by Gene Wolfe
“Of course,” I said.
“Not all the apports are animals, though there’s a lot more of those than anything else. Sometimes they’re people, and sometimes they live long enough to get inside the ship where there’s air.” She paused, then giggled. “You know, the others on their home worlds must wonder where they went when they were apported. Especially when it’s somebody important.”
It seemed strange to hear so massive a woman giggle, and I who seldom smile, smiled myself.
“Some people say too that some jibers are taken on board with the cargo, that they’re criminals who want to get away from their home worlds and have stowed aboard that way. Or that they’re only animals on their worlds and have been shipped as live cargo, though they’re people like us. We’d only be animals on those worlds — that’s what I think.”
Her hair, near my face now, was piercingly fragrant; and it occurred to me that it could hardly be thus always, that she had perfumed herself for me before returning to our cranny.
“Some people call them muties because so many can’t talk. Maybe they have some language of their own; but they can’t talk to us, and if we catch one he has to talk by signs. But Sidero said one time that mutist means a rebel.”
I said, “Speaking of Sidero, was he around when Zak took you to the bottom of the airshaft?”
“No, there was nobody there but you.”
“Did you see my pistol, or the knife you gave me when we first met?”
“No, there wasn’t anything there. Did you have them on when you fell?”
“Sidero had them. I was hoping he’d been honest enough to return them, but at least he didn’t kill me.”
Gunnie shook her head by rolling it back and forth on the rags, a process that brought one round and blooming cheek into contact with mine. “He wouldn’t. He can play rough sometimes, but I never heard that he killed anybody.”
“I think he must have struck me while I was unconscious. I don’t think I could have hurt my mouth in the fall. I was inside him, did I tell you that?”
She drew away to stare at me. “Really? Can you do that?”
“Yes. He didn’t like it, but I think that something in the way he’s built kept him from trying to expel me as long as I was conscious. After we fell, he must have opened up and pulled me out with his good arm. I’m lucky he didn’t break both my legs. When he got me out, he must have struck me. I will kill him for that; when we meet again.”
“He’s only a machine,” Gunnie said softly. She slipped her hand inside my ruined shirt.
“I’m surprised you know that,” I told her. “I would have thought you’d think him a person.”
“My father was a fisherman, so I grew up on boats. You give a boat a name and eyes, and a lot of times it acts like a person and even tells you things. But it isn’t a person, not really. Fishermen are funny sometimes, but my father used to say that you could tell when a man was really crazy, because if he didn’t like his boat he’d sink it instead of selling it. A boat has a spirit, but it takes more than a spirit to make a person.”
I asked, “Did your father approve of your signing on this ship?”
She said, “He drowned first. All fishermen drown. It killed my mother. I’ve got back to Urth pretty often, but it was never when they were alive.”
“Who was Autarch when you were a child, Gunnie?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It wasn’t the kind of thing we cared about.”
She wept a little. I tried to comfort her, and from that we might have slipped very quickly and naturally into making love, but her burn covered most of her chest and abdomen, and though I fondled her, and she me, the memory of Valeria came between us as well.
At last she said, “That didn’t hurt you, did it?”
“No,” I told her. “I’m only sorry I hurt you as much as I did.”
“You didn’t. Not at all.”
“But I did, Gunnie. It was I who burned you in the gangway outside my stateroom, as we both know.”
Her hand sought her dagger, but she had discarded it when she undressed. It lay beneath her other clothing and well out of her reach.
“Idas told me she’d hired a sailor to help her dispose of the corpse of my steward. She called that sailor ‘he,’ but she hesitated before she said the word. You were one of her workmates, and even though you didn’t know she was female, it would have been quite natural for her to seek the help of a woman, if she had no male lover”
“How long have you known?” Gunnie whispered. She had not begun to sob again, but in the corner of one eye I could see a tear, large and rounded as Gunnie herself.
“From the first, when you brought me that gruel. Because it had been exposed, my arm had been burned by the digestive juices of the flying creature; it was the only part of me that hadn’t been protected by Sidero’s metal hide, and of course I thought of that at once when I regained consciousness. You said you’d been seared by a flash of energy, but such things don’t discriminate. Your face and forearms, which had been exposed, were unburned. Your burns were in places that would surely have been protected by a shirt and trousers.”
I waited for her to speak, but she did not.
“In the dark, I called out for help, but no one answered. Then I fired my pistol with the beam set low, to give me light. I held it at eye level when I fired, but I couldn’t see the sights, and the beam was angled down a bit. It must have hit you at the waist. When I slept, you went looking for Idas, I suppose, so you could sell me to her for another chrisos. You didn’t find her, of course. She’s dead, and her body’s locked in my cabin.”
“I wanted to answer when you called,” Gunnie said. “But we were supposed to be doing something secret. All I knew was that you were lost in the dark, and I thought the lights would come on again soon. Then Idas put his knife — her knife, you say, but I didn’t know that — against my neck. He was right behind me, so close he didn’t even get hurt when you shot me.”
