Gene Wolfe - Return to the Whorl

When we parted, I asked where we were.

"On Green. Can't you feel the warmth, and the dampness of the air? If I were the way I was the last time you saw me, they would feel wonderful to me. Here I am as I am." She paused to smile and let the blanket slip a trifle. "And they still feel wonderful. I exult in them!" Azijin's eyes opened. He blinked and seemed to stare about him in a dazed fashion; then he shut them again and slept once more.

I crossed the room to the window and looked out, expecting to see Green's jungles. Clouds such as I had not seen since Saba lowered us from her airship spread below me, not the black-tinged rain clouds that had oppressed us through unending months on Green, but pearlescent clouds shining in the sun, a sea greater and purer than the keels of men have ever parted, and a new whorl fairer even than Blue and more turbulent.

To drink it in, I leaned as far from the window as I could, and at last stood barefoot upon its gray stone sill, and grasping the inner edge of the opening with the fingers of one hand looked out and down, then up, and left, and right.

We were in a slender tower, standing in a niche in the face of an immense cliff of the dark red stone. Above, the red stone rose until it was lost in the glory of the sky, an infinite wall of congealed blood. To my left and right, it extended without limit, lined and eroded. Below stretched the tower, taller than the tallest I have seen on any of the three whorls, a sickening height that made me shut my eyes and step down again into the room in which Jahlee and I had awakened-but not before I had glimpsed its mighty base and the cliff below it falling away into the restless sea of cloud, sheer, black with damp, and dotted with splotches of the most brilliant green.

"I wanted to be a real woman again," Jahlee said softly, "a real woman for you and Hide, and for everyone else who wants me to be what I really am. It was why I joined you. You must have known that."

"I should have driven you away, but the bandits would have killed us both if I had."

"You foresaw that?"

I shook my head.

"Our bodies are asleep in that wretched little inn on your frozen whorl. If I were to die there… I've overheard you and your son talking about the other one, a woman like me he meets in dreams. He's afraid of her, but he wouldn't have to be afraid of me."

"Do you want me to kill you? I can't. My own body is sleeping, just as yours is. If I were to kill you here, you know what would happen. You saw Duko Rigoglio."

She went to the window and stood upon the sill as I had, and a wind rose that stirred her blanket and set her sorrel hair fluttering behind her. "If I could be like this forever, I would jump," she told the sky.

"Before you do, will you answer a question? You've been a good friend to my son and me, and I hesitate to put us further in debt to you; but I'm curious, and it may be important."

She stepped down and turned to face me.

"We've been to various places on Green, and to the Red Sun Whorl, to the very spot on which the Duko's house once stood."

"Yes." Her eyes were bright blue now, as though they were holes bored through her skull and I were seeing the sky behind her; for a moment I wondered whether she could control their color, and then if they had drunk so much of that sky that they had taken on its very hue.

"Most of the places to which I've gone have been places where I've already been, and the street of ruins in the city they called Nessus was certainly the street on which Rigoglio had lived. I very much doubt that either Azijin or Vlug have been to Green at all, and I have certainly never been to this strange tower in this mighty cliff. Have you?"

She nodded without speaking, and I asked her when.

"When I was very young. When I'd just learned to fly, and before I'd decided to hunt your frigid, hostile Blue."

"Before you came the first time?"

She did not answer. "I was not at all sure I could make the Crossing. We heard stories. How much strength was required, how much endurance. If you're not strong enough, not a strong enough flier, you fall back to Green a failure. If you lack endurance…" She shrugged. "Only your frozen corpse gets to Blue. It crosses the sky there, a little scratch of fire. No doubt you've seen them. I have."

I nodded.

"That little scratch of fire, and you're gone forever. I wanted to try just the same. We all do, even if some want it more than others and many never actually try. It's something we get from you, a need to become more and more like you, until we're as human as we can possibly be."

"We feel it too," I told her, "though not always as strongly as we should."

"So I was wondering whether I could, and whether I'd be brave enough to try. I wasn't flying all that well yet, and I knew I'd have to get a lot better to fly fast enough to leave Green. One day there was a break in the clouds. You've lived on Green, you said. You must know it happens now and then."

I nodded again.

"Burning light from the sun came streaming through, but I looked up anyway and saw this little streak of gray against the cliff, and I told myself I'd fly up to it someday to see what it was, and when I did I'd be a strong enough flier to Cross."

"You did, clearly."

"Yes. I tried to for years, and there were days when I couldn't even get up above the clouds. There are strong winds at this level, and the air is thin."

I filled my lungs with it, and said, "It certainly seems better to me than the sopping air down there."

"I suppose it would. Are you waiting for the end of my story? It's ended. The day came when I was able to fly up here. I knew by then that I had much more to learn, and that I had to be stronger before I tried Crossing. But I felt I'd come more than halfway, too, and I was right. There was a corroded metal hatch over that window then. I tore it off and let it fall. When I'd explored all the rooms on all the levels, I decided to clean this one out and make it a private place just for myself, my own room in my own tower in the sky. There were bones in here and some other things, but I threw them out that window and swept this floor with my hands. When everything was tidy, I told myself I'd come back and spend hours up here after I'd made the Return Crossing, just thinking about who I was and what I had done for my children. But I never did, till now."

"I'll try to leave you here," I promised her, "and take the troopers back with me. I don't know if it can be done, but I'll try." I shut my eyes, gathering the thoughts that had fled my mind soon after we arrived. "Whose bones were they?"

"You know. They were your friends. I doubt that you want to talk about it."

Blindly, I sat down again upon the bed that been hers and mine. I hated Green then as I have hated it so often, the whorl of teeming unclean life, of violent death and universal decay. In my heart I rejected it, I hope once and for all. "Were they the Neighbors'?" I asked. "The Vanished People's?"

Perhaps she nodded. "I think that when we'd destroyed them everywhere else, they held the tablelands against us. As places of final refuge, they must have built these towers in the cliffs, with windows like this one so that-"

She was gone.

I had recalled my body as she spoke, with all its well-remembered knobs and insufficiencies, the sagging face behind my beard and the ankle that ached in rainy weather, and ached abominably in any weather whenever I had to walk far… And realized with a sort of shock that I was no longer sitting on the bed, but lying in it. I opened my eyes and saw the smoke-blackened timbers that supported the roof of the inn.

"Master Incanto? Awake you are?"

It was Azijin; I asked him who had told him to call me that.

"Your son, mysire. Where he was, and you, of Master Incanto they speak, he says. About dreams you know? That also he says, Mysire Horn."