by Gene Wolfe
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.
Chapter XXVI — 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.”
Both nodded.
“But I can’t call you by the same name. What shall I call you?”
Gunnie said, “When I was her age and I left my village to ship on here, I didn’t want to be Burgundofara anymore; so I got my mates to call me Gunnie. I’ve been sorry I did, but they wouldn’t have changed it back if I’d asked them to — just made a joke of it. So call me Gunnie, because that’s who I am.” She paused to take a deep breath. “And call the girl I used to be by my old name, if you will. She’s not going to change it now.”
“All right,” I said. “Perhaps there’s some better way to explain what bothers me, but I’m still weak, and I can’t think clearly enough to find it. Once I saw a certain man raised from the dead.”
They only stared at me. I heard Burgundofara’s indrawn breath.
“His name was Apu-Punchau. There was someone else there too, a man called Hildegrin; and this Hildegrin wanted to stop Apu-Punchau from returning to his tomb.”
Burgundofara whispered, “Was he a ghost?”
“Not quite, or at least I don’t think so. Or maybe it only depends on what you mean when you say ‘ghost.’ I think perhaps he was someone whose roots in time went so deep that he couldn’t be wholly dead in our time, perhaps not in any. However that may be, I wanted to help Hildegrin because he was serving someone who was trying to cure one of my friends…” My thoughts, still bewildered by the deathly atmosphere of the gangway, stuck on that point of friendship. Had Jolenta indeed been a friend? Might she have become one if she had recovered?
“Go on,” Burgundofara urged me.
“I ran up to them — to Apu-Punchau and Hildegrin. There was something I can’t really call an explosion, but it was more like that, or like lightning striking, than anything else I can think of. Apu-Punchau was gone, and there were two Hildegrins.”
“Like us.”
“No, the same Hildegrin twice. One who wrestled an invisible spirit and another who wrestled me. Then the lightning struck, or whatever it was. But before that, before I had even seen the two Hildegrins, I saw Apu-Punchau’s face; and it was mine. Older, but mine.”
Gunnie said, “You were right to want to stop somewhere. You have to tell us.”
“This morning — Tzadkiel, the captain, gave me a very nice cabin. Before I went out I washed, and I shaved with a razor I found there. The face I saw in the mirror troubled me, but I know now whose it was.”
Burgundofara said, “Apu-Punchau’s?” and Gunnie, “Your own.”
“There’s something more I didn’t tell you. Hildegrin was killed by the flash. I thought
I understood that, later, and I still do. There were two of me, and because there were, two Hildegrins also; but the Hildegrins had been created by division, and a man cannot be divided so and live. Or perhaps it was only that once divided he could not reunite, when there was only one Severian again.”
Burgundofara nodded. “Gunnie told me your name. It’s a beautiful name, like a sword blade.” Gunnie motioned her to silence.
“Now here I am, with both of you. There’s only one of me, as far as I can tell. Do you see two?”
Burgundofara said, “No. But don’t you see that it wouldn’t matter if we did? If you haven’t been Apu-Punchau yet, you can’t die!”
I told her, “Even I know more of time than that. I was the future Apu-Punchau of what is now a decade past. The present can always change its future.”
Gunnie shook her head. “I think I know more about time than you do, even if you’re going to bring a New Sun and change the world. This man Hildegrin didn’t die ten years ago, not to us here. When you get to Urth again, you may find it was a thousand years ago or who knows how many years ahead. Here it’s not one nor the other. We’re between the suns and the years too, so there can be two Gunnies with no danger to anybody. Or a dozen.”
She paused. Gunnie had always spoken slowly, but now her words crept from her as those who still live creep from the hulk of a wreck. “Yes, I can see two Severians, even if they’re just what I can remember. One’s the Severian I grabbed one time and kissed. He’s gone, but he was a handsome man in spite of his scarred face and lameness, and the gray in his hair.”
“He remembered your kiss,” I said. “He’d kissed many women, but he’d not often been kissed himself.”
“And the other one’s the Severian who was my lover, when I was a girl and newly signed. It was for his sake I kissed you then and fought for you later, the only real person fighting for you among the phantoms. I stabbed my old mates for him, even though I knew you didn’t remember me.” She rose. “You don’t know where we are, neither of you.”
Burgundofara said, “It seems to be a waiting room, but nobody’s using it but us.”
“I meant where the ship is. We’re outside the circle of Dis.”
I said, “Once I was told by a man who knew much of the future that a woman I sought was aboveground. I thought he meant merely that she was still alive. The ship’s always been outside the circle of Dis.”
“You know what I mean. When I came on board with you, I thought we had a long voyage ahead of us. But why should they — Apheta and Zak — have done that? The ship’s leaving eternity now, slowing down so the tender can find her. Until she slows down, she isn’t really a ship at all, did you know? We’re like a wave, or a shout going through the universe.”
“No,” I told her. “I didn’t. And I can hardly believe it.”
“What you believe makes a difference sometimes,” Gunnie said. “But not every time. That’s something I’ve learned here. Severian, I told you one time why I kept on sailing. Do you remember?”
I glanced at Burgundofara. “I thought perhaps…”
Gunnie shook her head. “To be what I was again, but myself. You must remember yourself when you really were her age. Are you the same person now?”
As clearly as if he were in that chamber of tears with us, I saw the young journeyman striding along, his fuligin cloak billowing behind him and the dark cross of Terminus Est rising above his left shoulder. “No,” I admitted. “I became another long ago, and another after that.”
She nodded. “So I’m going to stay here. Maybe here, when there’s only one of me, it’ll happen. You and Burgundofara are going back to Urth.”
