by Gene Wolfe
Saba grinned at Auk. “I don’t understand this either, but I like it.”
“Of course you do,” Silk told her, “and so will Auk. We all should, because it will help every one of us.”
He turned back to Auk. “A small ceremony at which you return General Saba’s sword might be appropriate. Would you like that?”
Auk shook his head.
“It wasn’t taken from her, in any event. It’s still in that box at the foot of her bed, she tells me.”
Nettle displayed her needler. “Can I put this up?”
Auk snapped, “Keep it!”
“A very small ceremony, then — here and now. Would you get out your sword for me, General? I’ll give it to Auk, who will give it back to you. You should wear it thereafter. It will hearten your troopers, I’m confident.”
Auk declared, “We’re not giving the slug guns back.”
“Not now, at least. That will depend upon whether there are arms on the craft the Crew provides you, though I imagine there will be.”
Horn mopped his forehead. “Nobody understands this except you, Calde.”
“It’s simple enough. Neither General Saba nor I desire a war between Viron and Trivigaunte. We Vironese have seized this airship, the pride of its city.”
Horn looked to Nettle, who said, “They’d seized as.”
“Exacily. Another reason for war, which General Saba and I wish to prevent. The solution is obvious — our freedom for the airship.”
“We’re free now!”
“Nobody can be truly free without peace. Consider the alternative. When we returned to Viron, Generalissimo Siyuf would try to recapture this airship by force, while General Mint and Generalissimo Oosik tried to prevent her; it would cost five hundred lives the first day — at least that many, and perhaps more.”
Saba told Nettle, “You’re going to have to wait a little before you get a tour of Trivigaunte. When he wanted to know if I’d take you home if I got my airship back, I was too surprised to say anything. But I will, and let Auk here and the rabble we loaded first out at Mainframe, if that’s what he wants.” She bent over her footlocker. “Some of you are afraid I’m going to cross you. All of you, except your Calde, most likely.”
Auk grunted.
She straightened up, holding a sharply curved saber with a gem-studded hilt. “This is the sword of honor the Rani awarded me last year, and I’m proud of it. Maybe I haven’t worn it as much as I ought to for fear something might happen to it.”
Oreb whistled, and Nettle told Saba, “It’s beautiful!”
Saba smiled at Auk. “The girl let me keep it. I told her about it, and she said leave it where it is, Auk won’t mind.”
He muttered, “I’d like mine back. That Colonel’s got it.”
“If you come back with us, I’ll try to get it for you.”
“No cut!” Oreb hopped from Silk’s shoulder to Saba’s to examine the sword more closely.
She drew it and took a half step backward, holding it at eye level with both hands grasping the blade. “By this sword I swear that as long as Calde Silk’s on my airship, I’ll do whatever he tells me, and when I land him and his friends at their city it will be as passengers, and not prisoners.”
Silk nodded. “On the terms you have described, General, we return command to you.”
“You’re going to let me talk to the Palace on the glass and tell them what we’re doing?”
“If you choose to. You are in command.”
Saba lowered her sword. “Then if I break my oath, you can take this and break it.”
She led them through the gondola to the airy compartment from which Silk had climbed to the deck. It held cabinets, a sizable table, and two leather seats; there was a glass on the wall, next to the door. “This is the chartroom,” Saba told Silk, “the nerve center of my airship, where our navigational instruments and maps are. There’s a speaking tube that runs through officers’ quarters to the cockpit. Do you know about those? Like a glass, but only to the one place and all you can do is talk.”
“This’s where you ought to be,” Auk said, but Silk shook his head.
Saba pointed. “Right up there’s the hatch. We go up to take the angle between the ship and the sun, mostly. Now it should be zero.” She swallowed. “I’ll check it as soon as I talk to the Palace.”
Horn touched Silk’s arm. “Don’t go back, Calde. Please?”
Auk asked, “You were up there, huh? Somebody nearly got killed is what I heard.”
