Fifth Head of Cerberus - the *real* story
by Rui Carrilho
So, the story is actually this:
Humans came to colonize Sainte-Anne, and it’s neighbour, Sainte-Croix. In the first story, David and Number Five (whose real name is totally Gene Wolfe) discuss what happened to the abos, the aboriginee people who were on those planets before humanity came. One crackpot theory put forward by Dr Veil, Gene’s “aunt” (actually daughter) is that the abos were shapeshifters, who killed the settlers and took their place. While this seems preposterous, it’s hinted by the other stories to be exactly the case.
In the second novella, it’s straight up said by the Shadow Children that they are what remains of the humans that came to Sainte Anne. According to them, the shapeshifters (abos) took their form, while they became addicted to a hallucinogenic plant and dwindled, becoming a very few bunch of cannibals, scavengers, and kinda-magical people who can spawn a mental construct (the Great Old One) with the echoes of their minds. Sandwalker befriends them, and they help him throughout the story, and ultimately save him in the climax - one of the last remaining Children, determined not to die, reveals that the Shadow Children are all using their mystical powers to keep spaceships away from the planet, for not-entirely-explained reasons. At the end, the child stops doing that, and a bunch of ships touch down on the planet, scaring the marshmen abos who are about to sacrifice Sandwalker and his family. This story is supposedly written by Dr. Marsch, an anthropologist we meet in the previous story.
The third story only makes sense when you consider the other two. In it, a soldier (who according to a cleverer writer is Number Five’s brother) analyzes the writings of an imprisoned Marsch, to decide what to do with him. The story is told out of order, but it’s easy to see what happened by putting the writings’ dates together. It starts off easy enough - Marsch finds an old drunk who claims he’s an abo (probably a fake, and his wife is the real deal), namely a descendant from Eastwind (from the former novella, who somehow got confused with Sandwalker at the end) and that his son is part abo. He volunteers his son to help Marsch go up to a sacred abo cave (likely one mentioned in the second story, where Sandwalker’s guru was). Marsch is surprised at the kid’s prowess at just about everything, except using tools. They make great progress on their journey towards the cave, with Marsch, supposedly an adept marksman, killing every bit of wildlife on the way (except a cat, which the kid tames). At one point, Marsch becomes certain that the boy is covertly seeing a girl, probably an abo. Then, the problems start.
One day, the cat attacks Marsch for no apparent reason, wounding his hand, tanking his shooting and his handwriting. Then, in a freak accident, the boy dies, after clumsily falling from a great height (which does not match what we’ve seen of him). Marsch, agitated by the death, buries him in a cave, along with the cat, and gives up on the expedition. In short order, after visiting Dr. Veil (happened in the first novella), he gets arrested for espionage. He gets interrogated multiple times throughout his years of captivity, and his interrogator believes his writings to be rubbish, and that Marsch has come to help topple Saint-Croix’s slavery-approving regime. By the end of his writings, Marsch decides to stop writing, to avoid giving his captors material with which to condemn him. At the end of the novella, the soldier advises that they keep Marsch imprisoned until he becomes cooperative, instead of executing or releasing him.
There’s clearly a deeper mystery at play, and to anyone paying attention, it’s clear that something’s off - Marsch’s writings at the start of the journey show that the man is a scatterbrained chatterbox. He’s also a great shot, using his rifle to slaughter the wildlife, while the boy sucks at using tools of any sort (like the abos). After his “cat attack”, his handwriting deteriorates, as well as his aim. This also happens along the time where the boy “dies”, and Marsch’s writing also completely changes by then, becoming far less rambling, straight to the point, and similar to Sandwalker’s POV. He straight up refers to Sainte-Anne as “sisterworld”, which only the abos do. What happened is obvious - the boy has killed Marsch, probably after Marsch stumbled upon him and the girl, and then impersonated him. Whether Marsch was a spy or not is unclear, though there is some evidence that he was, but as the abo boy (V.R.T btw) knew nothing of that, he is can’t tell the captors anything about that, leading to his current situation.
It gets muddier when you put all stories together. In this first one, Gene Wolfe meets Marsch two times. This clearly happens after the kid has impersonated him. In any case, the second time, as he’s in a hurry to kill his father, he gets Marsch to leave by saying he is clearly an abo (why he says this is not clear, probably due to a weird pallor he has going on, along with his reluctance to leave for Earth). Gene’s brother David is also aware of the abo theories, probably recognizes him as an abo, and decides to make use of his shapeshifting abilities as a spy. In any case, the story ends there.
Funny how even after piecing together the mystery, we still end up without the whole story. This is probably by design from Wolfe, to motivate the reader to make up his own ending to it, or to fill in the blanks however he wishes. Personally, I found the mystery compelling, the prose enriched to the point where a single sentence carries volumes of information and beauty, and the pacing utterly perfect. Each of the stories does its own thing, and does it quite well. Well done Gene Wolfe. This is an underrated sci-fi classic for the ages.