The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter X — Interlude

“YOU HAD a good rap on the head,” Gunnie said. She was sitting beside me watching me eat stew.

“I know.”

“I ought to have taken you to the infirmary, but it’s dangerous out there. You don’t want to be anywhere other people know about.”

I nodded. “Especially me. Two people have tried to kill me. Perhaps three. Possibly four.”

She looked at me as if she suspected the fall had unsettled my wits.

“I’m quite serious. One was your friend Idas. She’s dead now.”

“Here, have some water. Are you saying Idas was a woman?”

“A girl, yes.”

“And I didn’t know it?” Gunnie hesitated. “You’re not just making it up?”

“It isn’t important. The important thing is that she tried to kill me.”

“And you killed him.”

“No, Idas killed herself. But there is at least one other and perhaps more than one. You weren’t talking about them, though, Gunnie. I think you meant the people Sidero mentioned, the jibers. Who are they?”

She rubbed the skin at the corners of her eyes with her forefingers, the woman’s equivalent of male head scratching. “I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t even know if I understand them myself.”

I said, “Try, Gunnie, please. It may be important.”

Hearing the urgency in my voice, Zak abandoned his self-assigned task of watching for intruders long enough for a concerned glance.

“You know how this ship sails?” Gunnie asked. “Into and out of Time, and sometimes to the end of the universe and farther.”

I nodded, scraping the bowl.

“There are I don’t know how many of us in the crew. It may sound funny to you, but I just don’t. It’s so big, you see. The captain never calls us all together. It would take too long, days of walking just for all of us to get to the same place, and then there’d be nobody doing the work while we were going there and getting back.”

“I understand,” I told her.

“We sign on and they take us to one part or another. And that’s where we stay. We get to know the others who are already there, but there’s lots of others we never see. The forecastle up from here where my cabin is, that’s not the only one. There’s lots of othets. Hundreds and maybe thousands.”

“I asked about the jibers,” I said.

“I’m trying to tell you. It’s possible for somebody, anybody, to lose himself on the ship forever. And I mean Forever, because the ship goes there, and it comes back, and that makes strange things happen to time. Some people get old on the ship and die, but some work a long time and never get any older and make a load of money, until finally the ship makes port on their home, and they see it’s almost the same time there now as when they got on, and they get off, and they’re rich. Some get older for a while then get younger.” She hesitated, afraid for a moment to speak more; then she said, “That’s what’s happened to me.”

“You’re not old, Gunnie,” I told her. It was the truth.

“Here,” she said, and taking my leff hand, she laid it on forehead. “Here I’m old, Severian. So much has happened to me that I want to forget. Not just to forget, I want to be young there again. When you drink or drug, you forget. But what those things did to you is still there, in the way you think. You know what I’m saying?”

“Very well,” I told her. I took my hand from her forehead and held one of hers instead.

“But you see, because those things happen, and sailors know it and talk about it even if most longshore people won’t believe them, the ship gets people who aren’t really sailors and don’t want to work. Or maybe a sailor will fight with an officer and get written up for punishment. Then he’ll go off and join the jibers. We call them that because it’s what you say a boat does when she makes a turn you don’t want — she jibes.”

“I understand,” I said again.

“Some just stay in one place, I think, like we’re staying here. Some travel around looking for money or a fight. Maybe just one comes to your mess, and he has some story. Sometimes so many come nobody wants to give them trouble, so you pretend they’re crew, and they eat, and if you’re lucky they go away.”

“You’re saying that they’re only common seamen, then, who’ve rebelled against the captain.” I brought in the captain because I wanted to ask her about him later.

“No.” She shook her head. “Not always. The crew comes from different worlds, from other star-milks, even, and maybe from other universes. I don’t know about that for sure. But what’s a common seaman to you and me might be somebody pretty strange to somebody else. You’re from Urth, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“So am I, and so are most of the others here. They put us together because we talk the same and think the same. But if we went to another fo’c’sle, everything might be different.”

“I thought I’d traveled a great deal,” I told her, laughing inwardly at myself. “Now I see I haven’t gone quite as far as I believed.”

“It would take you days just to get out of the part of the ship where most of the sailors are more or less like you and me. But the jibers who move around get mixed up. Sometimes they fight each other; but sometimes they join together until there are three or four different kinds in one gang. Sometimes they pair up, and the woman has children, like Idas. Usually the children can’t have children, though. That’s what I’ve heard.”

She glanced significantly toward Zak, and I whispered, “He’s one?”

“I think he must be. He found you and came and got me, so I thought it would be all right to leave you with him while I went for food. He can’t talk, but he hasn’t hurt you, has he?”

“No,” I told her. “He’s been fine. In ancient times, Gunnie, the peoples of Urth journeyed among the suns. Many came home at last, but many others stayed on that world or this. The hetrochthnous worlds must by this time have reshaped humanity to conform to their own spheres. On Urth, the mystes know that each continent has its own pattern for mankind, so that if people from one shift their bode to another, they will in a short time — fifty generations or so — come to resemble the original inhabitants. The patterns of other worlds must be yet more distinct; and yet the human race would remain human still, I think.”

“Don’t say, ‘By this time,’” Gunnie told me. “You don’t know what the time would be if we were to stop at some sun. Severian, we’ve talked a lot and you look tired. Don’t you want to lie down now?”

“Only if you will lie down too,” I said. “You are as tired as I, or more. You’ve been going around collecting food and medicine for me. Rest now, and tell me more about the jibers.” The truth was that I was sufficiently better to wish to put my arm about a woman and even to bury myself in a woman; and with many women, of whom, I think, Gunnie was one, there is no better way to attain intimacy than to permit them to talk, and to listen to them.

