Gene Wolfe - Return to the Whorl

No, they did not eat their cattle in Gaon. Hari Mau had said so. Cattle were the mother goddess, were Nurturing Echidna, just like snakes. Snakes were understandable, of course. It was that way in Viron, too, to some extent. But cattle? Though cattle were associated with both Echidna and Pas, now that he thought of it. Rain from Pas, grass from Echidna; it was an old saying. Rain, the intercourse of the gods.

In Gaon, Hari Mau had said, cattle were offered to Echidna, but never eaten. The entire animal was burned on the altar. That said something about the size of altars in Gaon, and the supply of wood as well, surely.

The monitor's face appeared in a glass to his right, nearly human, though blurred about the mouth. "We'll cast off for the planet called Blue in thirty seconds. Your couch is secured."

"Yes," he said unnecessarily. "Yes, I think so." He wanted to ask whether they would get there, whether they would arrive and whether they would make a safe landing, but did not.

"If you suffer from heart disease, it would be best for you to remain in the Whorl," the monitor reminded him.

"I don't." There was a momentary roar, deafening even through the cotton. The lander trembled with a violence that its builders could not possibly have intended. He asked, "Is everything all right?"

"I am verifying our capabilities, Patera Silk."

It was maddening to be thus mistaken by a mere machine; what was almost worse, Oreb had taken his head from beneath his wing to listen. "Good Silk!"

"I am not Silk," he told the monitor. "You have been misinformed."

"Your name is on my passenger list, Patter Silk."

"Supplied by Hari Mau, of course." He could not keep the bitterness from his voice.

"I will first cast off from the Whorl," the monitor was saying. Higher up, others were saying the same thing. "When I have attained sufficient altitude, I will fire my engines. As soon as they are silent, you may move about the lander, Hari Mau. You will be unwell. Please employ the housekeeping tube to keep your area clean."

It struck him that it had been at least two minutes since the monitor had said they would leave in thirty seconds. He groped for his housekeeping tube and found that it was missing.

"It will activate upon access. You are responsible for your own area, Hari Mau."

That was because he had insisted that he was not Silk, he decided. Aloud he said, "I have no housekeeping tube, Monitor, and I will not be sick. I've traveled on landers before. I even flew here on this one. On no occasion was I sick."

"No sick," Oreb confirmed.

"I will first cast off from the Whorl, Potter Sulk." The blur around the monitor's mouth was spreading over its face like a cancer; the lower half of that face moved to the right, then jerked back into place. "When I have attained attitude, fire my engines. You may move about my. Plus deploy the housekeeping." The monitor's blurred gray face flickered, then vanished.

This was death, death's overture. This lander had been damaged too badly to fly. Although they had flown to the Pole in it, it could never return to Blue. It would explode when the rockets fired or crash when it tried to land, or leave them floating in the abyss to starve, visited perhaps by inhumi.

"I got there. I did it. I got back to Viron, where I could look for Silk." Suddenly aware that he was speaking out loud, he clenched his teeth.

"Good Silk!"

"Put your head under your wing, or you will be deafened. You may well be deafened anyhow."

Obediently, Oreb tucked his scarlet-capped head beneath a jet black wing.

"No, fly." It was a whisper. "Stay here."

It had been the best part of his life, the days when he had been with General Mint, with Silk in the Calde's Palace. How few they had been! How very, very few. The hours in Silk's palace, and the hours in the boat with Seawrack. "I've been happy twice," he told the bird in a voice that he himself could scarcely hear. A shellback comb floated before his eyes. He murmured, "Most men are not happy even once," and was violently, messily ill.

Sitting in what had been the lowest part of the lander, he seemed suspended in the sky. The Short Sun blazed to his left, mercifully obscured by the darkened canopy. To his right, stars shone, and Blue lay at his feet like a lost toy. Home.

Hari Mau joined him, strapping himself into the seat. "No one should see this twice, but I cannot get enough. It is like women."

He smiled. "Yes, in a way I suppose it is."

"My friends will not look. Mota and Roti? Those fellows? They came up here for as long as it takes to eat a banana. It was enough for them. I cannot satisfy myself, ever."

Oreb had been left out of the conversation long enough. "No eat," he declared.

"No," his master told him, "you cannot eat the stars, save with your eyes. I…"

"What is it Rajan?" Han Mau leaned toward him and touched his neck, as though to gauge its temperature or feel his pulse.

"I just realize that the Whorl is no longer my home. I grew up there, Hari Mau, and Nettle and I, in our real home on Lizard Island, used to say `home' when we spoke of it. In those days, we never thought it would be possible to go back. Now I have, and if I had not, perhaps she would have gone instead." He was tempted to say that she might even have succeeded in finding Silk; but he knew it would make Hari Mau angry.

"It did not make you happy, Rajan?"

"It did at first, and often after that." He sighed. "Or at least I would have told you I was if you had asked me."

"But you weren't?"

"Perhaps I should say that what I had, when I realized I was not only back in the Whorl but near Viron-and when I re-entered the city-was not true happiness. Only the anticipation of it."

"So I feel when everything is settled back there," Hari Mau jerked a thumb over his shoulder, "and I can come up here. Here I am happy. But looking at happiness is no bad thing, Rajan."

"No," he agreed, "it isn't. Nor is it happiness we ought to seek in life. For one thing, only those who seek something else find it."

"Work or war?"

"Yes, sometimes. Peace, too, and home. I don't mean to say that wherever one lives is good. Sometimes people try all their lives to make a home, and succeed just before the end, and are happy. Some-like me-succeed much earlier, but are not happy because they don't know. When you came here, I almost said that I didn't think a man who never saw the stars could ever be truly happy."

"There is much truth."

"Then I realized that there are millions like Hound-"

"Good Hound!" Oreb explained.

"Yes, he is. He's honest and humble; and he works hard, I believe. His wife wants children, and so does he, and he will love them when they get them. But he lives in the Whorl and has never seen the stars. In all probability he never will, though it is he and others like him who will touch them for us all."

"I do not understand, Rajan."

"The Whorl will leave our Short Sun," he pointed to it, "when the repairs are completed. I'm surprised you didn't learn about it when we were at the pole. After we had finished talking about Pig, it was one of the first things they told me."

"Oh, that." Hari Mau shrugged.

"Yes, that. It may take twenty years, or fifty. Or several hundred. There's still a great deal they have to learn. But the raw materials are there, and there's an abundance of labor. They will conquer the heat, rain will fall as it never has in living memory, and Lake Limna-all the lakes-will be sweet again. Streams that have not flowed in a hundred years will run as pure and clear as on the day when Pas's finger traced their courses."

"Perhaps. But you and I will never see it, Rajan."

"No. For us a little point of light in the sky will brighten, then fade until at last it vanishes."