Child of the River

Chapter Twenty The Hollow Man

When Yama reached the bottom of the stairs, he knew that there was a large number of machines ahead of him, but the size of the room was still surprising. Golden pillars twisted into fantastic shapes marched away across an emerald-green lawn, lending perspective to a space perhaps a thousand paces long and three hundred wide. The lawn was studded with islands of couches upholstered in brilliant silks, and fountains and dwarf fruit trees and statues—these last merely of red sandstone or marble, not petrified flesh. Displays of exotic flowers perfumed the air. Constellations of brilliant white lights floated in the air beneath a high glass ceiling. Above the glass was not air but water—schools of golden and black carp lazily swam through illuminated currents, and pads of water lilies hung above them like the silhouettes of clouds.

Thousands of tiny machines crawled amongst the closely trimmed blades of grass or spun through the bright air like silver beetles or dragonflies with mica wings, their thoughts a single rising harmonic in Yama’s head. Men in scarlet-and-white uniforms and silver helmets stood in alcoves carved into the marble walls. They were unnaturally still and, like the fallen guard at the gate, emitted faint glimmers of machine intelligence, as if machines inhabited their skulls.

As Yama walked across the lawn, with Iachimo following close behind, he heard music in the distance: the chiming runs of a tambura like silver laughter over the solemn pulse of a tabla. A light sculpture twisted in the air like a writhing column of brightly colored scarves seen through a heat haze.

The two musicians sat in a nest of embroidered silk cushions to one side of a huge couch on which lay the fattest man Yama had ever seen. He was naked except for a loincloth, and as hairless as a seal. A gold circlet crowned his shaven head. The thick folds of his belly spilled his flanks and draped his swollen thighs. His black skin shone with oils and unguents; the light of the sculpture slid over it in greasy rainbows. He was propped on his side amongst cushions and bolsters, and pawed in a distracted fashion at a naked woman who was feeding him pastries from a pile stacked high on a silver salver. Without doubt, this was the master of the house, the merchant, the rogue star-sailor.

Yama halted a few paces from him and bowed from the waist, but the merchant did not acknowledge him. Yama stood and sweated, with Iachimo beside him, while the musicians played through the variations of their raga and the merchant ate a dozen pastries one after the other and stroked the gleaming pillows of the woman’s large breasts with swollen, ring-encrusted fingers. Like her master, the woman was quite without hair. The petals of her labia were pierced with rings; from one of these rings a fine gold chain ran to a bracelet on the merchant’s wrist.

When the concluding chimes of the tambura had died away, the merchant closed his eyes and sighed deeply, then waved at the musicians in dismissal. “Drink,” he said in a high, wheezing voice. The woman jumped up and poured red wine into a bowl which she held to the merchant’s lips. He slobbered at the wine horribly and it spilled over his chin and chest onto the grassy floor. Yama saw now that the cushions of the couch were stained with old spillages and littered with crumbs and half-eaten crusts; underlying the rich scents of spikenard and jasmine and the sweet smoke of candles which floated in a bowl of water was a stale reek of old sweat and spoiled food.

The merchant belched and glanced at Yama. His cheeks were so puffed with fat that they pushed his mouth into a squashed rosebud, and his eyes peered above their ramparts like sentries, darting here and there as if expecting a sudden attack from any quarter. He said petulantly, “What’s this, Iachimo? A little old for your tastes, isn’t he?”

Iachimo inclined his head. “Very amusing, master, but you know that I would never trouble you with my bed companions. Perhaps you might look more closely. I believe that you will find he is a rare type, one not seen on Confluence for many an age.”

The merchant waved a doughy paw in front of his face, as if trying to swat a fly. “You are always playing games, Iachimo. It will be your downfall. Tell me and have done with it.”

“I believe that he is one of the Builders,” Iachimo said.

The merchant laughed—a series of grunts that convulsed his vast, gleaming body as a storm tosses the surface of the river. At last he said, “Your inventive mind never ceases to amaze me, Iachimo. I’ll grant he has the somatype, but this is some river-rat a mountebank has surgically altered, no doubt inspired by some old carving or slate. You’ve been had.”

“He came here of his own accord. He brought a book of great antiquity. I have it here.”

The merchant took the copy of the Puranas from Iachimo and pawed through it, grunting to himself, before casually tossing it aside. It landed facedown and splayed open amongst the cushions on which the merchant sprawled. Yama made a move to retrieve it, but Iachimo caught his arm.

