Argustal lifted his tired head from its pillow of stone. Again the voice changed pitch and trend, as if in response to his minute gesture.
“The present is a note in music. That note can no longer be sustained. You find what questions you have found, oh Argustal, because the chord, in dropping to a lower key, rouses you from the long dream of crimson joy that was immortality. What you are finding, others also find, and you can none of you be any longer insensible to change. Even immortality must have an end. Life has passed like a long fire through the galaxy. Now it fast burns out even here, the last refuge of man!”
He stood up then, and hurled the Or stone. It flew, fell, rolled … and before it stopped he had awoken a great chorus of universal voice.
All Yzazys roused and a wind blew from the west. As he started again to move, he saw the religious men of the town were on the march, and the great sun-nesting Forces on their midnight wing, and Hrt the flaming stone wheeling overhead, and every majestic object alert as it had never been.
But Argustal walked slowly on his flat simian feet, plodding back to Pamitar. No longer would he be impatient in her arms. There, time would be all too brief.
He knew now the worm that flew and nestled in her cheek, in his cheek, in all things, even in the Tree-men of Or, even in the great impersonal Forces that despoiled the sun, even in the sacred bowels of the universe to which he had lent a temporary tongue. He knew now that back had come that Majesty that previously gave Life its reason, the Majesty that had been away from the world for so long and yet so brief a respite, the Majesty called Death.
GENE WOLFE
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
By early 1970, I was familiar with the name Gene Wolfe, had read one or two of his stories, such as “The Encounter” in Orbit 3 and “Paul’s Treehouse” in Orbit 4, and had even, in my capacity as first reader for Dell’s SF line, rejected a novel manuscript – never subsequently published – by him. None of which prepared me for attending the Milford Writers Conference in the spring of that year and reading Wolfe’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” in manuscript there. I remember sitting in the cavernous, high-ceilinged living room of Damon Knight’s huge, rambling old wooden house in Milford, Pennsylvania, the manuscript in my lap, stunned by the brilliance of what I had just read. “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” was work a quantum jump better than anything that Wolfe had done up to that time, work that was clearly establishing a new Cutting Edge for the field, and it was plain to me that a new giant of the form had just loomed above the literary horizon.
It was an insight that would be shared by only a few in subsequent years. Although Wolfe went on to produce much of the really superior short fiction of the ’70s – pieces such as “The Hero As Werwolf,” “Seven American Nights,” “Alien Stones,” “The Eyeflash Miracles,” and “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories,” among many others – and one of the decade’s best novels (the brilliant 1975 novel Peace, which, published almost anonymously as a mainstream hardback in a plain tan dustcover, sank without arousing a single ripple), he remained severely underappreciated throughout most of the decade. Perhaps this was because Wolfe was strongly identified with Orbit in the early ’70s, and, as Orbit was the major American recipient for the spleen of the reactionary backlash that developed early in the decade, his reputation may have suffered from the association, as would the reputations of Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, and several other frequent Orbit contributors. Wolfe and Russ would become bugbears to the conservatives in much the same way that Heinlein had become a bugbear to the New Wavers, and Wolfe in particular would be loathed and pointed at as an example of the kind of non-rigorous, scientifically illiterate, custardheaded intellectual that the reactionaries saw hiding under every bed. This was strongly ironic, since, as a professional engineer and the editor for many years of the trade publication Plant Engineering, Wolfe was probably more conversant with the hard sciences than many of his detractors, and much of his work shows a fine understanding of technology and a concern for the intricacies of its workings.
Wolfe would finally establish his reputation with his landmark The Book of the New Sun novel series at the beginning of a new decade, one of the true masterworks of science fiction, and there are few serious critics today who would deny that Wolfe is one of the best writers working in (or out of) the genre in the ’90s.
As for “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” itself – lush and rich and strange, evocative and inventive, full of bizarrely transmuted echoes of Proust and Dickens and Kipling and Chesterton – I always believed that it was the best novella of a decade that bristled with good novellas, and doing the research for this anthology has done nothing to dissuade me from that opinion.
Gene Wolfe was born in New York, and grew up in Houston, Texas. Individual volumes of his monumental The Book of the New Sun series have won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and he also won a Nebula Award for his story “The Death of Doctor Island.” His other books include Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The Devil in a Forest, Soldiers in the Mist, and Free Live Free. His short fiction has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days, The Wolfe Archipelago and the recent World Fantasy Award-winning collection Storeys from the Old Hotel. His most recent books are Soldier of Arete, There Are Doors, Castleview, and Pandora by Holly Hollander.
When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she-wolf’s young.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were sleepy or not. In summer particularly, bedtime often came before sunset; and because our dormitory was in the east wing of the house, with a broad window facing the central courtyard and thus looking west, the hard, pinkish light sometimes streamed in for hours while we lay staring out at my father’s crippled monkey perched on a flaking parapet, or telling stories, one bed to another, with soundless gestures.
Our dormitory was on the uppermost floor of the house, and our window had a shutter of twisted iron which we were forbidden to open. I suppose the theory was that a burglar might, on some rainy morning (this being the only time he could hope to find the roof, which was fitted out as a sort of pleasure garden, deserted) let down a rope and so enter our room unless the shutter was closed.
