The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter IX — The Empty Air

MY KNIFE point had already found the slot. I twisted it as I snatched off my cloak and rolled into Sidero’s open body. I did not so much as try to see what creature those wings bore until I had thrust my head, with some pain, into his and could look out through his visor.

Even then I saw nothing, or almost nothing. The air-shaft, which had been fairly clear at this depth earlier, now seemed filled with mist; something had carried the cool upper air lower, mixing it with the warm, moist, reeking air we breathed. Something that roiled that mist now, as though a thousand ghosts searched there.

I could no longer hear the wings, or anything else. I might as well have had my head locked in a dusty strong-box, peeping through the keyhole. Then Sidero’s voice sounded — but not in my ear.

I do not know just how to describe it. I know well what it is to have another’s thoughts in my mind: Thecla’s came there, and the old Autarch’s, before I grew one with them. This was not that. And yet it was not hearing, either, as I had known it. I can come no nearer to it than to say that there is something more that hears, behind the ear; and that Sidero’s voice was there, without having passed through the ear to reach it.

“I can kill you.”

“After I repaired you? I have known ingratitude, but never such depths as that.” His chest had closed tightly, and I struggled to get my legs into his, pushing with hands braced against the hollows of his shoulders. If I had been able to take a moment more outside, I would have removed my boots; then it would have been easy. As it was, I felt I had already fractured both ankles.

“You have no right in me!”

“I have every right. You were made to protect men, and I was a man in need of protection. Didn’t you hear the wings? You can’t make me believe there is supposed to be a creatures like that loose in this ship.”

“They have freed the apports.”

“Who has?” My sound leg had at last straightened itself. My lame leg ought to have been easier, because its muscles had shrunk; but I could not summon strength enough to force it down.

“The jibers.”

I felt myself bent forward, as one sometimes is in wresting; Sidero was sitting up. He stood, and in standing shifted my position just enough for my lame leg to straighten. It was easy then to thrust my left arm into his. My right entered what had been his own right arm equally easily, but emerged from the damaged brassard, protected only at the shoulder.

“That’s better,” I said. “Wait a moment.”

He sprang up the stairs instead, able now to take three at a stride.

I halted, turned, and descended again.

“I will kill you for this.”

“For going back for my knife and pistol? I don’t think you should; we may need them.” I stooped and picked them up, the knife with my right hand, the pistol with my left, inside Sidero’s. My belt had half fallen through the grillwork floor; but I retrieved it without difficulty, threaded sheath and holster on it, and buckled it around Sidero’s waist without a thumb’s width to spare.

“Get out!”

I fastened my cloak about his shoulders. “Sidero, I’ve had people inside me too, though you may not believe it. It can be pleasant and useful. Because I’m where I am, we have a right arm. You said you were loyal to the ship. So am I. Are we going to—”

Something pale dropped from the pale mist. Its wings were translucent as the wings of insects, but more flexible than the wings of bats. And they were huge, so wide they wrapped the landing where we stood like the curtains of a catafalque.

Suddenly I could hear again. Sidero had activated the circuits that conveyed sound from his ears to mine; or perhaps he was only too distracted to prevent their functioning. However that might be, I heard the wind that roared around us from those great and ghostly wings, a hiss like the quenching of a thousand blades.

My pistol was in my hand, though I was not aware of having drawn it. I looked frantically for something, head or claws, at which to fire. There was nothing, and yet something gripped my legs, lifting me and Sidero too as a child lifts a doll. I fired at random. A rent — but, oh, how small a rent — appeared in the titanic wings, its edges just defined by a narrow band burned black.

The railing struck my knees. As it did, I fired again and smelled smoke.

It seemed that it was my own arm that burned. I cried out. Sidero was struggling with the winged creature without my volition. He had drawn the hunting knife, and I feared for a moment he had slashed my arm, that the burning pain I felt was that which we feel when sweat is carried to a wound. I thought of turning my pistol on him, then realized that my own hand was in his.

The horror of the Revolutionary gripped me once more; I fought to destroy myself, and I no longer knew whether I was Severian or Sidero, Thecla to live or Thecla to die. We spun, head downward.

We fell.

The terror of it was indescribable. Intellectually, I knew we could fall but slowly in the ship; I was even half-aware that we fell no faster at the lower levels. And yet we were falling, air whistling by faster and faster, the side of the airshaft a dark blur.

All of it had been a dream. How strange it seemed. I had boarded a great ship with decks upon every side, climbed into a metal man. Now I was awake at last, lying on the icy slope of the mountain beyond Thrax, seeing two stars and imagining, half in dream, that they were eyes.

My right arm had shifted too near the fire, but there was no fire. It was the cold, then, that made it burn so. Valeria moved me to softer ground.

The deepest bell in the Bell Tower was ringing. The Bell Tower had risen by night on a column of flame, settling at dawn beside Acis. The iron throat of the great bell shouted to the rocks, and they reverberated with its echoing sound.

Dorcas had played the recording “Deep Bells Offstage.” Had I delivered my final lines? “In future times, so it has long been said, the death of the old sun will destroy Urth. But from its grave will rise monsters, a new people, and the New Sun. Old Urth will flower as a butterfly from its dry husk, and the New Urth shall be called Ushas.” What fanfaron! Exit Prophet.

The winged woman of Father Inire’s book awaited me in the wings. Her hands she clapped once, formally, as a great lady summons her maid. As they parted there appeared between them a point of white light, hot and flaming. It seemed to me that it was my own face, and my face a mask that stared into it.

