# *THE BOOK OF THE SHORT SUN*: HOW MUCH CAN A MAN DENY?

>"On Green, I met a man who could not see the inhumi. They were there, but his mind would not accept them. You might say that his sight recoiled in horror from them. In just the same way, my own interior sight refuses to focus upon matters I find agonizing" (*Blue*, III 74).

One of the most ironic statements in all of Wolfe's writing can be found in the narrator of *The Book of the Short Sun's* assessment of his journal near the end of the first volume:

>Bile: I finished reading this one hour ago, appalled by my own hypocrisy. Particularly sickened by the last few words I wrote before the outbreak of the war. Did I really think that I could lie like that to myself, and make myself believe it? While all the time I was imagining myself Silk, forever thinking of what Silk would do or say? Silk would have been ruthlessly honest with himself, and worse. (*Blue*, XII 284)

Though Horn has been sent by the rulers of New Viron on Blue to seek out the lost Silk, by the time he begins writing he has already traveled to Green (physically) and to the Whorl (spiritually) in search of his idol, and returned to Blue believing himself a failure. He has been instated as the Rajan of Gaon by people who strongly believe that he is Silk. It is fairly reasonable to conclude even on a first reading that the balding body he began his mission in is quite distinct from the taller, one-eyed, and long-haired form writing his tale: when Horn picks up Oreb's quill, he is already somehow inside Patera Silk's body. This complicated combination of Silk and Horn makes the quotations above more poignant than they first appear, for no matter what the amalgamation of Silk and Horn believes at that point, Silk, too, is strongly motivated by the absolute need to refuse acknowledging the horrors which his mind cannot bear. At one point, when he peruses the narrative he has written, he admits it outright: "I have been wounded. That is why I am back here now, and why I have had the leisure to read so much of this tissue of half-truths. (Of lies I have told to myself.) And it is why I have the leisure to write" (*Blue*, XII 283).

These horrors that prompt the veneer of half-truths and self-deceptions include the death of Hyacinth and will soon come to encompass several sacrifices he cannot face without “recoil[ing] in horror,” driving him to a kind of blind denial. As war breaks out in Gaon, the narrator proclaims, "Let the Outsider punish me; we deceive ourselves when we think that we can measure out justice to ourselves" (*Blue*, XII 285). This self-deception pervades every aspect of the text, for when Silk looks into the mirror and sees his own face staring back at him, his inability to acknowledge Horn's sacrifice demands that he deny himself: Silk's continued life implies Horn must be dead. Throughout the book, this denial of reality is reiterated, as Krait explains to Horn regarding the effective glamours of inhumi such as Patera Quetzal: "The eyes see what the mind expects, Horn. Babbie there, lying still with a green twig in his mouth, could make you think he was a bush, if you were expecting to see a bush" (*Blue*, X 237). No one on Blue or Green, even those who travel to the Urth of Severian's time, expects to see evidence of the destruction of humanity. Even if they do recognize that the vast city on Green and Nessus on Urth might resemble each other, they cannot wrap their minds around the connotations of such similarities, and might even seek to actively deny them, as Silk denies himself every time he looks in the mirror. This theme of refusal extends far beyond Silk's person, for the death and loss which has been wrought in the name of a cosmic justice at the conclusion of *The Urth of the New Sun* can never be acknowledged in the smallest part, and we are left with a narrator who can’t accept the startling truth about Urth and the fate of humanity, even as the decayed and unrecognizable visage of a corpse consigned to a watery grave stares him in the face.

During Horn’s son Hoof’s narration at the end of *Return to the Whorl*, he mentions the feeling of absolute smallness and insignificance in the face of Nessus disappearing into the immensity of the ruined sun, tying this in with the “mystery” of the Vanished People, who appear as fleeting and ghostly figures to aid the Rajan throughout the tale:

>[I]t was all so big that when I looked at it, it was hard to breathe. But the sun kept on rising and rising, and Nessus was little. Finally I shut my eyes and would not look at it anymore. I had seen the way things really are, and I knew it. I knew that I was going to have to forget it as much as I could if I wanted to go on living. After Father left I was still curious about the Vanished People, and I asked a man I met one time about them because he seemed like somebody who might know something. He said there were things that we are not supposed to know. I think he was wrong, but right, too. I do not think that there is anything about the Vanished People that we should not know, just a whole lot that we do not. But the way things really are is something that we cannot deal with. I had to shut my eyes, and if you had been there you would have had to shut yours too. (*Return*, XVII 358)

Even though the characters in the text will never recognize the truth of the Vanished People and the ghastly City of the Inhumi left behind by them on Green, for the horror of humanity’s fate would be too real, there might metatextually be nothing “about the Vanished People that we should not know” as readers. The hybridization discussed at great length in the opening chapter of *On Blue’s Waters* holds both the key to the colonists continued survival and an explanation for the strangely doubled life found on Blue and Green. If the people on Blue are not actively in denial, then ignorance shutters their perception: "We lost one whole level of knowledge when we left the Short Sun Whorl and went aboard the *Whorl*. We lived in there for about three hundred years, if the scholars are right, but we never got that knowledge back. Now we're losing another level" (*Blue*, I 32). They are uniformly ignorant of their surroundings and about the creatures which might have such a profound impact upon their future, unable to even guess at the truth.

In one of the most sublime acts of literary sleight of hand in all of Wolfe’s body of work, everything is exactly as it first appears to be: the man who looks like Silk is indeed ultimately Silk, for all his denials, and the Blue and Green solar system which on a first reading make us wonder at possible connections between Urth and Lune is in the final reckoning the same, though Wolfe has once again fulfilled those teasing implications in an exceedingly complicated manner. The insignificance of Nessus and humanity Hoof notes before the sheer magnitude of the dying sun completes the thematic weight begun in *The Book of the New Sun*, a story of transformation ultimately achieved only through incomprehensible excruciation, suffering, and death.

## The Story

The basic plot is simple enough to describe after the fact, but untangling when and why things occur is much more difficult. Those who have created a life for themselves on Blue after leaving the Whorl behind have failed to change, having brought corruption and crime with them, even descending to the institution of slavery and indentured servitude on Blue. When the civic leaders of New Viron seek out Horn on his isolated island to find Silk for them, it is clear that rather than escaping their poor beginnings in the shadow of Pas, they "carried [the Sun Street Quarter and the Orilla] with [them]" from the Whorl (*Blue*, I 23). They need a caldé, and Silk's reputation for goodness and honesty, reinforced by Horn's book, has made him a mythic figure. They have received a missive from the men of Pajarocu, who claim to have a functioning lander in which they will be returning to the whorl. Horn finally agrees to the demands of New Viron’s leaders, and leaves behind his family to seek out his childhood hero and teacher. Along the way, he will face the danger of the vampiric inhumi and the conceivably hostile flora and fauna extant on Blue. Eventually, he becomes uneasy allies with the inhumu Krait (whose mother, Jahlee, bit Horn's son Sinew long ago) and the siren-like Seawrack, who is given to Horn by the massive and mysterious sea creature of Blue’s waters known as the Mother. Seawrack offers him a ring which later seems to attract the attention of Blue’s mysterious four-armed and four-legged ancient rulers, the Vanished People.

At their initial destination, Horn and Krait, reunited with Sinew, learn of the conspiracy between the inhumi and the people of Pajarocu, who have agreed to a mutually beneficial alliance. While Horn realizes that he is walking into a trap, he continues undeterred with his plan to seek out Patera Silk and boards the lander, hoping that the other humans on it will band together. Ultimately, that fails, and they wind up on Green, which materializes as a nightmare world where people are being kept as cattle for the inhumi. There, he soon raises a force to struggle against the human slaves of the inhumi. Unfortunately, his son Sinew eventually defects against Horn’s plans, taking a wife on Green, and it is Krait who ultimately fights (and dies) for Horn’s dream of continuing his search for Silk.

Horn seems doomed to fail as he himself lies dying on Green, but the Neighbors (who are also called the Vanished People), take pity on him, casting him into the body of Silk, which has suffered grievous mental anguish on the Long Sun Whorl in the wake of Hyacinth's death. The body of Silk seems to bear suicidal, self-inflicted wounds along his arms. In the darkness of the *Whorl*, Horn becomes allies with a gigantic, blind mercenary who calls himself Pig and the merchant Hound, and is also reunited with Oreb, who quickly begins calling him Silk. He learns that long periods of darkness are now commonplace as Mainframe attempts to repair the malfunctioning Long Sun.

Traveling by the ruins of Blood’s villa where Hyacinth once lived, the protagonist realizes that somehow Pig is possessed by the divine Silk who was once uploaded into mainframe, trapped by Pig’s eyeless state. He meets Maytera Marble’s half-finished daughter Olivine in the corridors of the Caldé’s Palace, and just as he will soon do for Pig, she sacrifices an eye for her mother. The Prolocutor Incus and Caldé Bison act to ensure that the man they believe to be Silk is removed from Viron. They arrange for a highly visible public sacrifice in which Hari Mau of Gaon finds Horn and coerces him (in Silk) back to Blue to become the ruler of Gaon and judge the populace justly. Horn in Silk agrees only on the condition that Pig is first taken to the far pole, where his sight might be restored. On Blue, the narrator begins plotting to escape as he writes *On Blue’s Waters*, so that he can return to Nettle and New Viron. Under the pressure of burgeoning war, he frees some interred inhumi (including the female Jahlee) to ensure the triumph of Gaon, then escapes to another conflict, facing Duko Rigoglio of Soldo and operating under the name Incanto in the city of Blanko.

During his stay there, he learns how to activate a kind of astral travel while “asleep,” undertaken in tandem with an inhuma, and he visits both Green and the Red Sun Whorl of Urth. After leaving Blanko, he is accosted at Dorp and put on trial for his treatment of one of its wealthy citizens during his travels. Many of the key players, including Horn’s sons Hide and Hoof, find themselves in Dorp at this pivotal point in the narrative. The Vanished People also begin to overtly interfere, whisking away those involved in “Horn’s” trial to Urth after one of their number, Windcloud, testifies on behalf of the narrator. Almost off screen, the overbearing judges of Dorp are deposed, and at last the Rajan returns to New Viron. Any happiness he might enjoy there is cut short when Jahlee attacks Nettle and the narrator kicks her to death in anger. His trips to the Urth of Severian’s youth culminate in putting to rest the ghostly presence of Scylla, which seems to have occupied Oreb since the sacrifice at the Grand Manteion in the *Whorl*, in her family mausoleum (also explaining all of the dreams of Scylla which have been haunting him throughout the series).

By the time our narrator returns to Horn's home, it has become increasingly obvious that though he still denies his identity, he is somehow almost wholly Silk. In a touching scene that embodies the heart and soul of the series, Silk at last acknowledges at Patera Remora's prompting that, indeed, Horn did not fail: Silk has returned to New Viron, and discovered that it was never his home. He soon departs for the *Whorl*, leaving Blue behind (taking Mainframe and the echo of Pas with him), and humanity is left to fend for itself. While it is clearly Silk who departs, what has happened to Horn and the Plan of Pas?

## Mysterious Words: Marble’s Prophecy, Quadrifons, and the Double Darkness of Sin and Ignorance

To answer these questions, we turn to the most overtly mystical moments of the text, one of which comes during Horn’s original visit to Maytera Marble. While dreams have always held strong implications that reflect on the actual plot in the Solar Cycle, this prophecy is much more specific than the usual auguries and visions described throughout *The Book of the Long Sun* and its sequel. Many of the most complicated themes and images in the series surround Maytera Marble’s prophecy and its thematic conclusion, the sacrifice our narrator performs with her unfinished daughter, Olivine.

When Horn approaches the lonely shelter in which Maytera Marble, now going by her original name of Magnesia, lives with Mucor, he notes, "a sheer black rock so lonely that it did not appear to be a separated part of the mainland at all, but the last standing fragment of some earlier continent, a land devoured by the sea not long after the Outsider built this whorl. Rubbish, surely" (*Blue*, III 78). At this point in our initial reading of the text, the hint of an all-devouring sea might inspire some vague expectation that Blue might be the future Urth, also known as Ushas, but these possibilities dissolve (or seem to) as we become familiar with the bizarre, many-limbed biology on Blue.

While that particular detail might be a calculated red herring, another important but subtle background symbol comes up during his discussion with Maytera, as Horn learns that "there was a big tree there that had fallen down but wouldn't quite lay flat. Do you know what I mean, Horn? ... I used to walk up the trunk until I stood quite high in the air, and look over the sea from there, looking for boats, or just looking at the weather we were about to get" (*Blue*, III 87). These trees will become intimately associated with the Vanished People, but for now let us focus on Maytera’s words. She offers to use her new-found gifts: “[In the *Whorl*,] I couldn't see things in the entrails the way my dear sib could, and Patera too. Now I can. Isn't that strange? Now that I’m blind, I have interior vision. I can't see the entrails till I touch them. But when I do, I see the pictures" (*Blue*, III 91).

As if to highlight the validity of her claims, Horn soon becomes aware of an immense presence during his visit there:

>I saw nothing and heard nothing, yet its seemed to me that the face of the Outsider had appeared, filling the whole sky and indeed overflowing it, a face too large to be seen - that I was seeing him in the only way that a human being can see him, which is to say in the way that a flea sees a man. Call it nonsense if you like; I have often called it nonsense myself. But is it really so impossible that the god of lonely, outcast things should have favored those two, exiled as they were to their sea-girt, naked rock? Who was, who could be, more broken, exiled, and despairing than Maytera Marble? Whether or not there was truth in the presence that I sensed then, I fell to my knees. (*Blue*, III 92)

This overwhelming presence grants some credibility to Maytera’s prophecy, in which she notes that during Horn’s journey he will face some inscrutable things: "[D]arkness. Then more darkness and a great wind. Wealth and command. I see you, Horn riding upon a beast with three horns. ... Darkness also for me. Darkness and love, darkness until I look up and see very far, and then there will be light and love. ... The city searches the sky for a sign, but no sign shall it have but the sign from the fish's belly" (*Blue*, III 93).

In his narration, Horn believes that her prophecy has already come to pass: "On Green I rode a three-horned beast, as Maytera foresaw. Indeed, I was riding it at the time I was wounded fatally" (*Blue*, III 94). Alas, his lack of sufficient perspective prevents him from comprehending that his ultimate fate has been revealed – the wealth and command in her words suggest his presence in Gaon (which he is still experiencing at the time her words are recorded), for his spirit has not yet retreated into that beast of the prophecy, to become its third “horn.” The double darkness she mentions might be equivalent to the death of Horn’s body and the turning off of the light on the *Whorl* to effect repairs, or it might refer to his dark sojourn in the pit on Blue even before he perishes on Green, his spirit “blown” by Neighbors (such as Windcloud) into another body.

This inability to contextualize the signs he is exposed to does not constitute the only metatextual moment when the narrator’s ignorance, willful or not, is suggested by the text. At one point, Horn’s son Hide asks the Rajan of Gaon who narrates our tale, “When you were my age, did you understand the whorl you lived in? The Long Sun Whorl?”

The protagonist (by this point almost purely Silk in denial) says:

>“When I was your age, Hide, I no longer lived there. Your mother and I had been married, your brother Sinew had been born, and we were here on Blue. … To answer your question, when I was your age I understood neither the Long Sun Whorl nor this one in which I was then living. I still don’t. I understand more than you, perhaps. Perhaps. But I don’t understand everything. You believe that I’m trying to withhold knowledge from you. … I’ve already told you a great deal. A great deal that you’ve paid scant attention to, and a great deal that you’ve rejected because it has not fallen in with your preconceptions.” (*Green*, XXII 334)

In addition to the acknowledgement at the opening of this essay that our narrator’s mind recoils in horror from certain truths, we finally have a direct admission that he does not understand the whorls in which he lives and travels – even as of the time that he is speaking. His abjuration to Hide might also serve as a warning to the reader, who has already been exposed to a great deal about the vast city on Green and the nature of the Vanished People and the inhumi which has perhaps been “rejected” because it does not meet with preconceptions. If no sign can be gleaned from the skies, as Marble’s prophecy advises, what conclusions might possibly be reached?

Our narrator goes even further in suggesting that his presentation has not captured the spirit of his experiences:

>I want very much to describe the Red Sun Whorl in such a way that you can see it, Nettle – to do it so well that whoever reads this can. Have I made you see Green’s jungles? The swamps and their dire inhabitants? The immense trees and the lianas clinging to them like brides? Or the City of the Inhumi, a grove of disintegrating towers like a noble face rotting in the grave?

>No, I have given only scattered hints in spite of all my efforts.” (*Green*, XXI 312)

This passage contains more weight than is at first obvious, describing the City of the Inhumi as a corpselike face decorated with towers and explicitly mentioning both trees and “lianas clinging to them like brides” – images which will be repeated many times amidst mysterious circumstances in *The Book of the Short Sun*. The verbiage upon his first description of Urth is equally metatextual: “[It seemed that t]his great ember of a sun I saw had tumbled from a ruin as the stones had, and that the stars I saw by day here had sprung up around it like the weeds. … To understand, you must visualize its sky and hold the vision above you. Not my words. Not my words. Not the smears of ink upon this paper” (*Green*, XXI 313).

Of course, by this point the sleeper Rigoglio actually recognizes the city as Nessus, but our narrator makes a comparison that we should be mindful of, in light of his overall reliability: “There is a city somewhat like this on Green, but we are not on Green; these houses would be the towers of the Neighbor lords there” (*Green*, XXI 314). It is immediately obvious that more time has passed on Urth than on the *Whorl*: “You can’t have lived here. Nobody alive now can. Just look at them” (*Green*, XXI 314). Relativistic travel at speeds approaching that of light would naturally account for this, but we have no assurance that the experience of the narrator on Urth is actually contemporaneous with his life on Blue. First time readers of *The Book of the Short Sun* are tempted to look for congruencies between Blue and Urth, and at times the book teases these points:

>When we got out of the delta, that was the open sea that they call Ocean. It was like our sea and it was not. If you wanted to look for what was the same, there was a lot. But if you wanted to look for what was different, there was a lot too. The smell was different. The color was not the same, either, but it was hard to say just what was changed. That may have been the dark sky, mostly, and the stars. This sea knew night was coming, when everything would die. There was more foam, and I think this Red Sun Sea had more salt in it. (*Return*, XVII 364)

We know from the words of the inhumi that Green has certain features of its water which Blue is also lacking, but, unfortunately, we do not have a direct comparison between the seas of Green and Urth. Wolfe, almost cruelly, even suggests that Green has lesser gravity than Blue in one scene, in which the narrator climbs a tower amidst a massing of hostile inhumi: “Fortunately, I did not have to [climb in the body left behind on Blue]; the weight I lifted – clawing sometimes, with bleeding fingers at the red rock-face – although it felt real, was substantially less than my true weight” (*Return*, IX 190). Alas, this is something of a trick: the narrator’s body lacks physical weight during the spirit travel, and the ease of his climb has nothing to do with the lesser gravity of Lune.

In another juxtaposition, our narrator keeps thinking about the remnants of the Neighbors during his stay on Urth: “I’ve been thinking [about the pit in a ruined city of the Vanished People], and about the City of the Inhumi on Green. Those were ruins left by the Neighbors’ ancient race; these were left by ours, I believe – we are as ancient as they, or nearly. How long have these been empty, do you think?” (*Green*, XXI 315) Even though he is making a distinction between the two, soon enough we will have reason to doubt that he understands everything (or, indeed, anything) regarding the nature of the Neighbors and the inhumi, just as he fails to understand his own identity. In one of the final descriptions of Urth, we are accosted with a very particular color: “Looking at the delta, that bright green everywhere, I got the feeling that I was looking at a body so old moss was growing on the bones and the hard dead meat of it” (*Return*, XVII 363-4).

Those details might help us pierce some of the darkness which covers the sky of Green and Blue. Marble’s prophecy is not the only place in the text which mentions more than one darkness, and while the blind Maytera is responsible for communicating these portents, the other scenario, in a kind of inverse relationship, occurs when the protagonist, in the body of Silk, offers a sacrifice very much like the Eucharist with Olivine, Marble’s daughter, on the *Whorl*. However, that scene opens with Olivine’s use of the name of the Roman god Quadrifons to open the path forward, so we shall take this opportunity to elaborate on his mythical significance.

As an aspect of Janus, a quintessentially Roman god, Quadrifons has many interesting associations. Janus, the two-faced, looks to the future and the past, and presides over beginnings and resolutions in conflicts. He is also a god of change and time, worshipped at the harvest and planting as well as at marriages and deaths, with jurisdiction over omens. He is considered the most important god in the archaic Roman pantheon, together with Jupiter, and serves as a solar god, half of a pair with Jana (or Diana) as sun and moon. In Wolfe’s novel, after the name of the god is spoken to unlock the barrier, our protagonist ducks “through the doorway, [where] he had to bend lower still to pass beneath the massive limbs of an ancient oak” (*Return*, X 215). He tells Olivine, “When you and Quadrifons opened the door for me, those leaves and weeds were all that I expected to see. It never occurred to me that this garden would be tended as it was in the days of Caldé Tussah when so much of the city lies in ruins. I find it heartening” (*Return*, X 218). We shall also return to this garden imagery in discussing the nature of the inhumi, and to the symbolism of a solar deity with jurisdiction over both past and future opening the path to that garden. Janus the two-headed has other titles, including “sower” and “father.” In discussing some of the thematic relationships between the cycle instigated by the Hierogrammates and Hierodules, we will also soon be looking at the mating ritual of the inhumi as described by Juganu, but its conclusion should be kept in mind: after their game of love through the night is over, the male inhumi releases his seed into the water for the female to accept. Janus also presides over the passage of semen, opening a path for it, and the culmination of Juganu’s story, too, would fall under his jurisdiction.

In addition to allowing pregnancy, the god is venerated at the entrance of each month. “Quadrifons is the most holy of the minor gods. … If it were left to me – as plainly it is not – I’d say that the Outsider is the most holy god, and indeed that he’s the only god, major or minor, who’s really holy at all. … So you see why I’m not an augur, Olivine. But the Writings say it’s Quadrifons, and the Chapter says that his name is so holy that it should hardly ever be used, so it won’t be profaned” (*Return*, X 215). All of these significations reverberate behind the text of the novels, especially those concerning his jurisdiction over time and the harvest. The name of Quadrifons even opens the path to Olivine’s sacrifice for her mother (perhaps best considered a builder or creator), leading indirectly to Horn’s own sacrifice.

When he consults the Writings during this ceremony, Horn-in-Silk (though perhaps in this scene he is described more accurately as Silkhorn) reads the following:

>”There, where a fountain’s gurgling waters play, they rush to land, and end in feast the day: they feed; then quaff; and now (their hunger fled) sigh for their friends and mourn the dead; nor cease their tears till each in slumber shares a sweet forgetfulness of human cares. Now far the night advances her gloomy reign, and setting stars roll down the azure plain: At the voice of Pas wild whirlwinds rise, and clouds and double darkness veil the skies.” (*Return*, XII 241)

This is from Book XII of Pope’s translation of Homer’s *Odyssey*, and though it is *almost* a direct translation, one vital word is missing: in Pope, they “sigh for their friends devoured” (Pas is of course Jove in the original). In this scene, Odysseus’s sailors have been transformed into swine and eaten by the sorceress Circe. This concealment of a very specific image also conjoins with the Eucharist ceremony which Horn and Silk in one body have just completed, which we will also discuss at greater length below. The implicit relationship between transformation and consumption is established by this quote, strongly reinforced by the equally metamorphic verbiage of the Eucharist (drinking of the mystical body and blood in the form of bread and wine). The elision of the word devoured in the Writings might indicate that a similar omission exists in our primary narrative.

One of our first descriptions of Green in Horn’s memories might be related to just such an understated but textually present appetite: "I can smell the rot, and see the trees that are eating trees that are eating trees" (*Blue*, VI 159). When Horn falls into the pit on Blue, Seawrack makes another rather shocking claim that might hint at some deeper significance: “You were dead ... Dead things are food” (*Blue*, X 231). His fall into the pit might be even more perilous than the text presents, given the nature of at least some of the islands on Blue. In a storm, he sees:

>[T]he green plain part for us, ripped in two by the fury of the waves, and seeing it so - lifted by great waves at one moment, then crashing down upon the sea again at the next - I knew it for what it was. At that place in the middle of the sea, the bottom is not leagues removed from the surface; but is, as Sewrack confirmed for me, not more than two or three chains distant from it. Great herbs (I do not know what else to call them) grow there that are not trees, not grasses, nor ferns, but share the natures of all three. Their tangled branches, lying upon the surface, are draped with the smooth green life over which Babbie and I wandered. It may be that it covers them as orchids cover our trees here in Gaon, or as strangling lianas cover the cannibal trees of Green. Or it may be that they cover themselves with it as the trees of land cover themselves with leaves and fruit. I do not know. But I know that it is so, because I saw it that night. I saw what I had once thought islands torn like banana leaves, and tossed like flotsam by the waves. (*Blue*, VI 161)

Given the existence of cannibal trees and the nature of the land masses on Blue as an accretion of vegetable matter, the omission of mourning for *devoured* friends in Pope’s *Odyssey* may be far more significant than a surface reading would suggest.

Putting aside this talk of mystical transformation and hungry foliage for now, “Silkhorn” determines (almost certainly erroneously) that the fountain in this passage almost assuredly refers to his own bath, though readers of Severian’s narrative might imagine another fountain which brings gurgling waters. The next stanza in Pope also resonates with a few other prominent plot themes of the Solar Cycle, especially as revealed at the conclusion of *The Urth of the New Sun*:

>The moon, the stars, the bright aetherial host / Seem as extinct, and all their splendors lost; / The furious tempest roars with dreadful sound: / Air thunders, rolls the ocean, groans the ground. / All night it rag’d; when morning rose, to land / We haul’d our bark, and moor’d it on the strand, / Where in a beauteous grotto’s cool recess / Dance the green Nereids of the neighb’ring seas. (Homer 401)

[While the “double darkness” in the section quoted by Wolfe might be simply a poetic turn of phrase, Silk tries to interpret it quite tellingly, involving both Pas and the concept of Quadrifons. Another, more Catholic, use of the phrase occurs in St. Thomas Aquinas’s “A Prayer before Study”: “Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.” These, then, are the literal problems afflicting all of those on Blue: a falling into sin and a complete ignorance of their place in the universe and their current situation.]

In his explanation of this passage from the Writings, our protagonist notes that “Pas is shown as a man with two heads, or a wind; so it’s not unreasonable to think that [Quadrifons], who is shown as a man with four faces, might be depicted as a wind as well” (*Return*, XII 246). He goes on to claim that “Pas will manifest himself more than once, and angrily. ‘Wild whirlwinds’ are to rise. Notice the plural” (*Return*, XII 247). As he begins the circling on his cheek that is the hallmark of Silk when engaged in some form of logic or intuition, he asks, “Clouds? I can’t make much of that. … ‘Skies’ presents the greatest puzzle of them all, at least to me. There have been two skies involved in the entire passage, as we have seen – the sky of Blue, and ours in this whorl. The plural must, I would think, refer to those two. The whirlwinds, clouds, and double darkness therefore refer not merely to this whorl, the Long Sun Whorl, but to Blue as well. It is dark on Blue each night, but how it can be doubly dark there I cannot imagine” (*Return*, XII 248).

This, too, ties in directly with Marble’s earlier prophecy: the city’s reliance on the sky for a sign is doomed. Once again, our narrator has failed to assess the prophecy correctly, for there is another sky in question – that of Green. This “double darkness” might be why attempts to map Blue onto Urth and Green onto Lune face some very real mechanistic issues, especially when we consider how the narrator actually wound up on the Red Sun Whorl of Urth in the presence of the sleeper Rigoglio. We shall return to the fish imagery invoked by Marble’s declaration in the section titled “The Tale of Fish, Frog, and Leech (and What Came of It),” but here it is vital that we understand that the skies of Blue and Green are not enough to equate them with Ushas and Lune, especially considering that Blue is colder than the Red Sun Whorl of Urth and that the City of the Inhumi has much more in common with Nessus than any structure we see on Blue. Additionally, we learn that Green is further from Blue than Lune is from Urth in Hoof’s sections of *Return to the Whorl*. Fortunately, we are able to offer at least one possible (if not plausible) solution to lift this double darkness, which conceals the sacrifice and death of the human race from its fragments stored on the *Whorl* (in this reading, an ark preserving them from the flood.) Yet there is even one more mystery embedded in Silk’s explication: how could it be that Pas would come more than once? The answer might lie in the most important aspect of this entire scenario.

The scene with Olivine soon turns to the quintessential theme of Horn’s journey: “You want me to sacrifice this bread and wine, and the day has indeed ended, which assures us that our sacrifice is what is meant. ‘Feast’ is probably ironic. We have no animal to offer – no real meat. … My name is Patera Horn – or rather just Horn, though I feel like an augur in these clothes” (*Return*, XII 242). While Olivine offers up her eye for Maytera Marble, and Silkhorn soon does the same for the blind mercenary Pig, the true sacrifice implied here, when no animal is present, is of course that of Horn, who must relinquish the body of Silk willfully and knowingly. Soon after this scene, he experiences a dream, before going to search for signs of Patera Silk at the Ermine’s pond, where Silk once met Hyacinth.

When taken literally, the dream he has represents one of the most overt statements of Silk’s relationship with Pas, a possibility which we explored in *The Book of the Long Sun*:

>“*Somebody to see you, Horn.*” It was Mother’s voice from the kitchen; but he was lost in flames and smoke, groping through the fire that had destroyed the quarter, groping backward through time to reach the two-headed man in the old wooden chair Father used at meals. “*Somebody to see you.*” …

>He woke sweating, and it was ten minutes at least before he fully accepted the fact that he was older and knew that there was no returning to the past save in dreams” (*Return*, XII 256).

This brief paragraph maintains the subtle depth of Wolfe’s metonymic exposition: to those familiar with our argument in *The Book of the Long Sun*, it is no surprise at all that a two-headed man is sitting in Father’s chair, especially if we recognize our hero at this point to be at least partially Patera Silk. That usurpation of Father’s chair represents Pas’s hubris in trying to play God and replace the Outsider, and on a more literal level serves to strengthen our suspicion that he is indeed Silk’s father. This key passage also overtly mentions “groping” backwards through time, which is one of the central arguments of this essay concerning the nature of Silk’s astral travel when he is accompanied by an inhumi: while they are dreams of the spirit, they can transcend time itself.

Besides these hints, the dream also reiterates Horn’s desperate reaching for Silk (even within the body he inhabits), especially if we consider that Mother’s voice might represent both Kypris’s innate concern for Silk and the quite distinct Mother on Blue who instructed Seawrack to accompany Horn. Our hero immediately goes to the garden where “Thelx holds up a mirror” to beg Patera Silk to return – perhaps by invoking memories of Hyacinth (also possessed, as we argue in our look at *The Book of the Long Sun*, by Silk’s true mother). The confused personality of Horn pleads, “You’re here; I know you’ll always be here and I can’t take you away. But you could talk to me, Patera, just for a minute. You always liked me. You liked me better than almost anybody else in the whole palaestra” (*Return*, XII 257). In a scene which may or may not link the foliage at Ermine’s to the rather more sinister vegetation described on Blue and Green, he notes, “Not all the blossoms were gone, it seemed; the cool night air bore a faint perfume” (*Return*, XII 257). Soon, kneeling beside the water, which reflects his own image, he hears (or speaks?), “‘I loved only you, nobody but you. Not ever.’ Warm lips brushed his ear. In the pool, an older Silk knelt beside Hyacinth. Both smiled at him” (*Return*, XII 258).

While he may believe that he is seeing a ghostly image of Silk, certainly the older image reflected in the pool is merely himself, and if any spirit is present in this scene, it is that of Hyacinth or Kypris. Now that we have introduced many of the most important themes and symbols at work in the text, including time, sacrifice, transformation, redemptive consumption, and that pesky beast with three horns, it is time to take a closer look at the identity of our hero.

## Lead and Silver: The Tangled Knot of Horn, Silk, and the Beast with Three Horns

Horn’s quest for Silk has clear implications for the moral well-being of his community: "New Viron needs a caldé. Anybody can see it" (*Blue*, I 23). Even in a new place, humanity has not changed enough to truly escape what it was. If anything, it is transforming into something objectively worse. The books place an important philosophical issue at center stage: can people change meaningfully, or are they doomed to be only what they are? At first, the insistence of the Rajan of Gaon that he is merely Horn would seem to indicate that while circumstances may change, the spiritual identity, for better or for worse, is immutable. However, Wolfe undercuts this message with the gradual revelation that the Horn who begins his quest is entirely distinct from the Silk at the end of *Return to the Whorl*. The protagonist finally acknowledges Horn’s sacrifice when confronted with a passage from the Writings that could only affect Patera Silk profoundly: “*Though trodden beneath the shepherd’s heel, the wild hyacinth blooms on the ground*” (*Return*, XX 408).

