are correct but it is not yet in your grasp, and when the tests come, you will encounter many who will slay you should you falter. You were nurtured in the Citadel of Nessus what are the words for its castellan? How are the man-apes of the treasure mine to be commanded? What phrases unlock the vaults of the Secret House? You need not tell me, because these things are the arcana of your state, and I know them in any case. But do you yourself know them, without thinking long?'
The phrases I required were present in my mind, yet I failed when I sought to pronounce them to myself. Like little fish, they slipped aside, and in the end I could only lift my shoulders.
'And there is one thing more for you to do. One adventure more, beside the waters.'
'What is it?'
'If I were to tell you, it would not come to pass. Do not be alarmed. It is a simple thing, over in a breath. But I must explain a great deal, and I have not much time in which to do it. Have you faith in the coming of the New Sun?'
As I had looked within myself for the words of command, so I looked within for my belief; and I could no more find it than I had found them. 'I have been taught so all my life,' I said. 'But by teachers the true Malrubius was one who I think did not themselves believe. So I cannot now say whether I believe or not.'
'Who is the New Sun? A man? If a man, how can it be that every green thing is to grow darkly green again at his coming, and the granaries full?'
It was unpleasant to be drawn back to things half heard in childhood now, when I was just beginning to understand that I had inherited the Commonwealth. I said,
'He will be the Conciliator come again his avatar, bringing justice and peace.
In pictures he is shown with a shining face, like the sun. I was an apprentice of the torturers, not an acolyte, and that is all I can tell you.' I drew my cloak about me for shelter from the cold wind. Triskele was huddled at my feet.
'And which does humanity need more? Justice and peace? Or a New Sun?'
At that I tried to smile. 'It has occurred to me that though you cannot possibly be my old teacher, you may incorporate his personality as I do the Chatelaine Thecla's. If that is so, you already know my answer. When a client is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.'
'To a large extent you are correct. The Master Malrubius you knew lives in me, and your old Triskele in this Triskele. But that is not important now. If there is time, you will understand before we go.' Malrubius closed his eyes and scratched the gray hair on his chest, just as I remembered him doing when I was among the youngest of the apprentices. 'You were afraid to board this little ship, even when I told you it would not carry you away from Urth, or even to a continent other than your own. Suppose I were to tell you I do not tell you, but suppose I did that it would in fact take you from Urth, past the orbit of Phaleg, which you call Ver-thandi, past Bethor and Aratron, and at last into the outer dark, and across the dark to another place. Would you be frightened, now that you have sailed with us?'
'No man enjoys saying he is afraid. But yes, I would.'
'Afraid or not, would you go if it might bring the New Sun?'
It seemed then that some icy spirit from the gulf had already wrapped its hands about my heart. I was not deceived, nor, I think, did he mean I should be. To answer yes would be to undertake the journey. I hesitated, in silence except for the roar of my own blood in my ears.
'You need not answer now if you cannot. We will ask again. But I can tell you nothing more until you answer.'
For a long time I stood on that strange deck, sometimes walking up and down, blowing on my fingers in the freezing wind while all my thoughts crowded around me. The stars watched us, and it seemed to me that Master Malrubius's eyes were two more such stars.
At last I returned to him and said, 'I have long wanted if it would bring the New Sun, I would go.'
'I can give you no assurance. If it might bring the New Sun, would you then?
Justice and peace, yes, but a New Sun such an outpouring of warmth and energy upon Urth as she knew before the birth of the first man?'
Now came the strangest happening I have to tell in all this already overlong tale; yet there was no sound or sight associated with it, no speaking beast or gigantic woman. It was only that as I heard him I felt a pressure against my breastbone, as I had felt it in Thrax when I knew I should be going north with the Claw. I remembered the girl in the jacal. 'Yes,' I said. 'If it might bring the New Sun, I would go.'
'What if you were to stand trial there? You knew him who was autarch before you, and in the end you loved him. He lives in you. Was he a man?'
'He was a human being as you, I think, are not, Master.'
'That was not my question, as you know as well as I. Was he a man as you are a man? Half the dyad of man and woman?'
I shook my head.
'So you will become, should you fail the trial. Will you still go?'
Triskele laid his scarred head against my knee, the ambassador of all crippled things, of the Autarch who had carried a tray in the House Absolute and lain paralyzed in the palanquin waiting to pass to me the humming voices in his skull, of Thecla writhing under the Revolutionary, and of the woman even I, who had boasted I could forget nothing, had nearly forgotten, bleeding and dying beneath our tower. Perhaps after all it was my discovery of Triskele, which I have said changed nothing, that in the end changed everything. I did not have to answer this time; Master Malrubius saw my answer in my face.
'You know of the chasms of space, which some call the Black Pits, from which no speck of matter or gleam of light ever returns. But what you have not known until now is that these chasms have their counterparts in White Fountains, from which matter and energy rejected by a higher universe flow in endless cataract into this one. If you
