On Blue's waters

by Gene Wolfe

  She waits.

  For what I do not know. It may be for her worshippers to return again. Or for us to become her new worshippers, as we well may.

  Or perhaps merely for death. She shaped herself, I believe, a woman of the Vanished People so that they would love her. We are here now, and so she shaped for me a woman of my own race-a woman beside whom Chenille would stand like a child-who could sing and speak to me. Beneath it the old sea goddess waited, and was not of our human race, nor of the race of the Vanished People, whom I was to come to know.

  I once had a toy, a little wooden man in a blue coat who was moved by strings. When I played with him, I made him walk and bow, and spoke for him. I practiced until I thought myself very clever. One day I saw my mother holding the two sticks that held his strings, and my little wooden man saluting my youngest sister much more cleverly than I could have made him do it, and laughing with his head thrown back, then mourning with his face in his hands. I never spoke of it to my mother, but I was angry and ashamed.

  * * *

  It has been a long while since I wrote last. How long I am not sure. I went to Skany as its ambassadors asked, and remained there most of the summer. Now I have returned to this fine, airy house my people here have built for me, which they enlarged while I was gone. The west wing was torn to pieces by a storm, they tell me; but they have rebuilt it and made it larger and stronger, so that I walk there among rooms that seem familiar and feel that I have shrunk.

  The storms are worse. Green is great in the sky. Like the eye of a devil, people say; but the truth for me is that it is so large that I look up at it and think on other days, and fancy sometimes that I can smell the rot, and see the trees that are eating trees that are eating trees. I never hear the wild song of the wind without recalling other days still, and how we built our house and our mill, Nettle.

  You were the dream of my boyhood. You shared my life, and I shared yours, and together we brought forth new lives. Who can say what the end of that may be? Only the Outsider. He is wise, Nettle. So wise. And because he is, he is just.

  I hear the wind’s song now at my window. I have opened the shutters. The flame of my lamp flickers and smokes. Through the open window I see Green, which will be gone in an hour as it passes beyond the windowframe. I want to call out to you that the tides are coming; but no doubt they have come already. It may be that the log walls of our house are turning and leaping in the waves as I write. Time is a sea greater than our sea. You knew that long before I went away. I have learned it here. Its tides batter down all walls, and what the tides of time batter down is never rebuilt.

  Not larger.

  Not smaller.

  Never as it was.

  * * *

  I see that before I left for Skany, that glorious, corrupt town, I wrote of how Seawrack and I slept in the cubby of the sloop, with Babbie sleeping too at our feet, or at least at times pretending to sleep so that he could be in our company; and I said that we did not sleep long.

  Nor did we. I remember lying like that, then turning on my back so that both my ears might listen. I wrote about the song of the wind, too; but I am not certain that I had ever really heard it until that night, although I thought I had. To hear the song of the wind truly, as I heard it that night, I think that you must hear it as I did, lying on your back in a rocking, pitching boat upon the wide, wide sea, with a woman younger than yourself asleep beside you.

  The wind was a woman, too. Sometimes it was a woman like General Mint, a small woman with a neat, pure, honest little face, a woman in flowing black astride the tallest white stallion anyone ever saw, singing as she rode like a flame before a thousand wild troopers who rode as she did or ran like wolves, firing and reloading as they came and halting only to die.

  And sometimes the wind was a woman like the tall, proud women of Trivigaunte, galloping along Sun Street with their heads up and their lances leveled, women singing to their wonderful horses, horses that had always to be held back and never had to be urged forward. And sometimes the wind was a singing woman like the one beside me, a sea woman who sings like her Mother, a woman that no one ever completely understands, with silver-blue combers in her eyes.

