Gene Wolfe - Return to the Whorl

Pig said nothing, but his big hands were shaking.

"You haven't had much practice lately, Pig." The bandage was loose, lying limply across Pig's eyes. "That's what they told me, and I must tell you the same thing. If you can see-"

Apropos of nothing, Oreb announced, "Good Silk."

"What you see may be blurred until you re-learn how to interpret visual images."

The room had darkened as he spoke, the lights on the ceiling fading to mere specks of gold; he looked at the glass and saw the nurse manipulating a control. She nodded, and he lifted the bandage away.

"Bucky…?" One of Pig's hands found his.

"Your eye is still closed, Pig."

"He kens h'it, bucky. Sae braw? He's nae!" Pig's eyelids fluttered.

"Braver than I would be."

Pig's head rolled on the pillow.

The nurse said, "It doesn't exactly go with his coloring."

Pig's right hand left the sheet in a peremptory gesture. "Wants ter see yer, ter see ther twa a' yer tergether. Dinna never want ter forget yer."

"See bird?"

"Aye." Naked now, the wide, thin-lipped mouth curved upward. "Pig sees yer, ter, H'oreb. Bucky…?" Pig choked, coughed, and at last recovered.

"You have a blue eye now, Pig. Like my own."

When the nurse's glass had faded to silver-gray, Pig ventured, "Yer gang ter stay wit' me, bucky?"

He nodded, knowing Pig could see his nod and glorying in it. "Until Hari Mau finds me, and makes me go with him."

"Bird go?"

"Yes, Oreb. Certainly, if you want it. I'll be flattered."

"Pig ter, bucky?"

He was taken aback. "Would you want to?"

"Aye." Pig's voice was firm.

Slowly, he shook his head.

"Seen me Nears."

"That has nothing to do with it. I am flattered, Pig. I'm humbled. But unless a god were to tell me otherwise, my answer must be no, for both our sakes."

"Auld Pig'd gae, bucky."

"I realize that-you would go, and endeavor to help and protect me in every way possible."

"Yet did sae fer him."

"Of course. I am your friend, as you are mine." He paused, his right forefinger tracing small circles on his cheek.

"'Twill be a lang walk ter na braithrean wi'hout yer."

He nodded, and gloried a second time. "You'll go back to them, at the other end of the whorl?"

"'Tis me h'only kin."

"Mercenaries. You were a mercenary trooper, Pig?"

"Ho, aye! Was he? He was! Fightin' ter make 'em gae, bucky. Paid ter. Moss-trooper, ter, an' there was nae better."

"Perhaps you'll find someone on the way, Pig. A woman who loves you. Or friends who like you as much as I do."

"Found yer h'already, bucky."

"Yes," he said sadly. "You have. And if I could take you back to New Viron with me, I would do so in an instant. The problem-one problem at least-is that I am not going there. I am going to a town very far from there, to which I promised Hari Mau I would go."

"Dimber wi' me."

"I will be a prisoner, Pig. They want me to judge their disputes, and arrange compromises for them. There are many disputes in which both sides are in the wrong, and many more in which no compromise acceptable to both parties is possible."

He sighed. "I cannot give them all that they hope for, and their disappointment is certain to turn to violence in time, unless I can escape them."

"Would yer do h'it, bucky? Gang awa'?"

Solemnly, he nodded. "I would. I will-if I can. I've promised Hari Mau that I'll go with him to his town, and that I will judge it to the best of my poor ability. But not that I'll remain there indefinitely. I will keep my promise if they'll let me. But when I've done what I can, I'm going home. I've been halfway around Blue already, and home cannot be farther than that."

"Need auld Pig then, bucky."

He sighed again. "No doubt I will, but I won't have you. In the first place, Hari Mau and his friends will learn where I am very quickly-if not today, certainly tomorrow. They'll hold me to my promise then, and insist we leave. You must have expert care for months. Your flesh may not accept your new eye. There are things that can be done should that occur, but they are difficult things and require an expert physician.

"In the second, you would be more of a prisoner than I, and in considerably greater danger, a focus for the discontents of every man I ruled against. I said that you will require months of care, because that is what your surgeon told me, and what they tell me here. If you were to come with me, I doubt that you'd live for months."

Something in Pig's face had changed. He said, "And in the third, Horn?"

"Patera!"

Oreb whistled shrilly.

"I would be a positive danger to you," Pig said. "Strength and a stout heart are hazardous qualities where they cannot prevail."

"Yes." He wiped his eyes.

Naked and subtly altered, the face was still Pig's; Silk's wellremembered voice issued from its lips. "Still, you would take me if you could."

"Yes. Yes, I would. If we reached New Viron, I would not have failed. Or even if you reached it alone."

"You do not wish to fail." Pig's big hand tightened on his.

He said, "I would give my life not to fail," and meant it.

"You already have."

"You must he here, on this acceleration couch." Hari Mau bent over him. "You must be strapped in, as well. I apologize, though it is essential."

"I know, I've been on them before. I'm worried about Oreb."

Hari Mau's smiled widened. "There under your arm he will be safe. The lighter one is, the less strain. Oreb is very light." A wide strap snapped closed, pressing the azoth into the tense muscles under it. "For yourself you are not afraid, Rajan Silk?"

If they wished to call him that, that was what they wished to call him. Not wanting to stare, he looked from Hari Mau's bearded face to the woven matting that had replaced-what? He tried to remember the interior of the lander that had brought him from Blue to Green, but he could recall only the long rows of crude brown couches, the cramped little galley that had fed them sparsely and badly, the shooting and the shouting, the twisted steel grip of Sinew's knife protruding from the back of a man whose name was forgotten.

Hari Mau repeated, "For yourself you are not afraid?"

"Of dying?" He shook his head. "No, not of that. In a way it would be a relief, a mitigation of failure. May I confide in you?"

"Of course! I am your friend."

"What I fear is showing fear. I am afraid I'll scream when thethe push comes, and the explosion."

Hari Mau brought cotton for his ears, and he stuffed it in them gratefully. "You must put your head under your wing, Oreb, and pretend you are going to sleep. Keep out as much of the noise as you can."

"No hear?"

"Yes," he said firmly. "No hear," and watched with approval as Oreb tucked his head beneath his wing.

He had wanted a couch near the others, perhaps next to Hari Mau's, but Han Mau had hustled him away, farther down, nearer the front of the lander, nearer the strange place to which Silk had once gone from which one could-while still in the whorl-see the stars. He was…

He craned his neck in a vain effort to see behind him.

Two or three rows farther down. Three rows at least, he decided, and more likely four. At least this lander was not jammed like the one in which he and Nettle had come to Blue.

Where was she now? He tried to imagine her and what she was doing, but found that he could only picture a much younger Nettle renting folding stools. I am distracted, he told himself as a slight tremor shook the lander. Under such circumstances as this, I am bound to be distracted.

Matting, woven of the split stems of some tropical plant. It would be warm in Gaon. He shivered.

Someone had ripped open the very walls to steal wire. If he and Hari Mau and all the rest were lucky, that someone would have left the insulation strewn about so it could be replaced and confined behind the matting. If they were not, it was gone and had been replaced with something else, the coarse and dirty hair of slaughtered cattle or something of the sort.