The Best of Gene Wolfe

by Gene Wolfe

  “It smells funny—like the kitchen in a place where they wanted me to work in the kitchen once.”

  “Vegetables rotting, that’s what that is. What did you do?”

  “Nothing—put detergent in the stuff they were cooking. What makes this?”

  “The Bright Spot. See, when it’s just about overhead the curve of the sky and the water up there make a lens. It isn’t a very good lens—a lot of the light scatters. But enough is focused to do this. It wouldn’t fry us if it came past right now, if that’s what you’re wondering, because it’s not that hot. I’ve stood right in it, but you want to get out in a minute.”

  “I thought it was going to be about seeing ourselves down the beach.”

  Diane seated herself on the trunk of a fallen tree. “It was, really. The last time I was here it was further from the water, and I suppose it had been there a long time, because it had cleared out a lot of the dead stuff. The sides of the sector are nearer here, you see; the whole sector narrows down like a piece of pie. So you could look down the Focus either way and see yourself nearer than you could on the beach. It was almost as if you were in a big, big room, with a looking glass on each wall, or as if you could stand behind yourself. I thought you might like it.”

  “I’m going to try it here,” Nicholas announced, and he clambered up one of the dead trees while the girl waited below, but the dry limbs creaked and snapped beneath his feet, and he could not get high enough to see himself in either direction. When he dropped to the ground beside her again, he said, “There’s nothing to eat here either, is there?”

  “I haven’t found anything.”

  “They—I mean, Dr. Island wouldn’t just let us starve, would he?”

  “I don’t think he could do anything; that’s the way this place is built. Sometimes you find things, and I’ve tried to catch fish, but I never could. A couple of times Ignacio gave me part of what he had, though; he’s good at it. I bet you think I’m skinny, don’t you? But I was a lot fatter when I came here.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “Keep walking, I suppose, Nicholas. Maybe go back to the water.”

  “Do you think we’ll find anything?”

  From a decaying log, insect stridulations called, “Wait.”

  Nicholas asked, “Do you know where anything is?”

  “Something for you to eat? Not at present. But I can show you something much more interesting, not far from here, than this clutter of dying trees. Would you like to see it?”

  Diane said, “Don’t go, Nicholas.”

  “What is it?”

  “Diane, who calls this ‘the Focus,’ calls what I wish to show you ‘the Point.’ ”

  Nicholas asked Diane, “Why shouldn’t I go?”

  “I’m not going. I went there once anyway.”

  “I took her,” Dr. Island said. “And I’ll take you. I wouldn’t take you if I didn’t think it might help you.”

  “I don’t think Diane liked it.”

  “Diane may not wish to be helped—help may be painful, and often people do not. But it is my business to help them if I can, whether or not they wish it.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to go?”

  “Then I cannot compel you; you know that. But you will be the only patient in this sector who has not seen it, Nicholas, as well as the youngest; both Diane and Ignacio have, and Ignacio goes there often.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “No. Are you afraid?”

  Nicholas looked questioningly at Diane. “What is it? What will I see?”

  She had walked away while he was talking to Dr. Island, and was now sitting cross-legged on the ground about five meters from where Nicholas stood, staring at her hands. Nicholas repeated, “What will I see, Diane?” He did not think she would answer.

  She said, “A glass. A mirror.”

  “Just a mirror?”

  “You know how I told you to climb the tree here? The Point is where the edges come together. You can see yourself—like on the beach—but closer.”

  Nicholas was disappointed. “I’ve seen myself in mirrors lots of times.”

  Dr. Island, whose voice was now in the sighing of the dead leaves, whispered, “Did you have a mirror in your room, Nicholas, before you came here?”

  “A steel one.”

  “So that you could not break it?”

  “I guess so. I threw things at it sometimes, but it just got puckers in it.” Remembering dimpled reflections, Nicholas laughed.

  “You can’t break this one either.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it’s worth going to see.”

  “I think it is.”

  “Diane, do you still think I shouldn’t go?”

  There was no reply. The girl sat staring at the ground in front of her. Nicholas walked over to look at her and found a tear had washed a damp trail down each thin cheek, but she did not move when he touched her. “She’s catatonic, isn’t she,” he said.

  A green limb just outside the Focus nodded. “Catatonic schizophrenia.”

  “I had a doctor once that said those names—like that. They didn’t mean anything.” (The doctor had been a therapy robot, but a human doctor gave more status. Robots’ patients sat in doorless booths—two and a half hours a day for Nicholas: an hour and a half in the morning, an hour in the afternoon—and talked to something that appeared to be a small, friendly food freezer. Some people sat every day in silence, while others talked continually, and for such patients as these the attendants seldom troubled to turn the machines on.)

  “He meant cause and treatment. He was correct.”

  Nicholas stood looking down at the girl’s streaked, brown-blond head. “What is the cause? I mean for her.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what’s the treatment?”

  “You are seeing it.”

  “Will it help her?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Listen, she can hear you, don’t you know that? She hears everything we say.”

