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

by Gene Wolfe

  Nitty bent over Little Tib, smoothing his blanket, then pressing it in against his sides. “It’s okay,” Little Tib said.

  “You’re goin’ back to Martinsburg with us,” Nitty said.

  “I’m going to Sugarland.”

  “After. What you want to go there for?”

  Little Tib tried to explain about Sugarland, but could not find words. At last he said, “In Sugarland they know who you are.”

  “Guess it’s too late then for me. Even if I found somebody knew who I was I wouldn’t be them no more.”

  “You’re Nitty,” Little Tib said.

  “That’s right. You know I used to go out with those gals a lot. Know what they said? Said, ‘You’re the custodian over at the school, aren’t you?’ Or, ‘You’re the one that did for Buster Johnson.’ Didn’t none of them know who I was. Only ones that did was the little children.”

  Little Tib heard Nitty’s clothes rustle as he stood up, then the sound his feet made walking softly away. He wondered if Nitty was going to stay awake all night; then he heard him lie down.

  His father had him by the hand. They had left the hanging-down train, and were walking along one of the big streets. He could see. He knew he should not have been noticing that particularly, but he did, and far behind it somewhere was knowing that if he woke up he would not see. He looked into store windows, and he could see big dolls like girls’ dolls wearing fur coats. Every hair on every coat stood out drenched with light. He looked at the street and could see all the cars like big, bright-colored bugs. “Here,” Big Tib said; they went into a glass thing that spun them around and dumped them out inside a building, then into an elevator all made of glass that climbed the inside wall almost like an ant, starting and stopping like an ant did. “We should buy one of these,” Little Tib said. “Then we wouldn’t have to climb the steps.”

  He looked up and saw that his father was crying. He took out his, Little Tib’s, own card and put it in the machine, then made Little Tib sit down in the seat and look at the bright light. The machine was a man in a white coat who took off his glasses and said, “We don’t know who this child is, but he certainly isn’t anyone.” “Look at the bright light again, Little Tib,” his father said, and something in the way he said it told Little Tib that the man in the white coat was much stronger than he was. He looked at the bright light and tried to catch himself from falling.

  And woke up. It was so dark that he wondered for a minute where the bright light went. Then he remembered. He rolled over a little and put his hand out toward the fire until he could feel some heat. He could hear it too when he listened. It crackled and snapped, but not very much. He lay the way he had been before, then turned over on his back. A train went past, and after a while an owl hooted.

  He could see here too. Something inside him told him how lucky he was, seeing twice in one night. Then he forgot about it, looking at the flowers. They were big and round, growing on long stalks, and had yellow petals and dark brown centers, and when he was not looking at them, they whirled around and around. They could see him, because they all turned their faces toward him, and when he looked at them they stopped.

  For a long way he walked through them. They came a little higher than his shoulder.

  Then the city came down like a cloud and settled on a hill in front of him. As soon as it was there it pretended that it had been there all the time, but Little Tib could feel it laughing underneath. It had high, green walls that sloped in as they went up. Over the top of them were towers, much taller, that belonged to the city Those were green too, and looked like glass.

  Little Tib began to run, and was immediately in front of the gates. These were very high, but there was a window in them, just over his head, that the gate-man talked through. “I want to see the king,” Little Tib said, and the gate-man reached down with a long, strong arm and picked him up and pulled him through the little window and set him down again inside. “You have to wear these,” he said, and took out a pair of toy glasses like the ones Little Tib had once had in his doctor set. But when he put them on Little Tib, they were not glasses at all, only lines painted on his face, circles around his eyes joined over his nose. The gate-man held up a mirror to show him, and he had the sudden, dizzying sensation of looking at his own face.

  A moment later he was walking through the city. The houses had their gardens sidewise—running up the walls so that the trees thrust out like flagpoles. The water in the birdbaths never ran out until a bird landed in it. Then a fine spray of drops fell to the street like rain.

  The palace had a wall too, but it was made by trees holding hands. Little Tib went through a gate of bowing elephants and saw a long, long stairway. It was so long and so high that it seemed that there was no palace at all, only the steps going up and up forever into the clouds, and then he remembered that the whole city had come down out of the clouds. The king was coming down those stairs, walking very slowly. She was a beautiful woman, and although she did not look at all like her, Little Tib knew that she was his mother.

  He had been seeing so much while he was asleep that when he woke up he had to remember why it was so dark. Somewhere in the back of his mind there was still the idea that waking should be light and sleep dark, and not the other way around. Nitty said: “You ought to wash your face. Can you find the water all right?”

  Little Tib was still thinking of the king, with her dress all made of Christmas-tree stuff; but he could. He splashed water on his face and arms while he thought about how to tell Nitty about his dream. By the time he had finished, everything in the dream was gone except for the king’s face.

  Most of the time Mr. Parker sounded like he was important and Nitty was not, but when he said, “Are we going to eat this morning, Nitty?” it was the other way around.

  “We eat on the train,” Nitty told him.

  “We are going to catch a train, George, to Martinsburg,” Mr. Parker told Little Tib.

