Ancients of Days

Chapter Twenty-Three Angel

“It was a lion,” Tamora said. “A lion or a panther. It was right beside him, and then it was gone. It ran along the edge of the world like an arrow shot from a bow.”

Pandaras said, “Most likely it was an ordinary cat. The women of the Mud People keep them as pets, and perhaps one of them followed my master. I noticed that they kept away from you, and no doubt you scared off the one which had kept him company.”

“I know what I saw,” Tamora said, with grim insistence. “There was a shrine, too. It was alive. It showed a garden and a blue flame, but when I drew near the garden had gone and the shrine was as black as your tongue.”

When the cateran was in one of her moods, she gave off a heavy scent that started Pandaras’s heart racing and had him looking around for hiding places. He was scared that she might unseam him with a gesture, or bite off his head for a grisly snack or simply to shut him up. But her stubborn literalness annoyed him so much that he was compelled to respond to it. Like most of his bloodline, Pandaras preferred to speak and take the consequences rather than regret a missed chance at a witty remark. So instead of biting his tongue, he said, “No doubt the garden went to the same place as the lioness.”

“I know what I saw,” Tamora said again, and spat over the rail into the brown water.

The Weazel, her big triangular sail bellying in the headwind, was slipping away from the dense mangroves that fringed the mudflats; and dissected mires along the shore.

Ahead was the open river. It was burnished with the light of the setting sun, and drifting banyans showed black against it. A pair of carracks stood four leagues off, but there was no sign of the warship or the picketboat which had pursued them from the burning city to the floating forest.

A long way behind the Weazel’s spreading wake, the smoke of the embers of the Aedile’s funeral pyre sent up a ribbon of smoke that bent into the dark sky. The pyre had been built on a platform on top of the ridge of the old shoreline, and the body, washed and coated with unguents and oil of spikenard, had been laid amidst heaps of flowers. Yama had lit the fire himself. Gunpowder and flowers of sulfur had burned fiercely at the base of the pyre, and then the sweet gum logs had caught, crackling and sending up dense, fragrant white smoke. The Aedile’s body had sat up in the midst of the fire, as bodies often did when heat dried and contracted the muscles, but Yama had shown no sign of emotion even then. He had watched the pyre with fierce unblinking attention, occasionally throwing aromatic oils and salts of nitre onto the flames, until the body of his father was quite consumed.

It had taken several hours. Much later, as Yama had bent to scoop up a bowlful of white ashes and bits of bone, Sergeant Rhodean had given a cry. He had kicked aside smoldering logs and had plucked the Aedile’s heart, black and shriveled but unconsumed, from the hot ashes.

It had been as hot as any ember and Sergeant Rhodean had burned his hand badly, but he had showed no sign of it. “I will take it back myself,” he had told Yama. “I will bury it in the garden of the peel-house.”

As the Weazel had set sail, Yama had thrown handfuls of his father’s ashes onto the water while Captain Lorquital had recited the sura of the Puranas which told of the resurrection of the dead at the end of all time and space.

Now, he sat on the forecastle deck, leafing through the papers left to him by his father, and Tamora would not let go of the argument about what she had seen.

She told Pandaras, “I can count the men standing on the decks of those merchant ships. Can you? Unless you can, don’t doubt what I saw.”

Pandaras relented. He said, “It’s certainly true that you do not have any imagination. If he can tame men and women, then I suppose he can also tame wild beasts.”

“I would have said the second is easier than the first. The only way to tame men is to break their spirit and make them slaves.”

“Yet you follow him, and so does the Captain. Why else would she have brought her ship to the far-side shore and waited two days? He didn’t even have to ask—she saw his need and stayed, when instead she should have made as much speed from this cursed place as she could.”

Tamora said, “I am not his slave, although I can’t speak for you or anyone else.”

“You don’t have to be a slave in order to follow someone. You can follow of your own free will and yet still bend your life to the service of another. Lovers do it all the time, although I’m not sure that what passes amongst your people for sex could be called love. My people are used to serving others, so perhaps I’m able to see what’s happening to everyone on board the ship while you deny it.”

“Grah. I deny nothing. That’s cowardice. Besides, if Yama casts a spell, then Eliphas is resistant.”

“I have my suspicions about the old fellow, too. My master chooses to believe his story about a lost city beyond the end of the river, but that does not mean that I must. He’s entirely too familiar with the Captain, too, and has a sly and secretive air about him. I think he has designs on our master.”

“I keep a careful watch,” Tamora said. “I keep watch on everyone. You stick to washing and mending shirts.”

“Have you thought that our master might be able to look after himself? He was kidnapped, true, but he rescued himself. And the fisherfolk came to his rescue earlier.”

