The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XXII — Descent

“THERE MUST be many questions you want to ask,” Apheta whispered. “Let us go out into the portico, and I will answer them all.”

I shook my head, for I heard the water-music of rain through the open doorway.

Gunnie touched my arm. “Is somebody spying on us?”

“No,” Apheta told her. “But let us go out. It should be pleasant there, and we have only a short time now, we three.”

“I can understand you well enough,” I told her. “I’ll stay here. Perhaps some others among these many dead will begin to moan. That would make a fit voice for you.”

She nodded. “It would indeed.” I had seated myself where Tzadkiel had crouched on the first day; she sat down beside me, no doubt so that I might hear her better.

In a moment Gunnie sat too and sheathed her dagger, having cleaned the blade on her thigh. “I’m sorry,” Gunnie said.

“Sorry for what? Because you fought for me? I don’t blame you.”

“Sorry the others didn’t, that the magic people had to defend you against us. Against all of us but me. Who were they? Did you whistle them up?”

“No,” I said. Apheta, “Yes.”

“They were people I’d known, that’s all. Some were women I’d loved. Many are dead — Thecla, Agilus, Casdoe… Perhaps they’re all dead now, all ghosts, though I didn’t know it.”

“They are unborn. Surely you know that time runs backward when the ship sails swiftly. I told you myself. They are unborn, as you are.”

She spoke to Gunnie. “I said he had called them because it was from his mind that we drew them, seeking those who hated him, or at least had reason to. The giant you saw might have mastered the Commonwealth, had Severian not defeated him. The blond woman could not forgive him for bringing her back from death.”

I said, “I can’t stop you from explaining all this, but do it elsewhere. Or let me go where I need not hear it.”

Apheta asked, “It gave you no joy?”

“To see them all again, tricked into defending me? No. Why should it?”

“Because they were not tricked, no more than Master Malrubius was on any of the occasions when you saw him after his death. We found them among your memories and let them judge. Everyone in this Chamber, save yourself, saw the same things. Has it not struck you as odd that I can scarcely speak here?”

I turned to stare at her, feeling I had been away and come back to hear her talk when it was of some other matter.

“Our rooms are always filled with the sound of water and the sighing of the wind. This was built for you and your kind.”

Gunnie said, “Before you came in, he — Zak — showed us that Urth had two futures. It could die and be born new. Or it could go on living for a long time before it died forever.”

“I’ve known that since I was a boy.”

She nodded to herself, and for a moment I seemed to see the child she had been instead of the woman she had become. “But we haven’t. We hadn’t.” Her gaze left my face, and I saw her looking from corpse to corpse. “In religion, but sailors never pay much attention to that.”

For want of something better to say, I said, “I suppose not.”

“My mother did, and it was like she was crazy, someplace in a corner of her mind. You know what I mean? And I think that was all it was.”

I turned to Apheta and began, “What I want to know—”

But Gunnie caught me by the shoulder, her hand large and strong for a woman’s, and drew me back to her. “We thought it wouldn’t be for a long while yet, a long while after we were dead.”

Apheta whispered, “When you sign aboard that ship, you sail from the Beginning to the End. All sailors know that.”

“We didn’t think about it. Not until you made us. He made us see it. Zak.”

I asked, “And you knew it was Zak?”

Gunnie nodded. “I was with him when they caught him. I don’t think I would have known otherwise. Or maybe I would. He’d changed a lot, so I knew already he wasn’t what we thought at first. He’s — I don’t know.”

Apheta whispered, “May I tell you? He is a reflection, an imitation, of what you will be.”

I asked, “You mean if the New Sun comes?”

“No. I mean that it is coming. That your trial is over. You have been obsessed with it for so long, I know, and it must be difficult for you to realize that it is truly over. You have succeeded. You have saved your future.”

“You have succeeded too,” I said.

Apheta nodded. “You understand that now.”

Gunnie said, “I don’t. What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you see? The Hierarchs and their Hierodules — and the Hierogrammates too — have been trying to let us become what we were. What we can be. Isn’t that right, my lady? That’s their justice, their whole reason for being. They bring us through the pain we brought them through. And—” I could not complete the thought. The words had become iron on my lips.

Apheta said, “You in turn will make us go through what you did. I think you understand. But you” — she looked to Gunnie — “do not. Your race and ours are, perhaps, no more than each other’s reproductive mechanisms. You are a woman, and so you say you produce your ovum so that there will someday be another woman. But your ovum would say it produces that woman so that someday there will be another ovum. We have wanted the New Sun to succeed as badly as he has wanted to himself. More urgently, in all truth. In saving your race he has saved ours; as we have saved ours of the future by saving yours.”

Apheta turned back to me. “I told you that you had brought unwelcome news. The news was that we might indeed lose the game you and I spoke of.”

I said, “I have three questions, my lady. Let me ask them and I’ll go, if you’ll let me.”

She nodded.