  Little Tib thought that the trains went too fast to be caught, but he did not say that.

  “Should be one by here pretty soon,” Nitty said. “They got to be going slow because there’s a road crosses the tracks down there a way. They won’t have no time to get the speed up again before they get here. You won’t have to run—I’ll just pick you up an’ carry you.”

  A rooster crowed way off somewhere.

  Mr. Parker said: “When I was a young man, George, everyone thought all the trains would be gone soon. They never said what would replace them, however. Later it was believed that it would be all right to have trains, provided they were extremely modern in appearance. That was accomplished, as I suppose you learned last year, by substituting aluminum, fiberglass, and magnesium for much of the steel employed previously. That not only changed the image of the trains to something acceptable, but saved a great deal of energy by reducing the weight—the ostensible purpose of the cosmetic redesign.” Mr. Parker paused, and Little Tib could hear the water running past the place where they were sitting, and the sound the wind made blowing the trees.

  “There only remained the awkward business of the crews,” Mr. Parker continued. “Fortunately it was found that mechanisms of the same type that had already displaced educators and others could be substituted for railway engineers and brakemen. Who would have believed that running a train was as routine and mechanical a business as teaching a class? Yet it proved to be so.”

  “Wish they would do away with those railroad police,” Nitty said.

  “You, George, are a victim of the same system,” Mr. Parker continued. “It was the wholesale displacement of labor, and the consequent nomadism, that resulted in the present reliance on retinal patterns as means of identification. Take Nitty and me, for example. We are going to Macon—”

  “We’re goin’ to Martinsburg, Mr. Parker,” Nitty said. “This train we’ll be catching will be going the other way. We’re goin’ to get into that building and let you program, you remember?”

  “I was hypothesizing,
” Mr. Parker said. “We are going—say—to Macon. There we can enter a store, register our retinal patterns, and receive goods to be charged to the funds which will by then have accumulated in our social relief accounts. No other method of identification is so certain, or so adaptable to data processing techniques.”

  “Used to have money you just handed around,” Nitty said.

  “The emperors of China used lumps of silver stamped with an imperial seal,” Mr. Parker told him. “But by restricting money solely—in the final analysis—to entries kept by the Federal Reserve Bank, the entire cost of printing and coining is eliminated; and of course control for tax purposes is complete. While for identification, retinal patterns are unsurpassed in every—”

  Little Tib stopped listening. A train was coming. He could hear it far away, hear it go over a bridge somewhere, hear it coming closer. He felt around for his stick and got a good hold on it.

  Then the train was louder, but the noise did not come as fast. He heard the whistle blow. Then Nitty was picking him up with one strong arm. There was a swoop and a jump and a swing, swing, swing, and they were on the train and Nitty set him down. “If you want to,” Nitty said, “you can sit here at the edge and hang your feet over. But you be careful.”

  Little Tib was careful. “Where’s Mr. Parker?”

  “Laying down in the back. He’s going to sleep—he sleeps a lot.”

  “Can he hear us?”

  “You like sitting like this? This is one of my most favorite of all things to do. I know you can’t see everything go by like I can, but I could tell you about it. You take right now. We are going up a long grade, with nothing but pinewoods on this side of the train. I bet you there is all kinds of animals in there. You like animals, George? Bears and big old cats.”

  “Can he hear us?” Little Tib asked again.

  “I don’t think so, because he usually goes to sleep right away. But it might be better to wait a little while, if you’ve got something you don’t want him to hear.”

  “All right.”

  “Now there’s one thing we’ve got to worry about. Sometimes there are railroad policemen on these trains. If someone is riding on them, they throw him off. I don’t think they’d throw a little boy like you off, but they would throw Mr. Parker and me off. You they would probably take back with them and give over to the real police in the next town.”

  “They wouldn’t want me,” Little Tib said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Sometimes they take me, but they don’t know who I am. They always let me go again.”

  “I guess maybe you’ve been gone from home longer than what I thought. How long since you left your Mom and Dad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Must be some way of telling blind people. There’s lots of blind people.”

  “The machine usually knows who blind people are. That’s what they say. But it doesn’t know me.”

  “They take pictures of your retinas—you know about that?”

  Little Tib said nothing.

  “That’s the part inside your eye that sees the picture. If you think about your eye like it was a camera, you got a lens in the front, and then the film. Well, your retinas is the film. That’s what they take a picture of. I guess yours is gone. You know what it is you got wrong with your eyes?”

  “I’m blind.”

  “Yes, but you don’t know what it is, do you, baby. Wish you could look out there now—we’re going over a deep place; lots of trees and rocks and water way down below.”

  “Can Mr. Parker hear us?” Little Tib asked again.

  “Guess not. Looks like he’s asleep by now.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Like he told you. He’s the superintendent; only they don’t want him any more.”

  “Is he really crazy?”

  “Sure. He’s a dangerous man, too, when the fit comes on him. He got this little thing put into his head when he was superintendent to make him a better one—extra remembering and arithmetic, and things that would make him want to work more and do a good job. The school district paid for most of it; I don’t know what you call them, but there’s a lot of teenie little circuits in them.”