*The Book of the Short Sun’s* two narrative strands explore Horn’s far-ranging search for Silk and the mysterious narrator who writes of that search as he tries to return home to Nettle. From the beginning, Horn does not deny that he, or his original body, has died. The gloss for Horn provided in *On Blue’s Waters* describes him as, "A New Vironese Paper-maker, the protagonist" (*Blue* 8). The title of the first chapter confirms this: "Horn’s Book." Even so, Horn hints that he is in Silk's body from almost the first page: “Silk may be here on Blue already ... so I am searching here, although I am the only person here in Gaon who could not tell you where to find him. Searching does not necessarily imply movement” (*Blue*, I 18). This implies that everyone knows the body he inhabits belongs to Silk, but he can find no trace inside himself that Silk lives. The glossary in the second volume, however, no longer lists Horn as the protagonist (*Green* 8). The shift in narrative focus from the past to the present in the second volume is highlighted even further when the Rajan, operating under the name Incanto, tells the story of Horn’s death on Green and begins in the third-person, completely demolishing our expectations of a detailed account of Green after the tense story of the inhumi-controlled lander from Pajorocu at the conclusion of the previous volume.

These narrative points of view allow us to determine when our narrator is primarily Horn, when he is a conglomerate of the two, and when, much earlier than we might first guess behind the screen of his denials, Silk travels on with only the merest sliver of Horn active in his memories, for, as he repeats several times, “The illusion is the last to die” (*Blue*, XIV 361). Solving this identity mystery is also tied to the biological life cycle of the Vanished People and their Vanished Gods. Silk's attempts to maintain positivity and spiritual light in a fallen and corrupt world force him into either ignoring or denying several situations which he simply cannot accept. Indeed, Silk actively refuses to be honest with himself to avoid facing the harsh realities of his existence: Hyacinth, Horn, and even humanity have all, by and large, perished. Even when Silk's own face stares at him in the mirror, he can never accept that his student Horn has sacrificed himself so that he might live; the last two volumes of *The Book of the Short Sun* are narrated by a man in absolute denial. If he cannot accept the death of one man, how then would he deal with an even more tragic outcome which might be lurking behind the entire series: the implicit destruction of the majority of humanity with the coming of the New Sun?

The markers for Horn and Silk are much clearer when the background details come into focus. First, Oreb constantly calls the Rajan of Gaon Silk, and has since the Night Chough returned to him after Horn “died” on Green and awoke in a different body on the *Whorl*. The actual narrative point of view can also help to pinpoint exactly who is speaking at certain times: *On Blue’s Waters* is told from Horn’s perspective, primarily in past tense, though his adventures in Gaon are related in the present tense. However, he makes mistakes that Horn should never make, such as calling his sons and Nettle by the wrong name. (As when he comforts one of his concubines in Gaon, saying, "When she was calmer I told her about you, Nettle, calling you Hyacinth" (*Blue*, IX 222).) Clearly, he is a conglomerate at this point of Silk and Horn, with Horn predominating. Here is the moment, presented in the third person, in which Horn finds himself in Silk’s body, bearing self-inflicted wounds after Hyacinth’s demise:

>His thoughts seemed to have nothing to do with the dead woman, her coffin, or the hot sunshine streaming through the open door into the poor little room. There was a pattering, as of rain; moisture splashed his ankles, and he looked down and saw blood trickling from his fingers to splash into a small pool at his feet.

>His son had deserted him.

>He was wounded. (No doubt the blood was from that wound?)

>He lay in the medical compartment of a lander, though he was standing now, his blood dripping on worn floorboards. The bier was for another, it seemed, and the other was a middle-aged woman, and was already dead. … He backed away from the knife and stumbled through the open door into the darkest night ever known. (*Return*, I 13-14)

While Horn clearly controls Silk’s body at that point, as the Rajan of Goan, he is later presented with a volume called *The Healing Beds*, written a century ago on the whorl, with a "special emphasis on herbs" (*Blue*, V 129). We shall return to the title of this volume and the strange, enormous herb-like “things” which seem to make up some of the islands on Blue during our discussion of the nature of the Vanished Gods, the Neighbors, and the inhumi, but the presentation of this book bring our narrator’s errors to light:

>It has made me acutely aware that this book of mine, which I have intended for my wife and sons, may very well be read long after they - and I - are gone. Even Hoof and Horn [sic], who must just be entering young manhood now, will someday be as old as Marrow and Patera Remora. There is argument about the length of the year here, and how well it agrees with the year we knew in the Long Sun Whorl, but the difference must be slight if there is any; in fifty years, Horn and Hide [sic] may well be dead. In a hundred, their sons and daughters will be gone too. These words, which I pen with so little thought - or hope - or expectation - may possibly endure long beyond that, endure for two centuries or even three, valued increasingly and so preserved with greater care as the whorl they describe fades into history. (*Blue*, V 129)

Clearly the mistakes in the above passages are only ones that could be made by a combination of Silk and Horn. A man would never call his twin sons in turn by his own name, no matter how senile he became. At the start of *Return to the Whorl*, he begins to notice these mistakes in times of stress, as he speaks to Hide of beating a man to death with his staff:

>“Then he started to rise, and I was afraid - desperately afraid, Horn –“

>“I’m Hide, Father.”

>Although I blush to record it now, I only blinked and stared at him, wondering how I could possibly have made such a foolish error. (*Return*, II 22)

The idea that the “written history” will in time supersede the reality which has faded also causes us to consider what would happen to history if that written account no longer existed, another important theme for the creation of myths. When the combination of Silk and Horn is considered metaphorically, Horn’s practical talk of the resources available to New Viron could very well describe the obviously flawed Horn’s addition to Silk (known quite symbolically as Silver Silk in mainframe): "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" (*Blue*, II 53). In times of hardship, war, and tragedy, Silk’s tendency to despair needs bolstering, perhaps from a less pure but slightly hardier source. The talk of corn hybridization in the first chapter is also thematically resonant with this mixing, but both the corn and the alloy imagery might just as well hint at a much more complicated, inter-species mixture which becomes the subtle counter-plot of *The Book of the Short Sun* (which, as has been repeated far too often even at the start of our essay, will be expanded upon soon).

When Horn first finds himself in Silk’s body, the narrative point of view forces us to consider that “he” (traveling in the Whorl with Pig, Hound, and Oreb in the third person before being abducted by Hari Mau to rule Gaon), might be distinct from the “I” who relates the present tense plot - the Rajan of Gaon who travels through Dorp and returns to New Viron with the inhuma Jahlee, whom he has adopted as his daughter. The absence of concern for Hyacinth’s death when he first arrives in Silk’s body has a definite counterpoint at the end of *On Blue’s Waters*, when the realization that Hyacinth is dead strikes him so profoundly, signaling that Silk has returned at last whether he admits it or not. However, even if the “he” of *Return to the Whorl* is predominately Horn, he quickly falls into patterns synonymous with Silk, including granting blessings: “I am not [of the clergy]. I’m a layman, just as your husband is, and have a wife of my own at home. Does it bother you that I blessed you? A layman may bless, I assure you; so may a laywoman” (*Return*, III 70). Those words could describe either Horn or Silk at this point.

News of Silk’s presence in Gaon attracts Horn’s son Hide, who uses the name Cuoio during his travels near Blanko: “Silk was over here, they said. Over on this side. That was what I’d heard, and I knew you’d gone to look for him, Father. So I thought you might be with him” (*Green*, XXIII 340-1). Of course, these tales of Silk all involve the Rajan of Gaon. Soon enough, however, the objective details of Horn’s body are driven home by the inhuma Jahlee in this discussion: “Haven’t you noticed that his bird calls him Silk?” (*Green*, XXIII 343) Naturally, Hide also recognizes this, as his words in Dorp indicate: “That man there isn’t really my father at all. … I don’t know if he’s lying, Mysire Rechtor. Sometimes it’s like he believes it himself” (*Return*, VII 151). When the narrator runs into Horn’s other son, Hoof (after encouraging Hide to *pretend* to be Hoof to confound the judges of Dorp during the trial), he is met with a similar lack of recognition: “I’m afraid I don’t remember you, sir. Are you from New Viron?”

Silk responds, “Yes I am … I’m your father, and this is your sister, Jahlee” (*Return*, VII 155-6). While calling Krait his son made a kind of sense, given the relationship between Sinew and the inhumu whose mother preyed upon the boy as a child, Jahlee is acknowledged as his daughter only after she begs to be regarded as such. This familial acknowledgement is also important in our consideration of the nature of the inhumi, as they seem to have inherited Green.

The use of point of view also illustrates that when “Incanto” relates the story of Horn on Green, there is a strange disconnect between himself and the tale of Horn, Sinew, and Krait: “On Green, at the time of which I speak, there was a band of a hundred bad men. … With [their] weapons they fought off the inhumi, and fought among themselves as well, only too often. Their leaders were a certain man and his son, and though they thought themselves better than the rest, they were much worse because they hated each other” (*Green*, VIII 120). As the Rajan tells the story of Horn's resolve to reclaim the lander, he is interrupted. “Here I stopped to listen, for I heard Hyacinth singing to her waves” (*Green*, VIII 121). Despite confusing the names of Seawrack and Hyacinth here, he switches to the first person in his story. Oreb says, “Poor Silk” several times, but the narrator continually denies it: “My name is not Silk … It has never been Silk.” When Inclito asks if he was truly on Green, he shakes his head in the negative. “[I]t had been someone else, a man whose name I have forgotten, a man who wore a ring with a white stone. My own name is Horn, no matter what Oreb may say” (*Green*, VIII 122). By this point, even at the start of *In Green’s Jungles*, Silk is already denying the sacrifice that transpired at the end of *On Blue’s Waters*, after Horn prophetically proclaims, “The illusion is the last to die. .... Good-bye, Nettle. Good-bye to all of you,” (*Blue* XIV 361) and before the narrator finally acknowledges that he “snatched the ball and won the game,” (*Blue*, XV 381) a move associated with Silk’s enlightenment and game-winning score, in a match which Horn lost. Though he recognizes that he is no longer truly the man who died on Green, Silk cannot accept the sacrifice of the closest thing he had to a son, refusing to let the illusion of Horn die until he returns to New Viron.

Returning briefly to the story of Horn on Green, Incanto describes how the men “stole into the City of the Inhumi by night, moving through the sewers at first, then through the cellars and the lower floors of the ruinous towers, the way having been scouted for them by their leader's son. Eventually, however, they were forced to go out into the neglected, rubbish-strewn streets, in which the inhumi take the shapes of men and women to act out their ghastly parody of human life” (*Green*, VIII 122-3). The reason for this ghastly parody of human life remains one of the best kept secrets in the series, and we shall expand upon it more soon. At one point, however, Jahlee brings it forcefully to life, tying it in with Silk’s tendency to deny unpleasant truths when he accuses her:

>“You don’t care about your race.”

>“*You* are my race. You know that, why won’t you admit it? Inside, I’m one of you. So was everybody who fought for you at Gaon.” …

>“What about the inhumi who destroyed the Vanished People, Jahlee? Were they human too?”

>“They were dead before I was born.” (*Green*, XXV 376)

While this may or may not suggest that humans and the inhumi are biologically related, on a more personal level, we learn that the inhumu Krait, who taunted Horn when he first fell into the pit on Blue, but eventually helped him escape, dies on Green, and is described in flattering terms: “the man who had been leader lay there beside [the brave young man]” (*Green*, VIII 124). This scene represents the death of Krait, described as a man, and leads to the death of Horn’s physical form. Yet what happens to his spirit?

As we have suggested, the point of view in the third person sections of *Return to the Whorl*, dominated by Horn’s leaden spirit, strongly hints that Horn has met his fate long before Silk reaches New Viron. By this point, the writer of our primary first-person narrative is almost entirely Silk. When Horn awakens in the body of Silk, Horn’s family on the Whorl of course acknowledge, as Smoothbone does, that “You’ve changed out of all reckoning” (*Return*, XII 250).

Even though at times during the dream travel his sons note that he resembles their father slightly more, the first time he arrives at Sinew’s village on Green, Hide unequivocally states that he does not believe Sinew will recognize the narrator at all: “He won’t know you, or I don’t think so” (*Green*, XXIV 360). Hoof later notes that during these travels, “[H]e looked more like our father there, not really like him, but more than on Blue” (*Return*, XVII 346). Two factors affect his later appearance, making him appear more like Horn during the dream travel: the return of Babbie and the narrator’s increasing ability to “shape” the environment as he wishes, perhaps including wishful thinking about his being, which influences his appearance. Silk needs to believe that he is still Horn and to deny the sacrifice made by his younger student.

Horn’s sacrifice is not the only one made in *The Book of the Short Sun* (nor in the Solar Cycle as a whole), but the narrator’s attitude towards sacrifice is vitally important. In the scene already discussed between Olivine and the protagonist, the Catholic Eucharist commemorating the last supper of Christ is invoked quite literally: “‘This is my body. Accept, O Obscure Outsider, its sacrifice. Accept it, Great Pas and all lesser gods. … This is my blood.’ He raised the bottle, lowered it, sipped from it, and sprinkled a few drops upon the cloth” (*Return*, XII 253). We shall return to the primary mystery of the Eucharist in respect to Horn’s (and Urth’s) destiny, but Olivine makes a sacrifice of her own in this scene, taking out her eye so that her unseen and unseeing mother can have it. The protagonist’s response is instant and firm, and completely in line with Silk’s later refusal to accept Horn’s fate: “‘I cannot let you do this. You’re young! I forbid it. I can’t let you sacrifice yourself –’ The eye fell among the crumbs and wine stains” (*Return*, XII 254).

While Silk is unequivocally the dominant personality by the conclusion of the books, there are enough context clues to suppose that he never truly left the body, as when the narrator remembers watching Nettle’s grandmother die “through two pairs of eyes” (*Return*, VIII 172). Another layer of complication arrives when the giant godling mercenary Pig appears, apparently possessed by the Silver Silk of mainframe who has merged with Pas. Almost immediately after this memory of an event from two points of view, the narrator addresses his companion Pig: “Silk, I know you’re in him, and I must talk with you” (*Return*, VIII 173). The culmination of the protagonist’s time on the *Whorl* involves giving up his own eye so that Pig might see and Silk be returned to mainframe, though it is still possible that the remnants of Silk inside Horn are (possibly during his oddly humorous talk with the monitor at the conclusion of that volume in transit to Blue) bolstered once again and amplified by Silver Silk, making the sacrifice of the eye one of the necessary steps to re-establishing Silk’s identity.

Leaving aside Silver Silk for a second, one of the great issues this gestalt personality raises involves Horn’s attitude towards Nettle. Clearly, he became attached to Seawrack during his original sojourn away from New Viron: “I am going to pray and go to bed, and (if I cannot sleep) daydream about the first time I lay with Seawrack on the clumsy little sloop I built with my own hands and loved so much, and of lying with Hyacinth, too, in Ermine’s on the night of our marriage” (*Green*, X 170). How much of his need for Nettle actually originates from Silk’s absolute despair at the loss of Hyacinth?

While Horn’s emotions are helplessly entangled with the perhaps more noble sentiments of Silk, Oreb never ceases to acknowledge him by that name, in so many places that only a few examples will serve to finish illustrating the point. At one point, soon after Horn awakens in Silk and comes to tears over his memories of happier times, Oreb laments, “Poor Silk!”

“Not really, Oreb … I’ve had a good life, one that’s not over yet. I’ve loved a wonderful woman and a very beautiful woman, and I have been loved. Not many men can say that” (*Return*, III 77). In this scene, we also learn that Silk’s rule of Viron was not without scandal and discontent. He took cards off the market due to the damage their use as currency was doing to the landers still operating, and was eventually forced from office (*Return*, III 78). Even at his dinner with Caldé Bison and the wheelchair bound General Mint, though he has not yet returned to Blue, the protagonist is acknowledging that at least part of his identity is Silk: “‘Silk talk!’ Oreb suggested.

‘Yes, he does. Too much at times, and doesn’t eat enough. These are excellent rolls’” (*Return*, XIV 291). One of the red herrings in the book involves the Rajan’s fasting and the impression those around him receive that he is not in fact eating his food, casting some suspicion on his very nature, given the inhumi’s dietary requirements. However, while meant to be another ambiguity for a first-time reader to ponder, this is ultimately a symbol of Silk’s self-abnegation and denial. In *The Book of the Long Sun*, his greedy refusal to share his lunch with Maytera Rose, eating it quickly, begins a preoccupation with food and selfishness that he struggles to overcome. By *The Book of the Short Sun*, Silk’s self-denial is complete, and his reluctant appetite yet another indication of conscious self-suppression. By the end of that meal in the Caldé’s palace, Horn is again the dominant personality, and Silk has retreated once more:

>“I know what you’re going to say.” …

>“Do you? Then why don’t you say it yourself and save me the trouble.”

>Oreb took up the word. “Say Silk!” ….

>“Pig and Hound know. Are you aware of that? They have from the beginning” ….

>“You had never been trying to deceive [Pig], Silk. Neither had you tried to deceive Hound. You have only been trying to deceive yourself, and now even that is at an end.” (*Return*, XIV 303)

For all that Silk’s life can be considered tragic, Horn’s response at this point is equally poignant: “No one, not even you, Maytera, can make a man who knows who he is believe that he is someone else” (*Return*, XIV 304). While Gyrfalcon, who emerges before the climactic wedding scene as one of the most ruthless rulers of New Viron, would certainly feel compelled to destroy Silk if he actually tried to reassert his control over the city, he asks Hoof another powerful question after Silk gives him the corn which represents hope for the continued human survival on Blue: “If this is your father, where is Caldé Silk?” (*Return*, XVII 341)

In a strangely satisfying response that begs us to consider how much we can ever know of someone else, Hoof answers, “In a book my mother and father wrote” (*Return*, XVII 341). Of course, a better question would be “If this man is truly Silk in denial, where is your father?” Gyrfalcon then asks whom Silk (for no matter what the text on its surface says, by this point our protagonist is certainly almost entirely that good man) is searching for, and he responds, “By name? … for a friend, that’s all. I don’t know his name. Or hers. I’ll learn it when I find the person” (*Return*, XVII 341). Silk is actually seeking out an inhumi (he finds Juganu to fill this role), hoping to bring about his own death when he offers that “friend” a taste of humanity for one final task on the Red Sun Whorl of Urth, before snatching it away forever. During these final trips to Urth, Silk is surprised to find that Babbie makes the trip with them. In a revealing passage, he is unable to identify the more human looking hus, but Hoof has no such problem: “Father wanted to know who that was, so I said, ‘It’s Babbie, Father’” (*Return*, XVII 347).

Besides the hus’s appearance, its behavior towards Hoof and the protagonist is highly suggestive. Hoof ponders, upon recognizing the more human nature of the hus, that “There must be a word for the time when we see something we have seen before turn out to be something else, like when a stick is a snake without moving. … [Even my wife] does not know a word for that” (*Return*, XVII 347). Unfortunately, his realizations regarding the humanity of the hus (and the aptness of his analogy of a stick-like snake, considering the narrator’s mysterious liana staff and the nature of the inhumi) are not quite self-conscious enough. During Hoof’s time on the *Samru* (which also features in the conclusion of *The Book of the New Sun*), at one point he “woke up on deck with Babbie licking my face. I thought at first he had hurt me because it stung, but what really happened was that I had fallen and hit it” (*Return*, XVII 348). When he later bumps into the powerful looking hus in the darkness that follows the girl Scylla’s meeting with the monstrous Scylla of Urth, he says:

>"It’s me Babbie. It’s Hoof," very quick. Something happened then that surprised me as much as just about anything I saw on the Red Sun Whorl, except for the part right at the last. Because Babbie threw his arms around me and gave me a great big hug, saying "Huh! Huh! Huh!" and lifted me off my feet. (*Return*, XVII 353)

If Babbie is simply a hus, his sudden joy at seeing Horn’s son is difficult to explain, but if the last remnant of Horn dwells inside the hus, then everything about the scene begins to make sense. When Hoof demands that a mate bring the captain to him, the crewman attacks Hoof and “Babbie grabbed his arm and threw him down so fast and hard that he might as well have been a girl’s doll” (*Return*, XVII 354). Babbie points to his mouth and continues to make his signature sound, but both “Father” and Hoof misconstrue that in fact he is trying to communicate that he is Hoof’s father, Horn, and has become “the beast with three horns” – and has been so since a vital scene at the end of *On Blue’s Waters*.

At the culmination of the first novel in the series, when the narrator escapes from Gaon and the inhumi mass against him, Horn says good-bye to his family as he runs out of paper, and seems to rest under a strange tree after following a voice into the forest. The text somehow equates him with Babbie in this scene:

>Someone on shore called again for Babbie, and I understood that he meant me; it never so much as occurred to me then that I had sometimes been called “Silk” or “Horn.” He who called me seemed quite near, and he called me with more urgency than Seawrack ever has. I searched the shadows under the closest trees for him without result. ... Another halt, and this one must be for the night - a hollow among the roots of (what I will say) is just such a tree as we had on Green. It is what we call a very big tree here, in other words. ...

>Goodbye again, Nettle. I have always loved you. Good-bye Sinew, my son. May the Outsider bless you, as I do. ...

>I found him in the forest, sitting in the dark under the trees. I could not see him. It was too dark to see anything. But I knelt beside him and laid my head upon his knee, and he comforted me.

(*Blue*, XV 377)

Afterwards, our narrator comes across Brother and Sister in a hut. They tell him that "They see the Vanished People sometimes … . Sometimes the Vanished People even help them. That is good to know. I asked them about the Vanished Gods. They said there was one in the forest, so I told them about him” (*Blue*, XV 380). It should be clear that by this point the tree under which Horn rests bears some relationship to the Vanished Gods of Blue, but more telling is the shift in tone in the last few pages, in which Silk at last speaks of how brave the men who must have fought on Green were, and how he should have emphasized more positive qualities of those around him. Most importantly, he has a vision of Olivine, who tells him, “This is where you lived with … This is where you lived with Hyacinth.” In that dream sequence, rife with symbolism (even featuring a symbolic excision of Nettle’s name), he notes:

>Hyacinth herself was beside me in sunshine. Together we were chopping nettles from around the hollyhocks. Hyacinth was fourteen or fifteen, and already breathtakingly lovely; but in some fashion I knew that she was terribly ill and would soon die. She smiled at me and I woke. For a long time the only thing I could think of was that Hyacinth was dead. (*Blue*, XV 379)

At this moment, the thoughts of the narrator, which were not at all with the dead woman in the coffin before him when he first materialized in the body, shift only to her. The volume concludes with a passage which reiterates that our narrator has changed significantly:

>I have re-read most of this. Not all, but most. There are many things I ought to have written less about, and a few about which I should have written more. Hari Mau’s smile, how it lights his face, how cheerful he is when everything is bad and getting worse. ... In the end we had to rush them to prevent them from joining the inhumi, and I led the rush. They were as human as we, and they may have been the best of us. ... Little space left. I am ashamed of many things I have done, but not of how I have lived my lives. I snatched the ball and won the game. I should have been more careful, but what if I had been? What then? (*Blue*, XV 380-381)

Throughout the rest of the series, Silk will be fighting the realization that his student Horn has surrendered his life and fled into Babbie with the assistance of the Vanished Gods, in order that he might return to New Viron. This terrible unacknowledged guilt stalks him throughout the rest of the story: “[T]here is a marsh here. Hide says he knew of it, but had hoped the ice would be thick enough for us to cross. It is not, and we will have to go around. Quite large, he says. A great man-killer stalks there two-legged like a man, green and quiet, with fangs longer and thicker than a strong man’s arm – but only for me, and only when I do not look for it” (*Green*, XXII 330). While it is not certain that this creature is necessarily Babbie, it does seem to resonate with Silk’s refusal to acknowledge the guilt such a sacrifice would incur. When he first finds himself in Silk’s body, Horn has a similar vision of his fate: “Something with tusks and shining eyes was swimming to him, swimming east, always and forever east, in a spear straight line from Shadelow, its wake marked already by faint phosphorescence” (*Return*, III 84). In the most telling manifestation of this stalking figure, it is equated with a strange moth-like creature bearing a symbol highly associated with sacrifice (and Green):

>The cold winter wind seemed to carry with it a steaming, fetid wind from Green, as a frigid old man, penurious and hoary with age, might bear in his arms the rotten corpse of a beautiful young woman. … It seemed to me that to my left, at or beyond the very edge of vision, a great man-killer of Green stalked, each slow and careful stride that crushed the too-thin ice devouring twenty cubits. When I looked beyond the fire, its light revealed wide, dripping leaves in silhouette; and once a moth with wings wider than the sheets on which I wrote, opalescent wings stamped by some god with a strange device of cross and circle, fluttered toward the flames – only to vanish when I blinked. (*Green*, XXIV 356-7)

Further evidence that Horn’s consciousness comes to reside in Babbie can be found in small details: At first, the narrator does not recognize the trader who told him about Pajarocu. However, “Babbie (who was asleep at my feet) raised his massive head and winked, his sign of cautious affirmation” (*Return*, XI 226). Silk was not truly present at that event, but Horn was. The hus will serve Patera Silk, but refuses to cater to his sons: “[Babbie] would even bring Father food, but he would not do that for Hide or me. Babbie has gone away, I think into the woods on the mainland, but Vadsig says Witches Rock” (*Return*, XVII 345).

One final oddly defining feature of Silk involves his suicidal tendencies. He first seeks death on the airship, saved by Horn, at the culmination of *Exodus from the Long Sun*, and that pattern would seem to indicate that the wounds on his arms which Horn finds when he awakens in Silk’s body are self-inflicted. The protagonist, probably a gestalt of the two at this point, hopes the cleansing of his arms will hurt. “Because I feel that I’ve done something wrong, that I’ve failed a test of some sort and deserve to be punished” (*Return*, III 88). When he considers the confines of Green and the risk of being trapped there, he immediately thinks of suicide again, but this time, the leaden trace of Horn has changed him subtly, and the possibility of persevering and fighting occurs to him: “I felt certain that if I knew I was to be confined for years in such a place I would take my own life, and sooner rather than later. … If I had [my azoth], I might well have killed myself then and there – or cut my way out and fled, as is more likely” (*Return*, XI 222).

Even with the subtle changes Horn’s presence might have wrought in Silk’s character from their time together, Silk’s final bid at suicide involves snatching Juganu away from Urth after he has found a woman to care for in the cells of the Matachin Tower. In one of the concluding and most powerful scenes of the series, he confesses to Patera Remora, “It is wrong to take one’s own life. … Is it also wrong to put oneself in harm’s way, in the hope that one’s life may be taken?” (*Return*, XX 403) He has not truly overcome the self-destructive urges that once plagued him, but he failed to consider “that Juganu would enlist hundreds of his kind for a public attack” (*Return*, XX 403). He condemns the bargain he once made with the inhumi, which must include his deal with Krait to be rescued from the pit and the freeing of the interred inhumi at Gaon, but does not exculpate humanity from its own guilt: “I made a covenant with evil, one I bitterly regret, though those I have known have been no worse than we” (*Return*, XX 404). If there is any doubt to his identity, the small circles Silk makes on his cheek give him away during this vital conversation with Remora: “’Wait a minute.’ His forefinger drew small circles over his right cheek. ‘I remember. You opened the Writings, apparently at random, read a passage, and appeared to reject it. You turned to the passage on marriage then’” (*Return*, XX 406).

When we consider Silk’s motivations in refusing to acknowledge who he truly was for so long, we should be mindful of one of Horn’s more penetrating assessments, which also seems to ironically acknowledge the role Kypris had in the events of both *The Book of the Long Sun* and its follow-up:

>“[I]n Silk’s case, his goodness *was* his gift – a gift he had made for himself. It was the magnetism that drew others to him that caused his embryo to be put aboard a lander. That was the work of Pas’s scientists, as Pig’s size and strength were. (Recalling the Red Sun Whorl that it became, I cannot but wonder whether it did not sacrifice too much for us.) … No doubt he was prompted by his mother, but then all boys are. I was myself, but how much good did Mother’s promptings do?” (*Return*, IV 96)

The simple acknowledgement at the end of *Return to the Whorl* at the mention of the crushed hyacinth blossom achieves a profound simplicity when we realize that Silk’s self-denial has been fostered in the vain hope that somehow his student Horn would still live. Silk tries his best to sacrifice everything he is for another man, but he is ultimately unable to do it in any meaningful or true way: “He wept; and another distant voice, Remora’s, said, ‘Horn did not fail us, Patera. Caldé. You see that now?’

“Silk nodded” (*Return*, XX 408).

## The Rajan’s Powers, Dreams, and Their Origins

While he seems to lack some of the miraculous powers that Severian wields as the paragon of Urth, Silk is very far from normal. The full extent of the weirdness surrounding him begins to come to the surface during *In Green’s Jungles*. As we have noted, our narrator always held Silk in high esteem: “Silk had been one of [the special embryos stored on the *Whorl*]. Silk had been our leader. That was his talent, leadership. People trusted and followed him, and he tried – I tried very hard, Mora, not to mislead them, not to lead them astray and betray them. But Silk had remained behind in the *Whorl* with Hyacinth, and it almost destroyed us” (*Green*, X 158). Beyond this ability to inspire confidence, which might be tied to the physical body of Silk, Horn, too, gains a few special abilities before he ever finds himself in Silk’s body. This originates from his strange contact with the Vanished People, with whom he makes a possibly sinister bargain. He first attracts their direct attention by falling into the pit on Blue.

That scene is sufficiently important to warrant a close look. Of this fall, he says, “It was as if my spirit had gone and left my body unoccupied as it did on Green; but in this case it had returned, and my memories (such as they were) were those of the body and not those of the spirit” (*Blue*, IX 195). While Seawrack and Babbie both seem to be under the impression that his fall has killed him, prompting them to abandon him, the inhumu Krait is attracted to his dilemma, and taunts him into their own agreement. Seawrack’s recreation of the event emphasizes that Horn’s fall was fatal: “I never have told you how it was for me when you died. … I thought he was dead. … I was absolutely sure he was, so sure that I didn't dare to go near his body. I watched for a long, long time, and he lay so still and never moved once” (*Blue*, XIII 340). (By now, readers will have already picked up on one of our primary arguments, involving the close relationship of trees with the Vanished People and of the parasitic liana vines with the inhumi, which will be asserted more forcefully below. This island chain is dotted with very young trees, but there is the very real sense that some of the islands on Blue are actually composed of enormous growths of vegetation.) Horn, trapped in the pit, notes:

>It seems to me instead that it was all that remained of some work of the Vanished People, possibly the cellar of a tower or some such thing. The tower (if there had ever been one) had collapsed centuries earlier, shattering its wreckage across the valley and leaving this pit to collect the leaves of autumn and unfortunates like me. Eventually treacherous vines had veiled its opening, weaving a sort of mat which I had torn to shreds when I fell. A few long strands hung over the edge still, and it seemed to me that I might be able to climb out with their help, if only I could reach them; but I was, as I have said, too weak even to stand. (*Blue*, IX 196)

Almost immediately after this notice of the “treacherous vines” as a possible escape from the pit, the inhumu Krait appears, offering Horn a tantalizing venue to freedom, but not before having some fun. One more mysterious event occurs within the pit, as Horn seems to experience a genuine out-of-body experience: “Once, as I lay there at the bottom of the pit, it seemed to me that a man with a long nose (a tall man or an immense spider) stood over me. I did not move or even open my eyes, knowing that if I did he would be gone. He touched my forehead with something he held, and the pit vanished” (*Blue*, IX 203). After this he has a disturbing encounter with Nettle which he insists is not a dream or vision, in which she offers to get him some water, but when he takes her hand, it prompts a terrified response: “She stared at me then as if I were some horror from the grave, and screamed. I can never forget that scream. And I lay in the pit, as before. The Short Sun was burning gold” (*Blue*, IX 203).

The description of the tall figure in the pit will only make sense when we come to appreciate the multi-limbed nature of the Vanished People, who are definitely interested in Horn. While his bargain with Krait does not grant him any unique powers save a closer relationship and understanding with the inhumi, the words his adopted son speaks to Horn as he frees him echo throughout the entire series: “Those who cling to life lose it; those who fling their lives away save them. … Paradoxes explain everything … Since they do, they can’t be explained” (*Blue*, IX 211). Though Horn acts to preserve his life at this point, he certainly dooms himself to death in his quest. Silk’s likely suicide attempt before Hyacinth’s casket, however, creates a need that allows Horn to succeed even as his body dies. Yet this pit scene is a mere prelude to Horn’s strange control over the brush through which he walks.

Later in the novel, as he wanders through the forest in search of some sign of the Vanished People, he sits under a small tree, which should prompt our close attention.

