Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (37 page)

“A new bride? Ulundra, you honor me!”

I felt rather than saw the dimpling smile.

“My love, all that I have is yours.”

I could not see him, so I glared straight ahead of me.

“I am not a toy to be given away!”

The red voice boomed. “You have entered my realm, and all here is at my pleasure! You have become mine, to do with as I choose!”

It was a foolish gesture to protest, when both these enormous presences held my life between them, but I despised a bully.

“If you want me for a bride, then I demand a bride price,” I said. “When the Exultant Odaracus wooed me in the court of the Autarch, he gave me gifts. In exchange for that, I gave him fifteen years of devotion and two daughters until he left me for one of his own rank. What do you offer me?”

The viscous substance surrounding me suffused with merriment.

“A challenge! Name your price, then, toy.”

“My name is Nedell,” I declared. It gave him power over me, but if I could fulfill my mission for the Order, I would do it. My life was only one of the myriad I could save. The New Sun had come; I had lived to see it. It was enough. I steeled my quavering heart. “I want Severian’s memoirs, to bring back to the people of Ushas. I need to save my world. Give me that, and I am yours forever.”

“Forever?” the voice echoed. “Do you even know the meaning of that, Nedell?”

“No,” I said simply.

“Then, learn!”

Long ago, when I had crossed into the sixth level of initiation of our Order, I had to learn to blend my thoughts with others. For my elevation, I had to follow the mind of a many-times senior initiate, a cacogen from the star that circled the head of the Ram. She drew me out of myself until I joined with her. Our minds together flicked between the mirrors in the Guildmistress’s study and out toward that star, where I saw worlds illuminated with blue light instead of red. At the time it was as much as I could bear. The girl I was then would have quailed against the sight I now beheld. Even my elder self feared, though we both marveled.

The gray- green murk dissolved, leaving a curtain of blackness. Myriad pinpoints pierced that curtain, diamonds against the dark. Their beauty and their number overwhelmed me. I saw the universe as I never hoped to see it. Tears overspilled my eyes and rolled in every direction, freezing on my forehead, nose and cheeks, some trickling off to hang around me like tiny stars.

“There, you form your own worlds,” the red voice murmured. “They, too, will spawn life.” I turned my head, and my whole body spun. I flailed to control myself. Ulundra laughed.

I saw her, then. In the void, she swam as easily as she did in the deeps. Her sleek nakedness was more beautiful than any mortal, any work of art I had ever seen. Her hair curled and flowed like the tail of a comet. Her breasts were perfect half- spheres, tipped with blue- green nipples. I had suspected a fish’s tail, but her legs were like mine, but ideal in shape, with pillowy thighs and slender calves. Beside her was a male, as naked as she, corded muscles rippling beneath gray- blue skin. His shoulders were as broad as a blacksmith’s, his arms a swordsman’s, and his manhood longer than I was tall. His hair was pure black with a few silver threads brighter than the suns that surrounded us. His eyes glowed as red as his voice.

“I set you a challenge of my own. Where is your New Sun?”

I tore my eyes from his beauty and looked around me. The flecks of light shone. I saw different colors among them, blue, gold, red, even green. The New Sun was white, but there seemed a preponderance of white.

“There are too many,” I said.

“If your world means so much to you that you would give me your life in exchange, can you truly tell me that you do not know it?”

Know it? How could I distinguish it?

I cudgeled myself to remember what I had learned in Mistress Cinitha’s astronomy lectures.

Ah, but I might! The old Nedell, who had been maiden, mother, and now encroaching upon crone, could not, but the new Nedell, as new as the New Sun itself, had been given a gift on the day of its birth.

I closed my eyes and concentrated. Where was my sisterhood? They were in my heart, as they had been all of my life.

“Well, toy?”

“Patience!” I snapped, as if Abaia were no more than Chettor.

He chuckled.