“He was going to jump off,” Horn told Auk. “I grabbed him and I guess I got him back, only I don’t remember, just sort of wrestling, and the roof gone, and music.” Puzzled, he stared at Silk. “Someplace down there was having a concert, I guess.”
“I saw the evil in the whorl,” Silk explained. “I thought I knew it, when I actually had no idea. A few days ago, I began to see it clearly.”
He waited for someone to speak, but no one did.
“An hour ago, I saw it very clearly indeed; and it was horrible. What was worse was that instead of focusing on the evil in myself, as I should have, I gave my attention to the evil in others. I would have told you then that I saw a great deal in Horn, for example. I still do.”
“Calde, I never said—”
“That was utterly, utterly wrong. I don’t mean that the evil isn’t there — it is, and it always will be because it is ineradicable; but seeing it alone, not merely Horn’s evil but everyone else’s too, did something to me far worse than anything Horn himself would ever do, I’m sure — it blinded me to good. Seeing only evil, I wanted with all my heart to reunite myself with the Outsider. That would itself have been an evil act, but Horn saved me from it.”
“I’m so glad.” Nettle looked at Horn with shining eyes.
“Just by coming up on the roof of this gondola, really. For Horn’s sake, I won’t go there again, though it’s such a marvelous thing to stand in the sky smiling down at the whorl that I find it difficult to renounce it; merely by standing there, I came to understand how Sciathan feels about flying.”
Auk cleared his throat. “I want to tell you about that clamp. All right if I do it now, before she talks to ’em back in Trivigaunte?”
“You found it, I assume.”
“Yeah, only that wasn’t a fuel hose. It was a lube hose.”
Saba’s eyes opened wide, “What!”
Auk ignored her. “The clamp cut the flow to where they got hot and seized. It didn’t show on the gauge up front ’cause it just measures tank temperature. The tank was all right and the pump was running, but there wasn’t much getting through. We got Number Seven busted loose, and maybe we can fix the rest.”
“They’ll never be as good as they were.” Saba sounded disgusted.
“They weren’t anyhow,” Auk told her. “I made a couple little improvements already.”
Oreb eyed them both. “Fish heads?”
“I feel the same way myself,” Silk announced. “If I’m to live after all, I’d like something to eat.”
Saba stepped to the glass and clapped; it grew luminous, as the monitor’s gray face coalesced. At once dancing flecks of color replaced it — peach, pink, and an etherial blue that deepened until it was nearly black.
Silk fell to his knees; for him the sunlit chartroom and its occupants vanished.
“Silk?” The face in the glass was innocent and sensual, preternaturally lovely. “Silk, wouldn’t you like to be Pas? We’d be together then… Silk.”
He bowed his head, unable to speak.
“They can scan you at Mainframe. As I was scanned, Silk, with him. He held my hand…”
Silk found that he was staring up at her; she smiled, and his spirit melted.
“You’ll go on with your life. Silk. Just as it is. You’d be Pas too. And he would be you. Look…”
The face lovelier than any mortal woman’s dispersed like smoke. In its place stood a bronze-limbed man with rippling muscles and two heads.
One was Silk’s.
Chapter 16 — Exodus from the Long Sun
They floated in an infinite emptiness lit by a remote, spool-shaped black sun: Sciathan the Flier, Patera Incus and Patera Remora, the old woman who called herself Moly, Nettle and Horn, the calde’s wife, and the calde. The shrinking red dot that was the lander winked out.
“Good-bye, Auk my noctolater.” The speaker seemed near, though there was a note in his voice that had traveled far; it was a man’s voice, deep, and heavy with sorrow.
“Good-bye, Auk,” Silk repeated; until he heard his own voice, he did not realize he had spoken aloud. “Good-bye, sister. Good-bye, Gib. Farewell.”
Maytera Marble murmured, “Heartbroken. Poor General Mint will be simply heartbroken.”
“He goes to a better place than any you have seen.”
“I disliked him, though the harlot Chenille was not devoid of pre-eminent qualities. Notwithstanding, I feel bereft…”
So softly that Silk supposed that only he could hear her, Hyacinth inquired, “Is that where? Those little dots?”
