by Gene Wolfe
“We didn’t think about it. Not until you made us. He made us see it. Zak.”
I asked, “And you knew it was Zak?”
Gunnie nodded. “I was with him when they caught him. I don’t think I would have known otherwise. Or maybe I would. He’d changed a lot, so I knew already he wasn’t what we thought at first. He’s — I don’t know.”
Apheta whispered, “May I tell you? He is a reflection, an imitation, of what you will be.”
I asked, “You mean if the New Sun comes?”
“No. I mean that it is coming. That your trial is over. You have been obsessed with it for so long, I know, and it must be difficult for you to realize that it is truly over. You have succeeded. You have saved your future.”
“You have succeeded too,” I said.
Apheta nodded. “You understand that now.”
Gunnie said, “I don’t. What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you see? The Hierarchs and their Hierodules — and the Hierogrammates too — have been trying to let us become what we were. What we can be. Isn’t that right, my lady? That’s their justice, their whole reason for being. They bring us through the pain we brought them through. And—” I could not complete the thought. The words had become iron on my lips.
Apheta said, “You in turn will make us go through what you did. I think you understand. But you” — she looked to Gunnie — “do not. Your race and ours are, perhaps, no more than each other’s reproductive mechanisms. You are a woman, and so you say you produce your ovum so that there will someday be another woman. But your ovum would say it produces that woman so that someday there will be another ovum. We have wanted the New Sun to succeed as badly as he has wanted to himself. More urgently, in all truth. In saving your race he has saved ours; as we have saved ours of the future by saving yours.”
Apheta turned back to me. “I told you that you had brought unwelcome news. The news was that we might indeed lose the game you and I spoke of.”
I said, “I have three questions, my lady. Let me ask them and I’ll go, if you’ll let me.”
She nodded.
“How is it that Tzadkiel could say my examination was over, when the aquastors had to fight and die to save me?”
“The aquastors did not die,” Apheta told me. “They live in you. As for Tzadkiel, he spoke as he did because it was the truth. He had examined the future and found the chance high that you would bring a fresh sun to your Urth, and thus save that strand of your race, so that it might produce ours in your Briahtic universe. It was on that examination that everything hinged; it was over, and the result favorable to you.”
Gunnie looked from Apheta to me and seemed about to speak, but she said nothing.
“My second question. Tzadkiel said also that my trial could not be just, and that he would make what reparation he could. You have said that he is truthful. Did my trial differ from my examination? How was it unjust?”
Apheta’s voice seemed no more than a sigh. “It is easy for those who need not judge, or judging need not toil for justice, to complain of inequity and talk of impartiality. When one must actually judge, as Tzadkiel does, he finds he cannot be just to one without being unjust to another. In fairness to those on Urth who will die, and especially to the poor and ignorant people who will never understand what it is they die for, he summoned their representatives—”
“Us, you mean!” Gunnie exclaimed.
“Yes, you shipmen. And he gave you, Autarch, those who had reason to hate you for your defenders. That was just to the shipmen, but not to you.”
“I have deserved punishment often before, and not received it.”
Apheta nodded. “For that reason certain of the scenes you saw, or at least might have seen had you troubled to look, were made to appear in the narrow passage that rings this room. Some recalled your duty. Others were meant to show you that you yourself had often meted out the harshest justice. Do you see now why you were chosen?”
“A torturer, to save the world? Yes.”
“Take your head out of your hands. It is enough that you and this poor woman can scarcely hear me. At least permit me to hear you. You have asked the three questions you spoke of. Have you more?”
“Many. I saw Dana. And Guasacht and Erblon. Had they reason to hate me?”
“I do not know,” Apheta whispered. “You must ask Tzadkiel, or those who assisted him. Or ask yourself.”
“I suppose they had. I would have displaced Erblon if I could. As Autarch, I could have promoted Guasacht, but I did not; and I never tned to find Dana after the battle. There were so many other things — so many important things — to do. I see why you called me a monster.”
