Gene Wolfe: On Blue's waters

I made Sinew help me in the mill as my father made me help him, and Sinew resisted and resented me in exactly the same way. The time will come, Sinew, when it will all come back to you, the gears and shafts and hammers, and the paddles churning in the big tank of slurry, and you will be very glad indeed that you knew them once.

My father stayed behind to fight for General Mint. I would never have believed that he had a drop of courage, going to his little shop on Sun Street day after day, always hoping to clear enough to feed his family and to keep his resentful eldest son in the palaestra.

His ungrateful, purblind oldest son. What my father did required no courage at all. So I believed.

Yet he went off to war, balder than I have ever been but smiling, with his new slug gun and his stiff canvas bandoleer of cartridges; war must have seemed very easy after all he had been through. When our roads crossed again before Hari Mau and his friends carried me off to Gaon, I did not even recognize him. Then Quadrifons whispered, “Those are the years you see. Look past them.”

And I knew him at once. I wanted to say, “Where you were, I have been, Father,” but I knew he would reply, “Where I am, you will quickly be, Son,” whether his lips uttered those words or not. Knowing it, I lacked the courage to speak.

Wijzer warned me.

Work hard, Sinew. Work well and wisely. Live free if you can, and live so that you will not be ashamed, as I am at times, to look back on what you have done.

Your grandfather was no hero. He was the kind of man who slept in the rain with Hari Mau and me on the marches of Han, too wet, too tired, and too hungry for heroics. No hero, but when our trumpets rang and the Hannese kettledrums thundered I saw men like him firing and chambering a fresh round and firing again, out in front of the flag.

He has married a second time, and begun a new family. I have small half brothers I have never seen.

Caught one! A good one, I believe. I have run a long string through its gills and put it back into the water just as we do on Lizard.

Just as I did on the sloop with the bluebilly Seawrack chivvied until it jumped aboard.

We have passed beyond the tilled fields of Gaon, which means that I can stop worrying about being recognized; I saw the last cart drawn by the last carabao some time back. Nadi is gentler here, although not yet stagnant or sullen. She is like a woman who sings at her work.

Evensong keeps us to the middle, or wherever the current is strongest, leaning her slight weight this way or that against the steering oar. “Good boat,” Oreb repeats; and then “Fish heads?” The banks are lined with trees so tall that I cannot catch sight of the summits of the mountains, trees that might almost be the savage trees of Green, although it may be only that the summits are lost in mist. Just before the fish bit, I saw something better, a felwolf that had come to the river to drink.

This is such a beautiful whorl that my poor gray quill falls silent from shame when I try to write about it.

This quill is exactly like the ones I used to tie in bundles of thirteen for my father, binding each bundle tightly but not too tightly and knotting the soft blue twine. I wish I had seen the bundle before Evensong cut it for me and put the quills into the old pen case I brought here.

We sold pen cases like this one, too, of course. I remember going into the little shed of a manufactory where they were made with my father and watching two women there smearing the leather and the pressboard cases with glue, and the waxed wooden forms they were put into until the glue dried. We could have brown or black, the man who employed those women told us, or any other color that we wanted, even white. But we had better keep in mind that the pen case would soon be stained with ink. It was best, he said, to choose a dark color, so that the ink stains would not show.

My father ordered black (like the one I am writing on), yellow, and pink. I thought he was being very foolish, but the yellow and pink ones sold first, bought by the mothers of little girls at our palaestra.

Why do we wage war, when this whorl is so wide? I believe it is because rulers such as I was in Gaon live in towns. There are so many people: a great number. So many farms: a smaller number, but still very great. People and houses, and animals that are in fact slaves, although we do not call them slaves.

(Marrow did not call his clerk a slave either; nor were the men who carried his apples and flour to my sloop called slaves.)

Buying and selling. Selling and buying, and never looking at the trees of the forest, or the side of the mountains. If we were wise, we would give the rulers of all the towns a stick and a knife apiece, and tell them we will be happy to take them back when they have traveled around this whorl, as Oreb did.

I can describe a tree or a felwolf, but not Blue. A poet might describe it perhaps. I cannot.

With nothing better to do than fish and catalogue the slow changes of the river, I have been thinking about my sons-about Krait on the lander, particularly. They caught him and forced open his mouth. I saved him, and thought that I had lost him forever when he joined the other inhumi barricaded in the cockpit. I wish that he were here now, here in this little boat with Evensong and me.

Evensong asks if it will be all right to stop when she sees a clearing. She wants to prepare my fish for us and cook some rice, she says. If I am any judge of women, she really wants to try the pots and pans she bought for us, enough to cook for all the men on Strik’s big boat. In any case, I said she might; it will be hours before she sights the perfect spot, I feel sure, and we will both be hungry.

Babbie was my slave, no doubt. I could have led him to the market and sold him. But he did not object in the least to his slavery, and in that way freed himself by freeing his spirit. He was my slave, but he could have escaped any time when we were on the river, simply by jumping into the water and swimming to shore. For that matter he could have escaped even more easily on any of the many occasions when I left him to guard the sloop. He never liked being left alone, but he protected the sloop as instructed just the same.

He was my slave, but in his heart we were companions who shared our food and helped each other when we could. I could see farther and better, although he may not have realized that; he could run and swim much faster, and hear better, too. He possessed a more acute nose. I could talk; and despite what Seawrack said, Babbie could only communicate. It did not matter. He was stronger than I, and a great deal braver; and we were there to support each other, not to boast of our superiorities. What would he think of Oreb, I wonder?

And what would Oreb think of him? Good thing? Good hus?

Is this, my Oreb whom I love, my Oreb who has returned to me after more than a year, the true Oreb? Is this really the tame night chough I played with as a boy, waiting in Silk’s sellaria for well-deserved punishment that never came?

“Oreb, why did you come back to me?” I asked him.

“Find Silk.”

“I’m not Patera Silk, Oreb. I’ve told you-and everybody-that over and over.” I ought to have asked him to find Silk for me, but I feel sure he could not unless he discovered some way to return to the Whorl , and I do not want to lose him again. “Where did you go, Oreb?”

“Find god.”

“I see. Passilk? I think that’s what the surgeon called him. Did you find him, and is that why you returned to me?”

“Find Silk.”

“You are free, you know. Patera Silk wouldn’t cage you, and I won’t either. All you have to do is fly off into these trees.”

“Fly good!” He flew from my shoulder to Evensong’s and back, a graphic demonstration.