[New Sun 04] The Citadel of the Autarch

Wolfe Gene

It was not a mass of cloud but a plain of ice. The window would not open, or if it would, I could not solve the puzzle of its mechanism; but I put my face close to the glass and peered downward as well as I could. The Last House rose, as I had seen before, from a high hill of rock. Now this hill top alone remained above the ice. I went from window to window, and the view from each was the same. Going back to the bed that had been mine, I pulled on my trousers and boots, and slung my cloak about my shoulders, hardly knowing what it was I did.

Master Ash appeared just as I finished dressing. “I hope I do not intrude,” he said. “I heard you walking up here.” I shook my head.

“I did not want you to become disturbed.” Without my willing it, my hands had gone to my face.

Now some foolish part of me became aware of my bristling beard. I said, “I meant to shave before putting on my cloak. That was stupid of me. I haven’t shaved since I left the lazaret.” It was as though my mind were trudging across the ice, leaving my tongue and lips to get along as best they might.

“There is hot water here, and soap.”

“That’s good,” I said. And then, “If I go downstairs ...” That smile again. “Will it be the same? The ice? No. You are the first to have guessed. May I ask how you did it?”

“A long time ago—no, only a few months, actually, though it seems like such a long time now—I went to the Botanic Gardens in Nessus. There was a place called the Lake of Birds, where the bodies of the dead seemed to remain fresh forever. I ws told it was some property of the water, but I wondered even then that there should be so much power in water. There was another place too, that they called the Jungle Garden, where the leaves were greener than I have ever known leaves to be—not a bright green but dark with greenness, as if the plants could never use all the energy the sun poured down. The people there seemed not of our time, though I could not say if they were of the past, or the future, or some third thing that is neither They had a little house. It was much smaller than this, but this reminds me of it. I’ve thought often of the Botanic Gardens since I left them, and sometimes I’ve wondered if their secret were not that the time never changed in the Lake of Birds, and that one moved forward or backward—however it might be—when walking the path of the Jungle Garden. Am I perhaps speaking overmuch?”

Master Ash shook his head.

“Then when I was coming here, I saw your house at the top of this hill. But when I climbed to it, it was gone, and the valley below was not as I remembered it.” I did not know what else to say, and fell silent.

You are correct,” Master Ash told me. “I have been put here to observe what you see about you now. The lower stories of my home, however, reach into older periods, of which yours is the oldest.”

“That seems a great wonder.”

He shook his head. “It is almost more wonderful that this spur of rock has been spared by the glaciers. The tops of peaks far higher are submerged. It is sheltered by a geographic pattern so subtle that it could only be achieved by accident.”

“But it too will be covered at last?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And what then?”

“I shall leave. Or rather, I shall leave some time before it occurs.”

I felt a surge of irrational anger, the same emotion I had sometimes known as a boy when I could not make Master Malrubius understand my questions. “I meant, what of Urth?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. What you see is the last glaciation. The surface of the sun is dull now; soon it will grow bright with heat, but the sun itself will shrink, giving less energy to its worlds. Eventually, should anyone come and stand upon the ice, he will see it only as a bright star. The ice he stands upon will not be that which you see but the atmosphere of this world. And so it will remain for a very long time.

Perhaps until the close of the universal day.”

I went to another window and looked out again on the expanse of ice. “Will this happen soon?”

“The scene you see is many thousands of years in your future.”

“But before this, the ice must have come from the south.”

Master Ash nodded. “And down from the mountaintops. Come with me.”

We descended to the second level of the house, which I had scarcely noticed when I had come upstairs the night before. The windows were far fewer there, but Master Ash placed chairs before one and indicated that we would sit and look out. It was as he had said—ice, lovely in its parity, crept down the mountainsides to war with the pines. I asked if this too were far in the future, and he nodded once more. “You will not live to see it again.”

“But so near that the life of a man will nearly reach it?” He twitched his shoulders and smiled beneath his beard. “Let us say it is a thing of degree. You will not see this. Nor will your children, nor theirs. But the process has already begun. It began long before you were born.”

I knew nothing of the south, but I found myself thinking of the island people of Hallvard’s story, the precious little sheltered places with a growing season, the hunting of the seals. Those islands would not hold men and their families much longer. The boats would scrape over their stony beaches for the last time. “My wife, my children, my children, my wife.”

“At this time, many of your people are already gone,” Master Ash continued. “Those you ‘call the cacogens have mercifully carried them to fairer worlds. Many more will leave before the final victory of the ice. I am myself, you see, defended from those refugees.”

I asked if everyone would escape.

He shook his head. “No, not everyone. Some would not go, some could not be found. No home could be found for others.”

For some time I sat looking out at the beleaguered valley and trying to order my thoughts. At last I said, “I have always found that men of religion tell comforting things that are not true, while men of science recount hideous truths. The Chatelaine Mannea said you were a holy man, but you appear to be a man of science, and you said your people had sent you to our dead Urth to study the ice.”

“The distinction you mention no longer holds. Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something, It is the same something. You are yourself what you call a man of science, so I talk of science to you. If Mannea were here with her priestesses, I would talk differently.”

I have so many memories that I often become lost among them. Now as I looked at the pines, waving in a wind I could not feel, I seemed to hear the beating of a drum. “I met another man who said he was from the future once,” I said. “He was green—nearly as green as those trees—and he told me that his time was a time of brighter Sun.”

Master Ash nodded. “No doubt he spoke truly.”

“But you tell me that what I see now is but a few lifetimes away, that it is part of a process already begun, and that this will be the last glaciation. Either you are a false prophet or he was.”

“I am not a prophet,” answered Master Ash, “nor was he. No one can know the future. We are speaking of the past.”

I was angry again. “You told me this was only a few lifetimes away.”

“I did. But you, and this scene, are past events for me.”