The Urth of the New Sun (22 page)

I scarcely heard the last word. Something so astounding was taking place that all my attention was seized by it. The uppermost knuckle of her index finger was shaping itself into a face, and it was the face of Tzadkiel. The nail divided and redivided, then the whole of the first and second joints too, so that the lowest knuckle became her knees. The finger stepped away from the hand and put out arms and hands of its own, and eye-spangled wings; and the giantess behind it vanished like a flame blown out.

"I will take you to your stateroom," Tzadkiel said. She was not so tall as I. I would have knelt, but she lifted me up.

"Come. You are fatigued—more than you know, and no wonder. There is a good bed for you there. Food will be brought to you whenever you wish it."

I managed to say, "But if you are seen..."

"We will not be seen. There are passages here that are used only by me." Even as she spoke, a pilaster swung away from the wall. She led me through the opening it revealed and down a shadowy corridor. I remembered then that Apheta had told me her people could see in such darkness; but Tzadkiel did not pulse with light as Apheta had, and I was not so foolish as to suppose we would share the bed she had mentioned. After what seemed a long walk, dawn came—low hills dropping below the old sun—and it seemed we were not in a corridor at all. A fresh wind stirred the grass. As the sky grew lighter, I saw a dark box set in the ground before us. "That is your stateroom," Tzadkiel told me. "Be careful. We must step down into it."

We did so, onto something soft. Then we stepped down again, and at last onto a floor. Light flooded the room, which was much larger than my old stateroom and oddly shaped. The morning meadow from which we had come was no more than a picture on the wall behind us, the steps the back and seat of a long settee. I went to the picture and tried to thrust my hand into it, but met solid resistance.

"We have such things in the House Absolute," I said. "I see whence Father Inire took his model, though ours are not so well contrived."

"Mount that seat confidently, and you may go through," Tzadkiel told me. "It is the pressure of a foot upon the back that dissolves the illusion. Now I must go, and you must rest."

"Wait," I said. "I won't be able to sleep unless you tell me..."

"Yes?"

"I have no words. You were a finger of Tzadkiel's. And now you are Tzadkiel."

"You know our power to change shape; your younger self encountered me in the future, as you told me only a few moments ago. 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."

"Your great self held me in her hands, then vanished like any dream."

"Yours is a race of pawns," Tzadkiel told me. "You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns."

Passion and the Passageway

EXHAUSTION operates strangely upon the mind. Left alone in my stateroom, I could only think that my door was unguarded now. Throughout my time as Autarch, there had always been sentries at my door, usually Praetorians. I wandered through several rooms searching for it merely to verify that there were none now; but when I opened it at last, half-human brutes in grotesque helmets sprang to attention.

I closed it again, wondering whether they were meant to keep others out, or myself inside; and I wasted a few moments more searching for some means of extinguishing the light. I was too spent, however, to keep that up for long. Dropping my clothing to the floor, I stretched myself across the wide bed. As my thoughts drifted toward that misty state we call dreaming, the light dimmed and went out.

I seemed to hear footsteps, and for what seemed a long time I struggled to sit up. Sleep pressed me to my mattress, holding me as securely as any drug. At last, the walker sat beside me and brushed back the hair from my forehead. Breathing her perfume, I drew her to me.

Curls brushed my cheek as our lips met.

When I woke, I knew I had been with Thecla. Though she had not spoken and I had not seen her face, there was no question in my mind. Odd, impossible, wonderful, I called it to myself, yet it was so. No one in this universe or any other could have deceived me so long through so much intimacy. But it was not, surely not, impossible at all. Tzadkiel's children, the mere infants she brooded upon her world in Yesod, had brought Thecla back with the rest to fight the sailors. Surely it was not impossible for Tzadkiel herself to bring her again.

I leaped up, then turned to see if there were not some trace—a hair or a crushed blossom left upon the pillow. I would (as I told myself) have treasured such a token always. The unfamiliar pelt with which I had covered myself was smoothly spread. No impression of a second body showed next to the one left by my own.