Gunnie exclaimed, “You’re no monster, she is!”
I shrugged. “Yet all of them fought for Urth, and so did Gunnie. That was wonderful.”
“Not for the Urth you have known,” Apheta whispered. “For a New Urth many will never see, except through your eyes and the eyes of others who recall them. Have you more questions?”
Gunnie said, “I’ve got one. Where are my shipmates? The ones who ran and saved their lives?”
I sensed that she was ashamed for them. I said, “Their running saved ours too, very likely.”
“They will be returned to the ship,” Apheta told her.
“What about Severian and me?”
I said, “They’ll try to kill us on the voyage home, Gunnie; or perhaps not. If they do, we’ll have to deal with them.”
Apheta shook her head. “You will be returned to the ship indeed, but by a different way. Believe me, the problem will not arise.”
Dark-robed Hierarchs came down the aisle with travails, gathering the dead. “They will be interred in the grounds of this building,” Apheta whispered. “Have we reached your last question, Autarch?”
“Nearly. But look there. One of those bodies belongs to one of your own people, to Tzadkiel’s son.”
“He will lie here as well, with those who fell with him.”
“But was it intended so? Did his father plan that too?”
“That he should die? No. But that he should risk death. What right would we have to risk your life and the lives of so many others if we would bear no risk ourselves? Tzadkiel risked death with you on the ship. Venant here.”
“He knew what would happen?”
“Do you mean Tzadkiel or Venant? Venant surely did not know what would happen, yet he knew what might happen, and he went forth to save our race, as others have gone forth to save theirs. For Tzadkiel I cannot speak.”
“You told me each of the isles judges a galaxy. Are we — is Urth — important to you after all?”
Apheta rose, smoothing her white gown. Her floating hair, which had seemed uncanny to me when I had seen it first, was familiar now; I felt sure that such a dark aureole was depicted somewhere in old Rudesind’s illimitable gallery, though I could not quite call the proper painting to mind. She said, “We have watched with the dead. Now they go, and it is time that we went also. It may be that from your ancient Urth, reborn, the Hieros will come. I believe it to be so. But I am only one woman, and of no high position. I said what I did so that you would not die despairing.”
Gunnie started to speak, but Apheta motioned her to silence, saying, “Now follow me.”
We did, but she walked only a step or two to the spot where Tzadkiel’s Seat of Justice had stood. “Severian, take her hand,” she told me. She herself took my free hand, and Gunnie’s.
The stone on which we stood sank under us. In an instant the floor of the Chamber of Examination closed above our heads. We dropped, or so it seemed, into a vast pit filled with harsh yellow light, a pit a thousand times wider than the square of stone. Its sides were mighty mechanisms of green and silver metals, before which men and women hovered and darted like so many flies, and across which titanic scarabs of blue and gold clambered like ants.
Chapter XXIII — The Ship
WHILE WE fell I could not speak. I gripped Gunnie’s hand and Aphe
ta’s, not because I feared they might be lost, but because I feared I might; and there was no room left in my mind for any thought but that.
At last we slowed — or rather, we seemed to be dropping no more rapidly. I recalled my leaps among the rigging, for it seemed that here too the insensate hunger for matter had been abated. I saw my own expression of relief upon Gunnie’s face when she turned to Apheta to ask where we were.
“In our world — our ship, if you are more comfortable calling it so, though it only circles our sun and requires no sails.”
A door had opened in the wall of the well, and though it seemed we fell still, we did not leave this door behind. Apheta drew us there, into a dark and narrow corridor I blessed when I felt its firm floor beneath my feet. Gunnie managed to say, “On our ship, we don’t have water on deck.”
“Where do you have it?” Apheta asked absently. It was not until I noticed how much stronger her voice was here that I was aware of the noise, a humming like the song of bees (how well I remembered it!) and distant clatterings and clickings, as though destriers galloped down a plank road while locusts trilled unseen in trees that surely could not flourish in this place.
“Inside,” Gunnie told Apheta. “In tanks.”
