Litany of the Long Sun

by Gene Wolfe

  The face spoke: "Aren't you going to ask how I do this? My skin is self-luminescent. Even my eyes. Watch."

  Two more faintly glowing splotches appeared and became Lemur's hands. One held a needler as large as Auk's by the barrel. "Take it, Doctor. It's your own."

  Crane's voice, from the darkness beyond Lemur's hands: "Silk's not impressed."

  Leaving Lemur, the needler vanished.

  "He's a man of the spirit." Crane chuckled.

  "As am I, Patera. Very much so. You've lost your god. May I propose another?"

  "Tartaros? I was praying to him before you came in."

  "Because of the dark, you mean." Lemur's face and hands faded, replaced by a blackness that now seemed blacker still.

  "And because it's his day," Silk said. "At least, I'd assume that it's Tarsday by now."

  "Tartaros and the rest are only ghosts, Patera. They've never been anything more, and ghosts fade. With the passing of three hundred years, Pas, Echidna, Tartaros, Scylla, and the rest have faded almost to invisibility. The Prolocutor knows it, and since you're going to succeed him, you should know it, too."

  "Since I-" Silk fell silent, suddenly glad that the room was dark.

  Lemur laughed again; and Silk-heartsick and terrified-nearly laughed with him, and found that he was smiling. "If only you could see yourself, Patera! Or have your likeness taken."

  "You…"

  "You're a trained augur, I'm told. You graduated from the schola with honors. So tell me, can Tartaros see in the dark?"

  Silk nodded, and by that automatic motion discovered that he had already accepted the implication that Lemur could see in the dark as well. "Certainly. All gods can, actually."

  Crane's voice: "That's what you were taught, anyhow."

  Lemur's baritone, so resonant that it made Crane sound thin and scratchy in comparison. "I can, too, no less than they. By waves of energy too long for your eyes, I'm seeing you now. And I hear and see in places where I am not. When you woke, Doctor Crane held up his fingers and required you to count them. Now it's your turn. Any number you choose."

  Silk raised his right hand.

  "All five. Again."

  Silk complied.

  "Three. Crane held up three for you. Again."

  "I believe you," Silk said.

  "Six. You believed Crane as well, when he told you that I plan to kill you both. It's quite untrue, as you've heard. We mean to elevate and honor you both."

  "Thank you," Silk said.

  "First I shall tell you the story of the gods. Doctor Crane knows it already, or guesses if he does not know. A certain ruler, a man who had the strength to rule alone and so called himself the monarch, built our whorl, Patera. It was to be a message from himself to the universe. You have seen some of the people he put on board it, and in fact you have walked and talked with one."

  Silk nodded, then (conscious of Crane) said, "Yes. Her name is Mamelta." "You talked about Mucor. The monarch's doctors tinkered with the minds of the men and women he put into the whorl as Blood's surgeon did with hers. But more skillfully, erasing as much as they dared of their patients' personal lives."

  Silk said, "Mamelta told me she had been operated upon before she was lifted up to this whorl."

  "There you have it. The surgeons found, however, that their patients' memories of their ruler, his family, and some of his officials were too deeply entrenched to be eliminated altogether. To obscure the record, they renamed them. Their ruler, the man who called himself the monarch, became Pas, the shrew he had married Echidna, and so on. She had borne him seven children. We call them Scylla, Molpe, Tartaros, Hierax, Thelxiepeia, Phaea, and Sphigx."

  In the darkness, Silk traced the sign of addition.

  "The monarch had wanted a son to succeed him. Scylla was as strong-willed as the monarch himself, but female. It is a law of nature, as concerns our race, that females are subject to males. Her father allowed her to found our city, however, and many others. She founded your Chapter as well, a parody of the state religion of her own whorl. She was hardly more than a child, you understand, and the rest younger even than she."

  Silk swallowed and said nothing.

  "His queen bore the monarch another, but she was worse yet, a fine dancer and a skilled musician, but female, too, and subject to fits of insanity. We call her Molpe."

  There was a soft click.

  "Nothing useful in your bag, Doctor? We searched it, naturally.

