The air in here must be bad. I feel sort of dizzy.”
“Maybe he’s going outside.”
“I hope so!” Audrey took my arm then, and it was quite a while before she let go. I was carrying the metal box or whatever it was flat, like a little tray. It was just heavy enough to be inconvenient.
After I don’t know how long, ten minutes or half an hour, I said, “See anything you recognize?”
Instead of answering, Audrey pointed. Away off, a tiny beam of white light was darting here and there. I nodded and told Audrey, “That’s a flashlight. It’s got to be.”
She nodded agreement.
The tall man seemed to be walking toward it, which was fine with me. I would have gone toward it whether he had been going there or not.
Audrey called, “Hello! Hello there!”
Somebody answered, very faint. I couldn’t make out the words, and I wanted to get out my own light stick and turn it on. No dice on that if I wanted to keep the box flat.
The flashlight beam found us; and Audrey and I shouted. Pretty soon we were near enough to see, dimly, the girl who held it—black curls and lots of them, quilted black jacket, close-fitting black trousers, and high-topped black boots. Pale, oval face. Full red lips and big dark eyes. As we got nearer, I realized there was something familiar about that face. I’d like to prove how smart I am right here, but it would be a lie. I never made her until she told us who she was.
“I’m Peggy Pepper.” She had a good smile. “I’m in here looking for Dr. Fevre. Have you seen him?”
“Not lately,” Audrey told her, “but we’d like to.”
Peggy Pepper turned her light on the tall man. “Do you know where Dr. Fevre is?”
“Sven,” the tall man said. It was the first time I had heard him speak, and I got the impression that just that one word had cost him a lot.
“We came in here with Dr. Fevre,” Audrey explained, “but we got separated. We’d like to find him or find our way out of here. Either one.”
“I can take you out,” Peggy said, “and I will after I find Dr. Fevre. That comes first.” She paused, and then … “You’re reclones, all three of you.”
Audrey nodded, and I said, “Guilty. I’m Ern A. Smithe, by the way.”
“From a library?”
Audrey nodded again. “Audrey Hopkins, Polly’s Cove Public Library.”
I said, “Spice Grove Public Library, on interlibrary loan to Polly’s Cove.”
“You screened me once, looking for Dr. Fevre.”
I nodded.
“Did he bring you here? All of you?”
I said, “He brought Audrey and me. We don’t know where Sven came from, we ran into him right here in the cave. He doesn’t talk a lot and he certainly wasn’t in the sleigh that brought us here.”
Audrey added, “Neither were you. How did you get here?”
Peggy smiled. “I’m supposed to ask the questions, but Hell’s bells, why not? The stable in Maiborg rented me a horse. He isn’t much of a saddle horse, but he’s docile and sturdy. How about you?”
Audrey said, “In a sled. Dr. Fevre got it, but I don’t know where.”
“A sled? With dogs?”
I said, “Horses. Two horses. I imagine it’s supposed to come back later and pick us up. Maybe Dr. Fevre has some way to call it, eephone or something. I don’t know.”
“I see.” Peggy switched off her flash and turned back to Audrey. “Are you an ancient author, too? How many books did you write?”
“Sixteen.”
“Wow! Give me some titles. I may have read you.”
“One Woman Sails Alone Around the World.” Audrey paused. “Lost at Sea, Teaching Girls to Sail, Among the Pirates of the Horn, Junks Weren’t, My Sheets Are Rigging, Coral Reefs Can Thrill You, You and Your Daughter Can Build a Boat, Safe Anchorage…” Aud
rey paused to wait for some comment.
“I’m writing a book myself,” Peggy said. “My first. Or at least I hope there’ll be others after it.”
I was tired of carrying the green box by then, so I put it down. “What’s the title?”
“An Atlas of Female Anatomy. That’s just a working title, of course. It’s not just the internal organs, it will cover everything. Musculature, skin and eyes, the works.”
Audrey said, “Aren’t a lot of things the same for men and women?”
“Ah!” Peggy looked pleased. “That’s it. At what points are men and women the same and where do they differ? All the standard works deal largely with male anatomy, then some of them consider the exception.”
I said, “I suppose that’s natural.”
“Not really. There are more women on this planet than men, and as far as anybody can tell there always have been. What about you, Smithe? How many books?”
“Somewhere between thirty and forty; it depends on how you count. The Ice-Blue Kiss, Men Mice and Murderers, Murder for Prophet, Murder’s Good for Business, Kill Mama Kill Papa, Death on a Daybed, The Corpse Drank Wine, When Will Murder End? Murder on Mars. Is that enough? I always stop there, but I’ll name the rest if you want them.”
Peggy nodded. “You must have found writing books pretty easy.”
“It is if you know what you want to say. If you have to make it up as you go along, you go slowly. Think of it as a wagon.”
There was a silence. Finally Peggy said, “I don’t understand that at all.”
“If your wagon’s all built and in good shape, you hitch up the horses and off you go. You should do forty or fifty kilometers a day, depending. If you have to build and rebuild your wagon on the road, you’ll be lucky to average ten kilometers a day.”
Audrey said, “We should be looking for Dr. Fevre.”
“I agree.” I picked up the green box and started off in a new direction, realizing after a minute or two that I was following Sven.
Audrey said, “Do you think it’s that way?”
I nodded. “Dr. Fevre’s not in the direction we came from, or in the direction Peggy came from. Besides, Sven was headed this way. He may know something.”