On Blue's waters

If Babbie had been even a trifle heavier, I doubt that the two of us could have moved him at all. As it was, we rolled him onto the cloth with which I had covered him and half lifted and half dragged him, after bailing the bilge until scarcely a drop remained.

When he lay feet-first under the foredeck, with Seawrack on his left and me on his right (and my slug gun between me and the sloop’s side) and all of us almost too cramped to move, she said, “I’ve been trying to remember about the inhumi. You said they lived in the sky? In that green light? It doesn’t seem like anyone could live in those things.”

“Most people would tell you that everybody knows that people live in or on the lights in the sky, but that no human being could live in the sea. The inhumi are native to Green. That’s what everyone says. Green is the big green light I showed you when we talked about them before. It’s much larger and brighter than any of the stars.”

“I know which one. We’ve got fish that shine like that down where it’s always dark.”

“They may look like Green,” I said, “but they don’t shine like Green. Not really. Green shines because the light from the Short Sun strikes it.”

“It’s a place, like this boat?”

“It’s a whole whorl. When I was a boy, people talked about ‘the whorl,’ as though it were the only whorl there was-as if nothing could come in or go out. It wasn’t true, even if it had been once. There are three whorls here, really, and I suppose you could say that as whorls go they’re pretty close together. There’s at least one other, too, now that I come to think of it-the old Short Sun Whorl, where my friend Maytera Marble was born.”

“You have to tell me about the inhumi,” Seawrack said urgently. Babbie’s head and shoulders blocked my view of her face.

“I’m trying to. I don’t think there were any where Maytera Marble came from, because she didn’t know about them. So the three whorls that we have to talk about when we consider the inhumi are the Whorl, which I’ll call the Long Sun Whorl to keep things straight, Blue, which is where we are, and Green, the whorl that brewed the big storm.”

“Go on.”

“I’ll try to point out the Long Sun Whorl to you as well sometime, because you’ll never find it for yourself. All that you can see is a faint point of white light among the stars. I’m guessing now, but my guess is that it’s a good deal farther from both Blue and Green than Green is from us-certainly it’s much farther away than Green is from us right now.”

“It’s where you were born?”

“Yes.” It rose like a ghost in my mind, and I added, “In Old Viron, the city I’ve sworn to go back to if I can,” but I cannot be certain that I spoke aloud.

“Were there inhumus up there?”

“We didn’t think so, but there was at least one. We thought that he was one of us.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to, because the inhumu you just saw didn’t look like a human being. But he did, and I would guess that the one we saw could have looked like that too, if he chose. I surprised him when I woke up, and he didn’t have time to disguise himself. If he’d had time and had wanted to deceive us, he’d have had a pretty good chance of succeeding. They frequently do.”

Seawrack lay silent for a time. At length she said, “Babbie’s more like people.”

I suppose I was resenting Babbie’s bristling back; in any event I said, “I’m the only person that you’ve ever seen. Me, and the sailors on Captain Strik’s boat.”

She said nothing.

“So you can’t know how different people can be. I’m about the same age as-”

“Me. Since I’ve been up here I’ve seen me. My face, my legs and my arm, all in the water.”

“Your reflection, you mean.”

“And I’m like you and the ones on the boat. The inhumi wasn’t. Babbie’s really more like us. I told you that, and he is.”

“The inhumi’s bodies aren’t like ours.” I tried to think of an enlightening comparison. “We think of a crab as rigid-it’s like a trooper in armor. A trooper in armor can move his arms and legs, and turn his head. But he can’t change the shape of his body.”

“I can’t change the shape of mine either.” Seawrack sounded puzzled.

“Yes, you can, a little. You can stand up straight or slump, draw in your stomach, throw out your chest, and so on. The inhumi can do much more. They can shape their faces, for instance, much more than we can by smiling or sucking in our cheeks. But I believe that a better comparison might be with the Mother, who-”

“I don’t want to talk about Mother,” Seawrack told me, and after enlarging upon that with some emphasis she slept, or at least pretended to sleep.