  "To continue. Their third child was male, but no better than the first two, because he was bom blind. He became that Tartaros to whom you were recommending yourself, Patera. You believe he can see without light. The truth is that he cannot see -by daylight. Am I boring you?" "That wouldn't matter, but you're risking the displeasure of the gods, and endangering your own spirit."

  Crane's dry chuckle came out of the darkness.

  "I'll continue to do it. Echidna conceived again and bore another male, a boy who inherited his father's virile indifference to the physical sensations of others to the point of mania. You must know, Patera, as we all do, the exquisite pleasure of inflicting pain upon those we dislike. He allowed himself to be seduced by it, to the point that he came to care for nothing else and while still a child slaughtered thousands for his amusement. We call him Hierax now, the god of death.

  "Shall I go on? There are three more, all girls, but you know them as well as I. Thelxiepeia with her spells and drugs and poisons, fat Phaea, and Sphigx, who combined her father's fortitude with her mother's vile temper. In a family such as hers, she would be forced to cultivate those qualities or die, unquestionably."

  Silk coughed. "You indicated that you intended to return my needler, Councillor. I'd like very much to have it back."

  This time the uncanny light wrapped Lemur's entire body, strong enough to glow faintly through his tunic and trousers. "Watch," he said, and held out his right arm. A dark smudge beneath the embroidered satin of his sleeve crept down his arm to the elbow, then down his forearm until Hyacinth's gold-plated needler slid into his open hand. "Here you are."

  "How did you do that?" Silk inquired.

  "There are thousands of minute circuits in my arms. By flexing certain muscles, I can create a magnetic field, and by tightening them in sequence while relaxing others, I can move the field. Watch."

  Hyacinth's needler crept from Lemur's hand to his wrist, and disappeared into his sleeve. "You say you'd like to have it back?"

  "Yes, very much."

  "And you, Doctor Crane? I have already given you yours, and I plan to make use of your services. Will you count your needler as your fee, paid in advance?"

  The light that streamed from Lemur was now so bright that Silk could make out Crane, seated on the cot, as he drew his needler and held it out. "You can have it back, if you want. But give Silk his, and I'll accept that."

  "Doctor Crane has already tried to shoot me, you see." Lemur's shining face smiled. "He's playing a cruel trick on you, Patera."

  "No, he's being the same kind friend he has been to me since we first met. There are men who are ashamed of their best impulses, because they have come to associate goodness with weakness. Give it to me, please."

  It was not Hyacinth's needler but her azoth that crawled like a silver spider into Lemur's open hand. Silk reached for it, but the hand closed about it; Lemur laughed, and they were plunged in darkness again.

  Crane's voice: "Silk tells me you captured a woman with him. If you've hurt her badly, I want to see her."

  "I could squeeze this hard enough to crush it," Lemur told them. "That would be dangerous even for me."

  Silk had succeeded in untangling the silver chain; he put it about his neck and adjusted the position of Pas's gammadion as he spoke. "Then I advise you not to do it."

  "I won't. Before I told you the truth about your gods, Patera, I hinted that I'd propose a new god to you, a living god to whom the wisest might kneel. I meant myself, as you must have realized. Are you ready to worship me?"


  "I'm afraid we lack an appropriate victim for sacrifice." Lemur's eyes glowed. "You're wasting your tact, Patera. Don't you want to be Prolocutor? When I happened to mention it, I expected you to kiss my rump for the thought. Instead you're acting as if you didn't hear me."

  "After the first moment or two, I assumed you intended a subtle torture. To speak frankly, I still do."

  "Not at all. I'm completely serious. The doctor said he wished he'd invented you. So do I. If you're what he and his masters required, you suit my purposes even better."

  Silk felt as though he were choking. "You want me to tell people that you're a god, Councillor? That you are to be paid divine honors?"

  Warm and rich and friendly, Lemur's voice boomed out of the darkness. "More than that. The present Prolocutor could do that, and would in a moment if I told him to. Or I could replace him with any of a hundred augurs who would."

  Silk shook his head. "I doubt it. But even if you're correct, they would not be believed."