  As I listened, the wind seemed to me more and more to be all three women and a million more, spurred onward-faster, always faster-by the rumbling voice of Pas. Beneath me, the sloop was lifted by giant’s hand, and rolled so far that Seawrack was tumbled onto me and clutching me in fear while Babbie squealed at the tiller. Outside the shelter of the foredeck, I was drenched to the skin in an instant. It was pitch dark except when the lightning flashed, and the sloop was laid over on her beam ends and in danger of being dismasted. I meant to cut her moorings before they pulled her under, but there was no need. The stakes I had pushed into the damp softness of that mossy shore had pulled free, and we were being driven before the storm like a child’s lost boat or a stick of driftwood, half foundering. I put out the little jib, hoping to steady her and keep her stern to the waves, but had hardly set it before it was carried away.

  I will not write about everything that took place that night, because most of it would be of interest only to sailors, who are not apt to be found so far inland as this. I rigged a sea anchor that tamed the diabolical pandemonium of boat and storm to mere insanity; and Seawrack and I bailed and bailed until I thought my arms would fall off of my shoulders; but the sloop never foundered or sunk, or lost a stick. I have never been prouder of something that I myself have made, not even my mill.

  What I want to tell whoever may read this is that in the flashes of lightning, which for whole hours were so frequent as to provide a hectic illumination that was nearly constant, I saw the green plain part for us, ripped in two by the fury of the waves, and seeing it so-lifted by great waves at one moment, then crashing down upon the sea again at the next-I knew it for what it was.

  At that place in the middle of the sea, the bottom is not leagues removed from the surface; but is, as Seawrack confirmed for me, not more than two or three chains distant from it. Great herbs (I do not know what else to call them) grow there that are not trees, nor grasses, nor ferns, but share the natures of all three. Their tangled branches, lying upon the surface, are draped with the smooth green life over which Babbie and I wandered. It may be that it covers them as orchids cover our trees here in Gaon, or as strangling lianas cover the cannibal trees of Green. Or it may be that they cover themselves with it as the trees of land cover themselves with leaves and fruit. I do not know. But I know that it is so, because I saw it that night. I saw what I had once thought islands torn like banana leaves, and tossed like flotsam by the waves.

  Something climbed into our sloop that night that was neither a beast nor a man, and was not a thing of the sea nor a thing of the land, nor even a thing of the air like the inhumi. I hesitated to write of it, because I know that it will not be believed; after thinking it over, I understand that I must. How many travelers’ tales, although full of wise advice and the soundest information, have been cast aside because among their thousands of lines there were two or three that their readers could not be brought to believe?

  If you do not believe this, believe at least that I believed that I saw it. And Seawrack also saw it. She confirmed for me that she had, although she did not like to speak of it. Babbie saw it, too, and rushed at it; it laid hold of him as a man might lay hold of a lady’s lapdog, and would, I believe, have thrown him over the side and into the raging water if Seawrack had not prevented it. In appearance it was like a man of many arms and legs, long dead and covered over with crabs and little shellfish and other things; and yet it moved and possessed great strength, although I think it feared the storm as much or more than we. I do not know how such a monstrous thing came to be, but I have thought about it again and again, and at last settled on the explanation that I offer here. If you find a better one, I congratulate you.

  Imagine that one of the Vanished People gained great favor with one of his people’s gods, those gods who are sa
id by us to have vanished too. Or who, at least, we think of as having vanished. This god, let us suppose, offered his worshipper a great gift-but only one. Silk, I believe, might say that this worshipper was in truth no favorite of the god’s but merely thought he was. Many times our own gods, the gods of the Long Sun Whorl, punished those they hated with riches, power, and fame that destroyed them.

  Offered such a gift, may not this man of the Vanished People have chosen a life without end? The immortal gods have it, or are said to. Given the gift that he had chosen, he may have lived for centuries enjoying food and women and fine days and, in short, everything that pleased him. Perhaps he tired of all of it at last. Or perhaps he merely discovered at length that though he himself could not die, the race that had given him birth was dwindling every year. Or perhaps he simply chose, in the end, to abide with the goddess who had favored him. In any event, he must have cast himself into the sea.

