Gene Wolfe - Return to the Whorl

"I know, Vadsig, and he's a good son to me as well. I couldn't be happier for you both."

"The blessing she gives, mysire? This you think?"

"Good girl?" Oreb inquired. Knowing that he meant you, dear Nettle, I nodded.

"Not she gives, I think." Vadsig eyed me sidelong to gauge my reaction.

"You're mistaken," I said, and my thoughts were full of you.

"No cards I have, mysire."

I dropped five or six into her lap, not real cards such as we used in Viron, but the shining gold and silver imitations that we see more and more here on Blue.

She would not touch them. "To Hide already so much you give, mysire."

"But I have given nothing to you, Vadsig, and I owe you a great deal."

"Mora and Fava you owe."

"I do indeed, and I'll try to repay them if I ever get the opportunity. At this moment I have the opportunity to repay you, to a small degree; and I intend to grab it. I won't detail all you did for us-you know it best. But I know it well enough, and those cards are merely a token."

"Also your son you give?" Her upper lip trembled, its minute motion piteously revealed by the brilliant sunlight.

"Are you asking whether I'll bless your union? Of course I will. I do. I'll perform the ceremony myself if you wish it, though it would be better to have His Cognizance Patera Remora. I can assist him, if he will permit it."

"A poor wife I will make." She smoothed her gown, pressing it against her body to show that she was slender to the point of emaciation.

"Before I returned here I met a young woman named Olivine, Vadsig. If she were here with us-and in a sense she is, for I have a part of her-she would point out to you that you can give a man your love and bear children. She could do neither, and she would gladly trade every one of the centuries the gods may allow her for your next year."

Vadsig's eyes melted. "Could not you help her, mysire?"

"No. She helped me."

Oreb picked up the first word, joining it to his favorite predicate. "No cut!"

I nodded. "I tried not to harm her, Oreb. It was the best that I could manage."

"Her hair?" Vadsig plunged thin fingers into her short orange tresses. "Ugly as mine it was?"

"She had none. As for yours, it is clean and straight and strongall admirable things."

"A bad color it is, mysire."

"A good woman's hair is never of a bad color," I told her.

We talked more, she expressing her fears of you and your rejection, and I assuring her that all were groundless, as indeed I feel certain they are. Let her fear childbirth, poor child, and murderous rape in lawless New Viron; she has more than enough to worry about without fantasies.

Then, "Sometime back like you I go, mysire?"

"Back to Viron, you mean, Vadsig?"

"To Viron, yes, mysire. Also to Grotestad. To go to the Long Sun Whorl I would like. Always of it you talk, and cook, and my old master and mistress. In Grotestad they were born, mysire, but never it I have seen."

I told her it was possible she would.

"There the Vanished People went?"

I nodded.

"To greet us it was?"

"You might put it so, though they were sensible enough to find out a good deal about us-and infect us with inhumi-"

"Bad thing!"

"Before they ventured to greet even a few of us."

"Bad it was," Vadsig agreed with Oreb.

"To leave inhumi among us?" I shook my head. "It was a small price to pay for two whorls, and it enabled the Neighbors to gauge much more accurately the differences between our race and their own."

"Because our blood they drink, mysire?"

For a moment I considered how I might explain without violating my promise. "You can't see yourself, Vadsig."

"In the mirror I see."

I shook my head. "Has anyone told you that you have wonderful eyes?"

She flushed, shrugging. "Hide it says."

"But you do not believe him, because you know he loves you. You are still very young. When you are older, perhaps you will come to understand that of all the emotions-and indifference, too, because even indifference is an emotion of a sort-only love sees the unveiled truth."

"See good!"

"Yes, love sees well, and it is well to see. No matter how wonder ful your eyes are, however, Vadsig, they cannot look back upon themselves. You see yourself, when you see yourself at all, in silvered glass. I used to know a very clever person who inspected his appearance in the side of a silver teapot every morning."

She smiled, as I had hoped she would. "A spoon in his pocket he might have carried, mysire."

"He knew, of course, that his image was distorted. You compare your own to that of other women you see in reality; but if you were wiser, you might compare their reflections to yours. That is what the Neighbors did. Knowing what their own inhumi were like, they gave us ours so they might compare the two. I wish I knew what they concluded, though I know what they did."

"The whorls they gave?" She looked around her as she spoke, at the beamy brown boat in which we sat, and the broad blue sea, the blue sky dotted with clouds and white birds, and the distant shore; and I dared to hope, as I do still, that she was seeing them a little differently.

"Yes. The inhumi had effectively ruined their entire race, Vadsig. I don't mean that all of them were dead, but that the civilization they had built had failed them when the shock came. Many had left these whorls already, fleeing the inhumi but taking inhumi with them."

"Their blood to drink?" She shuddered, and there was nothing feigned about it. "Not I understand, mysire."

"I said that we could not see ourselves directly, Vadsig. We need mirrors for that. We cannot run away from ourselves, either."

I heard the clicking of Babbie's claws over the creaking of the rigging as I spoke, and looked around to see Jahlee's head emerging from the little hatch. I motioned for her to join us, and Vadsig whispered, "So beautiful she is!"

We three talked together then for an hour or more. But it will soon be too dark to write, and I smell supper. I will write about all that some other time, perhaps.

"You should not come in here, Olivine!" A glance showed that the tepid water was reassuringly obscured by suds and clouded with soap.

"You don't have to duck down like that… You don't have to duck down like that, Patera…"

He snorted. "Nor do you have to look in on me every five minutes. I'm not going to drown."

"I just wanted to tell you your new clothes are out… I just wanted to tell you your new clothes are out here."

The door shut softly, and he stood up. The towel, like everything else in the tiny room, was within easy reach. As he dried himself, he realized that his old clothing was gone, save for his shoes. She had taken his tunic, his trousers, his filthy stockings, and his underdrawers the first time she had opened the door, beyond a doubt; he had been too busy hiding to notice. His corn, the precious seed corn he had obtained so easily, had been in a trousers pocket; but presumably his old clothes were in the bedroom. He stepped out of the tub, took the plug from the drain, and sat on the necessary stool to dry his feet.

That done, he wrapped his loins in his towel. "Are you out there, Olivine?" He followed the words with three sharp raps on the door, but there was no reply. Cautiously, he opened it.

Clean drawers, black trousers, and a black tunic waited on the bed. Beside them lay what appeared to be an augur's black robe, neatly folded; his seed corn was on that, with a clean handkerchief, new stockings, his spectacles, two cards, and his newly found pen case, the whole surrounded by his prayer beads. His old clothes and the enameled lantern were nowhere to be seen. Sighing, he dressed.