Gene Wolfe - Exodus from the Long Sun

Auk grunted.

She straightened up, holding a sharply curved saber with a gem-studded hilt. “This is the sword of honor the Rani awarded me last year, and I’m proud of it. Maybe I haven’t worn it as much as I ought to for fear something might happen to it.”

Oreb whistled, and Nettle told Saba, “It’s beautiful!”

Saba smiled at Auk. “The girl let me keep it. I told her about it, and she said leave it where it is, Auk won’t mind.”

He muttered, “I’d like mine back. That Colonel’s got it.”

“If you come back with us, I’ll try to get it for you.”

“No cut!” Oreb hopped from Silk’s shoulder to Saba’s to examine the sword more closely.

She drew it and took a half step backward, holding it at eye level with both hands grasping the blade. “By this sword I swear that as long as Calde Silk’s on my airship, I’ll do whatever he tells me, and when I land him and his friends at their city it will be as passengers, and not prisoners.”

Silk nodded. “On the terms you have described, General, we return command to you.”

“You’re going to let me talk to the Palace on the glass and tell them what we’re doing?”

“If you choose to. You are in command.”

Saba lowered her sword. “Then if I break my oath, you can take this and break it.”

She led them through the gondola to the airy compartment from which Silk had climbed to the deck. It held cabinets, a sizable table, and two leather seats; there was a glass on the wall, next to the door. “This is the chartroom,” Saba told Silk, “the nerve center of my airship, where our navigational instruments and maps are. There’s a speaking tube that runs through officers’ quarters to the cockpit. Do you know about those? Like a glass, but only to the one place and all you can do is talk.”

“This’s where you ought to be,” Auk said, but Silk shook his head.

Saba pointed. “Right up there’s the hatch. We go up to take the angle between the ship and the sun, mostly. Now it should be zero.” She swallowed. “I’ll check it as soon as I talk to the Palace.”

Horn touched Silk’s arm. “Don’t go back, Calde. Please?”

Auk asked, “You were up there, huh? Somebody nearly got killed is what I heard.”

“He was going to jump off,” Horn told Auk. “I grabbed him and I guess I got him back, only I don’t remember, just sort of wrestling, and the roof gone, and music.” Puzzled, he stared at Silk. “Someplace down there was having a concert, I guess.”

“I saw the evil in the whorl,” Silk explained. “I thought I knew it, when I actually had no idea. A few days ago, I began to see it clearly.”

He waited for someone to speak, but no one did.

“An hour ago, I saw it very clearly indeed; and it was horrible. What was worse was that instead of focusing on the evil in myself, as I should have, I gave my attention to the evil in others. I would have told you then that I saw a great deal in Horn, for example. I still do.”

“Calde, I never said—”

“That was utterly, utterly wrong. I don’t mean that the evil isn’t there — it is, and it always will be because it is ineradicable; but seeing it alone, not merely Horn’s evil but everyone else’s too, did something to me far worse than anything Horn himself would ever do, I’m sure — it blinded me to good. Seeing only evil, I wanted with all my heart to reunite myself with the Outsider. That would itself have been an evil act, but Horn saved me from it.”

“I’m so glad.” Nettle looked at Horn with shining eyes.

“Just by coming up on the roof of this gondola, really. For Horn’s sake, I won’t go there again, though it’s such a marvelous thing to stand in the sky smiling down at the whorl that I find it difficult to renounce it; merely by standing there, I came to understand how Sciathan feels about flying.”

Auk cleared his throat. “I want to tell you about that clamp. All right if I do it now, before she talks to ’em back in Trivigaunte?”

“You found it, I assume.”

“Yeah, only that wasn’t a fuel hose. It was a lube hose.”

Saba’s eyes opened wide, “What!”

Auk ignored her. “The clamp cut the flow to where they got hot and seized. It didn’t show on the gauge up front ’cause it just measures tank temperature. The tank was all right and the pump was running, but there wasn’t much getting through. We got Number Seven busted loose, and maybe we can fix the rest.”

“They’ll never be as good as they were.” Saba sounded disgusted.

“They weren’t anyhow,” Auk told her. “I made a couple little improvements already.”

Oreb eyed them both. “Fish heads?”

“I feel the same way myself,” Silk announced. “If I’m to live after all, I’d like something to eat.”

Saba stepped to the glass and clapped; it grew luminous, as the monitor’s gray face coalesced. At once dancing flecks of color replaced it — peach, pink, and an etherial blue that deepened until it was nearly black.

Silk fell to his knees; for him the sunlit chartroom and its occupants vanished.

“Silk?” The face in the glass was innocent and sensual, preternaturally lovely. “Silk, wouldn’t you like to be Pas? We’d be together then… Silk.”

He bowed his head, unable to speak.

“They can scan you at Mainframe. As I was scanned, Silk, with him. He held my hand…”

Silk found that he was staring up at her; she smiled, and his spirit melted.

“You’ll go on with your life. Silk. Just as it is. You’d be Pas too. And he would be you. Look…”

The face lovelier than any mortal woman’s dispersed like smoke. In its place stood a bronze-limbed man with rippling muscles and two heads.

One was Silk’s.

They floated in an infinite emptiness lit by a remote, spool-shaped black sun: Sciathan the Flier, Patera Incus and Patera Remora, the old woman who called herself Moly, Nettle and Horn, the calde’s wife, and the calde. The shrinking red dot that was the lander winked out.

“Good-bye, Auk my noctolater.” The speaker seemed near, though there was a note in his voice that had traveled far; it was a man’s voice, deep, and heavy with sorrow.

“Good-bye, Auk,” Silk repeated; until he heard his own voice, he did not realize he had spoken aloud. “Good-bye, sister. Good-bye, Gib. Farewell.”

Maytera Marble murmured, “Heartbroken. Poor General Mint will be simply heartbroken.”

“He goes to a better place than any you have seen.”

“I disliked him, though the harlot Chenille was not devoid of pre-eminent qualities. Notwithstanding , I feel bereft …”

So softly that Silk supposed that only he could hear her, Hyacinth inquired, “Is that where? Those little dots?”

“To one or the other,” the god replied. “The blue whorl or the green. Auk’s lander cannot carry them to both.”

“Auk — ah. Devoted to you, eh? As we, um, all. He was, er, reformed? Devout. If you are not, um, hey?”

There was no reply. The distant sparks faded. Hyacinth gripped Silk’s arm, pointing to the black, spool-shaped sun behind them, from which light streamed. “What is that? Is it — is it…? The lander came out of it.”

“That is our Whorl ” Sciathan wiped his eyes.

“That little thing?”

Already the little thing was fading; Silk relaxed. “You liked Auk, didn’t you? So did I. If I live as long as His Cognizance, I won’t forget meeting him in the Cock, sipping brandy while I tried to make out his face in the shadows.”

“When I saw Aer die, I did not weep. That pain was too deep for weeping. Auk is not dead, but no one will call me Upstairs any more. I weep for that.”