The Best of Gene Wolfe

“Today I did a little. He told me a story about a pet fish he used to have.”

“Ignacio grew up all alone; did he tell you that? On Earth. On a plantation in Brazil, way up the Amazon—Dr. Island told me.”

“I thought it was crowded on Earth.”

“The cities are crowded, and the countryside closest to the cities. But there are places where it’s emptier than it used to be. Where Ignacio was, there would have been Red Indian hunters two or three hundred years ago; when he was there, there wasn’t anyone, just the machines. Now he doesn’t want to be looked at, doesn’t want anyone around him.”

Nicholas said slowly, “Dr. Island said lots of people wouldn’t be sick if only there weren’t other people around all the time. Remember that?”

“Only there are other people around all the time; that’s how the world is.”

“Not in Brazil, maybe,” Nicholas said. He was trying to remember something about Brazil, but the only thing he could think of was a parrot singing in a straw hat from the comview cartoons, and then a turtle and a hedgehog that turned into armadillos for the love of God, Montresor. Nicholas said, “Why didn’t he stay here?”

“Did I tell you about the bird, Nicholas?” She had been not listening again.

“What bird?”

“I have a bird. Inside.” She patted the flat stomach below her small breasts, and for a moment Nicholas thought she had really found food. “She sits in here. She has tangled a nest in my entrails, where she sits and tears at my breath with her beak. I look healthy to you, don’t I? But inside I’m hollow and rotten and turning brown, dirt and old feathers, oozing away. Her beak will break through soon.”

“Okay.” Nicholas turned to go.

“I’ve been drinking water here, trying to drown her. I think I’ve swallowed so much I couldn’t stand up now if I tried, but she isn’t even wet, and do you know something, Nicholas? I’ve found out I’m not really me, I’m her.”

Turning back, Nicholas asked, “When was the last time you had anything to eat?”

“I don’t know. Two, three days ago. Ignacio gave me something.”

“I’m going to try to open a coconut. If I can I’ll bring you back some.”

 W

hen he reached the beach, Nicholas turned and walked slowly back in the direction of the dead fire, this time along the rim of dampened sand between the sea and the palms. He was thinking about machines.

There were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of machines out beyond the belt, but few or none of the sophisticated servant robots of Earth—those were luxuries. Would Ignacio, in Brazil (whatever that was like), have had such luxuries? Nicholas thought not; those robots were almost like people, and living with them would be like living with people. Nicholas wished that he could speak Brazilian.

There had been the therapy robots at St. John’s; Nicholas had not liked them, and he did not think Ignacio would have liked them either. If Nicholas had liked his therapy robot he probably would not have had to be sent here. He thought of the chipped and rusted old machine that had cleaned the corridors—Maya had called it Corradora, but no one else ever called it anything but “Hey!” It could not (or at least did not) speak, and Nicholas doubted that it had emotions, except possibly a sort of love of cleanness that did not extend to its own person. “You will understand,” someone was saying inside his head, “that motives of all sorts can be divided into two sorts.” A doctor? A therapy robot? It did not matter. “Extrinsic and intrinsic. An extrinsic motive has always some further end in view, and that end we call an intrinsic motive. Thus when we have reduced motivation to intrinsic motivation we have reduced it to its simplest parts. Take that machine over there.”

What machine?

“Freud would have said that it was fixated at the latter anal stage, perhaps due to the care its builders exercised in seeing that the dirt it collects is not released again. Because of its fixation it is, as you see, obsessed with cleanliness and order; compulsive sweeping and scrubbing palliate its anxities. It is a strength of Freud’s theory, and not a weakness, that it serves to explain many of the activities of machines as well as the acts of persons.”

Hello there, Corradora.

And hello, Ignacio.

My head, moving from side to side, must remind you of a radar scanner. My steps are measured, slow, and precise. I emit a scarcely audible humming as I walk, and my eyes are fixed, as I swing my head, not on you, Ignacio, but on the waves at the edge of sight, where they curve up into the sky. I stop ten meters short of you, and I stand.

You go, I follow, ten meters behind. What do I want? Nothing.

Yes, I will pick up the sticks, and I will follow—five meters behind.

“Break them, and put them on the fire. Not all of them, just a few.”

Yes.

“Ignacio keeps the fire here burning all the time. Sometimes he takes the coals of fire from it to start others, but here, under the big palm log, he has a fire always. The rain does not strike it here. Always the fire. Do you know how he made it the first time? Reply to him!”

“No.”

“No, Patrao!”

“‘No, Patrao.’”

“Ignacio stole it from the gods, from Poseidon. Now Poseidon is dead, lying at the bottom of the water. Which is the top. Would you like to see him?”

“If you wish it, Patrao.”