The Best of Gene Wolfe

myself, old as I be.”

“Give me the picking of his body. This one has nothing.”

The girl’s bright lips drew back from strong white teeth. From somewhere under the tattered shirt she wore, she had produced a long knife, and sudden light from a window high above the alley ran along the edge of the stained blade; the girl might be a dangerous opponent, as the old man claimed, but Paul could sense the femaleness, the woman rut, from where he stood. “No,” her father said. “You got good clothes. I need these.” He looked up at the window fearfully, fumbling with buttons.

“His cloak will hang on you like a blanket.”

“We’ll fight. Take the woman and go away, or we’ll fight.”

He could not carry both, and the fat man’s meat would be tainted by the testicles. When Paul was young and there had been no one but his mother to do the killing, they had sometimes eaten old males; he never did so now. He slung the pearl-eyed woman across his shoulders and trotted away.

Outside the alley the streets were well lit, and a few passersby stared at him and the dark burden he carried. Fewer still, he knew, would suspect him of being what he was—he had learned the trick of dressing as the masters did, even of wearing their expressions. He wondered how the black-haired girl and the old man would fare in their ragged clothes. They must live very near.

His own place was that in which his mother had borne him, a place high in a house built when humans were the masters. Every door was nailed tight and boarded up; but on one side a small garden lay between two wings, and in a corner of this garden, behind a bush where the shadows were thick even at noon, the bricks had fallen away. The lower floors were full of rotting furniture and the smell of rats and mold, but high in his wooden turret the walls were still dry and the sun came in by day at eight windows. He carried his burden there and dropped her in a corner. It was important that his clothes be kept as clean as the masters kept theirs, though he lacked their facilities. He pulled his cloak from the body and brushed it vigorously.

“What are you going to do with me?” the dead woman said behind him.

“Eat,” he told her. “What did you think I was going to do?”

“I didn’t know.” And then: “I’ve read of you creatures, but I didn’t think you really existed.”

“We were the masters once,” he said. He was not sure he still believed it, but it was what his mother had taught him. “This house was built in those days—that’s why you won’t wreck it: you’re afraid.” He had finished with the cloak; he hung it up and turned to face her, sitting on the bed. “You’re afraid of waking the old times,” he said. She lay slumped in the corner, and though her mouth moved, her eyes were only half-open, looking at nothing.

“We tore a lot of them down,” she said.

“If you’re going to talk, you might as well sit up straight.” He lifted her by the shoulders and propped her in the corner. A nail protruded from the wall there; he twisted a lock of her hair on it so her head would not loll; her hair was the rose shade of a little girl’s dress, and soft but slightly sticky.

“I’m dead, you know.”

“No, you’re not.” They always said this (except, sometimes, for the children) and his mother had always denied it. He felt that he was keeping up a family tradition.

“Dead,” the pearl-eyed woman said. “Never, never, never. Another year, and everything would have been all right. I want to cry, but I can’t breathe to.”

“Your kind lives a long time with a broken neck,” he told her. “But you’ll die eventually.”

“I am dead now.”

He was not listening. There were other humans in the city; he had always known that, but only now, with the sight of the old man and the girl, had their existence seemed real to him.

“I thought you were all gone,” the pearl-eyed dead woman said thinly. “All gone long ago, like a bad dream.”

Happy with his new discovery, he said, “Why do you set traps for us, then? Maybe there are more of us than you think.”

“There can’t be many of you. How many people do you kill in a year?” Her mind was lifting the sheet from his bed, hoping to smother him with it; but he had seen that trick many times.

“Twenty or thirty.” (He was boasting.)

“So many.”

“When you don’t get much besides meat, you need a lot of it. And then I only eat the best parts—why not? I kill twice a month or more except when it’s cold, and I could kill enough for two or three if I had to.” (The girl had had a knife. Knives were bad, except for cutting up afterward. But knives left blood behind. He would kill for her—she could stay here and take care of his clothes, prepare their food. He thought of himself walking home under a new moon, and seeing her face in the window of the turret.) To the dead woman he said, “You saw that girl? With the black hair? She and the old man killed your husband, and I’m going to bring her here to live.” He stood and began to walk up and down the small room, soothing himself with the sound of his own footsteps.

“He wasn’t my husband.” The sheet dropped limply now that he was no longer on the bed. “Why didn’t you change? When the rest changed their genes?”

“I wasn’t alive then.”

“You must have received some tradition.”

“We didn’t want to. We are the human beings.”

“Everyone wanted to. Your old breed had worn out the planet; even with much better technology we’re still starved for energy and raw materials because of what you did.”

“There hadn’t been enough to eat before,” he said, “but when so many changed there was a lot. So why should more change?”