Epiphany of the Long Sun

by Gene Wolfe

  Sand looked from Violet to Abanja, then at Siyuf. "Only Councillor Potto's got it in for him, and he knows it. He was like a brigadier back before the insurrection, so he had to be one of the Ayuntamiento's floor bolts. But when Caldé Silk came along, he went over right away and got made head of the whole host of Viron. He knows Councillor Potto, so he's got to know how pissed off he is about that."

  Siyuf, who had been slouching in her chair, straightened up. "You desire me to set free your Caldé to save your Viron, so much is plain. I do not care about your Viron."

  Violet said, "I do, a little. Besides, I know his wife."

  "You're thinking it's going to go back the way it was," Sand told Siyuf. "Them in the tunnels and us on top. Stuff it. Like we say, there's one thing they're together on."

  He paused and Abanja said, "That we must return to our own city, I'm sure. He's probably right, Generalissimo."

  "I am, only you're not. What they're saying, all four of them, is that they can't let you go back. Or won't. To start off, they don't think you'll go."

  Sand wanted for Siyuf to speak, but she did not.

  "So they're thinking let's take care of this, wipe 'em out-that's you, sir-before they can get reinforcements from Trivigaunte."

  Hammerstone declared, "The Caldé wouldn't do that, or I don't think so, sir. They're getting set now, getting General Mint's troopers together again, and lining up the Guard and getting the Army into position. If we weren't detached, we'd be with it this minute. You got maybe a day, maybe two. But if you let the Caldé go, he'll put a lid on it."

  "You are wise," Siyuf said. "I agree. Colonel Abanja, you have our friend Caldé Silk? Bring him to my Juzgado, I meet him there. This holy woman Marble, and the holy man, also. Saba's airship have not depart?"

  "I'm afraid it left an hour ago, Generalissimo," Abanja sounded regretful. "I'll contact General Saba on the glass, however, and convey your request that she return to Viron."

  Hammerstone edged closer, his hard features and scratched paint incongruous among so much satin, porcelain, and polished rosewood. "We don't want a request. We want a order. Tell them to turn around!"

  "This I cannot do," Siyuf explained. "When the airship has leave Viron, it come under control of our War Minister in Trivigaunte. She will send it back, I think, when I ask."

  "Get her now. Tell her!"

  "This I cannot either. Monitor, this is sufficient of Abanja. She know what she is to do."

  Siyuf turned back to Sand and Hammerstone. "Abanja must speak to General Saba, then Saba to our War Minister. While they speak I must make prepares for this attack. It may be we attack first. This we see."

  As Abanja's face faded to gray, Violet murmured, "I'd help if I could, only-"

  "Sure, Plutonium." Slinging his slug gun, Sand stooped, grasped an astonished Siyuf about the waist, and tossed her headfirst onto his broad steel shoulder. "You come too. You can keep her company."

  Shale caught Violet's arm. "You make one more for us to trade, see? That don't ever hurt."

  Sitting crosslegged on one of the ridiculous bladders that served as mattresses aboard the airship, Silk found it almost impossible to remain upright without holding onto the swaying, whispering bamboo grill that substituted for a floor. "You're wonderfully cheerful," he told Auk. "I admire it more than I can say. Cheerfulness is a sacred duty." He swallowed. "A cheerful agreement with the will of the gods is a-a-"

  "I been sick already," Auk told him. "Had the dry heaves, too. Worst thing since I busted my head down in the tunnels."

  The Flier smiled impishly. "I heard no cheerful agreement to the wishes of Mainframe at that time, however. Cursing is not a new thing to me, and my own tongue is a superior vehicle to this Common Tongue we speak. But never have I heard curses such as that."

  Face down and miserable behind Auk, Chenille muttered, "Just don't talk about it, all right?"

  "I do not. Instead I talk of cursing, a different thing. Should I say in this Common Tongue, may your pubic hair grow longer than your lies and become entangled in the working of a mill, it is but laughable. In my own tongue, it soars to the sun and leaves each hearer awed. Yet the cursing of Auk was new to me, grand and hideous as the birth of devils."