Tamora shrugged. “Why shouldn’t they help us? We shared a common enemy. Besides, they are indigens. They are as easily swayed as a parrot or a pet monkey. Are all your people so superstitious that they see an invisible hand in all that happens? The sergeant, Rhodean, hasn’t followed Yama, and nor have any of the others in the service of the Aedile. By your argument they would already be under his spell, for he has lived with them for most of his life. That they are not suggests that there are no spells. There’s no magic in this world, only old arts whose workings have been long forgotten.”

Pandaras said, “There’s scarcely room for the Aedile’s soldiers on the ship. Perhaps they will follow in another, or perhaps our master does not want them to follow. If I were him—”

“You claim to know his mind? Grah. You set yourself higher than you can ever reach.”

Pandaras touched his fingers to his lips in supplication. “I have no quarrel with you, Tamora. I do not compete for my master’s affections. I’m simply happy to serve him as I can. Why, I may hope only to be remembered in some song or other and I would be content. Even that is more than a mere pot boy deserves. I have left that life behind, and my family too. I think my master—our master—does the same.”

Tamora spat over the side again. “You’re a natural servant, but I have dedicated my life to his service. There’s a difference. You stick to his laundry. I guard his life with my own.”

She said it so fiercely that Pandaras could not deny the depth of the love she could not bring herself to admit. He changed the subject. “Do you think he will speak of the men who disappeared?”

“I could follow their trail out easily enough. At the end of it I found the remains of a great fire, but no trace of them; not so much as a splash of blood. It was as if they had been plucked from the face of the world.”

Pandaras said, “Perhaps they had.”

“Most likely they grew frightened and ran away. They are a bully race, all wind and no spine. But Yama spoke no more than three or four words to me on the whole journey back, and I did not ask. Besides, why should I care?”

“I heard that they wanted to kill him, as revenge for the burning of their town. You can’t deny they poisoned our beer to make us sleep. I had the worst of headaches all day. They took him off and he escaped, and they are vanished. It is a mystery. Perhaps your lioness ate them.”

“Not from the way she ran. Be grateful that a headache is all the sacrifice you have had to make.”

Tamora turned from the rail and looked toward the little forecastle deck, where Yama sat cross-legged under the taut lines of the yards. He had given up looking through the untidy mass of his father’s papers and was reading in his book, unconsciously turning the fetish Oncus had given him around and around on his wrist.

She said, “At least he finds some comfort in the Puranas.”

The book had changed. Yama remembered what the woman had said before he had destroyed her, and knew now what she had done. The frames of the pictures were still there, but the scenes they showed were no longer heraldic representations of the deep time before the creation of the world. Instead, each picture, glowing with freshly minted color, displayed a single scene laden with implicit symbolism. One after the other, they told the story of what happened to the original of the woman in the shrine after her ship had made landfall on Confluence.

Yama followed the story far into the night, reading by the light of a lantern Pandaras lit for him, ignoring the food laid beside him. Pandaras stayed a while, watching his master tenderly, but Yama could not speak to him.

Even thinking of speaking so soon after his father’s death brought an ache into his throat. Gritty ash was still lodged under his nails and in the creases of his palms, but he would not wash his hands.

Dumb with grief, he lost himself in the story and traveled far from the hurt of the Aedile’s death, the burning of Aeolis, the disappearance of Derev.

Angel ran from the ship soon after it arrived at Confluence. There was a whole world to understand and to conquer, and she plunged into it, reveling in her escape from the suffocating caution of the consensus of her partials.

They wanted to go on to the Home Galaxy, but Angel was tired of searching. She ran with a wild glee and a sense of relief at being able to control her fate once more.

Angel had set out millions of years ago to find aliens—not the strange creatures that thronged the riverside cities of Confluence, which were merely animals changed by design to resemble human beings, but true aliens, sapient creatures of a completely separate and independent evolutionary sequence. She had left an empire behind and she had hoped to found another, far from the crusade against the transcendents. Although no sapient aliens had been found in the Home Galaxy, the Universe was a vast place.

There were a dozen small satellite galaxies around the Home Galaxy, thousands of galaxies in the local group, and twenty thousand similar superclusters of galaxies. The search could last a billion years, but it gave her a purpose, concealing the reality that she was fleeing from defeat and certain death. Behind her, billions of her lineage were being purged by humans who did not believe in the cult of the immortal individual, by humans she considered little more than animals, clinging as they did to sexual reproduction and the dogma that maintenance of genetic and social diversity was more important than any individual, no matter how old, how learned, how powerful.

Angel fled far, neither sleeping nor dead, no more than stored potentials triply engraved on gold. The nearest spiral galaxy was almost two million light-years away, and that was where she went. Although the ship flew so fast that it bound time about itself, the journey still took thousands of years of slowed shipboard time, and more than two million years as measured by the common time of the Universe. At the end of that long voyage, Angel and her partials were not wakened: they were incarnated and born anew.

What she learned then, within a hundred years of waking, was that the Universe was not made for the convenience of humans. What she and her crew of partials found was a galaxy ruined and dead.

