Gene Wolfe - Return to the Whorl

She said, "Good place. No find."

She had sounded as if she was about to cry, and he said, "It's been twenty years and more. He will forgive you, surely."

"No, no. Never."

After that nobody said anything. Green came up, bigger and brighter than we ever see it on Blue. Or want to, either. The captain saw us and came running. He did not have his sword this time, but the mate was behind him and he had a long stick that smelled like smoke. From the way he held it, I knew it was some kind of weapon; and I kept my eye on it the whole time.

"Welcome," the captain said. "Welcome! We thought you deserted us."

Father explained that we had other affairs to attend to and would be leaving from time to time. The captain asked if we were hungry and invited us to join him at breakfast. Father thanked him but said we would stay where we were, and the captain and the mate went away.

"He was a long time fetching him," Juganu said, "and I wouldn't mind trying some of your human food."

I said I would have thought that just blood every time would get boring, but he said it did not, that there were hundreds of different kinds.

Father said, "Go ahead, if you wish. I'm sure he'll be happy to feed you. Just remember that if we are forced to leave without you, you won't be able to return on your own. We'll do our best to safeguard your physical self."

Juganu trotted away, and I told Father I thought he would stay here all the time if he could.

Scylla said, "No me."

"Even if you could do that with your arms?" I asked her.

She looked so bad I was sorry I said it. The bird said, "Poor girl! Poor girl!" and I tried to touch her, to pat her back or something, but she did not feel right and I jerked my hand away.

Father said, "She is less even than we. If Oreb were to die she would not be here at all."

His bird kicked up a fuss when it heard him say that, and he had to quiet it down.

We talked awhile, and I said, "This is the Red Sun Whorl. When are we going to see the red sun?"

He pointed astern, and I stood up and looked, and then I climbed up the ratlines to see it better. The Red Sun was rising behind us, and the old falling-down city was between us and it. It was so big and so dark, like a great big coal buried in ashes. You could look right at it, and the whole city was black against it, thin towers and thicker ones, and there were some you could see through and see the little thin lines of the beams holding them up.

You could see how big that city was, and it was bigger than I had ever imagined when we first went on the boat in the river and were in the middle of it. It went on forever to the north and the south, and down the river, too, almost to where we were, walls falling down and broken towers and so many little ruined houses nobody could ever live in anymore that my brother and I could have spent our whole lives trying to count them all, and when we died we would only have just started.

But up against the Red Sun like that, you saw how little the city was, too. This is hard to explain. The city was immense. Just immense. Huge. Nobody will believe this, but if you had taken all the towns on Blue and bunched them together, and then added all the cities that Father used to talk about up in the old whorl, you could have taken all that and set it down in this city; and then if you had gone away for a year and come back, you would not have been able to find it.

There was a wall around it. Just off at the edges you could see that, way far away to the east and so far to the north and south you could not be sure you were seeing it at all; but it must have been about as tall as the tallest towers, and it was a wall. It was probably the biggest thing that people had ever made, but it was dead and rotting like the rest.

So it was all so big that when I looked at it, it was hard to breathe. But the sun kept on rising and rising, and Nessus was little. Finally I shut my eyes and would not look at it anymore. I had seen the way things really are, and I knew it. I knew that I was going to have to forget it as much as I could if I wanted to go on living. After Father left I was still curious about the Vanished People, and I asked a man I met one time about them because he seemed like somebody who might know something. He said there were things that we are not supposed to know. I think he was wrong, but right, too. I do not think that there is anything about the Vanished People that we should not know, just a whole lot that we do not. But the way things really are is something that we cannot deal with. I had to shut my eyes, and if you had been there you would have had to shut yours too.

When I looked back down at the foredeck, Father and Babbie were still there, right where I had left them, but I could not see Scylla at all. I climbed down the ratlines and there she was again, then when we went back to our boat she was gone.

We could have used her, because there was another boat, and it was full of men with slug guns. I shook out the mainsail fast and set the big jib we had not used before. Father stood up at the tiller and tried to talk to them, but they shot at him. I went and got his sword, Azoth, and gave it to him. He did not want to use it at first, but when I was shot he cut off the whole front of their boat.

"I did my best not to kill them," he told me, "but I killed two. Their bodies are back there in the water." I said it did not make any difference since the others would drown, and he said he hoped not. Later while Father was resting, Juganu flew back to get some of them. It was nearly dark then where we were.

Here I want to tell you about how Scylla went out to talk to the Great Scylla, but there are a couple other things I ought to tell about first, about the knives Father gave Babbie and what Scylla told Father at night in the dark.

So I am just going to put all that in here. Some of it he told me while we were waiting for daylight on the river boat, and some was while Juganu and Babbie were holding me down and he was straightening out my wound and bandaging it. (I was wiggling around quite a bit and he kept talking to me, I think mostly to try to keep me still.) Some was after that, too, while he was making potato soup with the fish.

To tell the truth, I am not exactly sure what he said where, so I am putting it all here.

About the knives. I wanted to know where he got them. I had been watching as good as I could in the dark and did not see him take them from anyplace. So he told me we could make things there that were not really real but were like real for as long as we wanted them. He said he had made the gold like that, but the captain probably did not know it was not there when he was not around because he had locked it in a strongbox. Naturally I wanted to know if I could do that, too; and he said I could but I would have to be careful or they would know it was a trick. I said I would be.

Scylla was Pas's daughter. Father talked like there were a lot of them, but he said she was the oldest one and the most important. She and her mother and some of Pas's other sprats had tried to kill him because they did not want people leaving the old whorl to come to Blue where they would not be the gods. So they tried to kill Pas, and for a long while they thought they had done it, and nobody would ever get to come. But Pas came back, and they had to hide.

There were two ways to hide, Father said. One was to hide in Mainframe. Scylla had talked about that, and he said she would know a lot more about all that than he did, but Mainframe was like the tunnels under the old whorl. There were branches and side tunnels and rooms and caves nobody knew about. So Scylla and the others that had tried to kill Pas hid in them, but not the way we would have. It was like I could hide my finger over here and my thumb over there. They had hidden little pieces of themselves all over, and Pas was still hunting for them and killing every little piece when he found it.