Gene Wolfe - New Sun 5 - The Urth of the New Sun

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The Urth of the New Sun
by Gene Wolfe
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
—FITZGERALD
Chapter I The Mainmast
Chapter II The Fifth Sailor
Chapter III The Cabin
Chapter IV The Citizens of the Sails
Chapter V The Hero and the Hierodules
Chapter VI A Death and the Dark
Chapter VII A Death in the Light
Chapter VIII The Empty Sleeve
Chapter IX The Empty Air
Chapter X Interlude
Chapter XI Skirmish
Chapter XII The Semblance
Chapter XIII The Battles
Chapter XIV The End of the Universe
Chapter XV Yesod
Chapter XVI The Epitome
Chapter XVII The Isle
Chapter XVIII The Examination
Chapter XIX Silence
Chapter XX The Coiled Room
Chapter XXI Tzadkiel
Chapter XXII Descent
Chapter XXIII The Ship
Chapter XXIV The Captain
Chapter XXV Passion and the Passageway
Chapter XXVI Gunnie and Burgundofara
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Chapter XXVII The Return to Urth
Chapter XXVIII The Village Beside the Stream
Chapter XXIX Among the Villagers
Chapter XXX Ceryx
Chapter XXXI Zama
Chapter XXXII To the Alcyone
Chapter XXXIII Aboard the Alcyone
Chapter XXXIV Saltus Again
Chapter XXXV Nessus Again
Chapter XXXVI The Citadel Again
Chapter XXXVII The Book of the New Sun
To the Tomb of the Monarch
Chapter XXXIX The Claw of the Conciliator Again
Chapter XL The Brook Beyond Briah
Chapter XLI Severian from His Cenotaph
Chapter XLII Ding, Dong, Ding!
Chapter XLIII The Evening Tide
Chapter XLIV The Morning Tide
Chapter XLV The Boat
Chapter XLVI The Runaway
Chapter XLVII The Sunken City
Chapter XLVIII Old Lands and New
Chapter XLIX Apu-Punchau
Chapter L Darkness in the House of Day
Chapter LI The Urth of the New Sun
Appendix The Miracle of Apu-Punchau
Chapter XXXVIII
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Chapter I
The Mainmast
HAVING CAST one manuscript into the seas of time, I now begin again.
Surely it is absurd; but I am not—I will not be—so absurd myself as to
suppose that this will ever find a reader, even in me. Let me describe then, to
no one and nothing, just who I am and what it is that I have done to Urth.
My true name is Severian. By my friends, of whom there were never very
many, I was called Severian the Lame. By my soldiers, of whom I once
commanded a great many, though never enough, Severian the Great. By my
foes, who bred like flies, and like flies were spawned from the corpses that
strewed my battlefields, Severian the Torturer. I was the last Autarch of our
Commonwealth, and as such the only legitimate ruler of this world when we
called it Urth.
But what a disease this writing business is! A few years ago (if time retains any
meaning), I wrote in my cabin on the ship of Tzadkiel, re-creating from
memory the book I had composed in a clerestory of the House Absolute. Sat
driving my pen like any clerk, recopying a text I could without difficulty bring
to mind, and feeling that I performed the final meaningful act—or rather, the
final meaningless act—of my life.
So I wrote and slept, and rose to write again, ink flying across my paper,
relived at last the moment at which I entered poor Valeria's tower and heard
it and all the rest speak to me, felt the proud burden of manhood dropped
upon my shoulders, and knew I was a youth no more. That was ten years past,
I thought. Ten years had gone by when I wrote of it in the House Absolute.
Now the time is perhaps a century or more. Who can say?
I had brought aboard a narrow coffer of lead with a close-fitting lid. My
manuscript filled it, as I knew it would. I closed the lid and locked it, adjusted
my pistol to its lowest setting, and fused lid and coffer into a single mass with
the beam.
