The Locus Awards

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Death of Doctor Island

Gene Wolf

A grain of sand, teetering on the brink of the pit, trembled and fellin; the ant lion at the bottom angrily flung it out again. For a momentthere was quiet. Then the entire pit, and a square meter of sand around it,shifted drunkenly while two coconut palms bent to watch. The sand rose,pivoting at one edge, and the scarred head of a boy appeared -- a stubble ofbrown hair threatened to erase the marks of the sutures; with dilated eyeshypnotically dark he paused, his neck just where the ant lion's had been;then, as though goaded from below, he vaulted up and onto the beach,turned, and kicked sand into the dark hatchway from which he hademerged. It slammed shut. The boy was about fourteen.

For a time he squatted, pushing the sand aside and trying to find thedoor. A few centimeters down, his hands met a gritty, solid material which,though neither concrete nor sandstone, shared the qualities of both -- a sandfilledorganic plastic. On it he scraped his fingers raw, but he could not locatethe edges of the hatch.

Then he stood and looked about him, his head moving continually as theheads of certain reptiles do -- back and forth, with no pauses at the terminationsof the movements. He did this constantly, ceaselessly -- always -- and forthat reason it will not often be described again, just as it will not be mentionedthat he breathed. He did; and as he did, his head, like a rearingsnake's, turned from side to side. The boy was thin, and naked as a frog.

Ahead of him the sand sloped gently down toward sapphire water; therewere coconuts on the beach, and sea shells, and a scuttling crab that playedwith the finger-high edge of each dying wave. Behind him there were onlypalms and sand for a long distance, the palms growing ever closer togetheras they moved away from the water until the forest of their columniatedtrunks seemed architectural; like some palace maze becoming as it progressedmore and more draped with creepers and lianas with green, scarletand yellow leaves, the palms interspersed with bamboo and deciduous treesdotted with flaming orchids until almost at the limit of his sight the wholeended in a spangled wall whose predominant color was black-green.

The boy walked toward the beach, then down the beach until he stoodin knee-deep water as warm as blood. He dipped his fingers and tasted it -- it was fresh, with no hint of the disinfectants to which he was accustomed.He waded out again and sat on the sand about five meters up from the highwatermark, and after ten minutes, during which he heard no sound but thewind and the murmuring of the surf, he threw back his head and began toscream. His screaming was high-pitched, and each breath ended in a gibbering,ululant note, after which came the hollow, iron gasp of the next indrawnbreath. On one occasion he had screamed in this way, withoutcessation, for fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes, at the end of which anursing nun with an exemplary record stretching back seventeen years hadadministered an injection without the permission of the attending physician.

After a time the boy paused -- not because he was tired, but in order tolisten better. There was, still, only the sound of the wind in the palm frondsand the murmuring surf, yet he felt that he had heard a voice. The boy couldbe quiet as well as noisy, and he was quiet now, his left hand sifting whitesand as clean as salt between its fingers while his right tossed tiny pebbleslike beachglass beads into the surf.

"Hear me," said the surf. "Hear me. Hear me."

"I hear you," the boy said.

"Good," said the surf, and it faintly echoed itself: "Good, good, good."

The boy shrugged.

"What shall I call you?" asked the surf.

"My name is Nicholas Kenneth de Vore."

"Nick, Nick . . . Nick?"

The boy stood, and turning his back on the sea, walked inland. Whenhe was out of sight of the water he found a coconut palm growing slopedand angled, leaning and weaving among its companions like the plume ofan ascending jet blown by the wind. After feeling its rough exterior withboth hands, the boy began to climb; he was inexpert and climbed slowlyand a little clumsily, but his body was light and he was strong. In time hereached the top, and disturbed the little brown plush monkeys there, whofled chattering into other palms, leaving him to nestle alone among thestems of the fronds and the green coconuts. "I am here also," said a voicefrom the palm.

"Ah," said the boy, who was watching the tossing, sapphire sky far overhis head.

"I will call you Nicholas."

The boy said, "I can see the sea."

"Do you know my name?"

The boy did not reply. Under him the long, long stem of the twisted palmswayed faintly.

"My friends all call me Dr. Island."

"I will not call you that," the boy said.

"You mean that you are not my friend."

A gull screamed.

"But you see, I take you for my friend. You may say that I am not yours,but I say that you are mine. I like you, Nicholas, and I will treat you as afriend."

"Are you a machine or a person or a committee?" the boy asked.

"I am all those things and more. I am the spirit of this island, the tutelarygenius."

"Bullshit."

"Now that we have met, would you rather I leave you alone?"

Again the boy did not reply ...

---

Excerpted from The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Science Fiction and Fantasy by Charles N. Brown, Jonathan Strahan
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.