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V. The Lazaret
I DO NOT BELIEVE I really slept again that night, though I may have dozed. When dawn came, the snow had melted. Two Pelerines took the sheets away, gave me a towel with which to dry myself, and brought dry bedding. I wanted to give the daw to them then—my possessions were in the bag under my cot—but the moment seemed inappropriate. I lay down instead, and now that it was daylight, slept.
I woke again about noon. The lazaret was as quiet as it ever became; somewhere far off two men were talking and another cried out, but their voices only emphasized the stillness. I sat up and looked around, hoping to see the soldier. On my right lay a man whose close-cropped scalp made me think at first that he was one of the slaves of the Pelerines. I called to him, but when he turned his head to look at me, I saw I had been mistaken.
His eyes were emptier than any human eyes I had ever seen, and they seemed to watch spirits invisible to me. “Glory to the Group of Seventeen,” he said.
“Good morning. Do you know anything about the way this place is run?”
A shadow appeared to cross his face, and I sensed that my question had somehow made him suspicious. He answered, “All endeavours are conducted well or ill precisely in so far as they conform to Correct Thought.”
“Another man was brought in at the same time I was. I’d. like to talk to him. He’s a friend of mine, more or less.”
“Those who do the will of the populace are friends, though we have never spoken to them. Those who do not do the will of the populace are enemies, though we learned together as children.”
The man on my left called, “You won’t get anything out of him. He’s a prisoner.”
I turned to look at him. His face, though wasted nearly to a skull, retained something of humour. His stiff, black hair looked as though it had not seen a comb for months. “He talks like that all the time.
Never any other way. Hey, you! We’re going to beat you!”
The other answered, “For the Armies of the Populace, defeat is the springboard of victory, and victory the ladder to further victory.”
“He makes a lot more sense than most of them, though,” the man on my left told me. “You say he’s a prisoner. What did he do?”
“Do? Why, he didn’t die.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. Was he selected for some kind of suicide mission?”
The patient beyond the man on my left sat up—a young woman with a thin but lovely face. “They all are,” she said. “At least, they can’t go home until the war is won, and they know, really, that it will never be won.”
“External battles are already won when internal struggles are conducted with Correct Thought.”
I said, “He’s an Ascian, then. That’s what you meant. I’ve never seen one before.”
“Most of them die,” the black-haired man told me. “That’s what I said.”
“I didn’t know they spoke our language.”
“They don’t. Some officers who came here to talk to him said they thought he’d been an interpreter.
Probably he questioned our soldiers when they were captured. Only he did something wrong and had to go back to the ranks.”
The young woman said, “I don’t think he’s really mad. Most of them are. What’s your name?”
“I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Severian.” I almost added that I was a lictor, but I knew neither of them would talk to me if I told them that.
“I’m Foila, and this is Melito. I was of the Blue Huzzars, he a hoplite.”
“You shouldn’t talk nonsense,” Melito growled. “I am a hoplite. You are a huzzar.”
I thought he appeared much nearer death than she. “I’m only hoping we will be discharged when we’re well enough to leave this place,” Foila said.
“And what will we do then? Milk somebody else’s cow and herd his pigs?” Melito fumed to me.
“Don’t let her talk deceive you—we were volunteers, both of us. I was about to be promoted when I was wounded, and when I’m promoted I’ll be able to support a wife.”
Foila called, “I haven’t promised to marry you!”
Several beds away, someone said loudly, “Take her so she’ll shut up about it!”
At that, the patient in the bed beyond Foila’s sat up. “She will marry me.” He was big, fair ski
Surprising me, the Ascian prisoner a
Foila said, “They fight even when they’re pregnant—I’ve seen them dead on the battlefield.”
“The roots of the tree are the populace. The leaves fall, but the tree remains.”
I asked Melito and Foila if the Ascian were composing his remarks or quoting some literary source with which I was unfamiliar.
“Just making it up, you mean?” Foila asked. “No. They never do that. Everything they say has to be taken from an approved text. Some of them don’t talk at all. The rest have thousands—1 suppose actually tens or hundreds of thousands of those tags memorized.”
“That’s impossible,” I said.
Melito shrugged. He had managed to prop himself up on one elbow. “They do it, though. At least, that’s what everybody says. Foila knows more about them than I do.”
Foila nodded. “In the light cavalry, we do a lot of scouting, and sometimes we’re sent out specifically to take prisoners. You don’t learn anything from talking to most of them, but just the same the General Staff can tell a good deal from their equipment and physical condition. On the northern continent, where they come from, only the smallest children ever talk the way we do.”
I thought of Master Gurioes conducting the business of our guild. “How could they possibly say something like Take three apprentices and unload that wagon’?”
“They wouldn’t say that at all—just grab people by the shoulder, point to the wagon, and give them a push. If they went to work, fine. If they didn’t, then the leader would quote something about the need for labour to ensure victory, with several witnesses present. If the person he was talking to still wouldn’t work after that, then he would have him killed—probably just by pointing to him and quoting something about the need to eliminate the enemies of the populace.”
The Ascian said, “The cries of the children are the cries of victory. Still, victory must learn wisdom.”
Foila interpreted for him. “That means that although children are needed, what they say is meaningless. Most Ascians would consider us mute even if we learned their tongue, because groups of words that are not approved texts are without meaning for them. If they admitted—even to themselves—that such talk meant something, then it would be possible for them to hear disloyal remarks, and even to make them. That would be extremely dangerous. As long as they only understand and quote approved texts, no one can accuse them.”
I turned my head to look at the Ascian. It was clear that he had been listening attentively, but I could not be certain of what his expression meant beyond that. “Those who write the approved texts,” I told him, “ca
“Correct Thought is the thought of the populace. The populace ca
Foila called, “Don’t insult the populace or the Group of Seventeen. He might try to kill himself.
Sometimes they do.”
“Will he ever be normal?”
“I’ve heard that some of them eventually come to talk more or less the way we do, if that’s what you mean.”
I could think of nothing to say to that, and for some time we were quiet. There are long periods of silence, I found, in such a place, where almost everyone is ill. We knew that we had watch after watch to occupy; that if we did not say what we wished to say that afternoon there would be another opportunity that evening and another again the next morning. Indeed, anyone who talked as healthy people normally doafter a meal, for example—would have been intolerable.