The object of this hypothetical and very courageous thief would not, of course, be merely to steal us. Children, whether boys or girls, were extraordinarily cheap in Port-Mimizon; and indeed I was once told that my father who had formerly traded in them no longer did so because of the poor market. Whether or not this was true, everyone – or nearly everyone – knew of some professional who would furnish what was wanted, within reason, at a low price. These men made the children of the poor and the careless their study, and should you want, say, a brown-skinned, red-haired little girl or one who was plump or who lisped, a blond boy like David or a pale, brown-haired, brown-eyed boy such as I, they could provide one in a few hours.
Neither, in all probability, would the imaginary burglar seek to hold us for ransom, though my father was thought in some quarters to be immensely rich. There were several reasons for this. Those few people who knew that my brother and I existed knew also, or at least had been led to believe, that my father cared nothing at all for us. Whether this was true or not, I cannot say; certainly I believed it, and my father never gave me the least reason to doubt it, though at the time the thought of killing him had never occurred to me.
And if these reasons were not sufficiently convincing, anyone with an understanding of the stratum in which he had become perhaps the most permanent feature would realize that for him, who was already forced to give large bribes to the secret police, to once disgorge money in that way would leave him open to a thousand ruinous attacks; and this may have been – this and the fear in which he was held – t
he real reason we were never stolen.
The iron shutter is (for I am writing now in my old dormitory room) hammered to resemble in a stiff and oversymmetrical way the boughs of a willow. In my boyhood it was overgrown by a silver trumpet vine (since dug up) which had scrambled up the wall from the court below, and I used to wish that it would close the window entirely and thus shut out the sun when we were trying to sleep; but David, whose bed was under the window, was forever reaching up to snap off branches so that he could whistle through the hollow stems, making a sort of panpipe of four or five. The piping, of course, growing louder as David grew bolder, would in time attract the attention of Mr Million, our tutor. Mr Million would enter the room in perfect silence, his wide wheels gliding across the uneven floor while David pretended sleep. The panpipe might by this time be concealed under his pillow, in the sheet, or even under the mattress, but Mr Million would find it.
What he did with those little musical instruments after confiscating them from David I had forgotten until yesterday; although in prison, when we were kept in by storms or heavy snow, I often occupied myself by trying to recall it. To have broken them, or dropped them through the shutter onto the patio below would have been completely unlike him; Mr Million never broke anything intentionally, and never wasted anything. I could visualize perfectly the half-sorrowing expression with which he drew the tiny pipes out (the face which seemed to float behind his screen was much like my father’s) and the way in which he turned and glided from the room. But what became of them?
Yesterday, as I said (this is the sort of thing that gives me confidence), I remembered. He had been talking to me here while I worked, and when he left it seemed to me – as my glance idly followed his smooth motion through the doorway – that something, a sort of flourish I recalled from my earliest days, was missing. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what the appearance had been, eliminating any skepticism, any attempt to guess in advance what I “must” have seen; and I found that the missing element was a brief flash, the glint of metal, over Mr Million’s head.
Once I had established this, I knew that it must have come from a swift upward motion of his arm, like a salute, as he left our room. For an hour or more I could not guess the reason for that gesture, and could only suppose it, whatever it had been, to have been destroyed by time. I tried to recall if the corridor outside our dormitory, in that really not so distant past, held some object now vanished: a curtain or a windowshade, an appliance to be activated, anything that might account for it. There was nothing.
I went into the corridor and examined the floor minutely for marks indicating furniture. I looked for hooks or nails driven into the walls, pushing aside the coarse old tapestries. Craning my neck, I searched the ceiling. Then, after an hour, I looked at the door itself and saw what I had not seen in the thousands of times I had passed through it: that like all the doors in this house, which is very old, it had a massive frame of wooden slabs, and that one of these, forming the lintel, protruded enough from the wall to make a narrow shelf above the door.
I pushed my chair into the hall and stood on the seat. The shelf was thick with dust in which lay forty-seven of my brother’s pipes and a wonderful miscellany of other small objects. Objects many of which I recalled, but some of which still fail to summon any flicker of response from the recesses of my mind.…
The small blue egg of a songbird, speckled with brown. I suppose the bird must have nested in the vine outside our window, and that David or I despoiled the nest only to be robbed ourselves by Mr Million. But I do not recall the incident.
And there is a (broken) puzzle made of the bronzed viscera of some small animal, and – wonderfully evocative – one of those large and fancifully decorated keys, sold annually, which during the year of its currency will admit the possessor to certain rooms of the city library after hours. Mr Million, I suppose, must have confiscated it when, after expiration, he found it doing duty as a toy; but what memories!
My father had his own library, now in my possession; but we were forbidden to go there. I have a dim memory of standing – at how early an age I cannot say – before that huge carved door. Of seeing it swing back, and the crippled monkey on my father’s shoulder pressing itself against his hawk face, with the black scarf and scarlet dressing gown beneath and the rows and rows of shabby books and notebooks behind them, and the sick-sweet smell of formaldehyde coming from the laboratory beyond the sliding mirror.
