Gene Wolfe - On Blue's waters

I picked up the newly made slug gun, and told Marrow that I would need a sling of some kind for it.

“Aren’t you going to argue it with me? Your Caldé Silk would have, if you ask me.”

“No,” I told him. “If the parents are poor enough, the children starve. That would be enough for Silk, and it’s enough for me.”

“Well, you’ve the right of it. If they’re poor enough, the parents do, too. That boy of yours would tell me people can hunt, but you think about filling every belly here, year in and year out, by hunting. They’d have to scatter out, and when they were, every family’d have to hunt for itself. No more paper and no more books, no carpentry because they’d be moving camp every few days and tables and so on’s too heavy to carry. Pretty soon they wouldn’t even have pack saddles.”

I said it would not matter, since those who owned horses or mules would eat them after a year or two, and he nodded gloomily and dropped into a chair. “You like that gun?”

“Yes. Very much.”

“It’s yours. Take it out to your boat when you go back. Take that green box on the bottom shelf, too. It’s cartridges from a lander and never been opened. Our new ones work, but they’re not as good.”

I said that I would prefer new cartridges nevertheless, and he indicated a wooden box that held fifty. I told him about the paper I had on the sloop, and offered it to him to offset-in part, at least-the cost of the slug gun and the food he had promised me.

He shook his head. “I’m giving you the gun and the rest of it. The cartridges and harpoon, and the apples and wine and the other stuff. It’s the least I can do. But if you’ll let me have that paper, I’ll give whatever I get for it to your wife. Would you like me to do that? Or I can hold the money for you, until you get back.”

“Give it to Nettle, please. I left her with little enough, and she and Sinew are going to have to buy rags and more wood soon.”

He regarded me from under his brows. “You took your own boat, too, when I was going to let you have one of mine.”

“Sinew will build a new one, I’m sure. He’ll have to, and I believe it will be good that he has something to do besides run our mill, something he can watch grow under his hands. That will be important, at first particularly.”

“You’re deeper than you look. Your book shows it.”

I said that I hoped I was deep enough, and asked whether he had found anyone who had actually been to Pajarocu.

“Not yet, but there’s a new trader in the harbor every few days. You want to wait?”

“For a day or two, at least. I think it would be worth that to have firsthand information.”

“Want to see their letter again? There’s nothing there to tell where it is, not to me, anyhow. But you might see something there I missed, and you hardly looked at it back on your island.”

“I own only the southern part, the southern third or so. No, I don’t want to read it again, or at least not now. Can you have somebody copy the entire thing for me, in a clearer hand? I’d like to have a copy to take with me.”

“No trouble. My clerk can do it.” Again, he looked at me narrowly. “Why does my clerk bother you?”

“It shouldn’t.”

“I know that. What I want to know is why it does.”

“When we were in the tunnels and on the lander, and for years after we landed, I thought…” Words failed me, and I turned away.

“You figured we’d all be free and independent here? Like you?”

Reluctantly, I nodded.

“You got a farm, you and your girl. Your wife. You couldn’t make a go of it. Couldn’t raise enough to feed yourselves, even.”

This is too painful. There is pain enough in the whorl already, should I inflict more on myself?

On Green, I met a man who could not see the inhumi. They were there, but his mind would not accept them. You might say that his sight recoiled in horror from them. In just the same way, my own interior sight refuses to focus upon matters I find agonizing. In Ermine’s I dreamed that I had killed Silk. Is it possible that I actually tried once, firing Nettle’s needier at him when he disappeared into the mist? Or that I did not really give him mine?

(I should have told Sinew that the needier I was leaving with him had been his mother’s. It was the one she had taken from General Saba and given to me outside the entrance to the tunnels, and I have never seen a better one. Later, of course, I did.)

More pain, but this I must put down. For my own sake, I intend to make it as brief as possible-just a paragraph or two, if I can.

When I returned to the sloop, I found that I had been robbed, my cargo chests broken into and my paper gone, with much cordage and a few other things that I had brought from Lizard.

Before I had left to go to Marrow’s, I had asked the owner of the boat tied up beside mine, a man I had attended palaestra with, to watch the sloop for me. He had promised he would. Now I went to speak to him. He could not meet my eyes, and I knew that it was he himself who had robbed me. I fought him and beat him, but I did not get my paper back.

After that, bruised and bleeding, I sought help from Gyrfalcon, Blazingstar, and Eschar, but received none. Eschar was away on one of his boats. Gyrfalcon and Blazingstar were both too busy to see me.

Or so I was told by their clerks.

I received a little help from Calf, who swore that it was all he could give, and none at all from my other brothers; in the end I had to go back to Marrow, explain the situation, and beg to borrow three cards. He agreed, took my bond for the amount plus eight percent, then tore it up as I watched. I owe him a great deal more than the three cards and this too-brief acknowledgment.

When I had refitted I put out, sailing south along the coast, looking for something that had been described to me as a rock with a haystack on it.

While I had talked with Marrow before I was robbed, I had considered how I could learn something that His Cognizance had been unwilling to tell me when we had conferred the day I made port. Eventually I realized that Marrow was more than acute enough to see through any sleight of mine; the only course open to me was to ask him outright, which I did.

“The girl’s still alive,” he said, stroking his chin, “but I haven’t seen or heard tell of the old sibyl in quite a time.”

“Neither have I,” I told him, “but I should have. She was here in town, and I was out on Lizard, mostly, and it always seemed possible I would run across her someday when I brought paper to the market.” Full of self-recriminations I added, “I suppose I imagined that she would live forever, that she would always be here if I wanted her.”

Marrow nodded. “Boys think like that.”

“You’re right. Mine do, at least. When you’re so young that things have changed very little during your lifetime, you suppose that they never will. It’s entirely natural, but it is a bad mistake and wrong even in the moral sense more often than not.”

I waited for his comment, but he made none.

“So now… Well, I’m going to look for Silk, and he’s far away if he’s alive at all. And it seems even more wrong for me to leave without having seen Maggie. She’s no longer a sibyl, by the way.”

“Yes, she is.” Marrow was almost apologetic. “Our Prolocutor’s made her one again.”

“He didn’t tell me that.” (In point of fact, he had flatly refused to tell me anything about her.) “Did you know I talked to him?”

Marrow nodded.

“That was what I wanted to learn, or the principal thing. I wanted to find out what happened to her and Mucor, but he wouldn’t tell me or even say why he wouldn’t. You must know where they are, and he concedes that they’re still alive.”