The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

by Gene Wolfe

  “You’re very beautiful,” I said, and she was, though the delicately tinted cheeks beneath the cosmetics showed craquelure.

  “Very beautiful but older than you.”

  “A few years, maybe.”

  “Much more. But you find me attractive?”

  “Most men would find you attractive.”

  “I am not, you understand, a tart. Many times with Signor Stromboli, yes. But only a few with other men. And I have never been sold—no, not once for any price.” She was driving very fast, the buggy rattling down the turns.

  After a few moments of silence she said, “There is a place, not far from here. The ground is flat and you may drive off the road to where a stream comes down from the mountain. There is grass there, and flowers, and the sound of the water.”

  “I have to catch my ship.”

  “You have two hours. We would spend perhaps one. For the other you can sit in a chair down there, yawning and thinking nice thoughts about Sarg and me.”

  I shook my head.

  “You say that Signor Stromboli has taught you much. He has taught me much too. I will teach it to you. Now. In an hour.” Her leg pressed hard against mine.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but there’s somebody else.” It wasn’t true, but it seemed the best way of getting free of an embarrassing situation. I added, “Someone I can’t betray, if I’m going to live with myself.”

  Lili let me off at the entrance to the spaceport, where I could pile my bags directly on the conveyor. As soon as the last of them were gone she touched the horse’s rump with the lash of her whip, and she, with the horse and the rattling buggy, disappeared in rising dust. A coin-operated machine inside the port vacuumed most of it out of my clothes.

  As she had said, I had almost two hours to kill. I spent them alternately reading magazines and staring at the mountains I would be leaving.

  “For the Sol system and Vega. Gate five. You have fifteen minutes before departure.”

  I picked myself up in a leisurely way and headed toward Gate Five, then stopped. Coming toward me was a preposterous figure, familiar from a thousand pictures.

  “Sir!” (Actually it sounded more like “SeeraughHa!” given a rising intonation all the way—the kind of sound that might have come from a chummy, intoxicated, dangerous elephant.)

  “Sir!” The great swag belly was wrapped in a waistcoat with blue and white stripes as broad as my hand. The great shapeless nose shone with an officious cunning. “Sir, your shoes. I have your shoes!”

  It was Zanni the Butler, Stromboli’s greatest creation. He held out my second-best shoes, well brushed. In his flipper of a hand they looked as absurd as I felt. People were staring at us, and already beginning to argue about whether or not Zanni was real.

  “The master,” Zanni was saying, “insisted that I restore them to you. You will little credit it, sir, but I have run all the way.”

  I took my shoes and mumbled, “Thank you,” looking through the crowd for Stromboli, who had to be somewhere nearby.

  “The master has heard,” Zanni continued in a stage whisper that must have been audible out in the blast pits, “of your little talk with Madame Lili. He asks—well, sir, we sometimes call our little world the Planet of Roses, sir. He asks that you consider a part of what you have learned here—at least a part, sir—as under the rose.”

  I nodded. I had found Stromboli at last, standing in a corner. His face was perfectly impassive while his fingers flew over the levers of Zanni’s controller. I said, “Joruri.”

  “Joruri, sir?”

  “The Japanese puppet theater. The operators stand in full view of the audience, but the audience pretends not to see them.”

  “That is the master’s field, sir, and not mine; but perhaps that is the best way.”

  “Perhaps. But now I’ve got to catch my ship.”

  “So you said to Madame Lili earlier, sir. The master begs leave to remind you that he was once a young man very like yourself, sir. He expresses the hope that you know with whom you are keeping faith. He further expresses the hope that he himself does not know.”

  I thought of the fine cracks I had seen, under the cosmetics, in Lili’s cheeks; and of Charity’s cheeks, as blooming as peaches.

  Then I took my second-best pair of shoes, and went out to the ship, and climbed into my own little box.

  THE DOCTOR OF DEATH ISLAND

  “You shall read them, if you behave well,” said the old gentleman kindly; “and you will like that, better than looking at the outsides,—that is, in some cases; because there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”

  —DICKENS

  Oliver Twist

  Night, and prisoner orderlies halt in the bright hospital corridor to talk.

  “Did you know Alvard?” the older man asked, pulling at his chin. He contrived to lean on the push-bar of his cart in such a way that it did not roll. “No, I guess you didn’t. He’d pushed his partner out the window. Used to be a big blond guy—face like a big kid.”

  “What were they doing, Stan?”

  “I never had an idea. He was on days when I got here. Hell, I didn’t know where it was at. He got it—the long string—and he rode it all the way. Clear out the gate. Only a couple years ago, I think it was.”

  “Is he out now?” the other man inquired.

  The beginning-end of the string, when it comes, is not readily recognizable. It is cancer of the stomach; and it begins as a long bellyache that hurts even when he and dark Jessica, no longer jealous, tumble over one another on the big bed in Visitor’s Cottage #3.

  “In the evening,” (Alvard wrote) “the shadows come into the yard like furlough men: not talking, dragging their feet. They are as gray as we. It’s getting colder now, and the days are shorter. The shadows lapped all around my ankles when I crossed the yard tonight coming back from the hospital. I’d like to read A Christmas Carol again in December—if I can get Jessie to find a copy for me—and renew acquaintance with old Scrooge.”

