the youth he had been. 'It must be done by good men. You are badly advised, Autarch! What is intolerable is that it should be done by bad men.'
I smiled. His face, as I had seen it then, had recalled something I had thrust from my mind months before. It was that this guild was my family, and all the home I should ever have. I would never find a friend in the world if I could not find friends here. 'Between us, Master,' I told him, 'we have decided it should not be done at all.'
He did not reply, and I saw from his expression that he had not even heard what I had said. He had been listening instead to my voice, and doubt and joy flickered over his worn, old face like shadow and firelight.
'Yes,' I said. 'It is Severian,' and while he was struggling to regain possession of himself, I went to the door and got my sabretache, which I had ordered one of the officers of my guard to bring. I had wrapped it in what had been my fuligin guild cloak, now faded to mere rusty black. Spreading the cloak over Master Palaemon's table, I opened the sabretache and poured out its contents. 'This is all we have brought back,' I said.
He smiled as he used to in the schoolroom when he had caught me out in some minor matter. 'That and the throne? Will you tell me about it?'
And so I did. It took a long while, and more than once my protectors rapped at the door to ascertain that I was unharmed, and at last I had a meal brought in to us; and when the pheasant was mere bones and the cakes were eaten and the wine drunk, we were still talking. It was then that I conceived the idea that has at last borne fruit in this record of my life. I had originally intended to begin it at the day I left our tower and to end it when I returned. But I soon saw that though such a construction would indeed supply the symmetry so valued by artists, it would be impossible for anyone to understand my adventures without knowing something of my adolescence. In the same way, some elements of my story would remain incomplete if I did not extend it (as I propose to do) a few days beyond my return. Perhaps I have contrived for someone The Book of Gold. Indeed, it may be that all my wanderings have been no more than a contrivance of the librarians to recruit their numbers; but perhaps even that is too much to hope.
XXXIV
The Key to the Universe
When he had heard everything, Master Palaemon went to my little heap of possessions and took up the grip, pommel, and silver guard that were all that remained of Terminus Est. 'She was a good sword,' he said. 'Nearly I gave you your death, but she was a good sword.'
'We were always proud to bear her, and never found reason to complain of her.'
He sighed, and the breath seemed to catch in his throat. 'She is gone. It is the blade that is the sword, not the sword furniture. The guild will preserve these somewhere, with your cloak and sabretache, because they have belonged to you.
When you and I have been dead for centuries, old men like me will point them out to the apprentices. It's a pity we haven't the blade too. I used her for many years before you came to the guild, and never thought she would be destroyed fighting some diabolical weapon.' He put down the opal pommel and frowned at me.
'What's troubling you? I've seen men wince less when their eyes were torn out.'
'There are many kinds of diabolical weapons, as you call them, that steel cannot withstand. We saw something of them when we were in Orithyia. And there are tens of thousands of our soldiers there holding them off with firework lances and javelins, and swords less well forged than Terminus Est. They succeed in so far as they do because the energy weapons of the Ascians are not numerous, and they are few because the Ascians lack the sources of power needed to produce them.
What will happen if Urth is granted a New Sun? Won't the Ascians be better able to use its energy than we can?'
'Perhaps that may be,' Master Palaemon acknowledged.
'We have been thinking with the autarchs who have gone before us our guild brothers, as it were, in a new guild. Master Malrubius said that only our predecessor has dared the test in modern times. When we touch the minds of the others, we often find that they have refused it because they felt our enemies, who have retained so much more of the ancient sciences, would gain a greater advantage. Is it not possible they were right?'
Master Palaemon thought a long time before he answered. 'I cannot say. You believe me wise because I taught you once, but I have not been north, as you have. You have seen armies of Ascians, and I have never seen one. You flatter me by asking my opinion. Still from all you've said, they are rigid, cast hard in their ways. I would guess that very few among them think much.'
I shrugged. 'That is true in any aggregate, Master. But as you say, it is possibly more true among them. And what you call their rigidity is terrible a deadness that surpasses belief. Individually they seem men and women, but together they are like a machine of wood and stone.'
Master Palaemon rose and went to the port and looked out upon the thronging towers. 'We are too rigid here,' he said. 'Too rigid in our guild, too rigid in the Citadel. It tells me a great deal that you, who were educated here, saw them as you did; they must be inflexible indeed. I think it may be that despite their science, which may amount to less than you suppose, the people of the Commonwealth will be better able to turn new circumstances to their benefit.'
'We are not flexible or inflexible,' I said. 'Except for an unusually good memory, we are only an ordinary man.'
'No, no!' Master Palaemon struck his table, and again the lenses flashed. 'You are an extraordinary man in an ordinary time. When you were a little apprentice, I beat you once or twice you will recall that, I know. But even when I beat you, I knew you would become an extraordinary personage, the greatest master our guild would ever have. And you will be a master. Even if you destroy our guild, we will elect you!'
'We have already told you we mean to reform the guild, not destroy it. We're not even sure we're competent to do that. You respect us because we've moved to the highest place. But we reached it by chance, and know it. Our predecessor reached it by chance too, and the minds he brought to us, which we touch only faintly even now, are not, with one or two exceptions, those of genius. Most are only common men and women, sailors and artisans, farmwives and wantons. Most of the rest are eccentric second-rate scholars of the sort Thecla used to laugh at.'
'You have not just moved into the highest place,' Master Palaemon said, 'you have become it. You are the state.'
'We are not. The state is everyone else you, the castellan, those officers outside. We are the people, the Commonwealth.' I had not known it myself until I spoke.
