Gene Wolfe - The Best of Gene Wolfe

I saw the answer on their faces; David gripped his pry bar, and I opened the door.

The room beyond was larger than I had expected, but bare and dirty. The only light came from a single window high in the farther wall. In the middle of the floor stood a big chest, of dark wood bound with iron, and before it lay what appeared to be a bundle of rags. As I stepped from the carpeted office the rags moved and a face, a face triangular as a mantis’s, turned toward me. Its chin was hardly more than an inch from the floor, but under deep brows the eyes were tiny scarlet fires.

“That must be it,” Phaedria said. She was looking not at the face but at the iron-banded chest. “David, can you break into that?”

“I think so,” David said, but he, like me, was watching the ragged thing’s eyes. “What about that?” he said after a moment, and gestured toward it. Before Phaedria or I could answer, its mouth opened showing long, narrow teeth, gray-yellow. “Sick,” it said.

None of us, I think, had thought it could speak. It was as though a mummy had spoken. Outside, a carriage went past, its iron wheels rattling on the cobbles.

“Let’s go,” David said. “Let’s get out.”

Phaedria said, “It’s sick. Don’t you see, the owner’s brought it down here where he can look in on it and take care of it. It’s sick.”

“And he chained his sick slave to the cash box?” David cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Don’t you see? It’s the only heavy thing in the room. All you have to do is go over there and knock the poor creature in the head. If you’re afraid, give me the bar and I’ll do it myself.”

“I’ll do it.”

I followed him to within a few feet of the chest. He gestured at the slave imperiously with the steel pry bar. “You! Move away from there.”

The slave made a gurgling sound and crawled to one side, dragging his chain. He was wrapped in a filthy, tattered blanket and seemed hardly larger than a child, though I noticed that his hands were immense.

I turned and took a step toward Phaedria, intending to urge that we leave if David were unable to open the chest in a few minutes. I remember that before I heard or felt anything I saw her eyes open wide, and I was still wondering why when David’s kit of tools clattered on the floor and David himself fell with a thud and a little gasp. Phaedria screamed, and all the dogs on the third floor began to bark.

All this, of course, took less than a second. I turned to look almost as David fell. The slave had darted out an arm and caught my brother by the ankle, and then in an instant had thrown off his blanket and bounded—that is the only way to describe it—on top of him.

I caught him by the neck and jerked him backward, thinking that he would cling to David and that it would be necessary to tear him away, but the instant he felt my hands he flung David aside and writhed like a spider in my grip. He had four arms .

I saw them flailing as he tried to reach me, and I let go of him and jerked back, as if a rat had been thrust at my face. That instinctive repulsion saved me; he drove his feet backward in a kick which, if I had still been holding him tightly enough to give him a fulcrum, would have surely ruptured my liver or spleen and killed me.

Instead it shot him forward and me, gasping for breath, back. I fell and rolled, and was outside the circle permitted him by his chain; David had already scrambled away, and Phaedria was well out of his reach.

For a moment, while I shuddered and tried to sit up, the three of us simply stared at him. Then David quoted wryly:

Neither Phaedria nor I laughed, but Phaedria let out her breath in a long sigh and asked me, “How did they do that? Get him like that?”

I told her I supposed they had transplanted the extra pair after suppressing his body’s natural resistance to the implanted foreign tissue and that the operation had probably replaced some of his ribs with the donor’s shoulder structure. “I’ve been teaching myself to do the same sort of thing with mice—on a much less ambitious scale, of course—and the striking thing to me is that he seems to have full use of the grafted pair. Unless you’ve got identical twins to work with, the nerve endings almost never join properly, and whoever did this probably had a hundred failures before he got what he wanted. That slave must be worth a fortune.”

David said, “I thought you threw your mice out. Aren’t you working with monkeys now?”

I wasn’t, although I hoped to, but whether I was or not, it seemed clear that talking about it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I told David that.

“I thought you were hot to leave.”

I had been, but now I wanted something else much more. I wanted to perform an exploratory operation on that creature much more than David or Phaedria had ever wanted money. David liked to think that he was bolder than I, and I knew when I said, “You may want to get away, but don’t use me as an excuse, Brother,” that that would settle it.

“All right, how are we going to kill him?” David gave me an angry look.

Phaedria said: “He can’t reach us. We could throw things at him.”

“And he could throw the ones that missed back.”

While we talked, the thing, the four-armed slave, was grinning at us. I was fairly sure he could understand at least a part of what we were saying, and I motioned to David and Phaedria to indicate that we should go back into the room where the desk was. When we were there I closed the door. “I didn’t want him to hear us. If we had weapons on poles, spears of some kind, we might be able to kill him without getting too close. What could we use for the sticks? Any ideas?”

David shook his head, but Phaedria said, “Wait a minute; I remember something.” We both looked at her and she knitted her brows, pretending to search her memory and enjoying the attention.

“Well?” David asked.

She snapped her fingers. “Window poles. You know, long things with a little hook on the end. Remember the windows out there where he talks to customers? They’re high up in the wall, and while he and Papa were talking one of the men who works for him brought one and opened a window. They ought to be around somewhere.”

We found two after a five-minute search. They looked satisfactory: about six feet long and an inch and a quarter in diameter, of hardwood. David flourished his and pretended to thrust at Phaedria, then asked me, “Now what do we use for points?”

The scalpel I always carried was in its case in my breast pocket, and I fastened it to the rod with electrical tape from a roll David had fortunately carried on his belt instead of in the tool kit, but we could find nothing to make a second spear-head for him until he himself suggested broken glass.

“You can’t break a window,” Phaedria said. “They’d hear you outside. Besides, won’t it just snap off when you try to get him with it?”

“Not if it’s thick glass. Look here, you two.”

I did, and saw—again—my own face. He was pointing toward the large mirror that had surprised me when I came down the steps. While I looked his shoe struck it, and it shattered with a crash that set the dogs barking again. He selected a long, almost straight, triangular piece and held it up to the light, where it flashed like a gem. “That’s about as good as they used to make them from agate and jasper on Sainte Anne, isn’t it?”

By prior agreement we approached from opposite sides. The slave leaped to the top of the chest and, from there, watched us quite calmly, his deep-set eyes turning from David to me until at last, when we were both quite close, David rushed him.