The Urth of the New Sun Page 3

Page 3

 

  "Thank you," I said. "It happens all the time," she said. "I got stuck onto a basket like that once. Dont worry about it. " Led by Sidero, Purn and Idas were already carrying the creature away.

  I stood up. "Im afraid Im no longer accustomed to being laughed at. " "One time you were? You dont 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 youre quartermaster, nobody laughs. But if youre not, your best friend will slip a dust ball into it. Dont 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 dont?" She looked at me commiseratingly, her eyes as large, as dark, and as soft as any cows. "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 dont 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 wouldnt have scratched him. " She grinned. "Thats what the whoremaster said when the sailor came. " I laughed, and she linked her arm through mine. "Anyway, a knifes not mainly for fighting. Its for working, one way or another.

  Howre you going to splice rope without a knife, or open ration boxes? You keep your eyes open as we go along. No telling what youll find in one of these cargo bays. " "Were going in the wrong direction," I said. "I know another way, and if we went out the way we came in, youd never find anything. Its too short. " "What happens if Sidero turns out the lights?" "He wont. Once you wake them up they stay bright until theres 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. Nobodyll mind if you take it. " "That wasnt 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 cant 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 isnt really cargo. Just odds and ends. Do you know how the ships built?" "I havent 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 theyre wrong. Partly wrong, anyway. " "I would have thought youd know your ship. " "Shes too big, and there are too many places where they never take us, and we cant find for ourselves, or get into.

  But shes got seven sides; thats so shell carry more sail, you follow me?" "I understand. " "Some of the decksthree, I thinkhave deep bays. Thats where the main cargo is. They leave the other four with wedge-shaped spaces. Somes used for odds and ends, like this bay. Somes cabins and crews quarters and what not. But speaking of quarters, wed 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 youve seen a bit of her already. Youre a poet too, arent 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; its just that she wasnt built by people like you and me.

  Autarchdoes 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 Ive known ever since I began my journey that if I succeed, I wont 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 crews 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 bestby 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 dont know, master.

  Many voyages. " "Dont call me master," I told it. "I havent 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 numberone soon comes to realize that union cripples love when it does not enhance itand poor Valeria was often in my thoughts; yet I hungered for Gunnies affection. As Autarch I had few friends save for Father Inire, and Valeria was the only woman. Some quality in Gunnies 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. 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 fashionit 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.

  Chapter IV

  The Citizens of the Sails

  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 levelsbut it solidified instead, until I was reminded of Baldanderss 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 camea 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 burrowssomething 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, aint 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, thats what they say. " "Gunnie calls them apports," I remarked, "and Ive been thinking about that. The sails bring them, dont they?" Purn nodded absently and stretched a finger of his own through the barrier to tickle the shaggy creature.