Epiphany of the Long Sun

by Gene Wolfe

  "So let us review our position and take council, one with another. Then I will lead us in prayer, a fervent and devout prayer, let it be, to all the Nine, imploring their guidance."

  "Then we'll decide?" Urus demanded.

  "Then I will decide, my son." By an effort, Incus sat up straighter. "But first, allow me to dispel certain fallacies that have already crept into our deliberations." He addressed himself to Chenille. "You, my daughter, seek to accuse me of despotism. It is impolite, but courtesy itself must at times give way to the sacred duty of correction. May I remind you that you, for the space of nearly two days, tyrannized us all aboard that miserable boat? Tyrannized me largely by means of our unfortunate friend, for whom we have already searched, as I would think, for nearly half a day?"

  "I'm not saying we ought to stop, Patera. That was him." She pointed to Urus. "I want to find him."

  "Be quiet, my daughter. I am not yet finished with you. I shall come to him soon enough. Why, I inquire, did you so tyrannize us? I say-"

  "I was possessed! Scylla was in me. You know that."

  "No, no, my daughter. It won't do. It is what you have maintained, deflecting all criticism of your conduct with the same shabby defense. It shall serve you no longer. You were domineering, oppressive, and brutal. Is that characteristic of Our Surging Scylla? I affirm that it is not. As we have trudged on, I have reviewed all that is recorded of her, both in the Chrasmologic Writings and in our traditions likewise. Imperious? One can but agree. Impetuous at times, perhaps. But never brutal, oppressive, or domineering." Incus sighed again, removed his shoes, and caressed his blistered feet.

  "Those evil traits, I say, my daughter, cannot have been Scylla's. They were present in you when she arrived, and so deeply rooted that she found it, I dare say, quite impossible to expunge them. Some there are, or so I have heard it said, who actually prefer domineering women, unhappy men twisted by nature beyond the natural. Our poor friend Auk, with all his manifest excellencies of strength and manly courage, is one of those unfortunates, so it would seem. I am not, my daughter, and I thank Sweet Scylla for it! Understand that for my part, and for our tall friend's here, as I dare to say, we have not sought Auk for your sake, but for his own."

  "Talk talk," Oreb muttered.

  "As for you," Incus shifted his attention to Urus, "you appear to believe that it is only because of my loyal friend Hammerstone that you obey me. It that not so?"

  Urus stared sullenly at the tunnel wall to the left of Incus's face.

  "You are silent," Incus continued. "Talk and more talk, complains our small feathered companion, and again, talk, talk and talk. Not impossibly you concur. No, my son, you deceive yourself, as you have deceived yourself throughout what I feel certain must have been a most unhappy life." Incus drew Auk's needler and leveled it at the silent Urus. "I have but little need of my tall friend Hammerstone, where you are concerned, and should this endless talk that you complain of end, you may find yourself less pleased than ever with that which succeeds it. I invite a comment."

  Urus shook his head. Hammerstone clenched his big fists, clearly itching to batter him insensible.

  "Nothing? In that case, my son, I am going to take the opportunity to tell you something of myself because I have been pondering that, with many other things, while we walked, and it will bear upon what I mean to do, as you will see.

  "I was born to poor yet upright parents, their fifth and final child. At the time they were wed, they had made solemn pledge to Echidna that they would furnish the immortal gods with an augur or a sibyl, the ripest fruit of their union and the most perfect of all thank offerings for it. Of my older brothers and sisters, I shall say nothing. Nothing, that is to say, except that there was nothing to be hoped for from them. No more holy piety was to be discovered in the four of them than in four of those horrid beasts with which you, my son, proposed to attack us. I was born some seven years after my youngest sibling, Femur. Conceive of my parents' delight, I invite you, when the passing days, weeks, months, and years showed ever more plainly my predilection for a life of holy contemplation, of worship and ritual, far from the bothersome exigencies that trouble the hours of most men. The schola, if I may say it, welcomed me with arms outspread. Its warmth was no less than that with which I, in my turn, rushed to it. I was together pious and brilliant, a combination not often found. Thus endowed, I gained the friendship of older men of tastes like to my own, who were to extend themselves without stint in my behalf following my designation.

