Ancients of Days

Chapter Twenty-Five The Ascension of Angel

“They’re holding prefect Corin and both his ships,” Captain Lorquital said, “The magistrates think that he brought weapons ashore, or allowed his men to. They’d like to blame you, too, but they can’t see how one young man could have caused so much destruction. Our passenger put in a word, too.”

“Prefect Corin will follow us,” Yama said. “The magistrates may delay him, but they will not be able to stop him. They have no real cause, and he will be able to deny responsibility. After all, he is not the one who wrecked Mother Spitfire’s gambling palace.”

They stood on the quarterdeck, watching the lights of the floating harbor diminish across a widening gap of black water as the Weazel maneuvered through a channel marked by luminescent buoys. The fires had been put out and the crowds of sailors and soldiers had been dispersed to their ships. The places which had been damaged were ringed with lights, and the sounds of construction work could be heard. Beyond the floating harbor, the city of Gond shone against the night by its own inner light, like a range of low hills covered in luminous snow.

“The less of that kind of talk, the better,” Ixchel Lorquital said. “The magistrates have ears in the wind here.”

“No more,” Yama said, and shivered; he did not know why he had said it.

Pandaras had described in vivid detail how he and Pantin had found Yama by the dead man, with Eliphas praying over him. Yama had riddled a man with machines, but he did not remember it. He remembered nothing after his rage had taken him in the gambling palace. He had been floating above the Strip with burning buildings on either side…

There had been a woman hanging in green vapor… He turned the fetish around and around on his wrist; it helped him remember who he was.

He had suffered only a few scrapes and bruises, and there was a bump in the hollow between the two big tendons at the back of his skull. Something hard-edged which he could move around under the skin. He should know what it was… but the memory slid away when he tried to articulate it.

“By tomorrow,” Captain Lorquital said, “the place will be back to normal.”

“They will catch more of them,” Yama said. “The river renews all, good and bad.”

He was thinking of the kelpies in Mother Spitfire’s pit, but Ixchel Lorquital misunderstood. “Every day more soldiers pass by on their way downriver to the war,” she said. “The war has changed everything along the river. This place is the least of it.”

As the Weazel passed beyond the edge of the floating harbor and raised her sail to catch the offshore breeze, fireworks shot up from Gond, bursting in overlapping showers of gold and green and raining down toward their own reflections in the river’s black water. The Weazel’s crew, up in the rigging, cheered each new explosion.

“For our passenger,” Ixchel Lorquital said with a smile. “So few remain in the city that they mark the departure or return of every one of their bloodline.”

Yama had forgotten about the passenger for whom the Weazel had put in at the floating harbor. He said, “I suppose you and your daughter have lost your cabin to him. Is that where he is now? I would like to meet him, and thank him for his help.”

Captain Lorquital pointed at the mast with the stem of her clay pipe. “He has taken the crow’s nest. Climb up if you want to talk, but he’ll be with us for at least five days.”

The passenger from Gond had arrived an hour before Pandaras and Pantin had brought Yama back to the ship.

He was an envoy to the cities of the Dry Plains, where there were disputes about the new land uncovered by the river’s retreat. It was all to do with the war, Captain Lorquital declared. Normally, such matters were decided at a festival of dance and song, but most of the able young men had gone to fight the heretics, and there were not enough contestants.

“He’s been appointed to make peace between the cities,” Captain Lorquital said. “The people of Gond are a holy people. Their decisions are not easily come by, and are highly respected.”

All this time, Tamora had been sitting in the pool of light cast by the big square lantern at the stern rail, sharpening her sword with a stone and scrap of leather. When Yama left Captain Lorquital to her charts and went forward to the bow, Tamora followed him.

“I fucked up,” she said bluntly. “Put me off at the next port and I’ll find another job.”

“I remember that you saved my life,” Yama said. “And that I then did something foolish. The fault is mine.”

“You should have burned the place to the waterline,” Tamora said fiercely. “It’s no more than it deserves. You don’t need me when you can command any machine. Let me go.”

“I am too tired to talk about this,” Yama said. In fact, he was ashamed of what he had done, although he did not remember much of it. “I need your strength, Tamora. I need to know when to act and when to stay my hand.”

Tamora said, “That’s easy. You only strike when you have to.”

