On Blue's waters (6 page)

I have never struck the scribe I mentioned (his name is Hoop), although I have been severely tempted. I have shouted at him once or twice, or asked what he was writing before the ink dried upon his pen. But I have never asked him how he does nothing, or how I can learn to do it in case I find myself alone again in a boat upon a windless sea. I should.

There are always half a dozen little jobs waiting on a boat like the sloop. The standing rigging should be tightened here and there, simple though it is. It might be well to rake the mast a bit more-or a bit less. There is not much water in the bilge, but what there is can be removed with a little satisfying labor. The harpoon and its coil of line, carelessly stowed by Hide two days ago, can be stowed more neatly, so that they occupy a trifle less space. One by one I found them and did them all, and searched diligently for more, and took out the few belongings I had packed, and refolded and re-packed them all, except for our book.

And settled down to read, searching out Silk’s trip to Lake Limna with Chenille and reading about the poster they saw there and how he separated from Chenille, who had drawn his picture in colored chalks as soon as he was gone-all in my wife’s neat and almost clerkly hand.

How long and how diligently she had labored to produce copy after copy, until she had done six altogether and several persons were clamoring for more, and several others were copying the ones she had produced earlier (and producing with the wildest abandonment both abridgments and annotated editions in which their annotations were not always clearly distinguished, and sometimes were not distinguished at all). Then she-you, my own darling-although she had already labored for the better part of a year to satisfy what must have seemed a mere whim to her (as indeed it sometimes has to me), began, and toiled over, and at last completed that seventh fair copy, which she proudly presented to me.

I had been tempted to leave it at home. Not because I did not love it-I did, and almost certainly loved it too much; no man is so secure in his sanity that he can afford to lavish on a mere inanimate object the passionate affection that every good man at some time feels for another person. Loving it as I did, I had known I was carrying it into deadly danger when I resolved to take it to the Long Sun Whorl and present it to Silk. So it proved; I nearly lost it at once, and it did not remain with me long. I can only say that I knew the risk from the beginning, resolved with open eyes to run it, and am very glad I did.

So it has proved, and where is the Nettle who shall produce copy after copy of this, of this record of my travels and dangers and lucky escapes that I have begun, this
Book of Horn
? But you must surely think that in all this I have left my earlier self and our motionless sloop far behind.

I have not, because it was then, reading in the sloop by the light of the declining sun, that the thought of printing struck me with full force. I had read (I believe) that Silk had come upon a stone carved with a picture of Scylla, and I moved by imperceptible mental stages from the carving of that stone to the cutting into fine stone of pictures for books, as artists sometimes did at home, and from there to cutting whole pages as the pictures are cut, pages that might then be duplicated again and again, and from that to the memory of a visit to a printing shop with my father, who had supplied its owners with certain papers and inks, not all of which had proved completely satisfactory.

I ought to say here that Nettle and I had discussed the possibility of printing long before I wrote the incident in which Silk stopped to pray before the Scylla-marked stone. We had discussed it, but both of us had quickly concluded that it would be far easier to create the two or three copies we then envisioned by hand than to build the equipment necessary to print them and learn the process. Having thus sensibly concluded that printing was beyond our grasp, we abandoned all thought of it.

Now I, having seen the eagerness with which Nettle’s copies were bought, thought of printing again-but in a whole new light: I knew beyond doubt that we could sell as many as twenty or thirty in the course of a year, if only we had them.

Furthermore, we might also print the much shorter account of our departure from Old Viron that Scleroderma had completed before death claimed her. A grandson had her manuscript, and allowed others to copy it. Surely he would allow Nettle to copy it as well, and from her copy we might print and sell a dozen at least. In addition, there was a man in Urbasecundus who was said to have produced a similar book, although I had never seen it. We had paper, and the modest skills and tools required to sew folded sheets into a book and to bind the book between thin slats of runnerwood. We needed nothing but printing to create a new and profitable use for the paper we made and sold already.