Unlike most guilds, we did not often raise apprentices from infancy. Rather, a baffled-looking child was occasionally left at the Mercy Gate outside our tower, or a young man who knew the spots on the dice before they fell too often for chance, or a frightened woman, pursued by an angry mob, rang our alarm bell. Most of the time, the fact that she had reached our tower kept the mob back long enough for us to rescue her. Sometimes, it didn’t. Our small cemetery had an ossuary of bones of those whom had sought our protection yet not survived to enter the guild. We had plenty of charlatans and wish-they-weres come to the door, but they did not stay, as we could easily discern the falsehood. For the others, they knew from the moment the great door shut behind them that they had come home.

I had the very smell of the herb gardens in my nostrils. Scents as thick as wax and soft as silk caressed me. Gentle breezes brought birdsong and the chirring of insects. Unlike my present misfortune, that is a genuine memory, one I will always treasure, and hope to hold again, once the new gardens are grown and I have returned to the bosom of my family— the Guild of Witches. I sought for that single point of light that meant home. It was faint, so faint, at this distance, but I knew the kindness of the Infirmaress, the patience of the teachers, the love that the Guildmistress had for us all, and the children I loved and had to let go so that they, like I, could fulfill their destinies. It was there, I knew it!

I opened my eyes. A cluster of stars hung before me like a cloud of gnats. Ushas was among them.

“Well, toy, which one?” Abaia taunted me.

From this coign the tiny spots of white light seemed alike, taraxacum seeds dancing in night air. All of them felt like strangers going about their business but one, that faint point just to the right of the topmost light.

“That one,” I said.

“Are you certain? Would you stake all their lives as well as your own?”

I quailed in dread.

“Please don’t make them suffer more than they have,” I begged. There was no floor on which I could drop to my knees, but I crouched low and held my tiny hands out to him. “If I am wrong, let only me pay. I offered you my life. Take it. Let them be.”

“Who are you to demand anything at all?” Abaia asked, the magnificent eyebrows lifting high on the broad brow. “Order is at my whim, because chaos reigns when I will it.”

I swallowed. “But the Autarchs . . .”

“Are a mere moment in all of history. All but one. I rule for infinity! But you are correct, Nedell.” He smiled, showing all his teeth. In that flash of whiteness, I saw an infinity of reflections of myself, and suddenly we were back in the grayness of the deep. Ulundra clapped her hands with delight, as if I were an animal that had just done a trick.

Arms again enfolded me, but they exuded the majestic intelligence of Abaia himself. We spun together. The rags of my clothing fell away, until I was as naked as Ulundra. I felt his body explore mine, seeking its inner secrets. I felt passion as I had not for years as his lips and hands explored my flesh. The lapping of the seawater around us only excited me more greatly. But when he opened up my vulnerability, our minds were shared, as mine had been with the cacogen. I saw stars in the blackness within him, and realized that he was the universe turned inside out. I knew his truth.

When our passion was spent, he returned to titan size and floated lazily beside me.

“You don’t fear me.”

I considered the question.

“No. I am curious about you.”

He extended a huge hand. I kissed the nearest fingertip.

“I could snuff you out between two fingers.”

“That would not stop my curiosity,” I said. “I have faced my greatest fears and lived. I know yours. You fear being unmade by order. You are chaos. This is a time for you to thrive, but all will settle again, and you will lose the upper hand you have now.”

“Be my bride,” he said. “Join my women. You shall learn the beauty of chaos.”

I bowed my head. “When I have brought back to my Order that which we require.”

“I grant you leave,” Abaia said. “The coffer that held your Autarch’s memories is buried deep, and the other flung into another existence, where not even the cacogens can retrieve it. It belongs to the ages and the void.”

“Then we are lost,” I said.

“Chaos will reign, as is right.”

“I will seek the coffer,” I said stubbornly. I fought against the void of despair into which he sought to drag me. I had the strength of my sisters behind me, as well as the training and the weight of my years. We mystes were initiates in many disciplines. “Will you guide me to the archives? That is its most likely location.” He waved the hand. The swirling current it caused flung me outward several leagues and brought me back again.

“Ulundra will take you.”

I expected the Undine to be jealous of Abaia’s proposal. Instead, she was delighted. She gathered me up in her hand and swam down toward the shadows on the sea floor.

“We have had no new brides for an age,” she said. “We will so love having you join us. Come, this way! This is the way to seek your dream.”