Somewhere in those laborious writings I assembled in the clerestory of the House Absolute and even more laboriously will repeat aboard this ship at an unknown date in the future that has become my past, I have said that I have seldom felt myself alone, though I must have seemed so to the reader. In fairness to you, then, should you ever come across these writings as well, allow me to say that I did feel alone then, that I knew myself alone, though I was, as my predecessor had trained his equerries to call him, Legion. I was that predecessor, and alone, and his predecessors; each as solitary as every ruler must be until better times—or rather, better men and women—shall come to Urth. I was Thecla too, Thecla thinking of a mother and half sister never to be seen again, and of the young torturer who had wept for her when she no longer had tears left for herself. Most of all was I Severian, and horribly lonely, as the last man on some derelict ship knows loneliness when he dreams of friends and wakes to find himself as solitary as ever, and goes on deck, perhaps, to stare at the peopled stars and the tattered sails that will never bear him to any of them.

That fear gripped me, even while I sought to laugh it away. I was alone in the great suite Tzadkiel had called my stateroom. I could hear no one; and it seemed possible, as all the delirious things we dream seem possible in the moment of waking, that there was no one to hear, that Tzadkiel, for her own unfathomable reasons, had emptied the ship while I slept.

I bathed in the balneary, and scraped the disturbingly unscarred face that watched me from the glass, all the while listening for a voice or a footfall. My clothes were torn, and so dirty I hesitated to put them on again. The closets held clothing of many colors and many kinds, and particularly, so it seemed to me, of those kinds that can be readily adapted to masculine or feminine wear, and to any frame, all of them of the richest materials. I selected a pair of loose, dark trousers bound at the waist with a russet sash, a tunic with an open neck and large pockets, and a cloak of the true fuligin of that guild of which I am still officially a master, lined with particolored brocade. So arrayed I stepped at last from my door and was saluted as before by my monstrous ostiaries.

I had not been abandoned, and indeed by the time I had dressed myself the fear of it had largely left me; yet as I walked the grand and empty gangway beyond my suite, my mind dwelt upon the thought; and from the dreamed Thecla who had delighted and deserted me, it passed to Dorcas and Agia, to Valeria, and at last to Gunnie, whom I had been glad enough to take as my lover when she could be of service to me and I had no other, and from whom I had allowed myself to be separated without a word of protest when Tzadkiel told me she had sent the sailors away.

Throughout my life, I have been far too ready to abandon women who have had a claim on my loyalty—Thecla, of course, until it was too late to do more than ease her death; and after Thecla, Dorcas, Pia, and Dana, and at last Valeria. On this vast ship, I seemed about to cast aside another, and I resolved not to do so. I would seek out Gunnie, wherever she might be, and bring her to stay with me in my stateroom until we reached Urth and she could return, if she wished, to her fishing village and her own people. So determined I strode along, and my newly mended leg permitted me to walk at least as rapidly as when I had set off up the Water Way that runs with Gyoll; but my thoughts were not wholly of Gunnie. I was conscious of the need to take note of my surroundings and the direction in which I walked, for nothing would have been easier than to lose myself aboard this vast ship, as I had done more than once on the voyage to Yesod. I was conscious too of something else, a bright point of light that seemed infinitely far, yet immediate. Allow me to confess here that I confused it even then with that globe of darkness which was to become a disk of light when Gunnie and I passed through it. Certainly it is impossible that the White Fountain which has saved and destroyed Urth, the roaring geyser spewing raw gasses from nowhere, is the portal through which we passed. That is to say, I have always found it impossible when I was busy in the daylit world, the world that would have perished without a New Sun; but sometimes I wonder. May it not be that Yesod, seen from our universe, is as different from Yesod seen from within as a man seen from without is from the image he sees of himself? I know myself often foolish and sometimes weak—lonely and frightened, too much inclined to passive good nature and all too ready, as I have said, to desert my closest friends in pursuit of some ideal. Yet I have terrified millions.