To go on deck, one passes through strange gangways, often filled by an
echoing voice that, though it cannot be distinctly heard, can always be
understood. When one reaches a hatch, one must put on a cloak of air, an
invisible atmosphere of one's own held by what appears to be no more than a
shining necklace of linked cylinders. There is a hood of air for the head, gloves
of air for the hands (these grow thin, however, when one grasps something,
and the cold seeps in), boots of air, and so forth.
These ships that sail between the suns are not like the ships of Urth. In place of
deck and hull, there is deck after deck, so that one goes over the railing of one
and finds oneself walking on the next. The decks are of wood, which resists the
deadly cold as metal will not; but metal and stone underlie them.
Masts sprout from every deck, a hundred times taller than the Flag Keep of
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the Citadel. Every part appears straight, yet when one looks along their
length, which is like looking down some weary road that runs beyond the
horizon, one sees that it bends ever so slightly, bowing to the wind from the
suns.
There are masts beyond counting; every mast carries a thousand spars, and
every spar spreads a sail of fuligin and silver. These fill the sky, so that if a
man on deck desires to see the distant suns' blaze of citron, white, violet, and
rose, he must labor to catch a glimpse of them between the sails, just as he
might labor to glimpse them among the clouds of an autumn night.
As I was told by the steward, it sometimes happens that a sailor aloft will lose
his hold. When that occurs on Urth, the unfortunate man generally strikes the
deck and dies. Here there is no such risk. Though the ship is so mighty, and
filled with such treasures, and though we are so much nearer her center than
those who walk upon Urth are to the center of Urth, yet her attraction is but
slight. The careless sailor drifts among the shrouds and sails like thistledown,
most injured by the derision of his workmates, whose voices, however, he
cannot hear. (For the void hushes every voice except to the speaker himself,
unless two come so near that their investitures of air become a single
atmosphere.) And I have heard it said that if it were not thus, the roaring of
the suns would deafen the universe.
Of all this I knew little when I went on deck. I had been told that I would have
to wear a necklace, and that the hatches were so constructed that the inner
must be shut before the outer can be opened—but hardly more. Imagine my
surprise, then, when I stepped out, the leaden coffer beneath my arm.
Above me rose the black masts and their silver sails, tier upon tier, until it
seemed they must push aside the very stars. The rigging might have been
cobweb, were the spider as large as the ship—and the ship was larger than
many an isle that boasts a hall and an armiger in it who thinks himself almost
a monarch. The deck itself was extensive as a plain; merely to set foot on it
required all my courage.
When I sat writing in my cabin, I had scarcely been aware that my weight had
been reduced by seven-eighths. Now I seemed to myself like a ghost, or rather
a man of paper, a fit husband for the paper women I had colored and paraded
as a child. The force of the wind from the suns is less than the lightest zephyr
of Urth; yet slight though it was, I felt it and feared I might be blown away. I
seemed almost to float above the deck rather than to walk on it; and I know
that it is so, because the power of the necklace kept outsoles of air between the
planks and the soles of my boots.
I looked around for some sailor who might advise me of the best way to climb,
thinking that the decks would hold many, as the decks of our ships did on
Urth. There was no one; to keep their cloaks of air from growing foul, all
hands remain below save when they are needed aloft, which is but seldom.
Knowing no better, I called aloud. There was, of course, no answer.
A mast stood a few chains off, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had no hope of
climbing it; it was thicker through than any tree that ever graced our forests,
and as smooth as metal. I began to walk, fearing a hundred things that would
never harm me and utterly ignorant of the real risks I ran.
The great decks are flat, so that a sailor on one part can signal to his mate
some distance away; if they were curved, with surfaces everywhere equally
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distant from the hunger of the ship, separated hands would be concealed from
each other's sight, as ships were hidden from one another under the horizons
of Urth. But because they are flat, they seem always to slant, unless one stands
at the center. Thus I felt, light though I was, that I climbed a ghostly hill.
