Gene Wolfe - The Urth of the New Sun

The tenements had fallen, every one. I saw a mass of tiny fish, several hundred at least, clustered in the wreckage they scattered in sparks of argent fire at my approach revealing a bleached corpse partly devoured. After that I did not dismiss their schools again.

Doubtless there were many such dead in the city, which had once been so large as to excite the admiration of all the world; but what of me? Was I not another drifting corpse? My arm was cold to my own touch, and the weight of water burdened my lungs; even to myself, I seemed to walk in sleep. Yet I still moved or believed I moved against all currents, and my cold eyes saw.

The locked and rusted gate of the necropolis stood before me, wisps of mazed kelp threading its spikes like the mountain paths, the unchanged symbol of my old exile. I launched myself upward, swimming several strokes and thus flourishing the skull without intending it. Suddenly ashamed, I released it; but it appeared to follow me, propelled by the motion of my hand.

Before I had embarked upon the ship of the Hierodules that was to carry me to the ship of Tzadkiel, I had crouched in air, surrounded by circling, singing skulls. Here spread the reality this ceremony had foretold. I knew that; I understood it, and I was certain in my knowledge — the New Sun must do what I now did, going weightless through his drowned world, ringed by her dead. The loss of her ancient continents was the price Urth had paid; this journey was the price I had to pay, and I was paying it at this moment.

The skull settled softly upon the sodden earth in which the pailpers of Nessus had been laid, generation after generation. I picked it up again. What words had the lochage addressed to me in the bartizan?

The exultant Talarican, whose madness manifested itself as a consuming interest in the lowest aspects of human existence, claimed that the persons who live by devouring the garbage of others number two gross thousands — that if a pauper were to leap from the parapet of this bridge each time we draw breath, we should live forever, because Nessus breeds and breaks men faster than we respire .

They leap no longer, the water having leaped for them. Their misery, at least, is ended; and perhaps some survived.

When I reached the mausoleum where I had played as a boy, I found its long-jammed door shut, the force of the onrushing sea having completed a motion begun perhaps a century ago. I laid the skull on its threshold and swam hard for the surface, a surface that danced with golden light.

EATA’S BOAT was nowhere in sight. To write, as I must write, that I swam all that day and most of the following night seems preposterous, yet it was so. The water the others had called salt did not seem salt to me; I drank when I thirsted and was refreshed by it. I was seldom tired; when I was, I rested on the waves, floating.

I had already discarded all my clothes except my trousers, and now I slipped those off. From an old habit of prudence, I examined the pockets before I abandoned them; there were three small brass coins there, the gift of Ymar. Their legends, like their faces, had worn away; and they were dark with verdigris — in appearance precisely the ancient things they were. I let them slip from my fingers, with all Urth.

Twice I saw great fish, which were perhaps dangerous; but they appeared to pose no threat to me. Of the water women, of whom Idas had been, perhaps, the smallest, I saw nothing. Nor did I see Abaia, their master. Nor Erebus, nor any other such monstrous thing.

Night came with teeming stars in her train, and I floated on my back and gazed at them, rocked by the warm arms of Ocean. How many rich worlds flew above me then! Once when I had fled from Abdiesus, I had huddled in the lea of a boulder and stared at these same stars, trying to imagine their companions and how men might live upon them and lift cities that knew less of evil than ours. Now I knew how foolish all such dreams must be, for I had seen another world and found it stranger than anything I might have imagined. Nor could I have dreamed the heteroclite crewmen I had met aboard Tzadkiel’s ship, nor the jibers; and yet both had come from Briah, even as I; and Tzadkiel had not scrupled to take them into his service.

But though I rejected all such dreams, I found that they came unbidden. About certain stars, though they appeared but embers wafted through the night, I seemed to see stars smaller still; and as I watched them, dim vistas took shape in my mind, lovely and terrifying. At last clouds came to blot the stars, and for a time I slept.

When morning came, I watched the night of Ushas fall from the face of the New Sun. No world of Briah could hold a sight more wonderful, nor had I seen a thing more marvelous on Yesod. The young king, bright with such gold as is not found in any mine, strode across the waves; and the glory of him was such that he who looked on it should never look upon another.

Waves danced for him and cast ten thousand drops to honor his feet, and he turned each to diamond. A great wave came — for the wind was rising — and I rode it as a swallow rides the spring air. At its crest I could stay for less than a breath, but from that summit I glimpsed his face; and I was not blinded, but knew his face for my own. It is a thing that has not happened since, and perhaps never will. Between us, five leagues or more away, an undine rose from the sea, lifting her hand to him in salute.

Then the wave subsided, and I with it. If I had waited, a second wave would have come, I think, raising me a second time; but for many things (of which that moment was for me the chief) there can be no second time. So that no inferior memory should obscure it, I sounded the sun-bright water, pushing ever deeper, eager to test the powers I had discovered only the night before.

They remained, although I no longer swam half in dream, and the urge to end my life had vanished. My world was now a place of palest, purest blue, floored with ocher and canopied in gold. The sun and I floated in space and smiled down upon our spheres.

When I had swum a while — how many breaths I cannot say, for I did not draw breath — I recalled the undine and set out to find her. I feared her still, but I had learned at last that such as she were not always to be feared; and though Abaia had conspired to prevent the coming of our New Sun, the age in which my death might have prevented it was past. Deeper I swam and deeper, for I soon learned how much easier it was to see a thing that moved against the bright surface.

Then all thoughts of the undine evaporated. Under me lay another city, one I did not know, a city that was never Nessus. Its towers sprawled along the floor of Ocean, where the stumps of a few yet stood; and ancient wrecks lay among them, who had been ancient already when the wrecks had been fair young ships launched to shouts of joy, with banners in their rigging and dancing on their forecastles.

Searching among the fallen towers I discovered treasures so noble they had withstood the passing of aeons — splendid gems and bright metals. But I did not find the things I sought — the name of the city and the name of the forgotten nation that had raised it, and had lost it to Ocean just as we had lost Nessus. With shards and shells, I scraped lintels and pedestals; there were many words written there, but in a character I could not read.

For several watches, I swam and searched among those ruins and never raised my eyes; but at last a huge shadow glided down the sand-strewn avenue before me, and I looked up to behold the undine, kraken-tressed and ship-bellied, pass swiftly overhead and vanish in a dazzle of sunfire.

At once I forgot the ruins. When I reached the air again, I blew out water and foggy breath like a manatee and threw back my head to toss my hair away from my eyes. For as I shot up, I had seen the shore: a low, brown coast from which I was barred by less water than had once divided the Botanic Gardens from the bank of Gyoll.