"No," he said.

"Just to visit a sick friend."

"It's Pig." At the moment that was all the explanation he could give.

"All right. Look behind you. See the red light?"

He nodded again. "That's where we came from."

"Right. There's a box at the base of the pylon. Open it, pull the lever, and close it again and you can go inside. Not the Remote Viewing Room, but close. Ask for me."

"Will I have to go back there to get back to our lander?" The thought to making the league-long journey twice was almost more than he could bear.

The surgeon shook his head, and it was possible to think of living again, of Pig resting in a white bed, and silence, and prayer. The surgeon said, "This is in case you turn back."

"I won't."

"You might, if you're hurt." The surgeon clasped his shoulder. "If you don't . . . Well, good-bye."

"Good-bye, and thank you again." He would have turned then and gone, but the surgeon's hand maintained its grip.

"You'll be farther from the Pole. You'll have a little more weight as you get nearer the sick bay."

"That's good to know."

"I wish I could go with you."

He felt a surge of grat.i.tude. "So do I."

The surgeon released his shoulder. "I'll tell them to expect you, and ask them to change your dressing. There'll be sand in it."

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you again."

He had started down the slope when the surgeon's hail stopped him. "What is it?"

"You thanked me for patching up your friend Pig."

"Yes!" He had to shout to make himself heard.

"They told us to. A flier did. Wait up."

He watched the surgeon's bobbing headlamp ascend the rocky slope a good deal more quickly and skillfully than he had.

"The flier said we should. Maybe I ought to tell you about it. Mainframe's the captain. You probably know."

His instinct urged caution. "I knew it was in the east. I wasn't sure you obeyed it as well."

"We do." The surgeon drew him toward a boulder that offered shelter from the wind-driven sand. "It used to communicate with us directly. It can't anymore because the cable's been cut. So it sends fliers. Or G.o.dlings, but mostly fliers."

"No fly!" Oreb advised.

"We've found the break and we're fixing it, but it isn't as simple as hooking your optic nerve up to your friend's. There are millions and millions of fibers and every connection has to be right."

"I believe I understand."

"Still, it's got to be fixed before we leave. So do a lot of other things." The surgeon paused, clearly wrestling with whatever it was he really wanted to say.

"I'm very glad you agreed to operate on Pig, in any case."

"The thing is, we can't always be sure the flier's telling us what Mainframe said. Sometimes we think he may be adding on his own, or leaving something out. You know about the animals?"

"What animals?"

"Great Pa.s.silk is supposed to be mad at his wife and half his sprats. Frankly, I don't believe it." (Doctor Crane's chuckle seemed to echo among the rocks.) "But people say they've turned themselves into animals to get away from him."

"No cut," Oreb muttered in his master's ear.

"I heard something about that," he told the surgeon.

"So when we were told to fix up somebody, and it turned out he was called Pig, well, we had to wonder. Do you follow me?"

"Well enough to guess that you're in awe of G.o.ds you do not reverence."

"I suppose that's fair." The surgeon turned to go.

"You have been very good to us--to Pig and me. You've been a friend when we needed one in the worst way. So let me a.s.sure you that you've nothing to worry about. Pig doesn't harbor Echidna or any of Echidna's children. I won't explain how I know; but I do know. You needn't fear that I'm mistaken."

The surgeon turned back to him. "Thanks. You seem like somebody who can be trusted."

"You can trust me in this, at least."

The surgeon held out his hand. "What's your name? I know you told me, but I've forgotten it."

"Horn," he said; somewhere Doctor Crane chuckled again.

"M'to. It means a river." The surgeon cleared his throat and spat. "Those little men up on the bridge think we're pretty crude here in the black gang, and maybe we are. But we're not tricky, and we know a lot more medicine, because we get a lot more people hurt."

"I doubt that their opinion of you is nearly as low as you believe. The flier who told you about Pig--was Flannan his name?"

The surgeon shook his head. "I didn't talk to him. I don't know what his name was. I've got to get back."

They shook hands again.