She turned and left us. I tried to rise, but Burgundofara pulled me down again, and I was too weak to resist. “Let Gunnie go,” she said. “It’s already happened to you. Let her have her chance.” The door swung shut.
“She’s you,” I gasped.
“Then let me have mine. I’ve seen what I’ll be later. Is it still wrong, when you do that, to feel sorry for yourself?” There were tears in her eyes.
I shook my head. “If you don’t weep for her, who will?”
“You are.”
“But not for that reason. She was a true friend, and I haven’t had many.”
Burgundofara said, “I see now why all the faces cry. This is a hall made for crying.”
A new voice murmured, “For those who come and go.” I turned to see two masked Hierodules, and because I was not expecting them, it took me a moment to recognize Barbatus and Famulimus. It was Famulimus who had spoken, and I shouted for joy. “My friends! Are you coming with us?”
Famulimus said, “We only came to bring you here. Tzadkiel sent us for you, but you were gone, Severian. Tell me if you will see us more.”
“Many times,” I told her. “Good-bye, Famulimus.”
“You know our nature, that is plain. We greet you then, and say farewell.”
Barbatus added, “The hatches will open when Ossipago dogs down the door. You both have amulets of air?”
I took mine from my pocket and put it on. Burgundofara produced a similar necklace.
“Then, like Famulimus, I greet you,” Barbatus said, and stepped backward through the doorway, which closed after him.
The paired doors at the end of the room opened almost at once; the tears of the masks vanished as they fell, then dried altogether. Beyond the open doors shone the black curtain of night, hung from star to star.
“We have to go,” I said to Burgundofara, then realized she could not hear and moved near enough to take her hand, at which there was no longer any need for speech. Together we left the ship, and it was only when I paused at the threshold and turned to look back that it struck me I had never known her true name, if she had one, and that three of the masks were the faces of Zak, Tzadkiel, and her captain.
The tender waiting for us was far bigger than the little craft that had brought me to the surface of Yesod, as large as that which had carried me to the ship from Urth. And indeed, I think it likely that it was the same vessel.
“Sometimes they bring the big one in a good bit closer than this,” the hand detailed to guide us confided as we came aboard. “Only they can’t help getting between somebody’s eyes and a few stars when they do. So you’ll be about a day with us.”
I asked her to point out Urth’s Sun to me, and she obliged. He was a mere dot of crimson over the rail, and all his worlds, even Dis, were invisible save as specks that darkened when they crossed his sullen face.
I tried to indicate the faint white star that was a part of me; but the hand could not make it out, and Burgundofara looked frightened. Soon we walked through the portal of the tender and into the deckhouse.
Chapter XXVII — The Return to Urth
I HAD NOT been ceratin Burgundofara and I would be lovers; but we were assigned a single cabin (one perhaps a tenth the size of the stateroom I had occupied on my final night aboard the ship), and when I embraced and disrobed her she did not object. I found her less skillful far than Gunnie, though of course no virgin. How strange to think that Gunnie and I had lain together only once.
Her younger self told me afterward that no man had treated her gently before, kissed me for it, and fell asleep in my arms. I had never thought myself a temperate lover; I lay awake for some time, meditating upon it and listening, as once I had promised myself I would, to the centuries dashed against the hull.
Or perhaps they were merely years, the years of my life. I had thought at first, when I felt my mended leg beneath me, and later when I had shaved my strange new face in the stateroom, that they had somehow been lifted from me, as Gunnie had hoped hers would be lifted from her. Now I understood that it was not so.
It was only that the damage done by some nameless Ascian’s spear, by Agia’s palmed claws and the blood bat’s teeth, had been undone; I was the man I would have been without those (and perhaps other) wounds, and thus it was that my face was the face of that strange being — f
or what being can be stranger than oneself, or act more inexplicably? I was Apu-Punchau, whom I had seen resurrected in the stone town. To me it had seemed youth, and it left me mourning for the years I might have had. Perhaps someday I will board Tzadkiel’s ship once more, to search for true youth as Gunnie has; but if I am carried to Yesod again, I will remain there if I am suffered to do so. In centuries, perhaps, that air might wash the years from me.
As I contemplated them and the few that came before them, it seemed to me that my acts toward women had depended not upon my will, but upon their attitude toward me. I had been brutal enough with the khaibit Thecla of the House Azure, then as mild and clumsy as any untouched boy with the real Thecla in her cell; fevered at first with Dorcas, quick and clumsy with Jolenta (whom I might have been said to have raped, though I believed then and believe still that she wished it). Of Valeria I have said too much already.
Yet it cannot be thus for all men, since many act in the same way toward all women; and it may not even be so for me.
I dozed, thinking of all these things — and woke to find myself upon my other side and Burgundofara no longer in my arms, dozed again, woke again, and rose, unable to sleep more and longing, though I could not have said why, for a glimpse of the White Fountain. As quietly as I could, I put on the necklace and made my way on deck.
The endless night of the void was almost vanquished. The shadows of the masts, and my own shadow too, seemed drawn upon the planks in the blackest paint, and the Old Sun had grown from a faint star to a disk as large as Lune. His light made the White Fountain appear farther and weaker than ever. Urth had ceased to streak across his crimson face, but hung just beyond the bowsprit, spinning like a top.
The officer of the watch came to speak to me, telling me I had better go below. Not, I think, because I was in any actual danger, but because it made him uneasy to have someone on deck who was not under his command. I told him I would, but that I wanted an interview with the captain of this vessel, and that my companion and I were hungry.