Climb it I did for the space of many breaths, perhaps for half a watch. The
silence seemed to crush my spirit, a hush more palpable than the ship. I heard
the faint taps of my own uneven footfalls on the planks and occasionally a
stirring or humming from beneath my feet. Other than these faint sounds,
there was nothing. Ever since I sat under Master Malrubius's instruction as a
child, I have known that the space between the suns is far from empty; many
hundreds and perhaps many thousands of voyages are made there. As I
learned later, there are other things too—the undine I twice encountered had
told me that she sometimes swam the void, and the winged being I had
glimpsed in Father Inire's book flew there.
Now I learned what I had never really known before: that all these ships and
great beings are only a single handful of seed scattered over a desert, which
remains when the sowing is done as empty as ever. I would have turned and
limped back to my cabin, if I had not realized that when I reached it my pride
would force me out again.
At last I approached the faint descending gossamers of the rigging, cables that
sometimes caught the starlight, sometimes vanished in the darkness or against
the towering bank of silver that was the top-hamper of the deck beyond. Small
though they appeared, each cable was thicker than the great column's of our
cathedral.
I had worn a cloak of wool as well as my cloak of air; now I knotted the hem
about my waist, making a sort of bag or pack into which I put the coffer.
Gathering all my strength into my good leg, I leaped.
Because I felt my whole being but a tissue of feathers, I had supposed I would
rise slowly, floating upward as I had been told sailors floated in the rigging. It
was not so. I leaped as swiftly and perhaps more swiftly than anyone here on
Ushas, but I did not slow, as such a leaper begins to slow almost at once. The
first speed of my leap endured unabated—up and up I shot, and the feeling
was wonderful and terrifying.
Soon the terror grew because I could not hold myself as I wished; my feet
lifted of their own accord until I leaped half sidewise, and at last spun through
the emptiness like a sword tossed aloft in the moment of victory.
A shining cable flashed by, just outside my reach. I heard a strangled cry, and
only afterward realized it had come from my own throat. A second cable
shone ahead. Whether I willed it or not, I rushed at it as I might have rushed
upon an enemy, caught it, and held it, though the effort nearly wrenched my
arms out of their sockets, and the leaden coffer—which shot past my head—
almost strangled me with my own cloak. Clamping my legs around the icy
cable, I managed to catch my breath.
Many abuattes roamed the gardens of the House Absolute, and because the
lower servants (ditchers, porters, and the like) occasionally trapped them for
the pot, they were wary of men. I often watched and envied them as they ran
up some trunk without falling—and, indeed, seemingly without knowledge of
the aching hunger of Urth at all. Now I had myself become such an animal.
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The faintest tug from the ship told me that downward lay toward the
spreading deck, but it was less than the memory of a memory: once, perhaps, I
had fallen, somehow. I recalled recollecting that fall.
But the cable was a sort of pampas trail; to go up it was as easy as to go down,
and both were easy indeed. Its many strands provided me with a thousand
holds, and I scrambled up like a long-haunched little beast, a hare bounding
along a log.
Soon the cable reached a spar, the yard holding the lower main topsail. I
sprang from it to another, slimmer, cable; and from it to a third. When I
mounted to the spar that held it, I found I was mounting no longer; the
whisper of down was silent, and the grayish-brown hull of the ship simply
drifted, somewhere near the limit of my vision.
Beyond my head, bank after bank of silver sails rose still, apparently as
endless as before I had mounted into the rigging. To right and left, the masts
of other decks diverged like the tines of a birding arrow—or rather, like row
upon row of such arrows, for there were still more masts behind those nearest
me, masts separated by tens of leagues at least. Like the fingers of the Increate
they pointed to the ends of the universe, their topmost starsails no more than
flecks of gleaming tinsel lost among the glittering stars. From such a place I
might have cast the coffer (as I had thought to do) into the waste, to be found,
perhaps, by someone of another race, if the Increate willed it.