  Silk managed to smile. "I have been sick, actually. I was sick in the cage that swings so horribly in the wind, and we were so tightly packed into it that I couldn't help soiling myself and Hyacinth, and Patera Remora, too; they bore it with such fortitude and good will that I felt worse."

  Hyacinth smiled as she sat down beside him. "You didn't get a whole lot on me, but you filled up one of his shoes. If you're feeling better now, you should take a look around. Gib showed me, and it's pretty interesting."

  "Not yet." Silk found his handkerchief and wiped his nose.

  "It's not like the Juzgado at all, no bars on the windows."

  "Sure." Auk winked. "We can climb right out."

  "I opened one and looked outside. Not long, because it's so cold. I wish you could see better through the white stuff."

  "That's sheep's hide stretched and scraped till it's real thin," Auk told her. "When you get it the way you want it, you rub fat on it, and it lets the daylight in. They use it in the country 'cause they can make it themselves, but glass costs. It's a lot lighter, too, so that's why they got it here.

  "See, Patera, even with this as big as it is, everything's got to be real light, 'cause it's lifting the guns and those charges they blew up the Alambrera with, and food and water, and palm oil for the engines. That's going to make it easy for us."

  "To do what?"

  Gib sat down so violently that Silk feared the grill would give way. "To hook it, Patera. We got to. Only I wish I had Bongo here. He'd be abram about this place."

  Chenille groaned. "You're all abram. Me, too."

  "This ain't bad," Auk told her. "See, Patera, after they loaded us on in the city, it had to go northeast to get you, lousewise into the wind. It was doing this." He illustrated with gestures. "We all got pretty sick. Only now-"

  "I did not," Sciathan objected. "I am accustomed to the vagaries of winds."

  "Me neither," Hyacinth told Auk. "I never have been."

  "You weren't on it then. This is nicer, 'cause there's a north wind and we're heading south. That's why you can't hear the engines much. They don't have to work hard."

  "We're out over the lake," Hyacinth told Silk, who felt (but did not say) that it would be a blessing if the airship crashed into the water.

  "Thing is, Patera, Terrible Tartaros is setting this lay up for us. It's like we got somebody inside. The fat councillor said they'd do it in a month, remember? Then I said I got the best thieves in the city, we can do it quicker. I was thinking two or three weeks, 'cause we'd have to get clothes like these troopers' and get pals up so they could pull up the rest-"

  Spider joined the group around Silk, sliding across the woven bamboo as he shook his head.

  "You got a better way? Dimber here. I don't say mine's best, just that's how I was thinking. The queer was it'd have to be mostly morts, likely all morts. Wouldn't be rum, finding morts that wouldn't up tail if there was a row up here."

  "We'd be too sick." Chenille sat up, pale under her tan.

  Silk began, "If this is indeed the hand of Tartaros-"

  "Got to be. What I was saying, I was figuring maybe three weeks, and the fat one maybe a month. Then Upstairs here says we only got a couple days."

  Sciathan nodded.

  "Tartaros heard it and he says, Auk needs a hand. Willet, you tell the Trivigauntis Auk's knot's going to be at the Cock. They nab us and haul us up. How long was it? Under a day. So right there's the difference between a god and a buck like me. Twenty-one to one."

  For a moment there was silence, fined by the distant talk of the other prisoners, the whispered complaints of the bamboo, the almost inaudible hum of the engines, and a hundred nameless groanings and creakings. Silk said, "They have slug guns, Auk. And needlers, I suppose. You-we-have nothin
g."

  "Wrong, Patera. We got Tartaros. You watch."

  Chenille stood up; sitting at her feet, Silk found himself a trifle shocked by her height. She said, "I'm feeling better, I guess. Want to show me around, Hy? I'd like to see it."

  "Sure. Wait till you look outside."

  He made himself stand. "May I come? I'll try not to…" He groped for words, reminding himself of Remora.

  "Puke," Chenille supplied.

  "See their beds?" Hyacinth kicked the side of a bladder. "There's four rows, and twenty-five in a row, so this gondola's meant for a hundred pterotroopers. Gondola's what you call this thing we're in, Gib says."

  Silk nodded.

