The Urth of the New Sun Read Online Free Page B

ship's built?"
    "I haven't the least idea."
    She laughed at that. "Neither does anyone else, I suppose. We have ideas we pass along to each other, but eventually we usually find out they're wrong. Partly wrong, anyway."
    "I would have thought you'd know your ship."
    "She's too big, and there are too many places where they never take us, and we can't find for ourselves, or get into. But she's got seven sides; that's so she'll carry more sail, you follow me?"
    "I understand."
    "Some of the decks—three, I think—have deep bays. That's where the main cargo is. They leave the other four with wedge-shaped spaces. Some's used for odds and ends, like this bay. Some's cabins and crew's quarters and what not. But speaking of quarters, we'd better get back."
    She had led me to another ladder, another platform. I said, "I imagined somehow that we would go through a secret panel, or perhaps only find that as we walked these odds and ends, as you call them, became a garden."
    Gunnie shook her head, then grinned. "I see you've seen a bit of her already. You're a poet too, aren't you? And a good liar, I bet."
    "I was the Autarch of Urth; that required a little lying, if you like. We called it diplomacy."
    "Well, let me tell you that this is a working ship; it's just that she wasn't built by people like you and me. Autarch—does that mean you run the whole Urth?"
    "No, I ran only a small part of it, although I was the legitimate head of the whole of it. And I've known ever since I began my journey that if I succeed, I won't come back as Autarch. You seem singularly unimpressed."
    "There are so many worlds," she told me. Quite suddenly she crouched and leaped, rising into the air like a large blue bird. Even though I had made such leaps myself, it was strange to see a woman do it. Her ascent carried her a cubit or less above the platform, and she might honestly have been said to have floated down upon it.
    Without thinking, I had supposed the crew's quarters would be a narrow room like the forecastle of the Samru . There was a warren of big cabins instead, many levels opening onto walkways around a common airshaft. Gunnie said she had to return to her duty, and suggested I look for an empty cabin.
    It was on my tongue to remind her I had a cabin already, which I had left only a watch before; but something stopped me. I nodded and asked her what location was best—by which I meant, as she understood, which would be nearest hers. She indicated it to me, and we parted.
    On Urth the older locks are charmed by words. My stateroom had a speaking lock, and though the hatches had needed no words at all and the door Sidero had flung open had required none, the olive doors of these crew compartments were equipped with locks of the same kind. The first two I approached informed me that the cabins they guarded were occupied. They must have been old mechaisms indeed; I noticed that their personalities had begun to differentiate.
    The third invited me to enter, saying, "What a nice cabin!" I asked how long it had been since the nice cabin had been inhabited.
    "I don't know, master. Many voyages."
    "Don't call me master," I told it. "I haven't decided to take your cabin yet." There was no reply. No doubt such locks are of severely limited intelligence; otherwise they might be bribed, and they would surely go mad soon. After a moment the door swung open. I stepped inside.
    It was not a nice cabin compared with the stateroom I had left. There were two narrow bunks, an armoire, and a chest; sanitary facilities in a corner. Dust covered everything to such a thickness that I could readily imagine it being blown from the ventilating grill in gray clouds, through the clouds would be seen only by a man who had some means of compressing time as the ship compressed it; if a man lived as a tree does, perhaps, for which each year is a day; or like Gyoll, running through the valley of Nessus for whole ages of the world.
    While thinking of such things, which took me