In Green's Jungles tbotss-2

by Gene Wolfe

  "You taught her all that?"

  "No. I counseled her once or twice. So did Fava, I'm sure. So did her father. But what she's done, she's done herself, because she's the only person who could possibly do it."

  "You don't think I'm grown up yet. An adult."

  "I think that you are trying very hard to become one, and that you will soon succeed." I tried to make my voice, which I know is nearly as harsh as Oreb's, more gentle. "There must have been a time when Mora, too, was trying very hard to make herself an adult, though neither of us witnessed it. She was riding north then, or imprisoned by the Soldese."

  "I've got to think about this, Father. I will tonight."

  "Good."

  "Can I ask about you? You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

  "Certainly. Adulthood was forced on me, in some sense, when I came to our quarter from the schola; but the change really occurred in the tunnels, when we were fighting the Trivigauntis and trying to reach the lander. My father had stayed behind in Viron – I'm sure I've told you this."

  "Some of it. Go on."

  "But your grandmother was there, and my younger brothers and sisters. So was your mother."

  I, too, peered into the flames, remembering. I had not seen our quarter burn, having been aboard the Trivigaunti airship at that terrible time; but it seemed to me that I saw it then: old shiprock buildings that glowed with heat and crumbled, and troopers and soldiers clashing in the ruins.

  "Go on," Hide repeated.

  "When we reached Blue, my mother wanted to treat me as a child again, and my younger brothers and sisters wanted me to be one of them, as I had been in the Whorl. So Nettle and I left them, and got Patera Remora to marry us. You have aunts and uncles and cousins that you have scarcely seen, as you must know."

  "Sure. And you and Mother moved out to the Lizard to get away from them."

  "We went there, yes. Not for that purpose. I wanted to build the mill, which meant I had to have a good fall of water in a place to which the logs could be floated. I also had to have unclaimed land, since we couldn't afford to buy any. If I'd known how hard it was going to be…" I shrugged.

  "Why'd you want to know if I'd seen the Vanished People? Are you going to show them to me?"

  I had not thought of it and had to consider. "If I can, yes. But I wondered how human they appeared to you, if you had seen them. When I have, their faces have always been in shadow. That may not be true for everyone."

  "Aren't they people like us, only four arms and four legs?"

  "I doubt very much that they looked exactly as we do, Hide. No doubt the Outsider made them from the dust of this whorl, just as he formed us from the dust of the Short Sun Whorl-that is what it says in the Chrasmologic Writings, and it's proven by the fact that the human body returns to dust in death-but there could be little point in creating us in one place and creating us again in another. Besides, the dust of that whorl can scarcely be identical to the dust of this one."

  I was silent after that, thinking of our night in the Bear Tower, where Mora had mentioned the Neighbors and Rigoglio had died. Doubtless I was only staring into our fire as I had before; but I seemed to see the Old Court again, dark, cold, and sinister, so far below the little window of the little room the Bear Leaders had assigned to Hide and me. Across it stood the torturer's tower, against which even the Bear Leaders had warned me, a lander huge and sleek still although black with age and missing a few plates. To one side, the Witches' Keep (as it was called), yet more decayed. To the other, the Red Tower, ocher with rust. On Blue as on Green, we would have called all three landers. They were thought of as buildings on the Red Sun Whorl, and had accumulated accretions of masonry, dwarfish growths of brick and stone as hallowed by time now as the landers themselves.

  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!"

  "You would not, if you had seen and heard it. Her terrible scream ringing over this silent, desolate marsh. The hideous, misshapen thing writhing and bleeding at your feet that just a moment before had appeared to be a lovely woman. Try to imagine all that. Can you?"

  He said nothing.

  "You would have battered her head with the butt of your slug gun then, trying to end her agony. Her wig would have fallen from her head, and her eyes-her eyes, Hide-would roll up to you while she begged for her life, saying please, oh, please, Hide. Mercy for your mother's sake. Mercy! We were friends, I would have lain with you in the Bear Tower if only you had come to me. You know it's true! Spare my life, Hide!"

  "No talk!" Oreb commanded.

  I spoke again anyway. "You would have struck all the harder, smashing her toothless, blood-drinking mouth with the butt of your slug gun; but you would never be able to forget those eyes, which would return to stare at you-and at me, as well-in the small hours of many nights. When you were as old as I am, you would still see her eyes."

  Reluctantly, he nodded.

  "And a hundred years from now, every inhumi in the whorl would be a little harder, a little more cruel and proud, because of what we did here tonight. Remember-what we are, they must become."

  "All right."

