The Library of the
Citadel
As I was about to answer her question, a
couple strolled by our alcove, the man robed in a sanbenito, the
woman dressed as a midinette. They only glanced at us as they
passed, but something—the inclination, perhaps, of the two heads
together, or some expression of the eyes—told me that they knew, or
at least suspected, I was not in masquerade. I pretended I had
noticed nothing, however, and said, “Something that belongs to the
Pelerines came into my hands by accident. I want to return it to
them.”
“You’re not going to do them harm
then?” Cyriaca asked. “Can you tell me what it is?”
I did not dare to tell the truth, and I
knew I would be asked to produce whatever object I named, and so I
said, “A book—an old book, beautifully illustrated. I don’t pretend
to know anything about books, but I feel sure it’s of religious
importance and quite valuable,” and from my sabretache I drew the
brown book from Master Ultan’s library that I had carried away when
I left Thecla’s cell.
“Old, yes,” Cyriaca said. “And more
than a little water-stained, I see. May I look at it?”
I handed it to her and she fanned the
pages, then stopped at a picture of the sikinnis, holding it up
until it caught the gleam of a lamp burning in a niche above our
divan. The horned men seemed to leap in the flickering light, the
sylphs to writhe.
“I don’t know anything about books
either,” she said, handing it back. “But I have an uncle who does,
and I think he might give a great deal for this one. I wish he were
here tonight so he could see it—though perhaps it’s all for the
best, because I’d probably try to get it from you in some way. In
every pentad he travels as far as I ever did when I was with the
Pelerines, just to seek out old books. He’s even gone to the lost
archives. Have you heard about those?”
I shook my head.
“All I know is what he told me once
when he had drunk a little more of our estate cuvee than he usually
takes, and it may be that he didn’t tell me everything, because as
I talked to him I had the feeling he was a bit afraid I might try
to go myself. I never have, though I’ve regretted it sometimes.
Anyway, in Nessus, a long way south of the city most people visit,
so far down the great river in fact that most people think the city
would have ended long before, there stands an ancient fortress.
Everyone save perhaps for the Autarch himself—may his spirit live
in a thousand successors—has forgotten it long ago, and it’s
supposed to be haunted. It stands upon a hill overlooking Gyoll, my
uncle told me, staring out over a field of ruined sepulchers,
guarding nothing.”
She paused and moved her hands, shaping
the hill and its stronghold in the air before her. I had the
feeling that she had told the story many times, perhaps to her
children. It made me conscious that she was indeed old enough to
have them, children old enough themselves to have listened to this
and other tales many times. No years had marked her smooth,
sensuous face; but the candle of youth that burned so brightly
still in Dorcas and had shed its clear, unworldly light even about
Jolenta, that had shone so hard and bright behind Thecla’s strength
and had lit the mist-shrouded paths of the necropolis when her
sister Thea took Vodalus’s pistol at the grave side, had in her
been extinguished so long that not even the perfume of its flame
remained. I pitied her..
“You must know the story of how the
race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away
all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer
cared for the taste of the pale wind, nor for love or lust, nor to
make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other
animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the
rain forests at the bottom of time—though in fact, so my uncle told
me, those things brought them. And you know, or you should know,
that those to whom they sold those things, who were the creations
of their own hands, hated them in their hearts. And truly they had
hearts, though the men who had made them never reckoned with that.
Anyway, they resolved to ruin their makers, and they did it by
returning, when mankind had spread to a thousand suns, all that had
been left with them long before.
“So much, at least, you should know. My
uncle once told it to me as I have told it to you, and he found all
that and more recorded in a book in his collection. It was a book
no one had opened, as he believed, for a chiliad.
“But how they did what they did is less
well known. I remember that when I was a child, I imagined the bad
machines digging—digging by night until they had cleared away the
twisted roots of old trees and laid bare an iron chest they had
buried when the world was very young, and that when they struck off
the lock of that chest, all the things we’ve spoken of came flying
out like a swarm of golden bees. That’s foolish, but even now I can
hardly imagine what the reality of those thinking engines can have
been like.”
I recalled Jonas, with the light,
bright metal where the skin of his loins ought to have been, but I
could not picture Jonas setting free a plague to trouble mankind,
and shook my head.
“But my uncle’s book, he said, made
clear what it was they did, and the things they let go free were no
swarm of insects but a flood of artifacts of
every kind, calculated by them to revive all those thoughts that
people had put behind them because they could not be written in
numbers. The building of everything from cities to cream pitchers
was in the hands of the machines, and after a thousand lifetimes of
building cities that were like great mechanisms, they turned to
building cities that were like banks of cloud before a storm, and
others like the skeletons of dragons.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“A very long time ago—long before the
first stones of Nessus were laid.”
I had put an arm about her shoulders,
and now she let her hand creep into my lap; I felt its heat and
slow search.
“And they followed the same principle
in all they did. In the shaping of furniture, for example, and the
cutting of clothing. And because the leaders who had decided so
long before that all the thoughts symbolized by the clothes and
furniture, and by the cities, should be put behind mankind forever
were long dead, and the people had forgotten their faces and their
maxims, they were delighted with the new things. Thus all that
empire, which had been built only upon order, passed
away.
“But though the empire dissolved, the
worlds were a long time dying. At first, so that the things they
were returning to humans would not be rejected again, the machines
conceived of pageants and phantasmagoria, whose performances
inspired those who watched them to think on fortune or revenge or
the invisible world. Later they gave each man and woman a
companion, unseen by all other eyes, as an advisor. The children
had such companions long before.
