Gene Wolfe - In Green's Jungles

"You mean the Vanished People?"

I nodded, watching him as I spooned up the ragout I had made. We have silver cards enough for our needs, and were able to buy mutton, turnips, flour, butter, apples, and salt at a farm we passed.

"How do you know so much about them?"

With another nod I indicated this manuscript. "It's all here. It would require a weary evening to tell you everything, Hide, and in the end you would find out that I actually know next to nothing, though I've spoken with the Vanished People more than once."

"They built that place on Green? Then went away and let the inhumi have it? Why?"

"Because they preferred giving it up-giving both of these whorls up-to living with the inhumi as we do now."

"Why?" he repeated.

I shook my head.

"Don't you know?" He put down his bowl to study me across our little fire.

"No. I think I could guess, but guesses are of little value."

"I'd like to hear it just the same."

I shook my head again.

"All right." He picked up his bowl. "This is pretty good. What's the hot stuff?"

"Ginger."

"You didn't get that around here."

"I got it out of my bag, having brought it from Blanko when Duko Sfido and I left there with our troopers. I'd had more than enough camp food when I was in the hills with General Inclito, so I bought some spices there and took them with me-ginger, red pepper, basil, oregano, and a few others."

"You don't eat much. While I've been with you, you've hardly eaten at all."

"I eat far too much. I try constantly – perhaps I should say I try to try constantly – to keep it in check."

"The spices sound like my father, but that doesn't. Do you like fish?"

I smiled. "Much too much."

"What would you put on it?"

"Lemon juice and black pepper, I suppose; but no one seems to have black pepper here. We had lemons in Gaon, but I don't think I saw a single lemon in Blanko."

"At home. Suppose we were on the Lizard."

"Seawater and vinegar." I shrugged. "It depends on the variety of fish, somewhat. Oil or butter on the kind we used to call white trout-though it wasn't really trout, of course. It tends to be dry no matter how you cook it." I heard his spoon scrape the bottom of his bowl, and added, "There's a bit more in the pot if you want it."

"I'd rather see you eat it."

I shook my head.

After that we sat in silence for a time, and I began to review what I had already written.

"You know, sometimes I think you really are my father."

"I am."

"Sometimes you talk like him, and sometimes you don't. But he was always writing. He'd work all day in our mill, and eat supper. And then he'd write while the rest of us talked or played games. Sometimes he'd get up while it was still dark, and write until the sun came up, then go out and work."

"I was writing Patera Silk's history," I explained. "His life, insofar as I knew it. When I remembered something fresh while I was working, or when I woke up, I wanted to set it down while the impression was still vivid. Don't forget that your mother wrote too-wrote more than I did, in fact."

"She was making clean copies of what you wrote, mostly."

"She knew many things that I did not-what was said in Patera Silk's final meeting with Councilor Loris, for example, and more than once she suggested ideas and approaches I hadn't thought of."

"Have I ever told you my father's name? Or Mother's?"

I lifted my shoulders again, and let them fall. "I don't recall. What difference does it make?"

"I know I told you I had a brother named Sinew, and a twin brother, and since I told about him I probably said his name's Hoof."

"You may have. It's quite likely."

"Only I don't think I told you Mother's or Father's."

"Your mother's name is Nettle. Mine is Horn."

Hide spooned the last of the ragout into his bowl. "You really are my father, aren't you? Something's happened to you to make you look different."

The happiness I knew at that moment is really indescribable; I managed to say something on the order of "That's it exactly, Son," but I cannot be certain just what it was. I may have said, "My son." Perhaps I did.

"You looked a lot more like him in that other place."

I nodded. "There was a mirror in the guardroom of the barbican-I suppose the guards there used it to shave. Didn't you realize when you saw me there in the Red Sun Whorl that your search had succeeded?"

"Jahlee looked like a real woman there."

"She was a real woman," I told him, "there."

"A bad woman."

"Because she tried to seduce you? You have to understand that she has been doing that sort of thing for much of her life, inviting men. Promising much more than she could ever give them. She could never let men see her naked, for example, as we did, or even let them come close when she stood in a strong light. We went to the Red Sun Whorl, and suddenly everything she had pretended so long had become the truth; she was giddy with it. Try to put yourself in her place."

"All right."

"Seducing you would have been an evil act, and would have had a bad effect on your moral and emotional balance; but she did not know it. She knew only that she could actually give the love she had pretended she would give scores of men. I hope I'm making myself clear."

"Then she isn't really bad?"

I shook my head. "She is an evil creature, exactly as you said."

"You talked like she was your friend, but she was going out at night, flying-"

"Fly good!" Oreb seemed to feel that he had been excluded from our talk for too long.

"Out of the window of her room to drink people's blood. She said so. She told me so."

"Did she? I didn't know. I knew she must be doing it of course, but I didn't know she had confessed to you."

Hide looked uncomfortable. "It was after we got back."

"I see. She felt obliged to make her restored nature clear to you"

He could not meet my eyes. "Yeah."

"A grave disappointment."

He did not reply, and when he had finished his meal he stood up and began to build this little shelter.

There is a marsh here. Hide says he knew of it, but had hoped the ice would be thick enough for us to cross. It is not, and we will have to go around. Quite large, he says. A great man-killer stalks there two-legged like a man, green and quiet, with fangs longer and thicker than a strong man's arm – but only for me, and only when I do not look for it.

Tonight we talked about the Neighbors. I told him about the ruins on the island, and how I had fallen into the pit there, saying, "No wall was higher than my waist."

"You said there're towers on Green that go up and up, higher than the lander."

I nodded. "There are."

"When we were talking about the trees growing out of the walls, you said the Vanished People built better than we do."

"Better than we do thus far, at least."

"Then the place on that island must have been empty, a long long time."

I tried to read his eyes, as he was trying to read mine-tried to learn how much he knew and guess how much he guessed.

"What happened to them?"

I stared out over the marsh. It cannot have been for more than a few seconds, but the whole Red Sun Whorl seemed to rise before me: the starving, vicious omophagist; the cemetery gate through which wisps of fog wandered like lost spirits; the stupid, hard-faced guard before it who had represented our only hope of medical treatment for Rigoglio, and justice.

Surely we did not all speak at once, although it must have seemed so. Rigoglio himself was almost too weak to speak, the coachman had scarcely spoken since we arrived, and I believe Eco and Terzo held their peace. Perhaps Hide and Jahlee did as well-but Mora, Sfido, and I chattered away like monkeys.