On Blue's waters

“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?