  He had been going to write something beautiful about the shadows; but he had forgotten now what it was. Instead he wrote: “It will be two weeks now until Jessie can return. My stomach still hurts. She rubbed it while we were together, and it felt better then. I think I’m getting an ulcer. I never did when Barry and I were starting up the Genre Jinn.

  “Glazer is coming tomorrow. I’m going to make it plain to him—either he does something for me—gets the case reviewed, or at least gets me on the furlough list—or he loses me as a client.

  “There’s a new man in the ward, emptying bedpans. His name is Stanley (Stanley Johnson or something like that) but he wants to be called Snake. Seems like a nice enough kid, but he says he killed—he says cooled—a little girl in the course of a holdup. He asked me what I did. How can you explain to a boy of nineteen?”

  He remembered then, and wrote: “The shadows are like tall and beautiful women, drawing an old gray blanket over the dead.”

  The people over whose faces the shadows drag their gray blanket are not dead; many are not even sleeping. They lie in their beds, some of them, and think. Others pace their cells—four steps long Still others do their duty in the various departments of the prison—tending the boilers in the powerhouse, telling the warden’s children it is time to turn off the light. In the hospital, where Alan Alvard worked by day, others tend and wheel and feed by night, and tell their prisoner-patients that the doctor will be there in the morning, and that the can tell him then.

  Dr. Baldwin, who was on duty to deal with emergencies, saw Dr. Margotte, who was not supposed to be on duty at all by night, come in; he asked him if he wanted some coffee.

  “Thanks,” Margotte said, and reached for the plastic hotcup with his ruined hand. His white hair glimmered beneath the fluorescent lights.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?” Baldwin said.

  “All the time. I nap. This is my excuse.” Margotte blinked bulging, hyperthyroid eyes. “When Devereau
x knows I was in during the night, he doesn’t mind if I snooze.” Devereaux was the administrator and that was the way Devereaux was; but Margotte did not snooze.

  One of the prisoner-orderlies approached Baldwin when Margotte was gone. “Somebody’s passing over tonight.”

  “You mean dying,” Baldwin said.

  “That’s what I said -passing over. We always called it that—my mother did, I mean. It still doesn’t sound right to me to say right out that a person’s dying. It isn’t decent; it is what dogs do.”

  “How do you know someone’s dying?”

  “Doc Margotte knows. He comes in to see them go—or maybe they go when he comes in. They’ll take somebody off the top floor with a sheet on his face tonight. You watch and see if I’m not right.”

  Alan Alvard lies sweating in his bed. The sheet has gotten over his face somehow, and perhaps it has lent his dream a character of suffocation. A black box with plug jacks over all the surfaces like the scars of smallpox is on his bench. He knows that he has designed its circuits, though he has no idea now what it may be. And he knows he must repair it, though he has no notion of how it is intended to function when working correctly. He takes up a screwdriver, which slips and chatters along the black surface. At once there is a slipping and clattering thunder across the ceiling of the room. He cannot breathe, and understands that he is dead, and inside the box. His stomach hurts.

  For a moment he could not remember where he was. Then he heard Riemer snoring in the upper bunk. “Barry was coming,” Alvard said. He whispered so that he would not wake Riemer. “He was coming to see if I had fixed it.”

  Riemer asked, “What’d you say?”

  “I was talking to myself. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I had a dream. I was working, and Margotte was the boss.”

  “That’s not much of a dream.” Riemer worked in the hospital too.

  “It was eight or ten years ago. I’d never heard of Margotte then. But in my dream, he was coming to see if I had done what I was supposed to. I was holding something—I forget what it was—and something was scratching across the top of the room. I couldn’t breathe—it was as if there was no air. And Margotte was coming to see if I was finished. I wasn’t facing that way, but I could see his hand on the knob; it was Margotte’s, with the two fingers gone.”

  A new voice that was neither Alvard’s nor Riemer’s, a thin, sibilant voice, said: “You are quite correct. It was Karajan. I trust you know how it was done?”

  Riemer laughed. “I thought that would shake you up.”

  ALBANY, New York (AP) The State Board of Correction disclosed today that Alan Alvard had become the first prisoner in U.S. penal history to undergo cryogenic freezing. Alvard’s attorneys successfully contended that since he could afford the process and was suffering a terminal illness, to deny it would constitute a de facto sentence of execution, contrary to the intent of the court. Alvard, an inventor and publisher, was given a life sentence two years ago.

  His waking, which he had thought would be agony, is not. He is conscious of his body only as a presence, as he might be conscious of the scent from an open spicebox in a cluttered, hole-in-corner shop, or of lying between blankets instead of sheets. But he is awake. Awake.

  That thought circled in his mind for a long time. He could not be sure whether his eyes were open or closed; but he believed them closed. If so, he could not open them—not because they were gummed shut, but because the muscles would not respond. Similarly, he could not be certain of where he lay. He could not move his body, but he could feel his body move, against something … something.