  All of which is mere speculation. No doubt I have rendered myself ridiculous even to those who believe me. Remember, please, that those who believe me are not themselves ridiculous-I saw what I saw.

  The storm had come out of the northeast, as well as I could judge. It left us out of sight of land, and some considerable distance south of the place at which it had found us, as well as I could judge from the stars on the following night. We had no way of knowing how far west it had driven us, but sailed west-northwest hoping each day to sight land.

  Water was a constant concern, although Seawrack required very little. We caught such rain as the good gods provided, taking down the mainsail and rigging it in such a way as to catch a good deal and funnel it (once the sail had been wet enough to clean it of salt) into our bottles. In fair weather, when there was little wind or none, all three of us swam together beside the sloop. I found, not at all to my surprise, that Babbie was a better swimmer than I; but found too, very much to my surprise, that Seawrack was a far better swimmer than Babbie. She could remain under the water so long that it terrified me, although when she realized that I was both concerned and astonished, she pretended she could not. One night when I kissed her, my lips discovered her gill slits, three, closely spaced and nearer the nape of her neck than I would have imagined. I asked her no questions about them, then or later.

  At first she said nothing about the goddess she called the Mother. After nearly a week had passed, I happened to mention Chenille, saying that although she had known nothing of boats, she had understood Dace’s perfectly when Scylla possessed her. Seawrack seized upon the concept of divine possession at once and asked many questions about it, only a few of which I could answer. At length I said that she, whose mother was a goddess, should be instructing me.

  “She never said she was,” Seawrack told me with perfect seriousness.

  “Still, you must have known it.”

  Seawrack shook her lovely head. “She was my mother.”

  At that point I very nearly asked her whether her mother had not demanded prayers and sacrifices. “We used to give our gods gifts, when I lived inside the Whorl,” I said instead, “but that was not because they required such things of us. They were far richer than we were, but they had given us so much that we felt we ought to give them whatever we could in return.”

  “Oh, yes.” Seawrack smiled. “I used to bring Mother all sorts of things. Shells, you know. Lots of shells and pretty stones, and sometimes colored sand. Then she would say that my face was the best gift.”

  “She loved you.” At that moment, as at so many others, I felt I knew a great deal about love; my heart was melting within me.

  Seawrack agreed. “She used to look like a woman for me and hold me in her arms, and I used to think the woman was the real her and make her bring the woman back. She looked like a woman for you too. Remember?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll never forget that.”

  “When I was older, she would just wrap herself around me, and that was nice, like when you hold me. But not the same. What do they ask gods for, in the Whorl?”

  “Oh, food and peace. Sometimes for a son or daughter.”

  “For gold? She said you liked it.”

  “We do,” I admitted. “Every human being wants gold-every human being except you. Because they do, gold is a good friend to those who have it. Often it brings them good things without going away itself.”

  “Has my gold brought you anything?”

  I smiled. “Not yet.”

  “It’s old. You say that old things are always tired.”

  “Old people.” I had been trying to explain that she was much younger than I, and what that would mean to both of us when we found land, and people besides ourselves. “Not old gold. Gold never gets old in that way.”

  “Mine did. It wasn’t bright anymore, and the little worms were building houses on it. Mother had to clean it, pulling it through the sand. I helped.”

  “She must have had them a long time. Possibly for as long as you lived with her.” Privately I thought that it must have been a good deal longer than that.

  “Can I see it again?”

  I got the box out for her, and told her she could wear her gold if she wished, that it was hers, not mine.

  She selected a simple bracelet, narrow and not at all heavy, and held it up so that it coruscated in the sunshine. “This is pretty. Do you know who made it?”

  “I’ve been wondering about that,” I said, and wondered as I spoke whether she would tell me. “It could have been brought from the Long Sun Whorl on a lander; but I would guess that it is the work of the Vanished People, the people who used to live here on Blue long before we humans came.”

