The Best of Gene Wolfe

“In a minute. Is it comfortable? Is it a good fit? It’s costing us quite a bit, you know.”

“Actually,” Forlesen said, “it’s more comfortable than I had foreseen. The bottom is only thinly padded, but I find the firmness helps my back.”

“Good, that’s great. Now have you decided about the Explainer?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Didn’t you read your orientation? Everyone’s entitled to an Explainer—in whatever form he chooses—at the end of his life. He—”

“It seems to me,” Forlesen interrupted, “that it would be more useful at the beginning.”

“—may be a novelist, aged loremaster, National Hero, warlock, or actor.”

“None of those sounds quite right for me,” Forlesen said.

“Or a theologian, philosopher, priest, or doctor.”

“I don’t think I like those either.”

“Well, that’s the end of the menu as far as I know,” his son said. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll send him in and you can talk to him yourself; he’s right outside.”

“That little fellow in the dark suit?” Forlesen asked. His son, whose head was thrust out the door already, paid no attention.

After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen’s son placed a chair close to the coffin for him and went into the bedroom. “Well, what’s it going to be,” the small man asked, “or is it going to be nothing?”

“I don’t know,” Forlesen said. He was looking at the weave of the small man’s suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos. “I wish I could talk to my wife.”

“Your wife is dead,” the small man said “The kid didn’t want to tell you. We got her laid out in the next room. What’ll it be? Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, National Hero, aged loremaster, or novelist?”

“I don’t know,” Forlesen said again. “I want to feel, you know, that this box is a bed—and yet a ship, a ship that will set me free. And yet . . . it’s been a strange life.”

“You may have been oppressed by demons,” the small man said. “Or revived by unseen aliens who, landing on the Earth eons after the death of the last man, have sought to re-create the life of the twentieth century. Or it may be that there is a small pressure, exerted by a tumor in your brain.”

“Those are the explanations?” Forlesen asked.

“Those are some of them.”

“I want to know if it’s meant anything,” Forlesen said. “If what I suffered—if it’s been worth it.”

“No,” the little man said. “Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.”

AFTERWORD

There are men—I have known a good many—who work all their lives for the same Fortune 500 company. They have families to support, and no skills that will permit them to leave and support their families by other means in another place. Their work is of little value, because few, if any, assignments of value come to them. They spend an amazing amount of time trying to find something useful to do. And, failing that, just trying to look busy.

In time their lives end, as all lives do. As this world recons things they have spent eight thousand days, perhaps, at work; but in a clearer air it has all been the same day.

The story you have just read was my tribute to them.

WESTWIND

     “. . . to all of you, my dearly loved fellow countrymen. And most

     particularly—as ever—to my eyes, Westwind.”

 O

ne wall of the steaming, stinking room began to waver, the magic portal that had opened upon a garden of almost inconceivable beauty beginning to mist and change. Fountains of marble waved like grass, and rose trees, whose flowery branches wore strands of pearl and diamond, faded to soft old valentines. The ruler’s chair turned to bronze, then to umber, and the ruler himself, fatherly and cunning, wise and unknowable, underwent a succession of transformations, becoming at first a picture, then a poster, and at last a postage stamp.

The lame old woman who ran the place turned the wall off and several people protested. “You heard what he said,” she told them. “You know your duty. Why do you have to listen to some simpleton from the Department of Truth say everything over in longer words and spread his spittle on it?”

The protestors, having registered their postures, were silent. The old woman looked at the clock behind the tiny bar she served.

“Game in twenty minutes,” she said. “Folks will be coming in then, rain or no rain, wanting drinks. You want some, you better get them now.”

Only two did: hulking, dirty men who might have been of any dishonest trade. A few people were already discussing the coming game. A few others talked about the address they had just heard—not its content, which could not have meant much to most of them, but the ruler and his garden, exchanging at hundredth hand bits of palace gossip of untold age. The door opened and the storm came in and a young man with it.

He was tall and thin. He wore a raincoat that had soaked through and an old felt hat covered with a transparent plastic protection whose elastic had forced the hat’s splayed brim into a tight bell around his head. One side of the young man’s face was a blue scar; the old woman asked him what he wanted.

“You have rooms,” he said.

“Yes, we do. Very cheap too. You ought to wear something over that.”