When he had crawled over twenty or thirty cubits of rocky, windswept ground, he heard the surgeon's voice behind him, borne on the hot polar gale. "Don't disregard your monitor!" "Don't disregard your monitor!"

He shouted, "I won't!" hoping to be heard.

"And don't p.i.s.s into the wind!"

At his elbow Crane's ghost murmured, "Is it really worth all this to fight free of Hari Mau for an hour or two, Silk?"

17.

HE T TOOK M ME WITH H HIM.

P retty soon after the inhuma was buried he went back to New Viron and took me with him. "I must speak to Gyrfalcon," he told me while we went down the coast in his yawl. "To do it, I'll have to get his attention some way." retty soon after the inhuma was buried he went back to New Viron and took me with him. "I must speak to Gyrfalcon," he told me while we went down the coast in his yawl. "To do it, I'll have to get his attention some way."

Almost as soon as I had met him in Dorp, my brother told me I would have to call him Father. I said, "I've noticed, Father, that you don't have any trouble getting noticed."

He smiled. Let me say right here where I am the only one writing that he had the best smile I ever saw. It made me like him and trust him the first time I saw him in Wapen's, and I do not believe anybody was proof against it.

"I think the Vanished People might come again to help if you asked them." I said it because I had been really interested in them in Dorp, and would have liked to see some again.

Then he explained to me about the ring he had on, saying, "This was given me by a woman I called Seawrack. You don't know her, but when you read my ma.n.u.script you will learn about her." He took it off and handed it to me. It was a plain silver ring with a white jewel. There were scratches on it that could have been writing or pictures. If it was, I could not make them out. "Look through it," he told me.

I held it up to my eye. The weather was clear and cool, the wind northeast. The waves were white-capped, I would say a little bit less than two cubits. I saw all this through the round hole, but when I had been looking awhile I noticed the limb of a tree floating upright to starboard. The leaves were still silver and green, and the limb was so big it looked like a whole tree even though I would think there must have been a trunk floating the regular way since a floating tree does not stick up like that. There was somebody sitting in one of the branches, and it was one of the Vanished People.

Father took the ring back, and the Vanished Man was gone. So was the tree he had been sitting in. Only the waves were left. I asked Father to let me look again, but he would not.

"I've shown you this so that you will know how valuable it is and not bury it with me should I die," he said. "By it, the Neighbors" (it was what he called always them) "will know that you are friendly. Do you hold any malice toward them?"

I said plainly and sincerely that I do not.

"What right have they to run around on this whorl of ours, going where they please?" he asked me.

I said, "What right do I have? If someone wants to stop me, let's see him try it." He was pleased with my answer, and said that when he died I was to have the ring. I think he was afraid Gyrfalcon would kill him, and hoped that Gyrfalcon would let us claim his body afterward.

When we got to New Viron, I expected him to call up the ghosts that helped in Dorp and hoped he would ask the Vanished People to help too. But he just walked around talking to people. His bird went with him and so did I most of the time. Babbie and Cricket watched our boat.

He used to tell stories about two men trying to cheat each other. In most of the stories they both lost, but the one who first set out to cheat his friend was the only loser sometimes. He said, "If you rob someone who would help you if you needed help you only rob yourself." He said that again and again. He said stealing only made you poorer, and asked people to tell him an old thief who was rich.

"I knew the best thief in Viron," he told them. "He gave away jewels in a way that would have surprised the Rani of Trivigaunte, but he told me once that he slept in a different place each night, and his hand was always close to his needler. He made others rich; he was as poor as a beggar himself."

He also said that our cruelty stored up pain for us. "Do you imagine you can be cruel without teaching others to be cruel to you? You glory in your cruelty, because you believe it shows you are master of your victim. You are not even your own."

Uncle Calf's wife is making a collection of these sayings, and I have told her all I can remember. The first time I was in New Viron with him, while the inhuma was still alive, Uncle Calf would not believe they were brothers. Now he tells everyone.

