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On Urth I could not have done so — but then on Urth that whole great ship would have crumbled to ruin beneath its own weight; and here on board, where I had been able to run and even to leap before, I could now outrace the wind. I dashed along; when I reached the next turning, I leaped and kicked the wall, sending myself hurtling down the gangway even as I had leaped through the rigging.
In an instant, I had left the passage I knew behind, and found myself among eerie angles and ghostly mechanisms, where blue-green lights flew like comets and the walkway writhed like a worm’s gut. My feet struck its surface, but not in a fresh stride; they were numb, and my legs like the loose limbs of a marionette when the curtain has fallen. I went tumbling down the gangway, which shrank to a painfully bright but diminishing dot in a field of utter darkness.
Chapter XXVI — Gu
AT FIRST I thought my vision blurred. I blinked, and blinked again; but the faces, so much alike, would not become one. I tried to speak.
“It’s all right,” Gu
My mouth was filled with the dust of death. I sucked the water eagerly, moving it from cheek to cheek before I swallowed, feeling the tissues revive.
“What happened?” Gu
“The ship changes herself,” I said.
Both nodded without comprehension.
“She changes to suit us, wherever we are. I ran too fast — or failed to touch the floor enough.” I tried to sit up, and to my own astonishment succeeded. “I got to a part where there wasn’t any air — where there was only a gas that wasn’t air, I think. Perhaps it was meant for people from some other world, or for no one at all. I don’t know.”
“Can you stand?” Gu
I nodded; but if we had been on Urth, I would have fallen when I tried. Even on the ship, where one fell so slowly, the two women had to catch me and prop me as though I were sodden drunk. They were of the same height (which is to say each was nearly as tall as I) with wide dark eyes and broad, pleasant faces dotted with freckles and framed in dark hair.
“You’re Gu
“We both are,” the younger woman told me. “I signed on last voyage. She’s been here for a long time, I believe.”
“For a lot of those voyages,” Gu
“Wait,” I protested. “I must think. Isn’t there any place here where we can rest?”
The younger woman pointed to a shadowy archway. “That’s where we were.” Through it I glimpsed falling water and many padded seats.
Gu
The high walls were adorned with large masks. Watery tears dripped slowly from their eyes to splash into quiet basins, and cups like the one the younger woman had filled for me stood upon the rims. There was an angled hatch in the farther wall of the chamber; from its design, I knew it opened onto a deck.
When the women had seated themselves on either side of me, I told them, “You two are the same person — so you say, and so I believe.”
Both nodded.
“But I can’t call you by the same name. What shall I call you?”
Gu
“All right,” I said. “Perhaps there’s some better way to explain what bothers me, but I’m still weak, and I can’t think clearly enough to find it. Once I saw a certain man raised from the dead.”
They only stared at me. I heard Burgundofara’s indrawn breath.
“His name was Apu-Punchau. There was someone else there too, a man called Hildegrin; and this Hildegrin wanted to stop Apu-Punchau from returning to his tomb.”
Burgundofara whispered, “Was he a ghost?”
“Not quite, or at least I don’t think so. Or maybe it only depends on what you mean when you say ‘ghost.’ I think perhaps he was someone whose roots in time went so deep that he couldn’t be wholly dead in our time, perhaps not in any. However that may be, I wanted to help Hildegrin because he was serving someone who was trying to cure one of my friends…” My thoughts, still bewildered by the deathly atmosphere of the gangway, stuck on that point of friendship. Had Jolenta indeed been a friend? Might she have become one if she had recovered?
“Go on,” Burgundofara urged me.
“I ran up to them — to Apu-Punchau and Hildegrin. There was something I can’t really call an explosion, but it was more like that, or like lightning striking, than anything else I can think of. Apu-Punchau was gone, and there were two Hildegrins.”
“Like us.”
“No, the same Hildegrin twice. One who wrestled an invisible spirit and another who wrestled me. Then the lightning struck, or whatever it was. But before that, before I had even seen the two Hildegrins, I saw Apu-Punchau’s face; and it was mine. Older, but mine.”
Gu
“This morning — Tzadkiel, the captain, gave me a very nice cabin. Before I went out I washed, and I shaved with a razor I found there. The face I saw in the mirror troubled me, but I know now whose it was.”
Burgundofara said, “Apu-Punchau’s?” and Gu
“There’s something more I didn’t tell you. Hildegrin was killed by the flash. I thought I understood that, later, and I still do. There were two of me, and because there were, two Hildegrins also; but the Hildegrins had been created by division, and a man ca
Burgundofara nodded. “Gu
“Now here I am, with both of you. There’s only one of me, as far as I can tell. Do you see two?”
Burgundofara said, “No. But don’t you see that it wouldn’t matter if we did? If you haven’t been Apu-Punchau yet, you can’t die!”
I told her, “Even I know more of time than that. I was the future Apu-Punchau of what is now a decade past. The present can always change its future.”
Gu
She paused. Gu
“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.”