The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XXV — Passion and the Passageway

EXHAUSTION operates strangely upon the mind. Left alone in my stateroom, I could only think that my door was unguarded now. Throughout my time as Autarch, there had always been sentries at my door, usually Praetorians. I wandered through several rooms searching for it merely to verify that there were none now; but when I opened it at last, half-human brutes in grotesque helmets sprang to attention.

I closed it again, wondering whether they were meant to keep others out, or myself inside; and I wasted a few moments more searching for some means of extinguishing the light. I was too spent, however, to keep that up for long. Dropping my clothing to the floor, I stretched myself across the wide bed. As my thoughts drifted toward that misty state we call dreaming, the light dimmed and went out.

I seemed to hear footsteps, and for what seemed a long time I struggled to sit up. Sleep pressed me to my mattress, holding me as securely as any drug. At last, the walker sat beside me and brushed back the hair from my forehead. Breathing her perfume, I drew her to me.

Curls brushed my cheek as our lips met.

When I woke, I knew I had been with Thecla. Though she had not spoken and I had not seen her face, there was no question in my mind. Odd, impossible, wonderful, I called it to myself, yet it was so. No one in this universe or any other could have deceived me so long through so much intimacy. But it was not, surely not, impossible at all. Tzadkiel’s children, the mere infants she brooded upon her world in Yesod, had brought Thecla back with the rest to fight the sailors. Surely it was not impossible for Tzadkiel herself to bring her again.

I leaped up, then turned to see if there were not some trace — a hair or a crushed blossom left upon the pillow. I would (as I told myself) have treasured such a token always. The unfamiliar pelt with which I had covered myself was smoothly spread. No impression of a second body showed next to the one left by my own.

Somewhere in those laborious writings I assembled in the clerestory of the House Absolute and even more laboriously will repeat aboard this ship at an unknown date in the future that has become my past, I have said that I have seldom felt myself alone, though I must have seemed so to the reader. In fairness to you, then, should you ever come across these writings as well, allow me to say that I did feel alone then, that I knew myself alone, though I was, as my predecessor had trained his equerries to call him, Legion.

I was that predecessor, and alone, and his predecessors; each as solitary as every ruler must be until better times — or rather, better men and women — shall come to Urth. I was Thecla too, Thecla thinking of a mother and half sister never to be seen again, and of the young torturer who had wept for her when she no longer had tears left for herself. Most of all was I Severian, and horribly lonely, as the last man on some derelict ship knows loneliness when he dreams of friends and wakes to find himself as solitary as ever, and goes on deck, perhaps, to stare at the peopled stars and the tattered sails that will never bear him to any of them.

That fear gripped me, even while I sought to laugh it away. I was alone in the great suite Tzadkiel had called my stateroom. I could hear no one; and it seemed possible, as all the delirious things we dream seem possible in the moment of waking, that there was no one to hear, that Tzadkiel, for her own unfathomable reasons, had emptied the ship while I slept.

I bathed in the balneary, and scraped the disturbingly unscarred face that watched me from the glass, all the while listening for a voice or a footfall. My clothes were torn, and so dirty I hesitated to put them on again. The closets held clothing of many colors and many kinds, and particularly, so it seemed to me, of those kinds that can be readily adapted to masculine or feminine wear, and to any frame, all of them of the richest materials. I selected a pair of loose, dark trousers bound at the waist with a russet sash, a tunic with an open neck and large pockets, and a cloak of the true fuligin of that guild of which I am still officially a master, lined with particolored brocade. So arrayed I stepped at last from my door and was saluted as before by my monstrous ostiaries.

I had not been abandoned, and indeed by the time I had dressed myself the fear of it had largely left me; yet as I walked the grand and empty gangway beyond my suite, my mind dwelt upon the thought; and from the dreamed Thecla who had delighted and deserted me, it passed to Dorcas and Agia, to Valeria, and at last to Gunnie, whom I had been glad enough to take as my lover when she could be of service to me and I had no other, and from whom I had allowed myself to be separated without a word of protest when Tzadkiel told me she had sent the sailors away.

Throughout my life, I have been far too ready to abandon women who have had a claim on my loyalty — Thecla, of course, until it was too late to do more than ease her death; and after Thecla, Dorcas, Pia, and Dana, and at last Valeria. On this vast ship, I seemed about to cast aside another, and I resolved not to do so. I would seek out Gunnie, wherever she might be, and bring her to stay with me in my stateroom until we reached Urth and she could return, if she wished, to her fishing village and her own people.

So determined I strode along, and my newly mended leg permitted me to walk at least as rapidly as when I had set off up the Water Way that runs with Gyoll; but my thoughts were not wholly of Gunnie. I was conscious of the need to take note of my surroundings and the direction in which I walked, for nothing would have been easier than to lose myself aboard this vast ship, as I had done more than once on the voyage to Yesod. I was conscious too of something else, a bright point of light that seemed infinitely far, yet immediate.

Allow me to confess here that I confused it even then with that globe of darkness which was to become a disk of light when Gunnie and I passed through it. Certainly it is impossible that the White Fountain which has saved and destroyed Urth, the roaring geyser spewing raw gasses from nowhere, is the portal through which we passed.

That is to say, I have always found it impossible when I was busy in the daylit world, the world that would have perished without a New Sun; but sometimes I wonder. May it not be that Yesod, seen from our universe, is as different from Yesod seen from within as a man seen from without is from the image he sees of himself? I know myself often foolish and sometimes weak — lonely and frightened, too much inclined to passive good nature and all too ready, as I have said, to desert my closest friends in pursuit of some ideal. Yet I have terrified millions.

May it not be that the White Fountain is a window to Yesod after all?

The gangway twisted and twisted again; and as I had before, I observed that although it seemed, if not commonplace, at least nearly so in the part I occupied, yet the length that stretched ahead of me and the length I had left behind grew stranger and stranger as my eyes traversed them, full of mists and uncanny lights.

It occurred to me at last that the ship shaped herself for me as I passed and returned herself to herself for her own uses once I was gone, just as a mother devotes herself to her child when that child is present, speaking in the simplest words and playing babyish games — but pens an epic or entertains a lover at other times.

Was the ship in fact a living entity? That such a thing was possible, I did not doubt; but I had seen little to suggest it, and if it were so, why should she require a crew? The thing might have been done more easily, and what Tzadkiel had said the night before (reckoning the time in which I had slept to have been night) suggested a simpler mechanism. If the picture could be penetrated when the weight of my foot was on the back of the settee, might it not be that the light in my stateroom gradually extinguished itself when the weight of my feet left the floor, and that these protean gangways reshaped themselves to my footfalls? I resolved to use my mended leg to defeat them.

On Urth I could not have done so — but then on Urth that whole great ship would have crumbled to ruin beneath its own weight; and here on board, where I had been able to run and even to leap before, I could now outrace the wind. I dashed along; when I reached the next turning, I leaped and kicked the wall, sending myself hurtling down the gangway even as I had leaped through the rigging.

In an instant, I had left the passage I knew behind, and found myself among eerie angles and ghostly mechanisms, where blue-green lights flew like comets and the walkway writhed like a worm’s gut. My feet struck its surface, but not in a fresh stride; they were numb, and my legs like the loose limbs of a marionette when the curtain has fallen. I went tumbling down the gangway, which shrank to a painfully bright but diminishing dot in a field of utter darkness.