I do not remember what he said or whether it had been I or another who had knocked, but I do recall that after the door had closed, a woman in pink whom I thought very pretty stooped to bring her face to the level of my own and assured me that my father had written all the books I had just seen, and that I doubted it not at all.
* * *
My brother and I, as I have said, were forbidden this room; but when we were a little older Mr Million used to take us, about twice a week, on expeditions to the city library. These were very nearly the only times we were allowed to leave the house, and since our tutor disliked curling the jointed length of his metal modules into a hire cart, and no sedan chair would have withstood his weight or contained his bulk, these forays were made on foot.
For a long time this route to the library was the only part of the city I knew. Three blocks down Saltimbanque Street where our house stood, right at the Rue d’Asticot to the slave market and a block beyond that to the library. A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences. My brother and I were fascinated by the spurious antiques and bad bargains of the Rue d’Asticot, but often bored when Mr Million insisted on stopping for an hour at the slave market.
It was not a large one, Port-Mimizon not being a center of the trade, and the auctioneers and their merchandise were frequently on a most friendly basis – having met several times previously as a succession of owners discovered the same fault. Mr Million never bid, but watched the bidding, motionless, while we kicked our heels and munched the fried bread he had bought at a stall for us. There were sedan chairmen, their legs knotted with muscle, and simpering bath attendants; fighting slaves in chains, with eyes dulled by drugs or blazing with imbecile ferocity; cooks, house servants, a hundred others – yet David and I used to beg to be allowed to proceed alone to the library.
This library was a wastefully large building which had held government offices in the old French-speaking days. The park in which it had once stood had died of petty corruption, and the library now rose from a clutter of shops and tenements. A narrow thoroughfare led to the main doors, and once we were inside, the squalor of the neighborhood vanished, replaced by a kind of peeling grandeur. The main desk was directly beneath the dome, and this dome, drawing up with it a spiraling walkway lined with the library’s main collection, floated five hundred feet in the air: a stony sky whose least chip falling might kill one of the librarians on the spot.
While Mr Million browsed his way majestically up the helix, David and I raced ahead until we were several full turns in advance and could do what we liked. When I was still quite young it would often occur to me that, since my father had written (on the testimony of the lady in pink) a roomful of books, some of them should be here; and I would climb resolutely until I had almost reached the dome, and there rummage. Because the librarians were very lax about reshelving, there seemed always a possibility of finding what I had failed to find before. The shelves towered far above my head, and when I felt myself unobserved I climbed them like ladders, stepping on books when there was no room on the shelves themselves for the square toes of my small brown shoes, and occasionally kicking books to the floor where they remained until our next visit and beyond, evidence of the staff’s reluctance to climb that long, coiled slope.
The upper shelves were, if anything, in worse disorder than those more conveniently located, and one glorious day when I attained the highest of all I
found occupying that lofty, dusty position (besides a misplaced astronautics text, The Mile-Long Spaceship, by some German) only a lorn copy of Monday or Tuesday leaning against a book about the assassination of Trotsky, and a crumbling volume of Vernor Vinge’s short stories that owed its presence there, or so I suspect, to some long-dead librarian’s mistaking the faded V. Vinge on the spine for “Winge.”
I never found any books of my father’s, but I did not regret the long climbs to the top of the dome. If David had come with me, we raced up together, up and down the sloping floor – or peered over the rail at Mr Million’s slow progress while we debated the feasibility of putting an end to him with one cast of some ponderous work. If David preferred to pursue interests of his own farther down I ascended to the very top where the cap of the dome curved right over my head; and there, from a rusted iron catwalk not much wider than one of the shelves I had been climbing (and I suspect not nearly so strong), opened in turn each of a circle of tiny piercings – piercings in a wall of iron, but so shallow a wall that when I had slid the corroded cover plates out of the way I could thrust my head through and feel myself truly outside, with the wind and the circling birds and the lime-spotted expanse of the dome curving away beneath me.
To the west, since it was taller than the surrounding houses and marked by the orange trees on the roof, I could make out our house. To the south, the masts of the ships in the harbor, and in clear weather – if it was the right time of day – the whitecaps of the tidal race Sainte Anne drew between the peninsulas called First Finger and Thumb. (And once, as I very well recall, while looking south I saw the great geyser of sunlit water when a starcrosser splashed down.) To east and north spread the city proper, the citadel and the grand market and the forests and mountains beyond.
But sooner or later, whether David had accompanied me or gone off on his own, Mr Million summoned us. Then we were forced to go with him to one of the wings to visit this or that science collection. This meant books for lessons. My father insisted that we learn biology, anatomy, and chemistry thoroughly, and under Mr Million’s tutelage, learn them we did – he never considering a subject mastered until we could discuss every topic mentioned in every book catalogued under the heading. The life sciences were my own favorites, but David preferred languages, literature, and law; for we got a smattering of these as well as anthropology, cybernetics, and psychology.
Modern Classics of Science Fiction Page 38