>I must have spent three or four hours, if not longer, laboriously picking my way through the scrub. At last I hung my slug gun on the stub of a broken branch and sat down under one of the little trees with my back to the trunk, weary to the bone. Soon I let my eyes close ... and abandoned myself to disappointment. ... A tap on my shoulder woke me. The face that looked into my own was invisible in the darkness, but I took no note of that, thinking that mine must be equally impossible to see. ... Everything the Neighbors said to me, and every reply I made, has remained in my memory from that night to this as fresh as though it had been said only a few seconds ago. I do not know why this should be true, but I know that it is. (*Blue*, XI 266-7)

As he follows the Neighbor, the foliage ceases to impede him: "The branches of the twisted trees no longer raked my face, and I am quite certain that there was no place where I was forced to get out Sinew’s knife and cut my way through" (*Blue*, XI 267). He tells the Neighbors that he is trying to bring back Patera Silk and highlights the precarious position of humanity, forced out of the *Whorl* by the gods there but fearing the powers that remain behind in the shadows of Blue. The Neighbors’ response places a huge burden upon his shoulders: "Most of what you have said, we might say. This whorl of yours was ours. We, the remnant of our race, have abandoned it, giving it to no one and making no provision to keep it for ourselves. We found a way to leave and we left, seeking a new and a better home. ... This whorl is yours now. It is called Blue. It belongs to your race" (*Blue*, XI 270).

Horn is here described in much the same fashion as Severian once was, who was judged by the Hierogrammates as the paragon of his race:

>"We have brought you here as the representative of your race. ... You, here tonight, must speak for all of you. ... Let me remind you again ... that you will speak for your entire race. Every man of your blood. Every woman, and every child. ... Do you humans, the new possessors, object to our visiting it from time to time, as we are doing tonight? … From this whorl we sprang. You spoke of rocks and rivers, trees and islands here that have been famous among us for many thousands of years. This is one such place. I ask you again, may we visit it, and the others?" (*Blue*, XI 271)

Horn becomes fearful, but when he agrees, "They relaxed." When he shakes the Neighbor’s hand, Horn “remembered it,” insinuating that this was the same creature from the pit which granted him access to Nettle (*Blue*, XI 272). At this point, the Neighbor identifies himself: “My name is Horn also” (*Blue*, XI 271). From this point forward, the forest cannot impede him. This ability seems to originate from this interaction with the Vanished People. Afterwards, he describes the ease with which he can navigate the forest, even compared to experienced huntsmen:

>On the way back to He-pen-sheep's camp, he and his son often had a good deal of difficulty working their huge roll of hide through the tangle of scrub that had obstructed me so often. I, who stood taller than either of them and had the massive haunch (it must have weighed as much as the twins) over my shoulder, should have been at least as inconvenienced by the angular, wind-twisted trees. But I was not. … no matter in which direction I looked, I could see a clear path for me and my burden. (*Blue*, XI 275)

He describes his meeting with the Neighbors to He-pen-sheep in interesting terms, especially since it is not at all clear at which point the blood transfer or implied sharing of blood occurs (though the pit, whose environs feature only “young” trees, without “even one that seems to be ten years old,” could be one place where that exchange might have occurred (*Blue*, VIII 192). Our narrator even claims that after his fall into that pit, “the best part of my life was over. The pit was its grave” (*Blue*, VIII 194). The pit’s unambiguous association with death is profound.) In any case, he tells He-pen-sheep, “We changed blood … I … for you and all the other men, and for all the women and all the children, too. The Neighbor for all the Neighbors. … Because I spoke for you, I can tell you what we said. We agreed that where men are, Neighbors can come as well” (*Blue*, XI 276). [This final sentence might be more portentous than it appears, if men and Neighbors are somehow biologically related.]

The narrator can also extend his safe passage through foliage to others nearby. At one point, our narrator (in Silk’s body) leads Horn’s son Hide through a thick forest area, advising the younger man to, “Keep your grip on my staff” (*Green*, XIX 292). Once Hide releases that grasp, he is immobilized within the forest because of “the thornbushes” (*Green*, XIX 293). For a time, the narrator seems to lose this power after Horn’s body dies, but he rediscovers it during his tenure as the Rajan of Gaon: “After about an hour of that the Neighbor's gift came back to me, as it had on Green. Perhaps I had never really lost it, but only lost sight of it” (*Blue*, XII 300).

In addition to this strange forest magic (which makes perfect sense in our discussion of the nature of the Vanished People and the inhumi below), he also seems to influence the tales told by others in the family entertainment at Blanko while he is a guest of Inclito. At one point, it is noticed that, “At dinner yesterday you got inside Fava’s story and changed things around. Did it really happen?”

“I suppose it did. I didn’t do it consciously.”

To this, Oreb supplies, “Good Silk!” (*Green*, X 156) However, this ability to shape other people’s tales might have a more tangible basis in reality, for once Horn finds himself in Silk’s body, another bizarre ability manifests itself in tandem with an inhumi. Silk’s own description of this power suggests that he does not understand it completely:

>“When I was in Blanko, Fava and I found that when my mind was joined with hers we, and anyone else who was in our company, could travel in spirit. We went to Green; and later Jahlee, the Duko, Hide, and I, with some others, went to the great city of the Red Sun Whorl. We were able to, I believe, because the Duko had been there previously. Let me think” (*Return*, VII 141).

Of course, his belief that the Duko was responsible for them winding up on the Red Sun Whorl is, in true Wolfe fashion, called into question by some obvious qualifiers, “I believe … Let me think.” Indeed, Jahlee asserts that she thinks Rigoglio had nothing to do with them winding up on Urth: “[Y]ou said it was me and you and Duko Rigoglio, Incanto. I don’t think he had anything to do with it, and I know I didn’t. I’ve never lied to you. I hope you know that” (*Green*, XXI 318). This suggests that the Rajan of Gaon is solely responsible for their destination during the spiritual travel.

Discounting Rigoglio, the only thing left to explain arriving on Urth (besides considering Seawrack’s singing and the recent appearance of Mucor in the fire) involves the thought process of the narrator at that time: “I tried to recall Green's jungles and Sinew. Sleep rushed upon me, sending me spinning through an endless night” (*Green*, XX 311). When he arrives in Nessus, his description quite tellingly compares it to a location on Green: “It was a mighty river, the largest I have ever seen, a river so large that the farther bank was nearly invisible. A wide and ruinous road of dark stone ran beside the water, which lapped its edges in places, leaving the great, dark paving blocks slimed and filthy in a way that recalled the sewer on Green” (*Green*, XXI 320). He is not the only one who is reminded of the City of the Inhumi. They discuss how much time might have passed since those houses were built and abandoned, and estimate that it seems to be between two thousand five hundred and one thousand years, though only slightly over three hundred have passed on the *Whorl* since it left Urth (*Green*, XXII 325). Nessus has also put Jahlee in mind of the City of the Inhumi on Green: “I’ve been thinking about a city we both know, Rajan. … The slaves fix the old buildings a little when we – when they’re made to” (*Green*, XXII 325). From this, Hide, accompanying them in their dream travel, becomes curious about the age of the City of the Inhumi. The narrator admits, “I had great difficulty answering” (*Green*, XXII 326).

He also says:

>“I have no idea, though it must surely be very ancient. There are trees that we here would call large growing from the sides of many of the towers. … Those towers were built by the Neighbors, who built everything far better than we men build anything.”

“You mean the Vanished People?” (*Green*, XXII 326).

He goes on to wonder why the Vanished People left the city to the inhumi. With all these faint echoes between Green and Urth, and that strange qualification of the Neighbors as specifically Vanished “People,” when the narrator attempts to explain exactly why they wind up on Urth, he must acknowledge that he does not fully (or even partially) comprehend what has happened to them:

>“I don’t understand any of this, Father.”

>“It’s very likely no one does. … I wanted to take us to Green, where Sinew is. I wanted to see him again, as I still do, and I wanted you others – you and Duko Sfido particularly, and Mora and Eco as well, after they providentially appeared – to see what real evil is, so that you might understand why we on Blue must come together in brotherhood before our own whorl becomes what Green already is.”

>I fell silent, forced to think myself about what I myself had just said. (*Green*, XXI 321)

Unfortunately, his capacity for self-examination, judging from the assessments he makes whenever he sees his own reflection, is rather weak. We have already suggested that his abilities actually extend to passing through time. Hide continues to contend that the narrator knows something concerning the Vanished People that he is not revealing, and brings up how the passage of time on the Urth does not match up with the amount of time passed on the *Whorl*:

>“Hide, there is one matter, one very important matter, upon which I cannot speak. In the past I’ve tried to turn the subject when you came too near to it, and I suppose I will again.”

>“You understand about the Vanished People. I know you do.”

>“I do not.”

>He ignored it. “It seems to me like they’re the key. If I could just understand them, I’d understand everything, even that place we went to when you thought we were going to Green. Only it wasn’t Green, was it? …

>“But it was way too long, Father. You said that yourself. Thousands and thousands of years.” (*Green*, XXII 334-5)

Here, the Vanished People and understanding them are linked to Urth. Though we have little reason to trust Hide on this, we have less to trust the narrator’s judgment, who willfully turns away inquiries which broach some unstated subject (which is probably the rather quotidian secret of the inhumi). The narrator’s ability to “get inside” the story of others might actually be somehow related to the disparity in the passage of time which Hide notes in the above scene. The stories told in Blanko are highly suggestive – one involves Fava’s birth as an inhuma on Green (told in the third person quite unconvincingly), while another, told by Inclito’s mother, a tale of suitors and a strange scourge of death instituted from beyond the grave, prominently features a strego (or wizard) with a bird who uncannily resembles our narrator. This is one of the clearest hints that Silk’s astral travels are not simply limited to space, though he may not be “consciously” aware of the true ramifications of his abilities.

While some may deny that passage through time is overtly manifested in the story, there are even scenes where he seems to visit Krait at the time of his death, or Horn and Nettle at the precise moment when their life takes a turn for the worse – when Jahlee preys upon their son, casting a shadow over Horn’s happiness that, it is implied, never truly disperses. In a discussion with Inclito’s daughter Mora, the narrator experiences what might be a waking vision, but if we are prepared to suppose that he has powers over time itself, the scene gains an extra layer of poignancy (and reality). She asks if he has seen a dead inhumi who had been impersonating a human being, and Silk admits that he has, “more often than I like” (*Green*, X 157).

>Those were magic words, although I had been ignorant of their power when I pronounced them. As a small boy I had heard the stories all children hear, and used to imagine that if only I could stumble upon the correct syllables a garden would spring up where our neighbors’ houses stood, a place of mystery and beauty in which the trees bore emeralds that turned to diamonds as they ripened, and fountains ran with milk or wine. Eventually I came to realize that the immortal gods were the only spirits who granted the wishes of men, and that prayers were the magic words I had sought. …

>Now - very far from those friends, men and women I will never see again – I had stumbled upon words that were magic indeed. No sooner had I pronounced them than I found myself back in Green’s jungles, squatting beside the young man who had joined us and fought beside us, as he writhed and bled beneath the arching roots. (*Green*, X 157)

With all that poetic talk of trees and gardens, it should not be difficult by now to posit a mechanism for this transport through time. There is, however, one aspect of this scene which strongly hints that it is not merely a memory: Krait asks Silk why he hates the inhumi. His denial hammers home that it is specifically Silk from a future point in the timeline visiting this scene: “I’ve never told you anything of the kind … or talked to you at all until this moment.” It was Horn who had lived through this and traveled with Krait, and no matter how much Silk denies it, he is a different man. (Another point comes up during this exchange, which we should always remember when considering the understanding of the cargo placed upon the *Whorl*: “[The sleepers’] memories had been tampered with, like Mamelta’s, so they were confused in strange ways” (*Green*, X 158). Even eye-witnesses such as Rigoglio and Mamelta lack sufficient perspective to understand where (and even why) they are. As Rigoglio says when asked if he knew Mamelta, “I may have known your friend under that name or some other … but I have no way of telling. It was a long time, years in fact, before I understood that I did not remember everything, and that not everything I remembered had actually taken place. … Our memories are less trustworthy even that yours. At first we try to live in accordance with them, but sooner or later we learn very painfully that they lead us astray” (*Green*, XVIII 276).) This scene also metaphorically describes the loss of Horn’s happiness: it is breached when Krait the inhumi is born, and only at his death, as a human man reconciled with a father who comes to love him as a son, does that chasm disappear. With the reconciliation of Horn and Krait, there is no more reason for Horn’s bitterness regarding his family life. We might draw a parallel situation with humanity, that will be forever at war and unhappy until it recognizes the nature of the inhumi as distinctly human, ending their threat.

We shall reinforce the idea that Silk’s travel through dream is also one through time later, and that it was his thoughts that led him to a past Urth, knowing that he intended to reach Green, but Hoof gets much the same impression during his final journey to the Red Sun Whorl: “Father stopped talking, and it seemed to me that he had stopped a long time ago someplace a long way from where I was”

(*Return*, XIX 387). The other mystery of this journey involves the incessant sounds of Seawrack and the Mother’s song. At one point, the narrator actually makes her song real to a man named Terzo by singing it aloud. After that, Terzo continues to hear it. The narrator claims that “The lapping of the waves was in her song, and the eerie cries of seabirds, and the lonely whistling of the wind. ‘That is in the language of the Neighbors, whom you call the Vanished People,’ I said when I could no longer sing for weeping” (*Green*, XVI 266-7).

The words he reveals, however, are definitely ominous: “Seawrack is singing in the place that lies beyond this place. Listen there, and you cannot help but hear her. ‘In our small house with shining windows, I waited till the tide brought your wreck through. Lie here beside me in the darkness. I’ll wake to life the corpse I say is you’” (*Green*, XVI 267). Whether the metaphor is definitive and tells us anything about Seawrack’s nature or not (especially given that corpse-like imagery, wakened from death after a wreck), thoughts of Seawrack, the sea, and the strange creature lurking within it known as the Mother once prompted our narrator to consider that the distance between the listeners and the song is not one of space: "I have since thought that the distance was perhaps of time, that we heard a song on that warm, calm evening that was not merely hundreds but thousands of years old, sung as it had been sung when the Short Sun of Blue was yet young, and floating to us across that lonely sea with a pain of loss and longing that my poor words cannot express” (*Blue*, V 140). It is always tempting to take as metaphor that which might be intended quite literally in Wolfe. Horn also muses, "Time is a sea greater than our sea. ... Its tides batter down all walls, and what the tides of time batter down is never rebuilt. Not larger. Not smaller. Never as it was" (*Blue*, VI 159). One theme of the *The Book of the Short Sun* seems to be that as time passes, many things change beyond all recognition.

The narrator often contemplates how Seawrack’s song could possibly be audible to him:

>At every odd moment I find myself thinking about that 'impenetrable' forest, and remembering the forest at the mouth of the big river, the jungles on Green, and so forth – the tangled trees on the big sandspit I was writing about before Han invaded us. … It has been nearly two years now, I believe. More, perhaps. How is it that her song reaches me? (*Blue*, XII  292-3)

Immediately before his journey to Urth, he notices a singing that only he and Terzo can hear. He notes, “I fell silent for a moment to listen to Seawrack's song, the beating waves and the cries of the seabirds” (*Green*, XX 311). Even if Rigoglio is responsible for their arrival on Urth, all of the characters can see that more time has passed for the buildings of Nessus than the mere three centuries the cargo has spent aboard the *Whorl*. If our narrator can actually pierce the veil of time (as the Green Man, Severian, the Hieros, and their servants could), then perhaps it also solves one long standing mystery: at the very start of *The Book of the Long Sun*, when Oreb’s wing is still injured, Silk beholds a vision he takes for Patera Pike and sees a bird fluttering away – something which is probably impossible for Oreb at that time, accidentally wounded as he was by Silk and left downstairs. While this would not explain the resemblance between an older Silk and the elderly Pike, it could account for the materialization of a priestly figure and his bird, leaving the rest to a possibly mistaken identification – despite our adamantine and confident knowledge that Silk’s mind is so fine and precise that no illusion could *possibly* overcome his perspicacity. [Thankfully, Silk actually mentions Pike and the appearance of that ghost in *The Book of the Short Sun*: "I recalled Hyacinth's ghost and its effect upon Pig very vividly, but I chose not to mention that memory" (*Green*, IV 70). He mentions the ghost of Pike, and, if we view self-deluding and oblivious Silk as a potential source for Pike’s ghost, his description becomes yet another richly ironic device: "[Pike] wouldn't have lied to me - or to anybody, if he could help it - and he was a careful observer" (*Green*, IV 70). [Silk suffers from a singular lack of ability to recognize himself throughout the entire series.]

While we have attributed these strange powers and events to the narrator’s proximity to the inhumi or the Vanished People, it is heavily suggested that the ring given him by Seawrack ensures not only their attention but also a kind of defensive aegis: "The mounting was white gold I believe - some silvery metal that did not tarnish as plain silver would have. The stone was white and dull, scratched and very old. ... [Seawrack tells him,] ‘You must wear it, because you might fall in the pit again’” (*Blue*, X 253). Even though Silk relates the story of Horn and the Neighbors on Green in the third person at first, the ring seems to play a vital role in the interchange between them. When the Neighbor opens the door of Horn’s cell, he asks, “You are a friend of ours?” (*Green*, I 20) When the Neighbor sees Seawrack’s ring, he reveals his intentions: “We want to wake all of you up. … To your safety. … You can get out of this sewer … provided you do not drown” (*Green*, I 21). While the Neighbor has the power to open the sewer himself, if he does so, he believes the changes will be short-lived. Even if the Neighbor does not do it himself, “It will almost certainly become clogged again, even if you do as we ask. That is the most probable outcome, unfortunately” (*Green*, I 22). With a sword and a light, Horn is given the responsibility of chopping up human remains to clear the water-flow, starting a small deluge. We shall return to this later as an important mythical re-enactment, but we should be mindful that it occurs on Green.

Silk is not the only character in the text who seems to manifest the ability to travel in dreams and possibly through time. Inclito’s daughter Mora and her friend Fava (though her body has perished after a dream visit to Green in which she finds herself freed from the fears and nightmares of being an inhuma) also seem to be acting in others’ dreams consistently throughout the series.

In one such example, Hide’s sleep is filled with the smell of food as he walks through a house. He also reveals that his age has somehow regressed, as he describes it to Silk: “I couldn’t be sure how old I used to be, but I knew I was younger in my dream” (*Return*, II 22). This could be another hint that time can in fact be overcome within the context of the dreams. He sees tall men “with too many legs going into rooms, but I couldn’t get the doors open, and mostly I didn’t try. Sometimes they’d be waiting up against the wall where I couldn’t see them good because there was a cupboard or something there, and I’d be afraid to look. You’re making the little circles again, Father. What is it?” (*Return*, II 22) Clearly these are the hidden Vanished People, though whether those cupboards are made of the wood from trees concealing their presence or not is unclear.

In this vision, Hide runs into Mora, playing with dolls, and she invites him to a game of hide and seek with them. Silk asks him if he was wearing a ring or any jewelry at all, no doubt thinking of Seawrack’s ring and its influence over the Vanished People. In this scene, we learn more of Silk’s visit to Green, revealing that he actually went to the lander where Horn seems to have died:

“Do you remember the ring I found in the lander?”

“Sure. Only you gave it to Sinew, not me. I don’t think I could have taken it back with me” (*Return*, I 24).

In his dream, Hide finally finds a doll in the cabinet. “It was just a doll, though. Like a baby, only somebody had carved a face sort of like that one on your stick. Only this was a baby’s face, and painted pink” (*Return*, I 25).

He also relates that “There was a great big long sofa with lots of legs, I don’t know how many but eight or ten, maybe, and I got down on my stomach and crawled under it. … There was a little girl hiding under there already. At first I thought it was the one with yellow hair, but it wasn’t. … Pretty soon I could hear the doll, walking slow and looking in all the cabinets. And then I woke up and woke you up” (*Return*, I 25).

The narrator wonders why Hide won’t tell him who was under the sofa. While we will extrapolate some of the figures in this dream below, the relation of this dream leads directly to another one experienced by Silk in the very next scene, in which he relives the events leading up to Sinew’s bite. At first it is tempting to suppose that the huge sofa in Hide’s dream is actually Babbie, who gains an extra two legs from the human soul stored within him, but in this case it seems that neither the blond girl (Fava) nor Horn himself is hiding there, which would imply, it would seem, a girl with darker hair, (or at least not the blond one we know from Blanko). In addition, the strange doll, with its face like that of the narrator’s staff, might actually be symbolic of the Rajan’s staff, originally carved from a liana vine, and could account for many of the strange disturbances that occur in the city of Dorp while Jahlee’s spirit is trapped on Green, leaving her body comatose. Given the possibility of transcending time, it is even implied in a few of the other dream sequences that Mora and Fava might somehow be in contact with Hyacinth’s spirit. The two girls whose identities Hide might be motivated to conceal from his “Father” are Mucor and Hyacinth, though how he would recognize Silk’s wife under that sofa is not clear. In any case, Mora and Fava feature prominently in the repetition of an inexplicable vision from *The Book of the Long Sun*.

In the original version, after Musk's tunic is blown in the wind, Silk dreams of driving a dead coach to a grave, and, intending to whip one of the horses, he instead whips the other, so that the striving horse is always punished, though he knows that horse will "die at the grave if the other did not pull too." Meanwhile, Orpine writhes naked in the dead coach. Chenille says that the grave is too deep, and the frogs echo her, "the frogs he had loved and killed with his love." In that dream, he thinks that the streams would never wash Orpine, "would not rot her back to trees and flowers, never wash off Blood's blood nor wet the fiery cat with the black mouse in its jaws, nor the golden hyacinths. Never fill the golden pool in which the golden crane watched golden fish forever; for this was no good year for golden fish, nor even for silver ones" (*Lake*, IV 346). That first iteration of the dream emphasizes that he is on the coach with his beloved: "Though the wind bayed like a thousand yellow hounds, it could not blow their creaking, shining, old deadcoach off of this road that was no road at all, and he was glad of [Hyacinth's] company" (*Lake*, IV 347).

During the course of *The Book of the Short Sun*, we are reminded that “There were horses in my dream, and horses are said to be signatures of Scylla’s; but I’ve never felt the dream came from her” (*Return*, XII 244). When this dream recurs, Scylla’s monstrous tentacles are whipping them onwards, and at the start of the journey, the occupants of the coach are slightly different: the narrator, Mora, and Fava are riding through a jungle on Green in an open carriage. This occurs during the narrator’s incarceration at Dorp, and the girls are interested in the color of Vadsig’s hair and in learning other information about the location of his room. The narrator notes that Scylla tells him where they are going by cracking her arms “like whips over the horses. Since the immense boles of the trees we passed and the monstrous, hairless beasts we glimpsed showed that we were on Green, I knew … that we could never reach the sea unless I drove” (*Return*, IV 94). When he glances back, Fava has become a dead doll, with Chenille’s knife in her side. “The trees were gone. … I explained to Mora that I was taking us to Blue, but she had become Hyacinth” (*Return*, IV 95).

After this dream, the narrator finally succeeds in being far more perceptive than us: “At least I know what doll it was that searched for Hide” (*Return*, IV 96). Since the doll is equated with the face on the narrator’s staff, we are tempted to suggest that if Fava is able to return at all from her spiritual existence on Green, it is in another vessel – perhaps the liana vine used to make the narrator’s staff has become just such a receptacle for Fava. Originally, that doll’s position in the deadcoach was held by Orpine, also a victim of possession, killed while being controlled by Mucor. Perhaps the girl hiding in the sofa in Hide’s dream represents a fragment of Mucor’s soul accompanying “her” hus Babbie, though we know that by the end of the novel she is certainly not to be found within him. We shall return to the idea that there are two horses in this dream later, but the basic “plotline” of the second dream heavily implies that it is the path Silk is taking to lay Scylla to rest on Urth (though, cleverly, in the dream he realizes that he is on Green). The symbolism suggested by having the original dead coach containing Orpine, being drawn by two horses, one of which is woefully abused, will be explored in the section titled “Mucor and Cilinia.” The transformation of Mora into Hyacinth by the end is not necessarily indicative of possession by Kypris in this case, for at another point in the series, when Horn finds himself in Silk’s body and sleeps in Hound’s house, he has a very disturbing, almost cataclysmic dream that tells us quite a bit more than is at first obvious:

>“Something with tusks and shining eyes was swimming to him, swimming east … He shouted until Seawrack rose from the sea to comfort him, smoothing his hair with two smooth, white hands. ‘It’s only a dream, Horn, only a dream. If you need anyone, Hound and I are right here.’

>He wanted her to stay, to lie in their boat with him and comfort him, but she vanished when he tried to hold her, and it was getting dark and Green rising, a baleful jade eye. There were water bottles in the racks; but the boat was gone and the salt sea with it, the sea that was a river called Gyoll in which corpses floated, savaged by big turtles with beaks like the beaks of parrots, the river that circled with whorl, the river over which the stars never set. He had come to the end of that river, and it was too late.

>He sat up. The well-remembered walls of the pit encircled him, walls marked with dank crevices opening on ruinous passages half filled with earth and stones. (*Return*, III 84-5)

In the dream, he sees Spider talking to two small girls, and when he asks where Hyacinth is, the blond one says, “She’s down there like Spider and me,” and the dark girl tells him, “Down there where you’re going, and she can’t ever come back. Take a cake for the dog” (*Return*, III 85). Spider plays with a crawling green light, which somehow actually becomes Green rising in the east. The scene ends with Oreb on Pig’s shoulder, calling him Silk. “Pig removed the dirty gray cloth that had covered his eyes; and when it was gone, he, who had supposed that he could see, could actually see. And Pig’s big, bearded face was Silk’s” (*Return*, III 85). It is almost certain that the blond and dark girls, though Horn has not yet met them, as he has just come to inhabit Silk’s body and has not yet traveled through Blanko, are Fava and Mora, respectively. While at first the presence of Spider might seem inscrutable, the logic of the dream is easy enough to follow: he represents the Vanished People – the very first description of a Vanished Person in the text, also from the pit, where this dream seems to be set, was of a spider. Mora’s transformation into Hyacinth during the dead coach scene might somehow indicate, if she is in contact with the departed Fava, that her spirit is at least reachable. Even more importantly, this scene mentions the River Gyoll on Urth – long before Horn even makes a trip to Urth in his timeline, and seems to indicate that Mora (we should remember that Fava “looks blond next to Mora” (*Green*, II 36)) has some knowledge of the future Rajan of Gaon meeting Triskele when she advises him to take a cake for the dog. The most important and difficult to parse detail in the dream, however, involves how the River Gyoll is described as “the river that circled with whorl” – from our perspective on the pit, this is probably the most concrete suggestion in the text that, somehow, both Gyoll and the *Whorl* are circling Blue, hinting indeed that when Horn cleared the corpses from the river on Green, it was actually the River Gyoll on Urth, still covering drowned humanity.

Whether there is any reason to explore the possibility that Mora and Fava have found Hyacinth somehow, Silk soon experiences a dream of his own that seems culled from Horn’s past. He finds himself on Blue, and sees a baby in its bed. “The sleeping child was Sinew. He knew it before he saw its face, before he saw the small silver ring the child wore, or the white stone in the ring” (*Return*, I 27). This vision is related in the third-person, but given the confusing interchange between Horn’s experiences in Silk’s body in the *Whorl* and Silk’s first-person narration, it is never completely obvious when it occurs. Silk falls asleep immediately before this scene, so it does seem that he is experiencing this in the “present” timeline in *Return to the Whorl*.

The inhuma who feeds on Sinew recalls Jahlee, and soon:

>[H]e turned his head away and found himself crouching on the sand beside an earlier Horn who was seated on a blanket beside Nettle. Her right hand was in his; with her left, she pointed to a fish jumping far away, invisible against the setting sun but leaving silver circles on the calm swell of the sea. The fear of another pregnancy hung over them both, invisible as the fish but more real. (*Return*, I 27)

Our protagonist tries to prompt that earlier Horn to speak romantically, but he seems to be merely a thing of spirit at this point. “*In a moment the sun will be down. The stars will come out, and the wind grow cold. You will go inside and find Sinew, and it will never be the same again. Clasp her to you now. Tell her you love her now, before it is too late*” (*Return*, II 28).

Unable to influence the events he sees, perhaps the spectral presence beside Horn was actually there in reality; even though there is no trace of an inhumi in his bed, we might suppose that Silk’s staff *is* nearby. Many of the special qualities Silk enjoys, even down to altering his appearance and creating objects out of nothing in his dream travels, are somehow related to the inhumi and the Vanished People. Of course, his own dreams are, according to his own admission, often predicated upon the young girls he met in Blanko: “No dreams. Not of Fava and Mora, nor of anyone else; but I ought to have known better – Mora herself must be awake” (*Return*, VII 145).

One final description of Silk’s character from Hoof should set some of these strange qualities into perspective:

>Father was good.

>That is the hard part to explain to everyone, and it is the thing my aunt is trying to explain, too. If you meet her and she starts telling you about him, how scary he could be, and things moving themselves and the Vanished People coming down the street and knocking on her door, that is what you have to remember if you want to understand.

>If somebody frightens people, everybody thinks he has to be bad. But when you were around Father you were practically always scared to death, scared that he might really find out one day the way you were and do something about it.

>I was not going to tell why I did not like his bird, but I will just to get you to understand. It was not really a nice bird at all. It was dirty, and it did not sing. … and it would eat fish guts and rotten meat. After I got to know Father … I could see that the bird was exactly like me, except that it was a bird and I was a person. Father knew exactly how bad we were but he loved us just the same. Deep down, I think he loved everybody, even Jahlee and Juganu. He loved some people more than others, our mother especially. But he loved everybody and until you meet somebody like him you will never know how scary that was. … He was probably the best man alive, and I think that when somebody is really, really good, as good as he was, the rules change. (*Return*, XIX 390)

## The Plan of Pas: One in Being with the Father?

One of the most poignant themes of *The Book of the Short Sun* involves the unfulfilling and impossible nature of groping for a vanished past which denies reality. Silk can’t go home again, for Hyacinth is dead, nor can he facilitate the return of Horn to Nettle by denying himself. Whether he is actually a true biological aspect of Typhon, this Silk is quite distinct from his father in spirit. During his travels on the *Whorl*, the traumatized and damaged Silkhorn relates a story emphasizing this theme. The tale seems to describe Silk’s childhood rather than Horn’s, though once again, since Horn is the dominant personality at this point, the story is told from an external point of view. However, if we take the events of the story metaphorically, it brings the Plan of Pas into focus. The inconclusive ending of the story also matches humanity’s condition on Blue at the end of the series, serving as a powerful reminder of how much exposition Wolfe’s metaphors can disseminate once they are understood.

He begins the story by questioning whether the manteion which Pig visited is truly the same one he speaks of:

>“[T]hough I suspect they are. … A boy – I’ve forgotten his name, but his doesn’t matter – and his mother were returning to the city after living for a year or so in the country. … [T]his boy and his mother had moved to the country, living in a remote farmhouse where the boy, who was still quite small, was happy in the possession of a wood and a stream too wide to jump; but lonely all the same. Now they had decided to return to the city. It was a long journey as the boy measured journeys then, though he had ridden most of the way in a sort of cart pushed by his mother that carried their belongings.

>”She was very tired, and they stopped on the outskirts to spend the night with a friend before going into the city to the neat little house that another kind friend – a male friend who I suppose must have slept there from time to time, since he kept a razor there – had arranged for them to occupy some years earlier.” (*Return*, X 209)

The boy did not fall asleep even though the mother did. Oreb asks if the boy was good, and our protagonist answers, “Not particularly, Oreb, though he thought he was, because his mother loved him. He was not old enough to understand that she would always love him, whether he behaved well or badly.” At this point, he breaks off his story for a thematically important aside, noting that the burning of the quarter twenty years ago has left it almost as desolate as the City of the Inhumi on Green.

He continues:

>“I want to finish my little tale. I’ll interrupt it if I see anything worth commenting on. … The boy decided to take a short walk. He was hoping to find another child; but he was very conscious of the danger of becoming lost, so he walked only along the road upon which the house in which he and his mother were staying stood, reasoning that he could always retrace his steps and return to her. … Distracted by something or other, he became confused about the direction in which he had been walking. Thinking that he was returning to his mother and the house in which they were staying, he walked a long way until he saw an old man in black weeping upon the steps of a manteion. Until that time, the boy had been afraid to ask for help; but the old man looked so good and kind that the boy approached him and, after a minute or two of silent squirming … he said, ‘Why are you crying?’

>“The old man looked up, and seeing him pointed to the carts, wagons, and litters that passed them every few seconds. ‘If the wrongs I have done the gods were visible … there would be more than those, and four men would not be enough to weep for them all.’” (*Return*, X 210)

The protagonist and his companions walk on in silence, seeing the hovels made of salvaged timbers, until Pig finally asks if that is the end of the story. Oreb asks if the boy ever found his home. “Yes, he did. … But he was not the same boy … And that is not the same home.”