The old Autarch, who lived in my mind but seldom spoke, muttered through my swollen lips. “Find another…”

A dozen panting breaths had passed before I understood what he had told us: that it was time to surrender this body to death, time for us — time for Severian and Thecla, time for himself and all the rest who stood in his shadow — to take a step toward the shadows ourselves. Time for us to find someone else.

He lay between two great machines, already splattered with some dark lubricant. I bent, nearly falling, to explain what he must do.

But he was dead, his scarred cheek cold to my touch, his withered leg broken, the white bone thrusting through the skin. With my fingers I closed his eyes.

Someone came with hastening steps. Before they reached me, someone else was already at my shoulder, a hand behind my head. I saw the light of his eyes, smelled the musk of his hairy face. He held a cup to my lips.

I tasted, hoping for wine. It was water; but cold, pure water that tasted better than any wine to me.

A throaty female voice called, “Severian!” and a big sailor crouched at my side. It was not until she spoke again that I realized the voice had been hers. “You’re all right. We were — I was afraid—” She had no words and kissed me instead; as she did, the hairy face kissed us both. Its kiss was quick, but hers went on and on.

It left me breathless. “Gunnie,” I said when she released me at last.

“Now how are you feeling? We were afraid you were going to die.”

“So am I.” I was sitting up now, though it was all I could do to do so. Every joint ached, my head ached worst of all, and my right arm seemed to have been thrust into a fire. The sleeve of my velvet shirt hung in rags, and the skin had been coated with a yellow ointment. “What happened to me?”

“You must have fallen down the spiracle — that’s where we found you. Or anyway, Zak did. He came and got me.” Gunnie jerked her head toward the hairy dwarf who had held the water cup for me. “Before that, I guess you were flashed.”

“Flashed?”

“Burned by an arc when something shorted out. Same thing happened to me. Look.” She was wearing a gray workshirt; now she pulled it down far enough for me to see that the skin between her breasts had been seared an angry red and was smeared with the same ointment. “I was working in the powerhouse. When I got burned, they sent me to the infirmary. They put this stuff on and gave me a tube to use later — I guess that’s why Zak picked me. You’re not up to hearing all this, are you?”

“I suppose not.” The oddly angled walls had begun to turn, circling with a slow dignity like the skulls that had swung about me once.

“Lie down again while I get you something to eat. Zak will keep a watch for jibers. There don’t seem to be any down this far anyway.”

I felt I should ask her a hundred questions. Much more, I wanted to lie down, to sleep if the pain allowed it; and I was lying down and half-asleep before I had time to do more than think about it.

Then Gunnie had returned with a bowl and a spoon. “Atole,” she said. “Eat it.” It tasted like stale bread boiled in milk, but it was warm and filling. I believe I ate most of it before I slept again.

When I woke next, I was no longer so near to agony, though I was yet in pain. My missing teeth were missing still, my mouth and jaw still sore; there was a knot the size of a pigeon’s egg on the side of my head, and the skin of my right arm was beginning to crack despite the ointment. It had been ten years and more since Master Gurloes or one of the journeymen had thrashed me, and I found I was no longer so skilled at dismissing pain as once I had been.

I tried to distract myself with an examination of my surroundings. The place where I lay appeared not so much a cabin as a crevice in some great mechanism, the kind of place where one finds objects that appear to have come from nowhere — but such a place magnified many times. The ceiling was ten ells high at least, and slanted. No door preserved privacy or repelled intruders; an unobstructed passage led from a corner.

I lay on a heap of clean rags near the corner diagonally opposite. When I sat up to look around me, the hairy dwarf Gunnie called Zak appeared from the shadows and crouched beside me. He did not speak, but his posture expressed a concern for my well-being. I said, “I’m all right, don’t worry,” and at that he seemed to relax a bit.

The only light in the chamber came through the door; I used it to examine my nurse as well as I could. He seemed to me not so much a dwarf as a small man — that is to say, there was no marked disproportion between his torso and limbs. His face was not fundamentally different from any other man’s except in being overshadowed by bushy hair and having a luxuriant brown beard and an even more luxuriant mustache, neither of which appeared ever to have been touched by scissors. His forehead was low, his nose somewhat flat, and his chin (so far as it could be guessed at) less than prominent; but many men have such features. He was indeed a man, I should add, and then a completely naked one save for a thick crop of bodily hair; but when he saw me glance at his crotch, he pulled a rag from the pile and knotted it about his waist like an apron.

With some difficulty, I got to my feet and hobbled across the room. He outraced me and planted himself in the doorway. There every line of his body reminded me of a servant I had once watched restraining a drunken exultant; it pleaded with me not to do as I intended, and simultaneously announced its owner’s readiness to restrain me by force if I tried.

I was unfit for force of any sort, and as far as possible from those reckless high spirits in which we are ready to fight our friends when there are no enemies at hand. I hesitated. He pointed down the passage, drawing a finger across his throat in an unmistakable gesture.

“Danger there?” I asked. “You’re probably right. This ship would make some battlefields I’ve seen look like public gardens. All right, I won’t go out.”

My bruised lips made it difficult to talk, but he appeared to have understood me, and after a moment he smiled.

“Zak?” I asked, pointed to him.

He smiled again and nodded.

I touched my chest. “Severian.”

“Severian!” He grinned, showing small, sharp teeth, and performed a little dance of joy. Still joyful, he took my left arm and led me back to the pile of rags.

Though his hand was brown, it seemed faintly luminous in the shadows.