The Shadow of the Torturer

20. FATHER INIRE’S MIRRORS

As Agia had said, the real jungles sickened far to the north. I had never seen them, yet the Jungle Garden made me feel I had. Even now, as I sit at my writing table in the House Absolute, some distant noise brings back to my ears the screams of the magenta-breasted, cynaeous-backed parrot that flapped from tree to tree, watching us with white-rimmed and disapproving eyes—though this is no doubt because my mind was already turned to that haunted place. Through its screaming, a new sound—a new voice—came from some red world still unconquered by thought.

“What is it?” I touched Agia’s arm.

“A smilodon. But he’s far away and only wants to frighten the deer so they’ll blunder into his jaws. He’d run from you and your sword much faster than you could run from him.” Her gown had been torn by a branch, exposing one breast. The incident had left her in no good mood.

“Where does the path lead? And how can the cat be so far off when all this is only one room of the building we saw from the top of the Adamnian Steps?”

“I’ve never gone so deeply into this garden. You were the one who wanted to come.”

“Answer my questions,” I said, and took her by the shoulder. “If this path is like the others—I mean, in the other gardens—it runs in a wide loop that will eventually return us to the door by which we came in. There’s no reason to be afraid.”

“The door vanished when I shut it.”

“Only trickery. Haven’t you seen those pictures in which a pietist exhibits a meditating face when you’re on one side of the room, but stares at you when you cross to the opposite wall? We’ll see the door when we approach it from the other direction.”

A snake with camelian eyes came gliding onto the path, lifted a venomous head to look at us, then slipped away. I heard Agia’s gasp and said, “Who’s afraid now? Will that snake flee you as quickly as you would flee it? Now answer my question about the smilodon. Is it really far away? And if so, how can that be?”

“I don’t know. Do you think there are answers to everything here? Is that true in the place you come from?”

I recalled the Citadel and the age-old usages of the guilds. “No,” I said. “There are inexplicable offices and customs in my home, though in these decadent times they are falling out of use. There are towers no one has ever entered, too, and lost rooms, and tunnels whose entrances have not been seen.”

“Then can’t you understand that it’s the same way here? When we were at the top of the steps and you looked down and saw these gardens, could you make out the entire building?”

“No,” I admitted. “There were pylons and spires in the way, and the corner of the embankment.”

“And even so, could you delimit what you saw?”

I shrugged. “The glass made it difficult to tell where the edges of the building were.”

“Then how can you ask the questions you do? Or if you have to ask them, can’t you understand that I don’t necessarily have the answers? From the sound of the smilodon’s roar, I knew he was far off. Perhaps he is not here at all, or perhaps the distance is of time.”

“When I looked down on this building, I saw a faceted dome. Now when I look up, I see only the sky between the leaves and vines.”

“The surfaces of the facets are large. It may be that their edges are concealed by the limbs,” Agia said.

We walked on, wading a trickle of water in which a reptile with evil teeth and a finned back soaked himself. I unsheathed Terminus Est, fearing he would dart at our feet. “I grant,” I told her, “that the trees grow too thickly here to permit me to see far to either side. But look here, through the opening where this freshet runs. Upstream I can see only more jungle. Downstream there is the gleam of water, as though it empties into a lake.”

“I warned you that the rooms open out, and that you might find that disturbing. It is also said that the walls of these places are specula, whose reflective power creates the appearance of vast space.”

“I once knew a woman who had met Father Inire. She told me a tale about him.

Would you like to hear it?”

“Suit yourself.”

Actually it was I who wanted to hear the story, and I did suit myself: I told it to myself in the recesses of my mind, hearing it there hardly less than I had heard it first when Thecla’s hands, white and cold as lilies taken from a grave filled with rain, lay clasped between my own.

“I was thirteen, Severian, and I had a friend named Domnina. She was a pretty girl who looked several years younger than she teally was. Perhaps that’s why he took a fancy to her.

“I know you know nothing of the House Absolute. You must take my word for it that at one place in the Hall of Meaning there are two mirrors. Each is three or four ells wide, and each extends to the ceiling. There’s nothing between the two except a few dozen strides of marble floor. In other words, anyone who walks down the Hall of Meaning sees himself infinitely multiplied there. Each mirror reflects the images in its twin.