  "I was informed, and you may conceive of my rapture, my delight, that no less a figure than the coadjutor had agreed to make me his prothonotary. With all my heart I entered into my duties, drafting and summarizing letters and depositions, stamping, filing, and retrieving files, managing his calendar of appointments, and a hundred like tasks."

  Incus fell silent until Chenille said, "By Thelxiepeia I could sleep for a week!" She leaned back against the tunnel wall and closed her eyes.

  "Where Auk?" Oreb demanded, but no one paid him the least attention.

  "We are all exhausted, my daughter. I not less than you, and perhaps with more reason, because my legs are not so long, nor am I, by a decade and more, so young, nor so well fed."

  "I'm not even a little bit well fed, Patera." Chenille did not open her eyes. "I guess none of us are. I haven't had anything but water since forever."

  "When we were on that wretched little fishing boat, you appropriated to yourself what food you wished, and all that you wished, my daughter. You left to Auk and Dace, and even to me, an anointed augur, only such scraps as you disdained. But you have forgotten that, or say you have. I wish that I might forget it, too."

  "Fish heads?"

  Chenille shrugged, her eyes still closed. "All right, Patera, I'm sorry. I don't suppose we'll ever find any food down here, but if we do, or when we get back home, I'll let you have first pick."

  "I would refuse it, my daughter. That is the point I am striving to make. I became His Eminence's prothonotary, as I said. I entered the Prolocutor's Palace, not as an awestruck visitor, but as an inhabitant. Each morning I sacrificed one squab in the Private chapel below the reception hall, chanting my prayers to empty chairs. Afterward, I enjoyed that same bird at my luncheon. Upon a monthly basis, I shrove Patera Bull, His Cognizance's prothonotary, as he me. That was the whole compass of my duties as an augur.

  "But from time to time, His Eminence assigned to me such errands as he felt, or feigned to feel, overdifficult for a boy. One such brought me to that miserable village of Limna, as you know. I was to search for you, my daughter, and it was my ill luck to succeed. Your own life, I suppose, has been, I will not say adventurous, but tumultuous. Is that not so?"

  "It's had its ups and downs," Chenille conceded.

  "Mine had not, with the result that I had assumed myself incapable. Had some god informed me," Incus paused to thrust Auk's needler back into his waistband, then contemplated his scabbed hands, "that I should be forced to serve as the entire crew of a fishing vessel, bailing, making sail, reefing, and all the rest, and this during a tempest as severe as any the Whorl has ever seen, I should have called it quite impossible, declaring roundly that I should die within an hour. I would have informed this wholly supposititious divinity that I was a man of intellect, now largely affecting to be a man of prayer, for my early piety had long since given way to an advancing scepticism. Had he suggested that I might yet become a man of action, I would have declared it to be beneath me, and thought myself profound."

  Urus said, "Well, if you didn't have a needler 'n this big chem, we'd see."

  Incus nodded his agreement, his round, plump little face serious and his protuberant teeth giving him something of the look of a resolute chipmunk. "We would indeed. Therefore, I shall kill you, Urus my son, or order Hammerstone to, whenever it appears that I am liable to lose either."

  "Bad man!" It was not immediately apparent whether Oreb intended Incus or Urus.

  Chenille said, "You don't
really mean that, Patera."

  "Oh, but I do, my daughter. Tell them, Corporal. Do I mean what I say?"

  "Sure, Patera. See, Chenille, Patera's a bio like you, and bios like you and him are real easy to kill. You can't take chances, or him either. You got a prisoner, he's got to toe the line every minute, cause if you let him get away with anything, that's it. If it was up to me, I'd kill him right now, and not chance something happening to Patera."

  "We need him to show us how to get to the pit, and that door that opens into the cellar of the Juzgado."

  "Only we're not going to either one now, are we? And I know where the Juzgado is if I can get myself located. So why shouldn't I quiet him down?" As if by chance, Hammerstone's slug gun was pointing in Urus's direction; his finger found its trigger.

  "We have not been going to the pit, I am happy to say," Incus told them. "It was Auk who wished to go there, for no good reason that I could ever understand. Unfortunately, we haven't been going to the Juzgado, either, though it was to the Juzgado that Surging Scylla directed us. I am the sole person present who recollects her instructions, possibly. But I assure you it is so."

