I tried to distract myself with an examination of my surroundings. The place where I lay appeared not so much a cabin as a crevice in some great mechanism, the kind of place where one finds objects that appear to have come from nowhere — but such a place magnified many times. The ceiling was ten ells high at least, and slanted. No door preserved privacy or repelled intruders; an unobstructed passage led from a corner.
I lay on a heap of clean rags near the corner diagonally opposite. When I sat up to look around me, the hairy dwarf Gunnie called Zak appeared from the shadows and crouched beside me. He did not speak, but his posture expressed a concern for my well-being. I said, “I’m all right, don’t worry,” and at that he seemed to relax a bit.
The only light in the chamber came through the door; I used it to examine my nurse as well as I could. He seemed to me not so much a dwarf as a small man — that is to say, there was no marked disproportion between his torso and limbs. His face was not fundamentally different from any other man’s except in being overshadowed by bushy hair and having a luxuriant brown beard and an even more luxuriant mustache, neither of which appeared ever to have been touched by scissors. His forehead was low, his nose somewhat flat, and his chin (so far as it could be guessed at) less than prominent; but many men have such features. He was indeed a man, I should add, and then a completely naked one save for a thick crop of bodily hair; but when he saw me glance at his crotch, he pulled a rag from the pile and knotted it about his waist like an apron.
With some difficulty, I got to my feet and hobbled across the room. He outraced me and planted himself in the doorway. There every line of his body reminded me of a servant I had once watched restraining a drunken exultant; it pleaded with me not to do as I intended, and simultaneously announced its owner’s readiness to restrain me by force if I tried.
I was unfit for force of any sort, and as far as possible from those reckless high spirits in which we are ready to fight our friends when there are no enemies at hand. I hesitated. He pointed down the passage, drawing a finger across his throat in an unmistakable gesture.
“Danger there?” I asked. “You’re probably right. This ship would make some battlefields I’ve seen look like public gardens. All right, I won’t go out.”
My bruised lips made it difficult to talk, but he appeared to have understood me, and after a moment he smiled.
“Zak?” I asked, pointed to him.
He smiled again and nodded.
I touched my chest. “Severian.”
“Severian!” He grinned, showing small, sharp teeth, and performed a little dance of joy. Still joyful, he took my left arm and led me back to the pile of rags.
Though his hand was brown, it seemed faintly luminous in the shadows.
Chapter X — Interlude
“YOU HAD a good rap on the head,” Gunnie said. She was sitting beside me watching me eat stew.
“I know.”
“I ought to have taken you to the infirmary, but it’s dangerous out there. You don’t want to be anywhere other people know about.”
I nodded. “Especially me. Two people have tried to kill me. Perhaps three. Possibly four.”
She looked at me as if she suspected the fall had unsettled my wits.
“I’m quite serious. One was your friend Idas. She’s dead now.”
“Here, have some water. Are you saying Idas was a woman?”
“A girl, yes.”
“And I didn’t know it?” Gunnie hesitated. “You’re not just making it up?”
“It isn’t important. The important thing is that she tried to kill me.”
“And you killed him.”
“No, Idas killed herself. But there is at least one other and perhaps more than one. You weren’t talking about them, though, Gunnie. I think you meant the people Sidero mentioned, the jibers. Who are they?”
She rubbed the skin at the corners of her eyes with her forefingers, the woman’s equivalent of male head scratching. “I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t even know if I understand them myself.”
I said, “Try, Gunnie, please. It may be important.”
Hearing the urgency in my voice, Zak abandoned his self-assigned task of watching for intruders long enough for a concerned glance.
“You know how this ship sails?” Gunnie asked. “Into and out of Time, and sometimes to the end of the universe and farther.”
I nodded, scraping the bowl.
“There are I don’t know how many of us in the crew. It may sound funny to you, but I just don’t. It’s so big, you see. The captain never calls us all together. It would take too long, days of walking just for all of us to get to the same place, and then there’d be nobody doing the work while we were going there and getting back.”
“I understand,” I told her.
“We sign on and they take us to one part or another. And that’s where we stay. We get to know the others who are already there, but there’s lots of others we never see. The forecastle up from here where my cabin is, that’s not the only one. There’s lots of othets. Hundreds and maybe thousands.”
“I asked about the jibers,” I said.
“I’m trying to tell you. It’s possible for somebody, anybody, to lose himself on the ship forever. And I mean Forever, because the ship goes there, and it comes back, and that makes strange things happen to time. Some people get old on the ship and die, but some work a long time and never get any older and make a load of money, until finally the ship makes port on their home, and they see it’s almost the same time there now as when they got on, and they get off, and they’re rich. Some get older for a while then get younger.” She hesitated, afraid for a moment to speak more; then she said, “That’s what’s happened to me.”
“You’re not old, Gunnie,” I told her. It was the truth.
“Here,” she said, and taking my leff hand, she laid it on forehead. “Here I’m old, Severian. So much has happened to me that I want to forget. Not just to forget, I want to be young there again. When you drink or drug, you forget. But what those things did to you is still there, in the way you think. You know what I’m saying?”
“Very well,” I told her. I took my hand from her forehead and held one of hers instead.
“But you see, because those things happen, and sailors know it and talk about it even if most longshore people won’t believe them, the ship gets people who aren’t really sailors and don’t want to work. Or maybe a sailor will fight with an officer and get written up for punishment. Then he’ll go off and join the jibers. We call them that because it’s what you say a boat does when she makes a turn you don’t want — she jibes.”
“I understand,” I said again.
“Some just stay in one place, I think, like we’re staying here. Some travel around looking for money or a fight. Maybe just one comes to your mess, and he has some story. Sometimes so many come nobody wants to give them trouble, so you pretend they’re crew, and they eat, and if you’re lucky they go away.”
“You’re saying that they’re only common seamen, then, who’ve rebelled against the captain.” I brought in the captain because I wanted to ask her about him later.
“No.” She shook her head. “Not always. The crew comes from different worlds, from other star-milks, even, and maybe from other universes. I don’t know about that for sure. But what’s a common seaman to you and me might be somebody pretty strange to somebody else. You’re from Urth, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“So am I, and so are most of the others here. They put us together because we talk the same and think the same. But if we went to another fo’c’sle, everything might be different.”