“Naturally, it’s an attractive spot when you’re a girl and fancy yourself something of a beauty. Domnina and I were playing there one night, turning around and around to show off new camisias. We had moved a couple of big candelabra so one was on the left of one mirror and the other on the left of the facing one—at opposite corners if you see what I mean. “We were so busy looking at ourselves that we didn’t notice Father Inire until he was only a step away. Ordinarily, you understand, we would have run and hidden when we saw him coming, though he was scarcely taller than we. He wore iridescent robes that seemed to fade into gray when I looked at them, as if they had been dyed in mist. ‘You must be wary, children, of looking at yourselves like that,’ he said. ‘There’s an imp who waits in silvered glass and creeps into the eyes of those who look into it.’

“I knew what he meant, and blushed. But Domnina said, ‘I think I’ve seen him. Is he shaped like a tear, all gleaming?’

“Father Inire did not hesitate before he answered her, or even blink—still, I understood that he was startled. He said, ‘No, that is someone else, dulcinea. Can you see him plainly? No? Then come into my presence chamber tomorrow a little after Nones, and I’ll show him to you.’

“We were frightened when he left. Domnina swore a hundred times that she would not go. I applauded her resolution and tried to strengthen her in it. More to the point, we arranged that she should stay with me that night and the next day. “It was all for nothing. A little before the appointed time, a servant in a livery neither of us had ever seen came for poor Domnina. “A few days before I had been given a set of paper figures. There were soubrettes, columbines, coryphees, harlequinas, figurantes, and so on—the usual thing. I remeniber that I waited on the window seat all afternoon for Domnina, toying with these little people, coloring their costumes with wax pencils, arranging them in various ways and inventing games she and I would play when she came back.

“At last my nurse called me to supper. By that time I thought Father Inire had killed Domnina, or that he had sent her back to her mother with an order that she must never visit us again. Just as I was finishing my soup there was a knock. I heard mother’s servitrix go to answer the door, then Domnina burst in. I’ll never forget her face—it was as white as the faces of the dolls. She cried and my nurse comforted her, and eventually we got the story out of her. “The man who had been sent for her had taken her through halls she hadn’t known existed. That, you understand, Severian, was frightening in itself. We both thought ourselves perfectly familiar with our wing of the House Absolute. Eventually he had led her into what must have been the presence chamber. She said it was a large room with hangings of a solid, dark red and almost no furniture except for vases taller than a man and wider than she could spread her arms.

“In the center was what she at first took to be a room within the room. The walls were octagonal and painted with labyrinths. Over it, just visible from where she stood at the entrance to the presence chamber, burned the brightest lamp she had ever seen. It was blue-white, she said, and so brilliant an eagle could not have kept his eyes on it.

“She had heard the click of the bolt when the door had been closed behind her. There was no other exit she could see. She ran to the curtains hoping to find another door behind them, but as soon as she pulled one aside, one of the eight walls painted with labyrinths opened and Father Inire stepped out. Behind him she saw what she called a bottomless hole filled with light. “ ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘You’ve come just in time. Child, the fish is nearly caught. You can watch the setting of the hook, and learn by what means his golden scales are to be meshed in our landing net.’ He took her arm and led her into the octagonal enclosure.”

At this point I was forced to interrupt my tale to help Agia through a section of the path almost completely overgrown. “You’re talking to yourself,” she said. “I can hear you muttering behind me.”

“I’m telling myself the story I mentioned to you. You seemed to have no wish to hear it, and I wanted to listen to it again—besides, it concerns the specula of Father Inire, and may contain hints useful to us.”

“Domnina drew away. In the center of the enclosure, just under the lamp, was a haze of yellow light. It was never still, she said. It moved up and down and from side to side with rapid flickerings, never leaving a space that might have been four spans high and four long. It did indeed remind her of a fish. Much more than the faint flagae she had glimpsed in the mirrors of the Hall of Meaning ever had—a fish swimming in air, confined to an invisible bowl. Father Inire drew the wall of the octagon closed behind them. It was a mirror in which she could see his face and hand and shining, indefinite robes reflected. Her own form too, and the fish’s… but there seemed to be another girl—her own face peering over her shoulder; then another and another and another, each with a smaller face behind it. And so on ad infinitum, an endless chain of fainter Domnina-faces.

