The Best of Gene Wolfe

Since your name is now legally Wolf Moon, it would be well for us to execute a new agency agreement. I enclose it. All terms as before.

Very fondly,

Georgia

Dear Georgia,

I was sorry to hear of the unfortunate accident that befell Mr. Hearwell’s wife and children. Please extend my sympathy.

While you’re doing it, you might mention my check, which has yet to arrive. If you could contrive to drop the words disembodied claws into your conversation, I believe you might find they work wonders.

Now a very small matter, Georgia—a whim of mine, if you will. (We writers are entitled to an occasional whim, after all, and as soon as you have complied with this one of mine I will Air Express you the ms. of my latest, The Shrieking in the Nursery.) I have found that I work best when everything surrounding a new book corresponds to the mood. I am returning all four copies of our new letter of agreement. Can I, dear Georgia, persuade you to send me a fresh set signed in your blood?

Very sincerely,

Wolf

AFTERWORD

This is my editor’s favorite. For the sake of such attorneys as he may employ, I desire to state now, and categorically, that there is no connection whatsoever between editor David G. Hartwell and “Saul Hearwell.”

None!

My agent, who was still very much alive when this was written, was Virginia Kidd. “Georgia Morgan” is only a slight exaggeration. I have no idea whether Virginia liked this story, but I liked her a lot. I miss her terribly, and in that I have a whole bunch of company—including, I believe, David G. Hartwell.

DEATH OF THE ISLAND DOCTOR

 T

his story took place in the same university I mentioned in the Introduction to Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days.

At this university, there was once a retired professor, a Dr. Insula, who was a little cracked on the subject of islands, doubtless because of his name. This Dr. Insula had been out to pasture for so long that no one could remember anymore what department he had once headed. The Department of Literature said it had been History, and the Department of History said Literature. Dr. Insula himself said that in his time they had been the same department, but all the other professors knew that could not be true.

One crisp fall morning, this Dr. Insula came to the chancellor’s office—to the immense surprise of the chancellor—and announced that he wished to teach a seminar. He was tired, he said, of rusticating; a small seminar that met once a week would be no trouble, and he felt that in return for the pension he had drawn for so many years he should do something to take a bit of the load off the younger men.

The chancellor was in a quandary, as you may well imagine. As a way of gaining time, he said, “Very good! Oh, yes, very good indeed, Doctor! Noble, if I may resort to that rather old-fashioned word, and fully in keeping with that noble spirit of self-sacrifice and—ah—noblesse oblige we have always sought to foster among our tenured faculty. And may I ask just what the subject of your seminar will be?”

“Islands,” Dr. Insula announced firmly.

“Yes, of course. Certainly. Islands?”

“I may also decide to include isles, atolls, islets, holms, eyots, archipelagoes, and some of the larger reefs,” Dr. Insula confided, as one friend to another. “It depends on how they come along, you know. But definitely not peninsulas.”

“I see . . . ,” said the chancellor. And he thought to himself, If I refuse the poor old boy, I’ll hurt him dreadfully. But if I agree and list his seminar as Not for Credit, no one will register and no harm will be done.

Thus it was done, and for six years every catalog carried a listing for Dr. Insula’s seminar on islands, without credit, and in six years no one registered for it.

Now as it happened, the registrar was a woman approaching retirement age, and after registration, for twelve regular semesters and six summer semesters, Dr. Insula came to her to ask whether anyone had registered for his seminar. And there came a time, not in fall but rather in that dreary tag end of summer when it is ninety degrees on the sidewalk and the stores have Halloween cards and the first subtly threatening Christmas ornaments are on display, when she could bear it no longer.

She was bending over her desk making up the new catalog (which would be that last one she would ever do), and though the air-conditioning was supposedly set at seventy-eight, it was at least eighty-five in her office. A wisp of her own gray hair kept falling over her eyes, and the buzz of the electric fan she had bought herself, with her own money, kept reminding her of her girlhood and of sleeping on the screened porch in Atlanta when Mommy and Daddy took her to visit relatives.

And at this critical moment, the hundredth, perhaps, in a long line of critical moments, she came to the section labeled “Miscellaneous” at the very end of the catalog proper, just before the dishonest little biographies of the faculty. And there was Dr. Insula’s NO CREDIT seminar on islands.

A certain madness seized her. Why, mistakes happen all the time, she thought to herself. Why, only last year, the printer changed that lab of Dr. Ettelmann’s to Monday, Grunday, and Friday. Besides, NO CREDIT can’t possibly be right. Who would take a No-credit seminar on islands? Anyway, they really ought to run the airconditioning if they want us to work efficiently.

Almost before she knew it, her pencil had made a short, sharp, vertical line in the Credit Hours column, and she felt a great deal cooler.

So it was that that year when Dr. Insula came to inquire she was able to tell him, with some satisfaction, that two students—a young man and a young woman, as she said, judging from their names, as she said—had in fact enrolled in his seminar.