The Best of Gene Wolfe

by Gene Wolfe

  “I am sick. Everyone says so.”

  “I don’t; so ‘everyone’ just means the ones that do—isn’t that right? And if you don’t either, that will be two; it can’t be everyone then.”

  The girl called, “Doctor? Dr. Island?”

  Nicholas said, “You aren’t going to believe that, are you?”

  “Dr. Island, is it true?”

  “Is what true, Diane?”

  “What he said. Am I sick?”

  “Sickness—even physical illness—is relative, Diane, and complete health is an idealization, an abstraction, even if the other end of the scale is not.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You are not physically ill.” A long, blue comber curled into a line of hissing spray reaching infinitely along the sea to their left and right. “As you said yourself a moment ago, you are sometimes confused, and sometimes disturbed.”

  “He said if it weren’t for other people, if it weren’t for my mother and father, I wouldn’t have to be here.”

  “Diane . . .”

  “Well, is that true or isn’t it?”

  “Most emotional illness would not exist, Diane, if it were possible in every case to separate oneself—in thought as well as circumstance—if only for a time.”

  “Separate oneself?”

  “Did you ever think of going away, at least for a time?”

  The girl nodded, then as though she were not certain Dr. Island could see her said, “Often, I suppose, leaving the school and getting my own compartment somewhere—going to Achilles. Sometimes I wanted to so badly.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “They would have worried. And anyway, they would have found me, and made me come home.”

  “Would it have done any good if I—or a human doctor—had told them not to?”

  When the girl said nothing Nicholas snapped, “You could have locked them up.”

  “They were functioning, Nicholas. They bought and sold; they worked, and paid their taxes—”

  Diane said softly, “It wouldn’t have done any good anyway, Nicholas; they are inside me.”

  “Diane was no longer functioning: she was failing every subject at the university she attended, and her presence in her classes, when she came, disturbed the instructors and the other students. You were not functioning either, and people of your own age were afraid of you.”

  “That’s what counts with you, then. Functioning.”

  “If I were different from the world, would that help you when you got back into the world?”

  “You are different.” Nicholas kicked the sand. “Nobody ever saw a place like this.”

  “You mean that reality to you is metal corridors, rooms without windows, noise.”

  “Yes.”

  “That is the unreality, Nicholas. Most people have never had to endure such things. Even now, this—my beach, my sea, my trees—is more in harmony with most human lives than your metal corridors; and here, I am your social environment—what individuals call they. You see, sometimes if we take people who are troubled back to something like me, to an idealized natural setting, it helps them.”

  “Come on,” Nicholas told the girl. He took her arm, acutely conscious of being so much shorter than she.

  “A question,” murmured the waves. “If Diane’s parents had been taken here instead of Diane, do you think it would have helped them?”

  Nicholas did not reply.

  “We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.” Diane and the boy had turned away, and the waves’ hissing and slapping ceased to be speech. Gulls wheeled overhead, and once a red and yellow parrot fluttered from one palm to another. A monkey running on all fours like a little dog approached them, and Nicholas chased it, but it escaped.

  “I’m going to take one of those things apart someday,” he said, “and pull the wires out.”

  “Are we going to walk all the way round?” Diane asked. She might have been talking to herself.

  “Can you do that?”

  “Oh, you can’t walk all around Dr. Island; it would be too long, and you can’t get there anyway. But we could walk until we get back to where we started—we’re probably more than halfway now.”

  “Are there other islands you can’t see from here?”

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so; there’s just this one big island on this satellite, and all the rest is water.”

  “Then if there’s only the one island, we’re going to have to walk all around it to get back to where we started. What are you laughing at?”

  “Look down the beach, as far as you can. Never mind how it slips off to the side—pretend it’s straight.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Don’t you? Watch.” Diane leaped into the air, six meters or more this time, and waved her arms.

  “It looks like there’s somebody ahead of us, way down the beach.”

  “Uh-huh. Now look behind.”

  “Okay, there’s somebody there too. Come to think of it, I saw someone on the beach when I first got here. It seemed funny to see so far, but I guess I thought they were other patients. Now I see two people.”

  “They’re us. That was probably yourself you saw the other time too. There are just so many of us to each strip of beach, and Dr. Island only wants certain ones to mix. So the space bends around. When we get to one end of our strip and try to step over, we’ll be at the other end.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Dr. Island told me about it when I first came here.” The girl was silent for a moment, and her smile vanished. “Listen, Nicholas, do you want to see something really funny?”

  Nicholas asked, “What?” As he spoke, a drop of rain struck his face.

  “You’ll see. Come on, though. We have to go into the middle instead of following the beach, and it will give us a chance to get under the trees and out of the rain.”

  When they had left the sand and the sound of the surf and were walking on solid ground under green-leaved trees, Nicholas said, “Maybe we can find some fruit.” They were so light now that he had to be careful not to bound into the air with each step. The rain fell slowly around them, in crystal spheres.

  “Maybe,” the girl said doubtfully. “Wait; let’s stop here.” She sat down where a huge tree sent twenty-meter wooden arches over dark, mossy ground. “Want to climb up there and see if you can find us something?”

