Gene Wolfe - On Blue's waters

I was afraid that it might snatch the boat under, and bailed frantically, telling myself again and again that I must cut the line, which was tied to a ringbolt in the keel. I groped for it, terrified that a loop of the uncoiling line would catch my wrist or my ankle. But although I would have sworn an hour before that I could put my hand on that ringbolt in the dark, I would not find it.

The leatherskin surfaced thirty cubits from the bow, snorting blood and water. In less than a minute, the sloop was jerked along behind it, listing fearfully and making more speed than it ever had under sail. I lunged forward (I had been too far aft searching for the ringbolt) to cut the line, but before I could, the leatherskin had done the job for me. The line went slack.

By that time the first stars were out. I ought to have finished bailing and recoiled the line, I suppose, and no doubt done other things as well-gotten out our little tin lantern and lit it.

But I did not. I sat in the stern instead, where I was accustomed to sit, with my trembling hands resting on the tiller; and tried to catch my breath, and felt the hammering of my heart, and tasted the sweet-salt tang of the sea. Spat, and spat again, too tired and shaken to get up and break out a fresh bottle of water.

Green rose larger and brighter than any star, a flying whorl of visible width, where the stars are but twinkling points of light. I watched it climb above the dim white cliffs and swaying incense willows, and wondered whether Silk had seen it, at the bottom of the grave in his dream (where it would have been a fit ornament) and forgotten it when he awakened-or perhaps had only forgotten to tell me about it. Even if it had been there, he would not have known what a horror he saw.

After an hour or more had passed, it occurred to me that if the leatherskin had arrived a few minutes later it would almost certainly have killed me. By the last rays of the Short Sun I had scarcely escaped it.

In the dark…

The thought re-energized me, although I cannot explain why it should. I lit the lantern and ran it up the mast, found the bailer and resumed work, wearily scooping up water as black as ink and flinging it over the side. When I was a boy, we had pumps to raise the water from our wells; none but very backward country people and the poorest of the poor dropped buckets down their wells and hauled them up again; I thought as I worked how much easier a similar device would make it to empty a boat half filled with water, and resolved to build one when I could, and thought about how such a thing might be constructed-a tube of copper or waxwood, a plunger that would first draw the water up, and then, the positions of the valves being reversed by the motion of the handle, force it out another opening and back into the sea.

I longed for paper, pen, and ink. There was plenty of paper in the cargo chests, but I would not have dared to open them for fear it would get wet; and I had no ink and nothing with which to make my drawings, anyway.

Bailing is easy at first, when the water is high. It grows more difficult (as I suppose everyone knows) as it progresses. When my own bailer was scraping wood, I heard a soft and almost stealthy sound that seemed to have returned from the distant past, a whisper of sound that I associated with some similar labor long, long ago, with youth, and with the acrid smell of yellow dust. I left off bailing, straightened up to rest my back, listened, and heard, in addition to that remembered and practically inaudible rusding sigh, the faint creaking of the mast.

The swell was running a trifle higher now, I thought, and rocking us; but the sloop felt as steady under my feet as any floor. The faint rusding returned, perhaps minutely louder, and this time I knew it for what it was-or rather, for what it had been: the sound my father made turning over the pages of his ledger while I swept the floor of his shop. Day was done, palaestra was over, and the shop was about to close. Time to enter the sales, so many few of this and many fewer of that, which would have to be reordered at the end of the month or perhaps at the end of the year. Time to tote up the bits in the cash box and calculate that the total would not quite cover the cost of dinner tonight for Horn (who was helping around the shop so very unwillingly), the rest of the sprats, and the wife.

I spoke aloud to no one, saying, “Time to close,” and went aft to where the pages of Silk’s book were turning themselves, page after water-spotted page, upon one of the chests, in the faintest possible breeze.

Time to close.

So it was, and I thought about that then, I believe for the first time ever. My boyhood was over and done with long ago, and my young manhood was behind me. I had married because it had seemed natural for Nettle and me to marry as we had planned from childhood. We would not willingly separate as long as we both lived, no matter how much distance might separate us; and if she should die before me, I would not marry again. Life and chance had given us three sons; we would have liked a daughter as well, a daughter certainly, or even two; but it was too late for that now, perhaps. Or if not too late, it would be when I returned from the Long Sun Whorl.

Time to close, to tote up accounts.

That, as I realized sitting alone upon the quiet sea, had been the chief reason I had so readily accepted the task those five people had come to persuade me to undertake. How surprised they had been! They had brought food, tents, and trunks full of clothing, expecting to spend a week or more on Lizard; but in my books Silk was an account that had never been closed, one so large that it dwarfed all others. At fifteen, I had thought him the greatest of great men. At thirty-five, only a little taller, thick-bodied and nearly bald, I thought him a great man still.

I closed the book, and secured it in the cubby under the foredeck.

He would meet us at the lander, he had said, if he could; he had not met us there. Latecomers such as Blazingstar had reported that he was still caldé when they had left Viron; but even their information was years out of date. There had been Trivigaunti troopers in the tunnels, and it seemed probable to me then (I mean then, on the sloop) that they had captured him when he had tried to rejoin us. If so, it seemed likely that Generalissimo Siyuf would soon have restored him as caldé, subject to her orders. That would account for the latecomer’s reports, and in that case he might be governing Viron still, with every decision he made dictated by some cruel and arrogant Trivigaunti general.

Yet there were half a dozen other possibilities. No more settlers had reached us from Old Viron for years now, and Silk might have died aboard a lander that had failed to reach either whorl; everyone knew that not all the landers that left the Whorl landed safely on Blue or Green.

Equally, he might have been killed on Siyuf’s orders at a later date, or been deposed by her or some other Trivigaunti; in which case he might be living in exile.

With or without Hyacinth, he might have boarded a lander that took him to Green, and if he had he was presumably dead. Equally, he might have landed on some part of Blue remote from us. (This still seems possible to me, as I wrote when I began this straggling history.) Before they left Lizard, I had brought up the possibility with Marrow and the rest, and they had agreed that it could not be discounted entirely. Here I am in a part of Blue a very considerable distance from New Viron, and hear nothing of Silk; but that means nothing. If he were a hundred leagues east of Gaon and me-or on Shadelow-it would explain everything.

I may find him yet. Perseverance and prayer! All is not lost until I give up the search.

Very busy the last few days, busy until I was at length forced to put off all the others who desired to speak with me or desired to do it again, telling them that I required rest and prayer (which was true enough) and that my subordinates would hear their protestations, weigh their proofs, and decide matters. And telling my subordinates in turn that I trusted their judgment (which is not entirely false) and would support their decisions as long as they played no favorites and took no bribes.