Gene Wolfe - Castaway

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2024-11-19 3 0 43.74KB 8 页 5.9玖币

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Castaway

by Gene Wolfe

We picked him up on some dead world nobody ever

goes to. We did it because we had a field problem that

required a lot of tests, and that stuff is easier if you can

just dodge in and out of the ship without worrying about

the airlocks and how much air you're dumping every

time you go outside. Bad as this place was, you could

breathe—the air turned out to be real good, in fact—so

we set down in a warm belt around the middle.

Warm's one of those words, you know? It was still cold

enough for hightherms, and even with hightherms I blew

on my fingers a lot. The sun was red and real close, but

there didn't seem to be a lot of heat in it.

Anyway, he had been there twenty-seven years, he said,

and I said, standard years or world years, and he said,

they were so close it didn't make any difference. World

years were half an hour shorter now, he said, and I

should've asked why now—had they been longer a

while back? Only I didn't think of it right then.

"We got hit by the Atrothers," he said; so it had been

back during the war all right, back before I was born.

"We tried to get home, but we could see we couldn't

make it. This place was close, and we landed here."

We're not there anymore, I told him, we took off. Well,

that shut him up for the rest of the week. So next time I

tried not to say things like that. I know they had him up

to Debriefing three times. So you know they never got

much out of him, didn't get what they wanted, or they

wouldn't have talked to him so much. Somebody said

his mind was blown, and I guess that was sort of right.

Only he used to open up to me sometimes in the break

area, and that's what I want to tell about. Then maybe I

can stop thinking about him.

"There were only three of us," he said, "and Obert died

the first year and Yarmouth the second year. I thought

we were dying off one by one, and I'd go next year if

nobody came. But I didn't. We'd hung up the distress

buoy. It didn't do a bit of good, but I stayed tough."

He looked at me then like I wanted to argue. I just said,

sure.

"The rations ran out," he said. "I had to eat whatever I

could find. There's still a few plants. They're not good,

but you can eat them if you boil them long enough and

keep changing the water."

I said you were there all alone, huh? It must've been

double duty.

Of course that shut him up again, but next day he came

in about ten minutes after I got off shift. He sat down

right where he'd sat before. All the tables are white and

so are the chairs, so it doesn't make any difference

where you sit, it's all the same. Only he knew somehow,

and that's where he sat. I carried my caff over and sat

down across from him and waited.

About ten minutes after that he said, "There was a

woman. A woman was there with me. I wasn't alone.

No. Not really. Not with her there."

I said you should have told us. We'd have taken her off,

too.

He just shook his head.

Later he said it was too late for her. "She's old," he said.

"Old and ugly, and she can't think any more. She tries to

think of new things, but nothing comes. Nothing works

now, and sometimes she can't think at all. She told me.

You've got a good medpod. That's what they say."

I guess I nodded.

"I've been spending a lot of time in there. Maybe it's

helping. I don't know. But it wouldn't help her."

Then he reached over and grabbed my wrist—his hand

was like a vise. "We could have saved her. Earlier. We

could have made her young again. We could have taken

her away. We could have done it. Nothing stopping us."

Next day he wouldn't talk at all, or the day after that

either. I guess I should have just let him alone, but I was

sick of talking to the other guys in the crew. I'd been

talking to them ever since I signed on, and I knew what

they were going to say and the games they wanted to

play and what all their jokes were.

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Gene Wolfe - Castaway

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