  “If my answer disturbs you, Nicholas, I can change it. It will help her if she wants to be helped; if she insists on clasping her illness to her it will not.”

  “We ought to go away from here,” Nicholas said uneasily.

  “To your left you will see a little path, a very faint one. Between the twisted tree and the bush with the yellow flowers.”

  Nicholas nodded and began to walk, looking back at Diane several times. The flowers were butterflies, who fled in a cloud of color when he approached them, and he wondered if Dr. Island had known. When Nicholas had gone a hundred paces and was well away from the brown and rotting vegetation, he said, “She was sitting in the Focus.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “What will happen when the Bright Spot comes?”

  “Diane will become uncomfortable and move, if she is still there.”

  “Once in one of the places I was in there was a man who was like that, and they said he wouldn’t get anything to eat if he didn’t get up and get it, they weren’t going to feed him with the nose tube anymore, and they didn’t, and he died. We told them about it and they wouldn’t do anything and he starved to death right there, and when he was dead they rolled him off onto a stretcher and changed the bed and put somebody else there.”

  “I know, Nicholas. You told the doctors at St. John’s about all that, and it is in your file, but think: Well men have starved themselves—yes, to death—to protest what they felt were political injustices. Is it so surprising that your friend killed himself in the same way to protest what he felt as a psychic injustice?”

  “He wasn’t my friend. Listen, did you really mean it when you said the treatment she was getting here would help Diane if she wanted to be helped?”

  “No.”

  Nicholas halted in midstride. “You didn’t mean it? You don’t think it’s true?”

  “No. I doubt that anything will help her.
”

  “I don’t think you ought to lie to us.”

  “Why not? If by chance you become well you will be released, and if you are released you will have to deal with your society, which will lie to you frequently. Here, where there are so few individuals, I must take the place of society. I have explained that.”

  “Is that what you are?”

  “Society’s surrogate? Of course. Who do you imagine built me? What else could I be?”

  “The doctor.”

  “You have had many doctors, and so has she. Not one of them has benefited you much.”

  “I’m not sure you even want to help us.”

  “Do you wish to see what Diane calls ‘the Point’?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then you must walk. You will not see it standing here.”

  Nicholas walked, thrusting aside leafy branches and dangling creepers wet with rain. The jungle smelled of the life of green thing; there were ants on the tree trunks, and dragonflies with hot, red bodies and wings as long as his hands. “Do you want to help us?” he asked after a time.

  “My feelings toward you are ambivalent. But when you wish to be helped, I wish to help you.”

  The ground sloped gently upward, and as it rose became somewhat more clear, the big trees a trifle farther apart, the underbrush spent in grass and fern. Occasionally there were stone outcrops to be climbed, and clearings open to the tumbling sky. Nicholas asked, “Who made this trail?”

  “Ignacio. He comes here often.”

  “He’s not afraid, then? Diane’s afraid.”

  “Ignacio is afraid too, but he comes.”

  “Diane says Ignacio is important.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean by that? Is he important? More important than we are?”

  “Do you remember that I told you I was the surrogate of society? What do you think society wants, Nicholas?”

  “Everybody to do what it says.”

  “You mean conformity. Yes, there must be conformity, but something else too—consciousness.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Without consciousness, which you may call sensitivity if you are careful not to allow yourself to be confused by the term, there is no progress. A century ago, Nicholas, mankind was suffocating on Earth; now it is suffocating again. About half of the people who have contributed substantially to the advance of humanity have shown signs of emotional disturbance.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to hear about it. I asked you an easy question—is Ignacio more important than Diane and me—and you won’t tell me. I’ve heard all this you’re saying. I’ve heard it fifty, maybe a hundred times from everybody, and it’s lies; it’s the regular thing, and you’ve got it written down on a card somewhere to read out when anybody asks. Those people you talk about that went crazy, they went crazy because while they were ‘advancing humanity,’ or whatever you call it, people kicked them out of their rooms because they couldn’t pay, and while they were getting thrown out you were making other people rich that had never done anything in their whole lives except think about how to get that way.”

  “Sometimes it is hard, Nicholas, to determine before the fact—or even at the time—just who should be honored.”

  “How do you know if you’ve never tried?” “You asked if Ignacio was more important than Diane or yourself. I can only say that Ignacio seems to me to hold a brighter promise of a full recovery coupled with a substantial contribution to human progress.”

  “If he’s so good, why did he crack up?”

  “Many do, Nicholas. Even among the inner planets space is not a kind environment for mankind; and our space, trans-Martian space, is worse. Any young person here, anyone like yourself or Diane who would seem to have a betterthan-average chance of adapting to the conditions we face, is precious.”

  “Or Ignacio.”

  “Yes, or Ignacio. Ignacio has a tested IQ of two hundred and ten, Nicholas. Diane’s is one hundred and twenty. Your own is ninety-five.”

  “They never took mine.”

  “It’s on your records, Nicholas.”

