Gene Wolfe - In Green's Jungles

I had died in a room not very different from the room I occupied there, in just such a lander, and the memory of death returned to me with a poignancy I have seldom felt. I looked up at the stars then, which were brighter then than they had been by day, and more numerous; but I could not find Green there, or Blue, or the Whorl, or even the constellations Nettle and I used to see when Sinew was small and we spread a blanket on the beach and sat side by side there long after sunset, her hand in mine as we stared up at the stars.

Hide spoke and I looked up, although I had not understood him.

"I wondered what you were thinking about, Father."

"About Duko Rigoglio's death in the lander."

Hide nodded. "You looked so sad."

"Good Silk!" Oreb declared.

"Aren't you going to tell me anything else about the Vanished People tonight?"

"Not until you consider what I've said about them already."

"I think I have."

I was weary, at that stage of weariness in which one tells oneself that one will lie down for a moment, but not to sleep. "As you wish."

"There was something I wanted to ask about. A lot of them, really. You said the Vanished People probably don't look much like us."

"I suppose I did."

"Only the inhumi look almost exactly like us. They do to us, I mean, just like that red leech I told about looked like a fish to the frogs."

I said nothing.

"Well, they can shape their faces to look right. You said that yourself. They paint them, too, like women do. Only they talk like us, too, and it seems to me sometimes like they even think like us. Jahlee did, I mean. She got mad at us exactly like a real woman would."

"Go on."

His eyes opened a trifle wider. "You mean you want me to ask you questions?"

"No. I mean that I want you to reason for yourself, Hide. It's good for you, and for the whorl."

"I've gone about as far as I can already. It seems to me like the Vanished People were a lot stronger and smarter than we are. That's what everybody says. So if they were different from us, and the inhumi are so much like us, they ought to have been able to tell the difference pretty easy. So how could the inhumi do so much harm to them? Do you know, Father?"

I asked, "Why are the inhumi like us?"

"Why do I think they are, you mean? Well, Jahlee is, and you said they were. Watching out for people in old buildings and all that. If they had tails or something, we could just watch out for those."

"Not why you think it-you think it because it is true. Why is it true?"

He looked baffled.

"In Gaon – forgive me if I have mentioned this before-men who hunt wallowers weave a wallower out of wicker, and cover it with a wallower's skin."

"You didn't. I don't think so, anyway."

"Then I mention it now."

"You mean they look like us so they can hunt us."

I shook my head. "I mean that they become like us so that they can hunt us. The leech you saw in the pool above our mill looked like a small fish to the frogs, you said."

"Yeah. I think so."

"Suppose it had been unable to swim."

He was silent; then, "They really do make themselves just like we are. That's what you're saying. Only they couldn't do it if they didn't have us to copy. You're smiling."

"I am. I'd scarcely hoped to take you this far without violating an oath, which I will not do. I commanded more than twenty inhumi in Gaon, Hide. We were at war with Han, and I found them extremely useful, both as spies and as assassins; the spells I'm supposed to have cast there were little more than their activities behind our enemy's line. But when I left: the city by boat afterward, they tried to kill me."

"Why?"

"Because they were afraid I wouldn't keep the oath that I had sworn to your brother. He told me something in confidence that they believe might harm them greatly if it became widely known. I would probably violate my oath if I agreed; but I doubt that it-"

"Bad thing!"

"Yes. Certainly, Oreb."

"If they tried to kill you, I think you ought to tell everybody."

"For safety's sake, you mean."

Hide nodded.

"I won't secure my safety at the price of my honor. There have been times when I've longed for death, and even now I have no great fear of it.

There's never been a time when I've longed for dishonor."

He nodded again, slowly. "I was going to say this isn't about the Vanished People. Only I have a feeling it is, that you'll tie it up someday."

"I'll tie it up, as you put it, right now. You said that the Vanished People were wiser and stronger than we are, which is certainly true. You also said that the inhumi become like us, not merely in appearance but in speech, thought, and action, in order to prey upon us. That is true, too. They cannot make themselves precisely like us in every regard, of course. Their legs are never as strong as ours, a weakness that they sometimes disguise as old age, as Patera Quetzal did. Nettle and I have mentioned Patera Quetzal often in your hearing, I believe."

"Sure."

"He made himself so much like an elderly augur that he became head of the Chapter in Viron. For thirty or forty years he deceived everyone, and if he had not been shot, he might be deceiving us yet.

His counterfeit of a human being, though not perfect, was exceedingly good. Wouldn't you agree?"

"It sure sounds like it."

"Since we know that the inhumi preyed upon the Neighbors-the Vanished People, as we call them here-with great success, it seems reasonable that they could counterfeit them at least as well as they counterfeit us, and very plausibly better. Will you agree to that as well?"

Hide shook his head. "I don't see why it should be better."

"Think of the two whorls as they were thousand and thousands of years ago. The Vanished People were here on Blue, the inhumi on Green, where they preyed upon the great beasts in its jungles. They exterminated the Vanished People, Hide, or very nearly-that's why they vanished. Why didn't they exterminate the beasts on Green long before?"

"They wouldn't have had anything to eat."

"True. Did they have the intelligence to think of that? Without human beings to imitate?"

"I see. They were just animals, too. Big flying leeches. You're smiling again. You know, I like it."

"So do I. Eventually the Vanished People found some means of crossing the abyss to Green. Perhaps they built landers of their own-I believe that they must have. They went there, and the inhumi, too, became both powerful and wise, so powerful and so knowing that they hunted the Vanished People almost to extinction. The strengths of the Vanished People became their enemies' strengths, you see. They tried in their desperation to become stronger still, to know more and more and more, and succeeded, and were doomed by that success."

I thought then of the bestial men I had been shown in the Bear Tower, men who had surrendered their humanity, haunted by guilt or despair. Our omophagist had been caged with them; and when he had seen them, and understood what they were, he had striven to speak.

"Father?"

"Yes, my son?"

"Could they, the inhumi, wipe us out too?"

"Of course."

"Then we should have killed Jahlee."

I shook my head to clear it of the cages and the stench. "That would not prevent it."

"It would help!"

"It would not. If anything, it would do more harm. Never forget, Hide, that what we are the inhumi quickly become. Jahlee was an ally in Gaon, and a friend at the farmhouse. She had fought for me and slain my foes, and learned their secrets too, so that she might meet me with them in the garden or whisper them at the window of my bedroom. Suppose that I were to wait until her back was to me, draw the long sharp blade I have not got, and plunge it into her back."

"I wish you had!"