Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Often I got less than that. And I wondered why so much of what was being said was in numbers: TWO TWELVE TO THE MOUNTAINS… Then I realized that they, we, call ourselves usually by our cell number, which gives the location and is the most important thing, I suppose, about a prisoner anyway.

The page ended. The officer did not look for the next in sequence, but stood up and pushed back his chair. After a moment he stepped through the open doorway; outside there was a faint breeze now, and Sainte Anne, high over his head, steeped the world in sad green light; he could see, a mile or more away in the harbor, the masts of the ships. The air held the piercing sweet smell of the night-blooming flowers the previous commandant had ordered planted around the building. Fifty feet away under the shadow of a fever tree the slave squatted with his back to the trunk, sufficiently hidden to support the fiction that he was invisible when he was not wanted, sufficiently close to hear if the officer called or clapped his hands. The officer looked at him significantly and he came running across the dry, green-drenched lawn, bowing. “Cassilla,” the officer said.

The slave ducked his head. “With the major… Perhaps, Mattre, agirl from the town—”

Mechanically, the officer, who was younger than he, struck him, his open left hand smacking the slave’s right cheek. Equally mechanically, the slave dropped to his knees and began to sob. The officer pushed him with his foot until he sprawled on the half-dead grass, then went back into the small room that served him for an office. When he was gone the slave stood, brushed his threadbare clothing, and took up his station beneath the fever tree again. It would be two hours or more before the major was finished with Cassilla .

There was a native race. The stories are too widespread, too circumstantial, too well documented, for the whole thing to be a sort of overgrown new-planet myth. The absence of legitimate artefacts remains to be explained, but there must be some explanation.

To this indigenous people, humankind and the technological culture must have proved more toxic than to any other aboriginal group in history. From rather ubiquitous if thinly scattered primitives they have become something Jess than memory in a period of not much more than a century—this without any specific catastrophe worse than the destruction of the records of the first French landing parties by the war.

My problem, then, is to learn all there is to be learned about some very primitive people who have left almost no physical traces at all (as far as anyone knows) and some highly embroidered legends. I would be disheartened if it were not that the parallel with those paleolithic, Caucasoid Pygmies who came to be called the Good People (and who survived, as was eventually shown, in Scandinavia and Eire until the last years of the eighteenth century) were not almost exact.

How late, then, did the Annese hang on? Though I have been questioning everyone who will stand still for it, and listening to every tale they wanted to tell (thirdhand, n thhand, I always think I might pick up something, and there’s no use making an enemy of anyone who might later direct me to better information), I have been especially alert for firsthand, datable accounts. I have everything on tape, but it may be wise to transcribe a few of the more typical, as well as some of the most interesting, here; tapes can be lost or ruined after all. I give all dates by local calendar to avoid confusion.

March 13 . Directed by Mr Judson, the hotelkeeper, and bearing a verbal introduction from him, I was able to talk to Mrs Mary Blount, a woman of eighty who lives with her granddaughter and the granddaughter’s husband on a farm about twenty miles from Frenchman’s Landing. The husband warned me before I was taken in to meet the old lady herself that her mind sometimes wandered, and instanced, to prove his point, that she at times claimed to have been born on Earth, but at others insisted that she had been born aboard one of the colonizing ships. I began the interview by asking her about this; her answer shows, I fear, how little elderly people are listened to in our culture.

Mrs Blount: “Where was I born. On the ship. Yes. I was the first that was born on the ship and the last born on the old world—how d’you like that, young man? Women that was expecting wasn’t to come on board, you see, though lots of them did as it turned out. My Ma, she wanted to go, and she decided not to say anything about her condition. She was a heavy woman, as you may imagine, and I guess I was a small little baby. Yes, they had physical examinations for all that was going, but that had been months and months before, because the blasting-off was delayed, you see. All the women was to wear these coveralls that they called space clothes, just like the men, and Ma felt I was coming and told them she wanted hers loose, and the Devil take style. So they didn’t know. She was having pains, she said, when she come up in the gantry, but the doctor on the ship was one of them and didn’t say nothing to anybody. I was born and he put her and me to sleep the way they did and when we woke up it was twenty-one years afterward. The ship we come on was the nine-eight-six, which was not the first one, but one of the more earlier of them. I’ve heard that before they used to have names for them, which I think would be prettier.

“Yes, there was still quite a few French left here when we came, most all except the littlest children had their arms or legs gone or was scarred terrible. They knowed they had lost and we knowed we had won, and our men just took land and stock, whatever they wanted, that’s what Ma told me later. I was just small, you know, and didn’t realize nothing. When I was growing up those little French girls that had been too small to fight was growing up too, and weren’t they the cutest things? They got most of the handsome boys, you know, and all the rich ones. You could go to a dance in your prettiest dress, and one of those Frenchies would come in, just in rags you know, but with a ribbon and a flower in her hair, and every boy’s head would turn.

“Annese? What’s the Annese?

“Oh, them. We called them the abos or the wild people. They weren’t really people, you know, just animals shaped like people.

“Of course I’ve seen them. Why when I was a child I used to play with the children, the little ones, you know. Ma didn’t want me to, but when I was out playing alone I’d go out to the back of our pasture and they’d come and play with me. Ma said they’d eat me,” (Laughs) “but I can’t say how they ever tried. Wouldn’t they steal, though! Anything to eat, they were always hungry. They got to taking out of our smokehouse, and one night Pa killed three, right between the smokehouse and the barn, with his gun. One was one I had played with sometimes, and I cried; that’s the way a child is.

“No, I don’t know where he buried them or if he did; just dragged them out back for the wild animals, I’d suppose.”

A brother officer came in. The officer laid the notebook aside, and as he did so a puff of wind swayed the pages.

“Feel that,” the brother officer said. “Why can’t we have that during the day when we need it?”

The officer shrugged. “You’re up late.”

“Not as late as you are—I’m going to bed now.”

“You see what I’ve got.” The officer’s lips bent in a small, sour smile. He gestured at the jumble of papers and tapes on the table.

The brother officer stirred them with one finger. “Political?”

“Criminal.”

“Tell them to knock the dust off their garrotte and get yourself some sleep.”