The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter VIII — The Empty Sleeve

WHEN IT was too late I moved very swiftly, turning Idas upon her back, feeling for a pulse, pounding her chest to shock her heart into renewed life, all of it perfectly useless. I found no pulse, and the reek of poison in her mouth.

It must have been hidden on her person. Not in her shirt, unless she had already slipped the pellet to her lips in the darkness, to be crushed and swallowed should she fail. In her hair, perhaps (though that seemed too short to have concealed anything), or in the waistband of her trousers. From either place she might easily have conveyed it unseen to her mouth as she staunched the blood from her arm.

Recalling what had occurred when I tried to reanimate the steward, I did not dare try to revive her. I searched her body, but found almost nothing beyond nine chrisos of gold, which I put into the pocket in the sheath. She had said that she had given a hand a chrisos to assist her; it seemed reasonable to suppose that Abaia (or whichever of his ministers had sent her out) had provided her with ten. When I cut away her boots, I found that the toes they had concealed were long and webbed. I sliced the boots to bits, searching them just as she had searched my own belongings a couple of watches earlier, but found no more she than had.

As I sat on my bunk and contemplated her body, I thought it strange that I had been deceived, though certainly I had been at first, deceived not so much by Idas as by my recollection of the undine who had freed me from the nenuphars of Gyoll and accosted me at the ford. She had been a giantess; thus I had seen Idas as a gangling youth and not as a giant child, though Baldanders had kept a somewhat similar child — a boy, and much younger — in his tower.

The undine’s hair had been green, not white; perhaps that had done most of all. I should have realized that such a true and vivid green is not found in men or beasts with hair or fur, and when it seems to occur is the effect of algae, like that in the blood of the green man at Saltus. A rope left hanging in a pond will soon enough be green; what a fool I had been.

Idas’s death would have to be reported. My first thought was to speak to the captain, ensuring a favorable hearing for myself by contacting him through Barbatus or Famulimus.

I had no more than shut the door behind me when I realized that such an introduction was impossible. Our conversation in their stateroom had been their first encounter with me; it had therefore been my last with them. I would have to reach the captain in some other way, establish my identity, and report what had occurred. Idas had said that the repairs were being carried out below, and surely there would be an officer in charge of them. Once more I descended the windswept steps, this time continuing beyond the caged apports into an atmosphere warmer and damper still.

Absurd though it seemed, I somehow felt that my weight, which had been only slight on the tier of my cabin, diminished further as I descended. Earlier, when I had climbed the rigging, I had noticed that it dwindled as I ascended; it therefore followed that it should increase as I moved down from level to level in the bowels of the ship. I can only say that it was not so, or at least that it did not seem so to me, but the very reverse of that.

Soon I heard footsteps on the stair below me. If I had learned anything during the past few watches, it was that any chance-met stranger might be bent upon my death. I halted to listen, and drew my pistol.

The faint clanging of metal stopped with me, then sounded again, rapid and irregular, the noises of a climber who stumbled as he ran. Once there was a clatter, as of a sword or helmet dropped, and another pause before the faltering footsteps came again. I was descending toward something that some other fled; there seemed no doubt of that. Common sense told me I should flee too, and yet I lingered, too proud and too foolish to retreat until I knew the danger.

I did not have to linger long. After a moment I glimpsed a man in armor below me, climbing with fevered haste. In a moment more, only a landing intervened, and I could see him well; his right arm was gone, and indeed appeared to have been torn away, for tattered remnants still dangled and bled from the polished brassard.

There seemed little reason to fear that this wounded and terrified man would attack me, and much more to think that he might fly if I appeared dangerous. I holstered my pistol and called to him, asking what was wrong and whether I could help him.

He stopped and lifted his visored face to look at me. It was Sidero, and he was trembling. “Are you loyal?” he shouted.

“To what, friend? I intend you no harm, if that’s what you mean.”

“To the ship!”

It seemed pointless to promise loyalty to what was no more than an artifact of the Hierodules, however large; but this was clearly no time to debate abstractions. “Of course!” I called. “True to the death, if need be.” In my heart I begged Master Malrubius, who had once tried to teach me something of loyalties, to forgive me.

Sidero began to climb the steps again, a little more slowly and calmly this time, yet stumbling still. Now that I could see him better, I realized that the dark oozing fluid I has supposed human blood was far too viscid, and a blackish green rather than crimson. The tatters I had thought shredded flesh were wires mingled with something like cotton.

Sidero was an android, then, an automaton in human form such as my friend Jonas had once been. I upbraided myself for not having realized it sooner, and yet it came as a relief; I had seen blood enough in the cabin above.

By this time, Sidero was mounting the last steps to the landing where I stood. When he reached me, he halted, swaying. In that gruff, demanding way one unconsciously assumes in the hope of inspiring confidence, I told him to let me see his arm. He did, and I recoiled in amazement.

If I merely write that it was hollow, that will sound, I fear, as if it were hollow as a bone is said to be. Rather, it was empty. The tiny wires and wisps of fiber soaked with dark liquid had escaped from its steely circumference. There was nothing — nothing at all — within.

