On Blue's waters (23 page)

“They may look like Green,” I said, “but they don’t shine like Green. Not really. Green shines because the light from the Short Sun strikes it.”

“It’s a place, like this boat?”

“It’s a whole whorl. When I was a boy, people talked about ‘the whorl,’ as though it were the only whorl there was-as if nothing could come in or go out. It wasn’t true, even if it had been once. There are three whorls here, really, and I suppose you could say that as whorls go they’re pretty close together. There’s at least one other, too, now that I come to think of it-the old Short Sun Whorl, where my friend Maytera Marble was born.”

“You have to tell me about the inhumi,” Seawrack said urgently. Babbie’s head and shoulders blocked my view of her face.

“I’m trying to. I don’t think there were any where Maytera Marble came from, because she didn’t know about them. So the three whorls that we have to talk about when we consider the inhumi are the
Whorl
, which I’ll call the Long Sun Whorl to keep things straight, Blue, which is where we are, and Green, the whorl that brewed the big storm.”

“Go on.”

“I’ll try to point out the Long Sun Whorl to you as well sometime, because you’ll never find it for yourself. All that you can see is a faint point of white light among the stars. I’m guessing now, but my guess is that it’s a good deal farther from both Blue and Green than Green is from us-certainly it’s much farther away than Green is from us right now.”

“It’s where you were born?”

“Yes.” It rose like a ghost in my mind, and I added, “In Old Viron, the city I’ve sworn to go back to if I can,” but I cannot be certain that I spoke aloud.

“Were there inhumus up there?”

“We didn’t think so, but there was at least one. We thought that he was one of us.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to, because the inhumu you just saw didn’t look like a human being. But he did, and I would guess that the one we saw could have looked like that too, if he chose. I surprised him when I woke up, and he didn’t have time to disguise himself. If he’d had time and had wanted to deceive us, he’d have had a pretty good chance of succeeding. They frequently do.”

Seawrack lay silent for a time. At length she said, “Babbie’s more like people.”

I suppose I was resenting Babbie’s bristling back; in any event I said, “I’m the only person that you’ve ever seen. Me, and the sailors on Captain Strik’s boat.”

She said nothing.

“So you can’t know how different people can be. I’m about the same age as-”

“Me. Since I’ve been up here I’ve seen me. My face, my legs and my arm, all in the water.”

“Your reflection, you mean.”

“And I’m like you and the ones on the boat. The inhumi wasn’t. Babbie’s really more like us. I told you that, and he is.”

“The inhumi’s bodies aren’t like ours.” I tried to think of an enlightening comparison. “We think of a crab as rigid-it’s like a trooper in armor. A trooper in armor can move his arms and legs, and turn his head. But he can’t change the shape of his body.”

“I can’t change the shape of mine either.” Seawrack sounded puzzled.

“Yes, you can, a little. You can stand up straight or slump, draw in your stomach, throw out your chest, and so on. The inhumi can do much more. They can shape their faces, for instance, much more than we can by smiling or sucking in our cheeks. But I believe that a better comparison might be with the Mother, who-”

“I don’t want to talk about Mother,” Seawrack told me, and after enlarging upon that with some emphasis she slept, or at least pretended to sleep.

Whether she actually slept or not, I lay awake. I had been very tired when we had gone to bed that evening, and had dropped off to sleep almost at once. Now I had enjoyed three or four hours’ sleep, and had been thoroughly awakened. I was still tired, but I was no longer sleepy. Perhaps I was afraid that the inhumu would return, although I did not admit that to myself. Whatever the reason, I relaxed, pillowed my head on my hands by dint of driving an elbow beneath Babbie’s thick neck, and thought about all the things I would have told Seawrack if she had been willing to talk longer.

The inhumi can fly, as everybody knows. They can even fly through the airless vastness of the abyss, passing from Green to Blue, and back to Green, when they are at or near conjunction. I had never understood how that was possible, but as I lay under the foredeck that night with my head where my feet ought to have been, I recalled the batfish. Its wide fins had been a lot like wings, and I have no doubt that it swam with them in the same way that a bird flies. As a matter of fact, there are fishing birds that ‘fly’ through the water, swimming with the same wings they fly with, and moving them in pretty much the same way.

