In Green's Jungles (The Book of the Short Sun #2)

In Green's Jungles (The Book of the Short Sun #2) Page 43

"Never mind. Did you find a way in which we can take our horses through the marsh? Or around it?"

"Bird find." He ruffled his feathers and spread his wings to make himself appear larger. "Come bird!"

"Not now. We must sleep. We will be very grateful, though, if you'll guide us in the morning."

Hide said, "Now I suppose you'll want to go to bed, and I'll never get to hear what you were going to tell me."

I shook my head, listening to the uneasy motions of the horses I had just mentioned to Oreb.

"Then tell me now." To give weight to his words, he added wood to our fire.

"I've told you that the depredations of the inhumi drove the Vanished People from Blue."

He nodded.

"Have you seen them? I mean the Vanished People; I know you've seen the inhumi only from a distance, save for Jahlee."

"No, never. People say you have. They say you talk to them and all that. I don't see how you could if they're really gone."

I sighed. "I grow tired of hearing what people say. Which people were these, and how did they know?"

"Colonel Sfido. I don't know how he knew. He was trying to find out things from me, anyway. He wanted to know how you did it, but I couldn't tell him."

"He had heard rumors from the mercenaries, I imagine, and from our troopers."

"Donna Mora said so, too. When we were all in the Bear Tower? She said, 'Your father talks to the Vanished People and calls them his neighbors, and whisks us off to other whorls in the blink of an eye. But you don't know a thing about all that, do you?' She was teasing me, sort of. I said I really didn't, and she laughed. I liked her, and she can't be a whole lot older than I am."

"She is younger. Two years younger at least."

Hide stared at me and shook his head.

"If you won't believe me about Mora, whom you've seen and talked to and shared food with, why should you believe me about the Vanished People, whom you have never seen?"

Oreb championed him, croaking, "Good boy."

"Yes, he is. But he is skeptical and credulous by turns, as young men usually are, and very often skeptical of the truth and credulous of half truths and outright fabrications. Mora is substantially your junior, Hide, as I said; and if you could have seen her a month ago, you would have no doubt of it. May I burden you more? You may be as skeptical as you desire, yet it is the truth just the same."

"All right. What is it?"

"Adolescents are simply those people who haven't as yet chosen between childhood and adulthood. For as long as anyone tries to hold on to the advantages of childhood-the freedom from responsibility, principally-while seeking to lay claim to the best parts of adulthood, such as independence, he is an adolescent."

Hide stared at the flames and said nothing.

"Eventually most people choose to be adults, or are forced into it. A very few retreat into childhood and never leave it again. A larger number remain adolescents for life."

"I-" He paused and swallowed. "You mean Donna Mora grew up just by saying so?"

"Of course not. She couldn't, because no one can. She has married, and not to seek a new father-as so many young women do-but to become a full partner with Eco. She's become a new leader for the people of Blanko by the only possible means: that of offering her leadership when leadership was needed."

"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."