“It must be terrible to go to the surface of such a world. Here it is something we look forward to very much.”
A woman who looked rather like Apheta was striding toward us. She traveled a great deal faster than her walk should have carried her, so that she rushed past in an instant. I turned to stare after her, suddenly reminded of the way the green man had vanished down the Corridors of Time. When she had passed from sight, I said, “You do not come to the surface often, do you? I should have guessed; all of you are so pale.”
“It is a reward for us, for working long and hard. On your Urth, women who look as I do, do no work at all — or so I have heard.”
Gunnie said, “Some do.”
The corridor divided, and divided again. We too rushed along, and it seemed to me that our path swung in a long curve, counterclockwise and descending. Apheta had said her people loved the spiral; perhaps they favor the helix as well.
Just as a wave rises abruptly before the bow of a storm-tossed carrack, double doors of tarnished argent rose before us. We halted in a way that made it seem we had never moved save at a walk. Apheta motioned toward the doors, which groaned like clients but would not swing back until I helped her push them.
Gunnie looked up at the lintel and, as though she read the words there, recited, “No hope for those who enter here.”
“No, no,” Apheta murmured. “Every hope.” The hum and the clickings had been left behind.
I asked, “Is this where I will be taught to bring the New Sun?”
“You will not have to be taught,” she told me. “You are gravid with the knowledge, and it will be born as soon as you approach the White Fountain sufficiently for you to be aware of it.”
I would have laughed at her figure of speech, had not the utter emptiness of the chamber to which we had come stilled all amusement. It was wider than the Chamber of Examination, with silver walls that rose to a great arch in that curve one sees traced by a stone hurled into the air; but it was empty, utterly empty save for us, who whispered in its doorway.
Gunnie repeated, “No hope,” and I realized she had been too frightened to pay heed to Apheta or me. I put an arm around her shoulders (though the gesture seemed strange directed toward a woman who was as tall as I) and tried to comfort her, thinking all the while what a fool she would be to accept the comfort when it was clear I could do no more here than she herself.
She continued, “We used to have a sailor who said that. She was always hoping to go home, but we never landed in her time again, and after a while she died.”
I asked Apheta how I came to carry such knowledge without being aware of it.
“Tzadkiel gave it to you as you slept,” she said.
“You mean he came to your chamber last night?” I had spoken before I realized it would give Gunnie pain. I felt her muscles tighten as she shrugged my arm away.
“No,” Apheta told me. “On the ship, I believe. I cannot tell you the precise moment.”
I recalled then how Zak had bent over me in that hidden corner Gunnie had found for us — Tzadkiel become the savage that we, his paradigms, had once been.
“Come now,” Apheta was saying. She led us forward. I had been wrong in thinking there was nothing in the chamber; there was a wide area of black upon the floor. Some of the flaking silver of the arched ceiling had fallen there, where it was most visible.
“You have, both of you, those necklaces sailors carry?”
In some astonishment, I felt for mine and nodded. Gunnie did the same.
“Put them on. You will be without air soon.”
Only then did I realize what that sparkling darkness was. I drew out the necklace, wondering, I confess, whether each of its linked prisms functioned still, put it on, and went forward to look. My cloak of air came with me, so that I was conscious of no wind; but I saw Gunnie’s hair tossed by a gale I could not feel, streaming before her until she had her own necklace in place, and Apheta’s strange hair, which did not flutter as a human woman’s does, but stood out like a banner.
That blackness was the void; yet as I walked, it rose as though it sensed my approach, and before I reached it, it had become a sphere.
I tried to stop.
In a moment Gunnie was beside me, struggling too and grasping my arm. The sphere was like a wall. At its center, just as I had seen it pictured on board, was the ship.
I have written that I sought to stop. It was difficult, and soon I could not resist. It may be that the void held some attraction like that of a world. Or perhaps it was only that the pressure of the wind on the air held static around me was so strong that I was driven forward.