I think it was on the second morning we were in New Viron that he told me he had been troubled in the night. We slept on the boat the first night. Next day Uncle Calf invited us to stay with him, like Hide and I and Vadsig did before. I slept in the room that had been ours, and he slept in the one that had been Vadsig's.

"I have had a great many strange dreams in my life, Hoof," he said, "as I imagine everyone my age has; but I have never had even one as strange as this. I woke in the middle of the night, as I often do. I got up and relieved myself, walked around the room, looked out the window at the stars, and returned to bed."

"What was your dream?" I asked him.

"I was lying in bed; and Scylla was somewhere in the dark, up near the ceiling. She spoke to me, and I sat up thinking that I was awake and would no longer hear her. I put my feet over the edge of the bed. It was very strange."

I asked who Scylla was, and he said that she was a G.o.ddess, and had been patroness of Viron back in the old whorl; when he said that, I remembered Mother talking about her. There was a big lake there and Scylla was the G.o.ddess of the lake. They had G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses for all sorts of things.

"Scylla possessed a woman I knew once," he told me. "She was willful and violent."

I said, "But the Scylla you dreamed wasn't the real G.o.ddess, was it?" and I asked him if there had ever been a real Scylla.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, that's the terrible part." Then he said something I did not understand at all: "I feel sorry for Beroep." Beroep was a man we used to know in Dorp.

For the next two or three days, he stayed up late walking the streets at night or sitting in taverns. I went with him the first night. After that I got Aunt Cowslip's son Cricket to watch our boat so Babbie could come with us. We took his bird too, and even if it could not fight it made a good lookout, warning us about people behind us or watching from shadows.

Sometimes he spoke to these people, asking questions. When he thought he had their friendship, he asked them about strangers and the sick. Sometimes we looked for the sick people afterward so he could talk to them and the people who took care of them. Once we found a man that no one was taking care of and spent half a day cleaning and feeding him, and finding somebody who would. Soon people began bringing their sick and asking Father to pray for them.

"If Scylla were here, I'd ask her to heal you," he told one woman. "Scylla is not here--though she may like to think she is--and is no longer a G.o.ddess in any case, not even in Old Viron." The woman asked him to pray to Scylla just the same, and he prayed to whatever G.o.ds might hear him.

Gyrfalcon sent men for us. They wanted me to go back to Uncle's and take Babbie and the bird, but Father would not go unless we came with him. They said they would make him.

"By shooting me? Gyrfalcon will be furious when he finds out you killed me."

Their leader said, "We'll pick you up and carry you, if we have to."

"You cannot," he told him. The leader grabbed for him, but Father knocked him down with his stick. Another man aimed his slug gun at him, but Babbie knocked him off his feet and opened his leg from his knee to his belt. A lot of people were watching by then.

Gyrfalcon had a big house south of town. He met us on the walk, and shook hands. "So," he said, "have you come to take New Viron from me?" Father smiled and said he had not, and we went into a garden behind the house and sat down at a little round table. The crocuses were up, the blue cup-o'-scents, and many other beautiful flowers that grow from bulbs; but the apple trees had not bloomed yet.

Father got the little knife out of his pen case and ripped the hem of his robe. There were grains of corn in there, black, red, and white. He gave them all to Gyrfalcon. "Cross these," he said, "but always keep the pure strains for the years to come. New Viron will never go hungry."

Gyrfalcon took them, tied them up in his handkerchief, and put it in a pocket inside his tunic. Father cried then for a long time.

Servants with chains brought us wine and food, both very good. I ate and gave some to Babbie, and drank more than I should have.

"Is this your father?" Gyrfalcon asked me, and I said it was. I felt really brave.

"I don't recognize him."

I said, "Well, I do."

"If this is your father, where is Calde Silk?" Gyrfalcon thought he was being very smart when he asked that.

"In a book my mother and father wrote," I told him.

"You are Horn? The same Horn I spoke to a couple of years ago when we got the invitation from Pajarocu?"

"I am," Father said.

"You live on Lizard, near the tail, and make paper?"

He nodded.