“How is it that Tzadkiel could say my examination was over, when the aquastors had to fight and die to save me?”

“The aquastors did not die,” Apheta told me. “They live in you. As for Tzadkiel, he spoke as he did because it was the truth. He had examined the future and found the chance high that you would bring a fresh sun to your Urth, and thus save that strand of your race, so that it might produce ours in your Briahtic universe. It was on that examination that everything hinged; it was over, and the result favorable to you.”

Gunnie looked from Apheta to me and seemed about to speak, but she said nothing.

“My second question. Tzadkiel said also that my trial could not be just, and that he would make what reparation he could. You have said that he is truthful. Did my trial differ from my examination? How was it unjust?”

Apheta’s voice seemed no more than a sigh. “It is easy for those who need not judge, or judging need not toil for justice, to complain of inequity and talk of impartiality. When one must actually judge, as Tzadkiel does, he finds he cannot be just to one without being unjust to another. In fairness to those on Urth who will die, and especially to the poor and ignorant people who will never understand what it is they die for, he summoned their representatives—”

“Us, you mean!” Gunnie exclaimed.

“Yes, you shipmen. And he gave you, Autarch, those who had reason to hate you for your defenders. That was just to the shipmen, but not to you.”

“I have deserved punishment often before, and not received it.”

Apheta nodded. “For that reason certain of the scenes you saw, or at least might have seen had you troubled to look, were made to appear in the narrow passage that rings this room. Some recalled your duty. Others were meant to show you that you yourself had often meted out the harshest justice. Do you see now why you were chosen?”

“A torturer, to save the world? Yes.”

“Take your head out of your hands. It is enough that you and this poor woman can scarcely hear me. At least permit me to hear you. You have asked the three questions you spoke of. Have you more?”

“Many. I saw Dana. And Guasacht and Erblon. Had they reason to hate me?”

“I do not know,” Apheta whispered. “You must ask Tzadkiel, or those who assisted him. Or ask yourself.”

“I suppose they had. I would have displaced Erblon if I could. As Autarch, I could have promoted Guasacht, but I did not; and I never tned to find Dana after the battle. There were so many other things — so many important things — to do. I see why you called me a monster.”

Gunnie exclaimed, “You’re no monster, she is!”

I shrugged. “Yet all of them fought for Urth, and so did Gunnie. That was wonderful.”

“Not for the Urth you have known,” Apheta whispered. “For a New Urth many will never see, except through your eyes and the eyes of others who recall them. Have you more questions?”

Gunnie said, “I’ve got one. Where are my shipmates? The ones who ran and saved their lives?”

I sensed that she was ashamed for them. I said, “Their running saved ours too, very likely.”

“They will be returned to the ship,” Apheta told her.

“What about Severian and me?”

I said, “They’ll try to kill us on the voyage home, Gunnie; or perhaps not. If they do, we’ll have to deal with them.”

Apheta shook her head. “You will be returned to the ship indeed, but by a different way. Believe me, the problem will not arise.”

Dark-robed Hierarchs came down the aisle with travails, gathering the dead. “They will be interred in the grounds of this building,” Apheta whispered. “Have we reached your last question, Autarch?”

“Nearly. But look there. One of those bodies belongs to one of your own people, to Tzadkiel’s son.”

“He will lie here as well, with those who fell with him.”

“But was it intended so? Did his father plan that too?”

“That he should die? No. But that he should risk death. What right would we have to risk your life and the lives of so many others if we would bear no risk ourselves? Tzadkiel risked death with you on the ship. Venant here.”

“He knew what would happen?”

“Do you mean Tzadkiel or Venant? Venant surely did not know what would happen, yet he knew what might happen, and he went forth to save our race, as others have gone forth to save theirs. For Tzadkiel I cannot speak.”

“You told me each of the isles judges a galaxy. Are we — is Urth — important to you after all?”

Apheta rose, smoothing her white gown. Her floating hair, which had seemed uncanny to me when I had seen it first, was familiar now; I felt sure that such a dark aureole was depicted somewhere in old Rudesind’s illimitable gallery, though I could not quite call the proper painting to mind. She said, “We have watched with the dead. Now they go, and it is time that we went also. It may be that from your ancient Urth, reborn, the Hieros will come. I believe it to be so. But I am only one woman, and of no high position. I said what I did so that you would not die despairing.”

Gunnie started to speak, but Apheta motioned her to silence, saying, “Now follow me.”

We did, but she walked only a step or two to the spot where Tzadkiel’s Seat of Justice had stood. “Severian, take her hand,” she told me. She herself took my free hand, and Gunnie’s.

The stone on which we stood sank under us. In an instant the floor of the Chamber of Examination closed above our heads. We dropped, or so it seemed, into a vast pit filled with harsh yellow light, a pit a thousand times wider than the square of stone. Its sides were mighty mechanisms of green and silver metals, before which men and women hovered and darted like so many flies, and across which titanic scarabs of blue and gold clambered like ants.