  "Look through the floor and you can see the guns. Their floor's got to be solid, I guess, so it's iron or anyhow some kind of a metal. There's three on each side, and the barrels stick out through those holes. That's why it's so cold here, it comes up through the floor."

  "How do you get them open?" Chenille was wresting with the fastenings of a port.

  Silk rapped the wall with his knuckles. "Wood."

  "You've got to pull out both pins, Chen. You're right, they're wood, bent like on a boat, but really thin."

  Chenille slid back the frame of greased parchment to reveal what looked like a snow-covered plain bright with sun.

  "There's another gondola ahead of ours," Hyacinth told her, "and two in back. You can see them if you stick your head out. I don't know why they don't just have one big, long one."

  "It would break, I imagine," Silk told her absently. "This airship must bend a good deal at times." He looked out as she had suggested, peering above him as well as to left and right.

  "Remember when we were up in the air in that floater? I was scared to death." Her thigh pressed his with voluptuous warmth, and his elbow was somehow pushing her breast. "But you weren't scared at all! This is kind of like that."

  "I was terrified." Silk backed away, fighting with all his strength against the thoughts tugging at his mind.

  Chenille put her head through the port as he had; she spoke and Hyacinth said, "Because we're blowing along, or that's what I think. Going with it, you can't feel anything."

  Chenille retreated. "It's beautiful, really beautiful, only I can't see the lake. You said we were over it, but I guess the fog's too thick. I was hoping to see the place Auk and me bumped out to, that little shrine." She turned to Silk. "Is this how the gods see everything?"

  "No," he said. The gods who were in some incomprehensible fashion contained in Mainframe saw the whorl only through their Sacred Windows, he felt sure, no matter what augurs might say.

  His sweating hands fumbled the edge of the open port.

  Through Windows and the eyes of those whom they possessed, although Tartaros could not even do that, Auk said; born blind, Tenebrous Tartaros could never see.

  Over the snowy plain the long sun stretched from Mainframe to the end of the whorl-a place unimaginable, though the end of the whorl must come very soon.

  Through Sacred Windows and other eyes, and perhaps through glasses, too. No, certainly through glasses when they chose, since Kypris had spoken through Orchid's glass, had manifested the Holy Hues in Hyacinth's glass while Hyacinth slept.

  "The Outsider," he told Chenille. "I think the Outsider must be able to see the whorl this way. The rest of the gods can't-not even Pas. Perhaps that's what's wrong with them." A shoelace had knotted, as it always did when he tried to take off his shoes quickly. He jerked the shoe off anyway.

  Hyacinth asked, "What are you doing?"

  "Earning you, I hope." He pulled off his stockings and stuffed them into the toes of his shoes, recalling the chill waters of the tunnels and Lake Limna.

  "You don't have to earn me! You've already got me, and if you didn't I wouldn't charge you."

  He had her, perhaps, but he had not deserved her-he despaired of explaining that. "Doctor Crane and I shared a room at the lake. I doubt that I've mentioned it."

  "I don't care what you did with him. It doesn't matter."

  "We did nothing. Not the way you mean." Memories flooded back. "I don't believe he was inclined that way; certainly I'm not, though many augurs are. He told me you'd urged him to give me the azoth, and said something I'd forgotten until now. He said, 'When I was your age, it would have had me swinging on the rafters.'"

  Hyacinth told Chenille, "Half the time I don't understand a thing he says."

  She grinned. "Does anybody?"

  "One does, at least. I looked out the window of that room just as we've been looking out this opening." Silk put his foot on its edge and stepped up and out, holding the upper edge to keep from falling. "I was afraid the Guard would come."

  He had feared the Civil Guard, and had been willing to try to pull himself up onto the roof of the Rusty Lantern to escape it; yet very little had been at stake: if he had been taken, he would have been killed at worst.

  The roof of the gondola was just out of reach; but the side slanted inward, as the sides of large boats did.

  Much, much more was at stake now, because Auk's faith might kill them all. How many pterotroopers were on this airship? A hundred? At least that many, and perhaps twice that many.

  Hyacinth was looking out at him, saying something he could not understand and did not wish to hear; her hand or Chenille's grasped his left ankle. Absently, he kicked to free it as he waited, gauging the rhythm of the airship's slight roll.