I said, “However that may be, I want you to know that Idas had nine chrisos on her when I searched her body. I put them in the pocket of the sheath on that knife you found. Sidero has my knife and pistol; if you’ll return them to me, you may keep the gold and welcome.”
Gunnie did not want to talk after that. I feigned sleep, though in fact I watched from beneath my lids to see if she would try to stab me.
Instead she rose and dressed, then crept out of the chamber, stepping over the sleeping Zak. I waited for a long time, but she did not return, and at last I slept myself.
Chapter XI — Skirmish
I LAY in the nothingness of sleep, and yet some part of me remained awake, floating in the gulf of unconsciousness, which contains the unborn and so many of the dead.
“Do you know who I am?”
I did, though I could not have said how. “You are the captain.”
“I am. Who am I?”
“Master,” I said, for it seemed I was an apprentice once more. “Master, I do not understand.”
“Who captains the ship?”
“Master, I do not know.”
“I am your judge. This blossoming universe has been given to my guardianship. My name is Tzadkiel.”
“Master,” I said, “is this my trial?”
“No. And it is my own trial that grows near, not yours. You have been a warrior king, Severian. Will you fight for me? Fight willingly?”
“Gladly, master.”
My own voice seemed to echo in the dream: “Master…master…master…” There was no reply beyond a booming reverberation. The sun was dead, and I was alone in the freezing dark.
“Master! Master!”
Zak was shaking my shoulder.
I sat up, thinking for a moment that he had more speech than I had supposed. “Hush, I’m awake,” I said.
He parroted me: “Hush!”
“Was I talking in my sleep, Zak? I must have been, for you to hear that word. I remember—”
I fell silent because h
e had cupped a hand to his ear. I listened too and heard yells and scuffling. Someone called my name.
Zak was out the door before me, not so much running as launching himself in a flat leap. I was not far behind him, and after bruising my hands on the first wall, I learned to twist myself and strike them with my feet first as he did.
A corner and another, and we caught sight of a knot of struggling men. Another leap shot us among them, I not knowing which side was ours, or even if we had one.
A sailor with a knife in his left hand sprang at me. I caught him as Master Gurloes had once taught me and threw him against a wall, only then seeing that he was Purn.
There was no time for apology or question. The dagger of an indigo giant thrust for my lungs. I struck his thick wrist with both arms, and too late saw a second dagger, its blade held beneath his other hand. It flashed up. I tried to writhe away; a struggling pair pushed me back, and I beheld the steel-hearted blue nenuphar of death.
As if the laws of nature had been suspended for me, it did not descend. The giant’s backward motion never stopped, fist and blade continuing backward until he himself was bent backward too, and I heard his shoulder snap, and the wild scream he gave when the jagged bones tore him from within.
Big though his hand was, the pommel of his dagger protruded from it. I got it in one hand and a quillon in the other, and wrenched the weapon free — then drove it up into his rib cage. He fell backward as a tree falls, slowly at first, his legs always stiff beneath him. Zak, hanging from his uplifted arm, tore the other dagger from him, much as I had the one I held.
Each was large enough for a short sword, and we did some damage with them. I would have done more if I had not had to step between Zak and some sailor who thought him a jiber.
Such fights end as suddenly as they begin. One runs, then another, and then all the rest must, being too few to fight. So it was with us. A wild-haired jiber with the teeth of an atrox tried to beat down my blade with a mace of pipe. I half severed his wrist, stabbed him in the throat — and realized that save for Zak I had no comrades left. A sailor dashed past, clutching his bleeding arm. I followed him, shouting for Zak.
If we were pursued, it was with little zeal. We fled down a twisting gangway and through an echoing chamber full of silent machinery, along a second gangway (tracking those we followed by fresh blood on the floors and bulkheads, and once by the body of a sailor) and into a smaller chamber where there were tools and workbenches, and five sailors, full of sighs and curses as they bandaged one another’s wounds.
“Who are you?” one asked. He menaced me with his dirk.
Purn said, “I know him. He’s a passenger.” His right hand had been wrapped in bloodstained gauze and taped.
“And this?” The sailor with the dirk pointed toward Zak.
I said, “Touch him and I’ll kill you.”
“He’s no passenger,” the sailor said doubtfully.
“I owe you no explanation and give none. If you doubt that the two of us can kill all of you, try us.”
A sailor who had not spoken before said, “Enough, Modan. If the sieur vouches for him…”
“I will. I do.”
“That’s enough, then. I saw you killing the jibers, and your hairy friend the same. How can we help you?”
“You can tell me why the jibers were killing you, if you know. I’ve been told there are always some on the ship. They can’t always be that aggressive.”
The sailor’s face, which had been open and friendly, closed — though it seemed nothing in his expression had changed. “I’ve heard tell, sieur, that there’s somebody aboard this voyage that they’ve been told to do for, only they can’t find him. I don’t know no more than that. If you do, you know more than me, like the hog told the butcher.”
“Who gives them their orders?”
He had turned away. I looked around at the rest, and at last Purn said, “We don’t know. If there’s a captain of the jibers, we’ve never heard of him till now.”
