Read The Urth of the New Sun for Free Online Page B

memory like yours," Famulimus whispered. "But I shall not forget."
    "So it's my turn to say welcome now, and mine to be sad because we're parting. I've known you three for more than ten years, and I know that the hideous faces beneath those masks are only masks themselves—Famulimus took hers off the first time we met, though I did not understand then that it was because she had done so often before. I know that Ossipago is a machine, although he is not so agile as Sidero, who I am beginning to believe must be a machine too."
    "That name means iron," Ossipago said, speaking for the first time. "Though I do not know him."
    "And yours means bone-grower. You took care of Barbatus and Famulimus when they were small, saw to it that they were fed and so on, and you've remained with them ever since. That's what Famulimus told me once."
    Barbatus said, "We are come," and opened the door for me.
    In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated. When I was only a boy, the doorway of a certain mausoleum had been a portal of wonder to me; and when I had crossed its threshold, I was not disappointed. On this ship I was a child again, knowing no more of the world around me than a child does.
    The chamber into which Barbatus ushered me was as marvelous to Severian the man—to the Autarch Severian, who had Thecla's life, and the old Autarch's, and a hundred more to draw upon—as the mausoleum had been to the child. I am tempted to write that it appeared to be underwater, but it did not. Rather we seemed immersed in some fluid that was not water, but was to some other world what water was to Urth; or perhaps that we were underwater indeed, but water so cold it would have been frozen in any lake of the Commonwealth.
    All this was merely am effect of the light, I believe—of the freezing wind that wandered, nearly stagnating, through the chamber, and of the colors, tintings of green shaded with blue and black: viridian, berylline, and aquamarine, with tarnished gold and yellowed ivory here and there shining sullenly.
    The furnishings were not of furniture as we understand it. Mottled slabs of seeming stone that yielded to my touch leaned crookedly against two walls and were scattered across the floor. Tattered streamers hung suspended from the ceiling and, because they were so light and the attraction of our ship hardly felt, seemed in need of no suspension. So far as I could judge, the air was as dry here as in the corridor; yet the ghost of an icy spray beat against my face.
    "Is this strange place your stateroom?" I asked Barbatus.
    He nodded as he removed his masks, revealing a face that was at once handsome, inhuman, and familiar. "We have seen the chambers your kind makes. They are as disturbing to us as this must be to you, and since there are three of us—"
    "Two," Ossipago said. "It does not matter to me."
    "I'm not offended, I'm delighted! It's the greatest of privileges for me to see how you live when you live as you wish."
    Famulimus's falsely human face was gone, revealing some huge-eyed horror with needle teeth; she pulled that away as well, and I saw (for one last time, as I then believed) the beauty of a goddess not born of woman. "How fast we learn, Barbatus, that these poor folk we'll meet, who hardly know what we know best, know courtesy as guests." If I had attended to what she said, it would have made me smile. As it was, I was far too busy still in looking about that strange cabin. At last I said, "I know your race was formed by the Hierogrammates to resemble those who once formed them. Now I see, or think I see, that you were once inhabitants of lakes and pools, kelpies such as our country folk talk of."
    "On our home, as on yours," Barbatus