  “They tried to and I threw down the helmet and it broke; Sister Carmela—she was the nurse—just wrote down something on the paper and sent me back.”

  “I see. I will ask for a complete investigation of this, Nicholas.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I don’t think you believed me.”

  “Nicholas, Nicholas . . .” The long tongues of grass now beginning to appear beneath the immense trees sighed. “Can’t you see that a certain measure of trust between the two of us is essential?”

  “Did you believe me?”

  “Why do you ask? Suppose I were to say I did; would you believe that?”

  “When you told me I had been reclassified.”

  “You would have to be retested, for which there are no facilities here.”

  “If you believed me, why did you say ‘retested’? I told you I haven’t ever been tested at all—but anyway you could cross out the ninety-five.”

  “It is impossible for me to plan your therapy without some estimate of your intelligence, Nicholas, and I have nothing with which to replace it.”

  * * *

  The ground was sloping up more sharply now, and in a clearing the boy halted and turned to look back at the leafy film, like algae over a pool, beneath which he had climbed, and at the sea beyond. To his right and left his view was still hemmed with foliage, and ahead of him a meadow on edge (like the square of sand through which he had come, though he did not think of that), dotted still with trees, stretched steeply toward an invisible summit. It seemed to him that under his feet the mountainside swayed ever so slightly. Abruptly he demanded of the wind, “Where’s Ignacio?”

  “Not here. Much closer to the beach.”

  “And Diane?”

  “Where you left her. Do you enjoy the panorama?”

  “It’s pretty, but it feels like we’re rocking.”

  “We are. I am moored to the temperglass exterior of our satellite by two hundred cables, but the tide and the currents nonetheless impart a slight motion to my body. Naturally this movement is magnified as you go higher.”

  “I thought you were fastened right on to the hull; if there’s water under you, how do people get in and out?”

  “I am linked to the main air lock by a communication tube. To you when you came, it probably seemed an ordinary companionway.”

  Nicholas nodded and turned his back on leaves and sea and began to climb again.

  “You are in a beautiful spot, Nicholas; do you open your heart to beauty?” After waiting for an answer that did not come, the wind sang:

  The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns

  And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,

  The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,

  The lightning flash of insect and of bird,

  The lustre of the long convolvuluses

  That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran

  Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows

  And glories of the broad belt of the world,

  All these he saw.

  “Does this mean nothing to you, Nicholas?”

  “You read a lot, don’t you?”

  “Often, when it is dark, everyone else is asleep and there is very little else for me to do.”

  “You talk like a woman; are you a woman?”

  “How could I be a woman?”

  “You know what I mean. Except, when you were talking mostly to Diane, you sounded more like a man.”

  “You haven’t yet said you think me beautiful.”

  “You’re an Easter egg.”

  “What do you mean by that, Nicholas?”

  “Never mind.” He saw the egg as it had hung in the air before him, shining with gold and covered with flowers.

  “Eggs are dyed with pretty colors for Easter, and my colors are be
autiful—is that what you mean, Nicholas?”

  His mother had brought the egg on visiting day, but she could never have made it. Nicholas knew who must have made it. The gold was that very pure gold used for shielding delicate instruments; the clear flakes of crystallized carbon that dotted the egg’s surface with tiny stars could only have come from a laboratory high-pressure furnace. How angry he must have been when she told him she was going to give it to him.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it, Nicky?”

  It hung in the weightlessness between them, turning very slowly with the memory of her scented gloves.

  “The flowers are meadowsweet, fraxinella, lily of the valley, and moss rose—though I wouldn’t expect you to recognize them, darling.” His mother had never been below the orbit of Mars, but she pretended to have spent her girlhood on Earth; each reference to the lie filled Nicholas with inexpressible fury and shame. The egg was about twenty centimeters long and it revolved, end over end, in some small fraction more than eight of the pulse beats he felt in his cheeks. Visiting time had twenty-three minutes to go.

  “Aren’t you going to look at it?”

  “I can see it from here.” He tried to make her understand. “I can see every part of it. The little red things are aluminum oxide crystals, right?”

  “I mean, look inside, Nicky.”

  He saw then that there was a lens at one end, disguised as a dewdrop in the throat of an asphodel. Gently he took the egg in his hands, closed one eye, and looked. The light of the interior was not, as he had half-expected, gold tinted, but brilliantly white, deriving from some concealed source. A world surely meant for Earth shone within, as though seen from below the orbit of the moon—indigo sea and emerald land. Rivers brown and clear as tea ran down long plains.

  His mother said, “Isn’t it pretty?”

  Night hung at the corners in funereal purple, and sent long shadows like cold and lovely arms to caress the day; and while he watched and it fell, long-necked birds of so dark a pink that they were nearly red trailed stilt legs across the sky, their wings making crosses.

  “They are called flamingos,” Dr. Island said, following the direction of Nicholas’s eyes. “Isn’t it a pretty word? For a pretty bird, but I don’t think we’d like them as much if we called them sparrows, would we?”