The Best of Gene Wolfe

“In your case,” continued the first gnome, “it will be the labor force.”

“Come with us!” both of them exclaimed, and they seized him by the arms and began to drag him across the pile of rocks.

“Stop,” Little Tib demanded. “You don’t know who I am.”

“We don’t care who you am either.”

“If Nitty were here, he’d fix you. Or Mr. Parker.”

“Then he’d better fix Mr. Parker, because we’re not broken, and we’re taking you to see the Gnome King.”

They went down twisted sidewise caves with no lights but the eyes of the gnomes. And through big, echoing caves with mud floors, and streams of steaming water in the middle. Little Tib thought, at first, that it was rather fun, but it became realer and realer as they went along, as though the gnomes drew strength and realness from the heat, and at last he forgot that there had ever been anyplace else, and the things the gnomes said were no longer funny.

The Gnome King’s throne cavern was brilliantly lit, and crammed with gold and jewels. The curtains were gold—not gold-colored cloth, but real gold—and the king sat on a bed covered with a spread of linked diamonds, cross-legged. “You have trespassed my dominions,” he said. “How do you plead?” He looked like the other gnomes, but thinner and meaner.

“For mercy,” Little Tib said.

“Then you are guilty?”

Little Tib shook his head.

“You have to be. Only the guilty can plead for mercy.”

“You are supposed to forgive trespasses,” Little Tib said, and as soon as he had said that, all the bright lamps in the throne room went out. His guards began to curse, and he could hear the whistle of their axes as they swung them in the dark, looking for him.

He ran, thinking he could hide behind one of the gold curtains, but his outstretched arms never found it. He ran on and on until at last he felt sure that he was no longer in the throne room. He was about to stop and rest then when he saw a faint light—so faint a light that for a long time he was afraid it might be no more than a trick of his eyes, like the lights he saw when he ground his hands against them. This is my dream, he thought, and I can make the light to be whatever I want it to be. All right, it will be sunlight, and when I get out into it, it will be Nitty and Mr. Parker and me camped someplace—a pretty place next to a creek of cold water—and I’ll be able to see.

The light grew brighter and brighter; it was gold colored, like sunlight.

Then Little Tib saw trees, and he began to run. He was actually running among the trees before he realized that they were not real trees, and that the light he had seen came from them—the sky overhead was a vault of cold stone. He stopped, then. The trunks and branches of the trees were silver; the leaves were gold; the grass under his feet was not grass but a carpet of green gems, and birds with real rubies in their breasts twittered and flew among the trees—but they were not real birds, only toys. There was no Nitty and no Mr. Parker and no water.

Little Tib was about to cry when he noticed the fruit. It hung under the leaves, and was gold, as they were, but for fruit that did not look so unnatural. Each was about the size of a grapefruit. Little Tib wondered if he could pull them from the trees, and the first he touched fell into his hands. It was not heavy enough to be solid. After a moment he saw that it unscrewed in the center. He sat down on the grass (which had become real grass in some way, or perhaps a carpet or a bedspread) and opened it. There was a meal inside, but all the food was too hot to eat. He looked and looked, hoping for a salad that would be wet and cool, but there was nothing but hot meat and gravy, and smoking hot cornmeal muffins, and boiled greens so hot and dry he did not even try to put them in his mouth.

At last he found a small cup with a lid on it. It held hot tea—tea so hot it seemed to blister his lips—but he managed to drink a little of it. He put down the cup and stood up to go on through the forest of gold and silver trees, and perhaps find a better place. But all the trees had vanished, and he was in the dark again. My eyes are gone, he thought. I’m waking up. Then he saw a circle of light ahead and heard the pounding; and he knew that it was not marbles dropped on a floor he heard, but the noise of hundreds and hundreds of picks, digging gold in the mines of the gnomes.

The light grew larger—but dimmed at the same time, as a star-shaped shadow grew in it. Then it was not a star at all, but a gnome coming after him. And then it was a whole army of gnomes, one behind the other, with their arms sticking out at every angle, so that it looked like one gnome with a hundred arms, all reaching for him.

Then he woke, and everything was dark.

He sat up. “You’re awake now,” Nitty said.

“Yes.”

“How you feel?”

Little Tib did not answer. He was trying to find out where he was. It was a bed. There was a pillow behind him, and there were clean, starched sheets. He remembered what the doctor had said about the hospital, and asked, “Am I in the hospital?”

“No, we’re in a motel. How do you feel?”

“All right, I guess.”

“You remember about dancing out there on the air?”

“I thought I dreamed it.”

“Well, I thought I dreamed it too—but you were really out there. Everybody saw it, everybody who was around there when you did it. And then when we got you to come in close enough that we could grab hold of you and pull you in, Dr. Prithivi got you to come back to his bus.”

“I remember that,” Little Tib said.