She stretched herself beside me. “I’ve already told you about everything I know. Most are sailors gone bad. Some are their children, born on the ship and hidden till they’re old enough to fight. Then too, do you remember how we caught the apport?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Not all the apports are animals, though there’s a lot more of those than anything else. Sometimes they’re people, and sometimes they live long enough to get inside the ship where there’s air.” She paused, then giggled. “You know, the others on their home worlds must wonder where they went when they were apported. Especially when it’s somebody important.”

It seemed strange to hear so massive a woman giggle, and I who seldom smile, smiled myself.

“Some people say too that some jibers are taken on board with the cargo, that they’re criminals who want to get away from their home worlds and have stowed aboard that way. Or that they’re only animals on their worlds and have been shipped as live cargo, though they’re people like us. We’d only be animals on those worlds — that’s what I think.”

Her hair, near my face now, was piercingly fragrant; and it occurred to me that it could hardly be thus always, that she had perfumed herself for me before returning to our cranny.

“Some people call them muties because so many can’t talk. Maybe they have some language of their own; but they can’t talk to us, and if we catch one he has to talk by signs. But Sidero said one time that mutist means a rebel.”

I said, “Speaking of Sidero, was he around when Zak took you to the bottom of the airshaft?”

“No, there was nobody there but you.”

“Did you see my pistol, or the knife you gave me when we first met?”

“No, there wasn’t anything there. Did you have them on when you fell?”

“Sidero had them. I was hoping he’d been honest enough to return them, but at least he didn’t kill me.”

Gunnie shook her head by rolling it back and forth on the rags, a process that brought one round and blooming cheek into contact with mine. “He wouldn’t. He can play rough sometimes, but I never heard that he killed anybody.”

“I think he must have struck me while I was unconscious. I don’t think I could have hurt my mouth in the fall. I was inside him, did I tell you that?”

She drew away to stare at me. “Really? Can you do that?”

“Yes. He didn’t like it, but I think that something in the way he’s built kept him from trying to expel me as long as I was conscious. After we fell, he must have opened up and pulled me out with his good arm. I’m lucky he didn’t break both my legs. When he got me out, he must have struck me. I will kill him for that; when we meet again.”

“He’s only a machine,” Gunnie said softly. She slipped her hand inside my ruined shirt.

“I’m surprised you know that,” I told her. “I would have thought you’d think him a person.”

“My father was a fisherman, so I grew up on boats. You give a boat a name and eyes, and a lot of times it acts like a person and even tells you things. But it isn’t a person, not really. Fishermen are funny sometimes, but my father used to say that you could tell when a man was really crazy, because if he didn’t like his boat he’d sink it instead of selling it. A boat has a spirit, but it takes more than a spirit to make a person.”

I asked, “Did your father approve of your signing on this ship?”

She said, “He drowned first. All fishermen drown. It killed my mother. I’ve got back to Urth pretty often, but it was never when they were alive.”

“Who was Autarch when you were a child, Gunnie?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It wasn’t the kind of thing we cared about.”

She wept a little. I tried to comfort her, and from that we might have slipped very quickly and naturally into making love, but her burn covered most of her chest and abdomen, and though I fondled her, and she me, the memory of Valeria came between us as well.

At last she said, “That didn’t hurt you, did it?”

“No,” I told her. “I’m only sorry I hurt you as much as I did.”

“You didn’t. Not at all.”

“But I did, Gunnie. It was I who burned you in the gangway outside my stateroom, as we both know.”

Her hand sought her dagger, but she had discarded it when she undressed. It lay beneath her other clothing and well out of her reach.

“Idas told me she’d hired a sailor to help her dispose of the corpse of my steward. She called that sailor ‘he,’ but she hesitated before she said the word. You were one of her workmates, and even though you didn’t know she was female, it would have been quite natural for her to seek the help of a woman, if she had no male lover”

“How long have you known?” Gunnie whispered. She had not begun to sob again, but in the corner of one eye I could see a tear, large and rounded as Gunnie herself.

“From the first, when you brought me that gruel. Because it had been exposed, my arm had been burned by the digestive juices of the flying creature; it was the only part of me that hadn’t been protected by Sidero’s metal hide, and of course I thought of that at once when I regained consciousness. You said you’d been seared by a flash of energy, but such things don’t discriminate. Your face and forearms, which had been exposed, were unburned. Your burns were in places that would surely have been protected by a shirt and trousers.”

I waited for her to speak, but she did not.

“In the dark, I called out for help, but no one answered. Then I fired my pistol with the beam set low, to give me light. I held it at eye level when I fired, but I couldn’t see the sights, and the beam was angled down a bit. It must have hit you at the waist. When I slept, you went looking for Idas, I suppose, so you could sell me to her for another chrisos. You didn’t find her, of course. She’s dead, and her body’s locked in my cabin.”

“I wanted to answer when you called,” Gunnie said. “But we were supposed to be doing something secret. All I knew was that you were lost in the dark, and I thought the lights would come on again soon. Then Idas put his knife — her knife, you say, but I didn’t know that — against my neck. He was right behind me, so close he didn’t even get hurt when you shot me.”

I said, “However that may be, I want you to know that Idas had nine chrisos on her when I searched her body. I put them in the pocket of the sheath on that knife you found. Sidero has my knife and pistol; if you’ll return them to me, you may keep the gold and welcome.”

Gunnie did not want to talk after that. I feigned sleep, though in fact I watched from beneath my lids to see if she would try to stab me.

Instead she rose and dressed, then crept out of the chamber, stepping over the sleeping Zak. I waited for a long time, but she did not return, and at last I slept myself.