Nor was that all. Printing tens of thousands of words would surely require hundreds of reusable letters, and perhaps a thousand or more. In the shop I had visited with my father, they had made their letters by pouring molten metal into metal molds. (This reminded me of Chenille’s description of the way in which the heads of taluses are made, and I found and reread it.) The metal, which I recalled seeing a woman heat in an iron ladle held in a charcoal fire, had appeared to be pure silver when it was poured; but my father had said that it was mostly lead.

That in turn reminded me of a conversation a week earlier with Sinew, who delighted in discussing weapons of every kind and was prone to pontificate about them. I had urged that needlers were better suited to conditions here than slug guns, if only because the projectile fired was a simple, slender cylinder, not gready different from a short piece of wire. We owned a slug gun as well, the one with which Nettle had fired on the pirates, and although the gun itself was considerably simpler than a needier, every shot required a separate casing and a multitude of other parts that could be used only once: a dot of special chemical in a tiny copper cup, an explosive to propel the slug, the slug itself, and a disk of stiff paper, heavily waxed, with which to seal the casing-this last (I said) being the only item on the entire list that we ourselves could supply.

Sinew had disagreed. “Some man in town gave Gadwall a couple of needles and told him to make him some iron ones. He did, too. He cut them out of a thin rod he had and rolled them between red-hot plates and polished them. He showed them to me, and the real needles. His looked like the real thing. I couldn’t tell them apart. But when you put them in a needier, they wouldn’t shoot. Gadwall said you could have dropped in that many straws and done every bit as well.”

I started to object, but Sinew interrupted.

“Slug guns are different. We’re already making slug guns that work. In that book you and Mother wrote, you have one of the soldiers tell somebody his slugs are made of some stuff I never heard of.”

I agreed. “Yes, depleted uranium. That was what Silk said he said.”

“Well, I don’t know what that is. But I know the slugs they make in town are lead. You know about the silver mine they found up in the mountains?”

“I know everybody’s talking about one. I haven’t been there, but it sounds very promising.”

“Yeah.” He was silent for a moment, and I could see the dream of finding such a mine himself in his eyes. “We need a lot of things, and we’ve got to have things to trade for them, stuff that doesn’t take up a lot of room on the boat and won’t spoil. Silver should be perfect. The miners already swap it for whatever they need, like mining tools and powder, and the goldsmiths are making it into rings and stuff so it will bring more. Or you can just swap a little silver bar for twenty times that much iron. It’s better than the paper, all the traders want it.”

“Are you saying that silver can be used in the slug gun cartridges in place of depleted uranium? Or that iron can? Iron would be cheaper, naturally.”

He had shaken his head. “There’s lead in the silver ore. It’s heavier than silver, so the two are pretty easy to separate. So we’ve not only got silver here we’ve got lead, too, and that works great. You can’t trade it, not now anyway, because it’s heavy and nobody wants it much. But it’s a metal you can feed to slug guns, and we’ve got it.”

Lead could be cast into type, even cut into type by hand if the casting proved difficult, and lead was available and cheap. We would not need to start with thousands of movable pieces and print a book. Most people who wanted our paper wanted it for writing letters. We could-we would!-offer them decorated papers. Marrow could have a picture of a vegetable marrow on his paper if he liked, in green or yellow ink. Men named for birds, as Auk had been and Gyrfalcon and Gadwall were, could have a picture of the appropriate bird. Nettle drew very skillfully and had taught Hoof and Hide to draw almost as well as she did. Most women were named for flowers, and flowers were easy to draw (Nettle sometimes sketched them for amusement) and should be easy to print.

I was so excited by the prospect that I would have paced up and down if the size of the sloop had permitted it. As it was, I climbed out on the bowsprit and waved my cap to the empty, rolling sea and the dim and distant land. If the trolling bird was impressed, he showed no signs of it.

