Gene Wolfe: The Urth of the New Sun

I rinsed the rag again, conscious that I had done so often, though I could not have told how often; when I looked about for another dusty surface to wipe, I found that I had wiped them all.

The mattress was not so easily dealt with, but it had to be cleaned in some fashion — it was as filthy as everything else had been, and we would surely want to lie upon it occasionally. I carried it onto the walkway overhanging the airshaft and beat it until it yielded no more dust.

When I had finished and was rolling it up to take back into the cabin, the wind from the airshaft brought a wild cry.

IT CAME from below. I peered over the twig-thin railing and as I peered heard it again, filled with anguish and a loneliness that echoed and re-echoed among the metal catwalks, the metal tiers of metal cabins.

Hearing it, it seemed to me for a moment that it was my own cry, that something I had held deep inside me since that still-dark morning when I had walked the beach with the aquastor Master Malrubius and watched the aquastor Triskele dissolve in shimmering dust had freed itself and separated itself from me, and that it was below, howling in the faint, lost light.

I was tempted to leap over the rail, for then I did not know the depth of that shaft. As it was, I flung the mattress through the doorway of my new cabin and descended the narrow winding stair by jumping from one flight to the next.

From above, the abyss of the shaft had seemed opaque, the strange radiance of yellow lamps beating upon it without effect. I had supposed that this opacity would vanish when I reached the lower levels — but it solidified instead, until I was reminded of Baldanders’s chamber of cloud, though it was really not so thick as that. The swirling air grew warmer too, and perhaps the mist that shrouded everything was only the result of warm, moist air from the bowels of the ship mixing with the cooler atmoshere of the upper levels. I was soon sweating in my velvet shirt.

Here the doors of many cabins stood ajar, but the cabins themselves were dark. Once, or so it seemed to me, the ship must have had a more numerous crew, or perhaps had been used to transport prisoners (the cabins would have done well as cells, if the locks were differently instructed) or soldiers.

The cry came again, and with it a noise like the ringing of a hammer on an anvil, though it held a note that told me it rang from no forge, but from a mouth of flesh. Heard by night, in a fastness of the mountains, they would have been more terrible than the howling of a dire-wolf, I think. What sadness, dread, and loneliness, what fear and agony were there!

I paused for breath and looked around me. Beasts, so it seemed, were confined in the cabins farther down. Or perhaps madmen, as we of the torturers had confined pain-crazed clients on the third level of the oubliette. Who could say that every door was shut? Might not some of these creatures be unconfined, kept from the upper levels by mere chance or their fear of man? I drew my pistol and made sure it was at its lowest setting and that it had a full charge.

My initial glimpse of the vivarium below confirmed my worst fears. Filmy trees waved at the edge of a glacier, a waterfall tumbled and sang, a dune lifted its sterile yellow crest, and two score creatures prowled among them. I watched them for a dozen breaths before I began to suspect that they were confined nonetheless, and for fifty more before I felt sure of it. But each had its own plot of ground, small or large, and they could no more mingle than could the beasts in the Bear Tower . What a strange group they made! If every swamp and forest on Urth were combed for oddities, I do not believe such a collection could be assembled. Some gibbered, some stared, most lay comatose.

I holstered my pistol and called, “Who howled?”

That was only a joke made to myself, yet a response came — a whimper from the rear of the vivarium; I threaded my way through the beasts, following a narrow nearly invisible track made, as I soon afterward learned, by the sailors sent to feed them.

It was the shaggy creature I had helped catch in the cargo bay, and I beheld him with a certain warmth of recognition. I had been so much alone since the pinnace had carried me from the gardens of the House Absolute to this ship that to meet even so queer a being as he was seemed the second time almost a reunion with an old acquaintance.

Then too, I was interested in the creature himself, since I had assisted in his capture. When we had pursued him, he had appeared almost spherical; now I saw that he was in fact one of those short-limbed, short-bodied animals that generally live in burrows — something like a pika, in other words. There was a round head atop a neck so short that one had to take it on faith; a round body too, of which the head seemed a mere continuation; four short legs, each ending in four long, blunt claws and one short one; a covering of flattened, brownish-gray hairs. Two bright black eyes that stared at me.

“Poor thing,” I said. “How did you ever get into that hold?”

He came to the limit of the invisible barrier that enclosed him, moving much more slowly now that he was no longer frightened.

“Poor thing,” I said again.

He reared upon his hind legs as pikas sometimes do, forelegs nearly crossed over his white belly. Strands of black cord still streaked the white fur. They reminded me that the same cords had stuck to my shirt. I plucked at what remained of them and found them weak now, some crumbling under my fingers. The cords on the shaggy creature seemed to be falling away as well.

He whimpered softly; instinctively, I reached out to comfort him as I would have an anxious dog, then drew my hand away, fearful he might bite or claw me.

A moment later, I cursed myself for a coward. He had harmed no one in the hold, and when I had wrestled with him, there had been no indication that he was trying to do more than escape. I thrust a forefinger into the barrier (which proved no barrier to me) and scratched the side of his tiny mouth. He turned his head just as a dog would have, and I felt small ears beneath the fur.

Behind me, someone said, “Cute, ain’t it?” and I turned to look. It was Purn, the grinning sailor.

I answered, “He seems harmless enough.”

“Most are.” Purn hesitated. “Only most die and drift off. We only see a few of ‘em, that’s what they say.”

“Gunnie calls them apports,” I remarked, “and I’ve been thinking about that. The sails bring them, don’t they?”

Purn nodded absently and stretched a finger of his own through the barrier to tickle the shaggy creature.

“Adjacent sails must be like two large mirrors. They’re curved, so somewhere — in fact, in various places — they must be parallel, and the starlight shines on them.”

Purn nodded again. “That’s what makes the ship go, as the skipper said when they asked about the wench.”

“I once knew a man called Hethor who summoned deadly things to serve him. And I was told by one called Vodalus — Vodalus was not to be trusted, I’ll admit — that Hethor used mirrors to bring them. I’ve a friend who works mirror spells too, though his are not evil. Hethor had been a hand on a ship like this.”

That captured Purn’s attention. He withdrew his finger and turned to face me. “You know her name?” he asked.

“The name of his ship? No, I don’t think he ever mentioned it. Wait… He said he’d been on several. ‘Long I signed on the silver-sailed ships, the hundred-masted whose masts reached out to touch the stars.”’

“Ah.” Purn nodded. “Some say there’s only one. That’s something I wonder about, sometimes.”

“Surely there must be many. Even when I was a boy, people told me of them, the ships of the cacogens putting into the Port of Lune .”