Begging leave of their company and promising to rejoin them later, the man who will become the Rajan of Gaon goes on alone. When he arrives at the cenoby where Silk once served, inside he finds “weeds and blackberry brambles, and – yes – a straggling grape vine climbing the blackened stump of the fig tree. Enough of their arbor remained to sit on” (*Return*, X 213). This return to a place which was once home, overrun by weeds and vines, is highly symbolic of what has actually happened to humanity as a whole, which has become lost, and whose cities have crumbled beneath the weight of all that potentially hostile vegetation.

In the story our protagonist told above, we can see the old rumors of the Caldé’s folly and Silk’s childhood with his mother, in which they may have been sent out of town to avoid the fallout over Caldé Tussah’s fall from grace. In addition, it represents the most explicit metaphor for the Plan of Pas that we are going to get. The boy and his mother (in this case, Silk and Kypris, but the boy is also justly represented by the remnants of humanity on the *Whorl*) are sent into the countryside away from their home (which is the story of the *Whorl* in its travels, sent out from Urth). The time has come for it to return home (in this reading, its mission is particularly ark-like, preserving the seed of ancient humanity from the flood at the coming of the New Sun). However, the mother and child do not make it to the home which has been prepared for them (Green, as Quetzal directed the lander), but stop at another house instead (in this case, Blue). When the child goes out to explore on his own, he soon becomes lost (as humanity is, even though they have traveled the same path to home that they should, they do not know where they are, assuming it to be some far distant destination from their ancestral planet of origin.) The old man that the boy meets, who weeps for all of those sins, seems to be some fragment of old humanity left behind to wallow in regret and remorse. He could even represent the inhumi, who not only emulate humanity, but also claim to be human, though they have lost something vital that keeps them from being complete on their own. The ending of the hero’s story is inconclusive, as it is for *The Book of the Short Sun* as a whole, because the people of Blue may never realize where they actually are, unable to perceive a home that is no longer suited to them.

One of the chilling details of this story involves the razor which the mother’s friend keeps at the house, which implies that he intends to live there. Mindful of Oreb’s ubiquitous plea, “No cut!” that razor strongly suggests sacrifice. This, then, might be the clearest sign we get of Pas’s plan to return to Urth, in sacrificing his son so that he may walk his old world again (a *patera* is, after all, actually a broad, shallow dish used for pouring libations, and could be filled or emptied easily). Some of Silk’s meteoric rise to prominence within the *Whorl* can easily be justified by his part in the Plan of Pas. However, in the first and last chapter of *The Book of the Short Sun*, we are presented with a very specific effort on the part of the people of Blue to bring the gods of mainframe down to their new planet. Hide notes in the very first chapter, “Amberjack says that old Prolucutor’s trying to build a Sacred Window” (*Blue*, I 32). For all its talk of gods, mention of this project will be curiously muted until the return of Silk to Viron: “It is – ah – coming … If not in my, er, time, then in my acolyte’s we will have a working Window, um, Horn.” …

“Without Mainframe, no god can come to it, your Cognizance” (*Return*, XX 401). That effort to create a Sacred Window on Blue represents the possibility of Pas returning to rule and possess the people as he sees fit. With this rather ambiguous threat looming over the planet, Silk decides to leave, taking the Whorl with him, in what might be the final act of Typhon’s redemption.

We have already spent a fair amount of effort in our examination of *The Book of the Long Sun* arguing that Silk is the son of Typhon and Kypris, the heir to the Whorl and all of Typhon’s efforts. One of the most inconclusive features of that series involves the unanswered question of the specially designed embryos stored upon the *Whorl*. Were they entirely new beings, or, somehow, were they clones of previously existing individuals, who once walked beneath the light of Urth’s faltering sun? If they are clones, then it is certainly conceivable that Silk’s original model was Typhon. Even in the initial chapter of *The Book of the Short Sun*, the idea that Silk is actually a part of Pas is directly questioned:

>"Silk got made a part of this Pas, didn't he? That girlfriend of Pas's invited him to."

>"I don't know that, and neither do you."

>"Well, he went off with the flying man and wouldn't let you tag along. That's what you and Mom said." ...

>"That's what we wrote, because it was all we knew" (*Blue*, I 35).

As this scene makes clear, all of our direct information is filtered through this lens of limited knowledge and perspective. However, the conflation of Silk and Pas seems to reach beyond their association through the scanning of Silver Silk into Mainframe, and at times, especially if the narrator’s words are taken as ironically literal, they suggest that perhaps we have traveled with an aspect of Pas all along. Even though Silk soon stops refuting his name when Oreb calls him by it, his reluctance in recognizing the truth indicates that he might also be ignorant of his true relationship with Pas: “[Oreb] frequently calls me Silk … I believe it must have been the name of his former master, the man I set out to bring to my town of New Viron, but failed to bring. Silk is an aspect of Pas now” (*Green*, XIII 204). As Horn, he makes equally ambiguous claims regarding his hero and the chief god of his youth: "[W]hen Silk did not say that he trusted no god at all (which to tell the truth he frequently did) he said that the Outsider was the only god he trusted. ... Pas might or might not be Silk, in part at least" (*Blue*, II 59). While that speculation on the part of our narrator seems to be in much the same vein as our own thoughts on the matter, there are a few great precedents to consider.

If Silk was intended to save the people on the *Whorl*, and Typhon patterned so much of his engineered religion on Catholicism, even taking as his symbol the voided cross, we should keep in mind the orthodox philosophy of the Catholic Church of Christ’s homoousious relationship with his father (*not* homoiousios, which would mean “of a similar substance” instead “of the same substance”). Indeed, the imagery at the enlightenment scene at the start of *The Book of the Long Sun*, possibly featuring the execution of Christ, might be just another coded message from Typhon to his heir, revealing his hope for the future savior of the *Whorl* by revealing the details of that ancient sacrifice, the significance of which has been almost entirely suppressed or forgotten. This philosophy survives in the creeds repeated at Catholic services (here, we will take a look at the verbiage of the Nicene Creed as it might be spoken at Catholic Mass at the time of the book’s publication):

>We believe in One God,

>The Father, the Almighty,

>maker of heaven and earth,

> and of all that is, seen and unseen.

>We believe in one lord, Jesus Christ,

>The only Son of god,

>Eternally begotten of the Father,

>God from God, Light from Light,

>True God from true God,

>Begotten, not made,

>One in Being with the Father.

>Through him all things were made.

>For us men and for our salvation,

>He came down from heaven…

>He ascended into heaven

>And is seated at the right hand of the Father.

>He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead

>And his kingdom will have no end.

At his enlightenment, Silk hears a masculine voice like a mountain and a feminine voice cooing like doves, an impression which conjoins with imagery associated with Pas (via the gigantic Mount Typhon created in his image on Urth) and Kypris (the goddess of love, associated with doves). We have already hinted that much of Silk’s enlightenment was pre-programmed, part of the Plan of Pas to bring a worthy heir into the *Whorl*. While a scan of Silk definitely agrees to accompany Kypris to mainframe at the conclusion of *The Book of the Long Sun* and even appears again as Silver Silk inside the blind godling Pig, this interesting relationship between Pas and Silk might be even more literal: “Pas might or might not be Silk, in part at least.”

More tellingly, the idea of a seed is used to describe both the father of the gods and the Vanished People, as a conversation between Horn and Seawrack reveals:

>"[Pas] had planted himself, in a way, and grew back. ... He regrew himself from seed, so to speak. That's what a pure strain of corn does. It produces seed before it dies, and when that seed sprouts, the strain is back for another year, just as it was before." …

>"Do you think the Vanished People might have done that? … You told me the seed waited for water."

>"Yes, for rain, and warmer weather." (*Blue*, VI 165-6)

This exposition, too, not only suggests that Pas was capable of re-growing himself from the seed-like embryos planted in the whorl, but relates nicely to a description of the cargo of the whorl, presenting the seeds and embryos in close proximity: “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” (*Return*, VI 129). Given his prominence in the Plan of Pas, it might even be that Silk himself was the regrown seed of Pas. However, Horn’s suggestion that the seed is waiting for rain and warmer weather to come to fruition might imply a cosmic event on the scale of the coming of the New Sun.

At the conclusion of the story, even though Silk’s return to New Viron might help to inspire the people to be better than they were, he decides to leave with the *Whorl*, knowing that soon its repairs will be complete and it will go hurtling through the cosmos, away from Blue and Green forever. At the wedding sacrifice in the final chapters, Silk says that he sees the hand of a god in the entrails of the waterhorse: “I take this opportunity to tell you that [The Outsider] is the god of Blue. Have you never wondered who it is? We have other gods here already. There is a Scylla greater than the one we knew, for example. You should fear and respect – but not worship – her, lest you come to ill.”

When Pas’s name is mentioned, Silk says, “He is not yet here, or at least, I do not believe he is. He will come, however. You or others like you will bring him, and Silk with him – Silk, whom you sent me to bring and whom I failed to bring” (*Return*, XX 399). This equation of Silk and Pas once again might also go a long way towards supposing that, even though this Silk was probably made rather than begotten, he is still one in being with his father. This is yet another line steeped in too much irony to take seriously. Everyone knows that he is Silk, quite handily invalidating the concept that his “belief” concerning Pas is necessarily correct. Indeed, in the past, his admissions were more forthcoming, even if the literal meaning is not the one that our speaker intends: “In one sense [Pas] wasn’t [on the Long Sun Whorl], either. In another he is here with us at this moment, because I am” (*Green*, XVI 252).

On the *Whorl*, the nature of Silk’s life and divinity are already fading into myth, with cause and effect confused before the passage of a single generation: “I thought you must know about [the god called Silk]. You’re looking for Caldé Silk, and I suppose Caldé Silk must have been named for him, since it’s a name people can use, too” (*Return*, VIII 164). While that is clearly an erroneous assumption given our understanding of the reality of Silk as a person, the further elaboration might not be as mistaken: “They say he’s not a minor god at all, that he’s an aspect of Pas. I don’t understand aspects” (*Return*, VIII 164).

In yet another ironic moment, our hero describes aspects, even though he begins his assertions with an inaccurate assessment of his own nature: “I’m always myself. But the immortal gods, whose powers are so much greater than ours, can incorporate many different personalities, and do. … The god is still Pas, Molpe, or whoever; but this is a view of Pas or Molpe that we haven’t been privileged to see before – a new aspect of Pas or Molpe. Now, why has the god called Silk been awarded the epithet Silent?” (*Return*, VIII 165)

If Pas fully intended to return in the form of Silk, providence had other plans. In more redemptive imagery, Silk and the Outsider are also equated at times. Before Pig loses his eyes, he kills a holy man near his window, and he kneels and feels something touching him, “like h’it were standin’ behind. Looked h’around. Wasn’t nae thing there” (*Return*, X 201). The conglomeration which is probably Horn and Silk in one body proclaims that this presence was indeed that of the Outsider, and enjoins Pig to kneel. Silver Silk no doubt possessed Pig at the same point that the soon-to-be-blind mercenary noticed the presence of the “Outsider.” We are reminded of a scene in *The Book of the Long Sun* in which the wounded Silk finds his hand clasped by someone he can only identify as the Outsider, wondering that help could be offered to him in his time of need when *he* was supposed to be the only help for his people.

Another significant conversation between Hound and the protagonist on the whorl stresses that these gods are in more than one place at any given time, and while this might indicate that Pas can be in Silk and elsewhere, it also, quite literally, should make us consider the aspects of Scylla which might be operating within the text:

>“Do you think that because Scylla was possessing Chenille she was absent form Mainframe? Or that Scylla can’t have been in another woman – or a man, for that matter – at the same time? …

>“I was going to tell you what happened to me, and to Pig, after I left you. Then I decided that it might better be left unsaid – that I’d let Pig tell both of us, if he would, and let it pass in silence if he wouldn’t.” …

>“Does this have something to do with the gods?” (*Return*, VI 134)

Of course it does. This line of reasoning presents the possibility (without directly mentioning it, as we should be used to by now) that Silk is both within his own body and that of Pig at the same time, but it forces us to consider the fragmentary, strangely omnipresent essence of the gods of mainframe, very much including Pas, Kypris, and Scylla. Of course, all of this talk of Silk as an aspect of Pas might be completely literal, for the Plan of Pas seems to have always been to regrow himself from a seed and take command of humanity once again. Fortunately, in the world of the Solar Cycle (and, Wolfe would argue, in our own) humans have a choice: a man could grow to be like Typhon, or he could try to be like Silk. In a sublime encapsulation of that freedom, it could very well be that Typhon and Silk are, in essence, the same man.

## One Myth to Bind Them All: Purging the Sewers

Now is as good a time as any to assert outright that Green is actually the future Urth after the coming of the New Sun. In looking for echoes of lost Urth on Green, we have already described the Neighbor’s task for Horn in clearing out the clogged sewer by cutting up corpses, holding a light and a sword while flooding the area. In that unifying scene, our narrator claims:

>[T]he opening I had made was permitting the water in the sewer to erode dead men (and women and children) as any little flow of water washes away grains of sand. ... I heard Patera Pike read from the Chrasmologic Writings long, long ago. Something about the people Pas put into our Long Sun Whorl multiplying until they were as numerous as grains of sand. (*Green*, V 90)

In typically ironic fashion, remembering his experience prompts our narrator to claim, "We human beings are native to the Long Sun Whorl, and not to Blue or Green; and so the tangled corpses of so many hundreds of us would have presented a Neighbor with great difficulties, if I am correct" (*Green*, V 95). We know that humanity is very far from native to the Long Sun Whorl, once again casting doubt over his other assertions. He also states that the Neighbor’s “true goal was to give me a realistic understanding of what we faced" (*Green*, V 95).

However, as he describes a dream in which he relives the purging of the sewers, he wonders:

>Can Great Pas really have meant for all this to happen when he inspired one of the Chrasmologic Writers to pen those few words about grains of sand? Can he have foreseen the blocked sewer on Green, and the corpses bursting free in the wave that nearly drowned me? ... It became clear to me that the dead cannot know that they are dead, that if they know it they cannot be dead. Thus all those dead men and women behaved in death as they had in life. It seemed certain that I was dead as well - that it was only because I too was dead and did not know it that I could hear the dead as I did, that I could see them move and speak. (*Green*, V 91)

It does seem that Pas was somehow aware of the risk of just such an impending flood, with the corpses of humankind saturating the landscape beneath a gigantic wave to clear them away. He might have prepared accordingly, though the dead and dying on Green no longer understand that it was once the ancestral home of humanity. This dream of cleaning the sewers once again prompts our narrator to believe that the strange machines and weapons he sees there are further proof that his own mind cannot recognize the truth:

>"It may have been, however, that [those strange machines and weapons] were actually present, that I saw them and ignored them, refusing to recognize them for what they were; but that my memory has stored them up, and now recalls them to torment me for my neglect. What might we find if we were to dig for those treasures near buildings such as this rambling house of Inclito's?” (*Green*, V 93)

While the details of Horn’s excavation of the sewer on Green do not perfectly match the story of the deluge-bringing Severian, with his mysterious light, sword, and on-the-job experience in dismemberment, the summary still sounds strangely close. Some of the other details remind us of the fineness of the weapon and hints at mirrors, the likes of which we have not seen since Inire:

>"The man had been given a sword by a man of the Vanished People, a sword that was neither long nor heavy, but very sharp, its blade of a black steel (if it was steel) better than any we know. … It seemed to the man with the black sword that [the Vanished People] stood between mirrors that they carried with them. Or rather, that they had stood so once but had stepped away long ago, and that the doubled and redoubled images they had left behind had taken on lives of their own" (*Green*, IV 62).

There are a few more suggestions that somehow this purging is deeply symbolic. Horn comes across the figure of something completely indistinguishable, worn away with age, and he learns that it is a representation of the Vanished People’s goddess of purity (*Green*, IV 64). While there are no hints within the text as to the identity of this strangely important but completely indistinguishable figure, Catholic readers might be able to posit her identity: that lost goddess of purity is the Virgin Mary. On Horn’s way, he also encounters a naked and blind old man gnawing at a foot, who then takes him to the source of the congestion, where the human corpses are deepest. The narrator is strangely reminded of Auk, but the man recognizes neither that name nor the name of Chenille: "I can't help wondering whether you are Auk ... Auk, a man I used to know, murdered another man called Galada" (*Green*, IV 65). As Horn begins to cut up those human corpses damming the sewer, water trickles through, and Horn washes his face with it as the blind man tells him, “It’s what’s past … You see that, don’t you? It’s the past holding on” (*Green*, IV 66). As he continues his grisly task, Horn vows that “the future must be set free here” (*Green*, IV 67). While Horn is perceptive enough to thwart an attack aimed at his back by the hungry old man, he is caught unaware by the bursting deluge. "When he was able to gain the riverbank, it was a bank lined with trees so immense as to defy description, trees to dwarf towers, whose mammoth limbs and innumerable, whispering leaves hid the towers of the City of the Inhumi from his sight, and whose topmost leaves were among the stars" (*Green*, IV 67).

In addition to the sword and the light, this event features cannibalism, a flood, and the idea that the clogged human corpses constitute “the past holding on.” We should note that the leaves are hiding the towers of the City of the Inhumi in another symbolic explanation for how much they conceal of the old buildings beneath them. (Our discussion of *The Book of the Long Sun* offered the possibility that the gods of the whorl were somehow quite literally in the tunnels beneath them, and while this omophagist does not seem to be Auk, who is certainly trapped in a basement with Chenille, we should remember that Auk was once possessed by a god who was born blind. Though this raving cannibal bears little resemblance to the dignity of Tartaros, a life of starved corruption might have changed the body and personality (either regrown - or perhaps even the original stored on the *Whorl* as Rigoglio was) of that god beyond all recognition. When Rigoglio talks about his home on Urth, it includes a rather close parallel to the sewer on Green: “[S]outh of the Necropolis … its infinite dead polluted the water after each rain, a sort of sticky black, like tar, that might float or sink. We used to say the women floated and the men sunk, but that was a joke. Only a sort of joke. I doubt that it was true at all” (*Green*, XIV 219).

In addition to this mythic re-enactment, which might be symbolically relating one of the most important events in the planet’s history, we soon learn that Horn and his men on Green find a huge lander: “[T]his was a tower indeed, its nose high as the tops of the tallest trees and its sleek lines radiating a strength it no longer possessed. I can see it now, that slightly canted tower gleaming dully in the reddish light of the stifling afternoon. Like a rotting corpse, it showed ribs where some sideplates had been taken. How we shouted in our delight, thinking it would save us!” (*Green*, VIII 125) That “rotting corpse” imagery resembles the language used to describe the ruins of Nessus, and the tower might remind us of another iconic tower from the tale of Severian – which is also described in *Return to the Whorl*. Of course, we are here suggesting a relationship between the tower in which Horn dies and the Matachin Tower of *The Book of the New Sun*, so let us examine the scene leading up to its description, keeping in mind the ignorant irony of our narrator:

>“I wondered how human [the Vanished People] appeared to you, if you had seen them. When I have, their faces have always been in shadow. That may not be true for everyone.” …

>“Aren’t they people like us, only four arms and four legs?”

>“I doubt very much that they looked exactly as we do, Hide. No doubt the Outsider made them from the dust of this whorl, just as he formed us from the dust of the Short Sun Whorl … - but there could be little point in creating us in one place and creating us again in another. Besides, the dust of that whorl can scarcely be identical to the dust of this one.”

>I was silent after that, thinking of our night in the Bear Tower, where Mora had mentioned the Neighbors and Rigoglio had died.  … Across it stood the torturer’s tower, against which even the Bear Leaders had warned me, a lander huge and sleek still although black with age and missing a few plates. To one side, the Witches’ Keep (as it was called), yet more decayed. To the other, the Red Tower, ocher with rust. On Blue as on Green, we would have called all three landers. ….

>I had died in a room not very different from the room I occupied there, in just such a lander, and the memory of death returned to me with a poignancy I have seldom felt. I looked up at the stars then, which were brighter than they had been by day, and more numerous; but I could not find Green there, or Blue, or the *Whorl*, or even the constellations Nettle and I used to see when Sinew was small and we spread a blanket on the beach and sat side by side there long after sunset, her hand in mine as we stared up at the stars. (*Green*, XXIII 349)

Both the tower in which Horn meets his fate and the Matachin Tower are described as missing a few sideplates. Wounded within that tower-like lander, which so closely resembles the rooms within the landers on Urth, Horn removes Seawrack’s ring and prays for a Neighbor to come heal him, and the narrator weep as he recounts it. Peering through the ring, hoping that it will hold “the night at bay,” Horn soon regards a Neighbor:

>“[A]nd she came to him in his agony. He told her what was in his heart; and when he had finished, she said, 'I cannot make you well again, and if I could you would still be in this place. … I can send your spirit into someone else, into someone whose own spirit is dying. If you wish, I will find someone in the whorl in which you were born. Then there will be one whole man there, instead of two dying men, one here and another there.'” (*Green*, VIII 127)

He finds himself bleeding from the arms, face, and neck, with “an old, worn knife covered with blood” by his hand, near the body of a “middle-aged woman.” Our narrator writes, “I rose, and leaving the dead woman in her coffin opened the door and walked out into the whorl. It was a little after midday then, as well as I could judge from the narrowing line of the Long Sun” (*Green*, VIII 127).

At this point, we know that Silk retrieves the ring from Horn’s body during one of his astral visits to Green and gives it to Sinew, who is keeping Chenille and Auk in his basement. The dream Silk experienced of the origin of Horn’s unhappiness, contiguous with Krait’s inception, featured that ring on the baby Sinew’s hand. Yet on the way to Dorp, Oreb brings a ring which confuses the narrator. (By now this should be no surprise to readers). Upon Oreb’s return, the narrator comments, “[H]e had come to present me with a ring set with a peculiar black gem. … It is too large for my fingers, so I put it in my pocket, thinking I would look through the jewelry when I could do so at leisure, find a chain, and wear it around my neck” (*Return*, III 57). The narrator then considers the possibility that this might be the original bird: “So perhaps this Oreb is the very Oreb that Silk owned after all. It is such an interesting idea that I am glad there is no way in which it can be tested. How disappointed I would be if I found it were not true!” (*Return*, III 57) [Just as this is of course the original Oreb, that ring is also quite logically the same ring Horn was wearing on Green when his body died.]

Amidst a series of incompetent conclusions, not the least of which is that the comatose Jahlee is biting her jailers at Dorp in the night even though her soul was left behind on Green, he notes that the ring is shrinking: “The ring will no longer fit my thumb, which seems very odd. I have been wearing it on the third finger” (*Return*, III 67). Soon enough, he qualifies his description of the color: “The stone is not actually black, I find; call it purple-gray” (*Return*, IV 99). He continually amends previous descriptions, at times thinking that it might even be Seawrack’s ring. In what is surely meant to deflate his reliability across the board, he says:

>I see I have confused the rings. The one I am wearing is not the one Seawrack gave me, although it resembles it closely. This is Oreb’s ring. It seems the stone changes color when it is worn; it was originally much darker, surely.  … Besides, to line out is to accept responsibility for the correctness of all that is let stand. … And I cannot correct all or even most of them without tearing the whole account to shreds and starting again. … No, there really are such things as honest mistakes; this account is full of them, and I intend to leave it that way. (*Return*, IX 184)

By the end of the novel, when he has stopped narrating, he tells Hoof a different story: “This was given me by a woman I called Seawrack. You don’t know her, but when you read my manuscript you will learn about her. … Look through it” (*Return*, XVII 337). What Hoof sees is yet another strong confirmation that the Vanished People are intimately related to trees:

>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. (*Return*, XVII 338)

If this were our only clue, we could probably neither confirm nor deny the narrator’s fickle conclusions, and assume that the true ring must be back with Sinew, who still has Auk and Chenille in his basement. Fortunately, though Silk is not always the most reliable in terms of identifying the things around him, he is still by all accounts a very good man, and it would be extremely out of character for him to simply leave his friends Chenille and Auk to rot in a basement. In Dorp, besides this mysterious ring, we soon see evidence that *both* Auk and Chenille are there. While we do know that one of the men in that basement died, it does not seem to have been Auk. One of the narrator’s concerns during his trip to Sinew’s village involves the presence of a lander: “I was going to ask you – I do ask both of you now – if there isn’t a lander near here.” He learns that the one Horn tried to repair would not fly (*Green*, XXIV 366). The ring, the lander, Auk, and Chenille, were all concentrated around Sinew’s village on Green at one point.

In Dorp, when the narrator attempts to gain money before his trial, he rushes to a place to sit down and drink, where he sees Auk before him (*Return*, VII 153). The strangeness of this scene is highlighted by confusion over whether this is merely a lucid memory, a spectral presence, or a living man walking in front of the narrator. Soon enough, another person sits in Auk’s stool, but something else catches Silk’s eye:

>“I looked around at the swaying woman behind me and said, ‘Chenille?’

>’Tha’ lady on Green? No, ‘s me.’ Jahlee dropped onto Auk’s stool and leaned across the table, her chin on her hands. …

>‘… I foun’ thish woman in a alley. … I drank ‘n drank, ‘n I fell down ‘n I knew I better shtop.’

>‘Did you kill her, Jahlee?’

>‘Don’ thin’ sho. She’sh big woman. … Never wash sho drunk.” (*Return*, VII 155)

We should remember here that Chenille had a bad drinking and “rust” problem in *The Book of the Long Sun*, especially during tragic or depressed times. With the inhumi’s probable murder of her children for failing to capture Sinew’s village, and perhaps, if that was truly Auk’s ghost in the bar, with her husband’s death (on Blue rather than Green), she would have more reason than ever to pick up her old habits, and be preyed upon by Jahlee, who became inebriated from Chenille’s chemically tainted blood, gaining something of the appearance of her victim. With the ring, a ghostly reminder of Auk (if not Auk in the flesh), and Chenille all near Dorp, it is easy to imagine what happened: Silk liberated his friends from the basement, and Auk repaired the lander that once harbored Horn’s body (that powerful tower which so suggestively loomed over the landscape of Green). Something has happened near Dorp, but Chenille at least seems to have survived; as a large and powerfully built man, perhaps Auk wound up with Seawrack’s ring as well, which adapted to him, though Oreb was able to retrieve it. One of the most essential themes of *The Book of the Short Sun* involves uniting two things which seem to be distinct into one: our narrator is Silk, the ring is Seawrack’s, the drunken or drug addled woman Jahlee preyed upon was Chenille, and that damaged tower, repaired by Auk and taken to Green, might even be the lander which Silk uses at the end of the book to return to the *Whorl* (and, if we wish to extrapolate even further, the most iconic tower in the entire Solar Cycle, fulfilling Severian’s old dream: “How marvelous it would be to send this old Matachin Tower hurtling among the stars! And yet there was something sinister about it, as about all things perverted from a noble purpose to a shameful one. I had grown to manhood here feeling nothing of that” (*Urth*, XXXVII 261)), for the biggest paradox of all involves explaining how the obviously disparate solar system of Blue and Green is one and the same with the ancestral home of humanity. How, then, could the species on Blue and Green have changed so rapidly, given the chiliad or so we can assume has passed from the time of Typhon to the return of the *Whorl* to what is left of Urth in the form of Green?

## The Wake of the New Sun: The Eternal Rose and the Nature of Life on Green and Blue

In discussion about the legend of the Conciliator in *The Claw of the Conciliator,* Dorcas and Severian speculate upon his nature:

>”[S]ome people say he was hardly more than a boy. Some say he was not a human being at all - not a cacogen, but the thought, tangible to us, of some vast intelligence to whom our actuality is no more real than the paper theaters of the toy sellers. The story goes that he once took a dying woman by the hand, a star by the other, and from that time forward he had the power to reconcile the universe with humanity, and humanity with the universe, ending the old breach. He had a way of vanishing, then reappearing when everyone thought he was dead - reappearing sometimes after he had been buried. He might be encountered as an animal, speaking the human tongue, and he appeared to some pious woman or other in the form of roses. ... There are darker legends, too. ... They frightened me. ... Now I don't even remember them. Doesn't that brown book you carry with you make any mention of him?" (*Claw*, XXVI 381)

Given the thorn of the Claw of the Conciliator, this mention of the being known by that name returning as roses might be easily glossed over as mere symbolic conflation. Yet the dying woman whom Severian ultimately takes by the hand is in a sense humanity and Urth, as he brings the star that will rejuvenate it. Dorcas's fears of water (after her body’s long immersion) and of the final legends of the Conciliator no doubt suggest the terrible fate which awaits the vast majority of mankind. However, this terror is alleviated by the promise that humanity or its children will someday be worthy of a glorious ascent to Yesod and the Tree of Life.

While Urth is left covered in a mighty ocean, the words Severian uses to describe it promise verdant growth:

>I know it is fashionable to speak in tones of faint disgust of the ‘unhealthy’ growth of the lawns and trees in such places, but I have never observed that there is actually anything unhealthy about it. Green things die that men may live, and men die that green things may live, even that ignorant and innocent man I killed with his own ax there long ago. All our foliage is faded, so it is said, and no doubt it is so; and when the New Sun comes, his bride, the New Urth, will give glory to him with leaves like emeralds. But in the present day, the day of the old sun and old Urth, I have never seen any other greens so deep as the great pines’ in the necropolis when the wind swells their branches. They draw their strength from the departed generations of mankind, and the masts of argosies, that are built up of many trees, are not so high as they. (*Citadel*, XXXVII 400)

In considering the nature of the being called the New Sun, these questions are eventually posed: “Who is the New Sun? A man? If a man, how can it be that every green thing is to grow darkly green again at his coming, and the granaries full?” (*Citadel*, XXXI 363) We should also remember the prophetic visions Severian entertained at the start of *The Shadow of the Torturer*:

>The first was that at some not-distant time, time itself would stop ... the colored days that had so long been drawn forth like a chain of conjuror's scarves come to an end, the sullen sun wink out at last. The second was that there existed somewhere a miraculous light - which I sometimes conceived of as a candle, sometimes as a flambeau - that engendered life in whatever objects it fell upon, so that a leaf plucked from a bush grew slender legs and waving feelers, and a rough brown brush opened black eyes and scurried up a tree. (*Shadow*, II 18)

Originally intended to be the first chapter of the book, this section was later switched with the second chapter for dramatic effect. Wolfe has a wonderful talent for packing sublime themes that resonate on a holistic level in the opening chapters of his work, and these visions reflect some of the most important ideas expressed in *The Urth of the New Sun*, and even relate to the subtexts of its sequels as well. *The Book of the Short Sun* is no different, for as the officials of New Viron beg Horn to find the only man who could possibly rule with the greater good in mind, the conversation which ensues soon emphasizes that to survive in a harsh environment, hybridization is essential. Even more interestingly, Horn stresses that their table talk of hybridization (beyond the manner in which Silk will ultimately be saved, when he is combined with the coarser but hardier personality of Horn) is also intimately related to their location.

>"You get the best maize by crossing two strains. Some crosses are better than others, as you'd expect, but the best ones will yield a lot more than either of the original two, fight off blight, and need less water. ... The crop after the first is liable to be worse than either of the strains you crossed, in fact, and it's always worse than the parent strain, the one from the crossing." (*Blue*, I 28-9)

At this point, though we have not fully explored it, it is important to point out that the most likely mechanism to explain the doubled limbs of the Vanished People and the creatures which proliferate on Green involves a symbolic actualization of this hybridization. Hybrids have double the genetic content of the parent strains, and hybridization allows for instantaneous speciation – the creation of new life in but one generation, though it is incapable of breeding with the parent strain. The people and species on Ushas could have been transformed in just a few generations, especially if the hybrids which replaced them were much better suited to the new environment (or they systematically preyed upon the species who were not hybrids). We should also keep in mind that at this conversation, Horn declares that Pas is a very great god when Sinew brings up that "[t]he god that stocked the landers put all that mixed seed in them, didn't he? No pure strains, so we can't make new mixes ourselves" (*Blue*, I 29). On a seemingly random note, Horn then says to his listeners, “The point that you're both forgetting ... I'm not sure how I can explain. We call this whorl Blue, and call our sun here the Short Sun. ... At home, we called the whorl our ancestors came from the Short Sun Whorl." The response to his statement is rife with impatience: "I don't see what any of this has to do with maize." In what is almost certainly a metatextual statement which highlights that Horn is considering that both the ancestral home of humanity and their location are known by the same name, Horn asserts, "It has everything to do with it. ... [Pas] was a god there, you see, and I think probably the greatest. Since he was, he's capable of becoming a god here, too, although he hasn't done it, or at least hasn't let us know he's done it yet. … We need new seed, Hide. More than that, we need pure strains that we can cross for ourselves" (*Blue*, I 29-31). This emphasis on the relationship between the various settings (while acknowledging that they are known by the *same* name), hybridization, and vegetable genetics points in a very complicated way to an explanation for the differences between Urth and this new planetary system. Hybridization, as we said, is instant speciation, with a polyploid child generation which has twice the genetic content of its parent strain. Returning to the obvious level of meaning, Horn goes on to say that they need new seed, and pure strains that they can cross. This hybridization is also, in symbolic language, the same hope for the future once expressed in Dr. Talos's play, which we will return to below after a (not-so) quick glance at the vegetation on Blue and Green.

