The Best of Gene Wolfe

The path twisted around little hills, all covered with the red trees. Cardinals hopped in the branches, and one fluttered to his shoulder. Little Tib was very happy; he told the cardinal, “I don’t want to go away—ever. I want to stay here, forever. Walking down this path.”

“You will, my son,” the cardinal said. It made the sign of the cross with one wing.

They went around a bend, and there was a tiny little house ahead, no bigger than the box a refrigerator comes in. It was painted with red and white stripes, and had a pointed roof. Little Tib did not like the look of it, but he took a step nearer.

A full-sized man came out of the little house. He was made all of copper, so he was coppery-red all over, like a new pipe for the bathroom. His body was round, and his head was round too, and they were joined by a real piece of bathroom pipe. He had a big mustache stamped right into the copper, and he was polishing himself with a rag. “Who are you?” he said.

Little Tib told him.

“I don’t know you,” the copper man said. “Come closer so I can recognize you.”

Little Tib came closer. Something was hammering, bam, bam, bam, in the hills behind the red and white house. He tried to see what it was, but there was a mist over them, as though it were early morning. “What is that noise?” he asked the copper man.

“That is the giant,” the copper man said. “Can’t . . . you . . . see . . . her?”

Little Tib said that he could not.

“Then . . . wind . . . my . . . talking key. . . . I’ll . . . tell . . . you . . .”

The copper man turned around, and Little Tib saw that there were three keyholes in his back. The middle one had a neat copper label beside it printed with the words TALKING ACTION.

“. . . about . . . her.”

There was a key with a beautiful handle hanging on a hook beside the hole. He took it and began to wind the copper man.

“That’s better,” the copper man said. “My words—thanks to your fine winding—will blow away the mists, and you’ll be able to see her. I can stop her, but if I don’t you’llbekilledthatsenough.”

As the copper man had said, the mists were lifting. Some, however, did not seem to blow away—they were not mists at all, but a mountain. The mountain moved, and was not a mountain at all, but a big woman wreathed in mist, twice as high as the hills around her. She was holding a broom, and while Little Tib watched, a rat as big as a railroad train ran out of a cave in one of the hills. Bam, the woman struck at it with her broom, but it ran into another cave. In a moment it ran out again. Bam! The woman was Little Tib’s mother, but he sensed that she would not know him—that she was cut off from him in some way by the mists, and the need to strike at the rat.

“That’s my mother,” he told the copper man. “And that rat was in our kitchen in the new place. But she didn’t keep hitting at it and hitting at it like that.”

“She is only hitting at it once,” the copper man said, “but that once is over and over again. That’s why she always misses it. But if you try to go any farther down this path, her broom will kill you and sweep you away. Unless I stop it.”

“I could run between the swings,” Little Tib said. He could have too.

“The broom is bigger than you think,” the copper man told him. “And you can’t see it as well as you think you can.”

“I want you to stop her,” Little Tib said. He was sure he could run between the blows of the broom, but he was sorry for his mother, who had to hit at the rat all the time, and never rest.

“Then you must let me look at you.”

“Go ahead,” Little Tib said.

“You have to wind my motion key.”

The lowest keyhole was labeled MOVING ACTION. It was the largest of all. There was a big key hanging beside it, and Little Tib used it to wind the moving action, hearing a heavy pawl clack inside the copper man each time he turned the key. “That’s enough,” the copper man said. Little Tib replaced the key, and the copper man turned around.

“Now I must look into your eyes,” he said. His own eyes were stampings in the copper, but Little Tib knew that he could see out of them. He put his hands on Little Tib’s face, one on each side. They were harder even than Nitty’s, but smaller too, and very cold. Little Tib saw his eyes coming closer and closer.

Little Tib saw his own eyes reflected in the copper man’s face as if they were in a mirror, and they had little flames in them like the flames of two candles in church, and the flames were going out. The copper man moved his face closer and closer to his own. It got darker and darker. Little Tib said, “Don’t you know me?”

“You have to wind my thinking key,” the copper man said.

Little Tib reached behind him, stretching his arms as far as they would go around the copper body. His fingers found the smallest hole of all, and a little hook beside it; but there was no key.

A baby was crying. There were medicine smells, and a strange woman’s voice said, “There, there.” Her hands touched his cheeks, the hard, cold hands of the copper man. Little Tib remembered that he could not really see at all, not anymore.

“He is sick, isn’t he,” the woman said. “He’s hot as fire. And screaming like that.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Nitty said. “He’s sick sure enough.”

A little girl’s voice said, “What’s wrong with him, Mama?”