The Best of Gene Wolfe

by Gene Wolfe

  “I don’t think it worked here,” Nicholas said. “It was more complicated than that.”

  “Human beings are complicated monkeys, Nicholas.”

  “That’s about the first time I ever heard you make a joke. You like not being human, don’t you?”

  “Of course. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I always thought I would, but now I’m not sure. You said that to help me, didn’t you? I don’t like that.”

  A wave higher than the others splashed chill foam over Nicholas’s legs, and for a moment he wondered if this was Dr. Island’s reply. Half a minute later another wave wet him, and another, and he moved farther up the beach to avoid them. The wind was stronger, but he slept despite it, and was awakened only for a moment by a flash of light from the direction from which he had come; he tried to guess what might have caused it, thought of Diane and Ignacio throwing the burning sticks into the air to see the arcs of fire, smiled—too sleepy now to be angry—and slept again.

  Morning came cold and sullen; Nicholas ran up and down the beach, rubbing himself with his hands. A thin rain, or spume (it was hard to tell which), was blowing in the wind, clouding the light to gray radiance. He wondered if Diane and Ignacio would mind if he came back now and decided to wait, then thought of fishing so that he would have something to bring when he came; but the sea was very cold and the waves so high they tumbled him, wrenching his bamboo spear from his hand. Ignacio found him dripping with water, sitting with his back to a palm trunk and staring out toward the lifting curve of the sea.

  “Hello, you,” Ignacio said.

  “Good morning, Patrão.”

  Ignacio sat down. “What is your name? You told me, I think, when we first met, but I have forgotten. I am sorry.”

  “Nicholas.”

  “Yes.”

  “Patrão, I am very cold. Would it be possible for us to go to your fire?”

  “My name is Ignacio; call me that.”

  Nicholas nodded, frightened.

  “But we cannot go to my fire, because the fire is out.”

  “Can’t you make another one, Patrão?”

  “You do not trust me, do you? I do not blame you. No, I cannot make another—you may use what I had, if you wish, and make one after I have gone. I came only to say good-bye.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  The wind in the palm fronds said, “Ignacio is much better now. He will be going to another place, Nicholas.”

  “A hospital?”

  “Yes, a hospital, but I don’t think he will have to stay there long.”

  “But . . .” Nicholas tried to think of something appropriate. At St. John’s and the other places where he had been confined, when people left, they simply left, and usually were hardly spoken of once it was learned that they were going and thus were already tainted by whatever it was that froze the smiles and dried the tears of those outside. At last he said, “Thanks for teaching me how to fish.”

  “That was all right,” Ignacio said. He stood up and put a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder, then turned away. Four meters to his left the damp sand was beginning to lift and crack. While Nicholas watched, it opened on a brightly lit companion-way walled with white. Ignacio pushed his curly black hair back from his eyes and went down, and the sand closed with a thump.

  “He won’t be coming back, will he?” Nicholas said.

  “No.”

  “He said I could use his stuff to start another fire, but I don’t even know what it is.”

  Dr. Island did not answer. Nicholas got up and began to walk back to where the fire had been, thinking about Diane and wondering if she was hungry; he was hungry himself.

  * * *

  He found her beside the dead fire. Her chest had been burned away, and lying close by, near the hole in the sand where Ignacio must have kept it hidden, was a bulky nuclear welder. The power pack was too heavy for Nicholas to lift, but he picked up the welding gun on its short cord and touched the trigger, producing a two-meter plasma discharge which he played along the sand until Diane’s body was ash. By the time he had finished, the wind was whipping the palms and sending stinging rain into his eyes, but he collected a supply of wood and built another fire, bigger and bigger until it roared like a forge in the wind. “He killed her!” he shouted to the waves.

  “YES.” Dr. Island’s voice was big and wild.

  “You said he was better.”

