The
Flier
Sunlight in my face.
I tried to sit up, and in fact
succeeded in getting one elbow beneath me. All about me shimmered
an orb of color—purple and cyan, ruby and azure, with the orpiment
of the sun piercing these enchanted tints like a sword to fall upon
my eyes. Then it was blotted out, and its extinction revealed what
its splendor had obscured: I lay in a domed pavilion of variegated
silk, with an open door.
The rider of the mammoth was walking
toward me. He was robed in saffron, as I had always seen him, and
carried an ebony rod too light to be a weapon. “You have
recovered,” he said.
“I’d try and say yes, but I’m afraid
the effort of speaking might kill me.”
He smiled at that, though the smile was
no more than a twitching of the mouth. “As you should know better
than almost anyone, the sufferings we endure in this life make
possible all the happy crimes and pleasant abominations we shall
commit in the next … aren’t you eager to collect?”
I shook my head and laid it on the
pillow again. The softness smelled faintly of musk.
“That is just as well, because it will
be some time before you do.”
“Is that what your physician
says?”
“I am my own, and I’ve been treating
you myself. Shock was the principal problem … It sounds like a
disorder for old women, as you are no doubt thinking at this
moment. But it kills a great many men with wounds. If all of mine
who die of it would only live, I would readily consent to the death
of those who take a thrust in the heart.”
“While you were being your own
physician—and mine—were you telling the truth?”
He smiled more broadly at that. “I
always do. In my position, I have to talk too much to keep a skein
of lies in order; of course, you must realize that the truth … the
little, ordinary truths that farm wives talk of, not the ultimate
and universal Truth, which I’m no more capable of uttering than you
… that truth is more deceptive.”
“Before I lost consciousness, I heard
you say you are the Autarch.”
He threw himself down beside me like a
child, his body making a distinct sound as it struck the piled
carpets. “I did. I am. Are you impressed?”
“I would be more impressed,” I said,
“if I did not recall you so vividly from our meeting in the House
Azure.”
(That porch, covered with snow, heaped
with snow that deadened our footsteps, stood in the silken pavilion
like a specter. When the Autarch’s blue eyes met mine, I felt that
Roche stood beside me in the snow, both of us dressed in unfamiliar
and none-too-well-fitting clothes. Inside, a woman who was not
Thecla was transforming herself into Thecla as I was later to make
myself Meschia, the first man. Who can say to what degree an actor
assumes the spirit of the person he portrays? When I played the
Familiar, it was nothing, because it was so close to what I was—or
had at least believed myself to be—in life; but as Meschia I had
sometimes had thoughts that could never have occurred to me
otherwise, thoughts alien equally to Severian and to Thecla,
thoughts of the beginnings of things and the morning of the
world.)
“I never told you, you will recall,
that I was only the Autarch.”
“When I met you in the House Absolute,
you appeared to be a minor official of the court. I admit you never
told me that, and in fact I knew then who you were. But it was you,
wasn’t it, who gave the money to Dr. Talos?”
“I would have told you that without a
blush. It is completely true. In fact, I am several of the minor
officials of my court … Why shouldn’t I be? I have the authority to
appoint such officials, and I can just as well appoint myself. An
order from the Autarch is often too heavy an instrument, you see.
You would never have tried to slit a nose with that big headsman’s
sword you carried. There is a time for a decree from the Autarch,
and a time for a letter from the third bursar, and I am both and
more besides.”
“And in that house in the Algedonic
Quarter—”
“I am also a criminal … just as you
are.”
There is no limit to stupidity. Space
itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity
continues beyond infinity. I, who had always thought myself, though
not truly intelligent, at least prudent and quick to learn simple
things, who had always counted myself the practical and foreseeing
one when I had traveled with Jonas or Dorcas, had never until that
instant connected the Autarch’s position at the very apex of the
structure of legality with his certain knowledge that I had
penetrated the House Absolute as an emissary of Vodalus. At that
moment, I would have leaped up and fled from the pavilion if I
could, but my legs were like water.
“All of us are—all of us must be who
must enforce the law. Do you think your guild brothers would have
been so severe with you—and my agent reports that many of them
wished to kill you—if they had themselves been guilty of something
of the same kind? You were a danger to them unless you were
terribly punished because they might otherwise someday be tempted.
A judge or a jailer who has no crime of his own is a monster,
alternately
purloining the forgiveness that belongs to the Increate alone and
practicing a deathly rigor that belongs to no one and
nothing.