Two things restrained me, the first less a thought than a memory, the memory
of my first resolve, made when I wrote and all speculations about the ships of
the Hierodules were new to me, to wait until our vessel had penetrated the
fabric of time. I had already entrusted the initial manuscript of my account to
Master Ultan's library, where it would endure no longer than our Urth
herself.
This copy I had (at first) intended for another creation; so that even if I failed
the great trial that lay before me, I would have succeeded in sending a part of
our world—no matter how trifling a part—beyond the pales of the universe.
Now I looked at the stars, at suns so remote that their circling planets were
invisible, though some might be larger than Serenus; and at whole swirls of
stars so remote that their teeming billions appeared to be a single star. And I
marveled to recall that all this had seemed too small for my ambition, and
wondered whether it had grown (though the mystes declare it no longer
grows) or I had.
The second was not truly of thought either, perhaps; only instinct and an
overmastering desire: I wanted to mount to the top. To defend my resolution, I
might say that I knew no such opportunity might come again, that it scarcely
accorded with my office to settle for less than common seamen achieved
whenever their duties demanded it, and so on.
All these would be rationalizations—the thing itself was glorious. For years I
had known joy in nothing but victories, and now I felt myself a boy again.
When I had wished to climb the Great Keep, it had never occurred to me that
the Great Keep itself might wish to climb the sky; I knew better now. But this
ship at least was climbing beyond the sky, and I wanted to climb with her.
The higher I mounted, the easier and the more dangerous my climb became.
No fraction of weight remained to me. Again and again I leaped, caught some
sheet or halyard, scrambled until I had my feet on it, and leaped once more.
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After a dozen such ascents, it struck me that there was no reason to stop until I
reached the highest point on the mast—that one jump would take me there, if
only I did not prevent it. Then I rose like a Midsummer's Eve rocket; I could
readily have imagined that I whistled as they did or trailed a plume of red and
blue sparks.
Sails and cables flew past in an infinite procession. Once I seemed to see,
suspended (as it appeared) in the space between two sails, an indistinct golden
shape veined with crimson; insofar as I considered it at all, I supposed it to be
an instrument positioned where it might be near the stars—or possibly only an
object carelessly left on deck until some minor change in course had permitted
it to float away.
And still I shot upward.
The maintop came into view. I reached for a halyard. They were hardly
thicker than my finger now, though every sail would have covered ten score of
meadows.
I had misjudged, and the halyard was just beyond my grasp. Another flashed
by.
And another—three cubits out of reach at least.
I tried to twist like a swimmer but could do no more than lift my knee. The
shining cables of the rigging had been widely separated even far below, where
there were for this single mast more than a hundred. None now remained but
the startop shroud. My fingers brushed it but could not grasp it.
Chapter II
The Fifth Sailor
THE END of my life had come, and I knew it. Aboard the Samru, they had
trailed a long rope from the stern as an aid to any sailor who might fall
overboard. Whether our ship towed such a line, I did not know; but even if it
did, it would have done me no good. My difficulty (my tragedy, I am tempted
to write) was not that I had fallen from the rail and drifted aft of the rudder,
but that I had risen above the entire forest of masts. And thus I continued to
rise—or rather, to leave the ship, for I might as easily have been falling head
downward—with the speed of my initial leap.
Below me, or at least in the direction of my feet, the ship seemed a dwindling
continent of silver, her black masts and spars as slender as the horns of
crickets. Around me, the stars burned unchecked, blazing with splendor never
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seen on Urth. For a moment, not because my wits were working but because
they were not, I looked for her; she would be green, I thought, like green Lune,
but tipped with white where the ice-fields closed upon our chilled lands. I
could not find her, nor even the crimson-shot orange disk of the old sun.
Then I realized I had been looking in the wrong place. If Urth was visible at
all, Urth would be astern. I looked there and saw, not our Urth, but a growing,
spinning, swirling vortex of fuligin, the color that is darker than black. It was
like some vast eddy or whirlpool of emptiness; but circling it was a circle of
colored light, as though a billion billion stars were dancing.
