“That must be very inconvenient for you,” I said. I was staring out over the water.
“For us, not for me personally. If you are thinking that I am in some fashion the queen or guardian of your Urth, dismiss the thought. I am not. But yes, imagine that we desire to play shah mat upon a board whose squares are rafts on that sea. We move, yet even as we move the rafts stir and slip into some new combination; and to move, we must paddle from one raft to the next, which takes so long.”
“Against whom do you play?” I asked.
“Entropy.”
I looked around at her. “It is said that game is always lost.”
“We know.”
“Is Thecla really alive? Alive outside myself?”
“Here? Yes.”
“If I took her to Urth, would she be alive there?”
“That will not be permitted.”
“Then I will not ask whether I can stay here with her. You have already answered that. Less than a day all told, you said.”
“Would you stay here with her if it were possible?”
I thought about that for a moment. “Leaving Urth to freeze in the dark? No. Thecla was not a good woman, but…”
“Not good by whose measure?” Apheta asked. When I did not reply, she said, “I am truly inquiring. You may believe there is nothing unknown to me, but it is not so.”
“By her own. What I was going to say, if I could find the words, was that she — that all the exultants except a very few — felt a certain responsibility. It used to astonish me that she who had so much learning cared so little about it. That was when we used to talk together in her cell. A long time afterward, when I had been Autarch for several years, I realized it was because she knew of something better, something she had been learning all her life. It was a rough ethology, but I find I can’t say exactly what I mean.”
“Try, please. I would like to hear it.”
“Thecla would defend to the death anyone who could not help being dependent on her. That was why Hunna held Zak for me this afternoon. Hunna saw something of Thecla in me, though she must have known I was not really Thecla.”
“Yet you said Thecla was not good.”
“Goodness is so much more than that. She knew that too.”
I paused, watching the white flashes the waves made in the darkness beyond the boats while I tried to collect my thoughts. “What I was trying to say was that I learned it from her — that responsibility — or rather I absorbed it when I absorbed her. If I were to betray Urth for her now, I would be worse than she, not better. She wants me to be better, as every lover wants his lover to be better than he.”
Apheta said, “Go on.”
“I wanted Thecla because she was so much better than I, socially and morally, and she wanted me because I was so much better than she and her friends, just because I did something necessary. Most exultants don’t, on Urth. They have a great deal of power, and they pretend they’re important; they tell the Autarch that they’re ruling their peons, and they tell their peons they’re ruling the Commonwealth. But they don’t really do anything, and in their hearts they know it. They’re afraid to use their power, or at least the best of them are, knowing they can’t use it wisely.”
A few sea birds, pale birds with huge eyes and bills like swords, wheeled overhead; after a time I saw a fish jump. “What was I talking about?” I asked.
“Why you could not leave your world to freeze in the dark.”
I had remembered something else. “You said you didn’t speak my language.”
“I think I said I do not speak any tongue, that we have no tongues. Look.”
She opened her mouth and held it up to me, but it was too dark for me to see whether she had deceived me. “How is it I hear you?” I asked. Then I understood what it was she wished, and kissed her; that kiss made me certain she was a woman of my own race.
“Do you know our story?” she whispered as we parted.
I told her what the aquastor Malrubius had told me upon another night upon another beach: that in a previous manvantara, the men of that cycle had shaped companions for themselves from other races, and that at the destruction of their universe these had escaped here to Yesod; that they ruled our universe through the Hierodules, whom they themselves had shaped.
Apheta shook her head when I had finished. “There is much more than that.”
I said I had never supposed there was not, but that what I had just recited was all I knew. I added, “You said that you are the children of the Hierogrammates. Who are they, and who are you?”
“They are those of whom you spoke, those who were made in your image by a race cognate to your own. As for us, we are what I have told you we are.”
She ceased to speak, and when some time had passed I said, “Go on.”
“Severian, do you know the meaning of that word you used? Of Hierogrammate?”
I told her that someone had once told me it designated those who recorded the rescripts of the Increate.
“So much is correct.” She paused again. “Possibly we are too much in awe. Those whom we do not name, the cognates I spoke of; evoke such feelings still, though of all their works only the Hierogrammates remain. You say they desired companions. How could they shape companions for themselves, who were themselves ever reaching higher and higher?”
I confessed I did not know; and when she seemed disinclined to tell me more, I described the winged being I had seen in the pages of Father Inire’s book and asked whether it had not been a Hierogrammate.
She said it was. “But I will speak no more of them. You asked about us; we are their larvae. Do you know what larvae are?”
“Why, yes,” I answered. “Masked spirits.”
Apheta nodded. “We carry their spirit, and even as you say, until we attain to their high state we must go masked — not with an actual mask such as those our Hierodules wear, but with the appearance of your own race, the race that our parents, the Hierogrammates, first set forth to follow. Yet we are not yet Hierogrammates, nor are we truly like you. You have listened to my voice for a long while now, Autarch. Listen to this world of Yesod instead and tell me what you hear, other than my words, when I speak to you. Listen! What do you hear?”
I did not understand. I said, “Nothing. But you are a human woman.”
“You hear nothing because we speak with silence, even as you with sound. Whatever noises we find we shape, canceling those which are unneeded, voicing our thoughts in the remainder. That is why I led you here, where the waves murmur always; and why we have so many fountains, and trees to stir their leaves in the wind from our sea.”
I hardly heard her. Something vast and bright — a moon, a sun — was rising, madly shaped and drenched with light. It was as though some golden seed soared in the atmosphere of this strange world, borne aloft upon a billion black filaments. It was the ship; and the sun called Yesod, though the horizon was above it, struck that vast hull full and was reflected with a light that seemed like day.
“Look!” I called to Apheta.
And she cried back, “Look! Look!” pointing to her mouth. I looked and saw that what I had taken for her tongue when we had kissed was but a lump of tissue protruding from her palate.
Chapter XX — The Coiled Room
I CANNOT say how long the ship hung so in the sky. It was less than a watch, surely, and it seemed no longer than a breath. While it was there, I had eyes for nothing else; what Apheta did then, I have no notion. When it was gone, I found her sitting on a rock near the water and looking at me.
“I’ve so many questions,” I said. “Seeing Thecla again put them out of my mind, but now they’re there again; and there are questions about her too.”