“I’ve seen better,” the merchant said. “If this fake says he brought you an original of the Puranas, then that too will be a fake. I’m no longer interested. Take this creature away, Iachimo, and its book. Dispose of it in the usual way, and dispose of its companion, too, once you’ve caught it. Or do I have to take charge of the guards and do that myself?”

“It won’t be necessary, master. The other boy is certainly no more than a river-rat. He won’t be missed. But this one is something rarer.” Iachimo prodded Yama in the small of the back with a fingernail as sharply pointed as a stiletto and whispered, “Show him what you can do.”

“I do not understand what you want of me.”

“Oh, you understand,” Iachimo hissed. “I know what you can do with machines. You got past the gatekeeper, so you know something of your inheritance.”

The merchant said, “I’m in an indulgent mood, Iachimo. Here’s your test. I’m going to order my soldiers to kill you, boy. Do you understand? Stop them, and we’ll talk some more. Otherwise I’m rid of a fraud.”

Four of the guards started forward from their niches. Yama stepped back involuntarily as the guards, their faces expressionless beneath the bills of their silver helmets, raised their gleaming falchions and marched stiffly across the lawn toward him, two on the right, two on the left.

Iachimo said in a wheedling tone, “Master, surely this isn’t necessary.”

“Let me have my fun,” the merchant said. “What is he to you, eh?”

Yama put his hand inside his satchel and found the hilt of his knife, but the guards were almost upon him and he knew that he could not fight four at once. He felt a tingling expansion and shouted at the top of his voice. “Stop! Stop now!”

The guards froze in mid-step, then, moving as one, knelt and laid down their falchions, and bent until their silver helmets touched the grass.

The merchant reared up and squealed, “What is this? Do you betray me, Iachimo?”

“Quite the reverse, master. I’ll kill him in a moment, if you give the word. But you see that he is no mountebank’s fake. The merchant glared at Yama. There was a high whine, like a bee trapped in a bottle, and a machine dropped through the air and hovered in front of Yama’s face. Red light flashed in the backs of his eyes. He asked the machine to go away, but the red light flashed again, filling his vision. He could see nothing but the red light and held himself still, although panic trembled in his breast like a trapped dove. He could feel every corner of the machine’s small bright mind, but by a sudden inversion, as if a flower had suddenly dwindled down to the seed from which it had sprung, it was closed to him.

Somewhere beyond the red light, the merchant, said, “Recently born. No revenant. Where is he from, Iachimo?”

“Downriver,” Iachimo said, close by Yama’s ear. “Not far downriver, though. There’s a small town called Aeolis amongst the old tombs. The book at least comes from there.”

The merchant said, “The City of the Dead. There are older tombs elsewhere on Confluence, but I suppose you aren’t to know that. Boy, stop trying to control my machines. I have told them to ignore you, and fortunately for you, you don’t know the extent of your abilities. Fortunate for you, too, Iachimo. You risked a great deal bringing him here. I’ll not forget that.”

Iachimo said, “I am yours to punish or reward, master. As always. But be assured that this boy does not understand what he is. Otherwise I would not have been able to capture him.”

“He’s done enough damage. I have reviewed the security systems, something you haven’t troubled to do. He blinded the watchdogs and the machines patrolling the grounds, which is why he and his friend could wander the grounds with impunity. I have restored them. He has killed the gatekeeper too, and his friend is armed. Wait—there are two of them, both armed, and loose in the grounds. The security system was told to ignore them, but I’m tracking them now. You have let things get out of hand, Iachimo.”

“I had no reason to believe the security system was not operating correctly, master, but it proves my point. Here is a rare treasure.”

Yama turned his head back and forth, but could see nothing but red mist. There was a splinter of pain in each of his eyes.

He said, “Am I blinded?” and his voice was smaller and weaker than he would have liked.

“I suppose it isn’t necessary,” the merchant said, and the red mist was gone.

Yama knuckled his stinging eyes, blinking hard in the sudden bright light. Two of the guards stood at attention behind the merchant’s couch, their red-and-white uniforms gleaming, their falchions held before their faces as if at parade.

The merchant said, “Don’t mind my toys. They won’t harm you as long as you’re sensible.” His voice was silkily unctuous now. “Drink, eat. I have nothing but the best. The best vintages, the finest meats, the tenderest vegetables.”

“Some wine, perhaps. Thank you.”

The naked woman poured wine as rich and red as fresh blood into a gold beaker and handed it to Yama, then poured another bowl for the merchant, who slobbered it down before Yama could do more than sip his. He expected some rare vintage, and was disappointed to discover that it was no better than the ordinary wine of the peel-house’s cellars.

