The Best of Gene Wolfe

simulator here, which should be interesting. Only a few have ever been made.”

“A ten nine simulator?”

“A billion, ten to the ninth power. The human brain has several billion synapses, of course, but it’s been found that you can simulate its action pretty well—”

It seemed to me that no time at all had passed since Nerissa had left, but she was back. She curtsied to Dr. Marsch and said, “Madame will see you.”

I blurted, “Now?”

“Yes,” Nerissa said artlessly, “Madame said right now.”

“I’ll take him then. You mind the door.”

I escorted Dr. Marsch down the dark corridors, taking a long route to have more time, but he seemed to be arranging in his mind the questions he wished to ask my aunt, as we walked past the spotted mirrors and warped little walnut tables, and he answered me in monosyllables when I tried to question him about Earth.

At my aunt’s door I rapped for him. She opened it herself, the hem of her black skirt hanging emptily over the untrodden carpet, but I do not think he noticed that. He said, “I’m really very sorry to bother you, Madame, and I only do so because your nephew thought you might be able to help me locate the author of Veil’s Hypothesis.”

My aunt said, “I am Dr. Veil; please come in,” and shut the door behind him, leaving me standing openmouthed in the corridor.

* * *

I mentioned the incident to Phaedria the next time we met, but she was more interested in learning about my father’s house. Phaedria, if I have not used her name before now, was the girl who had sat near me while I watched David play squash. She had been introduced to me on my next visit to the park by no one less than the monster herself, who had helped her to a seat beside me and, miracle of miracles, promptly retreated to a point which, though not out of sight, was at least beyond earshot. Phaedria had thrust her broken ankle in front of her, halfway across the graveled path, and smiled a most charming smile. “You don’t object to my sitting here?” She had perfect teeth.

“I’m delighted.”

“You’re surprised too. Your eyes get big when you’re surprised; did you know that?”

“I am surprised. I’ve come here looking for you several times, but you haven’t been here.”

“We’ve come looking for you, and you haven’t been here either, but I suppose one can’t really spend a great deal of time in a park.”

“I would have,” I said, “if I’d known you were looking for me. I went here as much as I could anyway. I was afraid that she”—I jerked my head at the monster—“wouldn’t let you come back. How did you persuade her?”

“I didn’t,” Phaedria said. “Can’t you guess? Don’t you know anything?”

I confessed that I did not. I felt stupid, and I was stupid, at least in the things I said, because so much of my mind was caught up not in formulating answers to her remarks but in committing to memory the lilt of her voice, the purple of her eyes, even the faint perfume of her skin and the soft, warm touch of her breath on my cool cheek.

“So you see,” Phaedria was saying, “that’s how it is with me. When Aunt Uranie—she’s only a poor cousin of mother’s, really—got home and told him about you he found out who you are, and here I am.”

“Yes,” I said, and she laughed.

Phaedria was one of those girls raised between the hope of marriage and the thought of sale. Her father’s affairs, as she herself said, were “unsettled.” He speculated in ship cargoes, mostly from the south—textiles and drugs. He owned, most of the time, large sums which the lenders could not hope to collect unless they were willing to allow him more to recoup. He might die a pauper, but in the meantime he had raised his daughter with every detail of education and plastic surgery attended to. If when she reached marriageable age he could afford a good dowry, she would link him with some wealthy family. If he was pressed for money instead, a girl so reared would bring fifty times the price of a common street child. Our family, of course, would be ideal for either purpose.

“Tell me about your house,” she said. “Do you know what the kids call it? ‘The Cave Canem,’ or sometimes just ‘The Cave.’ The boys all think it’s a big thing to have been there and they lie about it. Most of them haven’t.”

But I wanted to talk about Dr. Marsch and the sciences of Earth, and I was nearly as anxious to find out about her own world, “the kids” she mentioned so casually, her school and family, as she was to learn about us. Also, although I was willing to detail the services my father’s girls rendered their benefactors, there were some things, such as my aunt’s floating down the stairwell, that I was adverse to discussing. But we bought egg rolls from the same old woman to eat in the chill sunlight and exchanged confidences and somehow parted not only lovers but friends, promising to meet again the next day.

At some time during the night, I believe at almost the same time that I returned—or to speak more accurately was returned, since I could scarcely walk—to my bed after a session of hours with my father, the weather changed. The musked exhalation of late spring or early summer crept through the shutters, and the fire in our little grate seemed to extinguish itself for shame almost at once. My father’s valet opened the window for me and there poured into the room that fragrance that tells of the melting of the last snows beneath the deepest and darkest evergreens on the north sides of mountains. I had arranged with Phaedria to meet at ten, and before going to my father’s library I had posted a note on the escritoire beside my bed, asking that I be awakened an hour earlier; and that night I slept with the fragrance in my nostrils and the thought—half plan, half dream—in my mind that by some means Phaedria and I would elude her aunt entirely and find a deserted lawn where blue and yellow flowers dotted the short grass.

When I woke, it was an hour past noon and rain drove in sheets past the window. Mr. Million, who was reading a book on the far side of the room, told me that it had been raining like that since six and for that reason he had not troubled to wake me. I had a splitting headache, as I often did after a long session with my father, and took one of the powders he had prescribed to relieve it. They were gray, and smelled of anise.

“You look unwell,” Mr. Million said.

“I was hoping to go to the park.”

“I know.” He rolled across the room toward me, and I recalled that Dr. Marsch had called him an unbound