From that it would seem possible for an ordinary fish to swim through the air like the glowing fish that accompanied us almost to Wichote, although it is not. If such a fish could, I decided, we could fly ourselves. We can swim, after all. Not as well as fish, certainly (here I found myself echoing Patera Quetzal, who had in sober fact been an inhumu); and I could not swim half as well as Seawrack, who shot through the water like an arrow. But although ordinary fish cannot swim in air, they can jump into the air, and sometimes jump quite far. I had seen fish jump many times, and had watched a fish jump from the water onto a flat stone when I was on the rock upon which Maytera Marble had built a hut for Mucor.

This, coupled with little need for breath, might explain how the inhumi could go from one whorl to another, or so it seemed to me. By an extreme effort, they could “jump” out of the great sea of air surrounding the whorl they wished to leave, taking aim at the whorl to which they wished to go. Their aim would not have to be precise, since they would begin to fall toward the whorl they were trying to reach as soon as they neared it. Landers, as I knew even then, must be built so that they will not overheat when they arrive at a new whorl. But landers are much larger than the largest boats, and being constructed almost entirely of metals, they must be much heavier. The inhumi are no bigger than small men, although they appear so large when their wings are spread; and even though they are strong, they are by no means heavy. Light objects fall much more slowly than heavy ones, something that anyone may see by dropping a feather as I have just dropped Oreb’s here at my desk. The heat that troubles the landers must present no great problem to the inhumi.

The need to survive for some time without air, as a man does while swimming underwater, and the need to approach the target whorl closely enough to be drawn to it explained the observation that everyone who has looked into the matter has made, namely that the inhumi cross only when the whorls are at or near conjunction.

All this-as I would have told Seawrack that night-was not at all complex, and demanded only that we not think of the inhumi as men who could stretch their arms into wings. As soon as we accepted the fact that they differ from us at least as much as snakes do, it fell into place quite readily. The difficulty was explaining the presence of the inhumu I had known as Patera Quetzal in the
Whorl
. The
Whorl
is (or at least seems) far more remote from Blue and Green than they are from each other. As with so many other riddles, it is easy to speculate but impossible to know which speculation is correct-if any are.

My first, which I then believed the most probable, was that the Whorl conjoins with either Blue or Green, or both, but only at very infrequent intervals. We know that conjunctions with Green occur every sixth year. That interval is determined by the motion of both about the Short Sun. A third body, the
Whorl
, having a different motion, presumably conjoins with one or both at a different interval. Since we have observed no such conjunction during the twenty years or so that we have been here on Blue, the interval is presumably long. For convenience, I assumed an interval ten times as great, which is to say one of sixty years. We had been on Blue for about a third of that, and I was quite confident that Patera Quetzal had been Prolocutor of Viron for thirty-three years prior to his death, giving a total of fifty-three years and (under our assumption of sixty years between conjunctions) allowing him seven in which to reach the
Whorl
, become an augur, and rise to the highest office in the Chapter.

That seemed rather short to me-I would have imagined that such a rise would require fifteen years if not more. If the speculation I am recalling tonight had been correct, in other words if Patera Quetzal had in fact crossed the abyss to the
Whorl
in the same way that other inhumi go from Green to Blue, it followed that it had been at least sixty-eight years since the last conjunction. It appeared then, as it still does, that no conjunction is imminent; from which I concluded that the period between conjunctions had to be considerably longer, say one hundred years.

Even then, I realized that other explanations were possible and might be correct. The landers were intended to return to the
Whorl
for more colonists. Patera Quetzal could have boarded a much earlier lander that did so, a lander whose departure was unknown to the Crew, and perhaps even to Pas, as well as to us in Old Viron.

A third possibility (I thought) was that a group of inhumi had built a lander of their own, in which they had traveled to the
Whorl
, and that after arriving they had separated to hunt.