The merchant smacked his lips and said, “Do you know what I am? And do stop trying to take control of my servants. You will give me a headache.”

Yama had been trying to persuade one of the machines which illuminated the room to fly down and settle above his head, but despite his sense of expansion, as if his thoughts had become larger than his skull, he might as well have tried to order an ossifrage to quit its icy perch in the high foothills of the Rim Mountains. He stared at the gold circlet on the merchant’s fleshy, hairless pate, and said, “You are really one of those things which crew the voidships. I suppose that you stole the body.”

“As a matter of fact I had it grown. Do you like it?”

Yama took another sip of wine. He felt calmer now. He said, “I am amazed by it.”

“You have been raised to be polite. That’s good. It will make things easier, eh, Iachimo?”

“I’m sure he could stand a little more polishing, master.”

“I’ve yet to find a body that can withstand my appetites,” the merchant told Yama, “but that’s of little consequence, because there are always more bodies. This is my—what is it, Iachimo? The tenth?”

“The ninth, master.”

“Well, there will soon be need for a tenth, and there will be more, an endless chain. How old are you, boy? No more than twenty, I’d guess. This body is half that age.”

The merchant pawed at the breasts of the woman. She was feeding him sugared almonds, popping them into his mouth each time it opened. He chewed the almonds mechanically, and a long string of pulp and saliva drooled unheeded down his chin.

He said, “I’ve been male and female in my time, too. Mostly male, given the current state of civilization, but now that I’ve made my fortune and have no need to leave my estate, perhaps I’ll be female next time. Are there others like you?”

“That is what I want to discover,” Yama said. “You know of my bloodline. You know more than me, it seems. You called me a builder. A builder of what?”

But he already knew. He had read in the Puranas, and he remembered the man in the picture slate which Osric and Beatrice had shown him.

Iachimo said, “’And the Preservers raised up a man and set on his brow their mark, and raised up a woman of the same kind, and set on her brow the same mark. From the white clay of the middle region did they shape this race, and quickened them with their marks. And those of this race were the servants of the Preservers. And in their myriads this race shaped the world after the ideas of the Preservers.’ There’s more, but you get the general idea. Those are your people, boy. So long dead that almost no one remembers—”

Suddenly, the room brightened: white light flashed beyond the lake which hung above the long room. Rafts of water-lily pads swung wildly on clashing waves and there was a deep, heavy muffled sound, as if a massive door had slammed in the keel of the world.

The merchant said, “No hope there, boy. You put some of my guards to sleep, but they’re all under my control again, and almost have your two friends. Iachimo, you did not say that one of them was a cateran.”

“There was another boy, master. I knew of no other.”

The merchant closed his eyes. For a moment, Yama felt that a thousand intelligences lived in his head. Then the feeling was gone and the merchant said, “She has killed several guards, but one caught a glimpse of her. She’s of the Fierce People, and she’s armed with one of the gatekeeper’s pistols.”

“There are still many guards, master, and many machines. Besides, the lake will absorb any blast from the pistol.”

The merchant pulled the woman close to him. “He’s an assassin’s tool, you idiot! Why else would a cateran come here? You know I have been expecting this ever since my old ship returned through the manifold.”

“There was the man who broke into the godown,” Iachimo said, “but we dealt with him easily enough.”

“It was just the beginning. They won’t rest—”

There was another flash of white light. A portion of water above the glass ceiling seethed into a spreading cloud of white bubbles, and the glass rang like a cracked bell. The merchant closed his eyes briefly, then relaxed and drew the naked woman closer. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. There’s a weapon in his satchel, Iachimo. Take it out and give it to me.”

The white-haired man lifted out the sheathed knife and said, “It is only a knife, master.”

“I know what it is. Bring it here.”

Iachimo offered the sheathed knife, hilt-first. Yama implored it to manifest the horrible shape which had frightened Lob and the landlord of The Crossed Axes, but he was at the center of a vast muffling silence. The merchant squinted at the knife’s goatskin sheath, and then the woman drew it and plunged it into Iachimo’s belly.

Iachimo grunted and fell to his knees. The knife flashed blue fire and the woman screamed and dropped it and clutched her smoking hand. The knife embedded itself point-first in the grass, sizzling faintly and emitting a drizzle of fat blue motes. Iachimo was holding his belly with both hands.

There was blood all over his fingers and the front of his black tunic.

The merchant looked at the woman and she fell silent in mid-scream. He said to Yama, “So die all those who think to betray me. Now, boy, you’ll answer all my questions truthfully, or you’ll join your two friends. Yes, they have been captured. Not dead, not yet. We’ll talk, you and I, and decide their fate.”