At one point quite early in the series, Horn considers all of the vegetation that he sees, noting:

>[I]t seemed irrational that so vast a quantity of vegetable matter should go to waste. Pas, who built the Whorl, would have arranged things better, I felt, little knowing that I would soon encounter one of the gods of this whorl of Blue that we call ours in spite of the fact that it existed whole ages before we did, and that it has been only a scant generation since we came to it. (*Blue*, V 142)

A poor understanding of the life native to Blue does not offer any certainty that it has actually disappeared, as Remora reveals: "You conceive that its former - um - population dead eh? Extinct. Everyone does, even, er, myself. Ask how I know, and I am - ah - constrained to respond that I do not" (*Blue*, I 58). Several people besides Horn claim to have direct contact with the Vanished People, but their reappearance seems to focus centrally around our narrator. While in the quote above, Horn may be referring to the Mother as the goddess of Blue he will soon encounter, the juxtaposition of speculation about the vast quantities of vegetable matter with the gods of Blue is completely pertinent. If indeed the crocodiles, elephants, and even the “Vanished People” who display the doubled limbs of Blue are hybrids, then their originals might very well be those creatures for which they are named. However, the association of plant and animal has roots far deeper in the Solar Cycle. The naming system of *The Book of the Long Sun* involves men named after animal products or animals themselves, while women are named after flowers or trees. In perhaps the only piece of biographical criticism we shall bring to bear in examining Wolfe’s legacy defining series, we should remember that a man named Wolfe was once married to a woman known as both Rose and Rosemary, and that the complex interaction of plants and animals such a hybridization would entail of course involves Genes. This integration of plant and animal rears its vaguely sinister head in the Green Man of Urth, and seems to stem from even more mythical sources. In his commentary on *The Book of the New Sun*, Gene Wolfe explains his motivation in naming the scholar of the frozen Ragnarök future, Ash, after the first man in Norse myth:

>Thinking it a good omen to give the last man the name of the first, I have called him Ash, translating the Teutonic *Ask*. Ask's wife was Embla (Vine). Odin, Hoenir, and Lodur are said to have created this couple from a dead tree and its equally dead parasite, so their very existence indicates the hope of rebirth. (*Otter*, 47)

When we look carefully at the nature of the life on Blue and Green, there is quite a bit of evidence to support the idea that it is based primarily around the trees and parasitic vines which proliferate on those planets. The agency of the trees is always highly anthropomorphized. Hoof’s look through the narrator’s ring directly links the presence of the Vanished Person there with a tree described in much the same terms as the one on Maytera Marble’s lonely island at the very start of the story. As they approach Pajarocu, Horn learns that "The trees are bigger up the river. Bigger and older and not so sleepy" (*Blue*, XII 303). Besides being described as sleepy and as cannibals, the trees on Green also seem to exhibit sympathy at certain points in time. While it is the Vanished People who are strongly associated with the trees, probably their Vanished Gods, the inhumi seem to be different in nature.

An examination of the first inhumi in *The Book of the Short Sun* to be introduced as a major character might be worthwhile. Krait’s taunting of the trapped Horn at the pit (where vines at the entrance linger beyond our hero’s reach) soon turns into genuine support for Horn, and in the end Krait and Horn become staunch allies, while Sinew strongly desires to remain behind on Green.

When their journey takes its toll, Horn offers his blood to Krait as the inhumu lies dying in the jungle. Krait says, “We feed to share your lives, to feel as you feel.” Horn notes, “I saw the serpent face, but I sensed the human face behind it” (*Green*, V 82). This recognition of Krait’s humanity will be repeated with other inhumi as the narrator comes to make his travels through dream, but there are two vital components to Krait’s death. The first involves his entrusting the secret of the inhumi to Horn. The second actually relates to the setting around them as Krait breathes his last:

>At the moment of death, it seemed to me that the mighty trees bent over Krait as I did – that he was in some sense their son as well as in some sense mine. I was conscious of their trailing lianas as female presences, wicked women in green gowns with gray and purple moths upon their brown shoulders and orchids flaming in their hair. Looking up in wonder, I saw only vines and flowers, and heard only the mournful voices of the brilliantly colored birds that glide from tree to tree; but the moment I looked down at Krait again the green-gowned women and the brutal giants who supported them returned, mourners sharing my sorrow. (*Green*, V 82)

Expecting that this train of thought will seem absurd, he continues:

>If you ever read this, Sinew, you will not believe it, I know. You have nothing but contempt for impressions at odds with what you consider simple truth. But my truth is not yours any more than your mother's is. … It may be that as Krait lay dying the Outsider permitted me to share Krait's thoughts to some degree, and to see Green's jungles as Krait himself did. To see it as our blood allowed him to see it. … [W]hat architect could give us columns to stand as those trees do in their millions of millions, individual and despotic, ancient and majestic?” (*Green*, V 82-3)

The language in which the narrator acknowledges that Krait is somehow the child of those trees as well as his own reminds us of the tree which the inhumi Quetzal had planted on the *Whorl*: “Their parent tree, nourished by his own efforts, was of more than sufficient size now, and a fount of joy to him: a sheltering presence, a memorial of home, the highroad to freedom. ... Even in this downpour the tree was safer, though he could fly” (*Caldé*, I 23). It seems that these trees of Blue and Green might even have been brought aboard the *Whorl* at one time or another, and thinking of it as a “parent” is highly suggestive. Yet this is not the only time Quetzal thinks of a tree, for though one would assume he is a “newcomer” to the *Whorl*, he has a more thorough understanding of Judeo-Christian myth than anyone else on the generational ark, as displayed in his metaphorical retelling of the story of Eden, related during *The Book of the Long Sun*. The basic theme of our exploration of *The Urth of the New Sun* involves the idea that the series is actually a strange, metaphorical, and highly ambiguous return to the garden. In *The Urth of the New Sun*, the fragment of Tzadkiel left behind at the Brook Madregot acts as the fiery-bladed Cherubim guarding Eden, and humanity might ascend the Sephirot of the Tree of Life to Yesod, eventually creating the Hieros, who definitely are able to migrate to Yesod. Quetzal’s story could almost be a literal rendition of this ascension: "A god called Ah Lah barred Wo-man and her husband from the garden. ... No one ever asked why the cobra wanted Wo-man to eat his fruit. ... In order that she would climb his tree ... . The man likewise. Their story's not over because they haven't climbed down" (*Caldé*, I 19). Indeed, at the very start of *The Book of the New Sun*, Severian’s vision involves a leaf sprouting feelers and, in a similar sprint to arboreal heights, a brush runs up a tree. Given an actual re-enactment of what seems to be the Eucharist amidst the forest in the middle of *The Book of the Short Sun*, we are even able to posit a rather terrible mechanism for the manner in which man and tree might become intimately related (a method which Severian actually uses to become Autarch in his own slightly diabolical Eucharist). Before doing so, we should present at least some evidence that the Vanished Gods are benevolent.

Our narrator will describe the death of Krait again, but, even then, the trees and vines lean in to overhear and weep.

>The young man lay on the ground, upon the naked black soil of Green, for little can grow between the monstrous trees. The man who had been leader lay beside him, and it seemed to him that the trees and vines leaned toward them to overhear their talk, and wept. I will not tell you how tall those trees are, or their thickness through the trunk; you would not credit anything I said. But I will say this. The trees you have seen are bushes, and the roots of many of the great trees on Green could heave the soil of this big farm from one end to the other and from one side to the other, making hills and valleys of its flat land. There are animals that burrow in the bark of those trees that are larger than we.” (*Green*, VIII 124)

In addition to these scenes of sympathy, the trees are also described as cannibals. The hugest trees of all seem to be hidden under Blue’s waters, with their tops forming at least some of the island chains on the planet. Even at the start of his journey, Horn suggests that he and Seawrack have company, though of course readers are led to believe that it is Babbie who represents the third presence in this scene: “The weed in the water became thicker and thicker as the day wore on; but there was no driftwood. Once, when Seawrack and I were on the riverbank, I felt that there were three of us" (*Blue*, V 137). When Babbie returns, he is “still swimming strongly but not making anything like the progress he had earlier because he was pushing a small tree ahead of him, roots and all. ... [Horn says,] ‘For a moment there I thought I saw somebody ... A face, very pale, down under the water. It was probably a fish, really, or just a piece of waterlogged wood’” (*Blue*, V 139). (At this mysterious point, the Mother’s song begins, and while the Vanished People are reluctant to talk about their gods with Horn, they do admit that at one point they venerated her as one.)

The relationship between humans and the Vanished People is given a slightly sinister overtone when the narrator recounts another person who has seen them on Blue:

>I am going to use [my limited time] to write about something that happened today instead. In a way it bears upon everything that I had intended to write, and I will get to that soon enough.

>A man came to court this morning to ask protection from the Vanished People. There was a good deal of laughter ... This man, whose name is Barsat, admitted that he had no evidence beyond the testimony of his wife, whom he offered to bring to court tomorrow; but he swore that he had seen the Vanished People on three occasions and felt sure they were by no means friendly.

>I asked what he had done to offend them. ...  He said he was going into the jungle to cut firewood when he saw several standing or sitting in thickets and regarding him in a less than friendly way, and turned back. I asked how many there were. He said he could not be sure, at which there was more laughter. ... Any number of Neighbors greater than two is difficult to count in my experience. (*Blue*, IX 212-213)

Most assuredly, Barsat’s experience is quite valid, for any threat to the trees seems to be a threat to the Vanished People as well. When Horn agrees that they can return to Blue, their feelings seem to extend beyond altruism, especially if their return would require the fresh “sharing” of blood which He-pen-sheep insists Horn has undergone somehow (his time in the pit, near those “young” trees, is ambiguous at best – both Seawrack and Babbie think him dead, with Seawrack even declaring that he was “food” (*Blue*, X 231).) During his hunts on Blue, Horn kills a breakbull against the small, green trees, and he thinks, “about what that other Horn had said concerning the customs of his race, and wondered what I had let us in for. Our own differ greatly from one town to the next, as everyone knows. Those of another race (I thought) must be very peculiar indeed. As they are” (*Blue*, XI 274). Once again, the parenthetical distinctions between the races might be entirely ironic, but that does not alleviate the possibly sinister nature of the bargain Horn has made, especially if we keep in mind the equation once suggested by Severian, “Green things die that men may live, and men die that green things may live” (*Citadel*, XXXVIII 400).

In considering that the Vanished Gods, too, might not be entirely at peace, we must think of the description Horn gives us of Green in the very first volume, which involves monstrousness and war:

>[M]ighty trees clung to rocks upon which it seemed that no tree could live, or plunged deep roots into the black soil of little hidden dales. On Green one finds trees without number, monstrous cannibals ten times the height of the tallest trees I saw on the island; but they are forever at war with their own kind, and are troubled all the while by the trailing, coiling, murderous lianas that have seemed to me the living embodiment of evil ever since I first beheld them.

>There was nothing of Green here save the huge trunks, and bluffs and rocky outcrops resembling Green's distant, towering escarpments in about the same way that a housecat resembles a baletiger (*Blue*, VII 189).

Yet another interesting juxtaposition occurs when the narrator discusses what could possibly have happened to the Neighbors – and we should also note that this scene takes place on Urth:

>Tonight we talked about the Neighbors. I told him about the ruins on the island, and how I had fallen into the pit there, saying, “No wall was higher than my waist.”

>”You said there’re towers on Green that go up and up, higher than the lander. … When we were talking about the trees growing out of the walls, you said the Vanished People built better than we do.”

>“Better than we do thus far, at least.” …

>“What happened to them?”

>I stared out over the marsh. It cannot have been for more than a few seconds, but the whole Red Sun Whorl seemed to rise before me: the starving, vicious omophagist; the cemetery gate through which wisps of fog wandered like lost spirits; the stupid, hard-faced guard before it who had represented our only hope of medical treatment for Rigoglio, and justice.” (*Green*, XXII 330-1)

It seems as if, with that gaze over the marsh on Urth and the train of thought leading to the concept of justice, the audience is intended to absorb some hint of what could have befallen the Neighbors, who build better than the people on Blue do, though it is known that they have forgotten much, if not most, of their old knowledge. Even when talking about the buildings of the Vanished People, the trees are mentioned. Picturesque language might account for one, perhaps two, of these arboreally animated events, but the manner in which the trees are explicitly linked to the Vanished Gods of the Neighbors is too consistent to be mere accident, especially given the pivotal scene at the conclusion of *On Blue’s Waters* where Horn seems to retreat after saying good-bye, under cover of a tree in the forest. Afterwards, he even offers to describe one of the Vanished Gods to Brother and Sister. While we do not have the space to list all of the strange things associated with the trees on Blue and Green, the relationship between the last man of Urth, Ash, and his mythical wife (literally named after a dead tree and its parasitic vine) and the life extant on Green and Blue is also far more than coincidence. So, too, is the existence of the Green Man, who has access to the corridors of time. When Severian first rescues the Green Man, an explicit hybrid between vegetable and animal, he receives a prophecy that does not seem at first glance to be fulfilled in the Solar Cycle. Upon seeing the Green Man laugh, Severian realizes, “You’re not a human being … Not now, if you ever were” (*Claw*, III 230). The words he offers to Severian as prophecy are categorized as “the fortune of all men”: “[Y]ou shall never regain the strength that is yours now. If you breed sons, you will engender enemies against yourself” (*Claw*, III 231). Whether we accept that the inhumi are biologically related to human beings or not, the narrator comes to call Krait son and Jahlee daughter, and the inhumi definitely enjoy an inimical relationship with the humans on Green. Silk only acknowledges Jahlee as a daughter after she accomplishes something which was previously discussed as impossible: she succeeds in riding a mule (*Green*, XXV 384). (Once again, the qualifying verbiage of the narrator proves to be sufficient reason to dismiss his original claim: “The inhumi always frighten horses, I believe; perhaps they smell the blood” (*Green*, XXIV 356). Whether an intentional pattern or not, we should also remember that even mules are a hybrid animal).

Of course, returning to the story of Ask and Embla and considering Embla as a vine should prompt us to pay attention to the vine imagery throughout the text. In addition to the vines at the rim of the pit where Krait first appears, at one point, Jahlee is explicitly compared to a vine: “I went over to watch Rigoglio, and in a moment more found Jahlee clinging to me like the lianas … Long sorrel hair that proceeded from no wig draped us both like the vines of Silk’s arbor” (*Green*, XXI 315). At the start of *In Green’s Jungles*, the narrator notes that "A woodcutter cut my staff for me. I still remember his name, which was Cugino [meaning Cousin]. ... [We] walked some distance into the forest, to a huge tree embraced by a vine thicker than my wrist" (*Green*, I 16). In further description, he says, "Before I forget, I ought to say that what my very good friend Cugino called a vine was what we called a liana on Green. Green is a whorl made for trees, and Green's trees have solved every problem but that one. One might call it a whorl made by trees, which cover every part of it except the bare rock of its mountaintops and cliffs, and its poles (or whatever the regions of ice should be called. And the trees are working on them" (*Green*, I 17). In this passage, the narrator claims that the trees have solved every problem on Green save that of the parasitizing lianas – but we know of another threat on that planet that seems to depend upon an equally predatory life cycle which has not been solved – unless they are the same problem. In describing the inhumi more thoroughly and teasing out the implications of their secret (that, in the absence of intelligent prey, they will descend to animalistic intelligence – but what would happen if the inhumi were even robbed of animals to prey upon?) we should consider some events surrounding the narrator and his possessions.

The staff of the narrator, of course, is not exactly what it appears to be. In Inclito’s household in Blanko, Onorifica asks him if his stick talks: "I smiled and said that it had not done so recently” (*Green*, V 97). While that may seem like levity, Onorifica is disturbed by the face she sees upon it. We should also remember Hide’s strange dream in which the doll has a face which resembles the narrator’s staff. Onorifica begs him, "Don't touch it please, sir. ... Don't make it talk" (*Green*, V 98). Indeed, one of the mysteries in Dorp is handily solved if we can make the connection between nascent inhumi and the liana vines, for at one point the narrator wonders how me might have undergone his dream travel in the absence of an inhuma bedmate. He offers several possibilities, but we should note that the innkeeper and his wife fall ill during the narrator’s stay there (*Return*, III 65). Beroep hears “talking and tapping” (*Return*, V 102). He ascribes this motion in the night to the comatose Jahlee, whose spirit has been left behind on Green when the narrator is snapped back to reality: “Sleeping all day she is. Sleeping all night she is not. Walking she is, talking is. … My pictures from the walls breaking!” (*Return*, V 107) At one point, the narrator even shows Vadsig, who will marry into Horn’s family, his staff: “and declared that it could talk” (*Return*, IV 94). Because of the presence of a doll in Hide’s dream, it is never clear whether the staff is animated by some spiritual force (such as that represented by the combination of Mora and Fava in dreams, or Fava herself) or if it is simply following its innate nature as the simplest form of the inhumi, a parasitic vine. After an inexplicable trip to Green, he considers three possibilities. The first is Fava, though he fears that the Fava in question is only a dream of Mora’s. “The second (which I am loath to adopt though I think it the most plausible of the three) is that an inhumu was present but unknown to me” (*Return*, IX 183). In his usual roundabout fashion, he presents a third: “that I was assisted by the Neighbors, from whom the inhumi must originally have gained this power. … It seems possible that Seawrack’s ring not only identifies me as a friend, but actually attracts them - although we are all attracted to friends, with a ring or without one” (*Return*, IX 183).

Besides this association between vines and the inhumi, the inhumi also exhibit some aspects of sea creatures and reptiles. During his time in Gaon, the narrator describes them further:

>An inhuma was caught alive last night, and today I was forced to watch as she was buried alive. ...These people, like people everywhere here, seem to fear that an inhumu may live on even with its head severed. That is not the case, of course; but I cannot help wondering how the superstition originated and became so widespread. Certainly the inhumi have no bones as we understand them. Possibly their skeletons are cartilage, as those of some sea-creatures are. On Green, Geier maintained that the inhumi are akin to slugs and leeches. No one, I believe, took him seriously, yet it is certain that once dead they decay very quickly, though they are difficult to kill and can survive for weeks and even months without the blood that is their only food. (*Blue*, IV 108-9)

In addition to being identified as leech-like, they are often described as chameleons: “They can make themselves look very much like us, as you see. … They think like us as well. There is a stain of evil in them, however. Perhaps I should say that there is a streak in them that appears evil to human beings like us, an undertone of black malignancy with roots in their reptilian nature” (*Green*, IX 143). The secret of the inhumi is of course that the malignancy does not actually originate in their reptilian nature, but in their human one: “Remember – what we are, they must become” (*Green*, XXIII 354).

Given their stories of flinging themselves through the vast emptiness of space (in much the same fashion that the Hierogrammate Tzadkiel seems able to traverse the universe), the inhumi do not require constant oxygen. According to rumors, "The inhumi are native to Green. That's what everyone says" (*Blue*, VII 178). There is also evidence that, at least in the eyes of the gods of the *Whorl*, they are the same as humans: "Echidna knew the Prolucutor was present at her theophany, but did not appear to realize that he was an inhumi. (Of course, she may simply not have cared, or not seen any significant difference between them and ourselves)” (*Blue*, VII 184).

Even as we balance this suggestion of their humanity against their parasitic nature, there is one constant that is difficult to argue against: when they participate in the dream travel of the narrator, their souls are definitely human. One of Jahlee’s most touching exclamations occurs when the narrator accuses her of not caring about her race, followed by her exclamation of humanity for all inhumi, as quoted above. “*You* are my race. You know that, why won’t you admit it?” (*Green*, XXV 376). The inhumi massing around Gaon were reluctant to kill the Rajan as he fled Gaon with Evensong (who was, of course, planted by the Man of Han), which speaks of their capacity for compassion as well: though they taunted him with threats of death, none of the inhumi truly wanted to kill him. “We kept hanging back, each of us hoping somebody else would do it” (*Green*, XXV 377). During the dream travel, their human nature is stressed many times: “She is a human being here, exactly as we are, and I believe for the same reason” (*Green*, XXI 319). This statement of their human soul is reiterated for Fava, Jahlee, and even Juganu. As the narrator says, “We went to the Red Sun Whorl, and suddenly everything [Jahlee] had pretended so long had become the truth … Try to put yourself in her place” (*Green*, XXII 329). In what could very well be the most profoundly dualistic statement in the text, Jahlee maintains that their spiritual semblance is reality: “That’s wrong, what the Rajan and Cuoio have been saying. … This is the real us. They talk like we’re really back on Blue, but that’s just the thing you bury. We’re here” (*Green*, XXIV 369).

Krait, too, emphasizes that his true nature is separate from his corporeal state: “Krait had told me once that his life was a nightmare in which he was trapped in the body of a blood-drinking reptile” (*Green*, XI 171). Yet one of the most profound differences involves the manner in which Krait beheld the night sky, as if he cannot perceive the light of the New Sun, instead seeing only the old, dark sky of Urth: "The sky I see is always black ... It's always black ... and the stars are there all the time” (*Blue*, IX 220). All of the inhumi yearn for a transcendent transformation into what they perceive to be genuine humanity.

It is clear that for the inhumi, their parasitic life-cycle is a kind of trap that they would do almost anything to escape. In the final chapter from the point of view of our protagonist, he has finally returned to New Viron, and brought Jahlee with him as his daughter. When she attacks Nettle, he kicks her to death in what is probably the most brutal action ever performed by Silk. Nettle accuses him: “’You brought an inhuma here? You couldn’t have!’” Of course, this risk was motivated by the sacrifice Krait made for Horn: “‘I thought she would do no harm.’ It was hard to meet your eyes, [Nettle,] but I met them. … I could not explain, although I have tried to in another book, saying in cold, black words how much [Krait and I] hated each other, and how much we meant to each other” (*Return*, XV 315-6). Even wounded as she is, Jahlee does not scruple to discuss what the inhumi are, involving Nettle in the truth: “Without you, we are only animals. Animals that fly, and drink blood by night” (*Return*, XV 316). Though Jahlee dies in Nettle’s arms, admitting that she cared for her child Krait just as a human would, jealousy motivated her actions. Dying, she throws “Horn’s” infidelity in Nettle’s face: “He had so many, Rani, in Gaon. I couldn’t kill them all. Lean closer. … Without blood, our children have no minds” (*Return*, XV 316). That jealousy, which wrenches apart families and drives them to despise each other, is oddly centered around Jahlee’s presence in Horn’s home. Horn’s family life faced a slow and lingering death when a similar jealousy of his son, Sinew, whose vulnerability was exposed by Jahlee’s attack so long ago, focused the maternal fears of Nettle, channeling her attention and concern towards their son and away from her resentful husband.

One of the most understated moments of the text occurs in the second volume when Horn somehow seems to influence the birth of Fava during her dinner tale. As he walks by the trees and water on Green, it seems that his motive might actually be to sabotage his son’s choice of a wife and family over his father by somehow using an inhumi:

>”Incanto's leader had merely wanted to frustrate the plans his son and a young woman were making in one of the human settlements. But without in the least intending to, he had made the little girl I have been talking about into a little girl from that day forward, a very good little girl, too, in her way, very fond of pretty dresses and playing nicely with other little girls.” (*Green*, IX 133)

Wolfe also uses Jahlee in creating a complex planetary metaphor, and if, over the course of its development, it seems that she resonates with Green or Urth, then her fate, stomped to death under the heel of a man we are tempted to call good, truly brings home both the final image from the Chrasmologic Writings and the fate of Urth at the coming of the New Sun. In a chapter titled “Why Are the Inhumi Like Us?” Jahlee spits in disgust at Hide’s interest in Oreb’s motivation for staying with the narrator. The Rajan speaks:

>“If I labor to teach you a little about the inhumi now, and perhaps a bit about the Vanished People – you seem very eager to learn about them – will you listen and store it up. … About the inhumi first. They love abandoned buildings. You know what happened in the farmhouse in which we slept. The threat of war drove the family out, and Jahlee moved into it almost at once, perhaps the same day. Duke Sfido and I arrived with our troops and found her occupying it. We assumed that she had a right to be there. I identified her unconsciously one night when I heard her voice without seeing her face, which was then that of a toothless old woman and very different indeed from the starved, sensual face I had seen her wear in Gaon.” (*Green*, XXIII 343)

This could almost be a metaphor for the sudden appearance of the inhumi on a decimated planet; any future inhabitants would simply assume they had “a right to be there.” When the narrator first presents this scenario, it emphasizes that though the woman has both old and young facades, she is still the same woman: “Hide, you must remember that there were an old woman and a young one living in the farmhouse in which we stayed. … The old one was presumed to be the farmer’s mother, and to own the farm. … I may have told you that both were called Jahlee. … They are the same person – the person who is walking with us – and an inhuma” (*Green*, XXI 319). Perhaps, in some twisted and bizarre way, the true reason that the inhumi are so much like humans involves their evolutionary history.

In any case, the narrator ties the fate of the Vanished People to the existence of the inhumi when Hide asks why the Vanished People seemed to perish on Blue before they died on Green - “Because of the depredations of the inhumi” (*Green*, XXIII 338). While they may have died out for just such a reason, there is also the sense that the Vanished People have moved on; their seemingly different fates on Blue and Green are another part of the difficult riddle presented in *The Book of the Short Sun*. Since we have already hinted that the hybridization mentioned in the first chapter is actually involved in the life cycle of the Vanished People, we will finally tie it to a source – in this case, the mythical retelling of Mars (whose symbol is, as we have explored in *Latro in the Mist*, the wolf) as Spring Wind, found in *The Book of the New Sun* in a chapter titled “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog.” The story begins:

>On a mountaintop beyond the shores of Urth there once lived a lovely woman named Early Summer. She was the queen of that land, but her king was a strong, unforgiving man, and because she was jealous of him he was jealous of her in turn, and killed any man he believed to be her lover.

>One day Early Summer was walking in her garden when she saw a most beautiful blossom of a kind wholly new to her. It was redder than any rose and more sweetly perfumed, but its strong stalk was thornless and smooth as ivory. She plucked it and carried it to a secluded spot, and as she reclined there contemplating it, it grew to seem to her no blossom at all but such a lover as she had longed for, powerful and yet as tender as a kiss. Certain of the juices of the plant entered her and she conceived. She told the king, however, that the child was his, and since she was well guarded, he believed her.

>It was a boy, and by his mother’s wish he was called Spring Wind … As Spring Wind grew, his mother saw with secret pleasure that he delighted most in field and flower and fruit. Every green thing thrived under his hand, and it was the pruning knife he desired to hold, and not the sword. But when he was grown a young man, war came, and he took up his spear. (*Sword*, XIX 102)

Spring Wind comes to Urth and impregnates Bird of the Wood, giving birth to twin sons, who are named Fish and Frog (cognates of Romulus and Remus, the children of Mars). While that story soon combines with the tale of Moses and even of *The Jungle Book* and the pilgrims, this hybridization of flesh and flower is intimately associated with Mars. We finally have some explanation for the rise of the Vanished People and their Vanished Gods on Blue before Green: humanity once settled beyond the shores of Urth, terraforming Red Verthandi before being changed by its environment. We should keep in mind that even in the midst of whatever future changes have occurred, regardless of where the *Whorl* may or may not have traveled, Blue is colder than even the dying Urth, and is referred to as a frozen place by the inhumi, who much prefer the warmth of Green and even that of the Red Sun Whorl. In this scenario, the Vanished People arose even before the coming of the New Sun, but since their structures on Verthandi were far more recent than the vast accretion of building material on Urth, they perished much more quickly there. They are still, however, descended from humans, and this is one of the great ironies of the texts.

This agrees with a more obvious claim made by Severian involving humanity in a different planetary setting:

>"In ancient times ... the peoples of Urth journeyed among the suns. Many came home at last, but many others stayed on that world or this. The hetrochthnous worlds must by this time have reshaped humanity to conform to their own spheres. ... The patterns of other worlds must be yet more distinct; and yet the human race would remain human still, I think." (*Urth*, X 73)

When the narrator is on trial at Dorp, the Neighbor Windcloud arrives to testify on his behalf. He claims to have known the narrator since he gave him a cup (*Return*, XI 231). This occurred when the woodsman Barsat found a house of the Vanished People, devoid of everything save "twigs and dead leaves" (naturally). Barsat said it was a happy place, and the sound of a bell in another room resulted in the Rajan of Gaon finding a chalice on the ground (*Blue*, XI 265). The cup the narrator received supposedly “cures the sick, and [after he left, the people of Gaon] keep it in the temple of their goddess.” (*Green*, X 154)

While the chalice is very important to the most essential Catholic rite at the heart of the narrative, it is not important to the trial, where Windcloud is asked, “’You he serves? … A traitor to our breed he is?’

“’No.’ There was amusement in the word, I believe” (*Return*, XI 231-2). Windcloud claims that he once, “boarded your whorl when it neared our sun. In the *Whorl*, I made the acquaintance of many of your race, and I have known others since, on both the whorls we once called ours. … [Horn and I] became better acquainted when he was living in my house, some distance from here. I have found him to be an honorable man, devoted to your kind” (*Return*, XI 232). The prosecution continues to press its point:

>”If to our kind devoted he is, to yours a foe he must be, mysire. That do you deny?”

>“I do. You spoke of your breed. You breed your own foes, who are our foes as well, those who would destroy others for gain and rob them for power.” Here Windcloud paused – I shall never forget it, and I doubt that anyone who was present will – and turned his shadowed face, very slowly, toward Hamer. (*Return*, XI 232)

Here, Windcloud is insinuating that fellow humans are the ones who are to be feared as enemies (though this would also be apt if the inhumi were also descended from humanity, in the fulfillment of the Green Man’s prophecy – but either way, it resonates very well with the words Severian once heard in Saltus). To answer the accusation that the Rajan of Gaon is a traitor to his race, the Neighbor transports those involved in the trial to Urth, which takes place largely off screen. This is enough to disrupt the government in Dorp, but unless this cryptically disproves that the narrator is a traitor by suggesting a common ancestry rooted in Urth, the move makes little sense.

From what we learn in the text, it seems that the Vanished People, too, once faced the inhumi “a thousand years ago, exactly as you are fighting yours” (*Green*, XXV 381). When the narrator asks if humanity will be driven away as the Neighbors were, they tell him, “You cannot go where we are” (*Green*, XXV 381). (Intentionally or not, this is an echo of a touching and powerful scene on the beach near the end of *The Book of the New Sun*, before Severian throws his boots into the ocean, when he tries to run after the eidolon of Triskele, and Malrubius advises him, “You cannot go where he is going, Severian” (*Citadel*, XXXI 365).) Inquiries about the Neighbor’s gods are met with equally terse answers; they certainly deny ever worshipping Pas, but beyond that, and a brief acknowledgement that the Mother was once worshipped, they refuse to answer: “‘I would ask you what god it was that you worshipped at an altar Oreb found for me in the hills between Blanko and Soldo.’

‘An unknown god,’ said the second Neighbor, but his voice smiled” (*Green*, XXV 382).

When he presses them further about their gods, they say, “[W]e will not answer, for your sake” (*Green*, XXV 383). If they truly wish for humanity to be free of the past to give them the benefit of a fresh start, then their refusal to answer makes a kind of sense, especially if they were to reveal that their gods were the ancestral deities (or the Increate) of Urth. However, they do eventually answer one of the narrator’s questions: “When I spoke with the Neighbors – I asked what they had called the whorl we call Blue, what their name for it had been. And they said, ‘Ours’” (*Return*, III 48). (Or - did the narrator mishear “Mars?”)

Even if there is some relationship between humanity and the Vanished People, this only partially answers a lingering question concerning Patera Quetzal’s presence on the *Whorl*: “For years I’ve wondered how he reached the Long Sun Whorl. We were told that no landers had left before we got to Mainframe” (*Green*, XXIV 370). Not only did Quetzal have time to firmly establish himself on the *Whorl* and rise to prominence, he seemed to have more knowledge of Urthly traditions than anyone else on the vessel. If, as Juganu asserts when he visits Urth, the inhumi are already present (“We were there! They brought us! We’re everywhere!” (*Return*, XIX 384-5)) then, assuming that the *Whorl* left and then returned immediately after the cataclysm of the New Sun, the Neighbors might very well have been able to plant him in the *Whorl* as Windcloud suggests, before they, too, moved on. In any case, Jahlee asserts that the *Whorl* is “too far” for inhumi to jump and soar to from Green, as they do towards Blue at conjunction (*Green*, XXIV 370). That distance in space does not eliminate the fact that they seem to have little need for air (*Blue*, VII 181). We shall discuss the inhumi as potentially “shaped” beings soon.