A billion years ago it had collided with another, slightly smaller galaxy. There were only a few collisions between the billions of stars as the two galaxies interpenetrated, because the distances between stars were so great. But interactions between gases and dark matter at relative speeds of millions of kilometers per second sent violent gravity waves and compression shocks racing through the tenuous interstellar medium. During the long, slow collision, stars of both galaxies were torn from their orbits and scattered in a vast halo: some were even ejected with sufficient velocity to escape into intergalactic space, doomed to wander forever, companionless. The majority of the stars coalesced into a single body, but except for ancient globular clusters, which survived the catastrophe because of their steep gravity fields, all was wreckage.

Angel and her crew of partials were not able to chart a single world where life had survived. Many had been remelted because of encounters with clumps of perturbed dark matter so dense that collisions with atoms of ordinary matter occurred, releasing tremendous amounts of energy.

They found a world sheared in half by immense tidal stresses; the orbits of the two sister worlds created by this disaster were so eccentric that they were colder than Pluto at their furthest points, hotter than Mercury at their nearest.

There were worlds smashed into millions of fragments, scattered so widely in their orbital paths that they never could re-form. They found a cold dark world of nitrogen ice wandering amongst the stars; there were millions of such worlds cast adrift. Millions more had been scorched clean by flares and supernovas triggered in their parent stars by infalling dust and gas or by gravity pulses. There were gas giants turned inside out—single vast perpetual storms. Angel’s ship constructed telescope arrays and sent out self-replicating probes and spent twenty thousand years sampling a small part of the huge galaxy. Its crew returned to the unbeing of storage while traveling from star to star.

Angel and her partials were reborn over and over. They did not find life anywhere.

Angel’s ship was a storehouse of knowledge. She had not known what she might need and so had taken everything she could, triply encoded, like herself, on lattices of gold atoms. She ordered a search of the records and learned that there had been millions of collisions between galaxies, and that it was likely that most galaxies had suffered such collisions at least once during their lifetime.

Even part of one arm of the Home Galaxy had been disrupted by transit of a small cluster of stars, although the reconstruction of the Home Galaxy by the transcendents had long ago erased the damage this had caused.

But the Home Galaxy was a statistical freak. Unlike other galaxies it had never endured a major collision with a body of similar size. There were various possibilities—it was one of the largest in the observable Universe, and it resided in an area with an anomalously low density of dark matter—but whatever the explanation, it was an outlier at the far end of the distribution of possible evolutionary paths, and therefore so too was life. It was likely that only the stars of the Home Galaxy had planetary systems stable enough for life to have evolved—it took a billion years for simple unicellular forms to develop, four and a half billion years for humans—for otherwise other civilizations would have surely arisen in the unbounded Universe, and traces of their existence would have been detected.

Angel concluded that humanity, in all its swarming vigor and diversity, was alone. It must make of itself what it could, for there was nothing against which it could measure itself. There were no aliens to conquer, no wise, ancient beings from which to learn deep secrets hidden in the beginnings of time and space.

Angel did not consider that she might be wrong. She killed herself, was reborn, and killed herself again as soon as she learned what her previous self had discovered.

When she woke again, with part of her memory suppressed by the ship, more than two million years had passed. The ship was in trailing orbit beyond a huge construction that orbited a star one hundred and fifty thousand light-years beyond the spiral arms of the Home Galaxy, close to the accretion disc of a vast black hole where the Large Magellanic Cloud had once been.

The ship showed her what it had observed as it had traversed the long geodesic between the two galaxies. At first there was an intense point of light within the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud. It might have been a supernova, except that it was a thousand times larger than any supernova ever recorded. The glare of this one dying star obscured the light of its millions of companions for a long time, and when at last it faded all of the remaining stars were streaming around the point where it had been.

Those stars nearest the center elongated and dissipated, spilling their fusing hearts across the sky, and more and more stars crowded in until nothing was left but the gas clouds of the accretion disc, glowing by red-shifted Cerenkov radiation, all that was left of material falling into the event horizon of the central black hole—a black hole that massed a million suns.

The ship had searched the Home Galaxy for sources of coherent electromagnetic radiation and had found nothing except for a scattering of ancient neutrino beacons. Apart from these, signals in the Home Galaxy had ceased while the ship was still half a million light-years out—the time when the first supernova had flared in the Large Magellanic Cloud. There had been a great deal of activity around the Large Magellanic Cloud while the black hole grew, but at last, a hundred thousand light-years out, that too had ceased.