“She realized when she saw them that the wall of the octagonal enclosure through which she had passed faced another mirror. In fact, all the others were mirrors. The light of the blue-white lamp was caught by them all and reflected from one to another as boys might pass silver balls, interlacing and intertwining in an interminable dance. In the center, the fish flickered to and fro, a thing formed, as it seemed, by the convergence of the light. “ ‘Here you see him,’ Father Inire said. ‘The ancients, who knew this process at least as well as we and perhaps better, considered the Fish the least important and most common of the inhabitants of specula. With their false belief that the creatures they summoned were ever present in the depths of the glass, we need not concern ourselves. In time they turned to a more serious question: By what means may travel be effected when the point of departure is at an astronomical distance from the place of arrival?’

“ ‘Can I put my hand through him?’

“ ‘At this stage you may, child. Later I would not advise it.’

“She did so, and felt a sliding warmth. ‘Is this how the cacogens come?’

“ ‘Has your mother ever taken you riding in her flier?’

“ ‘Of course.’

“ ‘And you have seen the toy fliers older children make on the pleasance at night, with paper hulls and parchment lanterns. What you see here is to the means used to travel between suns as those toy fliers are to real ones. Yet we can call up the Fish with these, and perhaps other things too. And just as the boys’ fliers sometimes set the roof of a pavilion ablaze, so our mirrors, though their concentration is not powerful, are not without danger.’ “ ‘I thought that to travel to the stars you’d have to sit on the mirror.’ “Father Inire smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile, and though she knew he meant only that she had amused and pleased him (perhaps more than a grown woman could have) it was not pleasant. ‘No, no. Let me outline the problem to you. When something moves very, very fast—as fast as you see all the familiar things in your nursery when your governess lights your candle—it grows heavy. Not larger, you understand, but only heavier. It is attracted to Urth or any other world more strongly. If it were to move swiftly enough, it would become a world itself, pulling other things to it. Nothing ever does, but if something did, that is what would happen. Yet even the light from your candle does not move swiftly enough to travel between the suns.’ “(The Fish ffickered up and down, forward and back.) “ ‘Couldn’t you make a bigger candle?’ I feel sure Domnina was thinking of the paschal candle she saw each spring, thicker than a man’s thigh. “ ‘Such a candle could be made, but its light would fly no more swiftly. Yet even though light is so weightless we have given its name to that condition, it presses against what it falls on, just as wind, which we cannot see, pushes the arms of a mill. See now what happens when we provide light to mirrors set face to face: The image they reflect travels from one to the other and returns. Suppose it meets itself in returning—what do you suppose happens then?’

“Domnina laughed despite her fear, and said she could not guess. “ ‘Why it cancels itself. Think of two little girls running across a lawn without looking where they’re going. When they meet, there are no more little girls running. But if the mirrors are well made and the distances between them are correct, the images do not meet. Instead, one comes behind the other. That has no effect when the light comes from a candle or a common star, because both the earlier light and the later light that would otherwise tend to drive it forward are only random white light, like the random waves a little girl might make by flinging a handful of pebbles into a lily pond. But if the light is from a coherent source, and forms the image reflected from an optically exact mirror, the orientation of the wave fronts is the same because the image is the same. Since nothing can exceed the speed of light in our universe, the aceelerated light leaves it and enters another. When it slows again, it reenters ours—naturally at another place.’

“ ‘Is it just a reflection?’ Domnina asked. She was looking at the Fish. “ ‘Eventually it will be a real being, if we do not darken the lamp or shift the mirrors. For a reflected image to exist without an object to originate it violates the laws of our universe, and therefore an object will be brought into existence.”’

“Look,” Agia said, “we’re coming to something.”

The shade of the tropical trees was so intense that spots of sunshine on the path seemed to blaze like molten gold. I squinted to peer beyond their burning shafts of light.

“A house set on stilts of yellow wood. It’s thatched with palm fronds. Can’t you see it?”

Something moved, and the hut seemed to spring at my eyes as it emerged from the pattern of greens, yellows, and blacks. A shadowed splotch became a doorway; two sloping lines, the angle of the roof. A man in light-colored clothes stood on a tiny veranda looking down the path at us. I straightened my mantle. “You don’t have to do that,” Agia said. “It doesn’t matter in here. If you’re hot, take it off.”

I removed the mantle and folded it over my left arm. The man on the veranda turned with an expression of unmistakable terror and went into the hut.