The Urth of the New Sun botns-5

by Gene Wolfe

  Apheta said, “Go on.”

  “I wanted Thecla because she was so much better than I, socially and morally, and she wanted me because I was so much better than she and her friends, just because I did something necessary. Most exultants don’t, on Urth. They have a great deal of power, and they pretend they’re important; they tell the Autarch that they’re ruling their peons, and they tell their peons they’re ruling the Commonwealth. But they don’t really do anything, and in their hearts they know it. They’re afraid to use their power, or at least the best of them are, knowing they can’t use it wisely.”

  A few sea birds, pale birds with huge eyes and bills like swords, wheeled overhead; after a time I saw a fish jump. “What was I talking about?” I asked.

  “Why you could not leave your world to freeze in the dark.”

  I had remembered something else. “You said you didn’t speak my language.”

  “I think I said I do not speak any tongue, that we have no tongues. Look.”

  She opened her mouth and held it up to me, but it was too dark for me to see whether she had deceived me. “How is it I hear you?” I asked. Then I understood what it was she wished, and kissed her; that kiss made me certain she was a woman of my own race.

  “Do you know our story?” she whispered as we parted.

  I told her what the aquastor Malrubius had told me upon another night upon another beach: that in a previous manvantara, the men of that cycle had shaped companions for themselves from other races, and that at the destruction of their universe these had escaped here to Yesod; that they ruled our universe through the Hierodules, whom they themselves had shaped.

  Apheta shook her head when I had finished. “There is much more than that.”

  I said I had never supposed there was not, but that what I had just recited was all I knew. I added, “You said that you are the children of the Hierogrammates. Who are they, and who are you?”

  “They are those of whom you spoke, those who were made in your image by a race cognate to your own. As for us, we are what I have told you we are.”

  She ceased to speak, and when some time had passed I said, “Go on.”

  “Severian, do you know the meaning of that word you used? Of Hierogrammate?”

  I told her that someone had once told me it designated those who recorded the rescripts of the Increate.

  “So much is correct.” She paused again. “Possibly we are too much in awe. Those whom we do not name, the cognates I spoke of; evoke such feelings still, though of all their works only the Hierogrammates remain. You say they desired companions. How could they shape companions for themselves, who were themselves ever reaching higher and higher?”

  I confessed I did not know; and when she seemed disinclined to tell me more, I described the winged being I had seen in the pages of Father Inire’s book and asked whether it had not been a Hierogrammate.

  She said it was. “But I will speak no more of them. You asked about us; we are their larvae. Do you know what larvae are?”

  “Why, yes,” I answered. “Masked spirits.”

  Apheta nodded. “We carry their spirit, and even as you say, until we attain to their high state we must go masked — not with an actual mask such as those our Hierodules wear, but with the appearance of your own race, the race that our parents, the Hierogrammates, first set forth to follow. Yet we are not yet Hierogrammates, nor are we truly like you. You have listened to my voice for a long while now, Autarch. Listen to this world of Yesod instead and tell me what you hear, other than my words, when I speak to you. Listen! What do you hear?”

  I did not understand. I said, “Nothing. But you are a human woman.”

  “You hear nothing because we speak with silence, even as you with sound. Whatever noises we find we shape, canceling those which are unneeded, voicing our thoughts in the remainder. That is why I led you here, where the waves murmur always; and why we have so many fountains, and trees to stir their leaves in the wind from our sea.”

  I hardly heard her. Something vast and bright — a moon, a sun — was rising, madly shaped and drenched with light. It was as though some golden seed soared in the atmosphere of this strange world, borne aloft upon a billion black filaments. It was the ship; and the sun called Yesod, though the horizon was above it, struck that vast hull full and was reflected with a light that seemed like day.

  “Look!” I called to Apheta.

  And she cried back, “Look! Look!” pointing to her mouth. I looked and saw that what I had taken for her tongue when we had kissed was but a lump of tissue protruding from her palate.

  Chapter XX — The Coiled Room

  I CANNOT say how long the ship hung so in the sky. It was less than a watch, surely, and it seemed no longer than a breath. While it was there, I had eyes for nothing else; what Apheta did then, I have no notion. When it was gone, I found her sitting on a rock near the water and looking at me.

  “I’ve so many questions,” I said. “Seeing Thecla again put them out of my mind, but now they’re there again; and there are questions about her too.”

  Apheta said, “But you are exhausted.”

  I nodded to that.

  “Tomorrow you must face Tzadkiel, and tomorrow is not far off. Our little world spins more quickly than your own; its days and night must seem short to you. Will you come with me?”

  “Gladly, my lady.”

  “You think me a queen, or something of the sort. Will it amaze you to discover I live in a single room? Look there.”

  I looked and saw an archway concealed among trees, only a dozen paces from the water.

  “Is there no tide here?” I asked.

  “No. I know what that means because I have studied the ways of your world — thus I was chosen to bring the shipmen, and later to speak with you. But Yesod, having no companion, has no tides.”

  “You knew from the first that I was Autarch, didn’t you? If you have studied Urth, you surely knew. Putting manacles on Zak was only a stratagem.”

