Wolfe, Gene - The Best of Gene Wolfe

SHE WENT TO UGANDA LOOKING FOR ME

7

Feb. More dreams—little man with pointed teeth smiling through the window. I doubt that I should write it all down, but I knew (in the dream) that he hurt people, and he kept telling me he would not hurt me. Maybe the first time was a dream too. More screams.

Anyway, I talked to Rob again yesterday afternoon, although I had not planned on it. By the time I got back here I was too sick to do anything except lie on the bed. The worst since I left the hospital, I think.

Went looking for the place the king took me to. Did not want to start from the village, kids might have followed me, so I tried to circle and come at it from the other side. Found two old buildings, small and no roofs, and a bone that looked human. More about that later. Did not see any marks, but did not look for them either. It was black on one end like it had been in a fire, though.

Kept going about three hours and wore myself out. Tripped on a chunk of stone and stopped to wipe off the sweat, and blam! I was there! Found the ashes and where the king and I stood. Looked around wishing I had my camera, and there was Rob, sitting up on four stones that were still together and looking down at me. I said, “Hey, why didn’t you say something?”

And he said, “I wanted to see what you would do.” So he had been spying on me; I did not say it, but that was what it was.

I told him about going there with the king, and how he gave me a charm. I said I was sorry I had not worn it, but anytime he wanted a Coke I would show it to him.

“It doesn’t matter. He knows you’re sick, and I imagine he gave you something to heal you. It might even work, because God hears all sorts of prayers. That’s not what they teach in the seminary, or even what it says in the Bible. But I’ve been out in the missions long enough to know. When somebody with good intentions talks to the God Who created him, he’s heard. Pretty often the answer is yes. Why did you come back here?”

“I wanted to see it again, that’s all. At first I thought it was just a circle of rocks; then when I thought about it, it seemed like it must have been more.”

Rob kept quiet, so I explained that I had been thinking of Stonehenge. Stonehenge was a circle of big rocks, but the idea had been to look at the positions of certain stars and where the sun rose. But this could not be the same kind of thing, because of the trees. Stonehenge is out in the open on Salisbury Plain. I asked if it was some kind of a temple.

“It was a palace once, Baden.” Rob cleared his throat. “If I tell you something about it in confidence, can you keep it to yourself?”

I promised.

“These are good people now. I want to make that clear. They seem a little childlike to us, as all primitives do. If we were primitives ourselves—and we were, Bad, not so long ago—they wouldn’t. Can you imagine how they’d seem to us if they didn’t seem a little childlike?”

I said, “I was thinking about that this morning before I left the bungalow.”

Rob nodded. “Now I understand why you wanted to come back here. The Polynesians are scattered all over the South Pacific. Did you know that? Captain Cook, a British naval officer, was the first to explore the Pacific with any thoroughness, and he was absolutely astounded to find that after he’d sailed for weeks his interpreter could still talk to the natives. We know, for example, that Polynesians came down from Hawaii in sufficient numbers to conquer New Zealand. The historians hadn’t admitted it the last time I looked, but it’s a fact, recorded by the Maori themselves in their own history. The distance is about four thousand miles.”

“Impressive.”

“But you wonder what I’m getting at. I don’t blame you. They’re supposed to have come from Malaya originally. I won’t go into all the reasons for thinking that they didn’t, beyond saying that if it were the case they should be in New Guinea and Australia and they’re not.”

I asked where they had come from, and for a minute or two he just rubbed his chin; then he said, “I’m not going to tell you that either. You wouldn’t believe me, so why waste breath on it? Think of a distant land, a mountainous country with buildings and monuments to rival Ancient Egypt’s, and gods worse than any demon Cotton Mather could have imagined. The time . . .” He shrugged. “After Moses but before Christ.”

“Babylon?”

He shook his head. “They developed a ruling class, and in time those rulers, their priests and warriors, became something like another race, bigger and stronger than the peasants they treated like slaves. They drenched the altars of their gods with blood, the blood of enemies when they could capture enough, and the blood of peasants when they couldn’t. Their peasants rebelled and drove them from the mountains to the sea, and into the sea.”

I think he was waiting for me to say something, but I kept quiet, thinking over what he had said and wondering if it was true.

“They sailed away in terror of the thing they had awakened in the hearts of the nation that had been their own. I doubt very much if there were more than a few thousand, and there may well have been fewer than a thousand. They learned seamanship, and learned it well. They had to. In the Ancient World they were the only people to rival the Phoenicians, and they surpassed even the Phoenicians.”

I asked whether he believed all that, and he said, “It doesn’t matter whether I believe it, because it’s true.”

He pointed to one of the stones. “I called them primitives, and they are. But they weren’t always as primitive as they are now. This was a palace, and there are ruins like this all over Polynesia, great buildings of coral rock falling to pieces. A palace and thus a sacred place, because the king was holy, the gods’ representative. That was why he brought you here.”

Rob was going to leave, but I told him about the buildings I found earlier and he wanted to see them. “There is a temple too, Baden, although I’ve never been able to find it. When it was built, it must have been evil beyond our imagining. . . .” He grinned then, surprising the hell out of me. “You must get teased about your name.”

“Ever since elementary school. It doesn’t bother me.” But the truth is it does, sometimes.

More later.

W

ell, I have met the little man I saw on the beach, and to tell the truth (what’s the sense of one of these if you are not going to tell the truth?), I like him. I am going to write about all that in a minute.

Rob and I looked for the buildings I had seen when I was looking for the palace but could not find them. Described them, but Rob did not think they were the temple he has been looking for since he came. “They know where it is. Certainly the older people do. Once in a while I catch little oblique references to it. Not jokes. They joke about the place you found, but not about that.”

I asked what the place I had found had been.

“A Japanese camp. The Japanese were here during World War Two.”

I had not known that.

“There were no battles. They built those buildings you found, presumably, and they dug caves in the hills from which to fight. I’ve found some of those myself. But the Americans and Australians simply bypassed this island, as they did many other islands. The Japanese soldiers remained here, stranded. There must have been about a company, originally.”

“What happened to them?”

“Some surrendered. Some came out of the jungle to surrender and were killed. A few held out, twenty or twenty-five from what I’ve heard. They left their caves and went back to the camp they had built when they thought Japan would win and control the entire Pacific. That was what you found, I believe, and that’s why I’d like to see it.”