by Gene Wolfe
Without thinking, I had supposed the crew’s quarters would be a narrow room like the forecastle of the Samru. There was a warren of big cabins instead, many levels opening onto walkways around a common airshaft. Gunnie said she had to return to her duty, and suggested I look for an empty cabin.
It was on my tongue to remind her I had a cabin already, which I had left only a watch before; but something stopped me. I nodded and asked her what location was best — by which I meant, as she understood, which would be nearest hers. She indicated it to me, and we parted.
On Urth the older locks are charmed by words. My stateroom had a speaking lock, and though the hatches had needed no words at all and the door Sidero had flung open had required none, the olive doors of these crew compartments were equipped with locks of the same kind. The first two I approached informed me that the cabins they guarded were occupied. They must have been old mechaisms indeed; I noticed that their personalities had begun to differentiate.
The third invited me to enter, saying, “What a nice cabin!”
I asked how long it had been since the nice cabin had been inhabited.
“I don’t know, master. Many voyages.”
“Don’t call me master,” I told it. “I haven’t decided to take your cabin yet.”
There was no reply. No doubt such locks are of severely limited intelligence; otherwise they might be bribed, and they would surely go mad soon. After a moment the door swung open. I stepped inside.
It was not a nice cabin compared with the stateroom I had left. There were two narrow bunks, an armoire, and a chest; sanitary facilities in a corner. Dust covered everything to such a thickness that I could readily imagine it being blown from the ventilating grill in gray clouds, through the clouds would be seen only by a man who had some means of compressing time as the ship compressed it; if a man lived as a tree does, perhaps, for which each year is a day; or like Gyoll, running through the valley of Nessus for whole ages of the world.
While thinking of such things, which took me much longer to meditate upon than it has taken me just now to write about them, I had found a red rag in the armoire, moistened it at the laver, and begun to wipe away the dust. When I saw that I had already cleaned the top of the chest and the steel frame of one bunk, I knew that I had decided to stay, however unconsciously. I would locate my stateroom again, of course, and more often than not I would sleep there.
But I would have this cabin as well. When I grew bored, I would join the crew and thus learn more about the operation of the ship than I ever would as a passenger.
There was Gunnie too. I have had women enough in my arms to have no conceit about the number — one soon comes to realize that union cripples love when it does not enhance it — and poor Valeria was often in my thoughts; yet I hungered for Gunnie’s affection. As Autarch I had few friends save for Father Inire, and Valeria was the only woman. Some quality in Gunnie’s smile recalled my happy childhood with Thea (how I miss her still!) and the long trip to Thrax with Dorcas. It had been a journey I had counted mere exile at the time, so that each day I had hurried forward. Now I knew that in many ways it had been the summer of my life.
I rinsed the rag again, conscious that I had done so often, though I could not have told how often; when I looked about for another dusty surface to wipe, I found that I had wiped them all.
The mattress was not so easily dealt with, but it had to be cleaned in some fashion — it was as filthy as everything else had been, and we would surely want to lie upon it occasionally. I carried it onto the walkway overhanging the airshaft and beat it until it yielded no more dust.
When I had finished and was rolling it up to take back into the cabin, the wind from the airshaft brought a wild cry.
Chapter IV — The Citizens of the Sails
IT CAME from below. I peered over the twig-thin railing and as I peered heard it again, filled with anguish and a loneliness that echoed and re-echoed among the metal catwalks, the metal tiers of metal cabins.
Hearing it, it seemed to me for a moment that it was my own cry, that something I had held deep inside me since that still-dark morning when I had walked the beach with the aquastor Master Malrubius and watched the aquastor Triskele dissolve in shimmering dust had freed itself and separated itself from me, and that it was below, howling in the faint, lost light.
I was tempted to leap over the rail, for then I did not know the depth of that shaft. As it was, I flung the mattress through the doorway of my new cabin and descended the narrow winding stair by jumping from one flight to the next.