Angel beat the ship to its conclusion. Humanity, or whatever humanity had become in the four and a half million years since she had fled the crusade, had created the black hole and vanished into it. The ship spoke of the possibility that humanity had developed wormhole technology—it had located a number of double occultations within the Home Galaxy that were typical of the theoretical effect of a wormhole exit passing between a star and an observer. The ship had also spotted a concentrated cluster of occultation events around a halo star more than ten thousand light-years beyond the accretion disc of the giant black hole. The ship told Angel that it had changed course—a maneuver that had taken a thousand years—and that it had built up a detailed map of the space around the star. Angel studied the map. There were more than a hundred wormhole entrances orbiting the star, and there was also an artifact as big as a world, if the surface of a world might be peeled from its globe and stretched out into a long plane. The ship had built arrays of detectors. It had obtained the infrared signatures of water and molecular oxygen, and estimated the average temperature of the surface of the artifact to be two hundred and ninety-three degrees above absolute zero. It had detected the absorption signatures of several classes of photosynthetic pigments, most notably rhodopsin and chlorophyll.

Angel beat the ship to its second conclusion. There was life on the surface of the artifact.

In the night, Pandaras settled a blanket around Yama’s shoulders. Yama did not notice. Beetles smashed at the lantern above his head as he read on.

The artifact was a stout needle twenty thousand kilometers long and less than a thousand wide, with a deep keel beneath its terraformed surface. It hung in a spherical envelope of air and embedded gravity fields. It tilted back and forth on its long axis once every twenty-four hours and took just over three hundred and sixty-five days to complete a single orbit of its ordinary yellow dwarf star.

These parameters struck a deep chord in Angel, whose original had been born in the planetary system where humanity had evolved. For the first time in millions of years she called up the personality fragment which retained memories of the earliest part of her long history. She muttered a little mantra over and over as she studied the data the ship had gathered: twenty-four hours, three hundred and sixty-five days, thirty-two meters per second squared, twenty percent oxygen, eighty percent nitrogen. The orbit of the artifact was slightly irregular; there would be seasons on its surface. One side was bounded by mountains fifty kilometers high. Their naked peaks rose out of the atmospheric envelope. On the other side, a great river ran half the length, rising in mountains three-quarters buried in ice at the trailing end of this strange world and falling over the edge at the midpoint. It was not clear how the water was recycled. The ship made neutrino and deep radar scans and discovered a vast warren of caverns and corridors and shafts within the rocky keel of the artifact, but no system of aquifers or canals.

One half of the world, beyond the fall of the river, was dry cratered desert with a dusty icecap at the leading end and a scattering of ruined cities. The other half was verdant land bounded on one side by the river and on the other by ice-capped ranges of mountains which were mere foothills to the gigantic peaks at the edge. There were cities strung like beads along the river, and every city, except the largest, was inhabited by a different race of humanlike creatures. The ship sent out thousands of tiny probes. Many were destroyed by the machines which roamed everywhere on the surface of the artifact, but the survivors returned with cellular samples of thousands of different organisms. Less than one-tenth of the plants and animals were from lineages that originated in the human home star system; the rest were of unknown and multiple origins. None of the inhabitants were of human descent, the ship said, and except for a few primitive races they all had an artificial homeobox inserted within their genetic material.

The ship could not explain what the homeobox sequence coded for. It could not explain why there were thousands of different, seemingly sapient, alien races crowded together on the surface of a single world-sized habitat. Nor could it explain why the physical appearance of almost all of these races mapped to at least eighty percent of the human norm—a much closer conformation than those of many of Angel’s lineages, in the days of her lost empire.

Angel ordered the ship to match the orbit of the artifact.

It refused, and her partials argued that the artifact was an anomaly and they had a better chance of understanding what had happened to humanity by exploring the Home Galaxy. Angel overrode them, and in the process discovered the data the ship had hidden from her. She learned all over again that there was unlikely to be life anywhere else in the local group of galaxies, and perhaps in the entire Universe.

This time she did not kill herself.

There was a huge city near the source of the long river. It was clearly the capital of this artificial world, ancient and extensive and swarming with a hundred different kinds of humanlike creature. The ship landed at the docks and Angel and her crew of partials began their exploration.

There was a capital city but no obvious unified system of government; there was a palace, but no rulers. There were millions of bureaucrats organized into a hundred or more different departments, but most of them appeared to be engaged in maintaining records rather than determining or carrying out policy. Indeed, there seemed to be no central or permanent government. Order was maintained by undiscussed consent, enforced by roaming gangs of magistrates who appeared to be answerable to no one but themselves, their powers limited only by strict adherence to custom.

It seemed that there had been rulers long ago, before a war fought between two factions of the machines which mingled with the people (some of the machines had tried to investigate the ship, and it destroyed the machines, and would have destroyed more except that Angel ordered it to stop). The war had scorched one half of the world to desert, and the ship said that it was possible that the sparse cloud of machines which trailed the orbital path of the artifact were survivors belonging to the losing side. The people of the capital city told Angel that after the war many of the avatars of the Preservers had fallen silent and many of the shrines had died. The Hierarchs, who appeared to have interceded between the avatars and the people, had vanished shortly after the end of the war; the surviving avatars were consulted only under the direction of priests. The ship told Angel that the shrines were clearly some kind of information processing system, but most were inactivated, and those still active were functionally compromised.