“To one or the other,” the god replied. “The blue whorl or the green. Auk’s lander cannot carry them to both.”
“Auk — ah. Devoted to you, eh? As we, um, all. He was, er, reformed? Devout. If you are not, um, hey?”
There was no reply. The distant sparks faded. Hyacinth gripped Silk’s arm, pointing to the black, spool-shaped sun behind them, from which light streamed. “What is that? Is it — is it…? The lander came out of it.”
“That is our Whorl” Sciathan wiped his eyes.
“That little thing?”
Already the little thing was fading; Silk relaxed. “You liked Auk, didn’t you? So did I. If I live as long as His Cognizance, I won’t forget meeting him in the Cock, sipping brandy while I tried to make out his face in the shadows.”
“When I saw Aer die, I did not weep. That pain was too deep for weeping. Auk is not dead, but no one will call me Upstairs any more. I weep for that.”
“Wish that he stated, um, unequivocally, eh?” Remora had already activated his propulsion module and was drifting toward the circular aperture. “Is — um — Great Pas satisfied? Is this adequate? Sufficient?”
Silk and Hyacinth followed him. Silk said, “If he were, we Cargo would return to our herds and fields. Auk has bought us a brief respite, that’s all. Pas will not be satisfied until the last person in the whorl has gone. It has served its purpose.”
They emerged into the penumbra, shade that seemed blinding light after the darkness. “I don’t see how Tartaros showed us the whorl from outside,” Hyacinth murmured. “There can’t be an eye out there, can there?” When Silk did not reply, “I don’t like not walking. My thighs are getting fat, I can feel it.”
Maytera Marble overtook them. “They can’t be, dear, you don’t eat anything. I’m worried about you.”
“I don’t like people seeing up my gown, either. I know it sounds silly, but I don’t. Every time I feel like somebody’s looking up there my thighs swell up and never go back down.”
“There is no up,” Incus called as he accelerated toward them, “nor is there any down. All is a realm of light.”
“The, um, deceased.” Remora glanced back at him, vaguely worried. “How shall we explain that, Your Eminence? The, um, faithful, eh? They expect the — ah — dear decedent.”
“Do you desire a visitation by your dead?” Sciathan asked.
Silk said flimly, “No.” Hyacinth’s jaw dropped, and for a moment her sculptured face looked foolish.
Silk decelerated to allow Sciathan to catch up. “I speak only for myself. I’ve met mine, and know and love them. The temptation to rejoin them would be too great. I know your offer was well intended but no, I do not.”
“There is no physicality,” the little Flier explained. “Mainframe recreates them and beams the data to one’s mind.”
“Moly, would you escort Hyacinth back to the airship for me, please? I have to confer with Sciathan.” Silk took the Flier’s arm.
Horn asked, “Can we come?” Silk hesitated, then shook his head; Oreb launched himself from Horn’s shoulder to flap after them upside down.
One by one the pilot was testing the engines; Horn counted as each coughed, roared to life, and declined to a hum.
Nettle asked, “Aren’t you going to knock?”
He would have preferred that she do it, but could not say so. “What on?”
“On the frame, I guess. They’re pretty solid.”
Silk pushed the curtain to one side as Horn raised his fist. “Hyacinth isn’t here. Were you looking for me?”
Both nodded.
“Very well, what can I do for you?”
Horn cleared his throat. “You promised me you wouldn’t go up on the roof again, Calde. Remember?”
“Of course. I’ve kept my promise.”
“Me and Nettle have been up there,” Horn said, and Oreb applauded with joyful wings.
Nettle said, “It’s not scary when you can float.” Her eyes appealed to Horn, who added, “We want you to go up with us.”
“You’re releasing me from my promise?”
Horn nodded. “Yeah.”
“Say yes, Horn.” Silk looked thoughtful. “You bear the repute of your palaestra.”
“Yes, Calde. Calde, is Patera Remora really going to be our new augur?”