My heart rent again and again as we flitted among the ruins of the great Citadel. No bodies of human or animal remained, but all the buildings and possessions left by those who fled or drowned cried out the stories of their makers to me.

The farther we descended, the smaller Ulundra became, until we could swim side by side. She guided me into the labyrinth of chambers once occupied by the Autarch, the exultants, and all those who governed us. I passed council chambers where schools of fish were in session, storehouses with polypi clinging to the walls, and a bedchamber that had become home to a massive cloudlike cnidarian.

At last, Ulundra came to a painting of a landscape with a small farmhouse in the foreground, crops and herds in the background.

“This is the door,” she said.

A mystery is only a mystery for a time, for it relies upon a sense of wonder and curiosity to maintain its air, and that needs energy. If it is not revealed before the energy runs out, then the mystery becomes a conundrum, a problem, an annoyance, and a pestilence. My guild had little patience with mysteries. Our task was to solve them and reveal their workings to those who inquired of us in a manner that they would understand, if such a thing were possible. If we could not, that mystery was relegated to the collection of things that we studied when we had the time to do so. Our Guildmistress, our mother, would present the problems remaining unsolved to us at our semiannual festivals, laying guerdons on the table that represented each, and invited us to take one that excited our curiosity all over again. I had seen such portals before. They were illusions. One only had to find the part that looked too perfect, and push through it.

I found a door within that image that had been rendered so realistically that a crack in the uppermost board was trailing a flake of paint. I touched it, and we found ourselves in a long room lined densely with books.

A metal coffer was the object I sought. We floated up and down the many aisles in between shelves that rose to the ceiling. It had been years since I had been in the archives. It broke my heart to see the knowledge of ages submerged and deteriorating with every eddy. I touched the leather spines, softened with salt water. In most of them I felt only three minds: the author, the bookbinder, and the archivist who had shelved it countless ages ago, never to be opened again.

At the end of the room was another door, not disguised, the one through which I had entered coming from the witches’ tower. But on either side of that were two smaller doors. With Ulundra’s help, I forced one open.

Within it, I felt the force of many wills so strong it knocked me back. I fought my way through and stepped over the threshold. I looked at the artifacts that lined the shelves, seeing helms, books, swords, folded cloaks, cups, and other items. Here was the collection of personal possessions of the Autarchs. They had all been labeled carefully with metal plates that had only just begun to corrode. I found things that had belonged to Tyron, and M, and, yes, thank the Incarnate, Severian. Such modest leavings! A leather scrip, a shard of sharp metal that must have been a sword blade, a tattered fuligin cloak. I touched them, and was overwhelmed by the hive of personalities. It is why the Cumaean never called Severian one man, but the multitude. At the center was one personality: a man, honest, strong, kind, and just. Severian shared the wisdom of many, all the Autarchs before him, and many others besides. It was a wonder that deserved much consideration. I would consult others when I returned to the Order.

I searched all over the room, but found no coffer that felt of Severian. Instead, on a shelf by itself, I found a small brown book. When I touched it, I found the unmistakable stamp of Severian and his multitude. The Tales of Urth and Sky was an ordinary storybook. Hundreds, if not thousands of copies existed, but this one held the essence of Severian: Torturer, Conciliator, Lictor, Autarch, and New Sun. The plain brown book, property of so many since its making from the skins of animals and the gall of trees, was one of the few things that he had treasured. In it I sensed the lessons he had learned over his long lifetime. It held the answers we sought, I knew it!

“Is that it?” Ulundra asked. “I thought it would be more impressive. No jewels? No devices?”

I trembled as I took it off the shelf.

“It is as if I am taking the hand of the Autarch himself,” I said.

Very, very gingerly, I opened it.

The Tales of Urth and Sky had a new appendix added to it, though not substantial. It included the story of how Apu-Punchau traveled through all the corridors of time, giving gifts of wisdom to those who needed them. I knew from my gift that it was Severian in all his many guises, and of Thecla, the beautiful, lost mnemosyne, repository of dreams, memories, and wishes, who walked down the ages as if they were only paths in a garden. Her memories became his memories, and so passed into the canon of the world. It was a greater legacy than a simple exultant could have achieved, on or off the face of Urth.