Gene Wolfe - On Blue's waters

Who can say?

It is very late, yet I feel I must write a little tonight, must continue this narrative I have not touched for three days or abandon it altogether. How odd to come to it by lamplight and read that I went to sleep instead of putting out from New Viron. I was so confident then that the lander at Pajarocu would fly as soon as it was ready, that it would return to the Whorl as promised, and that I would be on it if only I arrived in time. I was a child, and Marrow and the rest (whom I thought men and women as I thought myself a man grown), were only older children who risked far less.

The storms are worse. There was a bad one today, though it is nearly spent as my clock’s hands close. Almost all our date palms are gone, they say, and we will miss them terribly. I must remember to find out how long a seedling must grow before it bears. Twelve years? Let us hope it is not as long as that. The people are apprehensive, even the troopers of my bodyguard. Tonight I gathered some around me while the storm raged outside.

“A few of you seem to think that since the inhumi cross the abyss at conjunction they must leave before conjunction is past,” I said. “Why should they, when there are so many of us here, so much blood for them? I tell you that though some who have tarried here for years will leave as the whorls conjoin, returning to Green to breed, most will remain. Do you doubt me?”

They were shamefaced, and did not reply.

“There were many here last year, or so you tell me. And many the year before. Are you in greater danger from them now? Surely not! More will come, but we will be on guard against them; and they, being less experienced, will be a lesser threat to us. Will you sleep at your posts when the first is caught and interred alive in the market? The second? The third? I hope not. Nor should you relax when this conjunction is over, as it soon will be.”

Brave words, and they served a dress rehearsal for the speeches I must give in the next few months.

Would it be effective for us to dig up one of the recent inhumations and release him to warn the others? The thought recurs.

If the inhumas’ eggs hatched in our climate, would not our human kind become extinct? What tricks Nature plays! If they are natural creatures at all.

But they surely are. Natural creatures native to Green. Why would the Neighbors create something so malign?

Last night I intended to continue my narrative, but failed to advance it by even a finger’s width. I will do better this afternoon.

I sailed at shadeup, as I had planned. Much to my surprise, Marrow came down to see me off and present me with two parting gifts, small square heavy boxes. The wind was in the southeast, and a very good wind it was for me, so we shook hands and he embraced me and called me his son, and I untied the mooring lines and raised the mainsail.

Just as Mucor had waited until I was well under way and could not easily return her gift before presenting me with Babbie, and as Sinew had waited before throwing me his precious knife, so Marrow waited before presenting me with his third and final gift. It was his stick, which he flung aboard in imitation of Sinew (I had told him about it) when I was well away from the pier. I shouted thanks, and I believe I picked it up and flourished it, too, though I could not help thinking about Blood’s giving Patera Silk his lion-headed stick.

Was I wrong to think of it? Marrow has his bad side, I am sure; and I am perfectly certain he would be the first to admit it. Blood, who was Maytera Rose’s son, had his good side, too. Silk always insistcd on it, and I have not the least doubt that Silk, who was nearly always right, was right about that as well. The head of a large enterprise-even a criminal enterprise-cannot be wholly bad. If he were, his subordinates could not trust him. Orchid signed the paper he gave her without reading it, and accepted the money he gave her to buy the yellow house, knowing that he would extort as much money from her and her women as he could-but knowing, too, that he would not destroy her.

Marrow’s stick, as I ought to have said somewhat sooner, was of a heavy wood so dark as to be nearly black, and had a silver band below the knob with his name on it. I do not believe that he meant to give it to me until the moment arrived, and I liked him and it all the better for it. I showed Babbie that I had something to beat him with now, and as a joke ordered him to put up the jib; but he only glared, and I hauled it up myself Sometime after that I saw him fingering the halyard, and was amazed.

A little after noon, as I recall, we passed Lizard. Course due north, wind moderate and west by south. I had promised myself that I would stand far out, and I did, and likewise that I would not peer ashore in the hope of catching sight of Nettle or the twins. That promise, as I quickly discovered, was worth very little. I stared, and stood upon the gunwale, and stared some more, and waved. All of it was to no purpose, since I saw no one.

Did anyone see me? The answer must surely be yes. Sinew did, and launched our old boat, which he must have spent the days since my departure in repairing and refitting. I did not see him or it, and nothing that he had said before I left had suggested he might do anything of the kind.

Marrow’s other gifts proved to be a small box of silver jewelry with which to trade, and an even smaller box of silver bars. These last I hid with great care, promising myself that I would not trade them unless I was forced to. I would (as I then thought) find somebody at Pajarocu who would watch the sloop for me while I went for Silk. When the lander returned, Silk and I could sail back to New Viron in it; and I would have the silver bars for my trouble, and to help him if their help were required.

Wijzer had cautioned me against stopping at every port I came to, but his advice had been unnecessary. I was acutely conscious that putting in anywhere would cost me at least a day and might easily cost two or three, and resolved to sail north until resupply was urgent, put in at the nearest town, and turn west. That plan held only until I passed the first. Thereafter it always seemed that something was needed (water particularly) or advisable, and we put in at almost every town along the way. As Babbie came to trust me, the nocturnal nature of all hus asserted itself, so that he drowsed by day but woke at shadelow-a most useful arrangement even when we were not in port. The wind was so steady and so reliably out of the west or the southwest that I generally lashed the tiller and let the sloop sail herself under jib and reefed mainsail. Before I lay down each night, I instructed Babbie to wake me if anything unusual occurred; like Marrow he grunted his assent, but he never actually woke me, to the best of my memory. I have forgotten how many towns we put in at altogether. Five or six in six weeks’ sailing would be about right, I believe.

A visitor has presented me with a great rarity, a little book called The Healing Beds printed more than a hundred years ago in the Whorl . It is a treatise on gardening, with special emphasis on herbs, the work of a physician; but although it is pleasant to page through it, studying its quaint hand-colored illustrations and reading snatches of text, it is not of that book I intend to write today, but of its effect on this one.

It has made me acutely aware that this book of mine, which I have intended for my wife and sons, may very well be read long after they-and I-are gone. Even Hoof and Horn [sic], who must just be entering young manhood now, will someday be as old as Marrow and Patera Remora. There is argument about the length of the year here, and how well it agrees with the year we knew in the Long Sun Whorl, but the difference must be slight if there is any; in fifty years, Horn and Hide [sic] may well be dead. In a hundred, their sons and daughters will be gone too. These words, which I pen with so little thought-or hope-or expectation-may possibly endure long beyond that, endure for two centuries or even three, valued increasingly and so preserved with greater care as the whorl they describe fades into history.