THE BEST OF GENE WOLFE
BY GENE WOLFE FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
THE WIZARD KNIGHT
THE BOOK OF THE SHORT SUN
THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
(comprising
(comprising
THE BOOK OF THE LONG SUN
(comprising
(comprising
NOVELS
(comprising
NOVELLAS
COLLECTIONS
A DEFINITIVE RETROSPECTIVE
OF HIS FINEST SHORT FICTION
GENE WOLFE
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE BEST OF GENE WOLFE: A DEFINITIVE RETROSPECTIVE OF HIS FINEST SHORT FICTION
Copyright © 2009 by Gene Wolfe
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2135-0
ISBN-10: 0-7653-2135-1
First Edition: March 2009
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is for Alison Goulding,
with much love from her gran’pa.
CONTENTS
Parkroads
Copyright Acknowledgments
THE BEST OF GENE WOLFE
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH
AND OTHER STORIES
W
inter comes to water as well as land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wetting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half- buried write in the wet sand
Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlantic is destroying your work.
Home is the big house on Settlers Island, but Settlers Island, so called, is not really an island and for that reason is not named or accurately delineated on maps. Smash a barnacle with a stone and you will see inside the shape from which the beautiful barnacle goose takes its name. There is a thin and flaccid organ which is the goose’s neck and the mollusc’s siphon, and a shapeless body with tiny wings. Settlers Island is like that.
The goose neck is a strip of land down which a county road runs. By whim, the mapmakers usually exaggerate the width of this and give no information to indicate that it is scarcely above the high tide. Thus Settlers Island appears to be a mere protuberance on the coast, not requiring a name—and since the village of eight or ten houses has none, nothing shows on the map but the spider line of road terminating at the sea.
The village has no name, but home has two: a near and a far designation. On the island, and on the mainland nearby, it is called the Seaview place because in the earliest years of the century it was operated as a resort hotel.
