Gene Wolfe - New Sun 5 - The Urth of the New Sun.pdf

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The Urth of the New Sun
The Urth of the New Sun
by Gene Wolfe
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
—F ITZGERALD
Chapter I
The Mainmast
Chapter II
The Fifth Sailor
Chapter III
The Cabin
Chapter IV
The Citizens of the Sails
Chapter V
The Hero and the Hierodules
Chapter VI
A Death and the Dark
Chapter VII
A Death in the Light
Chapter VIII
The Empty Sleeve
Chapter IX
The Empty Air
Chapter X
Interlude
Chapter XI
Skirmish
Chapter XII
The Semblance
Chapter XIII
The Battles
Chapter XIV
The End of the Universe
Chapter XV
Yesod
Chapter XVI
The Epitome
Chapter XVII
The Isle
Chapter XVIII
The Examination
Chapter XIX
Silence
Chapter XX
The Coiled Room
Chapter XXI
Tzadkiel
Chapter XXII
Descent
Chapter XXIII
The Ship
Chapter XXIV
The Captain
Chapter XXV
Passion and the Passageway
Chapter XXVI
Gunnie and Burgundofara
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Chapter XXVII The Return to Urth
Chapter XXVIII The Village Beside the Stream
Chapter XXIX Among the Villagers
Chapter XXX Ceryx
Chapter XXXI Zama
Chapter XXXII To the Alcyone
Chapter XXXIII Aboard the Alcyone
Chapter XXXIV Saltus Again
Chapter XXXV Nessus Again
Chapter XXXVI The Citadel Again
Chapter XXXVII The Book of the New Sun
To the Tomb of the Monarch
Chapter XXXIX The Claw of the Conciliator Again
Chapter XL The Brook Beyond Briah
Chapter XLI Severian from His Cenotaph
Chapter XLII
Ding, Dong, Ding!
Chapter XLIII
The Evening Tide
Chapter XLIV
The Morning Tide
Chapter XLV
The Boat
Chapter XLVI
The Runaway
Chapter XLVII
The Sunken City
Chapter XLVIII
Old Lands and New
Chapter XLIX
Apu-Punchau
Chapter L
Darkness in the House of Day
Chapter LI
The Urth of the New Sun
Appendix
The Miracle of Apu-Punchau
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Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter I
The Mainmast
HAVING CAST one manuscript into the seas of time, I now begin again.
Surely it is absurd; but I am not — I will not be — so absurd myself as to
suppose that this will ever find a reader, even in me. Let me describe then, to
no one and nothing, just who I am and what it is that I have done to Urth.
My true name is Severian. By my friends, of whom there were never very
many, I was called Severian the Lame. By my soldiers, of whom I once
commanded a great many, though never enough, Severian the Great. By my
foes, who bred like flies, and like flies were spawned from the corpses that
strewed my battlefields, Severian the Torturer. I was the last Autarch of our
Commonwealth, and as such the only legitimate ruler of this world when we
called it Urth.
But what a disease this writing business is! A few years ago (if time retains any
meaning), I wrote in my cabin on the ship of Tzadkiel, re-creating from
memory the book I had composed in a clerestory of the House Absolute. Sat
driving my pen like any clerk, recopying a text I could without difficulty bring
to mind, and feeling that I performed the final meaningful act — or rather, the
final meaningless act — of my life.
So I wrote and slept, and rose to write again, ink flying across my paper,
relived at last the moment at which I entered poor Valeria's tower and heard
it and all the rest speak to me, felt the proud burden of manhood dropped
upon my shoulders, and knew I was a youth no more. That was ten years past,
I thought. Ten years had gone by when I wrote of it in the House Absolute.
Now the time is perhaps a century or more. Who can say?
I had brought aboard a narrow coffer of lead with a close-fitting lid. My
manuscript filled it, as I knew it would. I closed the lid and locked it, adjusted
my pistol to its lowest setting, and fused lid and coffer into a single mass with
the beam.
To go on deck, one passes through strange gangways, often filled by an
echoing voice that, though it cannot be distinctly heard, can always be
understood. When one reaches a hatch, one must put on a cloak of air, an
invisible atmosphere of one's own held by what appears to be no more than a
shining necklace of linked cylinders. There is a hood of air for the head, gloves
of air for the hands (these grow thin, however, when one grasps something,
and the cold seeps in), boots of air, and so forth.
These ships that sail between the suns are not like the ships of Urth. In place of
deck and hull, there is deck after deck, so that one goes over the railing of one
and finds oneself walking on the next. The decks are of wood, which resists the
deadly cold as metal will not; but metal and stone underlie them.
Masts sprout from every deck, a hundred times taller than the Flag Keep of
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the Citadel. Every part appears straight, yet when one looks along their
length, which is like looking down some weary road that runs beyond the
horizon, one sees that it bends ever so slightly, bowing to the wind from the
suns.
There are masts beyond counting; every mast carries a thousand spars, and
every spar spreads a sail of fuligin and silver. These fill the sky, so that if a
man on deck desires to see the distant suns' blaze of citron, white, violet, and
rose, he must labor to catch a glimpse of them between the sails, just as he
might labor to glimpse them among the clouds of an autumn night.
