Gene Wolfe: The Urth of the New Sun

Two women and a gaggle of children emerged from the square to watch us pass, and a man with a mallet stopped pounding dry grass into the seams of a boat to join them; my priest, walking half a step behind me, nodded toward me and made a gesture too swift for me to catch. The villagers fell to their knees.

Inspired by the sense of theater I have often been forced to cultivate, I raised my arms, spread my hands, and gave them my blessing, telling them to be kind to one another and as happy as they could. That is really all the blessing we godlings can ever give, though no doubt the Increate can do much more.

Ten strides put the village behind us, though not so far behind that I could not hear the boatwright begin his pounding again, or the children resume their play and their weeping. I asked how much farther it was to wherever Odilo lived.

“Not far,” my priest said, and pointed.

We were walking inland now, climbing a grassy little hill. From the crest we could see the crest of the next, and upon it three bowers side by side, decked as my own had been with twined lupine, purple loosestrife, and white meadow rue.

“There,” my priest told me. “There the other gods sleep.”

NO SORT of wonder is more convincing to the primitive mind than one affecting the presumably immutable workings of the heavens. Severian’s prolongation of the night, however, may leave less credulous minds puzzling over the ways in which such a marvel might be achieved without a cataclysm greater than that which accompanied the arrival of the New Sun.

At least two plausible explanations could be put forward. Mass hypnosis is invoked by historians to explain all multiply attested wonders that cannot be degraded in any other fashion; but it is something no actual hypnotist offers to produce.

If mass hypnosis is discarded, the only alternative appears to be an eclipse in the broadest sense — that is, the passage of some opaque body between the Old Sun and Urth.

In this context, it should be noted that the stars seen in the skies of the Commonwealth in winter rise in spring over the stone town (presumably due to the precession of the equinoxes); but that during his prolongation of the night Severian sees his accustomed spring stars. This would seem to favor the second explanation, as does the immediate manifestion of the Old Sun, already higher than the rooftops, after the capitulation of the autochthons. Nothing Severian writes indicates what the opaque body may have been; but the thoughtful reader will find little difficulty in advancing at least one plausible speculation.