“He remembered your kiss,” I said. “He’d kissed many women, but he’d not often been kissed himself.”
“And the other one’s the Severian who was my lover, when I was a girl and newly signed. It was for his sake I kissed you then and fought for you later, the only real person fighting for you among the phantoms. I stabbed my old mates for him, even though I knew you didn’t remember me.” She rose. “You don’t know where we are, neither of you.”
Burgundofara said, “It seems to be a waiting room, but nobody’s using it but us.”
“I meant where the ship is. We’re outside the circle of Dis.”
I said, “Once I was told by a man who knew much of the future that a woman I sought was aboveground. I thought he meant merely that she was still alive. The ship’s always been outside the circle of Dis.”
“You know what I mean. When I came on board with you, I thought we had a long voyage ahead of us. But why should they — Apheta and Zak — have done that? The ship’s leaving eternity now, slowing down so the tender can find her. Until she slows down, she isn’t really a ship at all, did you know? We’re like a wave, or a shout going through the universe.”
“No,” I told her. “I didn’t. And I can hardly believe it.”
“What you believe makes a difference sometimes,” Gunnie said. “But not every time. That’s something I’ve learned here. Severian, I told you one time why I kept on sailing. Do you remember?”
I glanced at Burgundofara. “I thought perhaps…”
Gunnie shook her head. “To be what I was again, but myself. You must remember yourself when you really were her age. Are you the same person now?”
As clearly as if he were in that chamber of tears with us, I saw the young journeyman striding along, his fuligin cloak billowing behind him and the dark cross of Terminus Est rising above his left shoulder. “No,” I admitted. “I became another long ago, and another after that.”
She nodded. “So I’m going to stay here. Maybe here, when there’s only one of me, it’ll happen. You and Burgundofara are going back to Urth.”
She turned and left us. I tried to rise, but Burgundofara pulled me down again, and I was too weak to resist. “Let Gunnie go,” she said. “It’s already happened to you. Let her have her chance.” The door swung shut.
“She’s you,” I gasped.
“Then let me have mine. I’ve seen what I’ll be later. Is it still wrong, when you do that, to feel sorry for yourself?” There were tears in her eyes.
I shook my head. “If you don’t weep for her, who will?”
“You are.”
“But not for that reason. She was a true friend, and I haven’t had many.”
Burgundofara said, “I see now why all the faces cry. This is a hall made for crying.”
A new voice murmured, “For those who come and go.” I turned to see two masked Hierodules, and because I was not expecting them, it took me a moment to recognize Barbatus and Famulimus. It was Famulimus who had spoken, and I shouted for joy. “My friends! Are you coming with us?”
Famulimus said, “We only came to bring you here. Tzadkiel sent us for you, but you were gone, Severian. Tell me if you will see us more.”
“Many times,” I told her. “Good-bye, Famulimus.”
“You know our nature, that is plain. We greet you then, and say farewell.”
Barbatus added, “The hatches will open when Ossipago dogs down the door. You both have amulets of air?”
I took mine from my pocket and put it on. Burgundofara produced a similar necklace.
“Then, like Famulimus, I greet you,” Barbatus said, and stepped backward through the doorway, which closed after him.
The paired doors at the end of the room opened almost at once; the tears of the masks vanished as they fell, then dried altogether. Beyond the open doors shone the black curtain of night, hung from star to star.
“We have to go,” I said to Burgundofara, then realized she could not hear and moved near enough to take her hand, at which there was no longer any need for speech. Together we left the ship, and it was only when I paused at the threshold and turned to look back that it struck me I had never known her true name, if she had one, and that three of the masks were the faces of Zak, Tzadkiel, and her captain.
The tender waiting for us was far bigger than the little craft that had brought me to the surface of Yesod, as large as that which had carried me to the ship from Urth. And indeed, I think it likely that it was the same vessel.
“Sometimes they bring the big one in a good bit closer than this,” the hand detailed to guide us confided as we came aboard. “Only they can’t help getting between somebody’s eyes and a few stars when they do. So you’ll be about a day with us.”
I asked her to point out Urth’s Sun to me, and she obliged. He was a mere dot of crimson over the rail, and all his worlds, even Dis, were invisible save as specks that darkened when they crossed his sullen face.
I tried to indicate the faint white star that was a part of me; but the hand could not make it out, and Burgundofara looked frightened. Soon we walked through the portal of the tender and into the deckhouse.
Chapter XXVII — The Return to Urth
I HAD NOT been ceratin Burgundofara and I would be lovers; but we were assigned a single cabin (one perhaps a tenth the size of the stateroom I had occupied on my final night aboard the ship), and when I embraced and disrobed her she did not object. I found her less skillful far than Gunnie, though of course no virgin. How strange to think that Gunnie and I had lain together only once.
Her younger self told me afterward that no man had treated her gently before, kissed me for it, and fell asleep in my arms. I had never thought myself a temperate lover; I lay awake for some time, meditating upon it and listening, as once I had promised myself I would, to the centuries dashed against the hull.
Or perhaps they were merely years, the years of my life. I had thought at first, when I felt my mended leg beneath me, and later when I had shaved my strange new face in the stateroom, that they had somehow been lifted from me, as Gunnie had hoped hers would be lifted from her. Now I understood that it was not so.
It was only that the damage done by some nameless Ascian’s spear, by Agia’s palmed claws and the blood bat’s teeth, had been undone; I was the man I would have been without those (and perhaps other) wounds, and thus it was that my face was the face of that strange being — for what being can be stranger than oneself, or act more inexplicably? I was Apu-Punchau, whom I had seen resurrected in the stone town. To me it had seemed youth, and it left me mourning for the years I might have had. Perhaps someday I will board Tzadkiel’s ship once more, to search for true youth as Gunnie has; but if I am carried to Yesod again, I will remain there if I am suffered to do so. In centuries, perhaps, that air might wash the years from me.
As I contemplated them and the few that came before them, it seemed to me that my acts toward women had depended not upon my will, but upon their attitude toward me. I had been brutal enough with the khaibit Thecla of the House Azure, then as mild and clumsy as any untouched boy with the real Thecla in her cell; fevered at first with Dorcas, quick and clumsy with Jolenta (whom I might have been said to have raped, though I believed then and believe still that she wished it). Of Valeria I have said too much already.
Yet it cannot be thus for all men, since many act in the same way toward all women; and it may not even be so for me.
I dozed, thinking of all these things — and woke to find myself upon my other side and Burgundofara no longer in my arms, dozed again, woke again, and rose, unable to sleep more and longing, though I could not have said why, for a glimpse of the White Fountain. As quietly as I could, I put on the necklace and made my way on deck.