Litany of the Long Sun

by Gene Wolfe

  "You can't stay here all night," Auk growled.

  "I can't? Watch me."

  Oreb pecked again. "Here Auk!"

  "Here yourself." Auk caught him. "Now you listen up. I'm going to pitch you over like I pitched you off the path back there. You look for Patera, Silk like you did before. If you find him, sing out."

  With weary indifference, Chenille warned, "He won't come back this time."

  "Sure he will. Get set, bird. Here you go." He tossed Oreb over the balustrade and watched as he glided down.

  Chenille said, "There's a hundred places where that long butcher could have fallen."

  "Eight or ten, maybe. I was looking."

  She stretched out on the stone floor. "Oh, Molpe, I'm so tired!"

  Auk turned to face her. "You really going to stay here all night?"

  If she nodded, it was too dark beneath the dome of the shrine for him to see her.

  "Somebody could come out here."

  "Somebody worse than you?"

  He grunted.

  "That's so funny. I'd bet everything I've got that if you checked out every last cull in that godforsaken little town you couldn't find a single-"

  "Shut up!"

  For a time she did, whether from fear or sheer fatigue she could not herself have said. In the silence, she could hear the lapping of the waves at the foot of the cliff, the sob of the wind through the strangely twisted pillars of the shrine, the surge of blood in her own ears, and the rhythmic thumping of her heart.

  Rust would have made everything all right. Recalling the empty vial she had left on her bed at Orchid's, she imagined one twenty times larger, a vial bigger than a bottle, filled with rust. She would sniff a pinch, and drop a big one in her lip, and walk back with Auk till they reached that bit where you felt like you were hanging in air, then push him off, down and down, until he fell into the lake below.

  But there was no such vial, there never would be, and the half bottle of red she had drunk had died in her long ago; she pressed her fingers to her throbbing temples.

  Auk bawled, "Bird! You down there? Sing out!"

  If Oreb heard him, he did not reply.

  Argumentatively, Auk inquired, "Why would he come way out here?"

  Chenille rolled her head from side to side. "You asked me that before. I don't know. I remember us riding in some kind of cart or something, all right? Horses. Only somebody else was in charge then, and I wish she'd come back." She bit her knuckle, herself astonished by what she had said. Wearily she added, "She did a better job of it than I do. A better job than you're doing, too."

  "Shut up. Listen, I'm going to climb down a ways. As far as I can go without falling. You rest. I should be back pretty soon."

  "We'll have a parade," Chenille told him. Some minutes afterward she added, "A big one, right up the Alameda. With bands."

  Then she slept and entered a great, shining room full of men in black-and-white and jeweled women. A three-sun admiral in full dress walked beside her holding her arm and did not count in the least. She walked proudly, smiling, and her wide collar was entirely of diamonds, and diamonds cascaded from her ears and flashed like the lights in the night sky from her wrists; and every eye was on her.

  Then Auk was shaking her shoulder. "I'm going. You want to come or not?"

  "No."

  "There's good places to eat in Limna. I'll buy dinner and rent a room, and we can head back to the city tomorrow. You want to come?"

  By now she was awake enough to say, "You don't listen, do you? No. Go away."

  "All right. If some cull gets to you out here, don't blame me. I did the best I could for you."

  She closed her eyes again. "If some cully wants to rape me, that's dimber with me, just as long as he's not you and he doesn't want me to wiggle around while he's doing it. If he'd like to vent my pipe, that'll be dimber, too." She sighed. "Long as he doesn't want me to help."

  Distinctly, she heard the scraping of Auk's boots as he left the shrine, and after what seemed to her a very short time she struggled to her feet. The night was clear; eerie skylight glimmered on the rolling lake and illuminated every harsh, bare point of rock. On the horizon, distant cities wrapped with Viron in the night appeared as tiny smears of fox fire, not half so desirable as the icy sparkles that had deserted her wrists.

  "Hackum?" she called, lifting her voice. "Hackum?"

  Almost at once he emerged from the shadows of the rocks to stand upon that very outthrust point of rock from which Silk had watched the spy vanish from the shrine, and from which she had imagined herself pushing him. "Jugs? Are you all right?"

