The Best of Gene Wolfe

trees, Nicholas said, “Maybe we can find some fruit.” They were so light now that he had to be careful not to bound into the air with each step. The rain fell slowly around them, in crystal spheres.

“Maybe,” the girl said doubtfully. “Wait; let’s stop here.” She sat down where a huge tree sent twenty-meter wooden arches over dark, mossy ground. “Want to climb up there and see if you can find us something?”

“All right,” Nicholas agreed. He jumped, and easily caught hold of a branch far above the girl’s head. In a moment he was climbing in a green world, with the rain pattering all around him; he followed narrowing limbs into leafy wilderness where the cool water ran from every twig he touched, and twice found the empty nests of birds, and once a slender snake, green as any leaf with a head as long as his thumb, but there was no fruit. “Nothing,” he said, when he dropped down beside the girl once more.

“That’s all right; we’ll find something.”

He said, “I hope so,” and noticed that she was looking at him oddly, then realized that his left hand had lifted itself to touch her right breast. His hand dropped as he looked, and he felt his face grow hot. He said, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

“We like you. He—over there—he can’t talk, you see. I guess I can’t talk either.”

“I think it’s just you—in two pieces. I don’t care.”

“Thanks.” He had picked up a leaf, dead and damp, and was tearing it to shreds, first his right hand tearing while the left held the leaf, then turnabout. “Where does the rain come from?” The dirty flakes clung to the fingers of both.

“Hmm?”

“Where does the rain come from? I mean, it isn’t because it’s colder here now, like on Callisto; it’s because the gravity’s turned down some way, isn’t it?”

“From the sea. Don’t you know how this place is built?”

Nicholas shook his head.

“Didn’t they show it to you from the ship when you came? It’s beautiful.

They showed it to me—I just sat there and looked at it, and I wouldn’t talk to them, and the nurse thought I wasn’t paying any attention, but I heard everything. I just didn’t want to talk to her. It wasn’t any use.”

“I know how you felt.”

“But they didn’t show it to you?”

“No, on my ship they kept me locked up because I burned some stuff. They thought I couldn’t start a fire without an igniter, but if you have electricity in the wall sockets it’s easy. They had a thing on me—you know?” He clasped his arms to his body to show how he had been restrained. “I bit one of them too—I guess I didn’t tell you that yet: I bite people. They locked me up, and for a long time I had nothing to do, and then I could feel us dock with something, and they came and got me and pulled me down a regular companionway for a long time, and it just seemed like a regular place. Then they stuck me full of Tranquil-C—I guess they didn’t know it doesn’t hardly work on me at all—with a pneumogun, and lifted a kind of door thing and shoved me up.”

“Didn’t they make you undress?”

“I already was. When they put the ties on me I did things in my clothes and they had to take them off me. It made them mad.” He grinned unevenly. “Does Tranquil-C work on you? Or any of that other stuff?”

“I suppose they would, but then I never do the sort of thing you do anyway.”

“Maybe you ought to.”

“Sometimes they used to give me medication that was supposed to cheer me up; then I couldn’t sleep, and I walked and walked, you know, and ran into things and made a lot of trouble for everyone; but what good does it do?”

Nicholas shrugged. “Not doing it doesn’t do any good either—I mean, we’re both here. My way, I know I’ve made them jump; they shoot that stuff in me and I’m not mad anymore, but I know what it is and I just think what I would do if I were mad, and I do it, and when it wears off I’m glad I did.”

“I think you’re still angry somewhere, deep down.”

Nicholas was already thinking of something else. “This island says Ignacio kills people.” He paused. “What does it look like?”

“Ignacio?”

“No, I’ve seen him. Dr. Island.”

“Oh, you mean when I was in the ship. The satellite’s round of course, and all clear except where Dr. Island is, so that’s a dark spot. The rest of it’s temperglass, and from space you can’t even see the water.”

“That is the sea up there, isn’t it?” Nicholas asked, trying to look up at it through the tree leaves and the rain. “I thought it was when I first came.”

“Sure. It’s like a glass ball, and we’re inside, and the water’s inside too, and just goes all around up the curve.”

“That’s why I could see so far out on the beach, isn’t it? Instead of dropping down from you like on Callisto it bends up so you can see it.”

The girl nodded. “And the water lets the light through, but filters out the ultraviolet. Besides, it gives us thermal mass, so we don’t heat up too much when we’re between the sun and the Bright Spot.”

“Is that what keeps us warm? The Bright Spot?”

Diane nodded again. “We go around in ten hours, you see, and that holds us over it all the time.”