by Gene Wolfe
“They have freed the apports.”
“Who has?” My sound leg had at last straightened itself. My lame leg ought to have been easier, because its muscles had shrunk; but I could not summon strength enough to force it down.
“The jibers.”
I felt myself bent forward, as one sometimes is in wresting; Sidero was sitting up. He stood, and in standing shifted my position just enough for my lame leg to straighten. It was easy then to thrust my left arm into his. My right entered what had been his own right arm equally easily, but emerged from the damaged brassard, protected only at the shoulder.
“That’s better,” I said. “Wait a moment.”
He sprang up the stairs instead, able now to take three at a stride.
I halted, turned, and descended again.
“I will kill you for this.”
“For going back for my knife and pistol? I don’t think you should; we may need them.” I stooped and picked them up, the knife with my right hand, the pistol with my left, inside Sidero’s. My belt had half fallen through the grillwork floor; but I retrieved it without difficulty, threaded sheath and holster on it, and buckled it around Sidero’s waist without a thumb’s width to spare.
“Get out!”
I fastened my cloak about his shoulders. “Sidero, I’ve had people inside me too, though you may not believe it. It can be pleasant and useful. Because I’m where I am, we have a right arm. You said you were loyal to the ship. So am I. Are we going to—”
Something pale dropped from the pale mist. Its wings were translucent as the wings of insects, but more flexible than the wings of bats. And they were huge, so wide they wrapped the landing where we stood like the curtains of a catafalque.
Suddenly I could hear again. Sidero had activated the circuits that conveyed sound from his ears to mine; or perhaps he was only too distracted to prevent their functioning. However that might be, I heard the wind that roared around us from those great and ghostly wings, a hiss like the quenching of a thousand blades.
My pistol was in my hand, though I was not aware of having drawn it. I looked frantically for something, head or claws, at which to fire. There was nothing, and yet something gripped my legs, lifting me and Sidero too as a child lifts a doll. I fired at random. A rent — but, oh, how small a rent — appeared in the titanic wings, its edges just defined by a narrow band burned black.
The railing struck my knees. As it did, I fired again and smelled smoke.
It seemed that it was my own arm that burned. I cried out. Sidero was struggling with the winged creature without my volition. He had drawn the hunting knife, and I feared for a moment he had slashed my arm, that the burning pain I felt was that which we feel when sweat is carried to a wound. I thought of turning my pistol on him, then realized that my own hand was in his.
The horror of the Revolutionary gripped me once more; I fought to destroy myself, and I no longer knew whether I was Severian or Sidero, Thecla to live or Thecla to die. We spun, head downward.
We fell.
The terror of it was indescribable. Intellectually, I knew we could fall but slowly in the ship; I was even half-aware that we fell no faster at the lower levels. And yet we were falling, air whistling by faster and faster, the side of the airshaft a dark blur.
All of it had been a dream. How strange it seemed. I had boarded a great ship with decks upon every side, climbed into a metal man. Now I was awake at last, lying on the icy slope of the mountain beyond Thrax, seeing two stars and imagining, half in dream, that they were eyes.
My right arm had shifted too near the fire, but there was no fire. It was the cold, then, that made it burn so. Valeria moved me to softer ground.
The deepest bell in the Bell Tower was ringing. The Bell Tower had risen by night on a column of flame, settling at dawn beside Acis. The iron throat of the great bell shouted to the rocks, and they reverberated with its echoing sound.
Dorcas had played the recording “Deep Bells Offstage.” Had I delivered my final lines? “In future times, so it has long been said, the death of the old sun will destroy Urth. But from its grave will rise monsters, a new people, and the New Sun. Old Urth will flower as a butterfly from its dry husk, and the New Urth shall be called Ushas.” What fanfaron! Exit Prophet.
The winged woman of Father Inire’s book awaited me in the wings. Her hands she clapped once, formally, as a great lady summons her maid. As they parted there appeared between them a point of white light, hot and flaming. It seemed to me that it was my own face, and my face a mask that stared into it.
The old Autarch, who lived in my mind but seldom spoke, muttered through my swollen lips. “Find another…”
A dozen panting breaths had passed before I understood what he had told us: that it was time to surrender this body to death, time for us — time for Severian and Thecla, time for himself and all the rest who stood in his shadow — to take a step toward the shadows ourselves. Time for us to find someone else.
* * *
He lay between two great machines, already splattered with some dark lubricant. I bent, nearly falling, to explain what he must do.
But he was dead, his scarred cheek cold to my touch, his withered leg broken, the white bone thrusting through the skin. With my fingers I closed his eyes.
Someone came with hastening steps. Before they reached me, someone else was already at my shoulder, a hand behind my head. I saw the light of his eyes, smelled the musk of his hairy face. He held a cup to my lips.
I tasted, hoping for wine. It was water; but cold, pure water that tasted better than any wine to me.
A throaty female voice called, “Severian!” and a big sailor crouched at my side. It was not until she spoke again that I realized the voice had been hers. “You’re all right. We were — I was afraid—” She had no words and kissed me instead; as she did, the hairy face kissed us both. Its kiss was quick, but hers went on and on.