“I need to be sure that I am acting for myself. I feel like a horse under a skillful rider. Most of the time I pick my own way, but sometimes I am pulled up short, or made to gallop in a direction not of my own choosing. I do not know if I am on the side of good or evil. Help me, Tamora.”

She fixed him with her gold-green gaze. “Before I was hurt in the war, they said I was crazy. No one would fight by my side because they said I took too many risks. You know what? I did it because I was scared. It’s easier to charge the enemy under fire than stand and wait for the right moment. So that’s what I did until I was wounded. Afterward, while I was recovering, I had plenty of time to think about what I’d done, and I swore then that I would never again let fear control me. I thought that I had been true to that oath until this night.”

Yama remembered that Sergeant Rhodean had told him that the best generals judge the moment to attack; the worst are driven by events willy-nilly, like a ship before a storm. He said, “You are right. Fear is natural, but I should be able to control it. Thank you.”

“What for? For being a damned fool? For letting you walk into that trap? For failing to help you when it went wrong?”

“For trusting me with your story.”

They watched the last of the fireworks burst far astern as the Weazel headed out into the deep water, and later fell asleep in each other’s arms. As the sky lightened, Yama woke and disentangled himself from Tamora’s embrace. Someone, probably Pandaras, had covered them with a blanket. Tamora sighed and yawned, showing her sharp white teeth and black tongue, and Yama told her to go back to sleep.

Apart from the old sailor, Phalerus, who had the helm, the whole ship was asleep. The new passenger must still be in the crow’s nest, for only Pandaras and Eliphas slept on the raffia matting under the awning. The Weazel was running ahead of a strong wind, her triangular mainsail filled, water creaming by on either side of her bow. The Great River stretched away on all sides; the Rim Mountains were no more than a long line floating low in the lightening sky. The water here was not the usual brown or umber but was the same dark blue as the predawn sky.

It was more than a league deep in places; some of the abyssal trenches plunged into the keel of the world. Hard to believe that this could ever change, and yet year by year the cities of the shore were stranded further and further inland by the river’s retreat. The Great River would at last run dry even here, leaving only a string of long, narrow lakes at the bottom of a deep dry valley.

Yama leaned at the starboard rail. Warm wind blew his unruly black hair back from his face. The bright lights of the huge fishing barges were scattered widely across the river. Yama wondered what monsters lay in the deeps under the Weazel’s keel, and for the first time in many days felt the tug of the feral machine which hung in its cold, solitary orbit a million leagues beyond the end of the world, attached to him by an impalpable thread, just as the kelpies had been attached to their operators by wires and cables. But who was puppet, and who operator? And for what end? He remembered the conclusion of his stepfather’s complicated calculations about the river’s shrinkage and shivered in the brightening sunlight.

After a while, he took out his copy of the Puranas.

The bright crammed pictures stirred to life under his gaze, speaking directly to an unconsciously receptive part of his mind. He realized that there must be machines embedded in the pages. Was every book freighted with hidden meanings? As a child, had he dreamed so vividly of the past because books from the library of the peel-house had lain by his bed?

But then he was lost in the last of Angel’s story, and all idle speculation was driven away.

When Angel came back from the far side of the river, she talked with those of her followers who had waited at the docks for her, then went straightaway to Mr. Naryan, the Archivist of Sensch, to tell him what she had found.

The Archivist was with a pupil, but the hapless lad was immediately dismissed when Angel appeared. Fortified by tea brought by the Archivist’s wife, a quiet woman of Sensch’s lizard race, Angel began to tell the tale of her adventure on the far-side shore.

The Archivist knew that Angel had been to the edge of the world, and for the first time he could not hide his fear.

He was afraid of what she might have done amongst the shrines on the river’s far side, about what she might change.

She said, teasingly, “Don’t you want to hear my story? Isn’t that your avocation?”

“I will listen to anything you want to tell me,” the Archivist said. Despite his fear, he maintained his air of quiet dignity, and she liked him for that.

She said, “The world is a straight line. Do you know about libration?”

The Archivist shook his head.

Angel held out her hand, palm down, and tipped it back and forth. “This is the world. Everything lives on the back of a long flat plate which circles the sun. The plate rocks on its axis, so the sun rises above one edge and then reverses its course. I went to the edge of the world, where the river that runs down half its length falls into the void. I suppose it must be collected and redistributed, but it really does look like it falls away forever.”