Iachimo, kneeling over the knife and a pool of his own blood, said something about a circle, and then the guards seized him and jerked him upright and cut his throat and lifted him away from the merchant, all in one quick motion.

They dropped the body onto the neatly trimmed grass beneath the light sculpture and returned to their position behind the merchant’s couch.

“You’re trouble, boy,” the merchant said. The woman tremblingly placed the mouthpiece of a clay pipe between his rosebud lips and lit the scrap of resin in its bowl. He drew a long breath and said, dribbling smoke with the words, “Your people were the first. The rest came later, but you were the first. I had never thought to see your kind again, but this is an age of wonders. Listen to me, boy, or I’ll have you killed too. You see how easy it is.”

Yama was holding the wine goblet so tightly that he had reopened the wound in his palm. He threw it away and said as boldly as he could, “Will you spare my friends?”

“They came to kill me, didn’t they? Sent by my crewmates, who are jealous of me.”

Yama could not deny it. He stared in stubborn silence at the merchant, who calmly drew on his pipe and contemplated the wreaths of smoke he breathed out. At last, the merchant said, “The woman is a cateran, and their loyalty is easily bought. I might have a use for her. The boy is no different from a million other river-rats in Ys. I could kill him and it would be as if he had never been born. I see that you want him to live. You are very sentimental. Well then. You must prove your worth to me, and perhaps the boy will live. Do you know exactly what you are?”

Yama said, “You say that I am of the bloodline of the Builders, and I have seen an ancient picture showing one of my kind before the world was made. But I also have been told that I might be a child of the Ancients of Days.”

“Hmm. It’s possible they had something to do with it. In their brief time here they meddled in much that didn’t concern them. They didn’t achieve anything of consequence, of course. For all that they might have appeared as gods to the degenerate population of Confluence, they predated the Preservers by several million years. Their kind were the ancestors of the Preservers, but with about as much relation to them as the brainless plankton grazers which were the ancestors of my own bloodline have to me. It is only because the Ancients of Days were time-shifted while traveling to our neighboring galaxy and back at close to the speed of light that they appeared so late, like an actor delayed by circumstance who incontinently rushes on stage to deliver his lines and finds that he has interrupted the closing soliloquy instead of beginning the second act. We are in the end times, young builder. This whole grand glorious foolish experiment has all but run its course. The silly little war downriver begun by the Ancients of Days is only a footnote.”

The merchant seemed exhausted by this speech, and drank more wine before he continued. “Do you know, I haven’t thought about this for a long time. Iachimo was a very clever man, but not a brave one. He was doomed to a servant’s role, and resented it. I thought at first you were some scheme of his, and I haven’t fully dismissed the thought from my mind. I do not believe that it was through simple carelessness that he allowed the cateran to roam free, or that you were allowed to carry a knife into my presence.”

“I have never seen him before tonight. I am not the servant of any man.”

The merchant said, “Don’t be a fool. Like most here, your bloodline was created as servants to the immediate will of the Preservers.”

“We all serve the Preservers as we can,” Yama said.

“You’ve been in the hands of a priest,” the merchant said. His gaze was shrewd. “You parrot his pious phrases, but do you really believe them?”

Yama could not answer. His faith was never something he had questioned, but now he saw that by disobeying the wishes of his father he had rebelled against his place in the social hierarchy, and had not that hierarchy proceeded from the Preservers? So the priests taught, but now Yama was unsure. For the priests also taught that the Preservers wanted their creations to advance from a low to a high condition, and how could that happen if society was fixed, eternal and unchanging?

The merchant belched. “You are just a curiosity, boy. A revenant. An afterthought or an accident—it’s all the same. But you might be useful, even so. You and I might do great things together. You asked why I am here. It is because I have remembered what all others of my kind have long forgotten. They are lost in ascetic contemplation of the mathematics of the manifolds and the secrets of the beginning and end of the cosmos, but I have remembered the pleasures of the real world, of appetite and sex and all the rest of the messy wonderful business of life. They would say that mathematics is the reality underlying everything; I say that it is an abstraction of the real world, a ghost.” He belched again. “There is my riposte to algebra.”

Yama made a wild intuitive leap. He said, “You met the Ancients of Days, didn’t you?”

