Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2 ) - Gene Wolfe Page 0,52

I could feel the pallet in position, then drew out the Claw. Its light was so faint I might have shaded it with my hand.

“Is it dying?” Jonas asked.

“No, it’s often like this. But when it is active—when it transmuted the water in our carafe and when it awed the man-apes—it shines brightly. If it can procure our escape at all, I don’t believe it will do so now.”

“We must take it to the door. It might spring the lock.” His voice was shaking.

“Later, when the others are all asleep. I’ll free them if we can get free ourselves; but if the door doesn’t open—and I don’t think it will—I don’t want them to know I have the Claw. Now tell me why you must escape at once.”

“While you were talking to the old people I was being questioned by a whole family,” Jonas began. “There were several old women, a man of about fifty, another about thirty, three other women, and a flock of children. They had carried me to their own little niche in the wall, you see, and the other prisoners couldn’t come there unless they were invited, which they weren’t. I expected that they’d ask me about friends on the outside. or politics, or the fighting in the mountains. Instead I seemed to be only a kind of amusement for them. They wanted to hear about the river, and where I had been, and how many people dressed the way I did. And the food outside—there were a great many questions about food, some of them quite ludicrous. Had I ever seen butchering? And did the animals plead for their lives? And was it true that the ones who make sugar carried poison swords and would fight to defend it? …

“They had never seen bees, and seemed to think they were about the size of rabbits.”

“After a time I began to ask questions of my own and found that none of them, not even the oldest woman, had ever been free. Men and women are put into this room alike, it seems, and in the course of nature they produce children. And though some are taken away, most remain here throughout their lives. They have no possessions and no hope of release. Actually, they don’t know what freedom is, and although the older man and one girl told me seriously that they would like to go outside, I don’t think they meant to stay. The old women are seventh-generation prisoners, so they said—but one let it slip that her mother had been a seventh-generation prisoner as well.

“They are remarkable people in some respects. Externally they have been shaped completely by this place where they have spent all their lives. Yet beneath that are …” Jonas paused, and I could feel the silence pressing in all about us. “Family memories, I suppose you could call them. Traditions from the outside world that have been handed down to them, generation to generation, from the original prisoners from whom they are descended. They don’t know what some of the words mean any longer, but they cling to the traditions, to the stories, because those are all they have; the stories and their names.”

He fell silent. I had thrust the tiny spark of the Claw back into my boot, and we were in perfect darkness. His labored breathing was like the pumping of the bellows at a forge.

“I asked them the name of the first prisoner, the most remote from whom they counted their descent. It was Kimleesoong … Have you heard that name?”

I told him I had not.

“Or anything like it? Suppose it were three words.”

“No, nothing like that,” I said. “Most of the people I have known have had one-word names like you, unless a part of the name was a title, or a nickname of some sort that had been attached to it because there were too many Bolcans or Altos or whatever.”

“You told me once that you thought I had an unusual name. Kim Lee Soong would have been a very common kind of name when I was … a boy. A common name in places now sunk beneath the sea. Have you ever heard of my ship, Severian? She was the Fortunate Cloud.”

“A gambling ship? No, but—”

My eye was caught by a gleam of greenish light so faint that even in that darkness it was scarcely visible. At once there came a murmur of voices echoing and reechoing throughout the wide, low, crooked room. I