Then I knew the miracle had passed without my notice, had passed as I copied
out some stodgy sentence about Master Gurloes or the Ascian War. We had
penetrated the fabric of time, and the fuligin vortex marked the end of the
universe.
Or its beginning. If its beginning, then that shimmering ring of stars was the
scattering of the young suns, and the only truly magical ring this universe
would ever know. Hailing them, I shouted for joy, though no one heard my
voice but the Increate and me.
I drew my cloak to me and pulled the leaden coffer from it; and I held the
coffer above my head in both my hands; and I cast it, cheering as I cast it, out
of my unseen cloak of air, out of the purlieu of the ship, out of the universe
that the coffer and I had known, and into the new creation as final offering
from the old.
At once my destiny seized me and flung me back. Not straight downward
toward the part of the deck I had left, which might well have killed me, but
down and forward, so that I saw the mastheads racing by me. I craned my
neck to see the next; it was the last. Had I been an ell or two to the right, I
might have been brained by the very tip of the mast. Instead I flashed between
its final extension and the starsail yard, with the buntlines far out of reach. I
had outraced the ship.
Enormously distant and at a different angle altogether, another of the
uncountable masts appeared. Sails sprouted from it like the leaves on a tree;
and they were not the now familiar rectangular sails, but triangular ones. For
a time, it seemed I would outrace this mast too, and then that I would strike it.
Frantically, I clutched at the flying jib stay.
Around it I swung like a flag in a changing wind. I clung to its stinging cold for
a moment, panting, then threw myself down the length of the bowsprit—for
this final mast was the bowsprit, of course—with all the strength of my arms. I
think that if I had crashed into the bow, I would not have cared; I wanted
nothing more, and nothing else, than to touch the hull, anywhere and in any
way.
I struck a staysail instead, and went sliding along its immense silver surface.
Surface indeed it was, and seemed all surface, with less of body than a
whisper, almost itself a thing of light. It turned me, spun me, and sent me
rolling and tumbling like a wind-tossed leaf down to the deck.
Or rather, down to some deck, for I have never been certain that the deck to
which I returned was that which I had left. I sprawled there trying to catch my
breath, my lame leg an agony; held, but almost not held, by the ship's
attraction.
My frantic panting never stopped or even slowed; and after a hundred such
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gasps, I realized my cloak of air was incapable of supporting my life much
longer. I struggled to rise. Half-suffocated though I was, it was almost too
easy—I nearly threw myself aloft again. A hatch was only a chain away. I
staggered to it, flung it wide with the last of my strength, and shut it behind
me. The inner door seemed to open almost of itself.
At once my air freshened, as though some noble young breeze had penetrated
a fetid cell. To hasten the process, I took off my necklace as I stepped out into
the gangway, then stood for a time breathing the cool, clean air, scarcely
conscious of where I was—save for the blessed knowledge that I was inside the
ship again, and not wandering wrack beyond her sails.
The gangway was narrow and bright, painfully lit by blue lights that crept
slowly along its walls and ceiling, winking and seemingly peering into the
gangway without being any part of it.
Nothing escapes my memory unless I am unconscious or nearly so; I recalled
every passage between my cabin and the hatch that had let me out onto the
deck, and this was none of them. Most of them had been furnished like the
drawing rooms of chateaus, with pictures and polished floors. The brown
wood of the deck had given way here to a green carpeting like grass that lifted
minute teeth to grip the soles of my boots, so that I felt as though the little
blue-green blades were blades indeed.
Thus I was faced with a decision, and one I did not relish. The hatch was
behind me. I could go out again and search from deck to deck for my own part
of the ship. Or I could proceed along this broad passage and search from
inside. This alternative carried the immense disadvantage that I might easily
become lost in the interior. Yet would that be worse than being lost among the
rigging, as I had been? Or in the endless space between the suns, as I had
nearly been?
I stood there vacillating until I heard the sound of voices. It reminded me that
my cloak was still, ridiculously, knotted about my waist. I untied it, and had
just finished doing so when the people whose voices I had heard came into
view.