  She did not reply, even after we had reached the dark arch. Set in a white stone wall, it seemed the entrance to a tomb; but the air within was as fresh and sweet as all the air of Yesod.

  “You must lead me, my lady,” I said. “I cannot see in this blackness.”

  I had no sooner spoken than there was light, a dim light like a flame reflected from tarnished silver. It came from Apheta herself, and pulsed like the beating of a heart.

  We stood in a wide room, hung on every side with muslin curtains. Padded seats and divans were scattered upon a gray carpet. One after another, the curtains were twitched aside, and behind each I saw the silent, somber face of a man; when he had looked at us for a moment, each man let his curtain fall.

  “You’re well guarded, my lady,” I told her. “But you’ve nothing to fear from me.”

  She smiled, and it was odd to see that smile lit by its own light. “You would cut my throat in an instant, if it would save your Urth. We both know that. Or cut your own, I think.”

  “Yes. At least I hope so.”

  “But these are not protectors. My light means that I am ready to mate.”

  “And if I am not?”

  “I will choose another while you sleep. There will be no difficulty, as you see.”

  She thrust aside a curtain, and we entered a wide corridor that bent to the left. Scattered about were seats such as I had seen outside, and many other objects as mysterious to me as the appliances in Baldanders’s castle, though they were lovely and not terrible. Apheta took one of the divans.

  “Does this not lead us to your chamber, my lady?”

  “This is mine. It is a spiral; many of our rooms are, because we like that shape. If you follow it, you will come to a place where you may wash, and be alone for a time.”

  “Thank you. Have you a candle to lend me?”

  She shook her head, but told me it would not be entirely dark.

  I left her and followed the spiral. Her light went with me, growing fainter and f
ainter but reflected by the curving wall. At the end, which I was not long in reaching, a breath of wind suggested that what Gunnie had called a spiracle stretched from the roof to this place. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw it as a circle of darkness less intense. Standing below it, I beheld the spangled sky of Yesod.

  I thought about it while I relieved myself and washed, and when I returned to Apheta, who lay on one of the divans with her naked loveliness pulsing through a thin sheet, I kissed her and asked, “Are there no other worlds, my lady?”

  “There are very many,” she murmured. She had unbound her dark hair, which floated about her shining face, so that she seemed herself some eerie star, wrapped in night.

  “Here in Yesod. On Urth we see myriad suns, dim by day, bright by night. Your day sky is empty, but your night sky is brighter than ours.”

  “When we require them, the Hierogrammates will build more — worlds as fair as this, or more fair. Suns for them too, should we require more suns. Thus for us they are there already. Time runs as we ask here, and we like their light.”

  “Time does not run as I ask.” I seated myself on her divan, my aching leg stretched before me.

  “Not yet,” she said. And then, “You are lame, Autarch.”

  “Surely you’ve noticed that before.”

  “Yes, but I am seeking a way to tell you that for you time will run as for us. You are lame now, but if you bring the New Sun to your Urth, you shall not always be so.”

  “You Hierarchs are magicians. You’re more powerful than those I once met, but magicians still. You talk of this wonder and that, but though your curses may blast, I feel your rewards are false gold that will turn to dust in the hand.”

  “You misunderstand us,” she told me. “And though we know so much more than you, our gold is true gold, got as true gold is, often at the cost of our lives.”

  “Then you’re lost in your own labyrinth, and no wonder. Once I had the power to cure such things — sometimes, at least.” And I told her of the sick girl in the jacal in Thrax, and of the Uhlan on the green road, and of Triskele; and last of all, I told her how I had found the steward dead at my door.

  “If I try to unravel this for you, will you understand that I do not, no more than you yourself, know all the secrets of your Briah, although they have been my study? They are without end.”

  “I understand,” I said. “But on the ship I thought we had come to the end of Briah when we came here.”

  “So you did, but though you may walk into a house at one door and walk out at the other, you do not know all the secrets of that house.”

  I nodded, watching her naked beauty pulse beneath the fabric and wishing, if the truth be known, that it lacked so strong a hold on me.

  “You saw our sea. Did you notice the waves there? What would you say to someone who told you that you saw not waves, but only water?”

  “That I’ve learned not to argue with fools. One smiles and walks away.”

  “What you call time is made up of such waves, and as the waves you saw existed in the water, so time exists in matter. The waves march toward the beach, but if you were to cast a pebble into the water, new waves, a hundredth or a thousandth the strength of the old, would run out to sea, and the waves there would feel them.”

  “I understand.”

  “So do future things make themselves known in the past. A child who will someday be wise is a wise child; and many who will be doomed carry their dooms in their faces, so that those who can see even a short way into the future find it there and turn away their eyes.”

  “Aren’t we all doomed?”

  “No, but that is another matter. You may master a New Sun. Should you, its energy will be yours to draw upon, though it will not exist unless you — and your Urth — triumph here. But as the boy foreshadows the man, something of that faculty has reached you through the Corridors of Time. I cannot say whence you drew when you were on Urth. Partly from yourself, no doubt. But not all or even most can have come from you, or you would have perished. Perhaps from your world, or from its old sun. When you were on the ship there was no world and no sun near enough, so you took what could be drawn from the ship itself, and nearly wrecked it. But even that was not sufficient.”