“No.” Absentmindedly, Silk glanced around the cubicle for his propulsion module before remembering that he had returned it. “He cannot become your new augur, since he is augur there already. He’ll take up his duties when we get home. How do you keep from floating away? That might not be frightening, I’ll allow; but I would think it serious.”
“Bird save!”
“Yes, if I’m adrift you must tow me to safety.”
“There’s supplies in the last gondola,” Horn explained as Silk pushed off from the doorway. “We found a coil of rope in there. The table in the chartroom’s bolted down, so we tie onto the legs.”
“It’s better than having that thing on your back,” Nettle told Silk. “You just float around without having to worry about anything. When you’re tired of it, you pull yourself in.”
Horn added, “But I don’t get tired of it.”
“There’s something you want me to see.” They had floated through the officers’ sleeping quarters; Silk stopped, bulging the canvas partition, and opened the door to the messroom.
“Just — just everything you can see from out there.”
“Something to ask, in that case.”
In the chartroom, Silk knotted the finger-thick line about his waist in accordance with Horn’s instructions and pushed off from the table, out through the open hatch.
The airship had revolved, whether from the torque of its engines or the pressure of some passing breeze, until Mainframe stood upright as a wall, its black slabs of colossal mechanism jutting toward them and its Pylon an endless bridge that dwarfed the airship and vanished into night.
Horn gestured. “See, Calde? We don’t have to sit on the edge, but we can go over there if you want to. Way, way down you can see the Mountains That Look At Mountains, I guess. It’s kind of blue at first, then so bright you can’t be sure.”
Nettle emerged from the hatch. “I still don’t understand what Mainframe is, Calde. Just all those things with the lights running over them? And why do they have roofs here if it can’t rain? How would they get the rain to come down?”
“This is Mainframe,” Silk told her. “You are seeing it.”
“The big square things?”
“With what underlies its meadows and lawns; Mainframe is dispersed among them all. Imagine millions of millions of tiny circuits like those in a card — billions of billions, actually. The warmth of each is less than the twinkle of a firefly; but there are so many that if they were packed together their own heat would destroy them. They would become a second sun. As things are it is always summer here, thanks to those circuits.”
“They would, if they were returned to their proper places in a lander. We will have to return some ourselves soon.”
Horn was watching Silk narrowly. “Did Sciathan tell you all that?”
“Not in so many words, but he said enough to let me infer the rest. What was it you wanted to ask?”
“A whole bunch of stuff. You know, Calde, for my book. Is it all right if I call you Calde?”
“Of course. Or Patera, or Silk, or even Patera Calde, which is what His Cognizance calls me. As you like.”
“I heard Chenille tell Moly that when she was Kypris she made you call her Chenille anyway. It must have seemed funny.”
Nettle said, “I’m not writing a book, Calde, but I’ve got stuff I want to ask, too. I’m helping Horn with his, I guess. I’ll have to, probably. Did you make the dead people come back and talk to us like they did?”
“Mainframe did that, Nettle.” Silk smiled. “Believe me, I’m unable to compel it to do anything. I asked Sciathan to ask it on our behalf, but he explained that it was unnecessary. Mainframe knows everything that takes place here; as soon as I formulated my request, Mainframe took it under consideration. I’m delighted that it was granted, immensely grateful.”
“But not back home.” Nettle waved vaguely at the deck some ten cubits below. “It doesn’t hear everything there.”
“No, it doesn’t; but it discovers more than I would have believed. Since Echidna’s theophany, I’ve assumed the gods knew only what they saw and heard through Sacred Windows and glasses, which seems to be very near the truth. Those are Mainframe’s principal sources, too; but it has others — the Fliers’ data, for example.”
Horn said, “I’ve got a tough one, Calde. I’m not trying to show you up or anything.
“Of course not. What is it?”
“Tartaros told Auk the short sun whorl would be like ours, only there wouldn’t be any people, or no people like us. Auk told Chenille, and I asked her. She said it means there’ll be grass and rocks and flowers, only not like we’re used to. Why is that?”