Returning to our book (in which I had lost my place) I read as before, often carried away by thoughts of printing and the wonderful possibilities it offered, until I chanced on a passage that caught me up short, the one in which Silk brings the Peace of Pas to the talus he has killed in the tunnels. Many prayers and blessings were already falling into disuse; but Nettle had told me of a woman she knew who had written dozens on sheets of our paper and hung them on the walls in her house to preserve them. Others might do the same, and no doubt some already had; but by printing, such things could not only be saved but disseminated.

Even that was not all. His Cognizance Patera Remora, with whom I hoped to speak again when I reached the town, had a copy of the Chrasmologic Writings he had brought from Viron-it was the book upon which I had sworn my oath. That would give us a third text much longer than the first two; and by printing and selling selections from it, we would not only perpetuate and preserve what foreigners here call the Vironese Faith but propagate it.

It was a thought that gave me pause. If, as so many of us thought, the gods we had known in the
Whorl
were not to be found here, the Vironese Faith was a lie undeserving of my credence, or anyone’s. For the ten thousandth time I wished with all my heart that Silk had come with us.

* * *

I have found a kind of paint that will stick to the lens of my glasses. It may be no great relief to those to whom I speak-they swear it is not-but it is to me. Returning to this airy bedroom tonight, I admired my reflection like a girl.

When I wrote last, it was about my wish that Silk had come with us, as he had intended to do. How I wish now that I could have brought him with me to Gaon! But I was describing that terrible night on the sloop.

If I slept, Silk might appear in dream, or so I supposed, and unravel the knot of faith for me; if I continued to read, something he had said (first set down in our book by my own hand and now forgotten) might solve everything; but I was no longer sleepy, and the Short Sun was so low already that reading would soon be impossible. I baited my hook and threw it out, and sat in the stern, pondering.

It might well be that Pas and Echidna, and Scylla and her siblings, were gods only in the Long Sun Whorl. That, I felt fairly confident, had been Silk’s opinion; but Silk’s opinion had been expressed before our lander left the Whorl. It was at least possible that we had somehow brought them with us, as Remora alleged. He was certainly correct in one sense: people who had revered those gods through half a lifetime, as so many had, had carried them to Blue in their hearts.

What was it Sinew had said?

That if Pas were truly a god he could come here whenever he wished, or go anywhere. If Silk was right, and Pas did not leave the Long Sun Whorl, it could only be because he did not want to. Or (Pas had been murdered with apparent success by his wife and children, after all) because he was somehow prevented by the other gods. The same might be said of Echidna, Scylla, and the rest-but if they restrained Pas, who restrained them? It might easily be that the gods were in fact present, remaining unknown to us because we lacked the Sacred Windows through which they had spoken at home.

There was one at least whom even Silk had expected to find here. The Outsider was so called, in part at least, because he was to be found outside the whorl as well as in it. Presumably he was here, although there was no more evidence to suggest it than there was for presence of the other gods. I had prayed to him occasionally ever since we had landed, in imitation of Silk, although less and less often as I found my prayers unavailing as the years wore on, maintaining the custom of prayer at family meals because I hoped it might promote the moral development of my sons.

Hope.

That is the trouble with all prayer. Because we hope, we find success where success is not to be found. How easy it would be for me to write here that Sinew would have been worse without the empty ritual of those prayers! It may be true; but try to find an honest man anywhere who would willingly say that Sinew’s moral development ever benefited from anything.

He was brave on Green, at least, and loyal for a time.

* * *

As for the gods that Sinew proposed on the night that I left Lizard, the original gods of this whorl of Blue, I asked myself then how much power they can have possessed, and whether they would not have saved at least a few of their worshippers if they could. I know better now, of course.

When I reached New Viron I asked Remora about it, and to my surprise he took the question very seriously, his long face growing longer still while he tried again and again to push back the lank hair that persisted in falling over his high forehead to obstruct his vision. “The-ah-um,” he said, and managed to load those noises with sacred dignity. “Ah-ah-er.”

“If the gods don’t want to be worshipped, there’s no reason for them to be swayed by our prayers and sacrifices,” I argued. “Therefore, they do, if you will allow that they sometimes answer prayers, as I know you will, Your Cognizance. Granting that, they ought-”