  Something invisible tightened around her throat. "No. But I will be. Hackum?"

  "What is it?" The flooding skylight that rendered every bush and outcrop far and fey prevented her from reading his posture (she was good at that, although she was unaware of it), even while it revealed it; and his tone was flat and devoid of emotion, though perhaps it was only made to sound so by distance.

  "I'd like to start over. I thought maybe you'd like to start over, too."

  He was silent while she counted seven thuddings of her pulse. At last: "You want me to come back?"

  "No," she called, and he seemed to have become minutely smaller. "What I mean is… I want you to come to Orchid's some night. All right?"

  "All right." It was not the echo.

  "Maybe next week. And I don't know you. And you don't know me. Start over."

  "All right," he called again. And then, "Sometime I'd like to meet you."

  She intended to say we will, but the words stuck in her throat; she waved instead, and then, realizing that he could not see her, stepped from under the dome so that she too was in the clear, soft skylight and waved again, and watched him disappear where the Pilgrims' Way bent inland.

  That was it, she thought.

  She was tired and her feet hurt, and for some reason she did not want to step back under the dome again; she sat down on the smooth, flat rock outside the entrance to the shrine instead, kicked off her shoes, and comforted her blisters.

  It was funny how you knew. That was it, and this's him, and I never knew till he said that: Someday I'd like to meet you. He'd want her to leave Orchid's, and quite unexpectedly she realized she'd be glad to leave shaggy Orchid's to live anywhere, even under a bridge, with him.

  Funny.

  There was a brass plate thing let into the smooth stone of the shrine; she fingered its letters idly, naming the ones she knew. The plate seemed to move, ever so slightly, as if it was not. solidly fastened but hinged at the top. She got her nails under it, lifted it, and saw swirling colors: reds and blues and pinks and yellows and golden browns and greens and greenish blacks and others for which she had no names.

  "IMMEDIATELY, YOUR EMINENCE," Incus said, bowing again. "I understand entirely, Your Eminence, and I shall be on the scene within the hour. You can trust in me absolutely, Your Eminence. As always."

  He shut the door slowly and almost noiselessly, bowing all the while, and made certain that the latchbar had dropped before he spat. The Circle was to convene after a dinner at Fulmar's, and Bittersweet had promised to show everyone the wonders she claimed to have achieved with an old porter, who would-as she reportedly had confided to Patera Tussah-adore her as Echidna, Scylla, Molpe, Thelxiepeia, Phaea, or Sphigx on command, all of it supposedly executed in compiler. Incus had wanted (never more than now) to see that. He had wanted very much to see the porter with his skullplate and faceplate removed. He had been (as he told himself angrily) more than merely anxious to witness at first hand an actual demonstration of Bittersweet's technique in order that he might compare it to his own.

  Was it actually possible for anyone to download-or was the whole thing, perhaps, a great deal simpler than he had imagined? Ideally, one subverted the art of the Short Sun programmers, utilizing it to one's own advantage, as an expert wrestler threw an opponent too heavy to lift by enlisting his opponent's strength in his own cause.

  Clench
ing his teeth and slamming his small fist into his palm, Incus sought to convince himself that there would be a raid tonight and that some well-disposed god had maddened old Remora so that he might be spared; but it was nonsense, and he knew it. He was entitled to go tonight. The Circle would not meet again until next month, and no one had toiled harder at black mechanics than he-no one had shared all that he had learned more willingly, earning this night a dozen times over. There was no fairness, no justice in the whorl. The gods did not care-or rather, were inimical. Beyond question, they were inimical to him.

  Dropping angrily into his chair, he jammed the nearest quill into the inkwell.

  My Dear Friend Fulmar:

  It is with deep regret that I must tell you that the old fool has cooked up another perfectly ridiculous piece of busywork for me. I am to go to Limna tonight, and no other night will do. I am to consort with fishermen in search of a woman (yes, I write a woman) I have never seen, who may not be there at all, all because his worthless spies have failed him again.

