The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XIX — Silence

IN THE confusion I could not tell at first who had freed me. I only knew that they were two, one to either side, and that they took my arms when I was free and led me quickly around the Seat of Justice and down a narrow stair. Behind us was pandemonium, the sailors shouting and scuffling, the alzabo baying.

The stair was long and steep, but it had been constructed in line with the aperture at the apex of the dome; faint light spilled down it, the final glimmer of a twilight yet reflected from a scattering of cloud, though Yesod’s sun would appear no more until morning.

At the bottom we emerged into darkness so intense that I did not realize we were outdoors until I felt grass beneath my feet and wind on my cheek.

“Thank you,” I said. “But who are you?”

A few paces away, Apheta answered, “They are my friends. You saw them on the craft that brought you here from your ship.”

As she spoke, the two released me. I am tempted to write that they vanished at once, because that is how it seemed to me; but I do not think they did. Rather, perhaps, they walked away into the night without a word.

Apheta slipped her hand into mine as she had before. “I pledged myself to show you wonders.”

I drew her farther from the building. “I’m not ready to see wonders. Yours, or any other woman’s.”

She laughed. Nothing is more frequently false in women than their laughter, a merely social sound like the belching of autochthons at a feast; but it seemed to me that this laughter held real merriment.

“I mean what I say.” The aftermath of fear had left me weak and sweating, but the wild bewilderment I felt had little or nothing to do with that; and if I knew anything at all (though I was not certain I did), it was that I did not want to begin some casual amour.

“Then we will walk — away from this place you wish so much to leave — and talk together. This afternoon you had a great many questions.”

“I have none now,” I told her. “I must think.”

“Why, so must we all,” she said sweetly. “All the time, or nearly.”

We went down a long, white street that meandered like a river, so that its slope was never steep. Mansions of pale stone stood beside it like ghosts. Most were silent, but from some there came the sounds of revelry, the clink of glasses, strains of music, and the slap of dancing feet; never a human voice.

When we had passed several I said, “Your people don’t speak as we do. We would say they don’t speak at all.”

“Is that a question?”

“No, it’s an answer, an observation. When we were going into the Examination Chamber, you said you didn’t speak our tongue, nor I yours. No one speaks yours.”

“It was meant metaphorically,” she told me. “We have a means of communication. You do not use it, and we do not use the one you use.”

“You weave paradoxes to warn me,” I said, though my thoughts were elsewhere.

“Not at all. You communicate by sound, we by silence.”

“By gestures, you mean.”

“No, by silence. You make a sound with your larynx and shape it by the action of your palate and lips. You have been doing that for so long that you have almost forgotten you do it; but when you were very young you had to learn to do it, as each child born to your race must. We could do it too, if we wished. Listen.”

I listened and heard a soft gurgling that seemed to proceed not from her, but from the air beside her. It was as though some unseen mute had come to join us, and now made a croaking in his throat. “What was that?” I asked.

“Ah, you see, you have questions after all. What you heard was my voice. We call so, occasionally, when we are injured or in need of help.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Nor do I wish to. I must be alone with my thoughts.”

Between the mansions were many fountains and many trees, trees that seemed to me tall, strange, and lovely even in the darkness. The waters of the fountains were not perfumed as so many of ours were in the gardens of the House Absolute, but the scent of the pure water of Yesod was sweeter than any perfume.

Flowers grew there too, as I had seen when we had left the flier and as I was to see again in the morning. Most had now folded their hearts in the bowers of their petals, and only a pale moonvine blossomed, though there was no moon.

At last, the street ended at the cool sea. There the little boats of Yesod were moored, just as I had seen them from above. Many men and women were there too, men and women who went to and fro among the boats, and between the boats and the shore. Sometimes a boat put out into the dark, lapping water; and at times some new boat appeared, with sails of many colors I could scarcely make out. Only rarely was there a light.

I said, “Once I was so foolish as to believe Thecla alive. It was a trick to draw me to the mine of the man-apes. Agia did it, but I saw her dead brother tonight.”

“You do not comprehend what happened to you,” Apheta told me. She sounded shamed. “That is why I am here — to explain it to you. But I will not explain until you are ready, until you ask me.”

“And if I never ask?”

“Then I will never explain. It may be better, though, for you to know, especially if you are the New Sun.”

“Is Urth really so important to you?”

She shook her head.

“Then why bother with it or me?”

“Because your race is important to us. It would be far less laborious if we could deal with it all at once, but you are sown over tens of thousands of worlds, and we cannot.”

I said nothing.

“The worlds are very far apart. If one of our ships goes from one to another as fast as the starlight, the voyage takes many centuries. It does not seem so to those on the ship, but it does. If the ship goes even faster, tacking in the wind from the suns, time runs backward so that the ship arrives before it sails.”

“That must be very inconvenient for you,” I said. I was staring out over the water.

“For us, not for me personally. If you are thinking that I am in some fashion the queen or guardian of your Urth, dismiss the thought. I am not. But yes, imagine that we desire to play shah mat upon a board whose squares are rafts on that sea. We move, yet even as we move the rafts stir and slip into some new combination; and to move, we must paddle from one raft to the next, which takes so long.”

“Against whom do you play?” I asked.

“Entropy.”

I looked around at her. “It is said that game is always lost.”

“We know.”

“Is Thecla really alive? Alive outside myself?”

“Here? Yes.”

“If I took her to Urth, would she be alive there?”

“That will not be permitted.”

“Then I will not ask whether I can stay here with her. You have already answered that. Less than a day all told, you said.”

“Would you stay here with her if it were possible?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Leaving Urth to freeze in the dark? No. Thecla was not a good woman, but…”

“Not good by whose measure?” Apheta asked. When I did not reply, she said, “I am truly inquiring. You may believe there is nothing unknown to me, but it is not so.”

“By her own. What I was going to say, if I could find the words, was that she — that all the exultants except a very few — felt a certain responsibility. It used to astonish me that she who had so much learning cared so little about it. That was when we used to talk together in her cell. A long time afterward, when I had been Autarch for several years, I realized it was because she knew of something better, something she had been learning all her life. It was a rough ethology, but I find I can’t say exactly what I mean.”

“Try, please. I would like to hear it.”

“Thecla would defend to the death anyone who could not help being dependent on her. That was why Hunna held Zak for me this afternoon. Hunna saw something of Thecla in me, though she must have known I was not really Thecla.”

“Yet you said Thecla was not good.”

“Goodness is so much more than that. She knew that too.”

I paused, watching the white flashes the waves made in the darkness beyond the boats while I tried to collect my thoughts. “What I was trying to say was that I learned it from her — that responsibility — or rather I absorbed it when I absorbed her. If I were to betray Urth for her now, I would be worse than she, not better. She wants me to be better, as every lover wants his lover to be better than he.”

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.