It left me breathless. “Gunnie,” I said when she released me at last.
“Now how are you feeling? We were afraid you were going to die.”
“So am I.” I was sitting up now, though it was all I could do to do so. Every joint ached, my head ached worst of all, and my right arm seemed to have been thrust into a fire. The sleeve of my velvet shirt hung in rags, and the skin had been coated with a yellow ointment. “What happened to me?”
“You must have fallen down the spiracle — that’s where we found you. Or anyway, Zak did. He came and got me.” Gunnie jerked her head toward the hairy dwarf who had held the water cup for me. “Before that, I guess you were flashed.”
“Flashed?”
“Burned by an arc when something shorted out. Same thing happened to me. Look.” She was wearing a gray workshirt; now she pulled it down far enough for me to see that the skin between her breasts had been seared an angry red and was smeared with the same ointment. “I was working in the powerhouse. When I got burned, they sent me to the infirmary. They put this stuff on and gave me a tube to use later — I guess that’s why Zak picked me. You’re not up to hearing all this, are you?”
“I suppose not.” The oddly angled walls had begun to turn, circling with a slow dignity like the skulls that had swung about me once.
“Lie down again while I get you something to eat. Zak will keep a watch for jibers. There don’t seem to be any down this far anyway.”
I felt I should ask her a hundred questions. Much more, I wanted to lie down, to sleep if the pain allowed it; and I was lying down and half-asleep before I had time to do more than think about it.
Then Gunnie had returned with a bowl and a spoon. “Atole,” she said. “Eat it.” It tasted like stale bread boiled in milk, but it was warm and filling. I believe I ate most of it before I slept again.
When I woke next, I was no longer so near to agony, though I was yet in pain. My missing teeth were missing still, my mouth and jaw still sore; there was a knot the size of a pigeon’s egg on the side of my head, and the skin of my right arm wa
s beginning to crack despite the ointment. It had been ten years and more since Master Gurloes or one of the journeymen had thrashed me, and I found I was no longer so skilled at dismissing pain as once I had been.
I tried to distract myself with an examination of my surroundings. The place where I lay appeared not so much a cabin as a crevice in some great mechanism, the kind of place where one finds objects that appear to have come from nowhere — but such a place magnified many times. The ceiling was ten ells high at least, and slanted. No door preserved privacy or repelled intruders; an unobstructed passage led from a corner.
I lay on a heap of clean rags near the corner diagonally opposite. When I sat up to look around me, the hairy dwarf Gunnie called Zak appeared from the shadows and crouched beside me. He did not speak, but his posture expressed a concern for my well-being. I said, “I’m all right, don’t worry,” and at that he seemed to relax a bit.
The only light in the chamber came through the door; I used it to examine my nurse as well as I could. He seemed to me not so much a dwarf as a small man — that is to say, there was no marked disproportion between his torso and limbs. His face was not fundamentally different from any other man’s except in being overshadowed by bushy hair and having a luxuriant brown beard and an even more luxuriant mustache, neither of which appeared ever to have been touched by scissors. His forehead was low, his nose somewhat flat, and his chin (so far as it could be guessed at) less than prominent; but many men have such features. He was indeed a man, I should add, and then a completely naked one save for a thick crop of bodily hair; but when he saw me glance at his crotch, he pulled a rag from the pile and knotted it about his waist like an apron.
With some difficulty, I got to my feet and hobbled across the room. He outraced me and planted himself in the doorway. There every line of his body reminded me of a servant I had once watched restraining a drunken exultant; it pleaded with me not to do as I intended, and simultaneously announced its owner’s readiness to restrain me by force if I tried.
I was unfit for force of any sort, and as far as possible from those reckless high spirits in which we are ready to fight our friends when there are no enemies at hand. I hesitated. He pointed down the passage, drawing a finger across his throat in an unmistakable gesture.
“Danger there?” I asked. “You’re probably right. This ship would make some battlefields I’ve seen look like public gardens. All right, I won’t go out.”
My bruised lips made it difficult to talk, but he appeared to have understood me, and after a moment he smiled.
“Zak?” I asked, pointed to him.
He smiled again and nodded.
I touched my chest. “Severian.”
“Severian!” He grinned, showing small, sharp teeth, and performed a little dance of joy. Still joyful, he took my left arm and led me back to the pile of rags.
Though his hand was brown, it seemed faintly luminous in the shadows.
Chapter X — Interlude
“YOU HAD a good rap on the head,” Gunnie said. She was sitting beside me watching me eat stew.
“I know.”
“I ought to have taken you to the infirmary, but it’s dangerous out there. You don’t want to be anywhere other people know about.”
I nodded. “Especially me. Two people have tried to kill me. Perhaps three. Possibly four.”
She looked at me as if she suspected the fall had unsettled my wits.
“I’m quite serious. One was your friend Idas. She’s dead now.”
“Here, have some water. Are you saying Idas was a woman?”
“A girl, yes.”
“And I didn’t know it?” Gunnie hesitated. “You’re not just making it up?”
“It isn’t important. The important thing is that she tried to kill me.”
“And you killed him.”