  "Precisely. But you would be. His Cognizance is old. His Cognizance will die, tomorrow perhaps. In a surprising but hugely popular development, it will be discovered that he has named you as his successor, and you will explain to the people that Pas has withheld his rains out of consideration for me. They need only pay me proper honors to be forgiven. Eventually they will come to understand that I am, as I am, a greater god than Pas. After all that I've told you, do you retain some loyalty to him? And Echidna and their brats?"

  Silk sighed. "I realized as you spoke how little I have ever had. Your blasphemies ought to have outraged me. I was merely shocked instead, like a maiden aunt who overhears her cook swearing; but you see, I've encountered a real god, the Outsider-"

  Crane whooped with laughter.

  "And Kypris, a real goddess. Thus I know wliat divinity is, the look and the sound and the true texture of it. You said something else that I ignored, Councillor."

  For the first time, Lemur sounded dangerous and even deadly. "Which was…?"

  "You said that you were not a chem. I'm not one of those ignorant and prejudiced bios who consider themselves superior to chems, but I know-"

  "You lie!" Doubly terrifying in the darkness, the blade of the azoth tore the plane of existence like so much paper, shooting past Silk's ear, manifest to every cell in his body, and horrible as nothing the universe contained could be. From the other side of the room, Crane shouted, "You'll sink us!" and the vessel lurched and shook as he spoke. Chips of burning paint and flakes of incandescent steel showered Silk with fire; he backed away in horror.

  "One bom a biological man did that, Patera. A man who has become more." Something rang in the darkness as a hammer rings against an anvil. "I am a biological man and a god." The harrowing discontinuity that had wounded the very fabric of the universe was gone.

  "Thank you," Silk said. He gasped for breath. "Thank you every much. Please don't do that again."

  As the violence of the vessel's motion abated to steady thrumming, Lemur's luminous arm reappeared; his hand opened, and the hilt of the azoth slid smoothly into its sleeve.

  There was a thump as Crane dropped his medical bag. "Are you inside there?"

  Lemur's voice was warm again. "Why do you ask?"

  "Just curious. I was wondering if it might not be like conflict armor, but better."

  "Which would be of some interest to your masters in the government of…?"

  "Paluslria."

  "No. Not Paluslria. We have eliminated certain cities, and thai is one of them. Like Patera Silk, you'll soon come to serve Viron, and when you do, you must be more forth- right. Meanwhile, let it be enough for you that I am in another part of this boat. Perhaps I'll show you when we're done with the business at hand."

  "Serve you, you mean."

  "We gods have many names.

  "Patera, you needn't concern yourself about your paramour from the past. She's nursing Doctor Crane's patient even as I speak, and worrying about you."

  Crane's voice: "You use some old-fashioned words. How old are you, Councillor?"

  "How old would you say I am?" Lemur extended his shining hand. "You doctors like to speak of pronounced tremors. Can you pronounce upon that one?"

  "You've held office under two caldes, and for twenty-two years since the death of the last. Naturally we wondered."

  "In Palustria. Yes, in Palustria, naturally you did. When you see me elsewhere you can formulate an estimate of your own, and I'll be interested to learn it.

  "Patera, doesn't all this astound you?"

  "I can understand how you could be a bio with prosthetic parts; our Maytera Rose is like that." Silk discovered that his own hands were trembling and pushed them into his pockets. "Not how you could be in another part of this boat."

  "In the same way that a glass conveys to you the image of a room at, the opposite end of the city. In the same way that your Sacred Window showed you the tricked-out image of a woman dead three hundred years and convinced you that you had spoken with a minor goddess." Lemur chuckled. "But I've wasted too much time already, while Doctor Crane's patient lies dying. I trust he'll forgive me, I was enjoying myself." The luminous hand held up Hyacinth's needler. "Here's Doctor Crane's fee, as specified by him. Doctor, I wish you to look at a patient. To earn this fee, you need only examine him and tell him the truth. Is it a violation of medical ethics to tell a patient the truth?"

  "No."

  "There have been times when I've thought that it must be. This fourth prisoner of mine's a spy, too. Will you do it? He's badly injured."

