On Blue's waters by Gene Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page B

had supplied its owners with certain papers and inks, not all of which had proved completely satisfactory.
    I ought to say here that Nettle and I had discussed the possibility of printing long before I wrote the incident in which Silk stopped to pray before the Scylla-marked stone. We had discussed it, but both of us had quickly concluded that it would be far easier to create the two or three copies we then envisioned by hand than to build the equipment necessary to print them and learn the process. Having thus sensibly concluded that printing was beyond our grasp, we abandoned all thought of it.
    Now I, having seen the eagerness with which Nettle’s copies were bought, thought of printing again-but in a whole new light: I knew beyond doubt that we could sell as many as twenty or thirty in the course of a year, if only we had them.
    Furthermore, we might also print the much shorter account of our departure from Old Viron that Scleroderma had completed before death claimed her. A grandson had her manuscript, and allowed others to copy it. Surely he would allow Nettle to copy it as well, and from her copy we might print and sell a dozen at least. In addition, there was a man in Urbasecundus who was said to have produced a similar book, although I had never seen it. We had paper, and the modest skills and tools required to sew folded sheets into a book and to bind the book between thin slats of runnerwood. We needed nothing but printing to create a new and profitable use for the paper we made and sold already.
    Nor was that all. Printing tens of thousands of words would surely require hundreds of reusable letters, and perhaps a thousand or more. In the shop I had visited with my father, they had made their letters by pouring molten metal into metal molds. (This reminded me of Chenille’s description of the way in which the heads of taluses are made, and I found and reread it.) The metal, which I recalled seeing a woman heat in an iron ladle held in a charcoal fire, had appeared to be pure silver when it was poured; but my father had said that it was mostly lead.
    That in turn reminded me of a conversation a week earlier with Sinew, who delighted in discussing weapons of every kind and was prone to pontificate about them. I had urged that needlers were better suited to conditions here than slug guns, if only because the projectile fired was a simple, slender cylinder, not gready different from a short piece of wire. We owned a slug gun as well, the one with which Nettle had fired on the pirates, and although the gun itself was considerably simpler than a needier, every shot required a separate casing and a multitude of other parts that could be used only once: a dot of special chemical in a tiny copper cup, an explosive to propel the slug, the slug itself, and a disk of stiff paper, heavily waxed, with which to seal the casing-this last (I said) being the only item on the entire list that we ourselves could supply.
    Sinew had disagreed. “Some man in town gave Gadwall a couple of needles and told him to make him some iron ones. He did, too. He cut them out of a thin rod he had and rolled them between red-hot plates and polished them. He showed them to me, and the real needles. His looked like the real thing. I couldn’t tell them apart. But when you put them in a needier, they wouldn’t shoot. Gadwall said you could have dropped in that many straws and done every bit as well.”
    I started to object, but Sinew interrupted.
    “Slug guns are different. We’re already making slug guns that work. In that book you and Mother wrote, you have one of the soldiers tell somebody his slugs are made of some stuff I never heard of.”
    I agreed. “Yes, depleted uranium. That was what Silk said he said.”
    “Well, I don’t know what that is. But I know the slugs they make in town are lead. You know about the silver mine they found up in the mountains?”
    “I know everybody’s talking about one. I haven’t been there, but it