My pen halts, though I do not. Reader, you will walk no more with me. It is time we both take up our lives.
To this account, I, Severian the Lame, Autarch, do set my hand in what shall be called the last year of the old sun.
APPENDIX
The Arms of the Autarch and the Ships of the Hierodules Nowhere are the manuscripts of The Book of the New Sun more obscure than in their treatment of weapons and military organization.
The confusion concerning the equipment of Severian's allies and adversaries appears to derive from two sources, of which the first is his marked tendency to label every variation in design or purpose with a separate name. In translating these, I have endeavored to bear in mind the radical meaning of the words employed as well as what I take to be the appearance and function of the weapons themselves. Thus falchion, fuscina, and many others. At one point I have put the athame, the warlock's sword, into Agia's hands.
The second source of difficulty seems to be that three quite different gradations of technology are involved. The lowest of these could be termed the smith level. The arms produced by it appear to consist of swords, knives, axes, and pikes, such as might have been forged by any skilled metalworker of, say, the fifteenth century. These appear to be readily obtained by the average citizen and to represent the technological ability of the society as a whole.
The second gradation might be called the Urth level. The long cavalry weapons I have chosen to call lances, conti, and so on undoubtedly belong to this group, as do the "spears" with which the hastar\a252 menaced Severian outside the door of the antechamber and other arms used by infantry. How widely available such weapons were is not clear from the text, which at one point speaks of "arrows" -
and "long-shafted khetens" being offered for sale in Nessus. It seems certain that Guasacht's irregulars were issued their conti before battle and that these were collected and stored somewhere (possibly in his tent) afterward. Perhaps it should be noted that small arms were issued and collected in this way in the navies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although cutlasses and firearms could be freely purchased ashore. The arbalests used by Agia's assassins outside the mine are surely what I have called Urth weapons, but it is likely these men were deserters.
The Urth weapons, then, appear to represent the highest technology to be found on the planet, and perhaps in its solar system. How efficient they would be in comparison with our own arms is difficult to say. Armor appears to be not wholly ineffective against them, but precisely this is true with regard to our rifles, carbines, and submachine guns.
The third gradation I would call the stellar level. The pistol given Thea by Vodalus and the one given Ouen by Severian are unquestionably stellar weapons, but about many other arms mentioned in the manuscript we cannot be so sure.
Some, or even all, of the artillery used in the mountain war may be stellar. The fusils and jezails carried by special troops on both sides may or may not belong to this gradation, though I am inclined to think they do.
It seems fairly clear that stellar weapons could not be produced on Urth and had to be obtained from the Hierodules at great cost. An interesting question to which I can offer no certain answer concerns the goods given in exchange. The Urth of the old sun seems, by our standards, destitute of raw materials; when Severian speaks of mining, he appears to mean what we should call archaeological pillaging, and the new continents said (in Dr. Talos's play) to be ready to rise with the coming of the New Sun have among their attractions "gold, silver, iron, and copper . . ." (Italics added.) Slaves some slavery certainly exists in Severian's society-furs, meat and other foodstuffs, and labor-intensive items such as handmade jewelry would appear to be among the possibilities.
We would like to know more about almost everything mentioned in these manuscripts; but most of all, certainly, we would like to know more about the ships that sail between the stars, commanded by the Hierodules but sometimes crewed by human beings. (Two of the most enigmatic figures in the manuscripts, Jonas and Hethor, seem once to have been such crewmen.) But here the translater is forced against one of the most maddening of all his difficulties Severian's failure to distinguish clearly between space-going and ocean-going craft.
Irritating though it is, it seems quite natural, given his circumstances. If a distant continent is as remote as the moon, then the moon is no more remote than a distant continent. Furthermore, the star-traveling ships appear to be propelled by light pressure on immense sails of metal foil, so that an applied science of masts, cables, and spars is common to ships of both kinds.
Presumably, since many skills (and perhaps most of all that of enduring long periods of isolation) would be required equally on both types of craft, crewmen from vessels that would only excite our contempt may sign aboard others whose capabilities would astonish us. One notes that the captain of Severian's lugger shares some of Jonas's habits of speech.
And now, a final comment. In my translations and in these appendixes I have attached to them, I have attempted to eschew all speculations; it seems to me that now, near the close of seven years' labor, I may be permitted one. It is that the ability to traverse hours and aeons possessed by these ships may be no more than the natural consequence of their ability to penetrate interstellar and even intergalactic space, and to escape the death throes of the universe; and that to travel thus in time may not be so complex and difficult an affair as we are prone to suppose. It is possible that from the beginning Severian had some presentiment of his future.
G.W.
About the Author
Gene wolfe was born in New York City and raised in Houston, Texas. He spent two and a half years at Texas A&M, then dropped out and was drafted. As a private in the Seventh Division during the Korean War, he was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge. The GI Bill permitted him to attend the University of Houston after the war, where he earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He is currently a senior editor on the staff of Plant Engineering Magazine.
Although he has written a "mainstream" novel, a young-adult novel, and many magazine articles, Wolfe is best known as a science-fiction writer, the author of over a hundred science-fiction short stories and of The Fifth Head of Cerberus. In 1973 his The Death of Doctor Island won the Nebula Award (given by the Science Fiction Writers of America) for the best science-fiction novella of the year. His novel Peace won the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award in 1977, and his "The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps" has been awarded the Rhysling for science-fiction poetry.
The first volume of The Book of the New Sun, The Shadow of the Torturer, was nominated for the Nebula Award and has just received the award for Best Fantasy Novel of the Year from the World Fantasy Convention. Volume Two, The Claw of the Conciliator, has been nominated for the Nebula Award.
Mr. Wolfe lives with his wife and children in Barrington, Illinois. Although The Citadel of the Autarch completes this narrative of Severian's, Mr. Wolfe is at work on an independent book, The Urth of the New Sun, which further illuminates this future history.
*v1.0 proofed by Knives - 08/20/04