After a time Nicholas felt his left side trembling. With his right hand he began to stroke it, running his fingers down his left arm, and from his left shoulder to the thigh. It worried him that his left side should be so frightened, and he wondered if perhaps that other half of his brain, from which he was forever severed, could hear what Ignacio was saying to the waves. Nicholas began to pray himself, so that the other (and perhaps Ignacio too) could hear, saying not quite beneath his breath, “Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, he’s not going to hurt us, he’s nice, and if he does we’ll get him; we’re only going to get something to eat; maybe he’ll show us how to catch fish, I think he’ll be nice this time.” But he knew, or at least felt he knew, that Ignacio would not be nice this time.
Eventually Ignacio stood up; he did not turn to face Nicholas, but waded out to sea; then, as though he had known Nicholas was behind him all the time (though Nicholas was not sure he had been heard—perhaps, so he thought, Dr. Island had told Ignacio), he gestured to indicate that Nicholas should follow him.
The water was colder than Nicholas remembered, the sand coarse and gritty between his toes. He thought of what Dr. Island had told him—about floating—and that a part of her must be this sand, under the water, reaching out (how far?) into the sea; when she ended there would be nothing but the clear temperglass of the satellite itself, far down.
“Come,” Ignacio said. “Can you swim?” Just as though he had forgotten the night before. Nicholas said yes, he could, wondering if Ignacio would look around at him when he spoke. He did not.
“And do you know why you are here?”
“You told me to come.”
“Ignacio means here. Does this not remind you of any place you have seen before, little one?”
Nicholas thought of the crystal gong and the Easter egg, then of the microthin globes of perfumed vapor that, at home, were sometimes sent floating down the corridors at Christmas to explode in clean dust and a cold smell of pine forests when the children stuck them with their hopping canes, but he said nothing.
Ignacio continued, “Let Ignacio tell you a story. Once there was a man, a boy, actually, on the Earth, who—”
Nicholas wondered why it was always men (most often doctors and clinical psychologists, in his experience) who wanted to tell you stories. Jesus, he recalled, was always telling everyone stories, and the Virgin Mary almost never, though a woman Nicholas had once known who thought she was the Virgin Mary had always been talking about her son. Nicholas thought Ignacio looked a little like Jesus. He tried to remember if his mother had ever told him stories when he was at home, and decided that she had not; she just turned on the comscreen to the cartoons.
“—wanted to—”
“—tell a story,” Nicholas finished for him.
“How did you know?” Angry and surprised.
“It was you, wasn’t it? And you want to tell one now.”
“What you said was not what Ignacio would have said. He was going to tell you about a fish.”
“Where is it?” Nicholas asked, thinking of the fish Ignacio had been eating the night before, and imagining another such fish, caught while he had been coming back, perhaps, from the Point, and now concealed somewhere awaiting the fire. “Is it a big one?”
“It is gone now,” Ignacio said, “but it was only as long as a man’s hand. I caught it in the big river.”
Huckleberry— “I know, the Mississippi; it was a catfish. Or a sunfish.” — Finn.
“Possibly that is what you call them; for a time he was as the sun to a certain one.” The light from nowhere danced on the water. “In any event he was kept on that table in the salon in the house where life was lived. In a tank, but not the old kind in which one sees the glass, with metal at the corner. But the new kind in which the glass is so strong, but very thin, and curved so that it does not reflect, and there are no corners, and a clever device holds the water clear.” He dipped up a handful of sparkling water, still not meeting Nicholas’s eyes. “As clear even as this, and there were no ripples, and so you could not see it at all. My fish floated in the center of my table above a few stones.”
Nicholas asked, “Did you float on the river on a raft?”
“No, we had a little boat. Ignacio caught this fish in a net, of which he almost bit through the strands before he could be landed; he possessed wonderful teeth. There was no one in the house but him and the other, and the robots, but each morning someone would go to the pool in the patio and catch a goldfish for him. Ignacio would see this goldfish there when he came down for his breakfast, and would think, Brave goldfish, you have been cast to the monster; will you be the one to destroy him? Destroy him and you shall have his diamond house forever. And then the fish, who had a little spot of red beneath his wonderful teeth, a spot like a cherry, would rush upon that young goldfish, and for an instant the water would be all clouded with blood.”
“And then what?” Nicholas asked.
“And then the clever machine would make the water clear once more, and the fish would be floating above the stones as before, the fish with the wonderful teeth, and Ignacio would touch the little switch on the table, and ask for more bread, and more fruit.”
“Are you hungry now?”
“No, I am tired and lazy now; if I pursue you I will not catch you, and if I catch you—through your own slowness and clumsiness—I will not kill you, and if I kill you I will not eat you.”
Nicholas had begun to back away, and at the last words, realizing that they were a signal, he turned and began to run, splashing through the shallow water. Ignacio ran after him, much helped by his longer legs; his hair flying behind his dark young face, his square teeth—each white as a bone and as big as Nicholas’s thumbnail—showing like spectators who lined the railings of his lips.
“Don’t run, Nicholas,” Dr. Island said with the voice of a wave. “It only makes him angry that you run.” Nicholas did not answer, but cut to his left, up the beach and among the trunks of the palms, sprinting all the way because he had no way of knowing Ignacio was not right behind him, about to grab him by the neck. When he stopped it was in the thick jungle, among the boles of the hardwoods, where he leaned, out of breath, the thumping of his own heart the only sound in an atmosphere silent and unwaked as Earth’s long, prehuman day. For a time he listened for any sound Ignacio might make searching for him; there was none. He drew a deep breath then and said, “Well, that’s over,” expecting Dr. Island to answer from somewhere; there was only the green hush.
The light was still bright and strong and nearly shadowless, but some interior sense told Nicholas the day was nearly over, and he noticed that such faint shades as he could see stretched long, horizontal distortions of their objects. He felt no hunger, but he had fasted before and knew on which side of hunger he stood; he was not as strong as he had been only a day past, and by this time next day he would probably be unable to outrun Ignacio. He should, he now realized, have eaten the monkey he had killed; but his stomach revolted at the thought of the raw flesh, and he did not know how he might build a fire, although Ignacio seemed to have done so the night before. Raw fish, even if he were able to catch a fish, would be as bad or worse than raw monkey; he remembered his effort to open a coconut—he had failed, but it was surely not impossible. His mind was hazy as to what a coconut might contain, but there had to be an edible core, because they were eaten in books. He decided to make a wide sweep through the jungle that would bring him back to the beach well away from Ignacio; he had several times seen coconuts lying in the sand under the trees.