“The Preservers watch all,” she was told by everyone she asked. They were the invisible power by which the illusion of order was maintained. It was like a theocracy, except that the priests and hierodules of the multitude of temples claimed no special power or privileges. All served the ideal of the Preservers.

Angel went everywhere, for there was no one who seemed to want to stop her, and she asked every kind of question, because there seemed to be no taboos. She found that the people of the capital city, Ys, were eager to help, and she began to suspect what the inserted homeobox coded for. The inhabitants of this strange world were better servants than her partials; they would lay down their lives if asked.

Angel used them to help her escape.

She did not plan it. If she had, no doubt her ship and its crew of partials would have stopped her. She did it on a whim, an impulse.

She was walking by the docks, followed by the usual crowd of curious people and a small group of the law-keepers—magistrates—and their machines. The sun was high. Its diamond light sparkled on the wide sweep of the river. The city stretched away under a haze of smoke that hid the foothills of the mountains beyond, so that their snowcapped peaks seemed to float in the blue distance.

The dock road was lined by trees in blossom: big red flowers attended by clouds of sulfur-yellow butterflies. Vendors stood at their carts or stalls in the sun-speckled shade of the trees, crying their wares. White birds wheeled over sun-struck water or strutted and pecked on wrinkled mudflats beneath the stone walls of the quays. Small clinker-built dinghies lay on their sides on the wet mud. Further out, larger boats bobbed at buoys and floating docks; sails dotted the wide, wide river. Closer to shore, men sat in small boats, fishing with the help of black long-necked birds very like cormorants; hundreds of men crowded stone steps at the water’s edge, washing themselves in the river’s brown water while children swam and splashed and shrieked with laughter; men sat cross-legged as they mended fine mesh nets stretched across wide frames; women gutted silver fish under green banana leaves, surrounded by a canopy of noisy flocks of birds that fought for fish guts tossed over the edge of the quay; a small machine moved at the water’s edge in quick bursts, like a squeezed pip of mercury. An ache rose in Angel, a universal desolation. Lost, all lost. All she had known was lost, and yet all around were echoes of what she had lost. For the first time since she had been reborn, she felt the weight of her age.

The people who were following her were not human. They were aliens. She was surrounded by aliens which distorted the human norm, by pigmen, lionmen, lizardmen, birdmen, toadmen and others she could not begin to identify. They were animals trying to be human; they were humans masked with animal faces. They called themselves the Shaped, and said that they had been changed, through words with the same root but subtly different meanings she did not quite understand.

Angel had lost so much, and so much surrounded her, rich and strange, yet hauntingly familiar. The birds and the butterflies, the wet fetid smell of the mud, the smells of hot stone and cooking oil and the acrid smoke from fires fueled with dry dung, the sunlight on the water and the wind that stirred the glossy leaves and the red flowers of the trees: a thousand fragmentary impressions that defined from moment to moment the unquantifiable richness of the quiddity of the world. Many of the transcendents had disappeared into imaginary empires within vast data banks, creating perfect images of known worlds or building impossible new ones, but Angel had always felt that these were less satisfactory than dreams, too perfect to be truly real. That was why she had opted for nonbeing during the long transits of her voyage, rather than slowtime in a fabrication.

Reality, or nothing.

Angel took a ship out from the city. It was that easy. The ship’s captain was a fat, solemn, ponderous man with sleek black skin and small eyes; his mother or grandmother might have been a seal, or might have lain with one. He did not question Angel’s presence as they sailed downriver from city to city, but deferred to her with quiet good humor. The fact that she had hijacked his ship and his life was never raised. A city of tombs; a city of porcelain; a city of caves in cliffs high above the river; a city of trees; a city built on stilts in the middle of the river.

Dozens of cities, each inhabited by a different race of people, all sharing the same unquestioned laws and religion.

And then a city at war with itself.

A Change War, the ship’s captain said, and when Angel told him to put in at the city’s long waterfront he came close to disobeying her for the first time. It was a city of square houses of red mud-brick, all heaped on each other like a tumbled pile of boxes. A terraced ziggurat of white, weather-worn stone stood in the middle of the forest outside the city wall, guarded by machines that constantly looped through the air above it. It was the home of an old woman who called herself the Commissioner.

Angel sat with the Commissioner on a high terrace of the ancient ziggurat, amongst potted lemon trees and geraniums. Riverward, across a sea of treetops, part of the city was burning. The sound of distant rifle fire popped and crackled, brought erratically by the warm wind. The Commissioner served Angel a bowl of the earthy infusion of twigs which people everywhere on this world called tea.

The Commissioner was half Angel’s height, a slow, deliberate woman with a humped back and a round face with lips pursed like a beak, and small black eyes half-hidden amongst the wrinkles of her leathery skin. She wore a kind of tent of fustian which dropped in many folds from a gold circlet at her neck to puddle the floor. A small machine darted and hovered above her like a bejeweled dragonfly.

