[New Sun 04] The Citadel of the Autarch
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“I was expecting—what was its name? Mamillian.”
“No pets today. Mamillian is an excellent comrade, silent and wise and able to fight with a mind independent of my own, but when all is said and done, I ride him for pleasure. We will thieve a string from the Ascians’ bow and use a mechanism today. They steal many from us.”
“Is it true that it consumes their power to land? I think one of your aeronauts once told me that.”
“When you were the Chatelaine Thecla, you mean. Thecla purely.”
“Yes, of course. Would it be impolitic. Autarch, to ask why you had me killed? And how you know me now?”
“I know you because I see your face in the face of my young friend and hear your voice in his. Your nurses know you too. Look at them.”
I did, and saw the woman-cats’ faces twisted in snarls of fear and amazement.
“As to why you died, I will speak of that—to him—on board the flier ... have we time. Now, go back. You find it easy to manifest yourself because he is weak and ill, but I must have him now, not you.
If you will not go, there are means.”
“Sieur-”
“Yes, Severian? Are you afraid? Have you entered such a contrivance before?”
“No,” I said. “But I am not afraid.”
“Do you recall your question about their power? It is true, in a sense. Their lift is supplied by the antimaterial equivalent of iron, held in a penning trap by magnetic fields. Since the anti-iron has a reversed magnetic structure, it is repelled by promagnetism. The builders of this flier have surrounded it with magnets, so that when it drifts from its position at the centre it enters a stronger field and is forced back.
On an antimaterial world, that iron would weigh as much as a boulder, but here on Urth it counters the weight of the promatter used in the construction of the flier. Do you follow me?”
“I believe so, Sieur.”
“The trouble is that it is beyond our technology to seal the chamber hermetically. Some atmosphere—a few moleculesis always creeping in through porosities in the welds, or by penetrating the insulation of the magnetic wires. Each such molecule neutralizes its equivalent in anti-iron and produces heat» and each time one does so, the flier loses an infinitesimal amount of lift. The only solution anyone has found is to keep fliers as high as possible, where there is effectively no air pressure.”
The flier was nosing down now, near enough for me to appreciate the beautiful sleekness of its lines.
It had precisely the shape of a cherry leaf.
“I didn’t understand all of that,” I said. “But I would think the ropes would have to be immensely long to allow the fliers to float high enough to do any good, and that if the Ascian pentadactyls came over by night they would cut them and let the fliers drift away.”
The woman-cats smiled at that with tiny, secretive twitchings of their lips.
“The rope is only for landing. Without it, our flier would require sufficient distance for its forward speed to drive it down. Now, knowing we’re below, it drops its cable just as a man in a pond might extend his hand to someone who would pull him out. It has a mind of its own, you see. Not like Mamillian’s—a mind we have made for it, but enough of a mind to permit it to stay out of difficulties and come down when it receives our signal.”
The lower half of the flier was of opaque black metal, the upper half a dome so clear as to be nearly invisible—the same substance, I suppose, as the roof of the Botanic Gardens. A gun like the one the mammoth had carried thrust out from the stem, and another twice as large protruded from the bow.
The Autarch lifted one hand to his mouth and seemed to whisper into his palm. An aperture appeared in the dome (it was as if a hole had opened in a soap bubble) and a flight of silver steps, as thin and insubstantial looking as the web ladder of a spider, descended to us. The bare-chested men had left off pulling. “Do you think you can climb those?” the Autarch asked.
“If I can use my hands,” I said.
He went before me, and I crawled up ignominiously after him, dragging my wounded leg. The seats, long benches that followed the curve of the hull on either side, were upholstered in fur; but even this fur felt colder than any ice. Behind me, the aperture narrowed and vanished.
“We will have surface pressure in here no matter how high we go. You don’t have to worry about suffocating.”
“I am afraid I am too ignorant to feel the fear, Sieur.”
“Would you like to see your old bacele? They’re far to the right, but I’ll try to locate them for you.”
The Autarch had seated himself at the controls. Almost the only machinery I had seen before had been Typhon’s and Baldanders’s, and that which Master Gurloes controlled in the Matachin Tower. It was of the machines, not of suffocation, that I was afraid; but I fought the fear down.
“When you rescued me last night, you indicated that you had not known I was in your army.”
“I made inquiries while you slept.”
“And it was you who ordered us forward?”
“In a sense ... I issued the order that resulted in your movement, though I had nothing to do with your bacele directly. Do you resent what I did? When you joined, did you think you would never have to fight?”
We were soaring upward, calling, as I had once feared to do, into the sky. But I remembered the smoke and the brassy shout of the graisle, the troopers blown to red paste by the whistling bolts, and all my terror fumed to rage. “I knew nothing of war. How much do you know? Have you ever really been in a battle?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, his blue eyes flashing. “I’ve been in a thousand. You are two as people are usually counted. How many do you think I am?”
It was a long while before I answered him.
XXV. The Mercy of Agia
AT FIRST I THOUGHT there could be nothing stranger than to see the army stretch across the surface of Urth until it lay like a garland before us, coruscant with weapons and armour, many-hued; the winged anpiels soaring above it nearly as high as we, circling and rising on the dawn wind.