We are of course asserting that the Plan of Pas involved a huge circular interplanetary trip (Silk *does* continually make those bizarre circles on his cheeks, after all). The narrator considers, with his poor understanding of that Plan (which was certainly to reclaim dominance after the Urth’s sun was reborn) that perhaps Pas was mistaken in selecting Green as the *Whorl’s* destination:

>When we were on the lander, I thought as we all did that Pas had made a terrible mistake, that Green was a sort of death trap filled with inhumi … It isn’t. There are inhumi there, of course, and in large numbers. But not in overwhelming numbers. They prey upon the colonists – or try to - exactly as they prey upon us here. …

>And they are killed in the attempt, not every time but quite often. Sinew and the colonists can kill them, you see, and frequently do. They lose nothing by it. The inhumi can kill them, too. I cleared a large sewer on Green once, Hide. It was choked with human bodies, several thousand I would say. …

>But, Hide, each of those bodies represented a slave or a potential slave, an inhuman who had bled to death instead of working and fighting for his masters. Sinew’s victories leave him stronger, but the inhumi’s leave them weaker.” (*Green*, XXV 380)

Of course, Jahlee’s rejoinder reminds them that humans are very far from united: “We’re winning on both whorls already … Because you fight among yourselves far more than you fight us. … You sell your own kind to us for weapons and treasure … and the more numerous you are, the crueler and more violent you are. Your cruelty and violence strengthen us” (*Green*, XXV 380-1). This should remind us that the inhumi are a mirror held up so that humanity can see itself, first put in place by the Vanished People: “You might [say that the Vanished People came to greet us], though they were sensible enough to find out a good deal about us – and infect us with inhumi - … Before they ventured to greet even a few of us” (*Return*, XI 235).

As the narrator insists in a conversation in Dorp, that “was a small price to pay for two whorls, and it enabled the Neighbors to gauge much more accurately the differences between our race and their one … You can’t see yourself, Vadsig.”

“In the mirror I see” (*Return*, XI 235).

The truism that a person can never see themselves clearly is so obviously illustrated in every scenario of *The Book of the Short Sun* that it almost robs some of the beautiful metaphor which follows of its power:

“[O]nly love sees the unveiled truth. … No matter how wonderful your eyes are, however … they cannot look back upon themselves. You see yourself, when you see yourself at all, in silvered glass. I used to know a very clever person who inspected his appearance in the side of a silver teapot every morning” (*Return*, XI 235-6). The inhumi, cruel as they are, are humanity’s looking glass.

>“You compare your own [image] to that of other women you see in reality; but if you were wiser, you might compare their reflections to yours. That is what the Neighbors did. Knowing what their own inhumi were like, they gave us ours so they might compare the two. I wish I knew what they concluded, though I know what they did.”

>“The whorls they gave?” …

>“Yes. The inhumi had effectively ruined their entire race, Vadsig. I don’t mean that all of them were dead, but that the civilization they had built had failed them when the shock came. Many had left these whorls already, fleeing the inhumi but taking inhumi with them. …

>“I said that we could not see ourselves directly, Vadsig. We need mirrors for that. We cannot run away from ourselves, either” (*Return*, XI 236).

It seems from Silk’s concluding words that the Vanished People took the inhumi with them because they were ultimately the same. These are not the only mirrors we learn of between Briah and Yesod, however. In *The Urth of the New Sun*, we learn that Tzadkiel himself, even though he is ostensibly the judge over humanity, is in fact something more (and less): Apheta reminds Severian that Zak is merely "a reflection, an imitation of what you will be" (*Urth*, XXII 159). In conversation with Tzadkiel, a few more features are revealed:

>“I do not understand myself, Severian, or you. Yet I am as I am, your own race having made us so before the apocatastasis. Were you not told that they had shaped us in their image? … The form you have now was their first, the shape they bore when they were newly sprung from the beasts. All races change, shaped by time. … But the Hieros grasped their own shaping, and that we might follow them, ours as well.” (*Urth*, XXI 151)

In considering the cosmology of the Hieros and comparing it to the life on Green, Dr. Talos’s play is the most obvious place to start. In that play, the concept of paradise looms large: when Meschiane arrives in the Autarch's garden, she says, "I'll start a fire, and you had better begin to build us a house. It must rain often here - see how green the grass is" (*Claw*, XXIV 353). This association with precipitation followed by verdant growth is repeated in several other places in the cycle of books, including *The Book of the Short Sun*: “How green everything is after the rains!” (*Blue*, XV 370)

However, this “greenness” is not merely linked to rain – it is also explicitly symbolic of the new races (like the Green Man) which will supplant humanity as it currently stands: "To people these lands, a new race is prepared. The humankind you know will be shouldered aside even as the grass, that has prospered on the plain so long, yields to the plow and so gives way to wheat." This discussion involves the two demons of the play, one of whom insists that this “seed might be burned still," and the future races prevented from materializing (*Claw*, XXIV 362).

When Severian colorfully explains the cycles of existence elsewhere, he makes the same metaphor for the entire universe:

>Just as a flower blooms, throws down its seed, dies, and rises from its seed to bloom again, so the universe we know diffuses itself to nullity in the infinitude of space, gathers its fragments (which because of the curvature of that space meet at last where they began) and from that seed blooms again. Each such cycle of flowering and decay marks a divine year.

>As the flower that comes is like the flower from which it came, so the universe that comes repeats the one whose ruin was its origin; and this is as true of its finer features as of its grosser ones: The worlds that arise are not unlike the worlds that perished, and are peopled by similar races, though just as the flower evolves from summer to summer, all things advance by some minute step (*Citadel*, XXXIV 384).

This talk of a cycle of flowers, where the races advance by some small step, might be implied in a very strange place. We have already mentioned that Quadrifons, in addition to looking to the past and present, also represents fertility. When Juganu describes the mating rituals of the inhumi, we should keep in mind the metaphor Severian used for the universe and its cycles. Juganu notes that when a “man” wishes to breed, he must build a hut of small green branches, “Always on Green, where the waters are warm enough, with the right life in them. …There must be life of the right kind in the water, or the children will starve” (*Return*, XIX 385). (This scene also vitally reveals that the waters on Blue are significantly colder than Green, and cannot engender new inhumi life. As the narrator once commented, "If the inhumas' eggs hatched in our climate, would not our human kind become extinct? What tricks Nature plays! If they are natural creatures at all. But they surely are. Natural creatures native to Green. Why would the Neighbors create something so malign?” (*Blue*, V 126) The creation of this hut also resonates with the first concern of Meschia and Meschiane in Dr. Talos’s play, as she commands him to build them a shelter). Juganu continues:

>”He builds the hut and trims it with flowers, and he goes away for a day. When he returns there is no one, perhaps, and his flowers have wilted. He takes them far away and throws them into the water, and in the morning he gathers fresh ones, more than before, and trims the hut again. Once again he goes away.

>”At evening he returns. The flowers he picked that morning have faded, and the leaves of the green branches from which he built his hut are flaccid and yellow. He destroys it, and carries the withered branches far away to throw in the water. Next morning he begins a new hut, higher and longer and more cunningly woven than the first. Its building requires a day. Next day he trims it with flowers both inside and out. And then he goes away.” (*Return*, XIX 385)

Note that if we combine the imagery of Severian’s description of that flowery cycle with this one, we get a metaphor that also describes the divine year: the man will only attract a mate when the hut and the flowers are sufficiently beautiful and perfect, just as humanity’s ascent to Yesod requires a kind of perfection – one that relies on the flowers being drowned in the water of the flood which brings Ushas, just as these flowers are thrown “into the water.” The flowers are symbolic of the current humanity of that cycle, slightly changing at each step. This also matches a description of the relationship between the Hierogrammates and humanity:

>"The Hierarchs and their Hierodules - and the Hierogrammates too - have been trying to let us become what we were. What we can be. ... That's their justice, their whole reason for being. They bring us through the pain we brought them through. And -" ...

>Apheta said, "You in turn will make us go through what you did. ... Your race and ours are, perhaps, no more than each other's reproductive mechanisms. You are a woman, and so you say you produce your ovum so that there will someday be another woman. But your ovum would say it produces that woman so that someday there will be another ovum. ... In saving your race [the New Sun] has saved ours; as we have saved ours of the future by saving yours." (*Urth*, XXII 160)

Returning to the mating ritual described by Juganu, when the hut is finally satisfactory, “This time a woman has come … She is lying in his hut. How does he know? By a thousand signs, and none. Perhaps some small plant that he spared for the beauty of its foliage has been trodden upon. Perhaps she has taken a single blossom from his hut to wear” (*Return*, XIX 385). This flower, “trodden upon,” is described in almost the same fashion as the hyacinth flower featured in the Writings, creating the emotional climax of the books: “*Though trodden beneath the shepherd’s heel, the wild hyacinth blooms on the ground*” (*Return*, XX 408). The other possible sign the inhumu looks for, that the female has taken a blossom to wear, bears an uncanny resemblance to the woman spared from death by Severian’s chance journey over a watery grave in the very first volume of the Solar Cycle. Dorcas, with her fear of the water, had a signature tendency to adorn herself with flowers in her hair. In addition, the imagery of a trampled flower ultimately used to quicken Silk back to self-awareness has been brought up at least twice before, in describing the immortality of the spirit: “The spirit that survives even death. It grows when trod upon, like the dandelion. I have learned it, eh? So may you" (*Exodus*, XIII 603). Even earlier in Wolfe’s writing, the Hierodules once said, “We've known you half our lives now, Severian, and you're a weed that grows best when stepped upon" (*Urth*, L 356). One final and powerful metaphor involves the death of Jahlee, trodden under the shepherd’s heel. Though Silk could kill the inhuma’s body, he could not destroy her immortal and human spirit, for all its faults.

At the finale of Juganu’s ritual:

>“He knows [there is a woman in his hut]. He reshapes himself then, becoming a man both young and strong. …. She has made herself such a woman as young men dream of. … All these things, you understand, are their promises to each other. Their promises concerning the children they will have. You, Rajan, will understand what I mean by this. Your son will not, and should not. … In his hut they love as men and women love. There is a game they play. I think, Rajan, that you can guess what that game is. … He is a human man for her, and she is a human woman for him. He tells her that he came to Green on a lander, as human men do, and she tells him that she ran away from her father’s house and happened upon his beautiful hut. It is not a lie. … This lasts all night. In the morning, when the sun’s hot kisses fall on the water, they say, ‘We must wash ourselves after so much love.’ They swim together, and she releases her eggs and he his sperm, and it is over.” (*Return*, XIX 386)

The coming of the New Sun, as most imagined it, must have been to create a new paradise on Urth, but it also brought an immersive flood. If we are to view the above story as a re-enactment of some of that Solar Myth, the finale, when fecundity is achieved, is represented in reality by the flood which brings Ushas and allows humanity to participate in this divine creation of new life. After all, that rain ultimately fosters creation, as the narrator of *The Book of the Short Sun* notes in thinking about the signs in the landscape around him, “Though cattle were associated with both Echidna and Pas, now that he thought of it. Rain from Pas, grass from Echidna; it was an old saying. Rain, the intercourse of the gods” (*Return*, XVIII 375-6). Returning to Dr. Talos’s play, Nod says of the garden, "Why, this is Paradise - we are in Paradise, or at least under it" (*Claw*, XXIV 361). Of course, besides the Edenic imagery associated with the Brook Madregot thanks to Tzadkiel’s fiery presence in *The Urth of the New Sun* (perhaps indicating where the Hieros and the Vanished People have gone), the play describes a more violent destiny for Urth: "[T]he death of the old sun will destroy Urth. But from its grave will rise monsters, a new people, and the New Sun. Old Urth will flower then as a butterfly from its dry husk, and the New Urth shall be called Ushas" (*Claw*, XXIV 360).

The play also ponders what shall happen to the old lives left behind: "What befalls leaves when their year is past, and they are driven by the wind?” (*Claw*, XXIV 356) The winds and double darkness mentioned in the prophecies and dreams of *The Book of the Short Sun* might also conjoin with this philosophical question of the fate of life left behind. In addition to this flowery metaphor, we also receive more concrete descriptions of the Hieros, which suggest a kind of perfection. However, there seems to be some (very slight) ambiguity about whether they are actually descended from humans or not:

>[W]hat had been made was not a new race like Humanity's, but a race such as Humanity wished its own to be: united, compassionate, just. I was not told what happened to the Humanity of that cycle .... Perhaps it evolved beyond our recognition. But the beings Humanity had shaped into what men and women wished to be escaped, opening a passage to Yesod, the universe higher than our own, where they created worlds suited to what they had become.  ... Perhaps it was we who shaped them - or our sons - or our fathers. (*Citadel*, XXXIV 385)

As the Contessa says in Dr. Talos’s play when she sees a man who is probably the Conciliator, "No, on this strange night, when we, who are the winter-killed stalks of man's old sprouting, find ourselves so mixed with next year's seed, I fear that he is something more we do not know" (*Claw*, XXIV 364). When we pick up *The Book of the Short Sun*, we might be holding the tale of how those winter-killed stalks are indeed mixing with new seed. Yet besides the inception of the Hieros, there are other strange creatures described in the Solar Cycle. As bizarre as they are, even the Hierodules are given a kind of evolutionary back story: "I know your race was formed by the Hierogrammates to resemble those who once formed them. Now I see, or think I see, that you were once inhabitants of lakes and pools, kelpies such as our country folk talk of." Barbatus responds, "On our home, as on yours, ... life rose from the sea. But this chamber has no more received its impression from that dim beginning than your own have received theirs from the trees where your forebears capered" (*Urth*, V 35). While there is really no reason to suppose that the inhumi are anything like the Hierodules, their description as slugs and leeches, with a life cycle that involves returning to the water to release their eggs for insemination should also be considered. Perhaps it indicates a vaguely similar “created” origin as the Hierodules seem to have. (They even mention those ubiquitous trees again in conjunction with the evolution of humanity.) While the language of the creation of the Hieros is nebulous, it is almost certain that "It may be that from your ancient Urth, reborn, the Hieros will come" (*Urth*, XXII 162).

We have already mentioned that Apheta calls Tzadkiel a mere reflection of what humans can be, but there is another strange feature of the Hierogrammates that might also be found in *The Book of the Short Sun* (keeping in mind that Hierogrammates can also travel between the vastness of space as the inhumi can, though the inhumi seem more limited in their ability to do so):

>"The cells of our bodies shift, like those of certain sea creatures on your Urth, which can be pressed through a screen yet reunite. What then prevents me from shaping a miniature and constricting the connection until it parts? I am such an atomy; when we reunite, my greater self will know all I have learned. ... Yours is a race of pawns … You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns." (*Urth*, XXIV 176)

Thinking of Tzadkiel’s ability to squeeze off a smaller version of himself and comparing that power to those of “certain sea creatures” on Urth might put us in mind of one more mysterious presence on Blue – that of the Mother, who is clearly related to Scylla on Urth. The girl whom she gives to Horn in the form of the one-armed Seawrack might or might not be human. It is pretty clear that Seawrack seems to have gills and can survive underwater, and it also seems as if Babbie might be responsible for her physical condition. Yet her very nature is never fully explored. Krait, seeming to identify her as human, says, "most of you lie constantly, as Seawrack does" (*Blue*, XII 307). However, his knowledge of her might be just as incomplete as Horn’s. How does she lie? The information we have of her, besides a description of her as a fierce and feral girl in the conclusion to the last book, tells us very little:

>[Seawrack] talked about her life beneath the sea, of people she had known and liked or known and feared there (not all or even most of them actual, I believe), the freshwater springs on the seafloor at which she had drunk, the pranks she had played upon unsuspecting men in boats, and the pets she had adopted but eventually discarded, lost, or eaten. (*Blue*, XIII 326)

That final word is probably enough to make us wonder if the Mother might come to view humanity as an amusing pet, which might one day be discarded, lost, … or eaten. According to Seawrack, “in the sea being people means something different. In the sea it's talking” (*Blue*, XIII 327). Horn does wonder exactly what she is at times: “The pet? The adopted daughter? The hook studded lure of the old sea goddess? Very likely she was all three. Why would the sea call to her then? It had her” (*Blue*, XII 297).

Always, Horn is cognizant that the Mother’s position is ambiguous: "A fraction of the truth, since even Seawrack, who had been cared for by the goddess since before she could swim, cannot have known everything. …  To put it simply, did the Mother suffer a change of heart, or is she pursuing some deep plan that will culminate in our destruction? It is very important that we know this" (*Blue*, VII 186).

As in almost every situation in *The Book of the Short Sun*, metaphor might provide us one possible solution to Seawrack’s identity. There might be something deceptive about her, keeping in mind her rather ugly name and the theme which seems to be repeated in the song which runs through the series like a refrain (“*Trumpin’ outwards from the city, / no more lookin’ than was she / ‘Twas there I spied a garden pretty / A fountain an’ a apple tree. / These fair young girls live to deceive you, / Sad experience teaches me*” (*Blue*, IX 221-2)). If we remember what Tzadkiel said about the sea creatures of Urth and keep in mind how Scylla and the Mother seem to be covered in large, cowled female figures, then Horn’s first mention of encountering the goddess might be enlightening. He comes across an island which seems composed of something he recognizes: "a moist and resilient turf that was not grass, and that stretched its bright green carpet not merely to the edge of the salt sea, but beyond the edge, extending some considerable distance underneath the water" (*Blue*, V 141). He is puzzled that an island so green could be so desolate, and then says:

>I do not mean that I did not know what that bright green carpet was. I pulled up some and tasted it; and when I did, and saw it in my hand, a little, weak, torn thing and not the vast spongy expanse over which Babbie and I wandered, I knew it for the green scum I had often seen washed ashore after storms, too salty for cattle, or even goats or any other such animal.

>And yet it seemed irrational that so vast a quantity of vegetable matter should go to waste. Pas, who built the *Whorl*, would have arranged things better, I felt, little knowing that I would soon encounter one of the gods of this whorl of Blue that we call ours in spite of the fact that it existed whole ages before we did, and that it has been only a scant generation since we came to it. (*Blue*, V 142)

We have encountered this quote before, but in its context, a piece of the seawrack is torn from the larger substance and “tasted” by Horn. Wolfe is doing several things in this passage – in addition to drawing our attention to all of the vegetable matter on Blue and creating a parallel with its lost gods, he is also describing at least one mechanism that might account for Seawrack, whom Horn will meet in the very next chapter. Perhaps, just like her name sake, she is torn from the larger portion of the Mother, a “little, weak, torn thing,” and her lies involve her very nature.

In considering the motives of the Mother, we should remember the various demons in Dr. Talos’s play, who hope to frustrate the plans of reseeding:

>Second Demon: But what if the seed were burned? What then? The tall man and the slight woman you met not long ago are such seed. Once it was hoped that it might be poisoned in the field, but she who was dispatched to accomplish it has lost sight of the seed now among the dead grass and broken clods, and for a few sleights of hand has been handed over to your Inquisitor for strict examination. Yet the seed might be burned still. (*Claw*, XXIV 362)

Returning once more to the seed and corn imagery of *The Book of the Short Sun*, the protagonist receives some practical advice on how viable future lines might be maintained: “You can’t let ‘em cross. Or cross with any other kind, either. You know about that? … Cross ‘em, and you’ll get good seed. Plant it to grind and feed the stock. Don’t plant the next, though. You got to go back to these old kinds and cross again” (*Return*, II 37). Perhaps this is the very reason that the original form of humanity is still necessary.

Even with our suggestion that the Vanished Gods are the trees which give birth to the Vanished People, that the liana vines are but nascent inhumi, and that Seawrack is a part of the Mother just as the smaller representatives of the Hierogrammates can be pinched off and operate autonomously, the fate of the human race is very far from clear on Blue and Green, and we have also been indirect in talking about the mechanism by which the hybridization between trees and humans might be understood. Before turning to that, we should see what Silk foresees for the planets he sets free with his departure:

>“Yes, Green will be saved because of things we’ve done and things we’ll do. So will Blue. The Vanished People know it already, and I should have known it too when they asked my permission to revisit Blue. If the inhumi were to enslave humanity here, the Vanished People wouldn’t want to come back; and if they were to exterminate it, no such permission would be needed” (*Green*, XXV 379).

For all of his refusal to recognize reality, Silk remains optimistic that true salvation will come to Blue and Green.

## The Carpenter God, The Eucharist, and the Hyacinth

Wolfe has always built subtle patterns of meaning through textual placement: when Number Five in *The Fifth Head of Cerberus* first dreams of the aborigines, it is textually right next to his introduction to his “aunt” Jeanine, creating an intimate association between them even stronger than the meaning of her pseudonym Aubrey Veil. *The Book of the Short Sun* features the same narrative strategy at several key points, and it relies on the absolute importance of Christian imagery. At the very start of *Return to the Whorl*, the third person sections depict Horn when he awakens in Silk’s body after his “death” on Green. One of the first things he does is imagine Patera Remora giving him advice, which creates a nice complement to the final scenes of the novel, when Remora actually awakens Silk to self-realization in an equally emblematic scene. This scene, like so many of the small scenarios in this series, is highly symbolic, and this time it strays to overtly Christian imagery of sacrifice: “His fingers met the rough bark of a tree, and he discovered for the second time that they were slippery with blood” (*Return*, I 15).

The lecture concerns the dead: “Remora had explained that ghosts, for the most part, did not realize they had died … Remora walked beside him, speaking into his ear” (*Return*, I 16). As Remora assures him that the presence of dreams assures that death is not the end, the protagonist steps on something hard and round.

>He picked it up, and felt dry, dead bark drop off under the pressure of his questing fingers. A fallen branch.

>“You see?”

>No Patera, he thought. No, I do not.

>“No, um, slumber without dreams, so we may know that sleep is not the end. We who’ve given over countless, um delightful hours to prayer are prepared. …”

>Its twigs were weak and brittle, but the branch itself seemed stout enough. (*Return*, I 16).

As Remora talks of steering by the sun and the stars at sea:

>“He waved the stick before him, discovering a tree that might perhaps have been the same tree to his left and something spongy that was probably a bush to his right. […]

>The stick made it easier to walk, and he told himself that he was walking toward the Aureate Path, toward the spiritual reality of which the mere material Long Sun was a sort of bright shadow. He would go to Mainframe (although he had already been there) and meet gods. […]

>“Pas, eh? Solar god, er, sun god. Go toward the light, child, hey? Steer by the sun.”

>What about the stars, Patera? Was Pas the god of the stars, too? No, he could not be, because the stars burned outside Pas’s whorl. (*Return*, I 16-17)

While we have already spent far too much time speaking of trees and spongy bushes, this entire scene could work as yet another metaphor for an ascent even beyond that of the Aureate Path – to a higher spiritual reality. This ultimate truth is finally made explicit when, whether he knows it or not, the protagonist ponders:

>There was no god’s hand in his own, nothing but the stick that he had picked up a moment before. Was there a stick god? A god of wood and tree? A god or goddess for carpenters and cabinetmakers? If there was any, he could not think of it (*Return*, I 18).

We can imagine a carpenter associated with wood, crucified on the same material to bring a reconciliation with the divine in expiation of humanity’s inherent sinfulness. This emergence of Christ almost a priori into the world of *The Book of the Short Sun* hints that this merging of man and tree is not a spiritually bankrupt evolution. While Urth and humanity are dead, their time past even if they do not realize it (like the ghosts in Remora’s analogy), it is not truly the end. Even though Horn does seem to die in the pit, another Horn is created, the Neighbor who possibly calls the man named Horn back to life.

We must now turn to the central Catholic and mythical mysteries in *The Book of the Short Sun* - the Eucharist. In Catholic Mass, the offering of bread and wine in remembrance of the sacrifice of Christ explicitly entails transubstantiation: the bread and wine become body and blood, but Olivine uses a suggestively different word in her description of this mystery – meat and blood. This transformation of the fruit of the vine into blood transmits salvation through a sharing in that mystical body – by eating and drinking it. We should keep that in mind at all times, given the prominent place of cannibalism in the image of the blind man during the purging of the sewers on Green, in the narrative of *The Book of the New Sun*, and in the descriptions of the “cannibal” trees on Green.

Our final image of Silk before the afterward is one of powerful acknowledgement, when Remora consults the Writings one final time, and advises him that there are some things he should not see. This creates the emotionally tense affirmation of all of his pain, sorrow, and denial:

>*Though trodden beneath the shepherd’s heel, / the wild hyacinth blooms on the ground*.

Reminded that though Hyacinth is dead, her spirit remains, at last the pain forces Silk to recognize who he is and drop the pretense of Horn, accepting at last that some sacrifices are necessary. However, the myth invoked by the Writings at this point is also central to the mystery of the entire series, for it revolves around the gods Apollo and the West Wind, Zephyros, who both love the male Hyacinth. Hyacinth seems to be more attracted to the light of Apollo, and during a game of discus, in an attempt to impress the god of radiance, Hyacinth runs to catch the projectile. He is killed when the jealous wind causes the discus to strike fatally. (We should think of all the jealousy present in the life of Horn as well as remain cognizant of that wind imagery, so prevalent in the visions and metaphorical language of *The Book of the Short Sun*.) From Hyacinth’s blood spilled on the ground, Apollo causes the hyacinth flower to grow, though in Ovid’s version it is stained with his tears. In many ways, though this might describe what happened to humanity in its fatal but transformative need for a New Sun, this myth is also the opposite of the mystery of the Eucharist, though they both commemorate a great sacrifice made in an attempt to reconcile humanity with the divine. In the Eucharist, bread and wine, the product of the fruit of the vine, are transformed into body and blood. As we said, this ceremony involves eating the bread and wine, and in just such a fashion both the inhumi and the Vanished People can come into existence: drinking of the blood of creatures and humans, they can shape their offspring in the image of those consumed. The ceremony is overtly explained by Olivine in *Return to the Whorl*: “The wine is the blood … the wine is the blood Patera. The bread is the … The bread is the meat” (*Return*, XII 241). While the inhumi are merely the intelligent descendants of the liana vines clinging to the giant trees on Green, the Vanished Gods interact more mystically with their prey.

The Eucharist is enacted at least twice in the series, and though chronologically the first time is with Olivine, the first presentation occurs when the narrator describes going into the forest during the struggles with Soldo, and he feels something watching him from behind. He offers flatbread at that altar:

 >[A]nd struck by the idea of sharing the simple meal we shared with our prisoners at midday, [I] climbed down and fetched the last of my wine from my saddlebag.  … [A]ll the emptiness I had felt when I had tried to pray, had vanished so completely I could almost believe they had never been. I was happy and more, and if an old instructor had appeared and demanded to know the reason for my joy, I would only have laughed at him for needing causes and explanations in so simple a matter. I was alive, and the Outsider – who knows very well what sort of creature I am – cared about me in spite of all.

He offers up the bread, breaks it in two, and pours wine over it:

>He came and stood behind me on the hilltop.

>I have been preparing myself to describe the whole time I have been writing, and now that the moment has come I am as wordless as my horse. I knew that he was there, that if I turned, I would see them. I also knew that it was not permitted me, that it would be an act of disobedience for which I would be forgiven but whose consequences I would suffer. (*Green*, XIX 284-5)

While the singular presence he feels in this scene may or may not be understood to be the Outsider (though it could also be one of the Neighbors, such as Windcloud), the plural “them” lingering behind him is almost certainly exactly what we would expect to see in the forest: trees. An unfortunate fact of their biology probably implies that they must eat the “meat” they wish to recombine with – and thus we finally get an explanation for the pit on Blue, Horn’s seeming lifelessness within it, Seawrack’s certainty that he was both “dead” and “food,” and the presence of a Neighbor who calls himself Horn. For just as Horn meets his inhumi son in that scene, he also meets the Neighbor son born of his body. The centrality of the Eucharist involves a sacrifice of the body, and while the inhumi participate in part by drinking the blood, the hybridization offered by the Vanished Gods is more complete. Of course, it seems that the Vanished People tend to move on and ascend to Yesod quickly, so human seed must remain for future crossing. This would also explain the enormous herbs that strike such a fearful note within Horn, which seem to make up entire island chains. He may have fallen into one’s reproductive maw.

At times, Silk is aware of a place that seems to be behind and around the world in which he lives:

>[I]n the presence of the Outsider, I was conscious of another whorl. Not a remote one like Green or the Long Sun Whorl that you and I grew up in, but a whorl that is as present to us as this one, a place all around us that we cannot see into. Many would say that it is not real, but that is almost the reverse of truth. It is the things of this whorl that are unreal by the standards of that one. (*Green*, XIX 285)

## The Tale of Fish, Frog, and Leech (and What Came of It)

In attempting to prove that Blue and Green are Verthandi and Ushas, respectively, we face a paucity of evidence. Once, the narrator indicates that he is thinking about:

>“The three whorls. Two large and low, by which I mean near the Short Sun. This one near the stars. I don’t know whether Green’s bigger than Blue, or Blue’s bigger than Green; but both are much bigger than this whorl we’re in, the Long Sun whorl. … I would guess that Blue is ten or twenty times larger – that there’s more difference in size between Blue and this whorl than between the godling and ourselves.” (*Return*, VIII 163)

That is not very much to go in. We also have this imprecise estimate from the people of Blue:

>“When it’s as close as it ever comes, [Green is] thirty-five thousand leagues [from Blue]. I can’t understand how anybody can measure a distance that great, and Gagliardo admits he may be in error by a thousand leagues or so, but that’s what he said. … Green’s nowhere near its closest now … It’s more than eighty thousand leagues away.” (*Green*, XV 228)

Since even we on Earth have different distances for leagues, one estimate might maintain that the distance between the planets fluctuates between 120,000 and 300,000 miles (if we are using nautical leagues). On land, a league varies from its ancient sense of 1.4 miles to its modern one of about 3.4 miles, but we can assert that the current distance to the moon is about 239,000 miles, which would fall in with some of these estimates. While it may not convince everyone, we do have a few metaphors which might explain what has happened to the solar system after the coming of the New Sun, especially given Marble’s prophecy that the only sign we can expect comes not from the sky but from the “fish’s belly.” We should keep in mind that many of these inscrutable tales have the nature of parables.

Descriptions of Verthandi, also called Phaleg by Malrubius in the original books, can be highly hallucinatory in nature, as in one dream-like reference to Severian’s mental duel with Decuman:

>Planets whistled down long, oblique, curving tracks that only they could see. Blue Urth carried the green moon like an infant, but did not touch her. Red Verthandi became Decuman, his skin eaten away, turning in his own blood. ... Then autochthons, copper-skinned and bowlegged, feathered and jeweled, were dancing behind their shaman, dancing in the rain. The undine swam in air, vast as a cloud, blotting out the sun." (*Sword*, XXII 122)

If anything definitive can be gleaned from that, we are not prepared to do so. In a chapter entitled “Why are the Inhumi Like Us,” after it is asserted that hands are not natural to the inhumi and wariness of those who will not write should be exercised, Hide notes that the Rajan once compared the inhumi to leeches:

>“When Hoof and I were real little we used to play in the pools up above your mill. … One time we found a really pretty one, that had a lot of pretty little fish in it, and spotted frogs. Green with blue spots, I think. … Well, while we were looking at them we saw this one leech, a red one. It was pretty big. It was swimming right at one of the frogs, and me and Hoof yelled for it to look out. … Only the frog didn’t pay attention, and just about the time it opened its mouth I figured out that it thought the leech was a fish, and it was going to eat it. … The frog got it in its mouth and spit it out, and it swam around in back where the frog couldn’t get at it, and fastened onto the back of its head. When we came back there was a dead frog, only the leech was gone. What I was thinking of was they don’t look enough like fish, not really, to fool us. But that one fooled the frog, he thought it was a little fish, and it probably fooled the fish, too. Jahlee fooled me the same way until you told me. I thought there was two women in the house, an old one and the young one, but they were both her.” (*Green*, XXIII 345)

While we have already searched the sky for some sign of the calamity which befell the solar system at the end of *The Urth of the New Sun*, this watery tale might be all that we receive. One fortunate association made by Hide here relates Jahlee to the leech, and also presents a fact which we should have been aware of already: even though she appeared to be two different women, one old and one young, both of those women were actually Jahlee. Hide also asks, “Couldn’t Jahlee come back with a new face, pretending to be someone we didn’t know?” (*Green*, XXIII 344) More telling is the use of color: in this case, the red leech is probably symbolic, if it has any meaning at all, of Mars, or Red Verthandi, approaching what could either be Green Urth (or Green Lune) and “attaching” itself to orbit. In this scenario, if Lune is the green frog, it has been destroyed. Returning to the image of Jahlee, her significance as an example of two distinct objects which ultimately wind up being one object helps indicate that this metaphor might actually function in just such a fashion in helping us reconcile the solar system of Green and that of Urth, though Hide has no idea of its cosmic significance.