  So grieve, my dear friend, for your poor coworker Myself, who would be with you this night if he could.

  Myself standing for I, as even that fool Fulmar could not help but understand. Briefly but satisfyingly, Incus reread, admired, amended mentally, and at last approved the note before ripping it in two, wadding it up, and flinging the wad into the incineratium. The chances that old Remora would ever see what he had written and identify him as the writer were slight, but not so slight that prudence did not forbid him to write his mind in any such fashion. A fresh sheet, in that case, and more ink-with the quill grasped wrongly.

  My Dear Friend,

  Pressing duties constrain me to forebear the pleasant social meal to which you were so very kind as to invite me tonight.

  His characteristic spiky M had been replaced by a new character remarkably like a double E upside down. Good-good!

  You know, my friend, yet it might more thoughtfully be said that you cannot know, how much I have been looking forward to a plain firsthand account of the marvelous adventures of our mutual acquaintance Bee. Bee himself.

  No, it would not do. Fulmar would be utterly thrown off the scent by the male pronoun; it would be necessary to stop at his house and leave a clear, straightforward message with his valet. Nor would the trouble and loss of time go entirely unrecompensed; he, Incus, would at least have the satisfaction of inquiring just how long it had been since the unfortunate valet had received his wages, and observing the chem's baffled incomprehension. The valet had been a most creditable little project, and one Fulmar could never have brought to its wholly successful conclusion without his help.

  Rising from his chair, Incus whistled shrilly and told the fat and worried-looking boy who answered his summons, "I need a fast litter with eight bearers to take me to the lake. Some fool woman- Never mind. His Eminence won't authorize renting a floater, although he insists upon speed. Tell the men that there will be only one passenger, myself. You might well describe me, I'm not weighty. They'll receive double pay at Limna and be dismissed there. Do the best you can, but hurry. Meanwhile I've got a hundred urgencies that must- Go, I say! Hurry! Is your bottom still sore? I'll make it sorer if you don't fly."

  "Yes, Patera. At once, Patera. Immediately." Bowing, the fat boy shut the door, made sure the latchbar had dropped, and spat expertly into a corner.

  FASCINATED, SILK WATCHED as the door opened in a swirl of petals, seeming to create the lofty green corridor beyond it. "It took me a while to identify the sensation," he confided to Mamelta, "but I placed it eventually. It was the feeling I'd had as a small boy when my mother had been holding me and put me down." He paused, musing.

  "And now we're in another place altogether, much deeper underground. Truly extraordinary! Is there a way to prevent Hammerstone's following us down in this thing?"

  Mamelta shook her head, whether in negation or merely to clear it, Silk could not have said. "So strange… Is this another dream?" "No," he assured her. He rose from his seat. "No, it isn't. Put that thought from your mind entirely. Did you dream much, up there?"

  "I don't know how long it was. Suppose I dreamed once each hundred years…?"

  Silk stepped out into the corridor. There was a well in it not far from the petaled door: a twilit shaft descended by spiraling steps. He set off down the corridor to examine it, felt something through the worn sole of one shoe, and stopped to pick it up.

  It was a card.

  "Look at this, Mamelta!" He held it up. "Money! My luck's certainly changed since I met you. Some god smiles on you, and smiles on me, too, because I'm with you."

  "That is not money."

  "Yes, it is," he told her. "Did you have money of some other kind on the Short Sun Whorl? This is the sort we use in Viron, and traders from foreign cities accept it, so I suppose they must use cards, too. This would buy a nice goat for Pas, for example-even a white ewe, if the market were depressed. Chop it into a hundred pieces, and every piece is one bit. A bit will buy two large cabbages or half a dozen eggs. Aren't you going to come out? I don't believe that the moving room is going to sink any farther."

  She rose and followed him into the corridor.

  "Maytera Marble remembers the Short Sun. I'll try to introduce you to her. You'll have a great deal in common, I'm sure."

  When Mamelta did not reply, he asked, "Do you want to tell me about your dreams? That might help. What did you dream about?"

  "People like you."