All were armed, but there all similarity ended. One seemed an ordinary
enough man, such as might have been seen any day around the docks of
Nessus; one of a race I had never encountered in all my journeyings, tall as an
exultant and having skin not of the pinkish brown we are pleased to call white,
but truly white, as white as foam, and crowned by hair that was white as well.
The third was a woman, only just shorter than I and thicker of limb than any
woman I had ever seen. Behind these three, seeming almost to drive them
before him, was a figure that might have been that of a massive man in armor
complete.
They would have passed me without a word if I had allowed it, I think, but I
stepped into the middle of the corridor, forced them to halt, and explained my
predicament.
"I have reported it," the armored figure told me. "Someone will come for you,
or I shall be sent with you. Meanwhile you must come with me."
"Where are you going?" I asked, but he turned away as I spoke, gesturing to
the two men.
"Come on," the woman said, and kissed me. It was not a long kiss, but there
seemed to be a rough passion in it. She took my arm in a grip that seemed as
9
strong as a man's.
The ordinary sailor (who in fact did not look ordinary at all, having a cheerful
and rather handsome face and the yellow hair of a southerner) said, "You'll
have to come, or they won't know where to look for you—if they look at all. It
probably won't be too bad." He spoke over his shoulder as he walked, and the
woman and I followed him.
The white-haired man said, "Perhaps you can help me." I supposed that he
had recognized me; and feeling in need of as many allies as I might enlist, I
told him I would if I could.
"For the love of Danaides, be quiet," the woman said to him. And then to me,
"Do you have a weapon?"
I showed her my pistol.
"You'll have to be careful with that in here. Can you turn it down?"
"I already have."
She and the rest bore calivers, arms much like fusils, but with somewhat
shorter though thicker stocks and more slender barrels. There was a long
dagger at her belt; both the men had bolos, short, heavy, broad-bladed jungle
knives.
"I'm Purn," the blond man told me.
"Severian."
He held out his hand, and I took it—a sailor's hand, large, rough, and
muscular.
"She's Gunnie—"
"Burgundofara," the woman said.
"We call her Gunnie. And he's Idas." He gestured toward the white-haired
man.
The man in armor was looking down the corridor in back of us, but he
snapped, "Be still!" I had never seen anyone who could turn his head so far.
"What's his name?" I whispered to Purn.
Gunnie answered instead. "Sidero." Of the three, she seemed least in awe of
him.
"Where is he taking us?"
Sidero loped past us and threw open a door. "Here. This is a good place. Our
confidence is high. Separate widely. I will be in the center. Do no harm unless
attacked. Signal vocally."
"In the name of the Increate," I asked, "what are we supposed to be doing?"
"Searching out apports," Gunnie muttered. "You don't have to pay too much
attention to Sidero. Shoot if they look dangerous."
While she spoke, she had been steering me toward the open door. Now Idas
said, "Don't worry, there probably won't be any," and stepped so close behind
us that I stepped through it almost automatically.
It was pitch dark, but I was immediately conscious that I no longer stood on
solid flooring but on some sort of open and shaky grillwork, and that I was
entering a place much larger than a common room.
Gunnie's hair brushed my shoulder as she peered past me into the blackness,
bringing with it the mingled smells of perfume and sweat. "Turn on the lights,
Sidero. We can't see a thing in here."
Lights blazed with a yellower hue than that of the corridor we had just left, a
jaundiced radiance that seemed to suck the color from everything. We stood,
10
摘要：

TheUrthoftheNewSunbyGeneWolfeAwake!forMorningintheBowlofNightHasflungtheStonethatputstheStarstoFlight:AndLo!theHunteroftheEasthascaughtTheSultan'sTurretinaNooseofLight.—FITZGERALDChapterITheMainmastChapterIITheFifthSailorChapterIIITheCabinChapterIVTheCitizensoftheSailsChapterVTheHeroandtheHierodules...

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