The Best of Gene Wolfe

Dr. Island heaved beneath his feet. “NO.”

“One of your cables is already broken—I saw that. Maybe more than one. You’ll pull loose. I’m turning this world, isn’t that right? The attitude rockets are tuned to my emotions, and they’re spinning us around, and the slippage is the wind and the high sea, and when you come loose nothing will balance anymore.”

“NO.”

“What’s the stress on your cables? Don’t you know?”

“THEY ARE VERY STRONG.”

“What kind of talk is that? You ought to say something like ‘The D-twelve cable tension is twenty billion kilograms’ force. warning! warning! Expected time to failure is ninety-seven seconds! warning! Don’t you even know how a machine is supposed to talk?” Nicholas was screaming now, and every wave reached farther up the beach than the last, so that the bases of the most seaward palms were awash.

“GET BACK, NICHOLAS, FIND HIGHER GROUND. GO INTO THE JUNGLE.” It was the crashing waves themselves that spoke.

“I won’t.”

A long serpent of water reached for the fire, which hissed and sputtered.

“GET BACK!”

“I won’t!”

A second wave came, striking Nicholas calf high and nearly extinguishing the fire.

“ALL THIS WILL BE UNDERWATER SOON. GET BACK!”

Nicholas picked up some of the still-burning sticks and tried to carry them, but the wind blew them out as soon as he lifted them from the fire. He tugged at the welder, but it was too heavy for him to lift.

“GET BACK!”

He went into the jungle, where the trees lashed themselves to leafy rubbish in the wind and broken branches flew through the air like debris from an explosion; for a while he heard Diane’s voice crying in the wind; it became Maya’s, then his mother’s or Sister Carmela’s, and a hundred others’; in time the wind grew less, and he could no longer feel the ground rocking. He felt tired. He said, “I didn’t kill you after all, did I?” but there was no answer. On the beach, when he returned to it, he found the welder half-buried in sand. No trace of Diane’s ashes, nor of his fire. He gathered more wood and built another, lighting it with the welder.

“Now,” he said. He scooped aside the sand around the welder until he reached the rough understone beneath it, and turned the flame of the welder on that; it blackened and bubbled.

“No,” Dr. Island said.

“Yes.” Nicholas was bending intently over the flame, both hands locked on the welder’s trigger.

“Nicholas, stop that.” When he did not reply, “Look behind you.” There was a splashing louder than the crashing of the waves, and a groaning of metal. He whirled and saw the great, beetlelike robot Ignacio had shown him on the seafloor. Tiny shellfish clung to its metal skin, and water, faintly green, still poured from its body. Before he could turn the welding gun toward it, it shot forward hands like clamps and wrenched the gun from him. All up and down the beach similar machines were smoothing the sand and repairing the damage of the storm.

“That thing was dead,” Nicholas said. “Ignacio killed it.”

It picked up the power pack, shook it clean of sand, and, turning, stalked back toward the sea.

“That is what Ignacio believed, and it was better that he believed so.”

“And you said you couldn’t do anything, you had no hands.”

“I also told you that I would treat you as society will when you are released, that that was my nature. After that, did you still believe all I told you? Nicholas, you are upset now because Diane is dead—”

“You could have protected her!”

“—but by dying she made someone else, someone very important, well. Her prognosis was bad; she really wanted only death, and this was the death I chose for her. You could call it the death of Dr. Island, a death that would help someone else. Now you are alone, but soon there will be more patients in this segment, and you will help them too—if you can—and perhaps they will help you. Do you understand?”

“No,” Nicholas said. He flung himself down on the sand. The wind had dropped, but it was raining hard. He thought of the vision he had once had, and of describing it to Diane the day before. “This isn’t ending the way I thought,” he whispered. It was only a squeak of sound far down in his throat. “Nothing ever turns out right.”

The waves, the wind, the rustling palm fronds and the pattering rain, the monkeys who had come down to the beach to search for food washed ashore, answered, “Go away—go back—don’t move.”

Nicholas pressed his scarred head against his knees, rocking back and forth.

“Don’t move.”

For a long time he sat still while the rain lashed his shoulders and the dripping monkeys frolicked and fought around him. When at last he lifted his face, there was in it some element of personality which had been only potentially present before, and with this an emptiness and an expression of surprise. His lips moved, and the sounds were the sounds made by a deaf-mute who tries to speak.

“Nicholas is gone,” the waves said. “Nicholas, who was the right side of your body, the left half of your brain, I have forced into catatonia; for the remainder of your life he will be to you only what you once were to him—or less. Do you understand?”

The boy nodded.

“We will call you Kenneth, silent one. And if Nicholas tries to come again, Kenneth, you must drive him back—or