The Commissioner seemed to regard the war as an unfortunate but inevitable natural process which could not be prevented but must be endured, like a sudden hailstorm or a forest fire. She told Angel that some of the people of the city had changed, and were at war with those who had not.

“The changed ones will win, of course. They always do. And then they will move on and found a new city, or more likely scatter along the river. It is an exciting time for them.”

It took Angel a long time to find out from the Commissioner what she meant by change. It was a kind of transcendence or epiphany, a realization of individual worth, the possibility of sin or at least of transgression against the fixed codes by which the citizens had ordered their lives for millennia. It was a little like the memes with which Angel had once experimented when attempting to unify her spreading empire, but it was also a physical infection, a change in brain structure and chemistry which provided, as far as Angel understood it, an area of high-density information storage that somehow interacted with the nine infolded dimensions in the quantum foam at the bottom of reality. Everything anyone of the changed races or bloodlines did or experienced was recorded or remembered by something like a soul that would survive until the end of the Universe. It was the true immortality which Angel and her kind had dreamed of millions of years ago, when they had still been human.

The Commissioner explained that the most primitive races, the indigens, would never change, but all others had changed or would change—there were still hundreds of unchanged races. Some had gone beyond the first change and transcended the world entirely, but the Commissioner could not tell Angel where they had gone. It was the work of the Preservers, and therefore not to be questioned. It simply was.

Angel wondered what happened to those of the unchanged and indigenous races who died (she was wondering about herself). The Commissioner grew reflective. It was night, now. The burning waterfront of the city stood above its own reflection in the still water of its long harbor. There were skirmishes in the fields and orchards upriver of the city—the flashes of rifles defined the opposing positions, and once there was a tremendous explosion that sent an expanding ball of red and yellow flame into the air and shook the terrace, rattling the bowls of tea on the slab of polished rock that floated between the two women.

“It is a question for the archivists,” the Commissioner said at last. “But they are busy at the moment, talking with the wounded, and I do hope you will not disturb them. Because of the war, so many lives will pass unremarked—that is the cost of change, and it is a heavy price to pay. But some say that the Preservers mark all, and all will be restored whether we record it or not.”

Angel thought of the millions of clerks laboring in the great palace of the capital city. She said, “Recording the world is important. Why is that?”

The Commissioner was watching the distant fighting. The fires, the stuttering flashes of rifles, the red blossoms of a cannonade, the abrupt fountains of earth and fire: at a distance, war is often beautiful. Firelight gleamed in her round, black eyes. She said, “It is one of the highest tasks.”

“Recording memories for the Preservers to use?”

“The Preservers will resurrect everyone at the end of time. We will all live again.”

This is an experiment, Angel thought. An experiment that records its own self. Things have been set in motion; evolution is expected. That means I can change things here. If the Preservers are using these people, then so can I.

She said, “If you could gain much in this life by behaving badly, and still the Preservers would resurrect you, then perhaps it is worth behaving badly. You could have power and wealth now, everything that you are promised in eternity, and the Preservers would forgive you.”

The Commissioner considered this for a while. Angel watched the dark city beyond the forest. There were small fires scattered around the dimming glow of the site of the big explosion; the rifle fire seemed to have stopped.

At last, the Commissioner said, “All possible worlds can be created by the Preservers at the end of time, and that means not only all possible good, but also all possible evil. But the Preservers will not permit evil because it contradicts the love they bear toward us. For if they did not love us, why did they lift us up? So we must live our lives as best we can, for otherwise we might not have anything to live for beyond this life. Some say that the Preservers can correct evil in any person. No matter how great that evil might be, the Preservers have all of time and all of space in which to work their will. They say that the willingness of the Preservers to resurrect an evil person and punish them while holding out the possibility of redemption demonstrates the depth of their love toward us, their imperfect creations. But even if this is true, it is better to do good, for in the presence of infinite good it is better for you to act well and help others than to harm them, for you will gain nothing more by acting badly.”

The Commissioner laughed. “Ah, besides that, to think of the shame of having to endure the forgiveness of the Preservers! It is a heavy burden. Few could bear it.”

Angel said, “Those who are changed are acting badly now.”

“Only because their unchanged brothers, who know no other way of life, are fighting them. The unchanged cannot imagine change, and so they fight it to the death, and those who have changed must defend themselves. The unchanged do not know good or evil because they cannot choose between them. They are what they are, and no more.”

“Yet you know the difference, and you do not intercede. You could remove the changed and stop the war. You condemn many to death by inaction. Is that not evil?”

“No one should set themselves in the place of the Preservers,” the Commissioner said, staring at Angel. For the first time, she seemed to be offended.