  “You’re going on a journey,” his counselor says. She is a clean, starched, stiff young woman, and a prisoner; she speaks with what sounds like a down-east twang. Everyone does. “A long, long journey; and you can’t come back.”

  Alvard said, “That’s what they used to tell people who were dying.”

  “How interesting. look at it this way. All your life has been spent in a remote country—the past. Now you have to live here. The world has changed from what you were used to; but it’s where you have to live from now on.”

  “And how long will that be? Can you cure the cancer? You wouldn’t have waked—”

  “Revivified,” the young woman said. “I’ve told you all this, but you’ve forgotten. That’s normal.”

  “You wouldn’t have revivified me if you couldn’t cure me, would you?”

  “That was done before you were conscious.” She paused. “Do you remember what I told you about life expectancy, Alan? The doctors used a technique we call cell therapy. They could give you the details better than I can, but it means that certain substances were introduced into your system that have altered your DNA. The result will be to hasten the death of old body cells, while stimulating the growth of newones. It’s a process that eliminates cancer—more or less as a side effect—while circumventing aging.”

  “And I’ve already had this treatment?”

  “Everyone has. When it was discovered, the government tried to keep it from the people. That was the government you knew about. There was a revolution, of course, and now we’re even using the technique to produce parthenogenetic children—clones.”

  “You mean I’ll live forever?” The thought was almost too great for him to grasp. Words in his mind became fleeting pictures of a hillside covered with long, sweet grass. A hillside smiling in the sun. Day always. No night ever.

  “Think of yourself as a porcelain vase. The vase can be broken at any time; but if it is not, it may last a thousand years, or ten thousand. If someone blows you apart, or a building falls on you—perhaps in an earthquake—or you drown or burn, you’ll be every bit as dead as if you had died back in your own time. Eventually something like that will happen to you by sheer chance, as it will to all of us.” He said nothing, and she added, “Is there anything else I can tell you?”

  “I want to think about it.”

  “I can’t go—I’m supposed to spend a certain amount of time with each patient on my list—but we don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

  “Ten thousand years.”

  “Perhaps.”

  It was longer than all recorded history. He said, “How long have I been gone?”

  “Forty years.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s all. Many of the people you knew must be still alive.”

  “I see.” He wanted to ask how much things had changed, but he was aware of the fatuity of the question. For a time he lay back, resting on his pillow, breathing and staring at the ceiling. “This building …”

  “Possibly you remember it. It must have been here before you were frozen. I believe they say it’s sixty or seventy years old.”

  “The hospital.”

  “Yes.”

  “I worked here. My job inside.” Alvard was exhausted. It seemed only a few days ago—yet immensely remote. He had had the same reaction when he had begun to serve his sentence; when his trial was over it had seemed, in less than a week, to have receded far into the past. This time it was real.

  An orderly began to perform some operation on the floor, using an implement that was not a broom or a vacuum cleaner or anything else Alvard was familiar with. For a time his eyes followed it; then he noticed the man’s clothes, and looked back to his counselor. She wore the same stiff, wide-legged trousers and slightly Russian-looking tunic.

  “Yes, I’m an inmate too. I work here in the hospital, just as you did.”

  He stared at her—soft blond hair, rounded chin, wide blue eyes.

  “I’ve been in prison for eighteen years, Alan. Some of us were lucky enough to be young still when C.T. was released; I’m forty-four.” She stood up. “It’s nearly time for your lunch now, and it’s not good—yet—for you to talk too much. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Can I eat solid food?”

  “You already have. Several times.”

  “I don
’t remember.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Accidentally, the orderly cleaning the floor bumped against her. She pushed him away violently, making Alvard think, for a moment, of children on a playground.

  As she went out the door, the orderly glanced at her. There was resentment in his look, but no surprise. Alvard wondered how old he was. He was of medium height or a little less, and had paintbrush-stiff black hair, like Hans in the old comic strip. After a moment, Alvard asked, “How’s it going?”

  “Slow.”

  Some things, at least, had not changed. “In the old days,” Alvard said, choosing his words, “we didn’t have women in here.”

  The orderly grinned. “Pretty soft. Say, you want your chow now? I’ll get it for you.”

  Lunch came on a tray of some green material that was not plastic (at least, as Alvard had known it) or wood or metal or any other identifiable material. The covered dish and the cup there, however, would have been commonplace in his own time—china, thick and cheap. A metal pot held a hot drink that was neither coffee nor tea.

  “I got to go now,” the orderly said. “There’s a buzzer on your right. Push it and the nurse’ll ask what you want.”

  Alvard lifted the cover: a meat patty, an unidentifiable reddish orange vegetable, and something that might almost have been an artichoke. With a red fork of the same smooth, temperatureless stuff as the tray, he cut off a bit of the patty and put it in his mouth. It was unlike anything he ever remembered eating—bland as shortening on his tongue, spiced in the back of his throat. The orange vegetable tasted like spoiled straw soaked in milk; but the artichokelike one was delicious, crisp yet meaty, and delicately flavored. He smiled to think of himself propped up in bed like Miss Havisham in the novel, eating from a tray; and after a time he slept.

  It is dim in the room, but not dark. Alvard sits up, feeling stronger than before, and listening.