Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (5 page)

“That’s insane.”

“One of us is, perhaps. Would you care to meet the other delusions?”

We picked our way through moderately dense forest—subtropical scrub with a few palms and deciduous trees—and came to a cooking fire smoldering low under a crude spit with two large fish impaled. A teenaged boy was tending to the spit, with eight older men and women in a rough circle around the fire.

They were a motley crew, more motley than most pirate assemblages, I think—of the nine, two were female and two of indeterminate gender, and most were clad in the same nondescript homespun that I was wearing, their appearance otherwise spanning a half- dozen centuries. One woman was naked, her face and arms covered with animated tattoos, surely from my future; one dignified man was wearing an old-fashioned powdered wig. Two were stylishly bald like myself, or perhaps came from a past where hereditary baldness couldn’t be corrected. They were black and white and Asian, and they all looked at me with mild curiosity or, in one case, undisguised hostility.

The hostile-looking woman spoke. “Oh, goody. Another sexist pig.” She was stocky but not bad-looking, with a single black braid down to her waist.

“Better to have another lass,” one of the wigged men said. “These two are not particularly forthcoming.”

“Lass my ass,” she snarled. The naked woman, also attractive, tried to keep her lips pursed, but they twitched in a smile.

“And what year are you from?” she asked quietly. “You look normal.”

I told her.

“An’ it pleases yer grace,” a drunk rough-looking man growled to no one in particular.

“Shut your trap,” the hostile woman said, mildly but with authority. She was solid, like a stevedore, and had a claw hammer thrust in her belt, perhaps a weapon.

“I’m from two years after you,” the prettier one said. “I could tell you who wins the election.”

“All right,” I said. “Who?”

“I just told you,” she said smiling.

A few of them laughed. “You don’t remember anything you could take back for profit,” a young man said. “Anything you could tell me about the twentieth or twenty-first century, I would forget right away. I was taken the year the war with Spain started, 1898. Don’t bother to tell me who won.”

“ ‘Take things back’?” I said. “So people do return to their own time?”

“We don’t know, really,” she said. “Some of us were told that.”

“People disappear after some days or weeks,” the gentleman said. “Perhaps they do return to the time and place from which they disappeared.”

“Yeah, right,” the stocky woman said. “That’s why the history books are full of time travelers.”

“Perhaps they don’t remember,” the gentleman said. “My theory is—”

“Oh, stuff your theory,” she said.

“My theory, which is only a theory, is that this could happen all the time, and perhaps does, to everybody. If no one remembers when they return, then it’s just as if you hadn’t gone.”

“Unless you croak,” the kid said, “like that old jasper over there.”

“He may have gone back home when he died,” a grandfatherly type said in a strained voice.

“And if pigs had wings they could fly,” the stocky woman said. “It doesn’t matter when you die, for God’s sake. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. Heaven or Hell.”

An old woman or man shook her head. “There’s no evidence one way or the other.”

“Why did I know you were going to say that?” she snarled. “I must be fucking psychic.”

“Psychoh,” the drunk muttered.

“If you don’t stop picking at one another,” the largest man said, “we could be here forever.” He was bare-chested, muscles hard and well defined. Clean-shaven and handsome, he sat with a broadsword across his lap. It was an executioner’s sword, squared off rather than pointed at the end. How would I know that detail?

“None of us knows why we’re here,” the executioner said to me. “Perhaps you have a clue?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “It’s as if I just woke . . . but into a dream rather than out of one.”

“So what do you do when you’re not in a dream? What is your name?” He extended his hand. “I am Severian.”

“I am . . . Father Christopher, a Roman Catholic priest. Newly ordained.” Had I ever been assigned a parish?

“A gift from God,” the pretty woman said. “We do need to bury someone.”

The liturgy for burial sped through my mind in English and Latin simultaneously, with an echo of Spanish and something else. Catalan? But I had no image of the ceremony; perhaps I’d never conducted one.

“Of course,” I said. “Though I must admit it will be a first time for me. I came late to my calling.”

“Just some churchly words,” the white-wigged one said. “We have to get him under the ground.”

“I don’t suppose you brought a shovel from the future,” the illtempered woman said.

“I had no warning,” I said. “Did any of you?”