“So I became a criminal. The violent
crimes offended my love of humanity, and I lack the quickness of
hand and thought required of a thief. After blundering about for
some time … that would be in about the year you were born, I
suppose … I found my true profession. It takes care of certain
emotional needs I cannot now satisfy otherwise … and I have, I
really do have, a knowledge of human nature. I know just when to
offer a bribe and how much to give, and, the most important thing,
when not to. I know how to keep the girls who work for me happy
enough with their careers to continue, and discontented enough with
their fates … They’re khaibits, of course, grown from the body
cells of exultant women so an exchange of blood will prolong the
exultants’ youth. I know how to make my clients feel that the
encounters I arrange are unique experiences instead of something
midway between dewy-eyed romance and solitary vice. You felt that
you had a unique experience, didn’t you?”
“That’s what we call them too,” I said.
“Clients.” I had been listening as much to
the tone of his voice as to his words. He was happy, as I thought
he had not been on either of the other occasions on which I had
encountered him, and to hear him was like hearing a thrush speak.
He almost seemed to know it himself, lifting his face and extending
his throat, the Rs in arrange and
romance trilled into the
sunlight.
“It is useful too. It keeps me in touch
with the underside of the population, so I know whether or not
taxes are really being collected and whether they’re thought fair,
which elements are rising in society and which are going
down.”
I sensed that he was referring to me,
though I had no idea what he meant. “Those women from the court,” I
said. “Why didn’t you get the real ones to help you? One of them
was pretending to be Thecla when Thecla was locked under our
tower.”
He looked at me as though I had said
something particularly stupid, as no doubt I had. “Because I can’t
trust them, of course. A thing like that has to remain a secret …
Think of the opportunities for assassination. Do you believe that
because all those gilded personages from ancient families bow so
low in my presence, and smile, and whisper discreet jokes and lewd
little invitations, they feel some loyalty to me? You will learn
differently, you may be sure. There are few at my court I can
trust, and none among the exultants.”
“You say I’ll learn differently. Does
that mean you don’t intend to have me executed?” I could feel the
pulse in my neck and see the scarlet gout of blood.
“Because you know my secret now? No. We
have other uses for you, as I told you when we talked in the room
behind the picture.”
“Because I was sworn to
Vodalus.”
At that his amusement mastered him. He
threw back his head and laughed, a plump and happy child who had
just discovered the secret of
some clever toy. When the laughter subsided at last into a merry
gulping, he clapped his hands. Soft though they looked, the sound
was remarkably loud.
Two creatures with the bodies of women
and the heads of cats entered. Their eyes were a span apart and as
large as plums; they strode on their toes as dancers sometimes do,
but more gracefully than any dancers I have ever seen, with
something in their motions that told me it was their normal gait. I
have said they had the bodies of women, but that was not quite
true, for I saw the tips of claws sheathed in the short, soft
fingers that dressed me. In wonder, I took the hand of one and
pressed it as I have sometimes pressed the paw of a friendly cat,
and saw the claws bared. My eyes brimmed with tears at the sight of
them, because they were shaped like that claw that is the Claw,
that once lay concealed in the gem that I, in my ignorance, called
the Claw of the Conciliator. The Autarch saw I was weeping, and
told the woman-cats they were hurting me and must put me down. I
felt like an infant who has just learned he will never see his
mother again.
“We do not harm him, Legion,” one
protested in such a voice as I had never heard before.
“Put him down, I said!”
“They have not so much as grazed my
skin, Sieur,” I told him.
With the woman-cats’ support I was able to
walk. It was morning, when all shadows flee the first sight of the
sun; the light that had wakened me had been the earliest of the new
day. Its freshness filled my lungs now, and the coarse grass over
which we walked darkened my scuffed old boots with its dew; a
breeze faint as the dim stars stirred my hair.
The Autarch’s pavilion stood on the
summit of a hill. All around lay the main bivouac of his army—tents
of black and gray, and others like dead leaves; huts of turf and
pits that led to shelters underground, from which streams of
soldiers issued now like silver ants.
“We must be careful, you see,” he said.
“Though we are some distance behind the lines here, if this place
were plainer it would invite attack from above.”
“I used to wonder why your House
Absolute lay beneath its own gardens, Sieur.”
“The need has long passed now, but
there was a time when they laid waste to Nessus.”
Below us and all around us, the silver
lips of trumpets sounded.
“Was it only the night?” I asked. “Or
have I slept a whole day away?”
“No. Only the night. I gave you
medicines to ease your pain and keep infection from your wound. I
would not have roused you this morning, but I saw you were awake
when I came in … and there is no more time.”
I was not certain what he meant by
that. Before I could ask, I caught sight of six nearly naked men
hauling at a rope. My first impression was that they were bringing
down some huge balloon, but it was a flier, and the sight of its
black hull brought vivid memories of the Autarch’s
court.
“I was expecting—what was its name?
Mamillian.”
“No pets today. Mamillian is an
excellent comrade, silent and wise and able to fight with a mind
independent of my own, but when all is said and done, I ride him
for pleasure. We will thieve a string from the Ascians’ bow and use
a mechanism today. They steal many from us.”
