Gene Wolfe: The Fifth Head of Cerberus

V. R. T.: (Weeps)

There was no reply to that last question; the boy broke into tears, embarrassing me so acutely that after putting my arm around his shoulders for a moment, I had to walk away from the fire, leaving him there sobbing for half an hour or more while I blundered around in the brush where huge worms, luminous but of the livid color of a dead man’s lips, writhe underfoot at night. I confess it was a miserably stupid question; what is he going to do, a beggar’s son, no better than half-educated? He does read well—he’s borrowed some of my anthropology texts, and I’ve asked him questions and gotten better answers than I would have expected from the average university student; but his hand-writing is miserable, as I’ve seen from an old school notebook (one of his very few pieces of personal baggage).

April 11 . An eventful day. Let me see if I can cure my habit of skipping back and forth and give everything of interest in the order in which it occurred. When I came back into camp last night (I see that at the close of yesterday’s entry I left myself blundering about in bushes), the boy was asleep in his bag. I put more wood on the fire and played back the.tape and wrote the stuff on the last page, then turned in. About an hour before dawn we were both roused by a commotion among the mules and went running out to see what the trouble was, myself with a flashlight and the heavy rifle, the boy with two burning sticks from the fire. Didn’t see anything, but smelled a stink like rotten meat and heard some big animal, which I really don’t believe could have been one of the mules, making off. The mules, when we found them, were covered with sweat, and one had broken its hobble—fortunately it didn’t go far, and as soon as it got light the boy was able to catch it, though it took him the best part of an hour—and the two that were still with us seemed very glad to claim the protection due domestic animals.

By the time we had thrashed around long enough to decide there was nothing to find, further sleep was out of the question. We struck the tent, loaded the mules, and then at my insistence spent the first hour in backtracking our path of the day before to see if we could turn up the spoor of any large predatory animal. We saw the cat (which growing bolder now that I’ve stopped shooting at it) and some tracks of what the boy calls a fire-fox and which, by comparing his description with my Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte Anne , I have decided is most probably Hutchesson’s fennec, a fox or coyote-like creature with immense ears and a liking for poultry and carrion.

After this little interlude of backtracking we made good progress, and about an hour before noon I made the best shot of the trip to date, dropping a huge brute—not described in the Field Guide —similar to the carabao of Asian Earth; this with a single brain shot from the heavy rifle. I paced the distance when the animal was down and found it to be a full three hundred yards!

Naturally I was proud as hell and carefully examined the result of my shot, which had struck the big fellow just in back of the right ear. Even there the skull was so massive that the bullet had failed to penetrate completely; so that the animal had probably been alive for a good part of the time while I was pacing off the distance to it; there seemed to have been a heavy flow of lachrymal fluid that left broad wet streaks in the dust beneath each eye. I lifted one of the eyelids with my fingers after I had looked at the wound and noticed that the eyes were double-pupiled, like those of certain Terrestrial fish; the lower segments of one eye moved slightly when I touched it with my finger, indicating that the animal may have been hanging on a bit even then. The double pupils don’t seem characteristic of most life here; so I suppose they must be an adaptation induced by the creature’s largely aquatic habits.

I longed to have the head mounted, but that was out of the question; as it was the boy was almost in tears (his own eyes, which are large, are a startling green), imagining that I would want to load the entire carcass, which must have weighed a good fifteen pounds, on to the mules, and assuring me that they could not be expected to carry so much. Eventually I was able to convince him that I intended to leave behind the entrails, the head (though how I regretted those horns!) and the hide and hoofs, as well as the ribs and, in fact, all but the choicest meat. The mules, even so, appreciated neither the added weight nor the smell of blood, and we had more difficulty with them than I had anticipated.

About an hour after we got them going again, we reached the bank of the Tempus. It is a very different river from the one I saw when the boy’s father showed me the Annese“temple”. There it was nearly a mile wide, brackish, and had hardly a trace of current, the mouth itself being not a single river but a serpent cluster of dull streams meandering through a choking delta of mud and reeds. Here everything is changed: the water has hardly any yellow coloration, and flows fast enough to whisk a stick out of sight in a few seconds.

The meadowmeres are entirely behind us now, and this new, swift, clear Tempus runs among rolling hills covered with emerald grass and dotted with trees and thickets. I see now that my original plan of ascending the river by boat was—as my acquaintances in Frenchman’s Landing warned me—completely impractical, no matter how convenient it would have been to search for riverbank caves that way. Not only is the water so swift even here that we would be spending most of our fuel just to fight the current, but the river shows every sign of falls and rapids farther up in the mountains. A hovercraft would perhaps be ideal, but with Sainte Anne’s small industrial capacity there are probably not more than two dozen on the whole planet, and they are (typically) the sacred prerogative of the military.

But I will not complain. In a hovercraft we might already have found the cave, but with what chance of making contact with any Annese who may yet survive? With our small and I hope not frightening party moving slowly and living off the country, we can hope for contact, if any Annese remain.

Besides, let me confess now, I enjoy it. When we had struck the river and gone a mile or so upstream the boy became very excited and told me we had reached an important point which he had often visited with his mother. It seemed to me to be in no way unusual—a slight bend with a few (very large) overhanging trees and a somewhat oddly shaped stone—but he insisted that it was a beautiful and special locality, showing me how comfortable the stone was, on which one could sit or lie in various positions, how the trees shaded the sun and would give protection from rain and even, covered with snow, form a sort of hut in winter. There were deep pools at the foot of the stone that always had fish—we could find mussels and edible snails (that French mother!)—along the bank here, and in short it was a veritable garden spot. (After listening to him talk in this way for a few minutes I realized that he looks upon the outdoors—at least on certain special areas or parts of it such as this—in the way that most people are accustomed to looking at buildings or rooms, which is an odd idea.) I had been wanting to be alone for a few minutes anyway; so I decided to pamper his harmless enthusiasm, and asked him to take the mules on ahead while I remained behind to contemplate the beauty of the wonderful place to which he had introduced me. He was delighted, and in a few minutes I was more utterly alone than it is ever given most of us born on Earth to be, with only the wind and the sun and the sighing of the great trees that trailed their roots in the murmuring water before me.