  “And had the Claw of the Conciliator no power at all?”

  “Let me see it.” She held out a shining hand.

  “It was destroyed long ago by the weapons of the Ascians,” I told her.

  She made no answer, but only stared at me; and when a heartbeat had passed, I saw that she was looking at my chest, where I carried the thorn in the little pouch Dorcas had sewn for me.

  I looked myself, and saw a light — fainter far than hers, yet steady. I took out the thorn, and its golden radiance shone from wall to wall before it died away. “It has become the Claw,” I said. “So I saw it when I drew it from the rocks.”

  I held it out to her; she did not look at it, but at the half-healed wound it had made. “It was saturated with your blood,” she said, “and your blood contains your living cells. I doubt that it was powerless. Nor do I wonder that the Pelerines revered it.”

  I left her then, and groping, found my way to the beach once more, and for a long time I walked up and down the sand. But the thoughts I had there have no place here.

  * * *

  When I returned, Apheta was waiting for me still, her silver pulsing more importunate than before. “Can you?” she asked, and I told her she was very beautiful.

  “But can you?” she asked again.

  “We must talk first. I would be betraying my kind if I did not question you.”

  “Then ask,” she whispered. “Though I warn you that nothing I say will help your race in the test to come.”

  “How is it you speak? What sound is there here?”

  “You must listen to my voice,” she told me, “and not to my words. What do you hear?”

  I did as she had instructed me, and heard the silken sliding of the sheet, the whisper of our bodies, the breaking of the little waves, and the beating of my own heart.

  A hundred questions I had been ready to ask, and it had seemed to me that each of the hundred might bring the New Sun. Her lips brushed mine, and every question vanished, banished from my consciousness as if it had never been. Her hands, her lips, her eyes, the breasts I pressed — all wondrous; but there was more, perhaps the perfume of her hair. I felt that I breathed an endless night…

  Lying upon my back, I entered Yesod. Or say, rather, Yesod closed about me. It was only then that I knew I had never been there. Stars in their billions spurted from me, fountains of suns, so that for an instant I felt I knew how universes are born. All folly.

  Reality displaced it, the kindling of the torch that whips shadows to their corners, and with them all the winged fays of fancy. There was something born between Yesod and Briah when I met with Apheta upon that divan in that circling room, something tiny yet immense that burned like a coal conveyed to the tongue by tongs.

  That something was myself.

  I slept; and because I slept without a dream, did not know I slept.

  When I woke, Apheta was gone. The sun of Yesod had come through the spiracle at the narrow end of the spiral chamber. Ever fainter, its illumination was directed to me by the white walls, so that I woke in a gilded twilight. I rose and dressed, wondering where Apheta might be; but as I pulled on my boots, she entered with a tray. I was embarrassed to have so great a lady serve me, and I told her so.

  “Surely the noble concubines of your court have waited upon you, Autarch.”

  “What are they compared with you?”

  She shrugged. “I am not a great lady. Or at least, only to you, and only today. Our status is decided by our closeness to the Hierogrammates, and I am not very near.”

  She set her tray down and sat beside it. It held small cakes, a carafe of cool water, and cups of some steaming liquid that looked like milk and yet was not milk.

  “I cannot believe you are far fr
om the Hierogrammates, my lady.”

  “That is merely because you think yourself and your Urth so important, imagining that what I say to you and what we do now will decide her fate. It isn’t so, none of it. What we will do now will have no effect, and you and your world are of importance to no one here.”

  I waited for her to say more, and at last she said, “Except to me,” and took a bite from one of the cakes.

  “Thank you, my lady.”

  “And that only since you have come. Though I cannot but dislike you and your Urth, you care so much for her.”

  “My lady…”

  “I know, you thought I desired you. It is only now that I like you enough to tell you I do not. You are a hero, Autarch, and heroes are always monsters, come to give us news we would sooner not hear. But you are a particularly monstrous monster. Tell me, as you walked the circular hall around the Examination Chamber, did you study the pictures there?”

  “Only a few,” I said. “There was the cell where Agia had been confined, and I noticed one or two others.”

  “And how do you suppose they came to be there?”

  I took a cake myself, and a sip from the cup nearest me. “I’ve no idea, my lady. I’ve seen so many wonders here that I’ve ceased to wonder about any save Thecla.”

  “But you could not ask much about her — even Thecla — last night for fear of what I might say or do. Although you were ready to do so a hundred times.”

  “Would you have liked me better, my lady, if I’d questioned you about an old love while I lay with you? Yours is a strange race indeed. But since you’ve brought her up yourself, tell me about her.” A drop of the white beverage, which I had swallowed without tasting, ran down the side of the cup. I looked around for something with which to blot it, but there was nothing.

  “Your hands shake.”

  “So they do, my lady.” I put down the cup, and it rattled against the tray.