  “All right,” Nicholas agreed. He jumped, and easily caught hold of a branch far above the girl’s head. In a moment he was climbing in a green world, with the rain pattering all around him; he followed narrowing limbs into leafy wilderness where the cool water ran from every twig he touched, and twice found the empty nests of birds, and once a slender snake, green as any leaf with a head as long as his thumb, but there was no fruit. “Nothing,” he said, when he dropped down beside the girl once more.

  “That’s all right; we’ll find something.”

  He said, “I hope so,” and noticed that she was looking at him oddly, then realized that his left hand had lifted itself to touch her right breast. His hand dropped as he looked, and he felt his face grow hot. He said, “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “We like you. He—over there—he can’t talk, you see. I guess I can’t talk either.”

  “I think it’s just you—in two pieces. I don’t care.”

  “Thanks.” He had picked up a leaf, dead and damp, and was tearing it to shreds, first his right hand tearing while the left held the leaf, then turnabout. “Where does the rain come from?” The dirty flakes clung to the fingers of both.

  “Hmm?”

  “Where does the rain come from? I mean, it isn’t because it’s colder here now, like on Callisto; it’s because the gravity’s turned down some way, isn’t it?”

  “From the sea. Don’t you know how this place is built?”

  Nicholas sho
ok his head.

  “Didn’t they show it to you from the ship when you came? It’s beautiful.

  They showed it to me—I just sat there and looked at it, and I wouldn’t talk to them, and the nurse thought I wasn’t paying any attention, but I heard everything. I just didn’t want to talk to her. It wasn’t any use.”

  “I know how you felt.”

  “But they didn’t show it to you?”

  “No, on my ship they kept me locked up because I burned some stuff. They thought I couldn’t start a fire without an igniter, but if you have electricity in the wall sockets it’s easy. They had a thing on me—you know?” He clasped his arms to his body to show how he had been restrained. “I bit one of them too—I guess I didn’t tell you that yet: I bite people. They locked me up, and for a long time I had nothing to do, and then I could feel us dock with something, and they came and got me and pulled me down a regular companionway for a long time, and it just seemed like a regular place. Then they stuck me full of Tranquil-C—I guess they didn’t know it doesn’t hardly work on me at all—with a pneumogun, and lifted a kind of door thing and shoved me up.”

  “Didn’t they make you undress?”

  “I already was. When they put the ties on me I did things in my clothes and they had to take them off me. It made them mad.” He grinned unevenly. “Does Tranquil-C work on you? Or any of that other stuff?”

  “I suppose they would, but then I never do the sort of thing you do anyway.”

  “Maybe you ought to.”

  “Sometimes they used to give me medication that was supposed to cheer me up; then I couldn’t sleep, and I walked and walked, you know, and ran into things and made a lot of trouble for everyone; but what good does it do?”

  Nicholas shrugged. “Not doing it doesn’t do any good either—I mean, we’re both here. My way, I know I’ve made them jump; they shoot that stuff in me and I’m not mad anymore, but I know what it is and I just think what I would do if I were mad, and I do it, and when it wears off I’m glad I did.”

  “I think you’re still angry somewhere, deep down.”

  Nicholas was already thinking of something else. “This island says Ignacio kills people.” He paused. “What does it look like?”

  “Ignacio?”

  “No, I’ve seen him. Dr. Island.”

  “Oh, you mean when I was in the ship. The satellite’s round of course, and all clear except where Dr. Island is, so that’s a dark spot. The rest of it’s temperglass, and from space you can’t even see the water.”

  “That is the sea up there, isn’t it?” Nicholas asked, trying to look up at it through the tree leaves and the rain. “I thought it was when I first came.”

  “Sure. It’s like a glass ball, and we’re inside, and the water’s inside too, and just goes all around up the curve.”

  “That’s why I could see so far out on the beach, isn’t it? Instead of dropping down from you like on Callisto it bends up so you can see it.”

  The girl nodded. “And the water lets the light through, but filters out the ultraviolet. Besides, it gives us thermal mass, so we don’t heat up too much when we’re between the sun and the Bright Spot.”

  “Is that what keeps us warm? The Bright Spot?”

  Diane nodded again. “We go around in ten hours, you see, and that holds us over it all the time.”

  “Why can’t I see it, then? It ought to look like Sol does from the Belt, only bigger; but there’s just a shimmer in the sky, even when it’s not raining.”

  “The waves diffract the light and break up the image. You’d see the Focus, though, if the air weren’t so clear. Do you know what the Focus is?”

  Nicholas shook his head.

  “We’ll get to it pretty soon, after this rain stops. Then I’ll tell you.”

  “I still don’t understand about the rain.”

  Unexpectedly Diane giggled. “I just thought—do you know what I was supposed to be? While I was going to school?”

  “Quiet,” Nicholas said.

  “No, silly. I mean what I was being trained to do, if I graduated and all that. I was going to be a teacher, with all those cameras on me and tots from everywhere watching and popping questions on the two-way. Jolly time. Now I’m doing it here, only there’s no one but you.”