Angel knew better than to insult the Preservers. They were universally worshipped, but no one could tell her much about them. Only that they had withdrawn their grace from the world but would return at the end of time and resurrect everyone who had ever lived, and everyone would live forever in an infinity of perfect worlds. It was a creed that was not dissimilar to the ambitions of the transcendents, but everyone on Confluence believed that the Preservers were capable of realizing it. At the same time, everyone believed that the ultimate nature of the Preservers was unknowable. What little that could be understood about them was in the Puranas, but the Puranas, which formed a kind of moral handbook illustrated by lessons in cosmology and galactic history, were maddeningly vague and imprecise. Early on, Angel had asked the ship to give her a précis of the Puranas, and recognized her own empire in a brief half sentence that horribly distorted what she had tried to do. That was another thing which must be put right. Her empire had once been the largest in human history, perhaps the largest empire ever known. She had not yet decided what she would do, but she would make sure that her long-lost empire was given its proper recognition.

“I’ll stay here tonight,” Angel said. “I assume this is a safe place. Find me food and a bed. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“Of course.” The Commissioner clacked her horny lips together and added, “However, I do believe that your ship has already left.”

It was true. While Angel had been talking with the Commissioner, the ship she had commandeered at Ys had escaped her geas and made off. But the next day Angel simply commandeered another and continued downriver. The new ship was much larger than the first. Its three masts bore square sails with sunbursts painted on them and its deep holds were full of fruit which had been bound for a city upriver. The fruit rotted after a week and Angel ordered it thrown over the side. It took the crew, including the officers and the captain, a whole day to empty the holds, but the ship rode high in the water afterward, and sailed more swiftly. The captain said that the ship should be ballasted with stones, for otherwise it was likely to capsize in a storm, but Angel ignored him. She was in a hurry now.

She passed city after city, mostly inhabited by unchanged races as fixed in their habits as ants or bees.

Without free will, they were more like zombies or organic machines than people, but even so, their unremarkable lives were recorded by patient archivists. They were policed by magistrates of their own kind. Although one or two officials of one or another of the changed races were present, they merely provided a kind of moral authority that was called on only when needed.

The last of the cities of the long, long river was called Sensch. It was a desert city of narrow streets shaded by palms and ginkgoes, dusty squares, flat-roofed buildings of whitewashed mud-brick. There were extensive plantations of sago and date palms, orange and pomegranate and banana, and various kinds of groundnuts. There was a great deal of camel-breeding, too. At least, the things were a little like camels.

The citizens of Sensch were a slender people, skilled in pottery and glassmaking. They had low, heavily ridged foreheads and small, lidless black eyes; their brown and black skins exhibited varying degrees of residual scaliness.

Snakes, the Commissioner of Sensch called them. He was a small, active fellow who lived in a garden that floated above the pink sandstone palace that was his official residence. The Commissioner, Dreen, seemed anxious to please, but Angel did not press her needs at once.

She met the Archivist of Sensch, a corpulent fellow with a limp, a few days later. His name was Mr. Naryan.

He was of the same race as the captain of the first ship Angel had commandeered; she had seen him swimming off the wide plaza by the river, as graceful in the water as he was awkward and slow on land. He sat down beside Angel in a tea shop by one of the city’s camel markets, pretending at first not to realize who she was. Angel liked his sly, patient air and demanded nothing of him at all, not even that he accept her for what she was. She missed conversation amongst equals.

The Archivist was afraid of Angel, but he hid it well.

He made small talk about a procession that went past, explaining that the people had had their reason taken away, either as punishment or because of what he called a religious avocation. He said that he understood that she had come a long way, and she laughed at the understatement.

The Archivist said with mild alarm, “I do not mean to insult you.”

Angel tried to make it easier by talking about the Archivist himself. She pointed at his loose, belted shirt and said, “You dress like a… native.” She had almost said Snake.

She said, “Is that a religious avocation?”

He told her what she already knew, that he was the city’s archivist. He had a round, kindly face, with heavy wrinkles at his brow and three fat folds under his chin.

Angel said, “The people here are different—a different race in every city. When I left, not a single intelligent alien species was known. It was one reason for my voyage. Now there seem to be thousands strung along this long river. They treat me like a ruler—is that it? Or am I like a god?”

“The Preservers departed long ago. These are the end times.”

The Archivist said this by rote. He had not really understood her questions.

Angel said, “There are always those who believe they live at the end of history. We thought that we lived at the end of history, when every star system in the Galaxy had been mapped, every habitable world settled.

“I was told that the Preservers, who I suppose are my descendants, made the different races, but each race calls itself human, even the ones who don’t look as if they could have evolved from anything that ever looked remotely human.”

“The Shaped call themselves human because they have no other name for what they have become, changed and unchanged alike. After all, they had no name before they were raised up.” The Archivist added in a pleading tone, “The citizens of Sensch remain innocent. They are our… responsibility.”