  “HE IS,” howled the wind. “YOU KILLED THE MONKEY THAT WANTED TO PLAY WITH YOU, NICHOLAS—AS I BELIEVED IGNACIO WOULD EVENTUALLY KILL YOU, WHO ARE SO EASILY HATED, SO DIFFERENT FROM WHAT IT IS THOUGHT A BOY SHOULD BE. BUT KILLING THE MONKEY HELPED YOU, REMEMBER? MADE YOU BETTER. IGNACIO WAS FRIGHTENED BY WOMEN; NOW HE KNOWS THAT THEY ARE REALLY VERY WEAK, AND HE HAS ACTED UPON CERTAIN FANTASIES AND FINDS THEM BITTER.”

  “You’re rocking,” Nicholas said. “Am I doing that?”

  “YOUR THOUGHT.”

  A palm snapped in the storm; instead of falling, it flew crashing among the others, its fronded head catching the wind like a sail. “I’m killing you,” Nicholas said. “Destroying you.” The left side of his face was so contorted with grief and rage that he could scarcely speak.

  Dr. Island heaved beneath his feet. “NO.”

  “One of your cables is already broken—I saw that. Maybe more than one. You’ll pull loose. I’m turning this world, isn’t that right? The attitude rockets are tuned to my emotions, and they’re spinning us around, and the slippage is the wind and the high sea, and when you come loose nothing will balance anymore.”

  “NO.”

  “What’s the stress on your cables? Don’t you know?”

  “THEY ARE VERY STRONG.”

  “What kind of talk is that? You ought to say something like ‘The D-twelve cable tension is twenty billion kilograms’ force. warning! warning! Expected time to failure is ninety-seven seconds! warning! Don’t you even know how a machine is supposed to talk?” Nicholas was screaming now, and every wave reached farther up the beach than the last, so that the bases of the most seaward palms were awash.

  “GET BACK, NICHOLAS, FIND HIGHER GROUND. GO INTO THE JUNGLE.” It was the crashing waves themselves that spoke.

  “I won’t.”

  A long serpent of water reached for the fire, which hissed and sputtered.

  “GET BACK!”

  “I won’t!”

  A second wave came, striking Nicholas calf high and nearly extinguishing the fire.

  “ALL THIS WILL BE UNDERWATER SOON. GET BACK!”

  Nicholas picked up some of the still-burning sticks and tried to carry them, but the wind blew them out as soon as he lifted them from the fire. He tugged at the welder, but it was too heavy for him to lift.

  “GET BACK!”

  He went into the jungle, where the trees lashed themselves to leafy rubbish in the wind and broken branches flew through the air like debris from an explosion; for a while he heard Diane’s voice crying in the wind; it became Maya’s, then his mother’s or Sister Carmela’s, and a hundred others’; in time the wind grew less, and he could no longer feel the ground rocking. He felt tired. He said, “I didn’t kill you after all, did I?” but there was no answer. On the beach, when he returned to it, he found the welder half-buried in sand. No trace of Diane’s ashes, nor of his fire. He gathered more wood and built another, lighting it with the welder.

  “Now,” he said. He scooped aside the sand around the welder until he reached the rough understone beneath it, and turned the flame of the welder on that; it blackened and bubbled.

  “No,” Dr. Island said.

  “Yes.” Nicholas was bending intently over the flame, both hands locked on the welder’s trigger.

  “Nicholas, stop that.” When he did not reply, “Look behind you.” There was a splashing louder than the crashing of the waves, and a groaning of metal. He whirled and saw the great, beetlelike robot Ignacio had shown him on the seafloor. Tiny shellfish clung to its metal skin, and water, faintly green, still poured from its b
ody. Before he could turn the welding gun toward it, it shot forward hands like clamps and wrenched the gun from him. All up and down the beach similar machines were smoothing the sand and repairing the damage of the storm.

  “That thing was dead,” Nicholas said. “Ignacio killed it.”

  It picked up the power pack, shook it clean of sand, and, turning, stalked back toward the sea.