The fact of the matter, as I would have had to explain to Seawrack, was that we knew frighteningly little about them. They did not appear to make weapons for themselves, or to build houses or boats, or any such thing-but appearances may be deceiving. General Saba’s pterotroopers had refused to fly wearing their packs, and in fact carried nothing beyond their slug guns and twenty rounds of ammunition. In the same way, the Fliers carried only their PMs (which actually helped them fly, rather than burdening them) and their instruments. It might be, as I thought that night, that the inhumi were even less willing to weight themselves with equipment. They flew much faster and much farther than Rani’s pterotroopers had, after all.

Farther even than the fliers had.

* * *

When I wrote last night I lacked the energy to say all that I had intended, which was a good deal. Regarding what I set down with detachment this morning, I can see that most of it was not worth the labor. My readers-should persons so singular ever exist-can speculate for themselves, and their speculations may be better than mine. What I came near to saying, and should have said because it is important and true, was that we on Blue had very little knowledge of the nature and abilities of the inhumi. Raided, we could not retaliate, and although they clearly knew a great deal about us, we knew next to nothing about them. They came from Green. They could fly, could speak as we did, and could counterfeit us. They were strong, swam well, drank our blood, and usually (but not always) fought without weapons, although they preferred stealth and deception to fighting. Few people on Blue knew more than that, and many did not know that much.

Even then I knew a bit more, having talked with Quetzal, and with Silk and the present Prolocutor, who had known Quetzal much better than I ever did. I knew that the inhumi were able to counterfeit the whole array of human emotions, and possibly even felt them just as we did; and that their deceptions were based on a comprehensive understanding of the myriad ways in which men and women think and act. I suspected that they were capable of deceiving the very gods, since Echidna knew the Prolocutor was present at her theophany, but did not appear to realize that he was an inhumi. (Of course, she may simply not have cared, or not seen any significant difference between them and ourselves.)

On the other hand, I felt quite certain that when Mucor had described Patera Remora as speaking to “the one who isn’t there” when he was coadjutor, she did not mean that he prayed but rather that to her roving spirit Patera Quetzal did not exist.

Seawrack and I were soon to become much more familiar with the inhumi; but I am writing here of what I knew and guessed at the time, errors and all.

* * *

My advisors, who are all good, well-intentioned men, are forever suggesting that I get down to business, although they never phrase it quite so baldly. If action must be taken, they want it taken now, immediately. Sinew was like that, too. When I decided that we ought to build a new boat, he wanted to lay the keel that very day, and would have been happy, I am sure, if he could have finished it that day as well. In Sinew this impatience was the effect of youth; it was something that he would get over, and indeed I believe that he has largely gotten over it already.

In Rajya Mantri, Hari Mau, and the rest, I think it must come from a tradition of warfare. Immediate action is the soul of war, as I learned many years ago by observing General Mint. It is not the soul of peace.

Last night Alubukhara (who is as round and sweet as the fruit of that name, and almost as dark) said, “If you wish to do a thing again, you must do it slowly.” I do not believe that is a proverb here; if it were, I would have heard it before this. No doubt it was a saying of her mother’s. But it ought to be a proverb for courts and for governments of every stripe, for sailors such as I once was, and for writers. Hard decisions, I have found, become easy ones when the judge understands the entire case. When a new burden must be laid upon the people, we should remove two, and look very carefully, first, at those we have chosen to remove. Those who sail fast do not sail for long, while what is written with great rapidity is rarely read-or worth reading.

I would like this read, and not by one woman or man alone (although I am very glad that you are reading it) but by so many that it reaches the eyes of the men and the woman for whom it is especially meant. My sons, I loved you so much! Am I really speaking to you now? Nettle, my heart’s delight, do you recall our first night together in the Caldé’s Palace? There has never been another night like that, and there can never be. I hope, and in my whole life I have never been more serious and sincere, that you have been unfaithful to me. That you have found a good and honest man to cast his lot with yours and help you bring up our sons. Nettle, can you hear my voice in this?