Gene Wolfe - On Blue's waters

“Do you like me?”

It was said so artlessly and with such childlike seriousness that I knew there could be only one answer. “Yes,” I told her, “I like you very much.”

She smiled. It was as if a child had smiled, and by smiling had rendered her face transparent, so that I could see the woman she would someday be and had always been, the woman who stands behind all women and stands behind even Kypris, Thelxiepeia, and Echidna. If that woman has a name I do not know it; “Seawrack” is as good a name as any.

Remaining where the smooth green shore dipped underwater, because it was plain that she was badly frightened, I asked where she had come from, and she pointed over the side. “Yes,” I said, “I can see you’ve been swimming. Did you swim here from another boat?”

“Down there. Do you want me to show you?” This was said eagerly, so I said I did. She dove, not stepping up onto the gunwale as I would have, but diving across it with liquid ease.

I went aboard then, and Babbie with me, expecting to see her in the water. She was not there, although for ten minutes if not more I walked from one side to the other, and from bow to stern looking for her. She had vanished utterly.

At last I saw my own reflection (which I had been trying to look past before) and realized that I was covered with the batfish’s blood, dry and cracking by this time, and remembered that I had planned to wash myself in the sea as soon as we got back to the sloop.

I had already begun to doubt my sanity. It occurred to me then that the batfish’s blood had somehow poisoned me, or that I had eaten its flesh-I had actually cut some for Babbie-and so poisoned myself. I questioned him then, and from his answers knew that the young woman I had seen had been real. I had seen and spoken to a young woman with one arm who had worn rings and anklets set with gems, a young woman with a fine gold chain about her waist.

“Red earrings, too,” I told him. “Or pink. I caught a glimpse of those through her hair. They may have been coral.” His look said very plainly, Well, I saw no such thing. “A year or two older than Hoof and Hide, I’d say. Rounded and very graceful, but there was muscle there. We saw it when she dove. And she…”

The complete implausibility of what I was saying crashed down on me, and I pulled off my boots and stockings in silence, jumped out of the sloop, and washed myself and my clothes as well.

Returning, I spread everything in the foredeck to dry. “Do you remember the singing we heard? That was her. It had to be, and she’s as beautiful as she is real.” He regarded me sheepishly for a few seconds, then slunk off to the foredeck and his accustomed place in the bow.

I shaved and combed what remained of my hair, and put on fresh underclothes, another tunic, and my best trousers. The ones I had washed in seawater would be stiff and unpleasantly sticky, I knew, unless it rained so that I could rinse them in fresh. Because the air was sullen and still, I thought it might; and I made what small preparations I could, bailing the sloop dry and breaking out the few utensils I had that could be employed to catch rainwater. After that, there was nothing more to do. Neither the vacant plain of green that seemed almost to roll like the sea, nor the oily sea itself, held anything of interest. I reviewed my brief conversation with Seawrack (whom I did not yet call that) trying to decide whether I might have kept her with me if I had spoken differently. For I wanted her to remain with me. I wanted that very badly, as I was forced to admit to myself as I shaved. It was not only that I desired her. (What man can see a beautiful woman naked and not desire her?) Nor was it that I hoped to take her gold; I would have cut off my own arm rather than rob her. It was that I felt certain she needed my help, which I was very eager to provide, and that I had somehow frightened her back to the troubles she had fled.

The men who had commanded the black boat would certainly have robbed me if they could, and would very likely have killed me as well. They would not have killed an attractive young woman, however. Not if I knew anything of criminals and criminal ways. They would have forced her to join them, as they had no doubt forced the woman I had shot and the rest. They had (so I imagined) taken Seawrack’s clothing so she would not escape; but she had escaped, and had first decked herself in their loot when she could find nothing else to wear-unless I was in sober fact a madman.

She had said, “I am one of you.” I should have welcomed her then, and I wished desperately that I had. I had asked about the boat she had come from, and she had said it was “Down there.”

Her boat had sunk after she got here, plainly; and while she had been waiting for us, she had swum underwater to inspect the wreck. When I had said that I wanted to see it, she had assumed that I would go with her, and so had dived into the sea-after which, something had prevented her from surfacing again.

I recalled the batfish with sick horror. It had been in the tarn, not in the sea; but the tarn must have been linked with the sea in some fashion, since its water had been too salt to drink and it could not have supported a creature as large as the devilish thing we found in it for long.

I baited several hooks, tied them to floats, and set them out around the sloop; and after an hour or so of inactivity which by that time I found very welcome, caught some good-sized fish that I gutted and filleted with the same knife that had killed the batfish. Using what little dry wood we had, I built a small fire in the sandbox, rolled my fillets in cornmeal and cooking oil, and fried the first in the little long-handled pan we always kept on the sloop. “Are you going to eat that?”

I did not actually drop the pan, but I must have tilted it enough for the fillet to slide into the fire. “You’re back!” I had practically broken my neck looking around at her; I stood up as I spoke, and that is when it must have happened. “She made me.”

Seawrack was not in the sloop with me, but she had pulled herself up to look over the gunwale. The music of her voice woke Babbie, and I saw again that she was terribly afraid of him. I assured her that he would not harm her, and told him emphatically that he was not to hurt her or do anything that might alarm her.

“Can I…?”

“What is it?” I asked. “You can do anything you like-with me to help, if you’ll let me.”

“Can I have one of the others?”

“These?” I picked up one of the other fillets, and she nodded.

“Absolutely. I’ll cook it for you, too, if you want.” I glanced at the pan and realized that the one I had prepared for myself was burning on the coals. I added, “Not that I’m very good at it.”

She was looking at the one I held and licking her lips, with something utterly wretched in her expression.

“Would you like it now?” I asked. “I know some people enjoy raw fish.”

A new voice said, “Do not give it to her.” It seemed that the words issued from the sea itself.

The top of the speaker’s head broke the water, and she rose effortlessly until the oily swell reached no higher than her waist. I can never forget that gradual, facile ascension. Like the face of Kypris seen in the glass of General Saba’s airship it remains vivid today, the streaming form of a cowled woman robed in pulsing red, a woman three times my own stature at least, with the setting sun behind her. I knelt and bowed my head.

“Help my daughter into your boat.”

I did as she had commanded, although Seawrack needed scant help from me.

“Prepare that fish as you would for yourself. When it is ready, give it to her.”

I said, “Yes, Great Goddess.”

The goddess (for I was and am quite confident that she was one of the Vanished Gods of Blue) used Seawrack’s name, saying, “You must go to your own people. Your time with me is ended.”