Later, that red leech comes up again when Hide becomes curious about why the Vanished People seem so different: “You said the Vanished People probably don’t look much like us … Only the inhumi look almost exactly like us. They do to us, I mean, just like that red leech I told about looked like a fish to the frogs” (*Green*, XXIII 350). That red leech might be able to explain, through “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog,” why the Vanished People bear so little resemblance to the humans left behind on Urth and in the Whorl. Soon, their conversation proceeds:

>“I was going to say this isn’t about the Vanished People. Only I have a feeling it is, that you’ll tie it up someday.”

>“I’ll tie it up, as you put it, right now. You said that the Vanished People were wiser and stronger than we are, which is certainly true. You also said that the inhumi become like us, not merely in appearance but in speech, thought, and action, in order to prey upon us. … Since we know that the inhumi preyed upon the Neighbors – the Vanished People, as we call them here – with great success, it seems reasonable that they could counterfeit them at least as well as they counterfeit us, and very plausibly better. Will you agree to that as well? …

>“Think of the two whorls as they were thousand[s] and thousands of years ago. The Vanished People were here on Blue, the inhumi on Green, where they preyed upon the great beasts in its jungles. They exterminated the Vanished People, Hide, or very nearly – that’s why they vanished. Why didn’t they exterminate the beasts on Green long before?” (*Green*, XXIII 352-3)

The answer we are meant to infer is that their intelligence dwindled without intelligent prey, but it seems more likely that the Vanished People were not in fact exterminated, but ascended to a higher state of being and Yesod. As far as Silk knows, however:

>”Eventually the Vanished People found some means of crossing the abyss to Green. Perhaps they built landers of their own – I believe that they must have. They went there, and the inhumi, too, became both powerful and wise, so powerful and so knowing that they hunted the Vanished People almost to extinction. The strengths of the Vanished People became their enemies’ strengths, you see. They tried in their desperation to become stronger still, to know more and more and more, and succeeded, and were doomed by that success.” (*Green*, XXIII 353)

Certainly, the Vanished People were present on Green as well, but Silk still does not understand the manner in which they evolved from the people on that planet, before their return from “the shores beyond Urth.” When Silk talks of using the inhumi to bring his family to him and consolidate power in Gaon, he repeats what he “believes” he knows of the Vanished People’s fate:

>“I rejected those possibilities and surrendered the throne the people of Gaon had given me instead, in part because I know what happened to the Neighbors, or believe I do – because I know that their towers still stretch to the damp skies of Green, when their cities here have crumbled into nameless hills. ... On Green, the Vanished People had done what I had done in Gaon, Hide. They had made the inhumi serve them; and as time passed they had become more and more dependent upon their servants, servants whom they permitted to come here to feed, and perhaps carried here to feed. I myself had allowed my own inhumi to feed upon the blood of the people of Han, you see. It was war, I told myself, and the Man of Han would surely have done the same to us; but I had set my foot upon that path, and I was determined to leave it. … [A] time came – I doubt that it was more than a few hundred years in coming – when it was no longer worthwhile for the inhumi to come here.” (*Green*, XXIII 355)

There is little reason to believe that Silk understands every aspect of the history of the Vanished People, but Jahlee’s metaphorical significance and her centrality to the lives of both Horn and Silk demand a close look. At one point the narrator will give her the name “Judastree,” with its obvious implications of treachery and death (*Green*, XXIV 364), but regardless of her fate, Jahlee accretes a kind of universal significance which is undeniable:

>I told [the old woman] we were fine, much better off than those who had fought so gallantly and lacked the comfort of her roof. She thanked me and began moving about the room, straightening small items as women will, snuffling to herself and coughing much as I do, but moving (although it did not strike me at the time) gracefully nonetheless, so that I was reminded vaguely of you, Nettle; and then more vaguely still of Evensong, Tansy, Seawrack, Hyacinth, and various others – or perhaps simply of all women – or of all the young women, at least – that I have known at various times in diverse places, and fell to thinking (as I pulled off my boots and removed my robe) that it was a pity, a great pity, that we had no daughter – although it was so often all that we could do to feed the children we had, boys but good boys all of them, at least until Sinew was older (*Green*, XVI 248).

The death of Jahlee under Silk’s boots seems to be a failure born of jealousy, when it should have represented an opportunity for a profound reconciliation within Horn’s household. Was this just another of the sacrifices required by inscrutable destiny, or was it simply a warning that humanity is not yet prepared to accept the inhumi as their children? Jahlee is both young and old, innocent and guilty, daughter and mother, and perhaps ultimately both inhumi and human.

So, too, does the narrative play with Green and Urth, making them appear as two distinct places, teasing us with some vague feeling that the Blue and Green planets in this solar system must somehow be the same as Urth and Lune, yet forever denying us closure. Even though the text makes it seem as though they are in fact disparate, Green and Urth were always the same place, one simply “younger” than the other, metaphorically reconciled with the help of Jahlee, who seems to serve as a parasite on multiple symbolic levels. The story of the fish pond and the disguised leech might be the sign from the fish’s belly that Maytera Marble’s prophecy spoke of, but that prophecy would also associate the double darkness Silk learns of during his sacrifice with Olivine to that red leech, which attaches to the green frog with blue spots like a parasite. Red Verthandi, or Mars, has been lurking in the background in *The Book of the Short Sun*, but “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog,” as we have explained, sheds some light on the life cycles evident on Blue and Green, allowing us to explain exactly how the Vanished People seemed to originate on Blue if, as the people understand it, they also built the City of the Inhumi on Green, though Silk has the order confused. Thus it is that the green frog meets its symbolic, astronomical fate – a planetary vision granted in a pond, hinting at destabilized orbits. If, indeed, the frog actually represents Lune, then its destiny is only superficially inferable: it has been destroyed in that rearrangement, for there is not enough evidence to suggest that the *Whorl*, a hollowed out asteroid, could ever have been Lune, which would then have to have left the sky at some point during Severian’s history.

During the discussion which engenders our tale of a red leech and a green frog, our narrator notes that sometimes young men are foolish in what they will choose to believe:

>“[H]e is skeptical and credulous by turns, as young men usually are, and very often skeptical of the truth and credulous of half truths and outright fabrications. … Adolescents are simply those people who haven’t as yet chosen between childhood and adulthood. For as long as anyone tries to hold on to the advantages of childhood – the freedom from responsibility, principally – while seeking to lay claim to the best parts of adulthood, such as independence, he is an adolescent.” (*Green*, XXIII 347)

This could very well be another of the metatextual comments which proliferate throughout *The Book of the Short Sun*, speaking to the ironies, both obvious and subtle, in the narrative presentation.

The color games are not limited to this treatment of the red leech, for at the very conclusion of the narrative strain found in the third person sections of *Return to the Whorl*, the protagonist attempts to travel to the sickbay holding Pig and Silk. In this scene, he is shown his destination by the physician, who points out a “green light … That’s where you’re going. That’s the sick bay. … Look behind you. See the red light?  … That’s where we came from” (*Return*, XVI 334). In some ways, this could also be a metaphor for Horn’s entire journey from Blue to Green, given his absolute resolve to reach Silk in Pig one final time, traveling from a once red planet to a green one. [In addition, Wolfe makes flooded and watery Blue a literal red herring for Urth, but one which permits no mechanism to explain how Silk might have originally wound up in Nessus during his astral travels.]

As far as physical details go, the atmosphere of each planet highly suggests that Blue is further from the light of the sun than Green, as we learn from various descriptions:

>It is very hot there and rains a great deal [on Green]. You must bear both those in mind as you hear this. The buildings of the city were not built by the inhumi themselves, for the inhumi do not like tools or use them skillfully. Its builders were the Vanished People, the same master builders who began this gracious house of yours. (*Green*, IV 60)

As we have said, the inception of the Vanished People on Mars, related to humanity, would not necessarily preclude that “Vanished People” in the most literal sense built the City of the Inhumi. If our disbelief or credulity is strained, as is that of the young man mentioned above, we should remember that the descriptions of the City of the Inhumi always show that the trees have destroyed much of its structure, concealing the shape it once had from people who have no reason to look beyond their initial perceptions:

>Think of a lovely woman, proud and wise. Picture to yourself the luminosity of her glance and the grace of her movements. … Now imagine that she has been dead for half a year, and that we are to open her casket. The City of the Inhumi was like that. ... Great lianas, vines thicker than a strong man's arm, stretched from one tower to another, some so high up that they seemed no more than cobwebs. The towers of the City of the Inhumi are ... of stories beyond counting. ... As from the cliffs, trees sprout from their sheer walls and every ledge, and the questing roots of those trees pry out huge blocks of masonry that scar the lower parts of their parent buildings as they crash into the streets. (*Green*, IV 60-1)

The color game of fish, frog, and leech is also present in another metaphor. At one point the narrator makes a point of illustrating how the inhuma’s eyes seem to take on the character of the sky itself: “Her eyes were bright blue now, as though they were holes bored through her skull and I were seeing the sky behind her; for a moment I wondered whether she could control their color, and then if they had drunk so much of that sky that they had taken on its very hue” (*Return*, III 60). While nothing comes of Jahlee’s eyes, at one point he does notice the color of Fava’s: "[Fava] leaned toward me, so intent on impressing me with her sincerity that she actually allowed her blue-green eyes to glitter in the candlelight" (*Green*, IV 73). Her dual nature as inhuma and person is quite touchingly described by Silk: “It's the interior person that survives death, Mora. Fava was an inhuma, as we both know. We both know, also, that her interior person, her spirit, was not. When you yourself die – and we all die – you will be the interior person, and there will be no other” (*Green*, XX 306). This dual nature does not prevent Wolfe from switching our expectations several times in regards to Fava and Mora. At one point, "Fava exchanged her seat with Mora in order to sit nearer the fire." (*Green*, III 57) While this does not necessarily indicate that our expectations for Blue and Green have been switched, it is also not the only time our expectations are not met regarding these two girls, who seem to switch places with a frequency that defies belief (considering how little they resemble each other physically). At one point, when Silk learns that Mora has been captured by the enemy, he is surprised when Fava is released, impersonating Inclito’s daughter.

In the second batch of stories told at Inclito’s household, Mora relates one in which the parts of the “good” and the “bad” girl are switched. Even though she seems to give the bad girl biographical details similar to Fava’s, at the end of the story, when the bad girl has to leave, an old woman along the way says to her, “I've known you all your life, Mora … and you're as mean and selfish a child as ever I saw. What's gotten into you?” (*Green*, VII 114) Mora laments that the friend from whom she has been separated was the only one she had.

Fava responds, “It was the other way 'round. You've got the parts mixed up.” However, Mora insists that her story is the truth. The main point here may be the switch itself, especially if we keep in mind Fava’s blue-green eyes. Meanwhile, the narrator notes that the grandmother “had no idea what her granddaughter had been talking about” (*Green*, VII 115). Nor, I suspect, do most (if not all) of us. This is an indictment of the people on Blue who believe themselves to be good while the inhumi and Green are seen as great evils. The true moral depravity comes from the manner in which the people on Blue behave, simply assuming that their humanity makes them superior to the inhumi. The fact that Fava spiritually “lives” on Green but dies on Blue also seems to be a kind of message, somehow, relating to the transcendent nature of that planet – unfortunately, that transcendence does not seem readily available for the people living on Blue and Green.

One other embedded story might have something to do with Silk or the fate of Urth, that of “The Washed Child.” Fava describes coming upon a mother trying to drown her son, Bricco, who “looked more like his father every day” (*Green*, II 40). Bricco (whose name means jug) has a bizarre fate, for though he is saved from that drowning by Fava and taken with her, the mother continually harasses Fava and her household, until they are finally taken to trial. On the way home, Bricco disappears, and she says he was taken by the Vanished People. Children claim that "once in a rare while they would see him still, thin and pale and looking as though he as very unhappy. But he would soon vanish like a ghost" (*Green*, II 43). While Silk seems to manifest some of these same powers, the story of a trial, a failed drowning, and a subsequent “disappearance” with the Vanished People make the story of “The Washed Child” seem more like a parable of Urth.

>“He was puzzled by [Fava's story] because the little boy in the story did not go back to his family, remember? … We were supposed to believe he was afraid that the mother who had set out to kill him in her desperation would try to kill him again. That didn't ring true … A boy too young to know his own name could have had only the vaguest notion of his mother's intention, and would have forgotten the entire incident in a day or two. Then Fava suggested that he got away from the Vanished People, who periodically recaptured him. That was ridiculous and made the real answer obvious, as ridiculous solutions frequently do.” (*Green*, V 80)

Unfortunately, Silk himself never seems to provide these “obvious” solutions which aren’t “ridiculous,” but at least one of the impressions of the tale hint that someone might be able to “become” a Vanished Person: "This Bricco sounds like one himself, like he had joined them, almost" (*Green*, IV 69). Later, he considers why Fava does not seem to believe in the Vanished People, and says, “I realized that [not believing in the Vanished People] wasn’t nearly so foolish as it looked, that the Vanished People I’d seen and spoke to here and on Blue were no more physically present than you and I in that jungle on Green” (*Green*, XIV 214). This prompts the question, “What do you suppose the inhumi were like when they were preying upon the Vanished People?” (*Green*, XIV 214) While this might be a difficulty analogy to explain, drawing a relationship between Bricco and Urth, as two partially drowned and vanished objects that seems to reappear from time to time, seems apt.

The other tale, told by Inclito’s mother, involves a fierce rivalry for her hand, in which the dead lover gets revenge on all of the others who follow him with a poisoned fang hidden in his boots.

>Gioioso had found the boots and worn them when he went hunting. The dried poison from the fang had entered his foot slowly until there was enough to stop his heart. Poor Solenno had found them too, in the back of the closet that had become his, and had worn them when he went to look at my father's muddy field.

>It is all simple and reasonable, you will say. I am older than any of you, and it seems to me that there is more to be said. Turco had avenged himself, as the strego had warned Casco he would. Have you ever seen another person who reminded you of yourself? ... We never do, you see. I have been told many times that such-and-such a woman looks exactly like me. And I have visited her and spoken to her, and come away feeling that no one could resemble me less. So it was with Turco. To my mother and me, Gioioso and Solenno seemed very like Turco. But to Turco himself they resembled Casco. Like Casco, they were rivals for my hand. And they wore boots of the same size, after all." (*Green*, III 56-7)

While these stories are beautiful in their own right, this final lesson might be related to why the inhumi resemble humanity so closely – with the implication being that all of the parties involved, human, Vanished Person, and inhumi, resemble one another far more in their enmity than one might at first suppose, seeking after the same transcendence and love, though they battle one another without ever seeing those similarities or sensing that they descend from a common stem.

These stories do not seem to offer much which could be related to astronomical events, however. There is one other switch that occurs during the trial in Dorp, when Silk convinces Hide to masquerade as Hoof at the initial plea to Judge Hamer (*Return*, VII 149). “My name’s Hoof. Hide’s my brother. We’re twins, and we changed places. We used to do it all the time when we were smaller to fool our father. He couldn’t tell us apart” (*Return*, VII 150). All of these strange switches should probably point somewhere – and nothing is sneakier than switching planets around without anyone noticing. Indeed, as we mentioned above, Blue and its color are planetary (and quite effective) red herrings.

## We Need Better People

The moral element of *The Book of the Short Sun*, with the damaged Silk at its center, is much clearer than its plot: "[Silk] hated all the evil he saw in the *Whorl*, and he must have hoped that people would be better in a new place" (*Blue*, IV 100). The “evangelism” of Horn’s book has spread news of Silk, and one of the conflicts in the story involves resolving the difference between the idealized Silk and the real one present in the first-person narration – in a sense, we are sifting through the rhetoric surrounding Silk to pick out the truth and essence of his character. As the amalgamation of Horn and Silk writes, "[Silk] has become a mythic figure. I hear rumors of altars and sacrifices. Disciples who have never seen him promulgate his teachings. If it had not been for our book Hari Mau and the rest would have chosen someone else, or no one” (*Blue*, I 40).

Despite having Silk as such a clear moral center, at times, the pessimism of Horn dominates the first volume, as when he considers the sun itself, a figure of renewal and hope in the Solar Cycle:

>This Short Sun is well named; it speaks daily of the transitory nature of all it sees, drawing for us the pattern of human life, fair at first and growing ever stronger so that we cannot help believing it will continue as it began; but losing strength from the moment it is strongest.

>What good are its ascension and domination, when all its heat cannot halt its immutable decline? Augurs here ... still prattle of an immortal spirit in every human being. No doctrine could be less convincing. Like certain seeds from the landers, it was grown beneath another sun and can scarcely cling to existence in the light of this one. I preach it like the rest, convincing no one less than myself. (*Blue*, I 47)

Of course, like so many of the thoughts in the book, our narrator is mistaken – that doctrine was grown under this very sun, and its decline has already been halted with the promise of renewal. However, the description of the sun "which crept down to the empty horizon as remorselessly as every man creeps toward his grave" is still powerfully evocative (*Blue*, I 48). His dismissal of prayer as one of empty hope also illustrates the practical difference between Silk and Horn: “Because we hope, we find success where success is not to be found" (*Blue*, II 56).

When Horn sets out of New Viron, he is motivated by material concerns for the people; as he describes how he has changed since the events of *The Book of the Long Sun*, one thing has not altered: "At thirty-five, only a little taller, thick-bodied and nearly bald, I thought [Silk] a great man still" (*Blue*, II 65). However, it is wealth and physical security and not the spiritual well-being of New Viron that motivates their request: "The question is, is New Viron going to be richer in a few years, or poorer? And I don't know. But that's all it *is*, not the rubbish about morals and so forth that the old Prolucutor goes on about. We need Silk for the same reason we need better corn, and we're asking you to bring him here to us for nothing" (*Blue*, III 71-2).

However, Silk’s influence *has* reached Horn, for their lives have been mingled inextricably long before Horn ever finds himself in Silk’s body: "If the parents are poor enough, the children starve. That would be enough for Silk, and it's enough for me" (*Blue*, III 72). The depths of the depravity in New Viron are fairly clear, and while the inhumi are castigated for using human slaves as cattle on Green, the people of New Viron are doing much the same thing – as even the decent seeming Marrow’s chained slave illustrates: “I asked him if the chain didn't get in the way when they made love, and he said no, he made her hold her hands over her head" (*Blue*, IV 100).

All of these things speak to the power of perception to both affirm and deny reality. People can see the goodness of Silk but still deny the reality or agency of the spirit. They can act against their best interests, as Wijzer notes of Marrow when he asks him quite pointedly, "Nothing you were. When this Silk comes, nothing again you will be. Why him do you want, if nothing you were?" (*Blue*, IV 111) The answer is that some needs are so obvious even a bad man will put aside his own self-interest to address them, for no one is completely selfish or selfless. Marrow believes himself to be a good man.

Even Wijzer, who gives Horn prophetic advice about meeting his father after so long and seems to cut to the obvious paradoxes in Marrow’s character, is presented as a man who can deceive himself:

>Wijzer … will have succeeded in convincing himself that [the Red Sun Whorl] was only a bad dream within a month. How many of the bad dreams I remember were not really dreams at all? Does it make any difference? We live our lives in our thoughts, or we do not live. A man imagines his wife faithful, and is happy. What difference does it make whether she is or is not, as long as he believes it? Read carefully, my sons.

>Doubtless the reality (known only to herself and the gods) is that she is faithful at times and unfaithful at others, like other women. … How do the people with whom we walk in our dreams perceive our waking? The people who speak to us there, and to whom we speak? We die to them; do our corpses remain behind until the companions of our sleep bury them weeping? (*Return*, XI 230)

While we have spent considerable time and effort in an attempt to prove the partially inscrutable background “truth” of the setting, the didactic message of the book comes through regardless. Anyone is capable of deceiving themselves about both the world around them and their own actions and thoughts. Goodness is a choice, no matter the environment, and to some degree it is everyone’s responsibility to make the world as good as it can possibly be. One of these clever parables found in *The Book of the Short Sun* involves Pas and Mainframe:

>“Do you know the story about the farmer who complained all his life about getting too much rain or too little, about the oils and the winds and so on … 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.’” (*Return*, VI 130-1)

The underlying message of the secret of the inhumi is that they will be a threat to humanity as long as *humanity* is a threat to itself. Silk says:

>I do not believe we can [employ the secret of the inhumi to ruin them]. I tell you that openly and fairly, all of you who hear me now… . It is a great secret, truly. If you will, it is a great and terrible weapon. That is how the inhumi themselves see it, and I will not call them wrong. But it is a weapon too heavy for our hands. The Neighbors, whom you name the Vanished People, knew it; but they could not wield it against the inhumi, who drank their blood in their time as they drink ours today. If they could not wield it, there is little hope that we human beings can. Or so it seems to me. (*Green*, VIII 125)

The narrator directly compares the behavior of those on Blue to parasites, "like a tick that falls off when it has drunk its fill;  ... [Greedy men] would crush the small farmers if I let them. *I will not*. ... We have the inhumi to prey on us, yet we prey upon one another" (*Blue*, X 246). Whether literally or morally, Krait’s statement rings true: “I agree, Father. We're every bit as human as you are, whatever that means" (*Blue*, XI 257). As is said at one point of the people of Blue, “now we, who complained so bitterly about the rich when we were poor, have taken up every practice and custom we hated in them” (*Green*, XV 230).

At one point, Sinew’s boat and needler are stolen by a man named Yksin, and our narrator offers a statement which once again equates the inhumi and humans:

>He was a bad man without a doubt, an opportunistic adventurer more than ready to exploit those he called friends, and to leave them in the lurch the moment it appeared to his advantage; but most of the men on the lander were as bad or worse, and more than a few were much worse. I must make that clear. Were the inhumi who controlled it monsters? Yes. But so were we” (*Blue*, XIV 346).

(Of course, in this very scene, Oreb arrives to proclaim how good home is, and to extol the virtue of Silk as well, in much fewer words than we have spent on it – for every human is capable of both sublime, self-sacrificing good and absolute depravity).

The book also stresses that the lessons we are forced to learn and despise will one day become things for which we are grateful: “I made Sinew help me in the mill as my father made me help him, and Sinew resisted and resented me in exactly the same way. The time will come, Sinew, when it will all come back to you, the gears and shafts and hammers, and the paddles churning in the big tank of slurry, and you will be very glad indeed that you knew them once” (*Blue*, XV 365).

The series, while not purely a model of moral behavior, definitely makes some suggestions in that direction, and even posits that leaders must have experience of the dangers and joys of the world, to appreciate its inexpressible immensity, to be worthy of their position:

>Why do we wage war, when this whorl is so wide? … (Marrow did not call his clerk a slave either; nor were the men who carried his apples and flour to my sloop called slaves.) Buying and selling. Selling and buying, and never looking at the trees of the forest, or the side of the mountains. If we were wise, we would give the rulers of all the towns a stick and a knife apiece, and tell them we will be happy to take them back when they have traveled around this whorl, as Oreb did. I can describe a tree or a felwolf, but not Blue. A poet might describe it perhaps. I cannot.” (*Blue*, XV 368)

More importantly for the plot and its denouement, Silk also understands that the chaos prevalent throughout Blue in the absence of the gods on the *Whorl* is driving men to seek out strong, authoritative bastions of order: “Many think a tyrant preferable to the anarchy that prevailed here earlier. … For their sake, I hope they will not learn differently in a year or two” (*Return*, XIII 260). Silk’s actions after his return to Blue are in every way designed to liberate those who are oppressed and then to remove himself from the equation, as he does in Gaon, Blanko, Dorp, and then, finally, for the entire planet as he returns to the *Whorl*.

When pressed for a reason for the failure of humanity given the fresh slate of Blue, our narrator does offer an opinion (that also, of course, reveals something about his own liana staff):

>“Why are people so mean?”

>“Because they separate themselves from the Outsider. … [the gods], too, have separated themselves from him. Nor are there really many gods, or even two. Insofar as they’re gods at all – which isn’t far, in most cases – they are him. … You have a walking stick. Suppose it could walk by itself, and that it chose to walk away from you. … [I]f the Outsider were to make a walking stick, it would be such a good walking stick it could do that. … But if it chose to walk away from him, instead of coming to him when he called to it, it would no longer be a walking stick at all, only a stick that walked.” (*Return*, XIII 271)

The advice Silk offers everyone is designed, of course, to improve them, whether that be Mora in the midst of her suffering, or even Severian, instructing him on how to write for posterity: “You must speak your best, and not show off as you might be inclined to do if you were talking with Eata” (*Return*, XIII 262).

In considering that Pas might have sent the *Whorl* to Green in error, Silk concludes that his true mistake was quite different:

>“It occurred to me that he had surely erred in permitting other gods in the *Whorl*. That had been a mistake, and in the end it nearly proved fatal to him. … But whether he erred or not, it is certain we did. We erred by accepting Echidna, Scylla, and all the rest as gods, and erred again by removing the Outsider from our prayer beads. … We took him out because we thought that he wasn’t one of Pas’s family, I dare say. We knew the names of Pas’s seven children and he wasn’t one of them. I doubt that it ever occurred to us that he might be Pas’s father, or even that Pas had one.” (*Green*, XXV 383)

Humanity has forgotten where it has been and what it believed in, and in replacing a spiritual focus with other concerns, it is distracted from the heights it can achieve. All of this, of course, can be summed up quite easily by casting the blame for the difficulty of life in New Viron exactly where it belongs - on the shoulders of those who could choose to be so much better than they are: “Dorp was like Viron – it needed a better government. New Viron needs better people” (*Return*, XIII 275).

## Sinew and Krait

The adoption of Krait and Jahlee represents a kind of reconciliation that is only partially successful, but both seem to be involved in an exploration of the “spirit.” They also involve in some way a sacrifice of the child to repair the relationship with the paternal figure. When the narrator tells Mora about his son Krait, she is confused, thinking his son’s name was Sinew. He says, “But when he died – when Krait died there in the jungle – the illusion was last to die. I think it always is. The illusion of humanity. It is a thing of the spirit, you see, and so partakes of immortality. The spirit is the breath, Mora” (*Green*, X 159). Nowhere are Horn's shortcomings clearer than in his thoughts of Sinew. His resentment of his oldest son has a very definitive motive: "[H]e was only a squalling toddler, although he had already taken [Nettle] from me to a certain extent" (*Blue*, I 42). We see the root of his domestic unhappiness begin when Jahlee attacks the sleeping child, but that encounter results in the creation of Krait, whom the narrator will eventually recognize as his own son. In many ways, that attack is yet another metaphor: human life is disrupted on Urth by the onset of the inhumi, their wayward and dangerous children, yet in the presence of love and goodness, they, too can become something more than they are. Much of this is played out in the complicated relationship between Sinew, Krait, and Horn.

At the start of the novel, Horn claims of Sinew that "although I loved him, I did not like him. Not then, although things were different on Green" (*Blue*, I 27). Even despite the fact that Sinew follows his father and risks his own life for him, the treatment he receives is often lukewarm at best: "It was always a mistake to try to treat him with any courtesy in those days, and I could have kicked myself for it. I put the telescope to my eye, wondering what Sinew was doing the second I could no longer watch him" (*Blue*, I 20).

When Sinew catches up with him, Horn says, "[M]y heart sank ... I know that if my feelings were to take me off guard here as they did there, I would call my guards and tell them to take him into the garden and cut off his head in any spot they liked, as long as it was out of sight of my window” (*Blue*, XIII 330). Yet knowing that Sinew has faced many dangers to follow his father, the resentment and hatred Horn feels for his son fades: "[F]or a moment I actually liked him" (*Blue*, XIII 332). Soon enough, Sinew gives voice to the resentment he can feel radiating from his father, who tells Sinew to take Seawrack with him while he travels on alone: "I know you didn't want me as soon as I saw you. Only I didn't think you’d give her up to get rid of me" (*Blue*, XIII 335).

Yet Horn’s reasoning is almost convincing: "Can't you get it through your head that I may never come back? That I may die? I'd like to arrange things so that neither of you dies with me ... If you found it, so can Krait and I" (*Blue*, XIII 335). Oddly, it is Seawrack who lectures him on his attitude towards others: "There are two people on this boat you don't think are people at all, Babbie and Krait. You don't think they are, but you're wrong. You're wrong about both of them" (*Blue*, XIII 337). Horn will definitely come to view Krait as his son before their time together ends, but while that may inform the potential relationship between humanity and all the inhumi, it also represents the relationship that should be possible between Horn and the son of his flesh. He rejoices when Sinew arrives in the Lander, despite the danger that it represents to his son, but something goes wrong between them on Green: Sinew chooses a family of his own.

His relationship with Krait develops quite differently; the taunting threats that identify humans as nothing but cattle mutate somehow into self-sacrificing love and respect. At one point, Horn beats Krait for flying when he was supposed to watch the ship, and they accuse each other: "I have been your friend ever since you got me out ... Have you been mine?" (*Blue*, XI 279) Horn says he would have treated his own sons the same way, and expected the same poisonous hatred from at least one of them. He saves Krait from the other humans on the lander: “They caught him and forced open his mouth. I saved him, and thought that I had lost him forever when he joined the other inhumi barricaded in the cockpit. I wish that he were here now, here in this little boat with Evensong and me” (*Blue*, XV 368). It is at that point on the lander, when they face the dangers of ostracism and hatred, that they recognize the truth: “Once the lander took off everything changed, and Krait and I discovered that we merely supposed we had been lying [about being father and son]” (*Blue*, XVI 374).

The hard attitude and the intense fluctuation between animosity and affection occasionally allows the narrator to pine for both the human son and the inhumi one born of his blood as he writes: “I wish that Krait and Sinew were here with me” (*Blue*, XII 298). His relationship with those “sons” does allow him a rare moment of genuine self-reflection: "For so many years I feared that [Sinew] would try to murder me, but in the end it was I who would have murdered him" (*Blue*, I 41). These murderous intentions also recall Scylla’s problematic relationship with her own father, and in the subtext of the series it is possible that an equally redemptive sacrifice repairs it, though it seems that both Horn’s relationship with his son and Pas’s with his daughter require a kind of mystical proxy to mend. The inhumi Krait seems to be fully inhumi and, by the narrator’s admission, fully human. His death redeems the moment when Horn’s life changed so drastically. Perhaps Scylla might also be of a double nature, with her digital remains and a body and soul that are easy to overlook.

## Mucor and Cilinia

While we have spent a lot of time trying to pin down whether Silk is a clone or a natural heir of Typhon, and might only be able to firmly suggest that he was intended to be Typhon’s vessel in either case, we have not offered much speculation on the other embryo whose artificial birth we can be absolutely certain of. Mucor’s powers of possession and spirit travel bear some superficial resemblance to the powers Silk has, but they are definitely more invasive. We don’t get a clear picture of Mucor in the flesh after her scene in *On Blue’s Waters*, but from the dream of the two horses, one of which was so terribly abused, we can posit that there is some relationship between Orpine being carted to her eternal rest and the same process undertaken for Cilinia, the original person behind Scylla. We do know that Mucor was possessing Orpine and instigated Chenille’s fatal attack. Given that the final thrust of that deadcoach ride involves putting Cilinia to rest in the mausoleum on Nessus, we actually do have an interesting parallel situation, for at the end of the book, Mucor is nowhere to be found.

When the protagonist sees her on the *Whorl*, he notes her skull-like face, and Silk remarks that he thought sailors brought her food, noting that she looks like she did the first time he met her. Her reply sounds tragic: “You’ve been gone a long time … I haven’t” (*Return*, VI 123). However, in his usual perceptive mode, our trusty narrator assures us that “[Mucor] isn’t dead – or I don’t believe she is” (*Return*, VI 119). To reassure us even further, Silk’s confidence remains astonishingly consistent throughout the book: “She isn’t dead, or at least I don’t believe she is” (*Return*, XIV 285). When the protagonist and Hound are discussing her powers, Hound says, “You say [Mucor’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” (*Return*, VI 128). Hound is once again more perceptive than our master of self-deception. Her powers really do seem like those of a goddess. Oreb does not seem to share Silk’s confidence that Mucor is alive, at one point asking, “Girl gone? … Ghost girl?” (*Green*, XVIII 280)

At the very end of the last volume, when Silk retrieves Marble, there is no sign of Mucor. “It was just after we left that I thought I saw her among the sunlit waves” (*Return*, XV 306). In a far more important observation, he ponders the significance of Maytera mournfully calling out Scylla’s name at this point, wondering why it should matter (*Return*, XV 309). This ambiguous relationship between Scylla and Mucor is driven home one more time, but, as is usual for Silk, he has slightly misunderstood his presentiment. Right after that ride with Marble, he writes:

>Strange dream last night. I was back in my cell on the Red Sun Whorl. The torturer’s apprentice was sitting on my bed. … Through the little barred window I could see the sea, quite smooth, and a hundred women standing upon the glassy water. All were robed in black. The boy behind me was saying, “And Abaia, and they live in the sea.”

