Gene Wolfe: On Blue's waters

Your smile was sad then, Nettle darling-it hurt me to see it. “Yet they are beautiful and true,” you told him, “as real as my parents and your father’s father, who are not here either.”

“That’s right,” I told Hoof, “but what you said wasn’t. You implied that Pas was a god only in the Long Sun Whorl.” Secretly I agreed with him, although I did not want to say so.

Sinew came to his brother’s defense, surprising and pleasing me. “Well, Pas isn’t much of a god here, no matter what the old Prolocutor in town says.”

“I agree. The point that you’re both forgetting… I’m not sure how I can explain. We call this whorl Blue, and call our sun here the Short Sun.”

“Sure.”

“At home, we called the whorl our ancestors came from the Short Sun Whorl. Your mother will remember that, I’m sure, and I remember talking with Patera Silk about all the wisdom and science that we left behind there.”

You said, “We put that in our book.”

“Yes, we certainly did.”

Hide had been waiting for a chance. “I don’t see what any of this has to do with maize.”

“It has everything to do with it. I was about to say that when Pas stocked the landers it was on that earlier Short Sun Whorl. He was a god there, you see, and I think probably the greatest. Since he was, he’s capable of becoming a god here, too, although he hasn’t done it, or at least hasn’t let us know he’s done it yet.”

No one contradicted me.

“One evening, when I was being punished for making fun of Patera Silk, he and I talked about the science of the Short Sun Whorl. The wrapping that healed his ankle had been made there. We couldn’t make it, we didn’t know how. Glasses and the Sacred Windows, and so many other wonderful things we had at home, we had only because they had been made on the Short Sun Whorl and put into ours by Pas. Chems, for example-living people of metal and sun-fire.”

At that, Sinew’s chair came down with a thump; but he said nothing.

I ate, and cut another slice for myself. “You used your bow when you killed this greenbuck for us,” I said.

He nodded.

“I’m going to offer a prayer. If any of you want to join in, you’ll be welcome. If you prefer to continue eating, that’s a matter between you and the god.”

Hide began, “Father, I-”

I was already making the sign of addition over my plate. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, imploring the Outsider, whom Silk had honored above all the other gods, to help me act wisely.

When I opened them and began to eat again, Hoof said, “You jumped from maize to all the other things you and Mother had in the Whorl .”

At the same moment, Hide said, “You promised you’d tell us what those people wanted.”

You motioned them to silence, telling Hide, “Your brother knows, I think. What was it, Sinew?”

Sinew shook his head.

Hoof asked him, “Why did he say about your bow?”

“He meant they had better things,” Sinew grunted. “Slug guns and needlers. But they’re making slug guns now in town. Father’s still got his needier. You’ve seen it. He let me hold it one time.”

“I am going to give it to you,” I told him. “Tonight or tomorrow, perhaps.”

Sinew stared, then shook his head again.

Hoof said, “If we could make those here, we’d have a lot more to eat, I bet.”

“The new slug guns aren’t nearly as good as the old ones,” Sinew told him, “but they’re still too expensive for us, and conjunction’s coming. It’s only a couple years now. You sprats don’t remember the last one.”

Hide said, “A whole bunch of inhumi came and killed lots of people.”

Hoof added, “If we had more needlers and a new slug gun, we could fight them better.”

You-I am nearly certain it was you, Nettle darling-said, “The slug gun we’ve got is just about worn out.”

No one spoke after that; the boys ate, and I made a show of eating, although I have never been less hungry than I was then. When a minute and more had passed, Sinew asked, “Why you?”

“Because I built our mill, and because I knew Patera Silk better than almost anyone else in New Viron did.”

Shaking his head, Sinew bent over his plate again.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Hide wanted to know.

“A great deal, I’m sure,” you told him, Nettle. “May I, Horn? I think I’ve followed everything.”

I suppose I said that you could, or indicated it by some gesture.

“We need new seed, Hide. More than that, we need pure strains that we can cross for ourselves. I imagine it would be possible to develop pure strains from what we have, and it may be that someone’s trying to, but it will take a long time. Before the next conjunction-”

Sinew interrupted you, as he invariably did. “We can’t even make needles, and they’re just little slivers of metal. Most of the slug guns people have can’t be used because there aren’t any more cartridges for them. Everybody’s worried about next conjunction. I think we’ll get by like we did before, but what about the one after that? Bows and spears, that’s all we’ll have. Anybody planning to be dead before then?” When none of us spoke, he added, “Me neither.”

I said, “We lost one whole level of knowledge when we left the Short Sun Whorl and went aboard the Whorl. We lived in there for about three hundred years, if the scholars are right, but we never got that knowledge back. Now we’re losing another level, as Sinew says.”

He made me a mocking bow.

“If it were just the weapons, that would be bad enough, but there are other problems I haven’t mentioned.”

You said, “We brought knowledge, even if it isn’t enough. People from other cities have landed all over this whorl. If all of us pooled what we know…?”

I nodded. (It seemed to me that I scarcely looked at her; yet I can see her face, scrubbed and serious, as I write.) “It might be, as you say. But to pool it we’d have to have glasses, when we don’t even have a Window for our Grand Manteion.”

Hide put in, “Amberjack says that old Prolocutor’s trying to build a Sacred Window.”

“Trying,” Sinew sneered.

I ignored it. “Or if we cannot make glasses, wings like the Fliers’, or vessels like the Trivigaunti airship.”

But now, darling, I have been reconstructing our suppertime conversation for several hours, exactly as you and I used to try to reconstruct Silk’s when we were writing our book. The work has rekindled many tender memories of those days; but you recall this conversation better than I, I feel sure, and you can fill in the rest for yourself. I am going to bed.

Three days in which I have had no chance to write in this sketchy half-book I have begun without Nettle’s help. I suppose it is no loss; she will never read it. Or if she does, she will have me at her side, and this account will be superfluous. Yet she may show it to others, as I said. Are not the people of our town entitled to know what became of the emissary they sent for Silk? Why and how he failed? Pig’s blindness, and all the rest? I will proceed, if I do, upon the assumption that it will be read by strangers and perhaps even copied and recopied as our own book-the book that ultimately brought me here-has been.

Our house and our mill stand on Lizard Island, as I should explain. Lizard Island is called by that name because we, seeing it from the lander, at once noted its resemblance to that animal; and not (as some now suppose) because it was first settled by a man named Lizard. No such person exists.

The head is more or less coffin-shaped. All four legs are extended, and their rocky toes splayed. The sandspit that forms the tail curves out to sea, then north, to shelter Tail Bay, which is where we keep our logs. A lengthy ridge of granite gives the lizard a spine. Its highest peak, near the tail, is called the Tor. The spring that turns our mill originates there, giving us a long and very useful fall. Our house is set back some distance from the sea, but the mill stands with its feet in the bay to make it easier to hook and drag out logs.