The Urth of the New Sun (3 page)

Lights blazed with a yellower hue than that of the corridor we had just left, a jaundiced radiance that seemed to suck the color from everything. We stood, the four of us crowded together in a compact mass, upon a floor of black bars no thicker than a man's smallest finger. There was no rail, and the space before us and below us (for the ceiling just above us must have supported the deck) would have held our Matachin Tower. What it now held was an immense jumble of cargo: boxes, bails, barrels, and crates of all kinds; machinery and parts of machines; sacks, many of shimmering, translucent film; stacks of lumber.

"There!" Sidero snapped. He pointed to a spidery ladder descending the wall.

"You go first," I said.

There was no rushing toward me—we were not a span apart—and thus no time for me to draw my pistol. He seized me with a strength I found amazing, forced me back a step, and pushed me violently. For an instant I teetered at the edge of the platform, clawing air; then I fell.

Doubtless I would have broken my neck on Urth. On the ship, I might almost be said to have floated down. Yet the slowness of my fall did nothing to allay the terror I felt in falling. I saw ceiling and platform revolve above me. I was conscious that I would land on my back, with spine and skull bearing the shock, and yet I could not turn myself. I clutched for some support, and my imagination fervently, feverishly conjured up the flying jib stay. The four faces looking down at me—Sidero's armored visor, Idas's chalk-white cheeks, Purn's grin, Gunnie's beautiful, brutal features—seemed masks from a nightmare. And surely no waking unfortunate flung from the top of the Bell Tower had so long in which to contemplate his own destruction.

I struck with a jolt that knocked out my breath. For a hundred heartbeats or more I lay gasping, just as I had panted for air when I had at last regained the interior of the ship. Slowly I realized that though I had suffered a fall indeed, it had been no worse than I might have suffered in falling from my bed to the carpet in some evil dream of Typhon. Sitting up, I found no broken bones.

Bundles of papers had been my carpet, and I thought Sidero must have known they were there and that I would not be hurt. Then I saw beside me a crazily tilted mechanism, spiky with shafts and levers.

I got to my feet. Far above, the platform was empty, the door that led to the corridor closed. I looked for the spidery ladder, but all except the uppermost rungs were obscured by the mechanism. I edged around that, impeded by the unevenly stacked bundles (they had been tied with sisal, and some of the cords had broken, so that I slipped and slid over documents as I might have over snow), but greatly aided by the lightness of my body. Because I was looking down to find my footing, I did not see the thing before me until I was actually peering into its blind face.

The Cabin

MY HAND went to my pistol—I had it out and leveled almost before I knew it. The shaggy creature seemed no different from the stooped figure of the salamander that had once nearly burned me alive in Thrax. I expected it to rear erect and reveal the blazing heart within.

It did not, and until too late I did not fire. For a moment we waited motionless; then it fled, bouncing and scrambling across the boxes and barrels like an awkward puppy in pursuit of the lively ball that was itself. With that vile instinct every man has to kill whatever may fear him, I fired. The beam—potentially deadly still, though I had reduced it to its lowest strength to seal the leaden coffer—split the air and set a solid-looking ingot to clanging like a gong. But the creature, whatever it was, was a dozen ells away at least, and in another moment it had disappeared behind a statue swathed in protective wrappings. Someone shouted, and I thought I recognized Gunnie's husky contralto. There was a sound like a singing arrow, then a yell from another throat.

The shaggy creature came bounding back, but this time, having regained my senses, I did not shoot. Purn appeared and fired his caliver, swinging it like a fowling piece. Instead of the bolt I expected, it shot forth a cord, something flexible and swiff that looked black in the strange light and flew with the singing I had heard a moment before. This black cord struck the shaggy creature and wrapped it with a loop or two, but seemed to produce no other result. Purn gave a shout and leaped like a grasshopper. It had not occurred to me before that in this vast place I could leap myself just as I had on deck, but I imitated him now (mostly because I did not wish to lose contact with Sidero before I had revenged myself) and nearly dashed out my brains against the ceiling. While I was in the air, however, I had a magnificent view of the hold beneath me. There was the shaggy creature, which might have been fallow under Urth's sun, streaked with black yet still skipping with frantic energy; even as I saw him, Sidero's caliver blotched him more. There was Purn nearly upon him, and Idas and Gunnie, the latter firing even as she ran in great leaps, from high place to high place across the jumbled cargo. I dropped near them, climbed unsteadily atop the tilted breach of a mountain carronade, and hardly saw the shaggy creature scrambling toward me until it had bounced almost into my arms. I say "almost" because I did not actually grasp it, and certainly it did not grasp me. Nevertheless, we remained together—the black cords adhered to my clothing as well as to the flat strips (neither fur nor feathers) of the shaggy creature. A moment after we had tumbled from the carronade, I discovered another property of the cords: stretched, they contracted again to a length less than the first, and with great force. Struggling to free myself, I found myself more tightly bound than ever, a circumstance that Gunnie and Purn found highly amusing.

Sidero crisscrossed the shaggy creature with fresh cords, then told Gunnie to release me, which she did by cutting me free with her dagger.

"Thank you," I said.

"It happens all the time," she said. "I got stuck onto a basket like that once. Don't worry about it."

Led by Sidero, Purn and Idas were already carrying the creature away. I stood up. "I'm afraid I'm no longer accustomed to being laughed at."

"One time you were? You don't look it."

"As an apprentice. Everyone laughed at the younger apprentices, especially the older ones."

Gunnie shrugged. "Half the things a person does are funny, if you come to think of it. Like sleeping with your mouth open. If you're quartermaster, nobody laughs. But if you're not, your best friend will slip a dust ball into it. Don't try to pull those off." 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.