  “You mind?”

  “No, I suppose I enjoy it.” There was a black-and-blue mark on Diane’s thigh, and she rubbed it pensively with one hand as she spoke. “Anyway, there are three ways to make gravity. Do you know them? Answer, clerk.”

  “Sure; acceleration, mass, and synthesis.”

  “That’s right; motion and mass are both bendings of space, of course, which is why Zeno’s paradox doesn’t work out that way, and why masses move toward each other—what we call falling—or at least try to; and if they’re held apart it produces the tension we perceive as a force and call weight and all that rot. So naturally if you bend the space direct, you synthesize a gravity effect, and that’s what holds all that water up against the translucent shell—there’s nothing like enough mass to do it by itself.”

  “You mean”—Nicholas held out his hand to catch a slow-moving globe of rain—“that this is water from the sea?”

  “Righto, up on top. Do you see, the temperature differences in the air make the winds, and the winds make the waves and surf you saw when we were walking along the shore. When the waves break they throw up these little drops, and if you watch you’ll see that even when it’s clear they go up a long way sometimes. Then if the gravity is less they can get away altogether, and if we were on the outside they’d fly off into space, but we aren’t, we’re inside, so all they can do is go across the center, more or less, until they hit the water again, or Dr. Island.”

  “Dr. Island said they had storms sometimes, when people got mad.”

  “Yes. Lots of wind, and so there’s lots of rain too. Only the rain then is because the wind tears the tops off the waves, and you don’t get light like you do in a normal rain.”

  “What makes so much wind?”

  “I don’t know. It happens somehow.”

  They sat in silence, Nicholas listening to the dripping of the leaves. He remembered then that they had spun the hospital module, finally, to get the little spheres of clotting blood out of the air; Maya’s blood was building up on the grilles of the purification intake ducts, spotting them black, and someone had been afraid they would decay there and smell. Nicholas had not been there when they did it, but he could imagine the droplets settling, like this, in the slow spin. The old psychodrama group had already been broken up, and when he saw Maureen or any of the others in the rec room they talked about Good Old Days. It had not seemed like Good Old Days then except that Maya had been there.

  Diane said, “It’s going to stop.”

  “It looks just as bad to me.”

  “No, it’s going to stop—see, they’re falling a little faster now, and I feel heavier.”

  Nicholas stood up. “You rested enough yet? You want to go on?” “We’ll get wet.”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t want to get my hair wet, Nicholas. It’ll be over in a minute.”

  He sat down again. “How long have you been here?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t you count the days?”

  “I lose track a lot.”

  “Longer than a week?”

  “Nicholas, don’t ask me, all right?”

  “Isn’t there anybody on this piece of Dr. Island except you and me and Ignacio?”

  “I don’t think there was anyone but Ignacio before you came.”

  “Who is he?”

  She looked at him.

  “Well, who is he? You know me—us—Nicholas Kenneth de Vore; and you’re Diane who?”

  “Phillips.”

  “And you’re from the Trojan Planets, and I was from the Outer Belt, I guess, to start with. What about Ignacio? You talk to him sometimes, don’t you? Who is he?”

  “I don’t k
now. He’s important.”

  For an instant, Nicholas froze. “What does that mean?”

  “Important.” The girl was feeling her knees, running her hands back and forth across them.

  “Maybe everybody’s important.”

  “I know you’re just a tot, Nicholas, but don’t be so stupid. Come on, you wanted to go; let’s go now. It’s pretty well stopped.” She stood, stretching her thin body, her arms over her head. “My knees are rough—you made me think of that. When I came here they were still so smooth, I think. I used to put a certain lotion on them. Because my dad would feel them, and my hands and elbows too, and he’d say if they weren’t smooth nobody’d ever want me; Mum wouldn’t say anything, but she’d be cross after, and they used to come and visit, and so I kept a bottle in my room and I used to put it on. Once I drank some.”

  Nicholas was silent.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me if I died?” She stepped ahead of him, pulling aside the dripping branches. “See here, I’m sorry I said you were stupid.”

  “I’m just thinking,” Nicholas said. “I’m not mad at you. Do you really know anything about him?”

  “No, but look at it.” She gestured. “Look around you; someone built all this.”

  “You mean it cost a lot.”

  “It’s automated, of course, but still . . . well, the other places where you were before—how much space was there for each patient? Take the total volume and divide it by the number of people there.”

  “Okay, this is a whole lot bigger, but maybe they think we’re worth it.”

  “Nicholas . . .” She paused. “Nicholas, Ignacio is homicidal. Didn’t Dr. Island tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re fourteen and not very big for it, and I’m a girl. Who are they worried about?”

  The look on Nicholas’s face startled her.

  * * *

  After an hour or more of walking they came to it. It was a band of withered vegetation, brown and black and tumbling, and as straight as if it had been drawn with a ruler. “I was afraid it wasn’t going to be here,” Diane said. “It moves around whenever there’s a storm. It might not have been in our sector anymore at all.”

  Nicholas asked, “What is it?”

  “The Focus. It’s been all over, but mostly the plants grow back quickly when it’s gone.”