From above, the abyss of the shaft had seemed opaque, the strange radiance of yellow lamps beating upon it without effect. I had supposed that this opacity would vanish when I reached the lower levels — but it solidified instead, until I was reminded of Baldanders’s chamber of cloud, though it was really not so thick as that. The swirling air grew warmer too, and perhaps the mist that shrouded everything was only the result of warm, moist air from the bowels of the ship mixing with the cooler atmoshere of the upper levels. I was soon sweating in my velvet shirt.
Here the doors of many cabins stood ajar, but the cabins themselves were dark. Once, or so it seemed to me, the ship must have had a more numerous crew, or perhaps had been used to transport prisoners (the cabins would have done well as cells, if the locks were differently instructed) or soldiers.
The cry came again, and with it a noise like the ringing of a hammer on an anvil, though it held a note that told me it rang from no forge, but from a mouth of flesh. Heard by night, in a fastness of the mountains, they would have been more terrible than the howling of a dire-wolf, I think. What sadness, dread, and loneliness, what fear and agony were there!
I paused for breath and looked around me. Beasts, so it seemed, were confined in the cabins farther down. Or perhaps madmen, as we of the torturers had confined pain-crazed clients on the third level of the oubliette. Who could say that every door was shut? Might not some of these creatures be unconfined, kept from the upper levels by mere chance or their fear of man? I drew my pistol and made sure it was at its lowest setting and that it had a full charge.
My initial glimpse of the vivarium below confirmed my worst fears. Filmy trees waved at the edge of a glacier, a waterfall tumbled and sang, a dune lifted its sterile yellow crest, and two score creatures prowled among them. I watched them for a dozen breaths before I began to suspect that they were confined nonetheless, and for fifty more before I felt sure of it. But each had its own plot of ground, small or large, and they could no more mingle than could the beasts in the Bear Tower . What a strange group they made! If every swamp and forest on Urth were combed for oddities, I do not believe such a collection could be assembled. Some gibbered, some stared, most lay comatose.
I holstered my pistol and called, “Who howled?”
That was only a joke made to myself, yet a response came — a whimper from the rear of the vivarium; I threaded my way through the beasts, following a narrow nearly invisible track made, as I soon afterward learned, by the sailors sent to feed them.
It was the shaggy creature I had helped catch in the cargo bay, and I beheld him with a certain warmth of recognition. I had been so much alone since the pinnace had carried me from the gardens of the House Absolute to this ship that to meet even so queer a being as he was seemed the second time almost a reunion with an old acquaintance.
Then too, I was interested in the creature himself, since I had assisted in his capture. When we had pursued him, he had appeared almost spherical; now I saw that he was in fact one of those short-limbed, short-bodied animals that generally live in burrows — something like a pika, in other words. There was a round head atop a neck so short that one had to take it on faith; a round body too, of which the head seemed a mere continuation; four short legs, each ending in four long, blunt claws and one short one; a covering of flattened, brownish-gray hairs. Two bright black eyes that stared at me.
“Poor thing,” I said. “How did you ever get into t
hat hold?”
He came to the limit of the invisible barrier that enclosed him, moving much more slowly now that he was no longer frightened.
“Poor thing,” I said again.
He reared upon his hind legs as pikas sometimes do, forelegs nearly crossed over his white belly. Strands of black cord still streaked the white fur. They reminded me that the same cords had stuck to my shirt. I plucked at what remained of them and found them weak now, some crumbling under my fingers. The cords on the shaggy creature seemed to be falling away as well.
He whimpered softly; instinctively, I reached out to comfort him as I would have an anxious dog, then drew my hand away, fearful he might bite or claw me.
A moment later, I cursed myself for a coward. He had harmed no one in the hold, and when I had wrestled with him, there had been no indication that he was trying to do more than escape. I thrust a forefinger into the barrier (which proved no barrier to me) and scratched the side of his tiny mouth. He turned his head just as a dog would have, and I felt small ears beneath the fur.
