The Best of Gene Wolfe

“It is gone now,” Ignacio said, “but it was only as long as a man’s hand. I caught it in the big river.”

Huckleberry— “I know, the Mississippi; it was a catfish. Or a sunfish.” — Finn.

“Possibly that is what you call them; for a time he was as the sun to a certain one.” The light from nowhere danced on the water. “In any event he was kept on that table in the salon in the house where life was lived. In a tank, but not the old kind in which one sees the glass, with metal at the corner. But the new kind in which the glass is so strong, but very thin, and curved so that it does not reflect, and there are no corners, and a clever device holds the water clear.” He dipped up a handful of sparkling water, still not meeting Nicholas’s eyes. “As clear even as this, and there were no ripples, and so you could not see it at all. My fish floated in the center of my table above a few stones.”

Nicholas asked, “Did you float on the river on a raft?”

“No, we had a little boat. Ignacio caught this fish in a net, of which he almost bit through the strands before he could be landed; he possessed wonderful teeth. There was no one in the house but him and the other, and the robots, but each morning someone would go to the pool in the patio and catch a goldfish for him. Ignacio would see this goldfish there when he came down for his breakfast, and would think, Brave goldfish, you have been cast to the monster; will you be the one to destroy him? Destroy him and you shall have his diamond house forever. And then the fish, who had a little spot of red beneath his wonderful teeth, a spot like a cherry, would rush upon that young goldfish, and for an instant the water would be all clouded with blood.”

“And then what?” Nicholas asked.

“And then the clever machine would make the water clear once more, and the fish would be floating above the stones as before, the fish with the wonderful teeth, and Ignacio would touch the little switch on the table, and ask for more bread, and more fruit.”

“Are you hungry now?”

“No, I am tired and lazy now; if I pursue you I will not catch you, and if I catch you—through your own slowness and clumsiness—I will not kill you, and if I kill you I will not eat you.”

Nicholas had begun to back away, and at the last words, realizing that they were a signal, he turned and began to run, splashing through the shallow water. Ignacio ran after him, much helped by his longer legs; his hair flying behind his dark young face, his square teeth—each white as a bone and as big as Nicholas’s thumbnail—showing like spectators who lined the railings of his lips.

“Don’t run, Nicholas,” Dr. Island said with the voice of a wave. “It only makes him angry that you run.” Nicholas did not answer, but cut to his left, up the beach and among the trunks of the palms, sprinting all the way because he had no way of knowing Ignacio was not right behind him, about to grab him by the neck. When he stopped it was in the thick jungle, among the boles of the hardwoods, where he leaned, out of breath, the thumping of his own heart the only sound in an atmosphere silent and unwaked as Earth’s long, prehuman day. For a time he listened for any sound Ignacio might make searching for him; there was none. He drew a deep breath then and said, “Well, that’s over,” expecting Dr. Island to answer from somewhere; there was only the green hush.

The light was still bright and strong and nearly shadowless, but some interior sense told Nicholas the day was nearly over, and he noticed that such faint shades as he could see stretched long, horizontal distortions of their objects. He felt no hunger, but he had fasted before and knew on which side of hunger he stood; he was not as strong as he had been only a day past, and by this time next day he would probably be unable to outrun Ignacio. He should, he now realized, have eaten the monkey he had killed; but his stomach revolted at the thought of the raw flesh, and he did not know how he might build a fire, although Ignacio seemed to have done so the night before. Raw fish, even if he were able to catch a fish, would be as bad or worse than raw monkey; he remembered his effort to open a coconut—he had failed, but it was surely not impossible. His mind was hazy as to what a coconut might contain, but there had to be an edible core, because they were eaten in books. He decided to make a wide sweep through the jungle that would bring him back to the beach well away from Ignacio; he had several times seen coconuts lying in the sand under the trees.

He moved quietly, still a little afraid, trying to think of ways to open the coconut when he found it. He imagined himself standing before a large and raggedly faceted stone, holding the coconut in both hands. He raised it and smashed it down, but when it struck it was no longer a coconut but Maya’s head; he heard her nose cartilage break with a distinct, rubbery snap. Her eyes, as blue as the sky above Madhya Pradesh, the sparkling blue sky of the egg, looked up at him, but he could no longer look into them, they retreated from his own, and it came to him quite suddenly that Lucifer, in falling, must have fallen up, into the fires and the coldness of space, never again to see the warm blues and browns and greens of Earth: I was watching Satan fall as lightning from heaven. Nicholas had heard that on tape somewhere, but he could not remember where. He had read that on Earth lightning did not come down from the clouds but leaped up from the planetary surface toward them, never to return.

“Nicholas.”

He listened, but did not hear his name again. Faintly water was babbling; had Dr. Island used that sound to speak to him? He walked toward it and found a little rill that threaded a way among the trees, and followed it. In a hundred steps it grew broader, slowed, and ended in a long blind pool under a dome of leaves. Diane was sitting on moss on the side opposite him; she looked up as she saw him, and smiled.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, Nicholas. I thought I heard you. I wasn’t mistaken after all, was I?”

“I didn’t think I said anything.” He tested the dark water with his foot and found that it was very cold.

“You gave a little gasp, I fancy. I heard it, and I said to myself, ‘That’s Nicholas,’ and I called you. Then I thought I might be wrong, or that it might be Ignacio.”

“Ignacio was chasing me. Maybe he still is, but I think he’s probably given up by now.”

The girl nodded, looking into the dark waters of the pool, but did not seem to have heard him. He began to work his way around to her, climbing across the snakelike roots of the crowding trees. “Why does Ignacio want to kill me, Diane?”

“Sometimes he wants to kill me too,” the girl said.

“But why?”

“I think he’s a bit frightened of us. Have you ever talked to him, Nicholas?”