Return to the Whorl (The Book of the Short Sun #3)

Return to the Whorl (The Book of the Short Sun #3) Page 17

"I doubt that he'll drink it, but it's a kind thought."

"You were saying nobody knows the wine god's name. Isn't that unusual? I thought we knew the names of all the gods, or that the augurs did even if I don't."

"It is unusual, yes-but not unique. I had an instructor once who made a joke about it. We studied the gods a good deal, and spent half a day, perhaps, on Thyone and her dark son. My instructor said that Thyone's son had drunk so much that we had forgotten his name."

Hound chuckled.

"He also said that Thyone's son was the only god whose name we don't know. It was years before I realized that he'd been wrong. We speak of the Outsider, but it's obvious that `the Outsider' can't be his name-that it's an epithet, a nickname."

"Good god," Oreb remarked.

Hound said, "He's your favorite, isn't he? The god you love the most."

"The only god I love at all, if I've ever succeeded in loving him. In a larger sense, he's the only god worth loving. I've been outside, you see, Hound. I've been to Blue and to Green, other whorls quite different from this one."

Hound nodded.

"One goes outside full of high ideals, but one soon discovers that one has left the gods behind, even Pas. I told you how badly things were going in New Viron."

"Yes, you did."

"That's one of the chief reasons, I feel sure. So many of us were good only because we dreaded the gods. The Outsider-this is very like him, very typical of him-has shown us to ourselves. He tells us to look at ourselves and see how much real honesty there is, how much genuine kindness. You're hoping to become the father of a child."

Hound nodded. "A son, I hope. Not that we wouldn't love a daughter."

"There are children who sweep hoping to be rewarded, and there are children who sweep because the floors need sweeping and Mother's tired. And there is an abyss between them far deeper than the abyss that separates us from Blue."

"The gods keep telling us to go. That's what everybody says. I-"

"That is their function."

"I don't go to manteion myself, Horn. It seems to me that the gods ought to go with us, that they owe it to us."

"It must seem to them, I suppose, that we should take them with us gladly, that we owe them that and more."

Hound did not speak, staring into the fire.

"For three hundred years they let us live in this whorl, which they control. Their influence was malign occasionally, but benign for the most part. Scylla is a poor example, but because you know her better than the rest I'll use her anyway. She helped found Viron and graciously condescended to be its patron. She wrote our Charter, which served us so well for three centuries. Don't you think that the people who leave Viron owe it to her to take her along-if they can?"

"Why did you call her a bad example?"

"Because she's probably dead. She was Echidna's eldest child, and seems the most likely to have assisted in her father's murder. She may come back, of course, as he did. We don't call them the immortal gods for nothing."

Hound rose, broke a stick across his knee, and tossed both halves into the fire.

"You're ready to sleep, I suppose, and I'm keeping you up. I'm sorry."

"Not at all. My donkeys are afraid of something tonight, and I'm waiting for them to calm down. If I go to sleep now, they'll be all over the forest when I wake up."

"Have you any idea what may have frightened them?"

"It's wolves, usually. That's one reason I wanted to stop here. I'm sure a whole menagerie of small animals have moved in since the owners moved out, but the wolves haven't taken to denning in here yet, and I don't think they like coming inside the wall. Maybe the ghosts keep them away."

"Perhaps they do. They will keep me away after tonight, I'm sure. Is it really night, by the way? Where would the shade be if the sun were rekindled now?"

"I have no way of telling."

"Nor do I. Oreb, have you seen any wolves since we've been here?"

"No see."

"Something's frightening Hound's donkeys. Do you know what it is? Might you guess?"

"No, no."

"Then as a favor to me, would you go out and have a look around? If you see a wolf-or anything else that the donkeys might find frightening-stay well clear of it and come back and tell us."

Oreb took wing.

"You spoke of ghosts, Hound. I ought to tell you that I saw the woman who is called the ugly daughter in your story. She told me that Silk was in Viron, and that I'd find him there. Please don't ask me to exhibit her to you-"

"I wasn't about to," Hound declared emphatically.

