Gene Wolfe: Incubator

“You’ll know it right away,” Fil had said, smiling. He had a charming smile. “Our roof was designed by some lunatic, and it’s all tile, sort of between a greenish yellow and a yellowish green.” When she had said nothing Fil added, “Depends on how the sun strikes it. There’s nothing like it for thousands of kilos—nothing else like it in the world, probably. I mean, who’d want a roof like that?”

She had remarked that she still did not understand why the locator would not take her straight there. “Don’t know,” Fil had said. He had golden hair, like someone in an old, old painting. “Something Father did, probably.” Then he vanished, and a hundred vocal and keyed commands had not brought him back.

There it was, over there! That jumble of poisoned leaves! She guided L-87 with a gesture and told him to land with another.

It was all garden here, no paths at all that she could see, no paved paths, no bridle paths, just lush green grass among straggling rose bushes. Were not roses supposed to bloom all summer? All winter, too, even here north of the line? These roses did not know the rules, or most did not. A few blue or green blossoms here and there. And foliage, though not as lush as she had expected.

She took a dozen steps before the thought struck, but once it did she knew that it was quite correct. These roses had not been chosen for their blossoms or even for their foliage. Chosen for something else. From fear, she refrained from naming it, even silently. No name, and no looking at those.

Left, then right, then straight on for twenty-odd steps and here was the inhabitation. She positioned in front of the lens, standing far enough back to give it a full view. Blond, she reminded herself. That was what Fil’s yellow hair was called. Dark blue eyes? Was she imagining those? Could semihumans, even blond ones, really have two such eyes?

The voice of the door was not his. “Come right in. It’s not locked.”

A woe man’s? An android’s?

The door swung open before she touched it. The room beyond was large and many-shadowed, with a ceiling that had to be three stories high—no, five. It seemed to draw her up like sky, promising something she could not have named. A row of pillars to the left, mucus stretched from floor to ceiling.

“Father wanted you to come here.”

Gene Wolfe: The Detective of Dreams

I was writing in my office in the rue Madeleine when Andrée, my secretary, announced the arrival of Herr D_____. I rose, put away my correspondence, and offered him my hand. He was, I should say, just short of fifty, had the high, clear complexion characteristic of those who in youth (now unhappily past for both of us) have found more pleasure in the company of horses and dogs and the excitement of the chase than in the bottles and bordels of city life, and wore a beard and mustache of the style popularized by the late emperor. Accepting my invitation to a chair, he showed me his papers.

"You see," he said, "I am accustomed to acting as the representative of my government. In this matter I hold no such position, and it is possible that I feel a trifle lost."

"Many people who come here feel lost," I said. "But it is my boast that I find most of them again. Your problem, I take it, is purely a private matter?"

"Not at all. It is a public matter in the truest sense of the words."

"Yet none of the documents before me—admirably stamped, sealed, and beribboned though they are—indicates that you are other than a private gentleman traveling abroad. And you say you do not represent your government. What am I to think? What is the matter?"

"I act in the public interest," Herr D_____ told me. "My fortune is not great, but I can assure you that in the event of your success you will be well recompensed; although you are to take it that I alone am your principal, yet there are substantial resources available to me."

"Perhaps it would be best if you described the problems to me?"

"You are not averse to travel?"

"No."

"Very well then," he said, and so saying launched into one of the most astonishing relations—no, the most astonishing relation—I have ever been privileged to hear. Even I, who had at first hand the account of the man who found Paulette Renan with the quince seed still lodged in her throat; who had received Captain Brotte's testimony concerning his finds amid the Antarctic ice; who had heard the history of the woman called Joan O'Neal, who lived for two years behind a painting of herself in the Louvre, from her own lips—even I sat like a child while this man spoke.

When he fell silent, I said, "Herr D_____, after all you have told me, I would accept this mission though there were not a sou to be made from it. Perhaps once in a lifetime one comes across a case that must be pursued for its own sake; I think I have found mine."