  Silk leaned over the coping of the shaft to peer down. The first six steps bore six words:

  HE WHO DESCENDS SERVES PAS BEST

  "Look at this," he said; she did not, and he asked, "Who were these people in your dreams?"

  She was silent so long that he thought she was not going to reply; he went through a gap in the coping and down to the first step. "There's writing on all of these," he told her. "The next series says, 'I will teach my children how I carried out the Plan of Pas.' There must be a shrine of Pas's at the bottom. Would you care to see it?"

  "I am trying to… think of a way to tell you. We did not speak. Words. I have to remember to speak words now. I say something. But you do not hear me unless I move my lips. To move my lips and my tongue… while I make this noise in my throat."

  "You're doing very well," Silk told her warmly. "Soon we'll have to go back up again, but not in that same little room since I'd assume it would take us to the place we left. I have to get back into the tunnels under Limna, however, and find the ashes from the manteion there. I'm not at all sure that we ought to take the time to look around this shrine and recite prayers and so forth. What do you think?"

  "I…" Mamelta fell silent, staring.

  "Patera Pike-my predecessor, and a most devout man-used to call out in dreams," Silk told her. "Sometimes he'd wake me in the next room. I think you may be afraid to speak, believing that this, too, is a dream; and that you might wake other sleepers. It isn't, so you will not.".

  She nodded, the movement of her head barely perceptible. "I may have called out in the beginning. One was small, the Monarch's second daughter. The one you used to see dance."

  "Molpe?" Silk suggested.

  "I remember seeing her often at home, dancing through my dreams. She was a wonderful dancer, but we cheered because we were afraid. You saw the hunger in her face for the kind of cheers the others got."

  "It may be Pas who favors you," Silk decided. "Indeed it probably is, since the moving room carried us straight to this shrine of his. If so, he'll certainly be offended if we don't visit it, after all that he's done for us. Won't you come with me?"

  She joined him on the uppermost step, and side-by-side they descended the spiral, seeing the footprints of those who had preceded them in the thin dust on the treads, and shivering in the cool air of the shaft, which narrowed and grew darker as they descended.

  They were less than halfway down when a faint odor of decay set Silk's nostrils twitching; it was as though an altar had not been properly cle
ansed and purified, and he (assuming that the shrine he anticipated included such an altar) resolved to purify it himself if need be.

  Mamelta, who had lagged behind him by a few steps, now touched his arm. "Is that a hammerstone?" Silk looked back at her. "Hammerstone? Where?"

  "Down there." She indicated the bottom of the shaft by a vague gesture. "Moaning? Something is moaning."

  Silk stopped to listen; the sound was so faint that he could not lie certain he did not imagine it, an eerie keen- ing, rising and falling, always at the edge of his hearing, and often threatening to fade away altogether.

  It was no louder at the bottom, where the soldier lay. Silk gripped the dead man's left arm and rolled him over, in the process discovering that he was no longer as strong as he had been. There was a ragged hole the size of his thumb in the dead man's blue-painted chest.

  When he had recovered breath he said, "You'd better stand back, Mamelta. Chems seldom explode once the moment of death is past, but there's always a risk." Squat- ting, he employed one of the steel gammas forming the voided cross he wore to remove the dead man's faceplate. When bridging connections with the gamma produced no arc, he shook his head.

  "How…? Mamelta is my name, and I told you. Have you told me yours?"

  "Patera Silk." He straightened up. "Call me Patera, please. Were you about to ask how this man died?"

  "He is a machine." She was looking at the dead man's wound. "A robot?"

  "A soldier," Silk told her, "though I've never seen a blue one before. Ours are mottled-green, brown, and black-so I suppose he must have come from another city. In any case he's been dead a long time, while someone in the shrine is alive and in pain."

  A massive door in the side of the shaft stood ajar. Silk opened it and stepped into the shrine, finding himself (to his astonishment) in a circular room a full thirty cubits high, with padded divans and glasses and multicolored readouts on its ceiling, its floor, and its curving wall. Every glass was energized, and in them all bobbed a tattered, skull-like thing that was no longer a face, wailing.