“When the powers of the machines had
weakened further—as the machines themselves wished—they could no
longer maintain these phantoms in the minds of their owners, nor
could they build more cities, because the cities that remained were
already nearly empty.
“They had reached, so my uncle told me,
that point at which they had hoped mankind would turn on them and
destroy them, yet no such thing had occurred, because by this time
they who had been despised as slaves or worshiped as devils before
were greatly loved.
“And so they called all who loved them
best around them, and for long years taught them all the things
their race had put away, and in time they died.
“Then all those whom they had loved,
and who had loved them, took counsel together as to how their
teachings could be preserved, for they well knew their kind would
not come again upon Urth. But bitter quarrels broke out among them.
They had not learned together, but rather each of them, man or
woman, had listened to one of the machines as if there were no one
in the world but those two. And because there was so much knowledge
and only a few to learn it, the machines had taught each
differently.
“Thus they divided into parties, and
each party into two, and each of those two into two again, until at
last every individual stood alone, misunderstood and reviled by all
the others and reviling them. Then each went away, out of the
cities that had held the machines or deeper into them, save
for a very few who by habit remained in the palaces of the machines
to watch beside their bodies.”
A sommelier brought us cups of wine
almost as clear as water, and as still as water until some motion
of the cup woke it. It perfumed the air like those flowers no man
can see, the flowers that can be found only by the blind; and to
drink it was like drinking strength from the heart of a bull.
Cyriaca took her cup eagerly, and draining it cast it ringing into
a corner.
“Tell me more,” I said to her, “of this
story of the lost archives.”
“When the last machine was cold and
still and each of those who had learned from them the forbidden
lore mankind had cast aside was separated from all the rest, there
came dread into the heart of each. For each knew himself to be only
mortal, and most, no longer young. And each saw that with his own
death the knowledge he loved best would die. Then each of them—each
supposing himself the only one to do so—began to write down what he
had learned in the long years when he had harkened to the teachings
of the machines that spilled forth all the hidden knowledge of wild
things. Much perished but much more survived, sometimes falling
into the hands of those who copied it enlivened by their own
additions or weakened by omissions … Kiss me,
Severian.”
Though my mask hampered us, our lips
met. As she drew away, the shadow memories of Thecla’s old
bantering love affairs, played out among the pseudothyrums and
catachtonian boudoirs of the House Absolute welled up within me,
and I said, “Don’t you know this kind of thing requires a man’s
undivided attention?”
Cyriaca smiled. “That’s why I did it—I
wanted to see if you were listening.
“Anyway, for a long time—no one knows
quite how long, I suppose, and anyway the world was not as near the
sun’s failing then and its years were longer—these writings
circulated or else lay moldering in cenotaphs where their authors
had concealed them for safekeeping. They were fragmentary,
contradictory, and eisegesistic. Then when some autarch (though
they were not called autarchs then) hoped to recapture the dominion
exercised by the first empire, they were gathered up by his
servants, white-robed men who ransacked cocklofts and threw down
the androsphinxes erected to memorialize the machines and entered
the cubicula of moiraic women long dead. Their spoil was gathered
into a great heap in the city of Nessus, which was then newly
built, to be burned.
“But on the night before the burning
was to begin, the autarch of that time, who had never dreamed
before the wild dreams of sleep but only waking dreams of dominion,
dreamed at last. And in his dream he saw all the untamed worlds of
life and death, stone and river, beast and tree slipping away from
his hands forever.
“When morning came, he ordered that the
torches not be kindled, but that there should be a great vault
built to house all the volumes and scrolls the white-robed men had
gathered. For he thought that if the new empire he
planned should fail him at last, he would retire to that vault and
enter the worlds that, in imitation of the ancients, he was
determined to cast aside.
“His empire did fail him, as it had to.
The past cannot be found in the future where it is not—not until
the metaphysical world, which is so much larger and so much slower
than the physical world, completes its revolution and the New Sun
comes. But he did not retire as he had planned into that vault and
the curtain wall he had caused to be built about it, for when once
the wild things have been put behind a man for good and all, they
are trapwise and cannot be recaptured.
“Nevertheless, it is said that before
all he gathered was sealed away, he set a guardian over it. And
when that guardian’s time on Urth was done, he found another, and
he another, so that they continue ever faithful to the commands of
that autarch, for they are saturated in the wild thoughts sprung
from the lore saved by the machines, and such faith is one of those
wild things.”
I had been disrobing her as she spoke,
and kissing her breasts; but I said, “Did all those thoughts of
which you spoke go out of the world when the autarch locked them
away? Haven’t I ever heard of them?”
“No, because they had been passed from
hand to hand for a long time, and had entered into the blood of all
the peoples. Besides, it is said that the guardian sometimes sends
them out, and though they always return to him at last, they are
read, whether by one or many, before they sink once more into his
dark.”
“It is a wonderful story,” I said. “I
think that perhaps I know more of it than you, but I had never
heard it before.” I found that her legs were long, and smoothly
tapered from thighs like cushions of silk to slender ankles; all
her body, indeed, was shaped for delight.
Her fingers touched the clasp that held
my cloak about my shoulders. “Need you take this off?” she asked.
“Can’t it cover us?”
“It can,” I said.