“Is it true that it consumes their
power to land? I think one of your aeronauts once told me
that.”
“When you were the Chatelaine Thecla,
you mean. Thecla purely.”
“Yes, of course. Would it be impolitic,
Autarch, to ask why you had me killed? And how you know me
now?”
“I know you because I see your face in
the face of my young friend and hear your voice in his. Your nurses
know you too. Look at them.”
I did, and saw the woman-cats’ faces
twisted in snarls of fear and amazement.
“As to why you died, I will speak of
that—to him—on board the flier … have we time. Now, go back. You
find it easy to manifest yourself because he is weak and ill, but I
must have him now, not you. If you will not go, there are
means.”
“Sieur—”
“Yes, Severian? Are you afraid? Have
you entered such a contrivance before?”
“No,” I said. “But I am not
afraid.”
“Do you recall your question about
their power? It is true, in a sense. Their lift is supplied by the
antimaterial equivalent of iron, held in a penning trap by magnetic
fields. Since the anti-iron has a reversed magnetic structure, it
is repelled by promagnetism. The builders of this flier have
surrounded it with magnets, so that when it drifts from its
position at the center it enters a stronger field and is forced
back. On an antimaterial world, that iron would weigh as much as a
boulder, but here on Urth it counters the weight of the promatter
used in the construction of the flier. Do you follow
me?”
“I believe so, Sieur.”
“The trouble is that it is beyond our
technology to seal the chamber hermetically. Some atmosphere—a few
molecules—is always creeping in through porosities in the welds, or
by penetrating the insulation of the magnetic wires. Each such
molecule neutralizes its equivalent in anti-iron and produces heat,
and each time one does so, the flier loses an infinitesimal amount
of lift. The only solution anyone has found is to keep fliers as
high as possible, where there is effectively no air
pressure.”
The flier was nosing down now, near
enough for me to appreciate the beautiful sleekness of its lines.
It had precisely the shape of a cherry leaf.
“I didn’t understand all of that,” I
said. “But I would think the ropes would have to be immensely long
to allow the fliers to float high enough to do any good, and that
if the Ascian pentadactyls came over by night they would cut them
and let the fliers drift away.”
The woman-cats smiled at that with
tiny, secretive twitchings of their lips.
“The rope is only for landing. Without
it, our flier would require sufficient distance for its forward
speed to drive it down. Now, knowing we’re below, it drops its
cable just as a man in a pond might extend his hand to someone who
would pull him out. It has a mind of its own, you see. Not like
Mamillian’s—a mind we have made for it, but enough of a mind to
permit it to stay out of difficulties and come down when it
receives our signal.”
The lower half of the flier was of
opaque black metal, the upper half a dome so clear as to be nearly
invisible—the same substance, I suppose, as the roof of the Botanic
Gardens. A gun like the one the mammoth had carried thrust out from
the stern, and another twice as large protruded from the
bow.
The Autarch lifted one hand to his
mouth and seemed to whisper into his palm. An aperture appeared in
the dome (it was as if a hole had opened in a soap bubble) and a
flight of silver steps, as thin and insubstantial looking as the
web ladder of a spider, descended to us. The barechested men had
left off pulling. “Do you think you can climb those?” the Autarch
asked.
“If I can use my hands,” I
said.
He went before me, and I crawled up
ignominiously after him, dragging my wounded leg. The seats, long
benches that followed the curve of the hull on either side, were
upholstered in fur; but even this fur felt colder than any ice.
Behind me, the aperture narrowed and vanished.
“We will have surface pressure in here
no matter how high we go. You don’t have to worry about
suffocating.”
“I am afraid I am too ignorant to feel
the fear, Sieur.”
“Would you like to see your old bacele?
They’re far to the right, but I’ll try to locate them for
you.”
The Autarch had seated himself at the
controls. Almost the only machinery I had seen before had been
Typhon’s and Baldanders’s, and that which Master Gurloes controlled
in the Matachin Tower. It was of the machines, not of suffocation,
that I was afraid; but I fought the fear down.
“When you rescued me last night, you
indicated that you had not known I was in your army.”
“I made inquiries while you
slept.”
“And it was you who ordered us
forward?”
“In a sense … I issued the order that
resulted in your movement, though I had nothing to do with your
bacele directly. Do you resent what I did? When you joined, did you
think you would never have to fight?”
We were soaring upward. Falling, as I
had once feared to do, into the sky. But I remembered the smoke and
the brassy shout of the graisle, the troopers blown to red paste by
the whistling bolts, and all my terror turned to rage. “I knew
nothing of war. How much do you know? Have you ever really been in
a battle?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, his
blue eyes flashing. “I’ve been in a thousand. You are two, as
people are usually counted. How many do you think I
am?”
It was a long while before I answered
him.