Gene Wolfe: The Urth of the New Sun

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, the four of us crowded together in a compact mass, upon a floor of black bars no thicker than a man’s smallest finger. There was no rail, and the space before us and below us (for the ceiling just above us must have supported the deck) would have held our Matachin Tower .

What it now held was an immense jumble of cargo: boxes, bails, barrels, and crates of all kinds; machinery and parts of machines; sacks, many of shimmering, translucent film; stacks of lumber.

“There!” Sidero snapped. He pointed to a spidery ladder descending the wall.

“You go first,” I said.

There was no rushing toward me — we were not a span apart — and thus no time for me to draw my pistol. He seized me with a strength I found amazing, forced me back a step, and pushed me violently. For an instant I teetered at the edge of the platform, clawing air; then I fell.

Doubtless I would have broken my neck on Urth. On the ship, I might almost be said to have floated down. Yet the slowness of my fall did nothing to allay the terror I felt in falling. I saw ceiling and platform revolve above me. I was conscious that I would land on my back, with spine and skull bearing the shock, and yet I could not turn myself. I clutched for some support, and my imagination fervently, feverishly conjured up the flying jib stay. The four faces looking down at me — Sidero’s armored visor, Idas’s chalk-white cheeks, Purn’s grin, Gunnie’s beautiful, brutal features — seemed masks from a nightmare. And surely no waking unfortunate flung from the top of the Bell Tower had so long in which to contemplate his own destruction.

I struck with a jolt that knocked out my breath. For a hundred heartbeats or more I lay gasping, just as I had panted for air when I had at last regained the interior of the ship. Slowly I realized that though I had suffered a fall indeed, it had been no worse than I might have suffered in falling from my bed to the carpet in some evil dream of Typhon. Sitting up, I found no broken bones.

Bundles of papers had been my carpet, and I thought Sidero must have known they were there and that I would not be hurt. Then I saw beside me a crazily tilted mechanism, spiky with shafts and levers.

I got to my feet. Far above, the platform was empty, the door that led to the corridor closed. I looked for the spidery ladder, but all except the uppermost rungs were obscured by the mechanism. I edged around that, impeded by the unevenly stacked bundles (they had been tied with sisal, and some of the cords had broken, so that I slipped and slid over documents as I might have over snow), but greatly aided by the lightness of my body.

Because I was looking down to find my footing, I did not see the thing before me until I was actually peering into its blind face.

MY HAND went to my pistol — I had it out and leveled almost before I knew it. The shaggy creature seemed no different from the stooped figure of the salamander that had once nearly burned me alive in Thrax. I expected it to rear erect and reveal the blazing heart within.

It did not, and until too late I did not fire. For a moment we waited motionless; then it fled, bouncing and scrambling across the boxes and barrels like an awkward puppy in pursuit of the lively ball that was itself. With that vile instinct every man has to kill whatever may fear him, I fired. The beam — potentially deadly still, though I had reduced it to its lowest strength to seal the leaden coffer — split the air and set a solid-looking ingot to clanging like a gong. But the creature, whatever it was, was a dozen ells away at least, and in another moment it had disappeared behind a statue swathed in protective wrappings.

Someone shouted, and I thought I recognized Gunnie’s husky contralto. There was a sound like a singing arrow, then a yell from another throat.

The shaggy creature came bounding back, but this time, having regained my senses, I did not shoot. Purn appeared and fired his caliver, swinging it like a fowling piece. Instead of the bolt I expected, it shot forth a cord, something flexible and swiff that looked black in the strange light and flew with the singing I had heard a moment before.

This black cord struck the shaggy creature and wrapped it with a loop or two, but seemed to produce no other result. Purn gave a shout and leaped like a grasshopper. It had not occurred to me before that in this vast place I could leap myself just as I had on deck, but I imitated him now (mostly because I did not wish to lose contact with Sidero before I had revenged myself) and nearly dashed out my brains against the ceiling.

While I was in the air, however, I had a magnificent view of the hold beneath me. There was the shaggy creature, which might have been fallow under Urth’s sun, streaked with black yet still skipping with frantic energy; even as I saw him, Sidero’s caliver blotched him more. There was Purn nearly upon him, and Idas and Gunnie, the latter firing even as she ran in great leaps, from high place to high place across the jumbled cargo.

I dropped near them, climbed unsteadily atop the tilted breach of a mountain carronade, and hardly saw the shaggy creature scrambling toward me until it had bounced almost into my arms. I say “almost” because I did not actually grasp it, and certainly it did not grasp me. Nevertheless, we remained together — the black cords adhered to my clothing as well as to the flat strips (neither fur nor feathers) of the shaggy creature.

A moment after we had tumbled from the carronade, I discovered another property of the cords: stretched, they contracted again to a length less than the first, and with great force. Struggling to free myself, I found myself more tightly bound than ever, a circumstance that Gunnie and Purn found highly amusing.

Sidero crisscrossed the shaggy creature with fresh cords, then told Gunnie to release me, which she did by cutting me free with her dagger.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It happens all the time,” she said. “I got stuck onto a basket like that once. Don’t worry about it.”

Led by Sidero, Purn and Idas were already carrying the creature away. I stood up. “I’m afraid I’m no longer accustomed to being laughed at.”

“One time you were? You don’t look it.”

“As an apprentice. Everyone laughed at the younger apprentices, especially the older ones.”

Gunnie shrugged. “Half the things a person does are funny, if you come to think of it. Like sleeping with your mouth open. If you’re quartermaster, nobody laughs. But if you’re not, your best friend will slip a dust ball into it. Don’t try to pull those off.”