by Gene Wolfe
Sidero nodded. “We will fight soon. Get away quickly.”
That was, of course, what I had intended, but I could not do so now. To escape by my own cunning, in the face of danger and by my own will, was one thing — to be ordered away from the battle like a spado was quite another.
In a few moments, our metal leader commanded us to fall in. When we did, the sight of my assembled comrades entirely failed to fill me with confidence; Guasacht’s irregulars had been crack troops by comparison. A few had fusils like Sidero’s, and a few bore calivers like those we had used to capture Zak. (It amused me to see Zak himself so armed now.) A sprinkling of others had pikes or spears; most, including Gunnie, who stood some distance from me and would not look toward me, had only their knives.
And yet all of them marched forward readily enough and gave the impression they would fight, though I knew that as likely as not half or all would run at the first shot. I sought and got a position well in the rear of their straggling column, so that I could better judge the number of deserters. There seemed to be none, and most of these sailors turned warriors appeared to find the prospect of a pitched battle a welcome change from their usual drudging.
As always in every sort of war I have known, there was delay in place of the expected fight. For a watch or more, we trooped through the bewildering interior of the ship, once entering a vast, echoing space that must have been an empty hold, once halting for an unexplained and unnecessary rest, twice joined by smaller parties of sailors who appeared human, or nearly so.
To one who had directed armies, as I have, or taken part in battles in which whole legions withered like grass cast into a furnace — again, as I have — it was a great temptation to look on our marchings and our halts with amusement. I write “temptation” because it was one in the formal sense of being wrong because false. The most trivial skirmish is not trivial to those who die in it, and so should not be trivial in any ultimate sense to us.
Let me confess, however, that I surrendered to that temptation, as I have surrendered to many another. I was amused, and still more amused when Sidero (plainly hoping to put me in a position of safety) created a rear guard and ordered me to take charge of it.
The sailors assigned to me were obviously those he felt least able to bear themselves with credit when our ragtag force went into action. Of ten, six were women, and all of them women far smaller and less muscular than Gunnie. Three of the four men were undersized and, if not actually old, at least well past the zenith of their strength; I was the fourth, and only I had a weapon more formidable than a work knife or a steel crowbar. On Sidero’s orders, we walked — I cannot say marched — ten chains to the rear of the main body.
Could I have done so, I would have led my nine hands, for I was eager that any of the poor creatures who wished to desert should do it. I could not; the shifting colors and shapes, the floating light of the ship’s interior, still bewildered me. I would have lost all track of Sidero and the main body at once. As the best available alternative, I put the most nearly able-bodied seaman ahead of me, told him what distance to maintain, and let the rest trail along behind us if they would. I admit to speculating on whether we would so much as be aware of it, should those ahead make contact with the enemy.
They did not, and we were aware of it at once.
Looking past my guide, I saw something leap into view, hurl a spinning, many-pointed knife, and spring at us with the heavy-shouldered bounds of a thylacosmil.
Though I do not remember feeling it, the pain of my burn may have slowed my hand. By the time I had my pistol clear of the holster, the jiber was hurtling over the unlucky seaman’s body. I had not increased the pistol’s setting, but Sidero must have; the gout of energy that struck the jiber blew him apart, pieces of his dismembered body flying by my head in a paroxysmal flock.
There was no time to glory in victory, even less to aid our guide, who lay at my feet drenching the jiber’s hydra-knife with blood. I had no more than stooped to look at his wound than two score jibers surged from a gallery. I fired five times as fast as I could press the trigger.
A bolt of flame from some contus or war spear roared like a furnace, splashing blue fire across the bulkhead in back of me, and I turned and ran as fast as my bad leg would permit for half a hundred ells, driving the remaining sailors before me. As we fled, we could hear the jibers engaging the rear of the main body.
Three pursued us. I shot them down and distributed their weapons — two spears and a voulge — to sailors who declared they knew how to use them. We pressed forward past a dozen or more dead, some of them jibers, some Sidero’s.