  "After which you'll kill Silk and me." Crane snorted. "All right, I've lived as a quacksalver. Since I've got to die, I'll die as one, too."

  "Both of you will live," Lemur told him, "because you will both become admirably cooperative. I could have you so now, if I wished, but for the present you serve me better as opponents. I will not say foes. You see, I have told this fourth prisoner that the doctor who will examine him and the augur who will shrive him are no friends of mine. That they have, in fact, seen fit to intrigue against the government I direct."

  The luminosity of Lemur's hand and arm brightened, and Hyacinth's engraved, gold-plated, little needler slithered like a living animal into his open palm. "Your Cognizance? Here you are." He handed the needler to Silk. "Will you, as an anointed augur, administer the Pardon of Pas to Doctor Crane's patient, if Crane judges him in imminent danger of death?"

  "Of course," Silk said.

  "Then let's go. I know you'll find this interesting." Lemur threw open the door. Blinking and wiping their eyes, they followed him along a narrow corridor floored with steel grating, and down a flight of steel stairs almost as steep as a ladder.

  "I'm taking you all the way down to the keel," Lemur lold them. "I hope you weren't expecting this boat to rock, by the way. We've put out-I gave the order while we were playing with that azoth-and we're cruising beneath the surface now, where there's no wave action."

  He led them to a heavy door set into the floor, spun two handwheels,'and threw it back. "Down here. I'm about to show you the hole in our bottom."

  Silk went first. The vibration that had shaken the boat since Lemur had threatened him with the azoth was stronger liere, almost an audible sound; there was a cool freshness to the air, and the iron railing of the steps he descended felt damp beneath his hand. Green lights that seemed imitations of the ancient lights provided the first settlers by Pas, and an indefinable odor that might have been no more than the absence of any other, made him feel for the first time that he was actually beneath the waters of Lake Limna.

  The flier's broken wings were the first things he saw. They had been laid out, with scraps of the nearly invisible fabric that had covered them, on the transparent canopy of a sizable yawl-shattered spars of a material that might have been polished bone, less thick than his forefinger.

  "Wait there a moment, Your Cognizance," Lemur called. "I want to show you these. You and Doctor Crane both. It will be well worth your while."<
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  "You got one after all," Crane said. "You've brought down a flier."

  There was a note of defeat in his voice that made Silk turn to stare back at him.

  "They'd all gone," Crane explained. "Blood and his thugs and most of the male servants. I thought this might be it, but I lioped…" He left the sentence incomplete and shrugged.

  Lemur had picked up an oddly curved, almost tear-drop-shaped grid of the cream-colored material. "We have, Doctor. And this is the secret. Simple, yet infinitely precious. Don't you want to examine it? Wouldn't you like to provide your masters with the secret of flight? The key that opens the sky? This is its shape. Pick it up if you wish. See how light it is. Run your fingers over it, Doctor."

  Crane shook his head.

  "Then you, Your Cognizance. When your followers have installed you as Caldé, it could prove a most useful thing to know."

  "I'll never be Caldé," Silk told him, "and I have never wished to be." He accepted the almost weightless grid, and stared at its fluid lines. "This is what lets a flier fly? This shape?"

  Lemur nodded. "With the material from which it's made. Tarsier's analyzing that. When you broke into Blood's villa Phaesday night-I know all about that, you see. When you broke in, didn't you wonder why Crane's city had sent him to watch Blood?"

  "I didn't realize he was a spy then," Silk explained. He put down the grid and fingered the swelling that Potto's fist had left on the side of his head. He felt weak and a little dizzy.

  "To keep his masters appraised of Blood's progress with the eagle," Lemur told him. "More than twenty-five years ago, I realized the possibilities of flight. I saw that if our troopers could fly as fliers did, enemy troop movements would be revealed at once, that picked bodies of men could land behind an enemy's lines to disrupt communications, and all the rest of it. As soon as I was free to act, I backed various experimenters whose work appeared promising. None developed a device capable of carrying a child, much less a trooper."

  Recalling Hammerstone, Silk asked, "Why not a soldier?"

  Crane grunted. "They're too heavy. Lemur there weighs four times as much as you and me together."