“How can I help you?” I asked. “I’ve had no experience in treating such wounds.”

He seemed to hesitate. I would have said that his visored face was incapable of expressing emotion; and yet it contrived to do so by its motions, the angles at which he held it, and the play of shadow created by its features.

“You must do exactly as I instruct. You will do that?”

“Of course,” I said. “I confess I swore not long ago that I’d someday cast you from a height as you cast me. But I won’t avenge myself upon an injured man.” I remembered then how much poor Jonas had wanted to be thought a man, as indeed I and many others had thought him, and to be a man in fact.

“I must trust you,” he said.

He stepped back, and his chest — his entire torso — opened like a great blossom of steel. And it opened upon emptiness, revealing nothing.

“I don’t understand,” I told him. “How may I help you?”

“Look.” With his remaining hand, he pointed to the inner surface of one of the petallike plates that had made up that empty chest. “Do you see writing?”

“Lines and symbols, yes, in many colors. But I can’t read them.”

Then he described a certain complex symbol and the symbols surrounding it, and after some searching I discovered it.

“Insert sharp metal there,” he said. “Twist to the right, one quarter turn and no more.”

The slot was very narrow, but my hunting knife had a needle point, which I had wiped clean on Idas’s shirt. Now I wedged this point into the place Sidero had indicated and twisted it as he had told me. The seeping of the dark liquid slowed.

He described a second symbol on another plate; and while I hunted for it, I ventured to tell him I had never heard or read of any such being as he.

“Hadid or Hierro could explain us to you better. I perform my duties. I do not think of such things. Not often.”

“I understand,” I said.

“You complain that I pushed you off. I did it because you did not attend to my instructions. I have learned that men like you are a hazard to the ship. If they are injured, it is no more than they would do to me. How many times do you think such men have tried to destroy me?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said, still scanning the plate for the symbol he had described.

“Nor do I. We sail in and out of Time, then back again. There is only one ship, the captain says. All the ships we hail between the galaxies or the suns are this ship. How can I know how often they have tried, or how often they have succeeded?”

He was growing irrational, I thought, and then I found the symbol. When I had fitted the point of my hunting knife into the slot and turned it, the seepage of fluid dropped almost to nothing.

“Thank you,” Sidero said. “I have been losing a great deal of pressure.”

I asked whether he would not have to drink new fluid to replace that he had lost.

“Eventually. But now I have my strength again, and I will have full strength when you make the last adjustment.” He told me where it was and what to do.

“You asked how we came to be. Do you know how your own race came to be?”

“Only that we were animals who lived in trees. That is what the mystes say. Not the monkeys, since the monkeys are there still. Perhaps something like the zoanthropes, though smaller. The zoanthropes always make for the mountains, I’ve noticed, and they climb trees in the high jungle there. At any rate, these animals communicated with one another, as even cattle do, and wolves, by certain cries and motions. Eventually, through the will of the Increate, it came to be that those who communicated best survived while those who did so poorly perished.”

“Is there no more?”

I shook my head. “When they communicated well enough that they could be said to speak, they were men and women. Such are we still. Our hands were made to cling to branches, our eyes to see the next branch as we move from tree to tree, our mouths to speak, and to chew fruit and fledglings. So are they still. But what of your own kind?”

“Much like yours. If the story is true, the mates wanted shelter from the void, from destructive rays, the weapons of hostiles, and other things. They built hard coverings for themselves. They wanted to be stronger too, for war and work on deck. Then they put the liquid you saw into us so that our arms and legs would move as they wanted, but with greater force. Into our genators, I ought to have said. They needed to communicate, so they added talk circuits. Then more circuits so we could do one thing as they did another. Controllers so we could speak and act even when they could not. Until at last we spoke in storage and acted without a mate inside. Are you unable to find it?”

“I’ll have it in a moment,” I told him. The truth was that I had found it some time before, but I had wanted to keep him talking. “Do you mean the officers of this ship wear you like clothing?”

“Not often now. The mark is like a star, with a straight mark beside it.”

“I know,” I said, debating what I might do and judging the cavity inside him. My belt, with the knife and my pistol in its holster, would never fit, I thought; but without those I might go in well enough.

I told Sidero, “Wait a moment. I’m having to work in a half crouch to find this thing. These are digging into me.” I slipped my belt free and laid it down, with the sheath and holstered pistol beside it. “This would be easier if you’d lie down.”

He did so, and more quickly and gracefully than I would have thought possible, now that he was no longer bleeding so much. “Be quick. I have no time to waste.”

“Listen,” I told him, “if somebody were after you, he’d have been here by now, and I can’t even hear anyone.” While I pretended to dawdle, I was thinking furiously; it seemed a mad idea, yet it would give protection and a disguise, if it succeeded. I had worn armor often. Why not better armor?

“Do you think I fled them?”

I heard what Sidero said, but I paid little attention to it. I had spoken a moment before of listening; now there was something to listen to, and after listening I recognized it for what it was: the slow beating of great wings.