A whistling wind sprang up behind us, nearly snatching the tattered shirt from my back.
Chapter XIV — The End of the Universe
THE SAILORS were wiser than I, putting on their necklaces at once. I did not understand what had taken place until I saw them.
Not far from us, the explosion of some dreadful weapon had opened the gangways to the void, and the air that had been held in this part of the ship was rushing out. As l got my necklace on, I heard the slamming of great doors., a slow, hollow booming, like the war drums of titans.
No sooner did I snap the catch of my necklace than the wind seemed to vanish, though I could still hear its song and see mad swirls of dust storming off like skyrockets. Around me, only a tempered breeze danced.
Creeping forward — for we expected at any moment to come upon more jibers — we reached the spot. Here if anywhere (I thought) I would be able to see enough of the structure of the ship to learn something of its design. I did not. Shattered wood, tortured metal, and broken stone mingled with substances unknown to Urth, as smooth as ivory or jade but of outlandish colors or no color. Others suggested linen, cotton, or the rough hair of nameless animals.
Beyond this layered ruin waited the silent stars.
We had lost contact with the main body, but it seemed clear the breach in the ship’s hull would have to be closed as soon as possible. I signaled the eight remaining hands of what had been the rear guard to follow me, hoping that by the time we arrived on deck we would find a repair gang at work.
Had we been on Urth, the climb up the ruined levels would have been impossible; here it was easy. One leaped cautiously, caught some twisted beam or stanchion, and leaped again, the best method being to cross the gap with each leap, which would have been madness elsewhere.
We achieved the deck, though it seemed at first that we had achieved nothing; it was as unpeopled as the plain of ice I had once surveyed from the highest windows of the Last House. Huge cables snaked across it; a few more trailed upward like columns, still mooring, far aloft, the wreckage of a mast.
One of the women waved, then pointed to another mast, whole leagues away. I looked, but for a moment could see nothing but a mighty maze of sail, yard, and line. Then came a faint violet spark, wan among the stars — and from another mast, an answering spark.
And then something so strange that for a moment I thought my eyes had deceived me, or that I dreamed it. The tiniest fleck of silver, leagues overhead, seemed to bow to us, then, very slowly, to grow. It was falling, of course; but falling through no atmosphere at all so that it did not flutter, and falling under an attraction so weak that to fall was to float.
Hitherto, I had led my sailors. Now they led me, swarming up the rigging of both masts while I stood on deck, entranced by that incredible spot of silver. In a moment I was alone, watching the men and women of the command that had been mine flying like arrows from cable to cable, and sometimes firing their weapons as they flew. Still I hesitated.
One mast, I thought, must surely be held by the mutists, the other by the crew. To mount the wrong one would be to die.
A second fleck of silver joined the first.
The shooting away of a single sail might be an accident, but to shoot away two, one after the other, could only be intentional. If enough sails, enough masts, were destroyed, the ship would never reach its destination, and th
ere could be only one side that wished it should not. I leaped for the rigging of the mast from which the sails fell.
I have already written that the deck recalled Master Ash’s plain of ice. Now in midleap, I saw it better. Air still rushed through the great rent in the hull where a mast had sprouted; as it hastened forth, it grew visible, a titan’s ghost, sparkling with a million million tiny lights. These lights fell like snow — floating down slowly indeed, though not more slowly than a man might — leaving that mighty deck white and gleaming with frost.
Then I stood again before Master Ash’s window and heard his voice: “What you see is the last glaciation. The surface of the sun is dull now; soon it will grow bright with heat, but the sun itself will shrink, giving less energy to its worlds. Eventually, should anyone come and stand upon the ice, he will see it only as a bright star. The ice he stands upon will not be that which you see, but the atmosphere of this world. And so it will remain for a very long time. Perhaps until the close of the universal day.”