The executioner held up his sword, lightly. “Just a tingling. I had just finished cleaning Terminus Est here and was reaching for its scabbard. Then there was a tingling, and suddenly I found myself here. In the air, actually; I fell a few cubits.”

“Cleaning the sword?” I said. “You just killed somebody with it?”

“It’s what I do. I travel from place to place and offer my services.” He sighted down the blade. “The place I was taken from, I hadn’t executed anyone yet. Took off two hands and an ear, and sewed a woman up. They were bringing out a murderer and a usurer, who would be executed, but something dimmed and I fell to earth here.”

“Were you dressed like that, for executing people?”

He pinched homespun between thumb and forefinger and frowned at it. “Not at all. Silk and leather. And you?”

If I said “Dockers and a polyester Princeton rugby shirt,” it would only add to the confusion. “No . . . different, but just as plain.”

A young woman, the smallest, head shaved and rings piercing her eyebrows and upper lip, edged forward. “Your sword has a name?”

He nodded. “ ‘Terminus est.’ There is an end, or an ending.”

“I read about you and your sword. In a fiction novel.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, smiling. “Novels are like fables, no? I am as real as you are.”

“Okay. What year do you think it is?”

“Twelve. The twelfth year of King Bader’s reign.”

“The hell it is! It’s 2094, all over two worlds, and this”—she indi- cated the whole of our surround—“is sure as hell not Luna!”

“Luna,” I said. “You’re from the moon?”

“Duh. So we’ve got a caped crusader and a moron.” She made a disgusted face at the rough woman. “And a lez- bo from Hell and an accordion geezer. A sword-wielding Swedish masseur and two fine specimens from New York City: a used-car dealer and a whore.”

“Escort,” the naked woman said calmly. “What planet are you from?”

“The moon! Like I said! The thing up in the sky?”

“You’re as crazy as you look. No one lives on the moon. There’s no air.”

“We make our own air.”

“Yeah. Bet I know how you do it, too.” They stepped toward each other, but the man with the sword was suddenly between them. Built like a weightlifter but swift as a dancer.

“Now please,” he said. “We have to get along.”

“Or what? You’ll chop my head off?” the naked woman said.

“It would quiet things down.” He turned back to me. “We’re on an island. Jim here followed a stream uphill and saw that the ocean is all around us.”

“Probably the Pacific,” the grandfatherly one said. “At least it looks like the South Pacific, where I fought the Japs.”

“But actually,” the naked woman said, “we don’t even know that it’s Earth.”

“Well, your moon was in the sky this morning,” he said. “Though I suppose that just narrows it down. Could be a million years in the past or future.”

“So what story are you from?” the young boy asked me. “I’m from a treasured island.”

“Your name is Jim?” I said.

“Aye, sir. Jim Hawkins. Most here know my story, unless they’re from way back.”

“Everybody here is from a work of fiction?”

“They say I’m in some goddam book,” said the teenager who was turning the fish. “It sure as hell ain’t some dream. I dream about naked women all the time, who doesn’t? But Jesus, this one really is naked, and she’s got stuff I never thought of, you know?”

She cupped a hand over her pubis and pulled up. “Want some?”

“Are you Holden Caulfield?” I said.

“Jesus, you too. Yeah, I’m from Catcher Walking Through the Fucking Wheat Field or some goddamn crap.”

“Hell, even I know about you,” said an old blind guy with an accordion, whose eyes were covered with a faded bandana. “It sounds like we’re all from made-up stories, complete with made-up memories. If your book says you’re from 1950, you won’t have read about any characters written after that.”

“It’s like we all have two memories,” the nude woman said, “one here on the island and one from some other place and time. A fictional one.”

“Two, for me,” I said. “I lived in a modern time, with airplanes and space travel. But I think I got there from the seventeenth century.” My head felt funny, and I sat to keep from falling down. “But before that, I was in modern times, too. I went from the twenty-first century to the seventeenth.”

“How did you get there?” the man in the wig asked.

“I think I walked. And rode in a cart.” The memory was clear enough, but choppy, like a sequence of strobe shots. “I left a monastery in rural Cuba and walked to Havana. When I got there the harbor was full of tall sailing ships. But there weren’t any cars or airplanes.”