“The river is eternally renewed,” the Archivist said. “Where it falls is where ships used to arrive and depart, but this city has not been a port for many years.”

“Fortunately for me, or my companions would already be here. There’s a narrow ribbon of land on the far side of the river. Nothing lives there, not even an insect. No earth, no stones. The air shakes with the sound of the river’s fall, and swirling mist burns with raw sunlight. And there are shrines, in the thunder and mist at the edge of the world.” Angel paused for effect, then said, “One spoke to me.” She could see that the Archivist was taken aback. He said nothing, staring past her in some private reverie. She grinned and said, “Don’t you want to know what it said to me? It’s part of my story.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

The Archivist looked at her. It was a look of helpless love; she knew then that like all the others he was hers to command. The thought disgusted her. She wanted him to be a friend, not a pet or a puppet. She passed her hand over the top of her head. She had had her hair cut close in the manner of microgravity construction workers, a style ten million years out of date. The bristly hair made a crisp sound under her palm. She said, “No. No, I don’t think I do. Not yet.”

Instead, she told him what the ship had showed her of the creation of the Eye of the Preservers. He seemed happier with this. It was something he understood. He said that it was just as it was written in the Puranas.

She said, “And is it also written there why Confluence was constructed around a halo star between the Home Galaxy and the Eye of the Preservers?”

“Of course. It is so we can worship and glorify the Preservers. The Eye looks upon us all.”

It was a stock answer, taken from the commentary at the end of the last sura of the Puranas. He had nothing new to tell her. No one on this strange world had had a new idea since its creation, but she would change that. If she was going to rule here, she must first topple the old gods.

The news that she had woken one of the shrines on the far-side shore spread through the city. The streets around her house became choked with curious citizens. She could no longer wander about the city, because huge crowds gathered everywhere she went. There was a story that she had been tempted with godhood, and that she had refused. It was not something she had told the citizens—they were changing her story to fit their needs. She tried to teach them that the Universe of things was all there was, that there were no gods capable of intercession, that everyone was responsible for their own destiny. Seize the day, she told them, and they made the slogan into their battle cry.

Her followers daubed slogans everywhere, and now many of the slogans were of their own making.

Somehow, the citizens of Sensch came to believe that they could use the far-side shrines just as she had, without intervention of priest or hierodule, and that personal redemption was within their grasp. They set off in their thousands on pilgrimages across the river; so many that the city’s markets closed because the merchants had moved to the docks to supply those making the journey across the river. Meanwhile, Angel became a prisoner in her house, surrounded by followers, her every move watched with reverence. She had to stand on the roof so that she could be seen and heard by all of them. She was trying to free them from their habits and their unthinking devotion to the Preservers, to shape them into an army that could be used against her ship when it finally came for her.

She built devices that might help her escape. A crude muscle-amplification suit. A circuit-breaking device that would interfere with the broadcast power on which the myriads of tiny machines fed. She tinkered with the gravity units of cargo sleds, and painstakingly reprogrammed a few captured machines. But all of this activity was marking time. It was almost a relief when her ship finally arrived.

Angel went up to the roof of her house when the ship drew near the city’s docks. It had reconfigured itself into a huge black wedge composed of stacked tiers of flat plates. Its pyramidal apex was taller than the tallest towers of the city. Angel knew that the ship would try to take her back, but she might be able to escape if she could use the powers of the ship against itself.

She insisted on going to the docks. The young men who were her closest followers were very afraid, but they could not disobey her. She had two of them carry the circuit breaker, and armed the rest with pistols. The streets were almost empty. Thousands upon thousands of citizens had gathered at the docks to greet the ship, held back by a thin line of magistrates and their machines. The people were restless; they made a humming noise that rose and fell in pitch but never ended. Machines swept their packed heads with flares of light. There had already been trouble, for those near the front were wounded in some way, fallen to their knees and wailing and clutching at their faces. And when Dreen, the Commissioner of Sensch, rode a cargo sled to the top of the ship to greet the men and women of the crew, the crowd pressed forward eagerly, held back only by the quirts and machines of the magistrates.

