Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2 ) - Gene Wolfe Page 0,33
listened to her as though he were impatient to speak himself, yet was too well mannered to interrupt her.
“Then others—who would have drawn a people to the innermost habitable world for their own reasons—took up the game as well, and called that world Skuld, the World of the Future. Thus our own became Urth, the World of the Past.”
“You are wrong in that, I fear,” Vodalus told her. “I have it on good authority that this world of ours has been called by that name from the utmost reaches of antiquity. Still, your error is so charming that I would rather have it that you are correct and I mistaken.”
Thea smiled at that, and Vodalus turned again toward me. “Though it does not explain why Urth is called as she is, my dear Chatelaine’s tale makes the vital point well, which is that in those times mankind traveled by his own ships from world to world, and mastered each, and built on them the cities of Man. Those were the great days of our race, when our fathers’ fathers’ fathers strove for the mastery of the universe.”
He paused, and because he seemed to expect some comment from me, I said, “Sieur, we are much diminished in wisdom from that age.”
“Ah, now you strike to the heart. Yet with all your perspicacity, you mistake it. No, we are not diminished in wisdom. We are diminished in power. Study has advanced without letup, but even as men have learned all that is needful for mastery, the strength of the world has been exhausted. We exist now, and precariously, upon the ruin of those who preceded us. While some skim the air in their fliers, ten thousand leagues in a day, we others creep upon the skin of Urth, unable to go from one horizon to the next before the westernmost has lifted itself to veil the sun. You spoke a moment ago of checkmating that mewling fool the Autarch. I want you to conceive now of two autarchs—two great powers striving for mastery. The white seeks to maintain things as they are, the black to set Man’s foot on the road to domination again. I called it the black by chance, but it would be well to remember that it is by night that we see the stars strongly; they are remote and all but invisible in the red light of day. Now, of those two powers, which would you serve?”
The wind was stirring in the trees, and it seemed to me that everyone at the table had fallen silent, listening to Vodalus and waiting for my reply. I said, “The black, surely.”
“Good! But as a man of sense you must understand that the way to reconquest cannot be easy. Those who wish no change may sit hugging their scruples forever. We must do everything. We must dare everything!”
The others had begun to talk and eat again. I lowered my voice until only Vodalus could hear me. “Sieur, there is something I have not told you. I dare not conceal it longer for fear you should think me faithless.”
He was a better intriguer than I, and turned away before he answered, pretending to eat. “What is it? Out with it.”
“Sieur,” I said, “I have a relic, the thing they say is the Claw of the Conciliator.”
He was biting the roasted thigh of a fowl as I spoke. I saw him pause; his eyes turned to look at me, though he did not move his head.
“Do you wish to see it, sieur? It is very beautiful, and I have it in the top of my boot.”
“No,” he whispered. “Yes, perhaps, but not here … No, better not at all.”
“To whom should I give it, then?”
Vodalus chewed and swallowed. “I had heard from friends I have in Nessus that it was gone. So you have it. You must keep it until you can dispose of it. Do not try to sell it—it would be identified at once. Hide it somewhere. If you must, throw it into a pit.”
“But surely, sieur, it is very valuable.”
“It is beyond value, which means it is worthless. You and I are men of sense.” Despite his words, there was a tinge of fear in his voice. “But the rabble believe it to be sacred, a performer of all manner of wonders. If I were to possess it, they would think me a desecrator and an enemy of the Theologoumenon. Our masters would think me turned traitor. You must tell