Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus

name: Rm E2S14 Seat 18

school: Armstrong School

city: Frenchman’s Landing

Taking up one of the spools of tape, he looked for a label, but there was none. The labels lay loose among the other materials, robbed by the humidity of their adhesion, though still neatly titled, dated and signed.

Second Interrogation.

Fifth Interrogation.

Seventeenth Interrogation—Third Reel.

The officer allowed them to sift between his fingers, then chose a spool at random and set it up on his recorder.

A: Is it going now?

Q: Yes. Your name, please.

A: I have already given you my name, it is on all your records.

Q: You have given us that name a number of times.

A: Yes.

Q: Who are you?

A: I am the prisoner in cell 143.

Q: Oh, you are a philosopher. We had thought you an anthropologist, and you don’t seem old enough for both.

A:

Q: I am instructed to familiarize myself with your case. I could have done that without calling you from your cell—you realize that? I am subjecting myself to the danger of typhus and several other diseases for your sake. Do you want to return underground? You seemed to appreciate the cigarette a moment ago. Isn’t there anything else you’d like?

A: ( Eagerly ) Another blanket. More paper! More paper, and something to write on. A table.

The officer smiled to himself and stopped the tape. He had enjoyed the eagerness in A’s voice, and he now found pleasure in speculating to himself about the answer A would receive. He rewound a few inches of tape, then touched the PLAY button again.

Q: Do you want to return underground? You seemed to appreciate the cigarette a moment ago. Isn’t there anything else you’d like?

A: (Eagerly) Another blanket. More paper! More paper, and something to write on. A table.

Q: We’ve given you paper, a great deal of it. And look at the use you’ve made of it: filled it with scrawlings. Do you realize that if the records in your case are ever forwarded to higher authority it will be necessary to have them transcribed? That will be weeks of work for somebody.

A: They could be photocopied.

Q: Ah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?

The officer touched the volume control, reducing the voices to murmurs, and poked at the litter on his table. An unusual and exceptionally sturdy notebook caught his eye. He picked it up.

It was perhaps fourteen inches by twelve, an inch thick, bound in stout canvas of a dun shade time and sun had turned to cream at the edges. The pages were heavy and stiff, ruled with faint blue lines, the first page beginning in the middle of a sentence. Looking more carefully, the officer saw that three leaves had been cut from the front of the book, as though with the blade of a razor or a very keen knife. He drew his dagger and tested its edge against the fourth. The dagger was sharp—the slave kept it so—but would not cut as cleanly as the edge someone had employed before him. He read:

…a deceptive quality even to daylight, feeding the imagination, so that I sometimes wonder how much of what I see here exists only in my own mind. It gives me an unbalanced feeling, which the too-long days and stretched nights don’t help. I wake up—I did even in Roncevaux—hours before dawn.

Anyway it’s a cool climate, so the thermometer tells me; but it does not seem cool—the whole effect is of the tropics. The sun, this incredible pink sun, blazes down, all light and no heat, with so little output at the blue end of the spectrum that it leaves the sky behind it nearly black, and this very blackness is—or at least seems to me—tropical; like a sweating African face, or the green-black shadows at noon in a jungle; and the plants, the animals and insects, even this preposterous jerrybuilt city, all contribute to the feeling. It makes me think of the snow langur—the monkey that lives in the icy valleys of the Himalayas; or of those hairy elephants and rhinoceros that during the glaciations held on to the freezing edges of Europe and North America. In the same way, here they had bright-colored birds and wide-leaved, red- and yellow-blossomed plants (as if this were Martinique or Tumaco) in profusion wherever the ground is high enough to free it from the monotonous grasp of the salt reeds of the meadowmeres.

Mankind collaborates. Our town (as you see, a few days in one of these new-built, falling-down metropolises makes you an old resident, and I was considered an Early Settler before I had transferred the contents of my bags to the splintering dresser in my room) is largely built of logs from the cypress-like trees that dot the lowlands around it and roofed with plastic sheet, corrugated—so that all we need is the throbbing of native drums in the distance. (And wouldn’t it make my job easier to hear a few! Actually some of the earliest explorers farther south are supposed to have reported signal drumming on the standing trunks of hollow trees by the Annese; they are said to have used no drum-sticks, striking the trunk with the open hand as if it were a tom-tom, and like all primitives they would presumably have been communicating by imitating, with the sound of their blows, their own speech—“talking drums.”)

The officer riffled the stiff leaves with his thumb. There were pages more of the same kind of material, and he tossed the notebook aside to take up a portion of a loose sheaf of papers bound at their point of origin (he glanced at the top of the cover letter —(Port-Mimizon) with a flimsy tin clasp which had now fallen off. These were in the neat writing of a professional clerk; the pages were numbered, but he did not trouble himself to find the first of them.

Now that I have paper again it has proved possible, just as I predicted, to decipher the tappings of my fellow prisoners. How? you ask. Very well, I will tell you. Not because I must, but in order that you may admire my intelligence. You should, you know, and I need it.

By listening to the tapping it was not difficult to separate code groups which, as I realized, each represented a letter. I was greatly helped, I admit, by the knowledge that this code was meant to be understood, not to baffle, and that it must often be employed by uneducated men. By marking tallies I could determine the frequency of use of each group; so much was easy, and anyone could have done as well. But what were the frequencies of the letters? No one carries that information in his head except a cryptographer, and here is where I thought out a solution I flatter myself you would never have arrived at if you had had to sit in this cell, as it seems I must, until the walls crumble away to sand: I analyzed my own conversation. I have always had an excellent memory for what I have heard said, and it is even better for what I have said myself—I can still recall, for example, certain conversations I had with my mother when I was four, and the oddity is that I comprehend now things she said to me which were perfectly opaque at the time, either because I did not know even the simple words she used or because the ideas she expressed, and her emotions, were beyond the apprehension of a child.

But I was telling you about the frequencies. I talked to myself—like this—sitting here on my mattress; but to prevent my unconscious favoring certain letters I wrote nothing down. Then I printed out the alphabet and went back, in my mind, over all that I had said, spelling the words and putting tallies beneath the letters.

And now I can put my ear to the sewer pipe that runs down through my cell, and understand.

At first it was hard, of course. I had to scribble down the taps, then work it out, and the fragment of message I had been able to record often conveyed no meaning: YOU HEARD WHAT THEY…