Gene Wolfe: The Urth of the New Sun

The black cords had clung to the nap of my velvet shirt, and I had been plucking at them. “I should carry a knife,” I said.

“You mean you don’t?” She looked at me commiseratingly, her eyes as large, as dark, and as soft as any cow’s. “But everybody ought to have a knife.”

“I used to wear a sword,” I said. “After a while I gave it up, except for ceremonies. When I left my cabin, I thought my pistol would be more than adequate.”

“For fighting. But how much do you have to do, a man who looks like you do?” She took a backward step and pretended to evaluate my appearance. “I don’t think many people would give you trouble.”

The truth was that in her thick-soled sea boots she stood as tall as I did. In any place where men and women bore weight, she would have been as heavy too; there was real muscle on her bones, with a good deal of fat over it.

I laughed and admitted that a knife would have been useful when Sidero threw me off the platform.

“Oh, no,” she told me. “A knife wouldn’t have scratched him.” She grinned. “That’s what the whoremaster said when the sailor came.” I laughed, and she linked her arm through mine. “Anyway, a knife’s not mainly for fighting. It’s for working, one way or another. How’re you going to splice rope without a knife, or open ration boxes? You keep your eyes open as we go along. No telling what you’ll find in one of these cargo bays.”

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” I said.

“I know another way, and if we went out the way we came in, you’d never find anything. It’s too short.”

“What happens if Sidero turns out the lights?”

“He won’t. Once you wake them up they stay bright until there’s nobody to watch. Ah, I see something. Look there.” I looked, suddenly certain she had noticed a knife during our hunt for the shaggy creature and was merely pretending to have found it now. Only a bone hilt was visible.

“Go ahead. Nobody’ll mind if you take it.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking about,” I told her.

It was a hunting knife, with a narrowed point and a heavy saw-backed blade about two spans long. Just the thing, I thought, for rough work.

“Get the sheath too. You can’t carry it in your hand all day.”

That was of plain black leather, but it included a pocket that had once held some small tool and recalled the whetstone pocket on the manskin sheath of Terminus Est . I was beginning to like the knife already, and I liked it more when I saw that.

“Put it on your belt.”

I did as I was told, positioning it on the left where it balanced the weight of my pistol. “I would have expected better stowage on a big vessel like this.”

Gunnie shrugged. “This isn’t really cargo. Just odds and ends. Do you know how the ship’s built?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

She laughed at that. “Neither does anyone else, I suppose. We have ideas we pass along to each other, but eventually we usually find out they’re wrong. Partly wrong, anyway.”

“I would have thought you’d know your ship.”

“She’s too big, and there are too many places where they never take us, and we can’t find for ourselves, or get into. But she’s got seven sides; that’s so she’ll carry more sail, you follow me?”

“I understand.”

“Some of the decks — three, I think — have deep bays. That’s where the main cargo is. They leave the other four with wedge-shaped spaces. Some’s used for odds and ends, like this bay. Some’s cabins and crew’s quarters and what not. But speaking of quarters, we’d better get back.”

She had led me to another ladder, another platform. I said, “I imagined somehow that we would go through a secret panel, or perhaps only find that as we walked these odds and ends, as you call them, became a garden.”

Gunnie shook her head, then grinned. “I see you’ve seen a bit of her already. You’re a poet too, aren’t you? And a good liar, I bet.”

“I was the Autarch of Urth; that required a little lying, if you like. We called it diplomacy.”

“Well, let me tell you that this is a working ship; it’s just that she wasn’t built by people like you and me. Autarch — does that mean you run the whole Urth?”

“No, I ran only a small part of it, although I was the legitimate head of the whole of it. And I’ve known ever since I began my journey that if I succeed, I won’t come back as Autarch. You seem singularly unimpressed.”

“There are so many worlds,” she told me. Quite suddenly she crouched and leaped, rising into the air like a large blue bird. Even though I had made such leaps myself, it was strange to see a woman do it. Her ascent carried her a cubit or less above the platform, and she might honestly have been said to have floated down upon it.

Without thinking, I had supposed the crew’s quarters would be a narrow room like the forecastle of the Samru . There was a warren of big cabins instead, many levels opening onto walkways around a common airshaft. Gunnie said she had to return to her duty, and suggested I look for an empty cabin.

It was on my tongue to remind her I had a cabin already, which I had left only a watch before; but something stopped me. I nodded and asked her what location was best — by which I meant, as she understood, which would be nearest hers. She indicated it to me, and we parted.

On Urth the older locks are charmed by words. My stateroom had a speaking lock, and though the hatches had needed no words at all and the door Sidero had flung open had required none, the olive doors of these crew compartments were equipped with locks of the same kind. The first two I approached informed me that the cabins they guarded were occupied. They must have been old mechaisms indeed; I noticed that their personalities had begun to differentiate.

The third invited me to enter, saying, “What a nice cabin!”

I asked how long it had been since the nice cabin had been inhabited.

“I don’t know, master. Many voyages.”

“Don’t call me master,” I told it. “I haven’t decided to take your cabin yet.”

There was no reply. No doubt such locks are of severely limited intelligence; otherwise they might be bribed, and they would surely go mad soon. After a moment the door swung open. I stepped inside.

It was not a nice cabin compared with the stateroom I had left. There were two narrow bunks, an armoire, and a chest; sanitary facilities in a corner. Dust covered everything to such a thickness that I could readily imagine it being blown from the ventilating grill in gray clouds, through the clouds would be seen only by a man who had some means of compressing time as the ship compressed it; if a man lived as a tree does, perhaps, for which each year is a day; or like Gyoll, running through the valley of Nessus for whole ages of the world.

While thinking of such things, which took me much longer to meditate upon than it has taken me just now to write about them, I had found a red rag in the armoire, moistened it at the laver, and begun to wipe away the dust. When I saw that I had already cleaned the top of the chest and the steel frame of one bunk, I knew that I had decided to stay, however unconsciously. I would locate my stateroom again, of course, and more often than not I would sleep there.

But I would have this cabin as well. When I grew bored, I would join the crew and thus learn more about the operation of the ship than I ever would as a passenger.

There was Gunnie too. I have had women enough in my arms to have no conceit about the number — one soon comes to realize that union cripples love when it does not enhance it — and poor Valeria was often in my thoughts; yet I hungered for Gunnie’s affection. As Autarch I had few friends save for Father Inire, and Valeria was the only woman. Some quality in Gunnie’s smile recalled my happy childhood with Thea (how I miss her still!) and the long trip to Thrax with Dorcas. It had been a journey I had counted mere exile at the time, so that each day I had hurried forward. Now I knew that in many ways it had been the summer of my life.