On Blue's waters

Whether she actually slept or not, I lay awake. I had been very tired when we had gone to bed that evening, and had dropped off to sleep almost at once. Now I had enjoyed three or four hours’ sleep, and had been thoroughly awakened. I was still tired, but I was no longer sleepy. Perhaps I was afraid that the inhumu would return, although I did not admit that to myself. Whatever the reason, I relaxed, pillowed my head on my hands by dint of driving an elbow beneath Babbie’s thick neck, and thought about all the things I would have told Seawrack if she had been willing to talk longer.

The inhumi can fly, as everybody knows. They can even fly through the airless vastness of the abyss, passing from Green to Blue, and back to Green, when they are at or near conjunction. I had never understood how that was possible, but as I lay under the foredeck that night with my head where my feet ought to have been, I recalled the batfish. Its wide fins had been a lot like wings, and I have no doubt that it swam with them in the same way that a bird flies. As a matter of fact, there are fishing birds that ‘fly’ through the water, swimming with the same wings they fly with, and moving them in pretty much the same way.

From that it would seem possible for an ordinary fish to swim through the air like the glowing fish that accompanied us almost to Wichote, although it is not. If such a fish could, I decided, we could fly ourselves. We can swim, after all. Not as well as fish, certainly (here I found myself echoing Patera Quetzal, who had in sober fact been an inhumu); and I could not swim half as well as Seawrack, who shot through the water like an arrow. But although ordinary fish cannot swim in air, they can jump into the air, and sometimes jump quite far. I had seen fish jump many times, and had watched a fish jump from the water onto a flat stone when I was on the rock upon which Maytera Marble had built a hut for Mucor.

This, coupled with little need for breath, might explain how the inhumi could go from one whorl to another, or so it seemed to me. By an extreme effort, they could “jump” out of the great sea of air surrounding the whorl they wished to leave, taking aim at the whorl to which they wished to go. Their aim would not have to be precise, since they would begin to fall toward the whorl they were trying to reach as soon as they neared it. Landers, as I knew even then, must be built so that they will not overheat when they arrive at a new whorl. But landers are much larger than the largest boats, and being constructed almost entirely of metals, they must be much heavier. The inhumi are no bigger than small men, although they appear so large when their wings are spread; and even though they are strong, they are by no means heavy. Light objects fall much more slowly than heavy ones, something that anyone may see by dropping a feather as I have just dropped Oreb’s here at my desk. The heat that troubles the landers must present no great problem to the inhumi.

The need to survive for some time without air, as a man does while swimming underwater, and the need to approach the target whorl closely enough to be drawn to it explained the observation that everyone who has looked into the matter has made, namely that the inhumi cross only when the whorls are at or near conjunction.

All this-as I would have told Seawrack that night-was not at all complex, and demanded only that we not think of the inhumi as men who could stretch their arms into wings. As soon as we accepted the fact that they differ from us at least as much as snakes do, it fell into place quite readily. The difficulty was explaining the presence of the inhumu I had known as Patera Quetzal in the Whorl. The Whorl is (or at least seems) far more remote from Blue and Green than they are from each other. As with so many other riddles, it is easy to speculate but impossible to know which speculation is correct-if any are.

My first, which I then believed the most probable, was that the Whorl conjoins with either Blue or Green, or both, but only at very infrequent intervals. We know that conjunctions with Green occur every sixth year. That interval is determined by the motion of both about the Short Sun. A third body, the Whorl, having a different motion, presumably conjoins with one or both at a different interval. Since we have observed no such conjunction during the twenty years or so that we have been here on Blue, the interval is presumably long. For convenience, I assumed an interval ten times as great, which is to say one of sixty years. We had been on Blue for about a third of that, and I was quite confident that Patera Quetzal had been Prolocutor of Viron for thirty-three years prior to his death, giving a total of fifty-three years and (under our assumption of sixty years between conjunctions) allowing him seven in which to reach the Whorl, become an augur, and rise to the highest office in the Chapter.