Gene Wolfe - The Urth of the New Sun

It occurred to me at last that the ship shaped herself for me as I passed and returned herself to herself for her own uses once I was gone, just as a mother devotes herself to her child when that child is present, speaking in the simplest words and playing babyish games — but pens an epic or entertains a lover at other times.

Was the ship in fact a living entity? That such a thing was possible, I did not doubt; but I had seen little to suggest it, and if it were so, why should she require a crew? The thing might have been done more easily, and what Tzadkiel had said the night before (reckoning the time in which I had slept to have been night) suggested a simpler mechanism. If the picture could be penetrated when the weight of my foot was on the back of the settee, might it not be that the light in my stateroom gradually extinguished itself when the weight of my feet left the floor, and that these protean gangways reshaped themselves to my footfalls? I resolved to use my mended leg to defeat them.

On Urth I could not have done so — but then on Urth that whole great ship would have crumbled to ruin beneath its own weight; and here on board, where I had been able to run and even to leap before, I could now outrace the wind. I dashed along; when I reached the next turning, I leaped and kicked the wall, sending myself hurtling down the gangway even as I had leaped through the rigging.

In an instant, I had left the passage I knew behind, and found myself among eerie angles and ghostly mechanisms, where blue-green lights flew like comets and the walkway writhed like a worm’s gut. My feet struck its surface, but not in a fresh stride; they were numb, and my legs like the loose limbs of a marionette when the curtain has fallen. I went tumbling down the gangway, which shrank to a painfully bright but diminishing dot in a field of utter darkness.

AT FIRST I thought my vision blurred. I blinked, and blinked again; but the faces, so much alike, would not become one. I tried to speak.

“It’s all right,” Gunnie told me. The younger woman, who seemed not so much a twin now as a younger sister, slipped her hand under my head and put a cup to my lips.

My mouth was filled with the dust of death. I sucked the water eagerly, moving it from cheek to cheek before I swallowed, feeling the tissues revive.

“What happened?” Gunnie asked.

“The ship changes herself,” I said.

Both nodded without comprehension.

“She changes to suit us, wherever we are. I ran too fast — or failed to touch the floor enough.” I tried to sit up, and to my own astonishment succeeded. “I got to a part where there wasn’t any air — where there was only a gas that wasn’t air, I think. Perhaps it was meant for people from some other world, or for no one at all. I don’t know.”

“Can you stand?” Gunnie asked.

I nodded; but if we had been on Urth, I would have fallen when I tried. Even on the ship, where one fell so slowly, the two women had to catch me and prop me as though I were sodden drunk. They were of the same height (which is to say each was nearly as tall as I) with wide dark eyes and broad, pleasant faces dotted with freckles and framed in dark hair.

“You’re Gunnie,” I muttered to Gunnie.

“We both are,” the younger woman told me. “I signed on last voyage. She’s been here for a long time, I believe.”

“For a lot of those voyages,” Gunnie agreed. “In time, it’s forever, but less than nothing. The time here isn’t the time you grew up with on Urth, Burgundofara.”

“Wait,” I protested. “I must think. Isn’t there any place here where we can rest?”

The younger woman pointed to a shadowy archway. “That’s where we were.” Through it I glimpsed falling water and many padded seats.

Gunnie hesitated, then helped me in.

The high walls were adorned with large masks. Watery tears dripped slowly from their eyes to splash into quiet basins, and cups like the one the younger woman had filled for me stood upon the rims. There was an angled hatch in the farther wall of the chamber; from its design, I knew it opened onto a deck.

When the women had seated themselves on either side of me, I told them, “You two are the same person — so you say, and so I believe.”

Both nodded.

“But I can’t call you by the same name. What shall I call you?”

Gunnie said, “When I was her age and I left my village to ship on here, I didn’t want to be Burgundofara anymore; so I got my mates to call me Gunnie. I’ve been sorry I did, but they wouldn’t have changed it back if I’d asked them to — just made a joke of it. So call me Gunnie, because that’s who I am.” She paused to take a deep breath. “And call the girl I used to be by my old name, if you will. She’s not going to change it now.”

“All right,” I said. “Perhaps there’s some better way to explain what bothers me, but I’m still weak, and I can’t think clearly enough to find it. Once I saw a certain man raised from the dead.”

They only stared at me. I heard Burgundofara’s indrawn breath.

“His name was Apu-Punchau. There was someone else there too, a man called Hildegrin; and this Hildegrin wanted to stop Apu-Punchau from returning to his tomb.”

Burgundofara whispered, “Was he a ghost?”

“Not quite, or at least I don’t think so. Or maybe it only depends on what you mean when you say ‘ghost.’ I think perhaps he was someone whose roots in time went so deep that he couldn’t be wholly dead in our time, perhaps not in any. However that may be, I wanted to help Hildegrin because he was serving someone who was trying to cure one of my friends…” My thoughts, still bewildered by the deathly atmosphere of the gangway, stuck on that point of friendship. Had Jolenta indeed been a friend? Might she have become one if she had recovered?

“Go on,” Burgundofara urged me.

“I ran up to them — to Apu-Punchau and Hildegrin. There was something I can’t really call an explosion, but it was more like that, or like lightning striking, than anything else I can think of. Apu-Punchau was gone, and there were two Hildegrins.”

“Like us.”

“No, the same Hildegrin twice. One who wrestled an invisible spirit and another who wrestled me. Then the lightning struck, or whatever it was. But before that, before I had even seen the two Hildegrins, I saw Apu-Punchau’s face; and it was mine. Older, but mine.”

Gunnie said, “You were right to want to stop somewhere. You have to tell us.”

“This morning — Tzadkiel, the captain, gave me a very nice cabin. Before I went out I washed, and I shaved with a razor I found there. The face I saw in the mirror troubled me, but I know now whose it was.”

Burgundofara said, “Apu-Punchau’s?” and Gunnie, “Your own.”

“There’s something more I didn’t tell you. Hildegrin was killed by the flash. I thought I understood that, later, and I still do. There were two of me, and because there were, two Hildegrins also; but the Hildegrins had been created by division, and a man cannot be divided so and live. Or perhaps it was only that once divided he could not reunite, when there was only one Severian again.”

Burgundofara nodded. “Gunnie told me your name. It’s a beautiful name, like a sword blade.” Gunnie motioned her to silence.

“Now here I am, with both of you. There’s only one of me, as far as I can tell. Do you see two?”

Burgundofara said, “No. But don’t you see that it wouldn’t matter if we did? If you haven’t been Apu-Punchau yet, you can’t die!”

I told her, “Even I know more of time than that. I was the future Apu-Punchau of what is now a decade past. The present can always change its future.”