Angel told him that his kind was not doing a very good job, judging by the Change War she had witnessed upriver.

She described the war, and asked the Archivist many questions, most of which he was unable to answer. Without asking her permission, he jotted down her description of the Change War and her questions on a tablet using an impacted system of diacritical marks. Angel was amused. “You listen to people’s stories.”

“Stories are important. In the end they are all that is left, all that history leaves us. Stories endure.”

Angel thought about this. She said at last, “I have been out of history a long time. I’m not sure that I want to be a part of it again.”

She was tired. While she had been traveling, she had been able to forget that she had escaped her ship and her responsibilities, but now she would have to come to a decision. She did not want to talk anymore and left the Archivist. He knew better than to follow her, and she liked him for that, too.

She found a suitable house, a two-story affair with a balcony around the upper story overlooking a central courtyard shaded by a jacaranda tree. Its owners, grateful for her attention, were only too pleased to give it to her, and others came with gifts: furniture, carpets, food and wine, musical instruments, cigarettes, paintings, sheets of plastic she realized were books, slates which showed scenes from the world’s past, stolen from tombs of hierophants far downriver.

Some of the people stayed with her, mostly young men. Angel experimented with sex. Full intercourse with the Snakes was anatomically impossible, but there were a variety of pleasing and diverting exercises. In the evenings, she watched dancers or shadow puppet plays, or listened to the atonal nasal singing of the finest poet of the city, accompanied by a silver flute and a two-string lyre. The days passed pleasantly until the Archivist found her in the tea house by the camel market and told her that her ship was coming to Sensch.

Angel affected a casualness she did not feel. She had expected it to find her, but not so quickly. She fell into conversation with the Archivist and eventually took him back to her house. He took in the bustle with a solemn air and told her gently that she should not take advantage of the citizens.

Angel said sharply, “They seem happy to me. What’s wrong with that?”

The Archivist cast his eyes down. She knew then that he could not argue with her, and felt a stab of shame. She had tea and honey fritters brought out, and described something of what she had seen on her long river journey, and asked the Archivist many questions about Dreen’s authority and the way that order was maintained in the city. She caught one of the machines and showed it to him. “And these? By what authority do these little spies operate?”

The Archivist stared at it opened-mouthed. Perhaps he had never seen anyone catch one before. Pinched between Angel’s thumb and forefinger, the little bronze bug wriggled as it tried to free itself. Its sensor cluster, a froth of glass and silver beads, turned back and forth until Angel let it go.

The Archivist watched it rise above the roof of the house. He said, “Why, they are part of the maintenance system of Confluence.”

“Can Dreen use them? Tell me all you know. It may be important.”

Angel met with the Archivist at intervals in the days that followed. The young men who followed her formed a kind of band or gang, and some went with her wherever she went. They made the Archivist nervous, but Angel encouraged them, if only because it was a measure of what she could do. She gave them white headbands lettered with a slogan she had composed. Giving away one of the headbands was like bestowing a blessing. She made speeches in the markets and on the plaza by the river to try and rouse the citizens, but although people gathered and listened politely, nothing much came of it, except that her own followers sometimes grew too excited. They were apt to misunderstand what she had to say about rising above destiny, and defaced walls with slogans, or overturned stalls in the market. They were gripped by powerful but unfocused emotions.

Perhaps these petty acts were to her followers heady and radical statements, but Angel knew that it was not the way. She went to the temple and had one of the priests help her consult the interactive librarian which manifested in one of the large terminals the priests called shrines. She decided that she would cross the river to where a cluster of old shrines stood, unused since the Snakes had come to occupy Sensch. She would try and wake the shrines there, and learn from them.

Then there was a blank picture. Whatever Angel had done at the shrines at the edge of the world, by the great falls at the end of the river, was not recorded. Yama set his book aside. He was very tired, but not at all sleepy.

It was a few hours from dawn. The smoky swirl of the Eye of the Preservers was setting at the edge of the world.

Tamora and Pandaras slept under the awning. Captain Lorquital and Aguilar slept in their cabins beneath the poop deck; the sailors slept head to toe in their hammocks beneath the deck on which Yama sat. He had always needed less sleep than Telmon or anyone else he knew, and was used to being awake when everyone else slept. Even so, and even though he was not strictly alone, for the helmsman stood at the wheel in the red glow of the shaded stern lantern, Yama felt a desolation, a vast aching emptiness, there on the ship in the midst of the wide river. He wondered if this was how Angel had felt, estranged from all she knew by millions of years of history, with only compliant uncomprehending aliens for company. How lonely she must have been, ruler of all the world, but with no purpose!

He would finish her story in a little while, he thought.

He already suspected that he knew how it ended. Enough for now. First his father’s papers, and the shock they contained amongst their dense ladders of calculations. And now this. No more stories.

Yama shook dew from the blanket Pandaras had put around his shoulders and lay down, just for a moment.

And slept.