It seemed to me that he was beside me again. Even when the nearness of rigging brought me to myself once more, it seemed he flew with me, his words reechoing in my ears. He had vanished that morning as we walked down a gorge in Orithyia, when I would have taken him to Mannea of the Pelerines; on the ship I learned whence he had fled me.
I learned too that I had chosen the wrong mast; if the ship foundered between the stars, it would matter very little whether Severian, once a journeyman torturer, once an Autarch, lived or died. Instead of clinging to the rigging when I reached it, I spun myself around and leaped again, this time for the mast the jibers held.
No matter how often I seek to describe those leaps, I will never paint the wonder and terror of them. One jumps as on Urth — but the first instant is extended to a dozen breaths, as it is for a ball children throw; glorying in it, one knows that should one miss every line and spar, it is destruction — as if the ball should be thrown into the sea and lost forever. Leaping, I felt all this even with the vision of the plain of ice still before my eyes. And yet my arms were stretched before me, my legs behind, and I felt myself not so much a ball as a magical diver in some old story, who dove where he would.
Without sound or warning, a new cable appeared before me in the space between the masts where no cable should be — a cable of fire. Another crossed it, and another; and then all vanished as I streaked across the void where they had been. The jibers had recognized me then, and were firing from their mast.
It is seldom wise to permit an enemy mere target practice. I jerked my pistol from its holster and took aim at the point from which the last bolt had come.
Much earlier I told how, when I stood in the dark corridor outside my stateroom with the dead steward at my feet, the tiny charge light at the breech of my pistol had frightened me. Now it frightened me again, for I glimpsed it just as I pulled the trigger, and there was no spark there.
Nor was there any bolt of violet energy a moment afterward. If I had been as wise as I have sometimes pretended to be, I would have cast the pistol from me then, I think. As it was, I thrust it back into its holster out of habit and hardly noticed another bolt of fire, the nearest of all, until it was past.
Then no time remained for shooting or being shot at. The cables of the rigging rose on every side, and because I was yet in its lower parts, they were like the trunks of great trees. Ahead I saw the cable I would have to hold, and on it a jiber who ran along it to reach the place. At first I thought him a man like myself, though an uncommonly large and powerful one; then — all this in much less time than is needed to write of it — I saw that he was not, for he was able to grip the cable in some way with his feet.
He extended his hands toward me as a wrestler does who prepares to receive his opponent, and the long claws on those hands shone in the starlight.
He had reasoned, I feel sure, that I would have to catch the cable or die, and that as I caught it he would make an end to me. I did not catch it, but dove straight at him and stopped my leap by burying my knife in his chest.
I said I stopped my leap, but the truth is I nearly failed to. For a moment or two we swung about, he like a moored boat, I like a second tied to it. Blood, the same crimson, I thought, as human blood, welled up from around the blade and formed spheres like carbuncles, which simultaneously boiled, froze, and withered as they drifted outside his mantle of air.
For a moment, I feared I would lose my grip on the knife. Then I tugged at it, and as I hoped, his ribs provided resistance enough for me to pull myself to the cable. Of course, I should have mounted higher at once, but I paused for a moment to look at him, with some vague notion that the claws I had seen might be artificial, like the steel claws of the magicians or the lucivee with which Agia had torn my cheek, and if artificial, they might be of some use to me.
They were not, I thought. Rather they seemed the result of some hideous surgery performed while he was a child, as are the mutilations of the men in certain tribes among the autochthons. The claws of an arctother had been shaped from his fingers — ugly and innocent, incapable of holding any other weapon.
Before I could turn aside, my attention was caught by the humanity of his face. I had stabbed him as I had killed so many others, without our ever exchanging a word. It had been a rule among the torturers that one should not speak to a client, nor understand anything a client chanced to say. That all men are torturers was one of my earliest insights; here it was confirmed for me by the bear-man’s agony that I remained a torturer still. He had been a jiber, true; but who could say he had chosen that allegiance freely? Or perhaps he had felt that his reasons for fighting for the jibers were as good as I had felt mine to be when I fought for Sidero and a captain I did not know. With a foot braced on his chest, I bent and wrenched my knife free.