"I cannot control her movements-her appearances and disappearances-though I confess there have been times when I very much wished I could. She's not a bad person, but I find her a frightening one, and I've never been more afraid of her than I was tonight, not even when I sat with her in the hut she and poor Maytera Marble built of driftwood. She was really present on that occasion, really there just as you and I are here. This time she was not, and I spoke with a sort of memory she has of herself."

Hound broke another stick. "You said she isn't a real ghost. That she isn't really dead as far as you know."

"I suppose I did."

"But Scylla is. Are you saying that if Scylla were to appear in the Sacred Window of the little manteion where Tansy and I were mar tied she would be a ghost, the ghost of a goddess? People used to talk about Great Pas's ghost when I was a sprat, and some of them still swear by it."

"I think it likely, but I can't say with any certainty. I know less about the gods than you may be inclined to believe, and in all humility I don't think anyone knows a great deal. We suppose that they are like us, and we read our own passions and failings into them-which was the point of my instructor's joke, of course. If we find our neighbor irritating, we're confident that the gods are irritated by him to an equal degree, and so on. I've even heard people say that a certain god was sleeping and required a sacrifice to wake him up."

Hound started to speak, stopped, and at last blurted, "Horn, do you think it's possible your friend Pig's gone to sleep in another room?"

"It's possible, I suppose, though I doubt very much that it's actually occurred. If it has, it's probably the best thing we could hope for. I pray that it has."

"You're worried about him, too."

"Yes, I am. You're not sleeping now because you're worried about your donkeys. I'm not sleeping because I'm concerned for Pig-and for myself and my errand, to acknowledge the truth."

"This woman who's not a ghost, couldn't she have harmed him? You say she's not a ghost. All right, I accept that. She sounds a lot like a goddess to me, Horn, and a goddess... You're shaking your head."

He sat up straighter and turned away from the fire to face Hound. "She isn't. May I tell you what she is? You may know some or all of it already, in which case I apologize."

Hound said, "I wish you would. And I wish you'd sent Oreb for Pig, instead of worrying about wolves. You don't agree."

"No, I don't. It might conceivably have helped. I don't know; but my best guess was and is that it would have been very dangerous for Oreb-far more so than scouting for wolves, which are unlikely to pose a threat to a bird. He would have been in a confined space with a very large man who has a sword, acute hearing, and an amazing ability to locate even silent objects by sound. If Pig had been enraged by the intrusion, which I judge by no means unlikely, Oreb might have been killed."

"You're saying Pig needs privacy right now."

"I am."

Hound sat down again, crossing plump legs. "Because of something the ghost said to him?"

"Possibly. I don't know."

"Tell me about her."

"As you wish. You mentioned that the gods have been telling everyone to leave. The devices used to cross the abyss to Blue or Green are called landers. Are you familiar with them?"

"I've heard of them," Hound said. "I've never seen one."

"Are you aware that they were provisioned by Pas before the W'iorl set out from the Short Sun Whorl? And that most of them have been looted?"

"All of them is what everybody says."

"I won't argue the point. There were human embryos among their supplies, ancient embryos preserved by cold far beyond that of the coldest winter nights. Sometimes the looters simply left those embryos. Sometimes they wantonly destroyed them, and sometimes they took and sold them, packing them in ice in an attempt to preserve them until they could be implanted."

"You said human embryos, Horn. I've heard of it being done with animals."

"Yes." His face was solemn in the flickering firelight, his blue eyes lost beneath their graying brows. "There were human embryos as well. There were also seeds, kept frozen like the embryos, so that they would sprout even after hundreds of years; but it is with the human embryos that you and I have to do, because Mucor was such an embryo. So was Patera Silk."

"Calde Silk? You can't be serious!"

He shook his head. "I set out to explain Mucor, but there would be no Mucor-or so I believe-without Patera Silk. Nor would either of them exist without Pas, who was called Typhon on the Short Sun Whorl."

Hound said, "I've heard that the gods have different names in different places, sometimes."

"That seems to have been the case with Pas, Echidna, and the rest. They had other names on the Short Sun Whorl, and those persons-Typhon, his family, and his friends-continued to exist there after they had entered the Whorl."