  “Didn’t they take it out when he wasn’t superintendent anymore?”

  “Sure, but his head was used to it by then, I guess. Child, do you feel well?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look so good. Kind of pale. I suppose it might just be that you washed off a lot of the dirt when I told you to wash that face. You think it could be that?”

  “I feel all right.”

  “Here, let me see if you’re hot.” Little Tib felt Nitty’s big, rough hand against his forehead. “You feel a bit hot to me.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Look there! You see that? There was a bear out there. A big old bear, black as could be.”

  “Probably it was a dog.”

  “You think I don’t know a bear? It stood up and waved at us.”

  “Really, Nitty?”

  “Well, not like a person would. It didn’t say bye-bye, or hi there. But it held up one big old arm.” Nitty’s hands lifted Little Tib’s right arm.

  A strange voice, a lady’s voice, Little Tib thought, said, “Hello there yourself.” He heard the thump as somebody’s feet hit the floor of the boxcar; then another thump as somebody else’s did.

  “Now wait a minute,” Nitty said. “Now you look here.”

  “Don’t get excited,” another lady’s voice told him.

  “Don’t you try to throw us off of this train. I got a little boy here, a little blind boy. He can’t jump off no train.”

  Mr. Parker said, “What’s going on here, Nitty?”

  “Railroad police, Mr. Parker. They’re going to make us jump off of this train.”

  Little Tib could hear the scraping sounds Mr. Parker made when he stood up, and wondered whether Mr. Parker was a big man or a little man, and how old he was. He had a pretty good idea about Nitty; but he was not sure of Mr. Parker, though he thought Mr. Parker was pretty young. He decided he was also medium-sized.

  “Let me introduce myself,” Mr. Parker said. “As superintendent, I am in charge of the three schools in the Martinsburg area.”

  “Hi,” one of the ladies said.

  “You will begin with the lower grades, as all of our new teachers do. As you gain seniority, you may move up if you wish. What are your specialties?”

  “Are you playing a game?”

  Nitty said: “He didn’t quite understand—he just woke up. You woke him up.”

  “Sure.”

  “You going to throw us off the train?”

  “How far are you going?”

  “Just to Howard. Only that far. Now you listen, this little boy is blind, and sick too. We want to take him to the doctor at Howard—he ran away from home.”

  Mr. Parker said, “I will not leave this school until I am ready. I am in charge of the entire district.”

  “Mr. Parker isn’t exactly altogether well either,” Nitty told the women.

  “What has he been using?”

  “He’s just like that sometimes.”

  “He sounds like he’s been shooting up on chalk.”

  Little Tib asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Say,” Nitty said, “that’s right. You know, I never did ask that. This little boy here is telling me I’m not polite.”

  “I’m Alice,” one of the ladies said.

  “Mickie,” said the other.

  “And we don’t want to know your names,” Alice continued. “See, suppose someway they heard you were on the train—we’d have to say who you were.”

  “And where you were going,” Mickie put in.

  “Nice people like you—why do you want to be railroad police?”

  Alice laughed. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? I’ve heard that one before.”

  “Watch yourself, Alice,” Mickey said. “He�
�s trying to make out.”

  Alice said, “What’d you three want to be ’boes for?”

  “We didn’t. ’Cept maybe for this little boy here. He run away from home because the part of his eyes that they take pictures of is gone, and his momma and daddy couldn’t get benefits. At least, that’s what I think. Is that right, George?”

  Mr. Parker said, “I’ll introduce you to your classes in a moment.”

  “Him and me used to be in the school,” Nitty continued. “Had good jobs there, or so we believed. Then one day that big computer downtown says, ‘Don’t need you no more,’ and out we goes.”

  “You don’t have to talk funny for us,” Mickie said.

  “Well, that’s a relief. I always do it a little, though, for Mr. Parker. It makes him feel better.”

  “What was your job?”

  “Buildings maintenance. I took care of the heating plant, and serviced the teaching and cleaning machines, and did the electrical repair work generally.”

  “Nitty!” Little Tib called.

  “I’m here, li’l boy. I won’t go way.”

  “Well, we have to go,” Mickie said. “They’ll miss us pretty soon if we don’t get back to patrolling this train. You fellows remember you promised you’d get off at Howard. And try not to let anyone see you.”

  Mr. Parker said, “You may rely on our cooperation.”

  Little Tib could hear the sound of the women’s boots on the boxcar floor, and the little grunt Alice gave as she took hold of the ladder outside the door and swung herself out. Then there was a popping noise, as though someone had opened a bottle of soda, and a bang and clatter when something struck the back of the car.

  His lungs and nose and mouth all burned. He felt a rush of saliva too great to contain. It spilled out of his lips and down his shirt; he wanted to run, and he thought of the old place, where the creek cut (cold as ice) under banks of milkweed and goldenrod. Nitty was yelling: “Throw it out! Throw it out!” And somebody, he thought it was Mr. Parker, ran full tilt into the side of the car. Little Tib was on the hill above the creek again, looking down across the bluebonnets toward the surging, glass-dark water, and a kiteflying west wind was blowing.