“Old Havana,” the nude woman said. “I saw that movie. But you’re a time traveler in your own story! You go back to olden times and grow up to be a pirate. And then at the end of the movie, you’re going back to Cuba on an airplane to . . . meet yourself? Meet your younger self and make sure you do the right thing.”

“But no,” I said. “I really am a pirate.” I held up the back of my hand, with its festering wound. “This is from a sword fight, a couple of days ago. Nobody ever made a movie about me.”

“Sure they did,” she said. “A book before the movie, too.”

“You are all so fucking crazy,” the drunk said. “What movie? We was just dropped here.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t pay any attention to him.”

“But he’s right, isn’t he? We were all dropped here. Literally dropped, in my case, and in Severian’s.”

“I was asleep,” she said. “In my crèche outside Luna City. It’s like I rolled out of bed and onto this island. Where the gravity stinks, incidentally.”

Something began to crystallize. “I think I read about you, too, in a science fiction book. Though I suppose you were wearing clothes.”

“I normally am. But not while I’m sleeping. Maybe I’ll buy some pajamas, now.” She heaved a sigh and looked around. “I guess you never know what kind of a world you’re going to wake up in.”

“Suppose we are all from books. Has anybody here read all of them?”

An older man who had been watching the proceedings with interest raised a finger. “Most of them. Including yours . . . Ignacio.”

No one had used that name here. “You have read about my life?”

“Oh, yes; more than once.” He patted his generous mustache, eyes dancing. “And most of the books all of our friends here inhabit. The mystery to me are the ones I can’t identify. Did I read them and forget?”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s good. I would hate to be upstaged by one of my own creations. I don’t understand, either.”

Another lunatic, but a harmless one. “You think we all came from books you wrote?”

“Oh, no; not all of you. You and Severian did. But most of you do seem to be from books I’ve read.”

“So we’re figments of your imagination?”

“Or memory, or dreams. I wonder if you’ll disappear when I wake up.”

Severian drew his sword back out in a long hiss. “I wonder what would happen to us if you died. Here in this supposed dream world.”

“Not an experiment I would care to try.”

“Or dare to,” Severian said. He picked up a coconut off the ground, tossed it up, and split it with a one-handed swing of the heavy blade. One hemisphere rolled to my feet.

Had the coconut been there before? I picked it up. Some dirt adhered to the edges of the cut. It smelled right.

“So you just willed us into being,” I said to the man with the mustache. “You’re God.”

“No, not at all. God made me, and then through me made you. I don’t pretend to know how or why.”

“But I’m real,” I said, feeling foolish.

“As I am,” Severian said.

“Me, too,” the nude woman said, hands on her hips. “Why don’t you try to erase one of us?”

The man stared at her. “All right. Go away.”

“No,” she said. “What’s happening?” Slowly she started to fade. I could see the forest through her. She looked around wildly and then disappeared with a quiet pop.

“My God,” I said. “Could you do that to any of us?”

He was still looking at the place where she had been. “I don’t know. I don’t want to get rid of anybody. But I don’t know how long I can stay asleep.”

“You aren’t asleep,” I said.

“Not here,” he said. “No one is ever asleep inside a dream; certainly not one he makes up himself. But what is going to happen to all of this when I wake up? To all of you?”

“But look,” I said. “I can remember back dozens of years. You couldn’t have made up all of that.”

“Maybe it’s not about ‘making up.’ I wouldn’t have made up that poor girl, stuck here without any clothes. Or the unpleasant modern woman.”

“I’ll give you unpleasant,” she said.

“I don’t think you will,” he said. “But please try. Take Severian’s weapon and try.”

She walked toward Severian with her hand out, but he just looked through her.

“Try Ignacio,” the man said.

She came toward me and held out her hand. I wasn’t able to pull my sword out of its scabbard. It was as if it were welded there.

“I haven’t imagined any one of you dead. Until I do—or until the authors of these other characters do—I think you’ll just have to live forever.”

“On this island?” I said.

He closed his eyes and everything around us shimmered and faded, dark and then gray light. There was a thunderous roar and the El roared by overhead as grit sifted down. Boxy old automobiles all around, shiny black. People dressed like flappers and gangsters. I wore a light flannel zoot suit and the girl was in a yellow pearlstudded chemise that came down almost to her knees.