“My ship hailed theirs, as it fell through the void toward the Eye of the Preservers. They had seen the Eye’s construction by ancient light while hundreds of thousands of years out, and were amazed to discover that organic intelligent life still existed. We merged our mindscapes and talked long there, and I followed them out into the world. And here I am. It is remarkably easy to make a fortune in these benighted times, but I’m finding that merely satisfying sensual appetites is not enough. If you’re truly a Builder, and I am not quite convinced that you are, then perhaps you can help me. I have plans.”

“I believe that I am no man’s servant. I cannot serve you as Iachimo did.”

The merchant laughed. “I would hope not. You will have to unlearn your arrogance to begin with; then I will see what I can make of you. I can teach you many things, boy. I can realize your potential. There are many like Iachimo in the world, intelligent and learned and quite without the daring to act on their convictions. There is no end to natural followers like him. You are something more. I must think hard about it, and so will you. But you will serve, or you will die, and so will your friends.”

The twisting scarves of color in the light sculpture ran together into a steely gray and widened into a kind of window, showing Tamora and Pandaras kneeling inside tiny cages suspended in dark air.

For a moment, Yama’s breath caught in his throat. He said, “Let them go, and I will serve you as I can.”

The merchant shifted his immense oiled bulk. “I think not. I’ll give you a taste of their fate while I decide how I can make use of you. When you can make that promise from your heart, then we can talk again.”

The two guards turned toward Yama, who stared in sudden panic into their blank, blind faces. His panic inflated into something immense, a great wild bird he had loosed, its wings beating at the edges of his sight. In desperation, quite without hope, his mind threw out an immense imploring scream for help.

The merchant pawed at his head and far down the room something struck the glass ceiling with a tremendous bang.

For a moment, all was still. Then a line of spray sheeted down, and the glass around it gave with a loud splintering crash. The spray became a widening waterfall that poured down and rebounded from the floor and sent a tawny wave flooding down the length of the room, knocking over pillars and statues and sweeping tables and couches before it.

The merchant’s couch lurched into the air. The woman gave a guttural cry of alarm, and clung to her master’s flesh as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a bit of flotsam. Yama dashed forward through surging water (for a moment, Iachimo’s corpse clutched at his ankles; then it was swept away), made a desperate leap and caught hold of one end of the rising couch. His weight rocked it on its long axis, so violently that for one moment he hung straight down, the next tipped forward and fell across the merchant’s legs.

The merchant roared and his woman clawed at Yama with sudden fury, her long nails opening his forehead so that blood poured into his eyes. The couch turned in a dizzy circle above the guards as they struggled to stay upright in the seething flood. The merchant caught at Yama’s hands, but his grasp was feeble, and Yama, half-blinded, grabbed the golden circlet around the man’s fleshy scalp and pulled with all his strength.

For a moment, he feared that the circlet would not give way. Then it snapped in half and unraveled like a ribbon.

All the lights went out. The couch tipped and Yama and the merchant and the woman fell into the wash of the flood.

Yama went under and got a mouthful of muddy water and came up spitting and gasping.

The guards had fallen; so had all the machines.

Yama asked a question, and after a moment points of intense white light flared down the length of the room, burning through the swirling brown flood. Yama wiped blood from his eyes. The current swirled around his waist. He was clutching a tangle of golden filaments tipped with stringy fragments of flesh.

At the far end of the huge room, something floated a handspan above the water, turning slowly end for end. It was as big as Yama’s head, and black, and decorated all over with spikes of varying lengths and thickness, some like rose thorns, others long and finely tapered and questing this way and that with blind intelligence. The thing radiated a black icy menace, a negation not only of life, but of the reality of the world. For a moment, Yama was transfixed; then the machine rose straight up, smashing through the ceiling. Yama felt it rise higher and higher, and for a moment felt all the machines in Ys turn toward it—but it was gone.

The merchant sprawled across the fallen couch like a beached grampus. A ragged wound crowned his head, streaming blood; he snorted a jelly of blood and mucus through his nose. The woman lay beneath him, entirely submerged. Her head was twisted back, and her eyes looked up through the swirling water. Up and down the length of the room, the guards were dead, too.

Yama held the frayed remnants of the circlet before the merchant’s eyes, and said, “Iachimo told me about this with his last breath, but I had already guessed its secret. I saw something like it on the lighter.”

“The Preservers have gone away,” the merchant whispered.

The floodwaters were receding, running away into deeper levels of the sunken house. Yama knelt by the couch and said, “Why am I here?”

The merchant drew a breath. Blood ran from his nostrils and his mouth. He said wetly, “Serve no one.”

“If the Preservers are gone, why was I brought back?”

The merchant tried to say something, but only blew a bubble of blood. Yama left him there and went to find Tamora and Pandaras.