As I was told by the steward, it sometimes happens that a sailor aloft will lose
his hold. When that occurs on Urth, the unfortunate man generally strikes the
deck and dies. Here there is no such risk. Though the ship is so mighty, and
filled with such treasures, and though we are so much nearer her center than
those who walk upon Urth are to the center of Urth, yet her attraction is but
slight. The careless sailor drifts among the shrouds and sails like thistledown,
most injured by the derision of his workmates, whose voices, however, he
cannot hear. (For the void hushes every voice except to the speaker himself,
unless two come so near that their investitures of air become a single
atmosphere.) And I have heard it said that if it were not thus, the roaring of
the suns would deafen the universe.
Of all this I knew little when I went on deck. I had been told that I would have
to wear a necklace, and that the hatches were so constructed that the inner
must be shut before the outer can be opened — but hardly more. Imagine my
surprise, then, when I stepped out, the leaden coffer beneath my arm.
Above me rose the black masts and their silver sails, tier upon tier, until it
seemed they must push aside the very stars. The rigging might have been
cobweb, were the spider as large as the ship — and the ship was larger than
many an isle that boasts a hall and an armiger in it who thinks himself almost
a monarch. The deck itself was extensive as a plain; merely to set foot on it
required all my courage.
When I sat writing in my cabin, I had scarcely been aware that my weight had
been reduced by seven-eighths. Now I seemed to myself like a ghost, or rather
a man of paper, a fit husband for the paper women I had colored and paraded
as a child. The force of the wind from the suns is less than the lightest zephyr
of Urth; yet slight though it was, I felt it and feared I might be blown away. I
seemed almost to float above the deck rather than to walk on it; and I know
that it is so, because the power of the necklace kept outsoles of air between the
planks and the soles of my boots.
I looked around for some sailor who might advise me of the best way to climb,
thinking that the decks would hold many, as the decks of our ships did on
Urth. There was no one; to keep their cloaks of air from growing foul, all
hands remain below save when they are needed aloft, which is but seldom.
Knowing no better, I called aloud. There was, of course, no answer.
A mast stood a few chains off, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had no hope of
climbing it; it was thicker through than any tree that ever graced our forests,
and as smooth as metal. I began to walk, fearing a hundred things that would
never harm me and utterly ignorant of the real risks I ran.
The great decks are flat, so that a sailor on one part can signal to his mate
some distance away; if they were curved, with surfaces everywhere equally
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distant from the hunger of the ship, separated hands would be concealed from
each other's sight, as ships were hidden from one another under the horizons
of Urth. But because they are flat, they seem always to slant, unless one stands
at the center. Thus I felt, light though I was, that I climbed a ghostly hill.
Climb it I did for the space of many breaths, perhaps for half a watch. The
silence seemed to crush my spirit, a hush more palpable than the ship. I heard
the faint taps of my own uneven footfalls on the planks and occasionally a
stirring or humming from beneath my feet. Other than these faint sounds,
there was nothing. Ever since I sat under Master Malrubius's instruction as a
child, I have known that the space between the suns is far from empty; many
hundreds and perhaps many thousands of voyages are made there. As I
learned later, there are other things too — the undine I twice encountered had
told me that she sometimes swam the void, and the winged being I had
glimpsed in Father Inire's book flew there.
Now I learned what I had never really known before: that all these ships and
great beings are only a single handful of seed scattered over a desert, which
remains when the sowing is done as empty as ever. I would have turned and
limped back to my cabin, if I had not realized that when I reached it my pride
would force me out again.
At last I approached the faint descending gossamers of the rigging, cables that
sometimes caught the starlight, sometimes vanished in the darkness or against
the towering bank of silver that was the top-hamper of the deck beyond. Small
though they appeared, each cable was thicker than the great column's of our
cathedral.
I had worn a cloak of wool as well as my cloak of air; now I knotted the hem
about my waist, making a sort of bag or pack into which I put the coffer.
Gathering all my strength into my good leg, I leaped.
Because I felt my whole being but a tissue of feathers, I had supposed I would
rise slowly, floating upward as I had been told sailors floated in the rigging. It
was not so. I leaped as swiftly and perhaps more swiftly than anyone here on
Ushas, but I did not slow, as such a leaper begins to slow almost at once. The
first speed of my leap endured unabated — up and up I shot, and the feeling
was wonderful and terrifying.
Soon the terror grew because I could not hold myself as I wished; my feet
lifted of their own accord until I leaped half sidewise, and at last spun through
the emptiness like a sword tossed aloft in the moment of victory.
A shining cable flashed by, just outside my reach. I heard a strangled cry, and
only afterward realized it had come from my own throat. A second cable
shone ahead. Whether I willed it or not, I rushed at it as I might have rushed
upon an enemy, caught it, and held it, though the effort nearly wrenched my
arms out of their sockets, and the leaden coffer — which shot past my head —
almost strangled me with my own cloak. Clamping my legs around the icy
cable, I managed to catch my breath.
Many abuattes roamed the gardens of the House Absolute, and because the
lower servants (ditchers, porters, and the like) occasionally trapped them for
the pot, they were wary of men. I often watched and envied them as they ran
up some trunk without falling — and, indeed, seemingly without knowledge of
the aching hunger of Urth at all. Now I had myself become such an animal.
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