Behind me, someone said, “Cute, ain’t it?” and I turned to look. It was Purn, the grinning sailor.
I answered, “He seems harmless enough.”
“Most are.” Purn hesitated. “Only most die and drift off. We only see a few of ‘em, that’s what they say.”
“Gunnie calls them apports,” I remarked, “and I’ve been thinking about that. The sails bring them, don’t they?”
Purn nodded absently and stretched a finger of his own through the barrier to tickle the shaggy creature.
“Adjacent sails must be like two large mirrors. They’re curved, so somewhere — in fact, in various places — they must be parallel, and the starlight shines on them.”
Purn nodded again. “That’s what makes the ship go, as the skipper said when they asked about the wench.”
“I once knew a man called Hethor who summoned deadly things to serve him. And I was told by one called Vodalus — Vodalus was not to be trusted, I’ll admit — that Hethor used mirrors to bring them. I’ve a friend who works mirror spells too, though his are not evil. Hethor had been a hand on a ship like this.”
That captured Purn’s attention. He withdrew his finger and turned to face me. “You know her name?” he asked.
“The name of his ship? No, I don’t think he ever mentioned it. Wait… He said he’d been on several. ‘Long I signed on the silver-sailed ships, the hundred-masted whose masts reached out to touch the stars.”’
“Ah.” Purn nodded. “Some say there’s only one. That’s something I wonder about, sometimes.”
“Surely there must be many. Even when I was a boy, people told me of them, the ships of the cacogens putting into the Port of Lune .”
“Where’s that?”
“Lune? It’s the moon of my world, the moon of Urth.”
“That was small stuff, then,” Purn told me. “Tenders and launches and so forth. Nobody never said there wasn’t a lot of little stuff shuttling around between the various worlds of the various suns. Only this ship here and the other ones like it, allowing that there’s more than the one, they don’t come in so close, generally. They can do it all right, but it’s a tricky business. Then too, there’s a good bit of rock whizzing around, close in to a sun, usually.”
The white-haired Idas appeared carrying a collection of tools. “Hello!” he called, and I waved to him.
“I ought to get busy,” Purn muttered. “Me and that one are supposed to be taking care of ‘em. I was just looking around to be sure they were all right when I saw you, uh, uh…”
“Severian,” I said. “I was the Autarch — the ruler — of the Commonwealth; now I’m the surrogate of Urth, and its ambassador. Do you come from Urth, Purn?”
“Don’t think I’ve ever been, but maybe I have.” He looked thoughtful. “Big white moon?”
“No, it’s green. You were on Verthandi, perhaps; I’ve read that its moons are pale gray”
Purn shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Idas had come up to us by then, and he said, “It must be wonderful.” I had no notion of what he meant. Purn moved away, looking at the beasts.
As if we were two conspirators Idas whispered, “Don’t worry about him. He’s afraid I’ll report him for not working.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll report you?” I asked. There was something about Idas that irritated me, though perhaps it was only his seeming weakness.
“Oh, do you know Sidero?”
“Who I know is my own affair, I believe.”
“I don’t think you know anyone,” he said. And then, as if he had committed a merely social blunder, “But maybe you do. Or I could introduce you. I will, if you want me to.”
“I do,” I told him. “Introduce me to Sidero at the first opportunity. I demand to be returned to my stateroom.”
Idas nodded. “I will. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I came there to talk with you sometime? You — I hope you’ll excuse me for saying this — you know nothing about ships, and I know nothing about such places as, ah…”
“Urth?”
“Nothing of worlds. I’ve seen a few pictures, but other than that, all I know are these.” He gestured vaguely toward the beasts. “And they are bad, always bad. But perhaps there are good things on the worlds too, that never live long enough to find their way to the decks.”