>I woke, not so much frightened as confused, and went out on deck. … The sea was exactly that which I had seen in my dream, though of course there were no women on it. Did the identical women represent Maytera’s progeny, and their black robes her black gown? It seems improbable, but I can make no better guess.” (*Return*, XV 312)

Luckily, we can make a much more informed guess than our confused narrator, keeping in mind that, once upon a time, Maytera Marble was possessed by Echidna.

We should remember the dream Silk experienced of Maytera Marble and Mucor in *The Book of the Long Sun*, in which Marble seems to be a stand in for mother of the gods and the owner of a litter representing her brood. That litter has:

>six bearers ... waiting in the street, and they discussed its ownership though he felt certain that it was Maytera Marble's. The bearers were all old, one was blind, and the dripping canopy was old, faded, and torn. He was ashamed to ask the old men to carry them, so they went up the street to a large white structure without walls whose roof was of thin white slats set on edge a hand's breadth apart; in it there was so much white furniture that there was scarcely room to walk. They chose chairs and sat down to wait. When the Prelate came, he was Mucor, Blood's mad daughter. ... She spoke about a difficulty she could not resolve, blaming him for it. (*Lake*, VIII 427)

Knowing as we do that the head of the Church in Viron was Scylla, we can make a more confident assertion now: the problems that she is blaming Silk for are the problems Scylla and the other gods have with Pas. Marble, the owner of that litter, was possessed by Echidna, and the blind bearer represents Tartaros. Thus, in a very real way, Echidna is caring for her daughter on that lonely island, and the identical women on Scylla truly do represent Maytera’s progeny, but not Olivine – they represent the copy of Scylla which was once placed in the *Whorl* as an embryo and cared for by Marble on that desolate island, after she was raised in such squalor and misery by Blood, becoming the beaten horse in Silk’s vision.

The fate of the “original” Scylla in mainframe is just as sad. At one point, trapped in Oreb, she asks, “I bad?”

Hoof answers, “Well, you’re sure not good, Scylla” (*Return*, XVII 367).

Oreb asks him:

>“You good? Good Hoof? Like Silk?”

>“No. He’s a better man than I’ll ever be.”

>“Your pa? Tell lie!”

>“If he told them who he is, they’d want to make him caldé and Gyrfalcon would kill him.” (*Return*, XVII 367)

While at one level it seems that Scylla-in-Oreb is indicting Silk for lying to Gyrfalcon, she might, in recognizing Silk as Pas, be accusing Hoof of lying about his father’s goodness. Scylla does try to justify her elimination of Pas: “We slaves. Pas own.” Hoof immediately compares it to the way Sinew used to talk, and concludes, “[Pas] was your father. He fed you and gave you a place to live, and clothes.” Scylla-in-Oreb responds, “I fed! Eat sheep. Eat boy” (*Return*, XVII 368). (Even in these simple scenes, it is hard to imagine which boy is being referred to in “Eat boy.”) While Scylla definitely had a difficult relationship with her father Pas, it could be that just as Sinew is reconciled with Horn vicariously through Krait, she finds peace with her father in the form of Silk (and perhaps even through his relationship with Mucor). As we learn, “Mainframe was like the tunnels under the old whorl. There were branches and side tunnels and rooms and caves nobody knew about. So Scylla and the others that had tried to kill Pas hid in them, but not the way we would have” (*Return*, XVII 359). Silk maintains that the Scylla-in-Oreb is nothing but a shadowy fragment of the original: “The Scylla we see is no more than a sketch of the original Scylla – of the daughter of the tyrant who assumed the name Typhon, the daughter who had pledged herself in secret to one of the sea gods of the Short Sun Whorl that would in time become our Red Sun Whorl” (*Return*, XVII 360). Given Scylla’s association with the sea powers, we are also reminded once again of their intentions for humanity: “Abaia, Erebus, Scylla and the rest had taken possession of the waters, and were plotting to gain the land as well. According to what I was told on one occasion, they still are” (*Return*, XVII 360-1).

While the Pas in mainframe might be bent on killing all of his renegade family, the conversations Silk has about the situation, once again, reverberate with a kind of irony unique to this book:

>“Did she say Pas would kill her if he could?”

>Father nodded and sipped from the wine bottle; sometimes it seemed like he was just pretending to eat and drink, and this was one of them. ‘That is indeed what she said, but I am not certain it’s true and I’m not Pas” (*Return*, XVII 361).

What might be more certain, however, is that originally, Pas intended to be present with his people on whichever world they wound up inhabiting: “You said she said she didn’t think Pas would let anybody come here unless he could come, too. She must have known him for a long time” (*Return*, XVII 362).

>“Are you so certain [Scylla] was wrong? … Pas has not yet come, perhaps. Or perhaps he has, and Oreb simply failed to find the place that Pas found or created. You pointed out that she had long years in which to learn the nature of her father. … [S]he underestimated him, and badly. … I believe Pas knows that as the years pass we will come to realize how much we need him, and bring him. New Viron sent me for Silk. That was foolish, because no mere man could repair all the evil there. Silk did his best for Viron itself, but left it scarcely better than he found it. The same impulse will be applied to Pas in another generation, surely” (*Return*, XVII 362).

If, as these quotes suggest (almost perversely) that Pas and Silk represent needs and remedies very close in nature, and that Silk’s arrival necessitates the eventual arrival of Pas, this makes another case for the pre-existing nature of the artificial embryos stored on the *Whorl*. Whether this is an accurate portrayal of the relationship between Pas and Silk or not, it is Silk who at last puts Scylla to rest in the mausoleum on Urth, with Severian’s help. When he hands the tool to Severian to open Cilinia’s coffin, Hoof notes, “It seemed right then like Father was not much more than a shadow and a little gleam of light, like there was a chink in the wall there that let the sunlight in” (*Return*, XIX 391).

He notices that the light makes “Father” appear more solid, but its effect on the shade of Scylla is quite the opposite: “[T]he girl got all wispy. After that, she went. It was like she was water in a bowl, and the dirt in the lead casket was the ground, and somebody we could not see was pouring her out. Maybe the light was” (*Return*, XIX 392-3). And as in every iteration of that purifying water, promising oblivion and a respite from the travails of a terrible existence, it is accompanied with a redemptive flower:

>There was a great big rosebush growing right by the door of the stone building with about a hundred purple roses on it. I had not noticed the smell when we came in, or anyway I do not think I did. But when we went out I noticed it a lot. The night seemed to bring it out, and it was almost like it followed us. … Now just about anytime I smell anything like that I think about the girl, and the dirt that was inside the lead box.  … She might have turned out to be a pretty nice person after all. (*Return*, XX 393)

Hoof’s presence on the Red Sun Whorl does allow us to be more confident in another conclusion, however. When Hoof sees the sea creature which seem to be an ally of Cilinia, his description is slightly grotesque:

>People started coming up out of the water up ahead. I borrowed the second mate’s telescope to look at them, and they were all women. The ones closest to us were smaller, and the ones farther away were bigger, so they all seemed like they were about the same size. Some of the farthest-back ones were as tall as Father, Juganu, and me put together. A lot had on black robes and cowls, but some were naked, especially the big ones farther back. The closest ones talked and sang, and called to us. (*Return*, XVII 365)

That siren-like behavior might be enough to bolster our earlier idea that Seawrack is but a piece of the Mother pinched off, given the nature of the other figures on the gestalt, who seem strangely independent in their actions. If, as some of the language suggests, Seawrack is a part of the monstrous flesh of the Mother, and Mucor is a copy of Typhon’s young daughter, then those myths still walk the world. As Silk says when he learns of all the conflicting and bizarre stories of Blood and his “ugly” daughter Mucor circulating on the *Whorl*, “Real stories, real events, never really end. … we thought that Blood’s story and this big house’s were over and done with. … We never foresaw that Blood and his daughter and his house would live on in legend, but that is clearly what has happened” (*Return*, VI 117). The legends, too, live on in these people, at least for a time. Their strange sacrifices, and the fate of humanity, might also resonate with another lost, almost mythical story, one in which a fully human and fully divine son was sacrificed almost inexplicably to repair a breach between a heavenly Father and His wayward children.

## Dionysus: The Dark Son of Thyone, God of Wine

While it does not seem to represent the most significant aspects of the text, Dionysus, god of the vine, is featured prominently in several scenes. We might have to look no further than his association with wine to justify allusions to him: “There’s something sacred about wine … [It belongs t]o Thyone’s son” (*Return*, VI 124). Strong drink also allows the human beings who have survived on Blue to continue in their ignorance: “When we use [wine] for something else – to make us forget, which is what I meant when I said it might keep off the ghosts – or to warm us when we are chilled, we pervert it” (*Return*, VI 125). In that regard, the wine represents a shadow that does not seem to be lifted even at the conclusion of the series, for even Silk has succumbed to the temptation to forget.

As we have mentioned in our *Book of the Long Sun* essay, the god Dionysus comes up when Mint and Remora are held captive by Spider. He is named as “the dark son of Thyone” as Mint drinks some wine (*Exodus*, VIII 465). Thyone is an alternative name for Zeus’s lover Semele, the mother of Dionysus, and some of Silk's story seems to relate to that of Dionysus's birth. Jealous Hera engineered Thyone’s death by tricking her into asking Zeus to reveal his divine glory, but Zeus actually carried their son to term by sewing him into his thigh, leading to the title of “twice-born.” In *The Book of the Short Sun*, the speculation around Dionysus becomes even stranger, and probably relates to the confusion of identity between Pas and Silk.

>“The other nameless god, is that Thyone’s son? Does anybody know who his father was?”

>“Pas, supposedly. It’s said that Thyone is one of his inferior concubines, less favored than Kypris.”

>“Then what I was going to ask about is pretty silly. I was going to ask if it isn’t possible they’re really the same … That the Outsider is Thyone’s son, the wine god, too.” (*Return*, VI 133)

Unless this posits another, darker heir to Typhon, which is unlikely given the tendency of myths and objects to shrink into one thing (from the desires of the pantheon on the *Whorl* to the will of the Outsider, as just one example) then the implication here is that the son of Pas and the Outsider are the same. However, previous speculation, certainly in line with a monotheistic view of powers and principalities, suggests that the Outsider was actually Pas’s father. Combining these two ideas would seem to imply that he is his own father (or grandfather?). Thanks to cloning, this might be possible, though that chain of logic is far from sound or definitive. Nevertheless, Thyone and Hound’s rather bizarre speculation concerning her son are present in the text, causing us to think about the manner in which it might be true.

## *Hamlet’s Mill*: Myth as Astronomy

At the grand sacrifice which attracts Hari Mau’s attention towards Silk and sets him on the path back to Blue, the Writings consulted read, “A simple way would be to admit that myth is neither irresponsible fantasy, nor the object of weighty psychology, nor any other such thing. It is wholly other, and requires to be looked at with open eyes” (*Return*, XVI 324). While the protagonist offers his own explication, the original source of that quote goes a long way towards postulating an almost scientific and rigorous purpose to otherwise inexplicable myths, as a kind of embedded and coded astronomy.

In the scene which represents both Bison’s and Incus’s betrayal of Silk to keep their own authority in the whorl, designed to take the troublesome figurehead off of their hands without killing him, the third-person protagonist who is at this point predominantly Horn with flashes of Silk reads the passage above, from Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, found in *Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth*. In that book, the authors assert that human myth is a symbolic code, almost scientific in nature, describing stars and the astronomy of the ancient world.

Our narrator’s explanation is of course applicable to the work as a whole:

>“What the gods are saying, I believe, is that there are various forms of knowledge, of which myth is one, and that we must not confound them. It is always a temptation to throw aside knowledge – it makes life so much easier. It may well be that the kind we are most tempted to cast away is exactly that which the gods warn us to preserve today: I mean the knowledge that a thing is itself, and not some other thing. A man says women are all alike, and a woman that men are all alike. One who fancies himself wise says that one can know only what one sees, or that no one can know anything at all, and thus saves himself much labor of thought, at the cost of being wrong” (*Return*, XVI 325).

Here, we are warned that the easiest knowledge to lose is “the knowledge that a thing is itself,” and this is exactly the fault that Silk and the people who once lived on the *Whorl* have fallen into. This imprecation towards understanding as *more* than what one sees falls back again on the altered skies: the essence of everything has been misunderstood and lost, but we, as wise readers, though at the cost of “much labor of thought,” might be able to avoid “being wrong” by seeking knowledge beyond the visible. Outside of the text, this certainly extends to believing in a spiritual reality. While that is a far more important message than any hidden subtext could be, for it can be gleaned by almost any reader, the classification of mythological systems as defined by De Santillana and Von Dechend truly could be describing Wolfe’s thought processes in constructing *The Book of the New Sun* and its sequels. They argue that myth has been obscured by time (just as the remains of Urth and its stories have been).

>The dust of centuries had settled up on the remains of this great world-wide archaic construction when the Greeks came upon the scene. Yet something of it survived in traditional rites, in myths and fairy tales no longer understood. Taken verbally, it matured the bloody cults intended to procure fertility, based on the belief in a dark universal force of an ambivalent nature, which seems now to monopolize our interest. Yet its original themes could flash out again, preserved almost intact, in the later thought of the Pythagoreans and of Plato.

>But they are tantalizing fragments of a lost whole. They make one think of those “mist landscapes” of which Chinese painters are masters, which show here a rock, here a gable, there the tip of a tree, and leave the rest to imagination. Even when the code shall have yielded, when the techniques shall be known, we cannot expect to gauge the thought of those remote ancestors of ours, wrapped as it is in its symbols. (De Santillana 4-5)

This heavily symbolic “mist landscape” featuring the tips of trees could also serve to describe our approach to Wolfe’s cycle. De Santillana goes on to write: “The theory about ‘how the world began’ seems to involve the breaking asunder of a harmony, a kind of cosmogonic ‘original sin’ whereby the circle of the ecliptic (with the zodiac) was tilted up at an angle with respect to the equator, and the cycles of change came into being” (5).

This sense of origin might be tied into the cyclic universal pattern of the Solar Cycle, especially since much of what was hidden seems to be the rearrangement of the solar system. The feeling of immensity which Hoof experiences when he sees the vastness of Nessus dwarfed by the red sun is directly confronted in the start of *Hamlet’s Mill* as well:

>The science of astronomy reaches out on a grander and grander scale without losing its footing. Man as man cannot do this. In the depths of space he loses himself and all notion of his significance. He is unable to fit himself into the concepts of today’s astrophysics short of schizophrenia. Modern man is facing the nonconceivable. Archaic man, however, kept a firm grip on the conceivable by framing within his cosmos an order of time and an eschatology that made sense to him and reserved a fate for his soul. … It, too, dilated the mind beyond the bearable, although without destroying man’s role in the cosmos. It was a ruthless metaphysics. (5-6)

While we will not delve into the specifics of *Hamlet’s Mill*, some of the introductory comments truly do echo many of the thematic and plot choices Wolfe made in constructing his great epic:

>In hard and perilous ages, what information should a well-born man entrust to his eldest son? Lines of descent surely, but what else? The memory of an ancient nobility is the means of preserving the *arcana imperii*, the *arcana regis* and the *arcana mundi*, just as it was in ancient Rome. … Sacred texts are another great source … Originally they represented a great concentration of attention on material which had been distilled for relevancy through a long period of time and which was considered worthy of being committed to memory generation after generation. The tradition of Celtic Druidism was delivered not only in songs, but also in tree-lore which was much like a code. And in the East, out of complicated games based on astronomy, there developed a kind of shorthand which became the alphabet. As we follow the clues – stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structures – a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels.  … When we speak of measures, it is always some form of Time that provides them, starting from two basic ones, the solar year and the octave, and going down from there in many periods and intervals to actual weights and sizes. (8)

The embedded stories which we have attempted to “fit” into the grand scheme are certainly symbols of that inscrutable alphabet of “stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music and structures,” all of which might be rife for interpretation in *The Book of the Short Sun*. One final thing of interest from *Hamlet’s Mill* is a description of the intersection of rationalism and mysticism at the cusp of modern science, emphasizing a figure who saw the world as a puzzle in needing of mystical but rigorous solution. In the words of John Maynard Keynes:

>Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual world rather less than 10,000 years ago … He looked on the whole universe and all that is in it *as a riddle*, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. … By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate. (9)

While that esoteric search might certainly be possible in Wolfe’s cycle, much of its most enduring message returns to human nature:

>One goes outside full of high ideals, but one soon discovers that one has left the gods behind, even Pas. … 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. (*Return*, VI 125-6)

The true mystery in *The Book of the Short Sun* is always self-revelation, for all knowledge is ultimately self-knowledge.

## The Pajarocu: A Mysterious Cloaked Figure on Green

At the opening of *The Book of the Short Sun*, the men of Pajarocu send out a devious missive. When Wijzer talks of the legend of the Pajarocu bird, Wolfe is once again creating a parable whose meaning is difficult to discern. In that story, the Maker paints all the creatures in the world, but he leaves birds and flowers for last. The owl and snake-eater go first, and the owl claims that it hurts to be so colored. The pajarocu bird hides undetectable in his colorlessness: “Because he has never been painted and nobody him can see, it is” (*Blue*, IV 116). While we might certainly posit why flowers would be left for last to be “colored” by the creator at this point, the use of the bird imagery is far less prevalent in the Solar Cycle as a whole.

The original story of the Cu Bird is slightly different than the story we get, and some of those differences might be worth discussing. In our version, the pajarocu is invisible – no one can see it because of its lack of color. Wijzer emphasizes this invisibility: "What too big not to see is, what nobody sees it is. ... [T]oo big to look out sharp for it is, and nobody it sees" (*Blue*, IV 121). Knowing what we should look for within the text, Wijzer is also giving us some firm advice when he draws a map for Horn: "He drew an arrow upon the unknown land beside it, and began to sketch in trees beside it” (*Blue*, IV 121).

In the more standard version of the story of Cu Bird, it is dissatisfied with its plumage, and all of the other birds, at the words of the owl, donate a feather – but in exchange the Cu Bird must become the messenger of the bird council. He soon begins to neglect his duties, distracted by his own plumage. When the birds become angry over its failure to inform them of a meeting called by the eagle, their commotion wakes a god in the forest, who sends a silent bird which cannot be heard to calm the strife. When they do not heed it, the god takes away the speech from all birds, and the Cu and the owl are damned to night, where no one can see the Cu’s glorious feathers.

At one point, when Silk climbs a large tower on Green in his search for Jahlee, he fights off the inhumi. At the very top of his ascent, he finds something very mysterious. Jahlee tells him that the inhumi have been offering her reverence and food in the form of children:

>I was about to ask what became of the children whose blood she was unable to drink (although I was afraid I knew) when my attention was drawn to a new figure, tall and tightly wrapped in a colorless cloak, approaching us with stiff, bird-like strides. Seeing him, I realized that what I had taken to be a large black boulder was in fact a squat domed building without windows. (*Return*, IX 191)

The colorless cloak and the stiff bird-like gate remind us forcefully of the Pajarocu Bird, invisible and hidden. Yet what, perched above this tower, could that stiff-legged man in a colorless cloak represent? The temptation, knowing that not as much time has passed on Green as we would be led to believe, is to suggest that the New Sun is hiding in the night, invisible but not entirely forgotten, wrapped in fuligin.

## Urth and a Eucharist of Ancient Trees

While we have talked about the presence of many clues and portents in *The Book of the New Sun* and its coda that anticipate the development of an unexpected future in the seemingly hellish world of Green, there are a few interesting moments that hint, though nowhere near as strongly, that the trees of Severian’s world might have some agency as well. In the cannibalistic ceremony directed by Vodalus which serves to reunite him with Thecla, though he may be drugged, the trees also seem to participate: “’There is an oath to be sworn before the sharing,’ he said, and the trees above us nodded solemnly. ... I tried to nod with the trees ... It was as if some unquiet spirit had haunted the gathering, then suddenly vanished" (*Claw*, XI 278).

This is not the only place in the text where Severian notices the trees as something ancient and important:

>The forest had set its own dead there as well, stumps and limbs that time had turned to stone, so that I wondered as I descended, if it might not be that Urth is not, as we assume, older than her daughters the trees, and imagined them growing in the emptiness before the face of the sun, tree clinging to tree with tangled roots and interlacing twigs until at last their accumulation became our Urth, and they only the nap of her garment. (*Sword*, XIV 75)

While it might be nothing but idle speculations, it is even suggested that some comforting power like that of the Pancreator might be nestled within those trees.

>I made my way through a forest less precipitous than the one through which I had followed the brook. The dark trees seemed, if anything, older. The great ferns of the south were absent there, and in fact I never saw them north of the House Absolute ... but there were wild violets with glossy leaves and flowers the exact color of poor Thecla's eyes growing between the roots of the trees, and moss like the thickest green velvet .... I heard the barking of a dog. At the sound, the silence and wonder of the trees fell back, present still but infinitely more distant. I felt that some mysterious life, old and strange, yet kindly too, had come to the very moment of revealing itself to me, then drawn away like some immensely eminent person, a master of the musicians, perhaps, whom I had struggled for years to attract to my door but who in the act of knocking had heard the voice of another guest who was unpleasing to him and had put down his hand and turned away, never to come again. Yet how comforting it was. (*Sword*, XIV 75)

## Unanswered Questions

While we have established an identity for our narrator as Pas’s heir Silk, for Babbie as Horn, for Blue as Mars or Verthandi, for Green as Urth, and for the Vanished People as the next step towards the Hieros of *The Book of the New Sun*, grounding our setting in a time and place and finally answering who, when, where, and how, there are still some questions which remain just as inscrutable as at the start of our journey. While it seems safe to assume that Babbie and the knowledge of Horn’s impending dissolution is represented by the tusked green man-killer which hunts Silk, some other narrative elements still make little sense.

One of the objections to the idea that Horn leaves Silk at the end of *On Blue’s Waters* involves the appearance of Silk during astral travel. After Chenille acknowledges that Hide resembles the Horn she used to know, Hide also admits, that the narrator “looks more like me here than back in camp” (*Green*, XXIV 373). He seems to look sometimes more and sometimes less like Horn on various trips, but by the final one the semblance of Horn has vanished. According to our reconstruction, the narrator is already Silk by the point he undergoes his first dream travel, but there is always a small sliver of influence left behind – no spirit leaves its environment unchanged. By and large, the narrator’s appearance during those dreams is self-image – believing himself to be Horn, he influences his own appearance there. However, by the last dream trip, even this illusion of Horn fades; as we have heard, the illusion is the last thing to die: “Father looked the way he had in Capsicum’s big house, only younger. Before he had looked a lot like our real father, and Hide says that is the way he always looked on the Red Sun Whorl. Now he did not” (*Return*, XIX 388). By the time Silk arrives in New Viron and has his fatal encounter with Nettle and Jahlee, he knows the truth of himself.

There are a few more items which are worthy of note. When he speaks to Mora about men’s intentions, serving to encourage her good qualities and provide a model for her to follow, he makes a cryptic observation. Mora says, “I’d rather live like that with a man who loved me, and live in a little tent of skins, than live here by myself or with a man who didn’t. Why are you smiling like that?”

Silk’s response, like so much of *The Book of the Short Sun*, is frustratingly indirect:

>“Because after racking my brain for four long days I’ve finally realized who you and your father remind me of. I knew – I felt, at least – that I had met you both before. I won’t tell you because the names would mean nothing to you.”

>“Were they good people?”

>“Very good people.” (*Green*, X 164)

While this may be obvious to some, the connection Silk makes does not immediately jump out. Is he somehow thinking of Horn and Nettle? Of himself and Hyacinth, though her “goodness” would be largely in Silk’s mind? Of another daughter and father? Sinew remaining behind on Green to forge a life and have children rather than return to an easier life on Blue? The only hint might be in the dream of the dead coach, when Mora mysteriously becomes Hyacinth (of course, it also might *not* be the only hint.)

Another seeming *non sequitur* involves a discussion in which the fractured and limited copy of Scylla trapped within Oreb is confirmed to have been copied from a young girl. Hoof asks, “‘The Scylla you dreamed wasn’t the real goddess, was it?’ and I asked if there had ever been a real Scylla.” Once again, it seems that we cannot follow Silk’s response: “Yes,” he said. Yes, that’s the terrible part. … I feel sorry for Beroep” (*Return*, XVII 339). Beroep might be one of those who will be exploited in Dorp in the wake of its political rearrangement, or he might have been victimized by Silk’s staff, but his relationship to the “real” child Scylla (who seems to have died both long ago and recently, for if anything is not limited by the confines of time and space in Wolfe’s Solar Cycle, it is the spirit) seems nonexistent.

There are two more lines which seem to promise far more than is obvious. One of them involves the rather random assertion that “Hierax is dead” (*Return*, X 203). We have argued that the blind scavenger who perishes when Horn re-enacts the myth of Severian is actually a form of Tartaros (if not his original body), and for that reason reminds Silk so strongly of Auk, but does Hierax appear in any form during the series? Hierax is described by Lemur as callously insensitive to the pain of others, and perhaps Musk best fits this psychological profile, but Echidna’s murder of Musk and subsequent call for Auk would make absolutely no sense – and there is no hint that Musk is anything but a normal inhabitant of the *Whorl*. Auk might perish off-screen, but he still seems to be alive in the basement on Green by the time this proclamation is made.

While we have discussed Mucor and Thyone separately, they are united in one scene, when the narrator remembers standing “with his back against a white statue of Thyone. He strained to see it in the darkness, and had made it out at last and started toward it when it moved. Leaning over the balustrade, Thyone became Mucor, then faded like mist. Nodding to himself, he took out the lantern Hound had given him and lit its candle with a stick from the fire” (*Return*, VIII 173). Why would Mucor and Thyone be joined in this scene?

The last involves Severian’s claim about Oreb: “It belongs to Master Malrubius, Master” (*Return*, XIX 396). Surely we are not intended to believe that somehow Silk is also actually Malrubius, but this identification might cause us to think about the connection between the eidolons of the Hierodules and the strange light which seems to allow Silk to manifest himself spiritually in a place far removed from his body. Are the Vanished People, who have gone somewhere humans cannot follow, really so distinct from the Hieros? How does the mausoleum of Typhon’s family, in which Severian helps put Cilinia to rest, relate to the mausoleum first featured in *The Book of the New Sun*, in which Severian believes he saw his own face on one of its cenotaphs?

## What Shall We Become?

With *The Book of the Short Sun*, Wolfe has created a sophisticated parable whose didactic truth boldly shouts from the surface, but the embedded patterns and games are so deep that (as over fifteen years of consideration and discussion have revealed) it is very difficult for readers to grasp the immense patterns he has established. Even if we miss the import of Silk’s self-denial, it should be obvious when he gives his corn to Gyrfalcon that he is hoping to make a bad man better by appealing to his humanity: “Cross these … but always keep the pure strains for the years to come. New Viron will never go hungry” (*Return*, XVII 340). As he does so, he weeps, understanding the character of others even as he cannot fully articulate his own motivations.

Another of the principles at work within the text, as should be obvious by now, involves playing with the idea that some things are finite and limited in nature, illustrating a strange multiplication of physical objects which seem separate and scattered to our perceptions (the ring, the planets, the inhumi, the forces of nature) and, with effort and belief, reconciling them into one unity. At the same time, identity (and spirit) seems to be limitless. “The philosophers – I am none - tell us that it is impossible for a single object to be in two places at once. We are not indivisible wholes however” (*Return*, XVII 351). Silk is in mainframe, in his own body, in Pig, in the book that Horn and Nettle wrote, and in the hearts and minds of the people, but so too is Pas and the temptation he represents to surrender choice.

The didactic nature of the novel also plays out the mirror-like nature of the inhumi, as fiction reflects the reality of human nature without being limited by the boundaries of our individual lives – *The Book of the Short Sun* is a universal (perhaps the adjective catholic would be more appropriate) mirror held up to its readers. When our narrator assures Mora, who has undergone trauma, rape, and pain enough to make anyone question the existence of goodness and the protection of a benevolent will, he shows us another sublime truth of what it is to be a mature human being: “When a boy becomes a man, Mora, there must be a moment, a moment when the boy falls away never to be seen again. But before that moment come moments, which may be many or few, when one can glimpse the man who is to be, the man waiting behind the boy” (*Green*, X 165). The entire Solar Cycle is just such an exploration of the maturation of humanity into something more. Those glorious and numinous moments in which we are closest to the divine, to the font of love and glory of life, are merely those moments of which Silk speaks, when that which is perfect, perceived dimly and only in part, peers through the veil of eternity, revealing the glory that might one day be achieved, even if humanity, from its darkness, can never truly comprehend it. The implication for the humans left behind on Blue is that they are still children, lost in fickleness and caprice – but in many small ways, the adult form lurking somewhere in the future can still be apprehended. That adulthood, the text suggests, might involve sacrifice and pain, but it will bring justice, forgiveness, and love.

For all that mankind seems to have lost everything in our understanding of the events in the Solar Cycle, we must remember that the salvation promised to humanity need not be for the same form - that man must also be changed to truly experience a closer union with divinity, and that this metamorphosis prompts the hope that then humanity will have different eyes to see a more glorious reality – at one point Krait says that the sky is always dark and sunless, but with clearer eyes he might be able to see that the new sun has already risen in the sky. In just the same fashion, when Gunnie looks at Apheta in *The Urth of the New Sun*, she sees a monster; when Horn beholds Green, he sees hell. For both Urth and for those who go to their rest in the hope one day of encountering God and paradise, the mortal, flawed, and temporal body must certainly be excavated to reveal the immortal and hopeful soul within, never the same as it appears on the surface.

When Silk thinks of the moment of enlightenment in his conversation with Hound and Pig, he conceives of “a black cross against the sun, a sign of addition that signed that something had been added to a whorl that would never be quite the same again, that the gods’ god who had been outside for so long had come in, a whispering breeze stronger than Pas’s howling, whirling storm” (*Return*, VIII 171). This divine grace seems to leave nothing unchanged.

In looking on Green after the wake of the New Sun, we are reminded of Severian’s own assessment of our visceral response to death: “We see only the terror, which is left behind" (*Urth*, L 359). The death of the innocent and the destruction of Urth, with all its pain and suffering, is something we cannot wrap our heads around. Silk admits that as time goes on, it is very difficult to avoid allowing the worst features of the world to change us:

>The Outsider has arranged our whorl in such a way that there is far more balance than at first appears, with gain involving loss, and loss, gain. … This matter of the interior person is similar. We mourn, we weep, we tear our clothes and our hair when a child dies; but the child's interior person was far superior to ours in most cases. … The longer you live the more difficulty you will have in keeping your interior person someone you can live with. My own difficulties have been so great that I would hesitate to say that I've succeeded (*Green*, XX 306-7).

In trying to assess his own actions and its quite unanticipated aftereffects, we must remember that the people remaining on Blue have the power to change the inhumi and their worlds by being better themselves. This message was also voiced by Severian himself in *The Urth of the New Sun* on his return to Urth in Typhon’s time, when he tells the captain of the drop ship that the world can be changed quite readily if humanity is willing to enact that change: "We could make it as good as Yesod if we wanted to." For all the doubt associated with Severian’s ambiguous salvation, he believes that humanity will succeed in doing that, "when enough of us have left it and come back" (*Urth*, XXVII 193). Even with that confidence, he later expresses the great difficulty (and the mysterious freedom) of being human:

>But whether all that came to good or evil, I don't know. Until we reach the end of time, we don't know whether something's been good or bad; we can only judge the intentions of those who acted. (*Urth*, XXXIII 237)

In the case of Silk, we can feel secure in judging his actions, as Horn does:

>All this time I have tried to be Silk for them. I have thought of Silk day and night – what would he do? What would he say under these circumstances? On what principles would he make his decisions? Yet to every such questions there is just the one answer: he would do what was right and good, and in doubt he would side against his own interests. That is what I must do. What I will do. I will try to be what he tried to be. He succeeded, after all. (*Blue*, XII 309)

Even if sin and ignorance may veil the skies, Silk acts to prevent Pas from controlling humanity’s destiny, removing himself to at last set the humans on Blue free, perhaps to become a new thing, a thing of beauty incomprehensible to us as we are now. Would a paradise predicated upon our own human nature necessarily become a hell? As Silk says, “It may well be that the kind [of knowledge] we are most tempted to cast away is exactly that which the gods warn us to preserve today: I mean the knowledge that a thing is itself, and not some other thing” (*Return*, XVI 325). The only way to make the world better, *The Book of the Short Sun* argues, is to see it with clear eyes and become worthy at last by recognizing who and what we truly are, both evil and good.

## Resources

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- Homer. *The Odyssey of Homer, Vol. II*, trans. Alexader Pope. Clerkenwell: Bye and Law, 1806. Print.

- Wolfe, Gene. *In Green’s Jungles*. New York: Tor Books, 2000. Print.

- Wolfe, Gene. *On Blue’s Waters*. New York: Tor Books, 1999. Print.

- Wolfe, Gene. *Return to the Whorl*. New York: Tor Books, 2001. Print.

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