Angel knew then that this was her only chance to take the ship from the crew. She fired up the circuit breaker and every machine fell from the sky, burned out by the power surge. The magistrates were powerless to stop the crowd as it surged down the docks toward the ship. Angel saw Dreen’s cargo sled fly away from the top of the ship—it drew power from the world’s gravity fields—toward the floating gardens above the pink sandstone palace. The Archivist was coming toward her, struggling through the crowd. Angel ordered those around her to take him to the palace, and left to organize the siege.

Power was down all over the city. The population had lost all restraint, as if it was only the presence of the machines which had kept them in order. There was drunkenness and gambling and open fornication. Buildings were set on fire; markets were looted. But those citizens Angel encountered still obeyed her unquestioningly. They loaded up cargo sleds with batteries for a localized power system and marched on the palace and attacked the floating gardens, some using the modified sleds to smash away pieces of the gardens’ superstructure, others starting to grow towers into the air using self-catalyzing masonry. Angel was sitting in the middle of her followers on the palace roof, with the machines she had reprogrammed spinning above her head, when the Archivist was brought before her. He was bruised and disheveled, not badly hurt, but clearly terrified. She beckoned him forward and he drew on his last reserves of dignity to confront her. She said, “What should I do with your city, now that I have taken it from you?”

The Archivist said, “You have not finished your story.”

There was a hint of defiance in his voice, but then he added weakly, “I would like to hear it all.”

“My people can tell you. They hide with Dreen up above, but not for long.” Angel pointed to a dozen men who were wrestling a sled into the crude launch cradle and explained how she had enhanced its anti-gravity properties. “We’ll chip away that floating fortress piece by piece if we have to, or we’ll finish growing towers and storm its remains, but I expect them to surrender long before then.”

“Dreen is not the ruler of the city.”

“Not anymore.”

The Archivist dared to step closer. He said, “What did you find out there, that you rage against?”

Angel laughed. None of them understood. They were not human—how could they understand her, the last human in the Universe? She said, “I’ll tell you about rage. It is what you have forgotten, or never learned. It is the motor of evolution, and evolution’s end, too.”

She snatched a beaker of wine from one of her followers and drained it and tossed it aside. Its heat mixed smoothly with her angry contempt. She said, “We traveled for so long, not dead, not sleeping. We were no more than stored potentials triply engraved on gold. Although the ship flew so fast that it bound time about itself, the journey still took thousands of years of shipboard time. At the end of that long voyage we did not wake: we were born. Or rather, others like us were born, although I have their memories, as if they are my own. They learned then that the Universe is not made for the convenience of humans. What they found was a galaxy dead and ruined.”

Angel took the Archivist’s hands in hers and held them tightly as she told him of the ruin of the neighboring galaxy, the disrupted nebulae, the planets torn from their orbits by gravity stress, the worlds torched smooth by stars which had flared because of infalling gases. She told him what she had learned.

“Do you know how many galaxies have endured such collisions? Almost all of them. Life is a statistical freak. Our galaxy has never collided with another like it, or not for a long time, long enough for life to have evolved on planets around some of its stars. It must be unique, or else other civilizations would surely have arisen elsewhere in the unbounded Universe. As it is, we are certain that we are alone. We must make of ourselves what we can. We should not hide from the truth, as your Preservers chose to do. Instead, we should seize the day, and make the Universe over with the technology that the Preservers used to make their hiding place.”

The Archivist said, “You cannot become a Preserver. No one can, now. You should not lie to these innocent people.”

“I didn’t need to lie. They took up my story and made it theirs. They see now what they can inherit—if they dare. This won’t stop with one city. It will become a crusade!”

She stared into the Archivist’s black eyes and said softly, “You’ll remember it all, won’t you?”

The Archivist said nothing, but she knew that he was hers, now and forever. It seemed to make him unbearably sad and it broke her heart, too, to have to use him so badly when she had wanted him to be her friend.

Around them, the crowd of her followers cheered. The sled rocketed up from its cradle and smashed into the underside of the hanging gardens. Another piece of the gardens’ substructure was knocked loose. It spilled dirt and rocks amongst the spires of the palace roof as it twisted free and spun away into the night. The crowd cheered again, and Angel saw that figures had appeared at the wrecked edge of the habitat. One of the figures tossed something down, and a man brought it to Angel. It was a message tube. She shook it open: Dreen’s face glowed on the flexible membrane. His voice was squeezed small and metallic by the tube’s induced speaker. Angel listened to his entreaties and was filled with joy and hope.