  "When the war in Gaon was just about over, I freed my inhumi from their service – Jahlee among them. Why do you think I did that?"

  He shrugged uncomfortably. "You didn't need them anymore."

  "I could have found a great many uses for them. Believe me, I thought of many. I could have conquered the towns downriver and founded an empire. I could have used them to consolidate my hold on Han, and to tighten my grip upon Gaon. Nettle sent you and your twin to look for me, not so long ago?"

  Hide nodded.

  "I could have sent my inhumi to fetch all three of you to Gaon, where we would have become the ruling family, the sort of thing that Inclito's family is clearly becoming in Blanko; and when I died, you and your brother would have fought to the death for my throne.

  "I rejected those possibilities and surrendered the throne the people of Gaon had given me instead, in part because I know what happened to the Neighbors, or believe I do-because I know that their towers still stretch to the damp skies of Green, when their cities here have crumbled into nameless hills."

  I waited for him to speak; he only stared at me, open mouthed but wordless.

  "On Green, the Vanished People had done what I had done in Gaon, Hide. They had made the inhumi serve them; and as time passed they had become more and more dependent upon their servants, servants whom they permitted to come here to feed, and perhaps carried here to feed. I myself had allowed my own inhumi to feed upon the blood of the people of Han, you see. It was war, I told myself, and the Man of Han would surely have done the same to us; but I had set my foot upon that path, and I was determined to leave it."

  "What happened when all the Vanished People here were dead?" Hide asked in a strangled voice.

  "I'm not sure it ever occurred," I told him. "A very few may have survived; a very few may survive here still. But a time came-I doubt that it was more than a few hundred years in coming-when it was no longer worthwhile for the inhumi to come here."

  "What happened then?"

  "I think you know," I told him, and wished him a good night.

  24

  Sinew's Village

  So much has happened since I last wrote that I feel I should begin another book – or end this one. Perhaps I will do both tonight; that would be fitting.

  For a long time I sat beside our little fire, writing and watching the stars rise above the scrub-covered hills through which Hide and I had ridden that day. Jahlee had never really gone, I knew. Oreb had testified to that, and testified to it still, although I cautioned him again and again to keep his voice down lest he wake Hide. Our horses had testified to it as well – the inhumi always frighten horses, I believe; perhaps they smell the blood.

  I needed no more proof, but I soon had it. The cold winter wind seemed to carry with it a steaming, fetid wind from Green, as a frigid old man, penurious and hoary with age, might bear in his arms the rotten corpse of a beautiful young woman. My eyes were on my paper, squinting and straining to see each letter I shaped there, for it is no easy business to write by firelight. And it seemed to me that to my
left, at or beyond the very edge of vision, a great man-killer of Green stalked, each slow and careful stride that crushed the too-thin ice devouring twenty cubits. When I looked beyond the fire, its light revealed wide, dripping leaves in silhouette; and once a moth with wings wider than the sheets on which I wrote, opalescent wings stamped by some god with a strange device of cross and circle, fluttered toward the flames-only to vanish when I blinked.

  Jahlee was waiting for me the moment my eyes closed, more beautiful in her embroidered gown than she had ever been when she went naked in the Red Sun Whorl. "This steaming heat becomes you," I told her. "You were made for Green."

  She pretended to pout. "I thought this was going to be a great surprise to you, if it happened at all. You expected it all along."

  "My son should have joined you here some time ago. He fell asleep long before I finished writing."

  She nodded, her face expressive of nothing.

  "Did you seduce him? He would have had more than enough time to resume his clothing and go, I imagine."

  "That's none of your business!"

  "You did not, or you would boast of it."

  "I said it's none of your affair. Hasn't it struck you that he may not have wanted to see you? I told him you'd be along."

  "Of course. Particularly if you bit him on the neck at climax, as you bit the neck of the trooper who took us to the fort over the ditch."

  "I didn't!"

  "You didn't bite Hide because you were unable to seduce him. That's what you must mean, since-"

  "Boy come!" Oreb sailed overhead, again three times his normal size, and absurdly resembling a feathered dwarf with overlong arms.

  "If we continue this fight," I told Jahlee, "Hide and I will drive you away, just as we drove you away from our fire beside the frozen marsh. This is Green, and you are a human being here. Remember Rigoglio? The spittle running from his mouth? The empty eyes?"

  She did. I saw her shudder.

  "I won't pretend to value your life more highly than you do yourself, but I value it. Let us be friends-"

  I had wanted to say, Let us be friends again, as we were in Gaon, and in the farmhouse by the battlefield; but she was weeping in my arms, and there seemed no point in continuing.