  "All right," Chenille said wearily, "I believe you."

  "As you ought, my daughter, because it was through your mouth that Scylla spoke. That very fact brings me to another point. She made Auk, Dace, and myself her prophets, specifying that I am to replace His Cognizance as Prolocutor. Dace has departed this whorl, so grievously infected by evil, for the richer life of Mainframe. Succoring Scylla might recall him if she chose, perhaps. I cannot. If our search for Auk is to be given up, or at least postponed, and I confess there is much that appeals to me in that, only I remain of Scylla's three.

  "Earlier, bedeviled by multiple interruptions, I strove to explain my position. Because neither of you has patience for that explanation, though it would occupy but a few moments at most, I shall state it. Pay attention, both of you."

  Incus's voice strengthened. "I have awakened to myself, both as man and as augur. A servant of Men, if you will. A servant of the gods, most particularly. You are three. One loves, two hate me. I am not unaware of it."

  "I don't hate you," Chenille protested. "You let me wear this when I got cold. Auk doesn't hate you either. You just think that."

  "Thank you, my daughter. I was about to remark that from what I've learned from my brother augurs concerning manteions, the proportion implied is the one most frequently seen, though our congregation is so much less numerous. Very well, my good people, I accept it. I shall do my best for each and for all, nonetheless, trusting in a reward from the east."

  "See?" Hammerstone nudged Chenille. "What'd I tell you? The greatest man in the Whorl."

  Oreb cocked his head at Incus. "Where Auk?"

  "Nowhere to be found in that shining city we name Reason, I fear," Incus told him half humorously. "He hailed someone. I saw him do it, though there was no one to be seen. After saluting this unseen being, he dashed away. Our good corporal pursued him, as you saw, but lost him in the darkness."

  "These green lights don't work the way people think, see, Chenille. People think they just crawl around all the time and don't care where they're at, only they're not really like that. If it's bright one way and dark the other, they'll head for the dark, see? Real slow, but that's how they go. It's what keeps them spread out."

  Chenille nodded. "Urus said something about that."

  "In a little place, they get everything worked out among themselves after a while and don't hardly move except to get away from the windows in the daytime, but in a big place like this they don't ever settle down completely. Only they don't ever go down much, 'cause if they did, they'd get stepped on and broken real fast."

  "Lots of these tunnels slope down besides the one Auk ran down," she objected, "and I've seen lights in them."

  "Depends on how dark it is down there, and how steep the slope is. If it's too steep, they won't go in there at all."

  "It was pretty steep," Chenille conceded, "and we went down it quite a ways, but later we took that one that went up, remember? It didn't go up as steep as the dark one went down, and it had lights, but it climbed like that for a long time."

  "I think, my daughter-"

  "So what I've been wondering is would Auk have gone back up like we did? He was kind of out of it."

  "He was deranged," Incus declared positively. "I would hope that condition was only temporary, but temporary or not, he was not rational."

  "Yeah, and that's why we took the tunnel that angled back up that I was talking about, Patera. We're not abram and we knew we wanted to get back up to the surface, besides finding Auk. But if Auk was abram… To let you have the lily word, all you bucks seem pretty abram to me, mostly, so I didn't pay much attention. Only if he was, maybe he'd just keep on going down, because that's easier. He was running like you say, and it's pretty easy to run downhill."

  "There may be something in what you suggest, my daughter. We must keep it in mind, if our discussion concludes that we should continue our pursuit.

  "Now, may I sum up? The question is whether we are to continue, or to break off our search, at least temporarily, and attempt to return to the sufface. Allow me, please, to state both cases. I shall strive for concision. If any of you has an additional point, you are free to advance it when I have concluded.

  "It would seem to me that there is only one cogent reason to protract our search, and I have touched upon that already. It is that Auk is one of the triune prophets commissioned by Scylla. As a prophet he is a theodidact of inestimable value, as was Dace. It is for that reason, and for it alone, that I instructed Hammerstone to pursue him following his precipitate departure. It is for that reason solely that I have prolonged the pursuit so far. For I, also, am such a prophet. The only such prophet remaining, as I have said."