  “That is what Ignacio believed, and it was better that he believed so.”

  “And you said you couldn’t do anything, you had no hands.”

  “I also told you that I would treat you as society will when you are released, that that was my nature. After that, did you still believe all I told you? Nicholas, you are upset now because Diane is dead—”

  “You could have protected her!”

  “—but by dying she made someone else, someone very important, well. Her prognosis was bad; she really wanted only death, and this was the death I chose for her. You could call it the death of Dr. Island, a death that would help someone else. Now you are alone, but soon there will be more patients in this segment, and you will help them too—if you can—and perhaps they will help you. Do you understand?”

  “No,” Nicholas said. He flung himself down on the sand. The wind had dropped, but it was raining hard. He thought of the vision he had once had, and of describing it to Diane the day before. “This isn’t ending the way I thought,” he whispered. It was only a squeak of sound far down in his throat. “Nothing ever turns out right.”

  The waves, the wind, the rustling palm fronds and the pattering rain, the monkeys who had come down to the beach to search for food washed ashore, answered, “Go away—go back—don’t move.”

  Nicholas pressed his scarred head against his knees, rocking back and forth.

  “Don’t move.”

  For a long time he sat still while the rain lashed his shoulders and the dripping monkeys frolicked and fought around him. When at last he lifted his face, there was in it some element of personality which had been only potentially present before, and with this an emptiness and an expression of surprise. His lips moved, and the sounds were the sounds made by a deaf-mute who tries to speak.

  “Nicholas is gone,” the waves said. “Nicholas, who was the right side of your body, the left half of your brain, I have forced into catatonia; for the remainder of your life he will be to you only what you once were to him—or less. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded.

  “We will call you Kenneth, silent one. And if Nicholas tries to come again, Kenneth, you must drive him back—or return to what you have been.”

  The boy nodded a second time, and a moment afterward began to collect sticks for the dying fire. As though to themselves the waves chanted:

  Seas are wild tonight . . .

  Stretching over Sado island

  Silent clouds of stars.

  There was no reply.

  Afterword

  I suspect that this is my most successful story. You already know how I came to write it. “Death,” as I saw it, could be handled in two ways: Dr. Island could die, or Dr. Island could decree a death. In the same way, I could have a doctor named Island (a cop-out) or I could have a doctor who was in fact an island. You know the decisions I made.

  The brain operation Nicholas suffered is perfectly real. It is (or was) done in cases of severe epilepsy that can be treated in no other way. It results in what appear to be two persons living in a single skull, a condition superficially similar to multiple personality.

  As prophesied, this story won a Nebula.

  La Befana

  When Zozz, home from the pit, had licked his fur clean, he howled before John Bananas’ door. John’s wife, Teresa, opened it and let him in. She was a thin, stooped woman of thirty or thirty-five, her black hair shot with gray. She did not smile, but he felt somehow that she was glad to see him.

  She said, “He’s not home yet. If you want to come in we’ve got a fire.”

  Zozz said, “I’ll wait for him—,” and six-legging politely across the threshold sat down over the stone Bananas had rolled in for him when they had been new friends. Maria and Mark, playing some sort of game with bottle caps on squares scratched on the floor dirt, said, “Hi, Mr. Zozz—,” and Zozz said, “Hi—,” in return. Bananas’ old mother, whom Zozz had brought here from the pads in his rusty powerwagon the day before, looked at him from piercing eyes, then fled into the other room. He could hear Teresa relax, hear her wheezing outpuffed breath.

  He said, “I think she thinks I bumped her on purpose yesterday.”

  “She’s not used to you yet.”

  “I know,” Zozz said.

  “I told her, Mother Bananas, it’s their world and they’re not used to you.”

  “Sure,” Zozz said. A gust of wind outside brought the cold in to replace the odor of the gog-hutch on the other side of the left wall.

  “I tell you it’s hell to have your husband’s mother with you in a place as small as this.”

  “Sure,” Zozz said again.