“No, Idas killed herself. But there is at least one other and perhaps more than one. You weren’t talking about them, though, Gunnie. I think you meant the people Sidero mentioned, the jibers. Who are they?”
She rubbed the skin at the corners of her eyes with her forefingers, the woman’s equivalent of male head scratching. “I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t even know if I understand them myself.”
I said, “Try, Gunnie, please. It may be important.”
Hearing the urgency in my voice, Zak abandoned his self-assigned task of watching for intruders long enough for a concerned glance.
“You know how this ship sails?” Gunnie asked. “Into and out of Time, and sometimes to the end of the universe and farther.”
I nodded, scraping the bowl.
“There are I don’t know how many of us in the crew. It may sound funny to you, but I just don’t. It’s so big, you see. The captain never calls us all together. It would take too long, days of walking just for all of us to get to the same place, and then there’d be nobody doing the work while we were going there and getting back.”
“I understand,” I told her.
“We sign on and they take us to one part or another. And that’s where we stay. We get to know the others who are already there, but there’s lots of others we never see. The forecastle up from here where my cabin is, that’s not the only one. There’s lots of othets. Hundreds and maybe thousands.”
“I asked about the jibers,” I said.
“I’m trying to tell you. It’s possible for somebody, anybody, to lose himself on the ship forever. And I mean Forever, because the ship goes there, and it comes back, and that makes strange things happen to time. Some people get old on the ship and die, but some work a long time and never get any older and make a load of money, until finally the ship makes port on their home, and they see it’s almost the same time there now as when they got on, and they get off, and they’re rich. Some get older for a while then get younger.” She hesitated, afraid for a moment to speak more; then she said, “That’s what’s happened to me.”
“You’re not old, Gunnie,” I told her. It was the truth.
“Here,” she said, and taking my leff hand, she laid it on forehead. “Here I’m old, Severian. So much has happened to me that I want to forget. Not just to forget, I want to be young there again. When you drink or drug, you forget. But what those things did to you is still there, in the way you think. You know what I’m saying?”
“Very well,” I told her. I took my hand from her forehead and held one of hers instead.
“But you see, because those things happen, and sailors know it and talk about it even if most longshore people won’t believe them, the ship gets people who aren’t really sailors and don’t want to work. Or maybe a sailor will fight with an officer and get written up for punishment. Then he’ll go off and join the jibers. We call them that because it’s what you say a boat does when she makes a turn you don’t want — she jibes.”
“I understand,” I said again.
“Some just stay in one place, I think, like we’re staying here. Some travel around looking for money or a fight. Maybe just one comes to your mess, and he has some story. Sometimes so many come nobody wants to give them trouble, so you pretend they’re crew, and they eat, and if you’re lucky they go away.”
“You’re saying that they’re only common seamen, then, who’ve rebelled against the captain.” I brought in the captain because I wanted to ask her about him later.
“No.” She shook her head. “Not always. The crew comes from different worlds, from other star-milks, even, and maybe from other universes. I don’t know about that for sure. But what’s a common seaman to you and me might be somebody pretty strange to somebody else. You’re from Urth, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“So am I, and so are most of the others here. They put us together because we talk the same and think the same. But if we went to another fo’c’sle, everything might be different.”
“I thought I’d traveled a great deal,” I told her, laughing inwardly at myself. “Now I see I haven’t gone quite as far as I believed.”
“It would take you days just to get out of the part of the ship where most of the sailors are more or less like you and me. But the jibers who move around get mixed up. Sometimes they fight each other; but sometimes they join together until there are three or four different kinds in one gang. Sometimes they pair up, and the woman has children, like Idas. Usually the children can’t have children, though. That’s what I’ve heard.”
She glanced significantly toward Zak, and I whispered, “He’s one?”
“I think he must be. He found you and came and got me, so I thought it would be all right to leave you with him while I went for food. He can’t talk, but he hasn’t hurt you, has he?”
“No,” I told her. “He’s been fine. In ancient times, Gunnie, the peoples of Urth journeyed among the suns. Many came home at last, but many others stayed on that world or this. The hetrochthnous worlds must by this time have reshaped humanity to conform to their own spheres. On Urth, the mystes know that each continent has its own pattern for mankind, so that if people from one shift their bode to another, they will in a short time — fifty generations or so — come to resemble the original inhabitants. The patterns of other worlds must be yet more distinct; and yet the human race would remain human still, I think.”
“Don’t say, ‘By this time,’” Gunnie told me. “You don’t know what the time would be if we were to stop at some sun. Severian, we’ve talked a lot and you look tired. Don’t you want to lie down now?”
“Only if you will lie down too,” I said. “You are as tired as I, or more. You’ve been going around collecting food and medicine for me. Rest now, and tell me more about the jibers.” The truth was that I was sufficiently better to wish to put my arm about a woman and even to bury myself in a woman; and with many women, of whom, I think, Gunnie was one, there is no better way to attain intimacy than to permit them to talk, and to listen to them.
She stretched herself beside me. “I’ve already told you about everything I know. Most are sailors gone bad. Some are their children, born on the ship and hidden till they’re old enough to fight. Then too, do you remember how we caught the apport?”