Or perhaps the ship had some hold upon us both. If I dared, I would say that my destiny drew me, yet Gunnie cannot have been drawn by the same destiny, though perhaps her quite different fate drew her toward the same place. For if it were merely the wind, or the insensate hunger of matter for matter, why was Apheta not drawn with us?
I will leave it to you to explain these things. Drawn I was, and Gunnie too I saw her flying through the void behind me, twisting and whirling as the universe twisted and whirled, saw her just as one leaf twirling in a spring storm might see another. Somewhere behind or before us, above us or below us, was a wide circle of light, spinning, frantically spinning, a thing like Lune, if such a thing as a moon of the most brilliant white can be imagined. Gunnie fluttered across it once or twice before she was lost in the diamond-decked blackness. (And once it seemed to me — and still seems when I call that frantic memory forth — that I saw Apheta’s face as she leaned from that moon.)
With the next wild spin, it was not Gunnie who was lost but that spot of shining white, lost somewhere among the billions of staring suns. Gunnie was not far off, and I saw her turn her head to look at me.
Nor was the ship lost; it was indeed so near that I could see a sailor here and there in the rigging. Perhaps we were still falling. Surely we must have been traveling with great velocity, because the ship herself must have been hurtling from world to world. Yet all such speed was invisible, as the wind vanishes when a swift xebec scuds before a tempest on the Ocean of Urth . We drifted so lazily that if I had not had faith in Apheta and the Hierarchs, I would have feared we would never reach the ship at all and be lost forever in that endless night.
It was not so. A sailor sighted us, and we watched him leap from one to another of his comrades, waving and pointing until he was close enough for their cloaks of air to touch, so that he could speak.
Then one who carried a burden climbed a mastnear us, rising in practiced leaps, until standing upon the topmost spar he took a bow and an arrow from his bundle, drew the bow, and sent the arrow hurtling toward us, trailing an interminable line of silver no thicker than a pack thread.
/> The arrow passed between Gunnie and me, and I despaired of catching the line; but Gunnie was more fortunate, and when she held it and had been pulled toward the ship some distance by the burly sailor, she cracked it as a drover snaps his whip, so that a long wave ran from her to me like a live thing and brought the line near enough for me to snatch.
I had not loved the ship when I had been a passenger and a seaman aboard her, but now the mere thought of returning to her filled me with pleasure. Consciously I knew, as I was reeled toward the mast, that my task was far from complete, that the New Sun would not come unless I brought it, and that in bringing it I would be responsible for the destruction it would cause as well as the renewal of Urth. Thus every common man who brings a son into the world must feel himself responsible for his woman’s labor and perhaps for her death, and with reason fears that the world will in the end condemn him with a million tongues.
Yet though I knew all this, my heart thought it was not so: that I, who had desired so desperately to succeed and had bent every effort toward success, had failed; and that I would now be permitted to reclaim the Phoenix Throne, as I had in the person of my predecessor — to reclaim it and enjoy all the authority and luxury it would bring, and most of all that pleasure in dealing justice and rewarding worth that is the final delight of power. All this while freed at last from the unquenchable desire for the flesh of women that has brought so much suffering to me and to them.
Thus my heart was wild with joy, and I descended to that titanic forest of masts and spars, those continents of silver sail, as any shipwrecked mariner would have clambered from the sea to some flower-decked coast with friendly hands helping him ashore, and, standing with Gunnie on the spar at last, embraced the sailor as I might Roche or Drotte, grinning I am sure like any fool, and leaped down from halyard to stay with him and his mates no more circumspectly than they, but as though all the wild elation I felt were centered not in my heart, but in my arms and legs.
It was only when my final leap carried me to the deck that I discovered such thoughts were no idle metaphors. My crippled leg, which had pained me so much when I had descended from the mast after casting away the leaden coffer that held the record of my earlier life, did not pain me at all but seemed as strong as the other. I ran my hands from thigh to knee (so that Gunnie and the sailors who had gathered around us believed I had injured it) and found the muscle there as abundant and firm as that of the other.