His eyes opened, and he roared, though foaming blood flew from his mouth. For an instant, it seemed stranger to me that I should hear him in that infinite silence than that he, who had appeared dead, should live again; but we were so near that our atmospheres joined, and I could hear the very gushing of his wound.
I stabbed at his face. By ill luck, the point struck the thick frontal bones of the skull; with no purchase for my feet, the thrust lacked force enough to penetrate and drove me back, backward into the emptiness that surrounded us.
He lunged for me, his claws tearing my arm, so that we floated furiously together with the knife hanging between us, its polished, bloody blade gleaming in the starlight. I tried to snatch it, but his claws batted it whirling into the void.
My fingers caught his necklace of cylinders and jerked it free. He should have clung to me then, but perhaps he could not, with those hands. He struck me instead, and I watched him gasp for air and die as I spun away.
Any triumph I might have felt was lost in remorse and the certainty that I must soon follow him in death. Remorse because I regretted his death with all the easy sincerity the mind calls up when there is no danger it will be put to the test; certainty because it was clear from my course and the angles of the masts that I would never come nearer than I was now to any strand of rigging. I had only the vaguest idea how long the air bound by the necklaces would last: a watch or more, I thought. I had a double supply — say, three watches at most. At the end of that time, I would die slowly, gasping faster and faster as more and more of the life principle in my atmosphere became locked in the form that only trees and flowers may breathe.
I remembered then how I had cast the leaden coffer that had held my manuscript into the void, and so been saved; and I tried to think of what I might cast now. To discard the necklaces was to die. I thought of my boots, but I had sacrificed boots once before, when I had stood for the first time in my life beside this all-devouring sea. I had cast the ruins of Terminus Est into Lake Diurturna ; that suggested the hunting knife that had served me so ill. But it was already gone.
My belt remained, on it the black leather sheath with nine chrisos in the sheath’s small compartment, an
d my empty pistol in its holster. I pocketed the chrisos, took off belt, sheath, pistol, and holster, whispered a prayer, and flung them away.
At once I began to move faster, but not (as I had hoped I would) toward the deck or any strand of rigging. Already I was level with the top-hamper of the masts to either side. Looking toward the rapidly receding deck, I saw a single bolt of violet flash between masts. Then there were no more, only the uncanny silence of the void.
Soon, and with that intensity which signals our desire to escape all thoughts of death, I began to wonder why no one had shot at me, as they had when I leaped for the mast, and why no one was firing now.
I rose above the top of the sternward mast, and at once all such petty puzzles were swept aside.
Rising over the topmost sail as the New Sun of Urth might someday rise above the Wall of Nessus (yet far, far larger and more beautiful than even the New Sun can ever be, just as that smallest and uppermost sail was an entire continent of silver, compared to which the mighty Wall of Nessus, a few leagues in height and a few thousand long, might have been the tumbledown fence of a sheepfold), was such a sun as no one with his feet set upon grass will ever see — the birth of a new universe, the primal explosion containing every sun because from it all suns will come, the first sun, that was the father of all the suns. How long I watched it in awe I cannot say; but when I looked again at the masts below, they and the ship seemed very far away.
And then I wondered, for I recalled that when my little band of sailors had reached the rent in the hull and looked upward there, I had seen the stars.
I turned my head, and looked the other way. There the stars swarmed still, but it seemed to me they formed a great disk in the sky, and when I looked at the edges of that disk, I saw they were streaked and old. Since that time I have often pondered on that sight, here beside the all-devouring sea. It is said that so great a thing is the universe that no one can see it as it is, but only as it was, just as I, when I was Autarch, could not know the present condition of our Commonwealth, but only its conditions as they were when the reports I read were written. If that is so, then it may be that the stars I saw were no longer there — that the reports of my eyes were like those reports I found when we opened the suite that had once been the Autarchs’ in the Great Keep.