  "He's one of us," Chenille declared. "I was with him at Limna before Scylla possessed me, and I remember him a little on the boat. We can't just go off and leave him."

  "Nor do I propose to do so, my daughter. Hear me out, I beg you. We are exhausted and famished. When we return to the surface with Scylla's messages, in fulfillment of her will, we can gain rest and food. Furthermore, we can enlist others in the search. We will-"

  Urus interrupted. "You said we could put in stuff of our own, right? All right, how about me? Do I get to talk, or are you goin' to have the big chem shoot me?"

  Incus smiled gently. "You must understand, my son, that as your spiritual guide, I love you no less and no more than the others. I have threatened your life only as the law does, for your correction. Speak."

  "Well, I don't love Auk, only if you want to get him back it looks to me like you're goin' about it wrong. He wanted us to go to the pit, remember? So maybe now that he's gone off by himself that's where. We could go 'n see, 'n there's lots of bucks there that know these tunnels as well as me, so why not tell 'em what happened 'n get 'em to look too?"

  Incus nodded, his face thoughtful. "It is a suggestion worthy of consideration."

  "They'll eat us," Chenille declared.

  "Fish head?" Oreb fluttered to her shoulder.

  "Yeah, like you'd eat a fish head, Oreb. Only we'd have to have fish heads to do it."

  "They won't eat me," Hammerstone told her. "They won't eat anybody I say not to eat, either, while I'm around."

  "Now let us pray." Incus was on his knees, hands clasped behind him. "Let us petition the immortal gods, and Scylla particularly, to rescue both Auk and ourselves, and to guide us in the ways they would have us go."

  "I twigged you don't buy that any more."

  "I have encountered Scylla," Incus told Urus solemnly. "I have seen for myself the majesty and power of that very great goddess. How could I lack belief now?" He contemplated the voided cross suspended from his prayer beads as if he had never seen it before. "I have suffered, too, on that wretched boat and in these detestable tunnels. I have been in terror of my life. It is hunger and fear that direct us toward the gods,
my son. I have learned that, and I wonder that you, suffering as you clearly have, have not turned to them long ago.

  "How do you know I haven't, huh? You don't know a shaggy thing about me. Maybe I'm holier than all of you."

  Tired as she was, Chenille giggled.

  Incus shook his head. "No, my son. It won't do. I am a fool, perhaps. Beyond dispute I have not infrequently been a fool. But not such a fool as that." More loudly he added, "On your knees. Bow your heads."

  "Bird pray! Pray Silk!"

  Incus ignored Oreb's hoarse interruption, his right hand making the sign of addition with the voided cross. "Behold us, lovely Scylla, wonderful of waters. Behold our love and our need for thee. Cleanse us, O Scylla!" He took a deep breath, the inhalation loud in the whispering silence. "Your prophet is bewildered and dismayed, Scylla. Wash clear my eyes as I implore you to cleanse my spirit. Guide me in this confusion of darkling passages and obscure responsibilities." He looked up, mouthing: "Cleanse us, O Scylla."

  Chenille, Hammerstone, and even Urus dutifully repeated, "Cleanse us, O Scylla."

  Bored, Oreb had flown up to grip a rough stone protrusion in his red claws. He could see farther even than Hammerstone through the yellow-green twilight that filled the tunnel, and clinging thus to the ceiling, his vantage point was higher; but look as he might, he saw neither Auk or Silk. Abandoning the search, he peered hungrily at Dace's corpse; its half-open eyes tempted him, though he felt sure he would be chased away.

  Below, the black human droned on: "Behold us, fair Phaea, lady of the larder. Behold our love and our need for thee. Feed us, O Phaea! Famished we wander in need of your nurture." All the humans squawked, "Feed us, O Phaea!"

  "Talk talk," Oreb muttered to himself; he could talk as well as they, but it seemed to him that talking was of small benefit in such situations.

  "Behold us, fierce Sphigx, woman of war. Behold our love and our need for thee. Lead us, O Sphigx! We are lost and dismayed, O Sphigx, hemmed all about by danger. Lead us in the ways we should go." And all the humans, "Lead us, O Sphigx!"