The Best of Gene Wolfe

I picked myself up in a leisurely way and headed toward Gate Five, then stopped. Coming toward me was a preposterous figure, familiar from a thousand pictures.

“Sir!” (Actually it sounded more like “SeeraughHa!” given a rising intonation all the way—the kind of sound that might have come from a chummy, intoxicated, dangerous elephant.)

“Sir!” The great swag belly was wrapped in a waistcoat with blue and white stripes as broad as my hand. The great shapeless nose shone with an officious cunning. “Sir, your shoes. I have your shoes!”

It was Zanni the Butler, Stromboli’s greatest creation. He held out my secondbest shoes, well brushed. In his flipper of a hand they looked as absurd as I felt. People were staring at us, and already beginning to argue about whether or not Zanni was real.

“The master,” Zanni was saying, “insisted that I restore them to you. You will little credit it, sir, but I have run all the way.”

I took my shoes and mumbled, “Thank you,” looking through the crowd for Stromboli, who had to be somewhere nearby.

“The master has heard,” Zanni continued in a stage whisper that must have been audible out in the blast pits, “of your little talk with Madame Lili. He asks—well, sir, we sometimes call our little world the Planet of Roses, sir. He asks that you consider a part of what you have learned here—at least a part, sir—as under the rose.”

I nodded. I had found Stromboli at last, standing in a corner. His face was perfectly impassive while his fingers flew over the levers of Zanni’s controller. I said, “Joruri.”

“Joruri, sir?”

“The Japanese puppet theater. The operators stand in full view of the audience, but the audience pretends not to see them.”

“That is the master’s field, sir, and not mine, but perhaps that is the best way.”

“Perhaps. But now I’ve got to catch my ship.”

“So you said to Madame Lili earlier, sir. The master begs leave to remind you that he was once a young man very like yourself, sir. He expresses the hope that you know with whom you are keeping faith. He further expresses the hope that he himself does not know.”

I thought of the fine cracks I had seen, under the cosmetics, in Lili’s cheeks, and of Charity’s cheeks, as blooming as peaches.

Then I took my second-best pair of shoes, and went out to the ship, and climbed into my own little box.

Afterword

Now it seems that all toys are high tech. Goodness knows there’s nothing wrong with high-tech toys, but it seems to me that we had just as much fun with low. Can I have been alone in playing with puppets and marionettes?

There was once a marionette in the form of a robot with a spiked club, and a blond boy with a sword who was to fight him. Best of all, there was a puppet, just one puppet, a grinning monkey. I wish I had him still.

G. K. Chesterton had a toy theater, doubtless with a princess, Saint George, and a dragon. Back then they were a penny plain and tuppence colored, but if you got the plain sort you had the pleasure of coloring everything to suit yourself. You might have a princess with fiery red hair, if you liked, and a flaxen dragon. Years after my monkey had returned to the jungle (or wherever), I read about Chesterton’s theater with pleasure. By then I already knew of certain sad toys possessed by adult men.

And long years after I had finished this story and sold it, and almost forgotten it, I set out to write a circus story to be called “On a Vacant Face a Bruise.” Chesterton had never really forgotten his toy theater, and I soon learned that I had never really forgotten mine.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she-wolf’s young.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were sleepy or not. In summer particularly, bedtime often came before sunset; and because our dormitory was in the east wing of the house, with a broad window facing the central courtyard and thus looking west, the hard, pinkish light sometimes streamed in for hours while we lay staring out at my father’s crippled monkey perched on a flaking parapet, or telling stories, one bed to another, with soundless gestures.

Our dormitory was on the uppermost floor of the house, and our window had a shutter of twisted iron which we were forbidden to open. I suppose the theory was that a burglar might, on some rainy morning (this being the only time he could hope to find the roof, which was fitted out as a sort of pleasure garden, deserted), let down a rope and so enter our room unless the shutter was closed.

The object of this hypothetical and very courageous thief would not, of course, be merely to steal us. Children, whether boys or girls, were extraordinarily cheap in Port-Mimizon; and indeed I was once told that my father, who had formerly traded in them, no longer did so because of the poor market. Whether or not this was true, everyone —or nearly everyone—knew of some professional who would furnish what was wanted, within reason, at a low price. These men made the children of the poor and the careless their study, and should you want, say, a brown- skinned, red-haired little girl or one who was plump or who lisped, a blond boy like David or a pale, brown-haired, brown-eyed boy such as I, they could provide one in a few hours.

Neither, in all probability, would the imaginary burglar seek to hold us for ransom, though my father was thought in some quarters to be immensely rich. There were several reasons for this. Those few people who knew that my brother and I existed knew also, or at least had been led to believe, that my father cared nothing at all for