The Best of Gene Wolfe

Patrao,’ and, ‘No, Patrao,’ to him—he likes that, and he’s only used to machines. You don’t have to smile at him or anything—just look at the fire; that’s what I do, just look at the fire.”

To Ignacio, perhaps wisely, he at first said nothing at all, leading Diane to the place where he had been sitting himself a few minutes before and placing some scraps from his fish in her lap. When she did not eat he found a sliver of the tender, roasted flesh and thrust it into her mouth. Ignacio said, “Ignacio believed that one dead,” and Nicholas answered, “No, Patrao.”

“There is another fish. Give it to her.”

Nicholas did, raking the gob of baked mud from the coals to crack with the heel of his hand, and peeling the broken and steaming fillets from the skins and bones to give to her when they had cooled enough to eat; after the fish had lain in her mouth for perhaps half a minute she began to chew and swallow, and after the third mouthful she fed herself, though without looking at either of them.

“Ignacio believed that one dead,” Ignacio said again.

“No, Patrao,” Nicholas answered, and then added, “Like you can see, she’s alive.”

“She is a pretty creature, with the firelight on her face—no?”

“Yes, Patrao, very pretty.”

“But too thin.” Ignacio moved around the fire until he was sitting almost beside Diane, then reached for the fish Nicholas had given her. Her hands closed on it, though she still did not look at him.

“You see, she knows us after all,” Ignacio said. “We are not ghosts.”

Nicholas whispered urgently, “Let him have it.”

Slowly Diane’s fingers relaxed, but Ignacio did not take the fish. “I was only joking, little one,” he said. “And I think not such good joke after all.” Then when she did not reply, he turned away from her, his eyes reaching out across the dark, tossing water for something Nicholas could not see.

“She likes you, Patrao,” Nicholas said. The words were like swallowing filth, but he thought of the bird ready to tear through Diane’s skin, and Maya’s blood soaking in little round dots in the white cloth, and continued. “She is only shy. It is better that way.”

“You. What do you know?”

At least Ignacio was no longer looking at the sea. Nicholas said, “Isn’t it true, Patrao?”

“Yes, it is true.”

Diane was picking at the fish again, conveying tiny flakes to her mouth with delicate fingers; distinctly but almost absently she said, “Go, Nicholas.”

He looked at Ignacio, but the Brazilian’s eyes did not turn toward the girl, nor did he speak.

“Nicholas, go away. Please.”

In a voice he hoped was pitched too low for Ignacio to hear, Nicholas said, “I’ll see you in the morning. All right?”

Her head moved a fraction of a centimeter.

 O

nce he was out of sight of the fire, one part of the beach was as good to sleep on as another; he wished he had taken a piece of wood from the fire to start one of his own and tried to cover his legs with sand to keep off the cool wind, but the sand fell away whenever he moved, and his legs and his left hand moved without volition on his part.

The surf, lapping at the rippled shore, said, “That was well done, Nicholas.”

“I can feel you move,” Nicholas said. “I don’t think I ever could before except when I was high up.”

“I doubt that you can now; my roll is less than one one-hundredth of a degree.”

“Yes, I can. You wanted me to do that, didn’t you? About Ignacio.”

“Do you know what the Harlow effect is, Nicholas?”

Nicholas shook his head.

“About a hundred years ago Dr. Harlow experimented with monkeys who had been raised in complete isolation—no mothers, no other monkeys at all.”

“Lucky monkeys.”

“When the monkeys were mature he put them into cages with normal ones; they fought with any that came near them, and sometimes they killed them.”

“Psychologists always put things in cages; did he ever think of turning them loose in the jungle instead?”

“No, Nicholas, though we have . . . Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“I guess not.”

“Dr. Harlow tried, you see, to get the isolate monkeys to breed—sex is the primary social function—but they wouldn’t. Whenever another monkey of either sex approached they displayed aggressiveness, which the other monkeys returned. He cured them finally by introducing immature monkeys—monkey children—in place of the mature, socialized ones. These needed the isolate adults so badly that they kept on making approaches no matter how often or how violently they were rejected, and in the end they were accepted, and the isolates socialized. It’s interesting to note that the founder of Christianity seems to have had an intuitive grasp of the principle—but it was almost two thousand years before it was demonstrated scientifically.”

“I don’t think it worked here,” Nicholas said. “It was more complicated than that.”