“Surely they’re not all evil.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Oh, yes they are. And I, who have to clean up after them, and feed them, and adjust the atmosphere for them if they need it, would rather kill them all; but Sidero and Zelezo would beat me if I did.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they killed you,” I told him. I had no desire to see such a fascinating collection wiped out by this petty man’s spite. “Which would be just, I think. You look as though you belong among them yourself.”
“Oh, no,” he said seriously. “It’s you and Purn and the rest who do. I was born here on the ship.”
Something in his manner told me he was trying to draw me into conversation and would gladly quarrel with me if only it would keep me talking. For my part, I had no desire to talk at all, much less quarrel. I felt tired enough to drop, and I was ravenously hungry. I said, “If I belong in this collection of exotic brutes, it’s up to you to see I’m fed. Where is the galley?”
Idas hesitated for a moment, quite plainly debating some sort of exchange of information — he would direct me if I would first answer seven questions about Urth, or something of that sort. Then he realized I was ready to knock him down if he said anything of the kind, and he told me, though sullenly enough, how to get there.
One of the advantages of such a memory as mine, which stores everything and forgets nothing, is that it is as good as paper at such times. (Indeed, that may be its only advantage.) On this occasion, however, it did me no more good than it had when I had tried to follow the directions of that lochage of the peltasts whom I met upon the bridge of Gyoll . No doubt Idas had assumed I knew more of the ship than I did, and that I would not count doors and look for turnings with exactness.
Soon I realized I had gone wrong. Three corridors branched where there should have been only two, and a promised stair did not appear. I retraced my path, found the point at which (as I believed) I had become lost, and began again. Almost at once, I found myself treading a broad, straight passageway such as Idas had told me led to the galley. I assumed then that my wanderings had sent me wide of part of the prescribed route, and I strode along in high spirits.
By the standards of the ship, it was a wide and windy place indeed. No doubt it was one that received its atmosphere directly from the devices that circulated and purified it, for it smelled as a breeze from the south does on a rainy day in spring. The floor was neither of the strange grass I had seen before nor of the grillwork I had already come to hate, but polished wood deeply entombed in clear varnish. The walls, which had been of a dark and deathly gray in the crew’s quarters, were white her
e, and once or twice I passed padded seats that stood with their backs toward the walls.
The passageway turned and turned again, and I felt that it was rising ever so slightly, though the weight I lifted with my steps was so slight I could not be certain. There were pictures on the walls, and some of these pictures moved — once a picture of our ship as it might have been limned by someone far distant; I could not help but stop to look, and I shuddered to think how near I had come to seeing it so.
Another turn — but one that proved not to be a turn, only the termination of the passageway in a circle of doors. I chose one at random and stepped into a narrow gangway so dark, after the white passage, that I could hardly see more than the lights overhead.
A few moments later, I realized that I had passed a hatch, the first I had seen since reentering the ship; still not wholly free from the fear that had gripped me when I saw that terrible and beautiful picture, I took out my necklace as I strode along and made certain it had not been damaged.
The gangway turned twice and divided, then twisted like a serpent.
A door swung open as I passed, releasing the aroma of roast meat. A voice, the thin and mechanical voice of the lock, said, “Welcome back, master.”
I looked through the doorway and saw my own cabin. Not, of course, the cabin I had taken in the crew’s quarters, but the stateroom I had left to launch the leaden coffer into the great light of the new universe aborning only a watch or two before.
Chapter V — The Hero and the Hierodules
THE STEWARD had brought my meal and, finding me not in my stateroom, had left it on the table. The meat was still warm under its bell; I ate it ravenously, and with it new bread and salt butter, celeriac and salsify, and red wine. Afterward I undressed, washed myself, and slept.
He woke me, shaking me by my shoulder. It was odd, but when I — the Autarch of Urth — had boarded the ship, I had scarcely noticed him, though he brought my meals and willingly saw to various little wants; no doubt it was that very willingness which had unjustly wiped him from my attention. Now that I myself had been a member of the crew, it was as though he had turned to show another face.