“I see. I’d like to speak to an officer — not just a petty officer like Sidero, but a mate.”
The sailor called Modan said, “Well, bless you, sieur, so’d we. You think we jumped all them jibers, without no leader nor proper weapons? We was a work gang, nine hands, and the jumped us. Now we’re not goin’ to work no more without we have pikes, and marines posted.”
The others nodded their agreement.
I said, “Surely you can tell me where I’d be likely to find a mate.”
Modan shrugged. “For’ard or aft, sieur. That’s all I can say. Mostly they’re in one place or the other, those bein’ the best for navigation and observations, the instruments not bein’ blocked off so much by her sails. One or t’other.”
I recalled seizing the bowsprit rigging during my wild career among the sails. “Aren’t we pretty far forward here?”
“That’s so, sieur.”
“Then how can I get farther forward?”
“That way.” He gestured. “And foller your nose. That’s what the monkey told the elephant.”
“But you can’t tell me precisely how I should go?”
“I could, sieur, but it wouldn’t be mannerly. Can I give you some advice, sieur?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking for.”
“Stay with us till we get someplace safer. You want a mate. We’ll turn you over to the right one, when we can. You go off on your own and the jibers will kill you sure.”
Purn said, “Right when you come out that door, then straight along till you come to the companionway. Up, and take the widest passage. Keep going.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Come on, Zak.”
The hairy man nodded, and when we were outside jerked his head and announced, “Bad man.”
“I know, Zak. We have to find a place to hide. Do you understand? You look on this side of the corridor, and I’ll look on that one. Keep quiet.”
He stared at me quizzically for a moment, but it was plain he understood. I had gone no more than a chain down the corridor when he pulled at my sound arm to show me a little storeroom. Although most of its space was taken up by drums and crates, there was room enough for us. I positioned the door so that a hairline crack remained for us to look through, and he and I sat down on two boxes.
I had been sure the sailors would leave the chamber in which we had found them soon, since there was nothing there for them once they had treated one another’s wounds and caught their breath. In the event, they stayed so long that I was almost convinced we had missed them — that they had gone back to the scene of the fight, or down some branching passage that we had overlooked. No doubt they had disputed long before setting out.
However it had been, they appeared at last. I touched a finger to my lips to warn Zak, though I do not think that was necessary. When all five had passed and seemed likely to be fifty ells or more ahead, we crept out.
I had no way of knowing how long we would have to follow them before Purn would be last among them, or if he would ever be last; in the worst case, I was prepared to pin our hopes on our courage and their fears, and take him from their midst.
Fortune was with us — Purn soon lagged a few steps behind. Since succeeding to the autarchy, I have often led charges in the north. I feigned to lead such a charge now, shouting for pandours who consisted exclusively of Zak to follow. We rushed upon the sailors as though at the head of an army, flourishing our weapons; and they turned and fled as one man.
I had hoped to take Purn from behind, sparing my burned arm as much as I could. Zak saved me the trouble with a long flying leap that sent him crashing into Purn’s knees. I needed only to hold the point of my dagger at his throat. He looked terrified, as well he should: I expected to kill him when I had wrung as much information from him as I could.
For the space of a breath or two we remained listening to the retreating feet of the four who had fled. Zak had snatched Purn’s knife from its sheath, and now waited with a weapon in either hand, glari
ng at the fallen seaman from beneath beetling brows.
“You’ll die at once if you try to run,” I whispered to Purn. “Answer me and you may live awhile. Your right hand’s bandaged. How was it hurt?”
Although he lay flat on his back, with my dagger against his throat, his eyes defied me. It was a look I knew well, an attitude I had seen broken again and again.
“I haven’t enough time to waste any on you,” I told him, and I prodded him with the point just enough to draw blood. “If you won’t answer, say so plainly; and I’ll kill you and be done with it.”
“Fighting the jibers. You were there. You saw it. I tried to get you, sure, that’s true enough. I thought you were one of them. With that jiber—” His eyes flickered toward Zak. “With him with you, anybody would have. You weren’t hurt, and no harm done.”
“’As the viper told the sow.’ So a man called Jonas used to say. He was a sailor too, Purn, but as quick to lie as you are. That hand was wrapped in bandages already when Zak and I joined the fight. Take the bandages off.”
He did so, reluctantly. The wound had been treated by a skillful leech, no doubt at the infirmary Gunnie had mentioned; the tear in his flesh was sutured now, yet it was clear enough what sort of wound it had been.
And as I bent to look at it, Zak, bending too, drew his lips back from his teeth as I have sometimes seen tame apes do. I knew then that the wild conjecture I had been trying to dismiss was the simple truth: Zak had been the shaggy, bounding apport we had hunted in the hold.
Chapter XII — The Semblance
TO HIDE my confusion, I planted my foot on Purn’s chest and barked, “Why did you try to kill me?”
For some men, there comes a moment when they accept the certainty of death, and so are no longer afraid. That moment came for Purn, a change as unmistakable as the opening of an eye. “Because I know you, Autarch.”