Gene Wolfe - On Blue's waters

“Yes,” I said. “Certainly.”

“I used to walk up the trunk until I stood quite high in the air, and look out over the sea from there, looking for boats, or just looking at the weather we were about to get. It was a waste of time, but I enjoyed it.”

I tried to say that I did not think she had been wasting her time, but succeeded only in sounding foolish.

“Thank you, Horn. Thank you. That’s very nice of you. Look at the sea, Horn, while you can. Look at it for me, if you won’t do it for yourself.”

I promised I would, and did so as I spoke. The rock offered a fine view in every direction.

“It wasn’t good soil,” Maytera Marble continued. “It was too sandy. I grew a few things there, though. Enough to feed my granddaughter, and a little bit over that I took to town and sold, or gave the palaestra. I had a little vegetable patch in the garden at our manteion. Do you remember? Vegetables and herbs.”

I had forgotten it, but her words brought back the memory very vividly.

“Patera had tomatoes and berry brambles, but I had onions and chives, marjoram and rosemary, and red and yellow peppers. All sorts of things. Little red radishes in spring, and lettuces all summer. I tried to grow the same things on our farm, and succeeded with most of them. But my granddaughter would swim out here and stay for days and days. It worried me.”

Looking east to the mainland, I said, “It would worry me, too. It’s a very long swim, and she can’t be strong.”

“I built a little boat, then. I had to, so I could come out here and get her. I found a hollow log and scraped out all the rotten wood, and made ends for it. They were just big wooden plugs, really, but they kept the water from running in. Sometimes she would not go, and I’d have to stay out here with her till she would. That was why I built this little house. Then a storm came, a terrible one. I thought it was going to blow our little house away. It didn’t, but it broke my boat. I can’t swim, Horn.”

She looked up as she said it in such a way that sunshine struck her face, and I saw that her faceplate was gone. The lumps and furrows that had seemed deformities were a host of mechanisms her faceplate had hidden when I had known her earlier. Trying to ignore them, I said, “I can take you both back to the mainland in my sloop, Maytera. Nettle and I built it to carry our paper to the market in town, and it will carry the three of us easily.”

She shook her head. “She wouldn’t go, Horn, and I won’t leave her out here alone. I only wish-but I don’t worry about falling off anymore. I tap on the stone with my stick, you see.” She demonstrated, rapping the rock between us. “A man who came to consult my granddaughter made it for me, so now I can always find the edge.”

“That’s good.”

“It is. Yes, it is. I was feeling blue when you came, Horn. I feel blue at times, and sometimes it lasts days and days.”

Her free hand groped for me, and I stepped nearer so that she could put it on my shoulder.

“How tall you’ve grown! Why, you’ve taken me out of myself, just by coming to see us. Not that I should ever be blue anyway. I had good eyes for hundreds and hundreds of years. Most people don’t get to see things for anything like that long. Look at all the children who die before they’re grown! Dead at fifteen or twelve or ten, Horn, and I could name a dead child for you for every year between fifteen and birth.”

When she spoke again, the voice was Maytera Rose’s. “My other eyes. I had them less than a hundred years, and Marble ought to have taken them when she took my hands and so many other things. Taken the good one, I mean, for one was blind.

“But I didn’t. I left her eyes, because I never realized my own were wearing out. Her processor, yes. I took that, but not her eye. Horn?”

“Yes, I’m still here, Maytera. Is there some way I can help you?”

“You already have, by bringing us those nice bottles of water for my granddaughter and her pet. That was very, very fine of you, and I will never forget it. But you’re going home, Horn? Isn’t that what you said? Going back to-to the whorl we used to live in?”

I told her that I was going to try to go wherever Silk was and bring him to New Viron, which was what I had sworn to do; and that I thought he was probably in Old Viron, in which case I was going to go there if the people of Pajarocu would allow me on their lander.

“Then I want to ask a very great favor. Will you do me a very great favor, Horn, if you can?” Her free hand left my shoulder and Went to her own face. “My faceplate is gone. I took it off myself, and put it away somewhere. Have I told you?”

I shook my head, forgetting for a moment that she could not see it.

“We were here on this rock, my granddaughter and I, after the storm, and one of my eyes just went out. I told myself that it was all right, that the other one would probably last for years and years yet, and I could take good care of my poor granddaughter with one eye as well as I had with two.”

She sounded so despondent that I said, “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“I do. I must. It was only four days, Horn. Four days after my left eye failed, my right eye failed, too. I took them out and reversed them, because I knew there was a chance that one might work then, but it didn’t help. That was when I took my faceplate off, because I felt somehow that it was in the way, that I was trying to look through it. And I couldn’t have. It’s solid metal, aluminum I think. They all are.”

Not knowing what else to say, I said, “Yes.”

“It didn’t help, but I’ve left it off ever since. My poor granddaughter doesn’t complain, and I’m more comfortable without it for some reason.”

As she spoke, she had plucked her right eye from its socket.

“Here, Horn. Take it, please. It’s a bad part, and not of the least use to me anymore.”

Reluctantly, I let her put it into my hand, which she closed around it for me with her own slender fleshlike fingers.

“If I were to tell you what it is, the part number and all that, it would be of very little use to you. But with the actual part, you might be able to find another one, and you’ll recognize it if you come across one.”

I resolved then to make every effort to find two (at which I have failed also) and told her so.

“Thank you, Horn. I know you will. You were always such a good boy. Sometimes it’s very hard to bear, but I shouldn’t feel blue. I really shouldn’t. The gods have given me a-a consolation prize, I suppose you’d call it. I can see into the future now, just as my dear sib Maytera Mint could. Did I tell you?”

I believe I must have said that I had always assumed she could prophesy, as all sibyls could.

“I wasn’t any good at it, because I couldn’t ever see the pictures. I knew the things everybody knows, what an enlarged heart means, and all those commonplace indicants. But I couldn’t see things in the entrails the way my dear sib could, and Patera, too. Now I can. Isn’t that strange? Now that I’m blind, I have ulterior vision. I can’t see the entrails till I touch them. But when I do, I see the pictures.”

Silk, I knew, had prophesied in that way; but I also knew that he had not had great faith in such prophesies. He had been both fascinated by and skeptical of the entire procedure. Bearing all that in mind, I asked whether she would be willing to prophesy for me, provided I could supply a good big fish for a victim.

“Why, yes, Horn. I’m very flattered.”

She paused, thinking. “We must have another fire for your sacrifice, however. A fire here outside. I built a little altar of stones, too. It’s what I use when the men who come in boats want me to do it.”