May it not be that the White Fountain is a window to Yesod after all?

The gangway twisted and twisted again; and as I had before, I observed that although it seemed, if not commonplace, at least nearly so in the part I occupied, yet the length that stretched ahead of me and the length I had left behind grew stranger and stranger as my eyes traversed them, full of mists and uncanny lights.

It occurred to me at last that the ship shaped herself for me as I passed and returned herself to herself for her own uses once I was gone, just as a mother devotes herself to her child when that child is present, speaking in the simplest words and playing babyish games—but pens an epic or entertains a lover at other times.

Was the ship in fact a living entity? That such a thing was possible, I did not doubt; but I had seen little to suggest it, and if it were so, why should she require a crew? The thing might have been done more easily, and what Tzadkiel had said the night before (reckoning the time in which I had slept to have been night) suggested a simpler mechanism. If the picture could be penetrated when the weight of my foot was on the back of the settee, might it not be that the light in my stateroom gradually extinguished itself when the weight of my feet left the floor, and that these protean gangways reshaped themselves to my footfalls? I resolved to use my mended leg to defeat them. On Urth I could not have done so—but then on Urth that whole great ship would have crumbled to ruin beneath its own weight; and here on board, where I had been able to run and even to leap before, I could now outrace the wind. I dashed along; when I reached the next turning, I leaped and kicked the wall, sending myself hurtling down the gangway even as I had leaped through the rigging.

In an instant, I had left the passage I knew behind, and found myself among eerie angles and ghostly mechanisms, where blue-green lights flew like comets and the walkway writhed like a worm's gut. My feet struck its surface, but not in a fresh stride; they were numb, and my legs like the loose limbs of a marionette when the curtain has fallen. I went tumbling down the gangway, which shrank to a painfully bright but diminishing dot in a field of utter darkness.

Gunnie and Burgundofara

AT FIRST I thought my vision blurred. I blinked, and blinked again; but the faces, so much alike, would not become one. I tried to speak.

"It's all right," Gunnie told me. The younger woman, who seemed not so much a twin now as a younger sister, slipped her hand under my head and put a cup to my lips. My mouth was filled with the dust of death. I sucked the water eagerly, moving it from cheek to cheek before I swallowed, feeling the tissues revive.

"What happened?" Gunnie asked.

"The ship changes herself," I said.

Both nodded without comprehension.

"She changes to suit us, wherever we are. I ran too fast—or failed to touch the floor enough." I tried to sit up, and to my own astonishment succeeded. "I got to a part where there wasn't any air—where there was only a gas that wasn't air, I think. Perhaps it was meant for people from some other world, or for no one at all. I don't know."

"Can you stand?" Gunnie asked.

I nodded; but if we had been on Urth, I would have fallen when I tried. Even on the ship, where one fell so slowly, the two women had to catch me and prop me as though I were sodden drunk. They were of the same height (which is to say each was nearly as tall as I) with wide dark eyes and broad, pleasant faces dotted with freckles and framed in dark hair.

"You're Gunnie," I muttered to Gunnie.

"We both are," the younger woman told me. "I signed on last voyage. She's been here for a long time, I believe."

"For a lot of those voyages," Gunnie agreed. "In time, it's forever, but less than nothing. The time here isn't the time you grew up with on Urth, Burgundofara."

"Wait," I protested. "I must think. Isn't there any place here where we can rest?" The younger woman pointed to a shadowy archway. "That's where we were." Through it I glimpsed falling water and many padded seats.

Gunnie hesitated, then helped me in.

The high walls were adorned with large masks. Watery tears dripped slowly from their eyes to splash into quiet basins, and cups like the one the younger woman had filled for me stood upon the rims. There was an angled hatch in the farther wall of the chamber; from its design, I knew it opened onto a deck.

When the women had seated themselves on either side of me, I told them, "You two are the same person—so you say, and so I believe."