  Auk and his followers would wait, biding their time until shadelow probably, if shadelow came before the airship reached Trivigaunte-break the hatch that barred them from its body, climb the rope ladder through the canvas tube that he could just glimpse, and strike with a rush, breaking necks and gouging out eyes…

  At the next roll. It was useless to wait. Hyacinth would have called for help already; Auk and Gib would grapple his legs and pull him inside.

  He jumped, caught the edge of the top of the gondola, and to his delight found it a small coaming. In some remote place, someone was screaming. The noise entered his consciousness as he scrambled frantically up the clinker-laid planks, hooking his leg over the coaming when the slow roll favored him most.

  A final effort, and he was up, lying on the safe side of the coaming and almost afraid to look at it. Rolling onto his back put half a cubit between him and the edge; he pressed his chest with both hands and shut his eyes, trying to control the pounding of his heart.

  Almost he might have been on top of Blood's wall, with its embedded sword blades at his shoulder. Almost, except that a fall from Blood's wall would have been survivable-he had survived one, in fact.

  He sat up and wiped his face with the hem of his robe.

  How foolish he had been not to take off his robe and leave it with his shoes! The gondola had been cold, the draft from the port colder still; and so he had kept his robe, and never so much as considered that he might have lightened himself by some small amount by discarding it. Yet it was comforting to have it now, comforting to draw its soft woolen warmth around him while he considered what to do next.

  Stand up, though if he stood he might fall. Muttering a prayer to the Outsider, he stood.

  The top of the gondola was a flat and featureless deck, painted mummy-brown or perhaps merely varnished. Six mighty cables supported the gondola, angled out and stabbing upward into the airship's fabric-covered body. Forward, the canvas tube snaked up like an intestine; aft was a hatch secured with lashings, a hatch that would return him to the gondola-that would, equally, permit those inside it to leave. Once again he pictured the stealthy advance and wild charge, a score of young pterotroopers dead, the rest firing, disorganized at first.

  Soon, shouted orders would render them a coherent body. A few Vironese would have weapons by then, and they might kill more pterotroopers; but they would be shot down within a minute or two, and the rest shot as well. Auk and Chenille and Gib would die, and with them Horn and Nettle and even poor Maytera Marble, who called herself Moly now. And not long after th
at, unless he and Hyacinth were lucky indeed-

  "Hello, Silk."

  He whirled. Mucor was sitting on the deck, her shins embraced by her skeletal arms; he gasped, and felt the pain of his wound deep in his chest.

  She repeated her greeting.

  "Hello." Another gasp. "I'd nearly forgotten you could do this. You did it in the tunnel, sitting on the water-I should have remembered."

  She bared yellow teeth. "Mirrors are better. Mirrors scare more. This isn't, is it? I'm just here."

  "It was certainly frightening to hear your voice." Silk sat too, grateful for the chance.

  "I didn't mean to. I wanted to talk to you, but not where there were so many people."

  He nodded. "There would have been a riot, I suppose."

  "You were worried about me with so many people gone. My grandfather came to see if I was all right. The old man and the fat woman are taking care of me. He wanted to know where Grandmother and the little augur went, and I told him."

  My grandfather was Hammerstone, clearly; Silk nodded and smiled. "Does the old man have a beard and jump around?"

  "A little beard, yes."

  Xiphias in that case, not His Cognizance; no doubt the fat woman was a friend of Xiphias's, or a servant.

  "I've been eating soup.

  "That's very good-I'm delighted to hear it. Mucor, you possessed General Saba, and there's something that you can tell me that's very, very important to me. When does she expect us to arrive in Trivigaunte?"

  "Tonight."

  Silk nodded, he hoped encouragingly. "Can you tell me how long after shadelow?"

  "About midnight. This will float over the city, and in the morning they'll let you down."

  "Thank you. Auk intends to try to take control of this airship and fly it to Mainframe."

  Mucor looked pleased. "I didn't know that."

  "He won't be able to. He'll be killed, and so will others I like. The only way that I've been-" He heard voices and paused to listen.