Wolfe, Gene: The Best of Gene Wolfe

A woman with a fish for a head and a shiny, silver dress is Aunt Julie. A doctor with a doctor’s coat and listening things and a shiny thing on his head to look through is Dr. Black, and a soldier in a black uniform with a pirate thing on his hat and a whip is Jason. The big table has a punch bowl and cakes and little sandwiches and hot bean dip. You pull away when the gypsy is talking to someone and take some cakes and sit under the table watching legs.

There is music and some of the legs dance, and you stay under there a long time.

Then a man’s and a girl’s legs dance close to the table and there is suddenly a laughing face in front of you—Captain Ransom’s. “What are you doing under there, Tack? Come out and join the party.” And you crawl out, feeling very small instead of older, but older when you stand up. Captain Ransom is dressed like a castaway in a ragged shirt and pants torn off at the knees, but all clean and starched. His love beads are seeds and seashells, and he has his arm around a girl with no clothes at all, just jewelry.

“Tack, this is Talar of the Long Eyes.”

You smile and bow and kiss her hand, and are nearly as tall as she. All around people are dancing or talking, and no one seems to notice you. With Captain Ransom on one side of Talar and you on the other you thread your way through the room, avoiding the dancers and the little groups of people with drinks. In the room you and Mother use as a living room when there’s no company, two men and two girls are making love with the television on, and in the little room past that a girl is sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, and men are standing in the corners. “Hello,” the girl says. “Hello to you all.” She is the first one to have noticed you, and you stop.

“Hello.”

“I’m going to pretend you’re real. Do you mind?”

“No.” You look around for Ransom and Talar, but they are gone and you think that they are probably in the living room, kissing with the others.

“This is my third trip. Not a good trip, but not a bad trip. But I should have had a monitor—you know, someone to stay with me. Who are those men?”

The men in the corners stir, and you can hear the clinking of their armor and see light glinting on it and you look away. “I think they’re from the City. They probably came to watch out for Talar,” and somehow you know that this is the truth.

“Make them come out where I can see them.”

Before you can answer, Dr. Death says, “I don’t really think you would want to,” and you turn and find him standing just behind you wearing full evening dress and a cloak. He takes your arm. “Come on, Tackie; there’s something I think you should see.” You follow him to the back stairs and then up, and along the hall to the door of Mother’s room.

Mother is inside on the bed, and Dr. Black is standing over her filling a hypodermic. As you watch, he pushes up her sleeve so that all the other injection marks show ugly and red on her arm, and all you can think of is Dr. Death bending over Talar on the operating table. You run downstairs looking for Ransom, but he is gone and there is nobody at the party at all except the real people and, in the cold shadows of the back stoop, Dr. Death’s assistant Golo, who will not speak, but only stares at you in the moonlight with pale eyes.

The next house down the beach belongs to a woman you have seen sometimes cutting down the dry fall remnant of her asparagus or hilling up her roses while you played. You pound at her door and try to explain, and after a while she calls the police.

. . . across the sky. The flames were licking at the roof timbers now. Ransom made a megaphone of his hands and shouted, “Give up! You’ll all be burned to death if you stay in there!” but the only reply was a shot and he was not certain they had heard him. The Lemurian bowmen discharged another flight of arrows at the windows.

Talar grasped his arm: “Come back before they kill you.”

Numbly he retreated with her, stepping across the massive body of the bull-man, which lay pierced by twenty or more shafts.

Y

ou fold back the corner of a page and put the book down. The waiting room is cold and bare, and although sometimes the people hurrying through smile at you, you feel lonely. After a long time a big man with gray hair and a woman in a blue uniform want to talk to you.

The woman’s voice is friendly, but only the way teachers’ voices are sometimes. “I’ll bet you’re sleepy, Tackman. Can you talk to us a little still before you go to bed?”

“Yes.”

The gray-haired man says, “Do you know who gave your mother drugs?”

“I don’t know. Dr. Black was going to do something to her.”

He waves that aside. “Not that. You know, medicine. Your mother took a lot of medicine. Who gave it to her? Jason?”

“I don’t know.”

The woman says, “Your mother is going to be well, Tackman, but it will be a while—do you understand? For now you’re going to have to live for a while in a big house with some other boys.”

“All right.”

The man: “Amphetamines. Does that mean anything to you? Did you ever hear that word?”

You shake your head.

The woman: “Dr. Black was only trying to help your mother, Tackman. I know you don’t understand, but she used several medicines at once, mixed them, and that can be very bad.”

They go away and you pick up the book and riffle the pages, but you do not read. At your elbow Dr. Death says, “What’s the matter, Tackie?” He smells of scorched cloth and there is a streak of blood across his forehead, but he smiles and lights one of his cigarettes.

You hold up the book. “I don’t want it to end. You’ll be killed at the end.”

“And you don’t want to lose me? That’s touching.”

“You will, won’t you? You’ll burn up in the fire and Captain Ransom will go away and leave Talar.”

Dr. Death smiles. “But if you start the book again we’ll all be back. Even Golo and the bull-man.”

“Honest?”

“Certainly.” He stands up and tousles your hair. “It’s the same with you, Tackie. You’re too young to realize it yet, but it’s the same with you.”

AFTERWORD

This story got me the friendship of Isaac Asimov and fathered three sequels, two of which are in this book. It was, you see, my first ever Nebula nomination, so Rosemary and I journeyed to New York for the banquet. Isaac was announcing the winners, beginning with Best Short Story. And he named this story.

I rose to accept, and the committee swarmed on Isaac. He had been given a list, not just the winner but the second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-place finishers. The winner had been No Award—which Isaac, understandably assuming that some story would have won, had skipped. He apologized profusely, then and afterward, and I explained repeatedly that he had honored me.

He’d also gotten me a great deal of sympathy in SFWA. Grinning, John Jakes said, “You know, Gene, if you’d just write ‘The Death of Doctor Island’ now, you’d win.”

He thinks I can’t do it , I thought. We’ll see about that! But that’s another story, one you’ll find later in this book.

THE TOY THEATER

E

ight hours before we were due to land on Sarg they dropped a pamphlet into the receiving tray of the two-by-four plastic closet that was my “stateroom” for the trip. The pamphlet said landing on Sarg would be like stepping into a new world. I threw it away.

Landing on Sarg was like stepping into a new world. You expect a different kind of sunlight and a fresh smell to the air, and usually you don’t get them. Sarg had them. The light ran to sienna and umber and ocher, so that everything looked older than it was and made you think of waxed oak and tarnished gold. The air was clear and clean. Sarg wasn’t an industrial world, and since it was one of the lucky ones with no life of its own to preserve, it had received a flora en masse from Earth. I saw Colorado spruce, and a lot of the old, hardy, half-wild roses like Sarah Van Fleet and Amelie Gravereaux.