  Maria announced, “Daddy’s home!”

  The door rattled open and Bananas came in, looking tired and cheerful. Bananas worked in the slaughtering market and though his cheeks were blue with cold, his two trousers cuffs were red with blood. He kissed Teresa and tousled the hair of both children and said, “Hi, Zozzy.”

  Zozz said, “Hi. How does it roll?” And moved over so Bananas could warm his back.

  Someone groaned and Bananas asked a little anxiously, “What’s that?”

  Teresa said, “Next door.”

  “Huh?”

  “Next door. Some woman.”

  “Oh. I thought it might be Mom.”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In back.”

  Bananas frowned. “There’s no fire in there. She’ll freeze to death.”

  “I didn’t tell her to go back there. She can wrap a blanket around herself.”

  Zozz said, “It’s me—I bother her.” He got up.

  Bananas said, “Sit down.”

  “I can go. I just came to say hi.”

  “Sit down.” Bananas turned to his wife. “Honey, you shouldn’t leave her in there alone. See if you can’t get her to come out here, okay?”

  “Johnny—”

  “Teresa, dammit!”

  “Okay, Johnny.”

  * * *

  Bananas took off his coat and sat down in front of the fire. Maria and Mark had gone back to their game.

  In a voice too low to attract their attention Bananas said, “Nice thing, huh?”

  Zozz said, “I think your mother makes her nervous.”

  Bananas said, “Sure.”

  Zozz said, “This isn’t an easy world.”

  “For us two-leggers? No, it ain’t, but you don’t see me moving.”

  Zozz said, “That’s good. I mean, here you’ve got a job anyway. There’s work.”

  “That’s right.”

  Unexpectedly Maria said, “We get enough to eat here, and me and Mark can find wood for the fire. Where we used to be there wasn’t anything to eat.”

  Bananas asked, “You remember, honey?” “A little.”

  Zozz said, “People are poor here.”

  Bananas was taking off his shoes, scraping the street mud from them, and tossing it into the fire. He said, “If you mean us, us people are poor everyplace.” He jerked his head in the direction of the back room. “You ought to hear her tell about our world.”

  “Your mother?”

  Bananas nodded. “You should hear what she has to say.”

  Maria said, “Daddy, how did Grandmother get here?”

  “Same way we did.”

  Mark said, “You mean she signed a thing?”

  “A labor contract? No, she’s too old. She bought a ticket—you know, like you would buy something in a store.”

  Maria said, “Why did she come, Daddy?”

  “Shut up and play. Don’t bothe
r us.”

  Zozz said, “How did things go at work?”

  “So-so.” Bananas looked toward the back room again. “She came into some money, but that’s her business. I never ask her anything about it.”

  “Sure.”

  “She says she spent every dollar to get here—you know, they haven’t used dollars even on Earth for fifty, sixty years, but she still says it. How do you like that?” He laughed and Zozz laughed too. “I asked how she was going to get back and she said she’s not going back. She’s going to die right here with us. What could I possibly answer?”

  “I don’t know.” Zozz waited for Bananas to say something and, when he did not, added: “I mean, she is your mother, after all.”

  “Yeah.”

  Through the thin wall they heard the sick woman groan again and someone moving about. Zozz said, “I guess it’s been a long time since you saw her last.”

  “Yeah—twenty-two years Newtonian. Listen, Zozzy—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know something? I wish I had never set eyes on her again.”

  Zozz said nothing, rubbing his hands, hands, hands.

  “That sounds lousy, I guess.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “She could have lived good for the rest of her life on what that ticket cost her.” Bananas was silent for a moment. “She used to be a big, fat woman when I was a kid, you know? A great big woman with a loud voice. Look at her now—dried up and bent over. It’s like she wasn’t my mother at all. You know the only thing that’s the same about her? That black dress. That’s the only thing I recognize, the only thing that hasn’t changed. She could be a stranger—she tells stories about me I don’t remember at all.”