“Yes,” she said, but so softly that perhaps only the Archivist heard her. She stood and raised her hands above her head, and when she had the attention of her followers she cried out, “They wish to surrender! Let them come down!”

The cargo sled dropped. They were all there, the men and women who were closer to her than sisters and brothers, shining in their white clothes. Angel’s followers jeered and threw rocks and burning brands and clods of earth, but her partials had modified the sled’s field and everything was deflected away into the night. Angel smiled. She had anticipated that trick.

The partials called to her, pleading with her to return, to join them and search for their long-lost home. Dreen jumped from the sled and dodged through the crowd of Angel’s followers. The little Commissioner caught the Archivist’s hand and told him breathlessly, “They are all one person, or variations on one person. The ship makes its crew by varying a template. Angel is an extreme. A mistake.”

Angel laughed. So Dreen had been subverted by the partials! “You funny little man,” she said. “I’m the real one—they are copies!”

She turned to the partials, who were still calling out to her, pleading with her to come back, to join them in the search for their lost home. None had dared follow Dreen. “There’s no home to find,” she told them. “Oh you fools! This is all there is! Give me back the ship!”

She knew they would never agree, but she wanted to give them the chance. It was only fair.

“It was never yours,” they chorused. “Never yours to own, only yours to serve.”

Angel jumped onto her chair and signaled to the man she had entrusted with the field degausser. It shot hundreds of fine silvery threads at the sled. For a moment, she thought it might not work, for when the threads reached the edge of the field their ends flicked upward. But then the threads drained the field—there was a great smell of burning as the degausser’s iron heat-sink glowed red-hot—and the threads fell in a tangle over the partials. Angel’s followers, seeing what had happened, began to pelt the crew with rubbish, but Angel ordered them to stop. She wanted to defeat the crew, not humiliate it.

She said, “I have the only working sleds. That which I can enhance, I can also take away.” The partials could not follow her now. The ship was hers for the taking. She turned to the Archivist triumphantly. “Come with me, and see the end of the story.”

That was when one of the partials walked away from the grounded sled, straight toward Angel. She confronted him. She told herself that there was nothing to fear. She had won. She said to him, “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Of course not, sister,” the man said.

He reached out and grasped her wrists. And the world fell away.

The acceleration was so brutal that Angel almost passed out. A rush of air burned her clothes and scorched her skin… and then there was no more air. She was so tall above the world that she could see across its width, tall mountains on one side and a straight edge on the other, stretching ahead and behind to their vanishing points. The world was a dark line hung in an envelope of air. Angel saw the brilliant point of the sun come into view beneath it. Vacuum stung her eyes with ice-cold needles; air rushed from her nose and mouth; her entire skin ached. The man embracing her pressed his lips against hers, kissing her with the last of his breath, tasting the last of hers.

There were only two pictures after that. Neither spoke to Yama. They were only pictures.

The first showed a vast room within the ship of the Ancients of Days. There was a window which displayed the triple spiral of the Home Galaxy. Two men stood before it, one grossly corpulent, the other wide-hipped and long-armed, as small as a child. The Archivist of Sensch, Mr. Naryan, and the Commissioner of Sensch, Dreen.

Dreen was pointing at the glowing window. He was telling Mr. Naryan something.

The second picture was from a point of view above Dreen, who stood at the edge of a huge opening in the ship, looking down at the river far below. A figure hung halfway between the hatch and the river. It was Mr. Naryan.

So Angel had died—although if her ship wished, she could be born again—but her ideas lived on. They had escaped with Mr. Naryan, and Yama knew that, with the help of the aspect Angel had downloaded into the space inside the shrines, the old Archivist had spread Angel’s story far and wide. The revolution in Sensch was only the beginning of the heresy which had set one half of Confluence against the other.

Shoreward, the sky grew brighter. The floating line of the Rim Mountains freed the platinum disc of the sun. A widening lane of sunlight glittered on the river, like a golden path leading to infinity. Yama watched the play of light on water and thought for a long time about the things that the changed pictures in his copy of the Puranas had shown him.