"Go on, please."

"If you wish. I should say that I heard that Pas had been called Typhon from a man named Auk, someone I knew long ago, who said he had been told by Scylla. He was a bad man, a bully and a thug, yet he was deeply religious in his way-I very much doubt that he would have made such a thing up. It was not his sort of lie, if you know what I mean.

"When Pas-let us call him Pas, since we're accustomed to that name-decided to send mortals to the whorls beyond the Short Sun Whorl, he used no less than three separate means. Some he sent as sleepers, unconscious in tubes of thin glass until they were awakened by the breaking of the glass. Some-your ancestors, Hound, and mine-he simply set down here inside the Whorl. And some he sent as frozen embryos, the products of carefully controlled matings in his workshops."

"Why so many ways?" Hound asked.

"I can only guess, and you could guess every bit as well. Do so now."

Hound looked thoughtful. "Well, he wanted us to colonize the new whorls, didn't he? So he put people in here to do it."

"Waking or sleeping?"

"Both, I guess. He must have been afraid we'd fight in here, and kill everyone off. Or get some disease that would wipe us out. No, that can't be right, because then there would have been no one to wake up the sleepers."

"Mainframe could have done that, I believe."

"I've never met a sleeper, Horn. I've never even seen one. I take it that you have. Are they very different from us?"

"In appearance? No, not at all. They were made to forget certain things and given falsified memories in their place, but one only occasionally catches a hint of it."

"You're saying that everybody could have been asleep? All of us? No houses and no people, just trees and animals?"

"No, I'm saying Pas must have considered that and rejected it as unworkable, or at least undesirable."

Hound nodded. "He'd have had nobody to worship him."

"That's true, though I'm not sure it was a consideration. If it didn't seem so impious, I'd say now that the Chapter and the manteions seem almost to have been a joke, that Pas made himself our chief god largely because it amused him. Do you know the story about the farmer who complained all his life about getting too much rain or too little, about the soil and the winds and so on? It's no more impious than my instructor's joke about Thyone's son; and like that one, it has wisdom."

Hound shook his head.

"The farmer died and went to Mainframe, and was soon called to the magnificent chamber in which Pas holds court. Pas said to him, `I understand you feel that I botched certain aspects of the job when I built the Whorl'; and the farmer admitted it was so, saying, `Well, sir, pretty often I thought I could have made it better.' To which Pas replied, `Yes, that's what I wanted you to do.' "

"That hits very close to home." Hound smiled.

"It does. It also explains many things, once you understand that Pas himself was brought into being by the Outsider. Pas wished to mold and guide us; and for him to do it, we had to be awake. As our chief god, he was ideally situated, though the false memories given the sleepers may have been intended to serve the same purpose. Like the farmer we complain of storms, but Pas must have foreseen that there would be storms-and things far worse-on the new whorls. How could we cope with them if we never saw snow, or a wind storm?"

"I still don't understand about the embryos. You said that you... that Calde Silk was one of the people grown from them, and this Mucor was, too."

"To colonize the new whorls-speaking of storms and such, there's a wind rising outside. Have you noticed?"

"I've been listening to it. I won't bring my donkeys in unless there's an actual storm. They can't graze in here."

"To colonize Blue and Green, Pas had to make certain that some human beings reached them alive. He pretty well assured that by dividing us into the two groups-ourselves, and the sleepers. If the sleep process, whatever it was, couldn't keep them alive for three hundred years, we would supply colonists. If we were wiped out by some disease as you suggested, the sleepers could be roused by Mainframe, or by the chems that Pas put in this whorl as well.

"But though our surviving until we reached Blue and Green was necessary, it was not sufficient. We had to survive on those whorls afterward. Blue is a hospitable one; we are our own worst enemies there. Green is much harsher. It's where the inhumi breed, and there are diseases and dangerous animals. Pas felt we ordinary people might not be able to deal with those, so he took steps to see that we'd have some extraordinary ones as well, people like Mucor, who can send out her spirit without dying; and people like Silk, who was the sort of leader we weave legends about but seldom get-or deserve, I might add."