  “You’re afraid of them.”

  It had been said with such certainty that I knew it would be futile to argue. “Yes. I suppose I am.”

  “All of you, I mean. All of us.” She turned the bracelet to and fro, admiring it, then held it in her teeth to slip over her wrist.

  “The Long Sun Whorl was our whorl, our place,” I told her. “It was made especially for us, and we were put into it by Pas. This was their whorl. Perhaps it was made for them, but we don’t even know that. They’re bound to resent us, if any of them are still alive; and so are their gods. Their gods must still exist, since gods do not die.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Where I used to live, the greatest of all goddesses tried to kill Pas. Wise people who knew about it thought that she had, although most of us didn’t even know she’d tried. Then Pas came back. He had planted himself, in a way, and grew again. Do you know about seeds, Seawrack?”

  “Planting corn. You told me.”

  “He re-grew himself from seed, so to speak. That’s what a pure strain of corn does. It produces seed before it dies, and when that seed sprouts, the strain is back for another year, just as it was before.”

  “Do you think the Vanished People might have done that?” From her tone, it was a new idea to her.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I have no way of knowing what they may or may not have done.”

  “You told me the seed waited for water.”

  “Yes, for rain, and warmer weather.”

  Babbie ambled over to see what Seawrack and I had in the box, snuffled its rings and chains and snorted in disgust, and returned to his place beside the butt of the bowsprit. I, too, looked away, if only mentally. My eyes saw bracelets and anklets of silver and gold, but I was thinking about Seawrack’s implied question. Assuming that the Vanished People were capable of coming back in some fashion, as Pas had, what might constitute warmth and rain for them?

  Would we know, if they returned? Would I? At that time I did not even know what they had looked like, and so far as I knew, no one did. Doubtless they had been capable of making pictures of themselves, since they had certainly been capable of constructing the great building whose ruins we had discovered when we arrived; but any such pictures-if they had ever existed-had been erased by time, on Lizard and in the region around Viron at least. Seawrack, who appe
ared so fully human, had gills beneath the golden hair that hung below her waist. Were those gills the gift of the goddess, or the badge of the original owners of this whorl we call ours? At that time, I had no way of knowing.

  “I think I see another boat.” She rose effortlessly, pointing at a distant sail.

  “Then we’d better get these out of sight.” I began to shut the lid.

  “Wait.” As swiftly as a bird, her hand dipped into the box. “Look at this, Horn.” Between thumb and forefinger she held a slender silver ring, newly made in New Viron. “I like it. It’s small and light. All that gold made it hard to swim, but this won’t. Will you give it to me?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “It’s a great pleasure.” I took it from her and slipped it on her finger.

  * * *

  In the light airs that were all we had that day, the other boat took hours to reach us. I had ample time to break out my slug gun and load it, and to put a few more cartridges in my pockets.

  “Are you going to fight with that?” I had told her about the pirates.

  “If I must. I hope I won’t. Sailors are usually friendly. We trade information, and sometimes supplies. I may be able to get us more water.” I hesitated. “If they’re not friendly, I want you to dive into the sea at once. Don’t worry about me, just swim away to-to someplace deep where they won’t be able to find you.”

  She promised solemnly that she would, and I knew that she would not.

  It was a much larger boat than mine, two-masted and blunt-bowed, with a crew of five. The owner (a stocky, middle-aged man who spoke in a way that recalled Wijzer) hailed us, asking where we were bound.

  “Pajarocu!” I told him.

  “Riding light you are,” he said, clearly assuming that we were traders too.

  Soon his big boat lay beside our small one. Lines from bow and stern united the two, we introduced ourselves, and he invited us aboard. “In these waters not so many boats I see.” He chuckled. “But farther than this I would sail a woman so pretty to see. Whole towns even, not one woman like your wife they got.” One of his crew set up a folding table for us, with four stools.