Child of the River

Chapter Three Dr. Dismas

Dr. Dismas’s bent-backed, black-clad figure came up the dry, stony hillside with a bustling, crabbed gait. The sun was at the height of its daily leap into the sky, and, like an aspect, he cast no shadow.

The Aedile, standing at the top of the slope by the spoilheap of his latest excavation site, watched with swelling expectation as the apothecary drew near. The Aedile was tall and stooped and graying, with a diplomat’s air of courteous reticence which many mistook for absentmindedness. He was dressed after the fashion of the citizens of Aeolis, in a loose-fitting white tunic and a linen kilt. His knees were swollen and stiff from the hours he had spent kneeling on a leather pad brushing away dirt, hairline layer after hairline layer, from a ceramic disc, freeing it from the cerements of a hundred thousand years of burial. The excavation was not going well and the Aedile had grown bored with it before it was halfway done. Despite the insistence of his geomancer, he was convinced that nothing of interest would be found. The crew of trained diggers, convicts reprieved from army service, had caught their master’s mood and worked at a desultory pace amongst the neatly dug trenches and pits, dragging their chains through dry white dust as they carried baskets of soil and limestone chippings to the conical spoil heap. A drill rig taking a core through the reef of land coral which had overgrown the hilltop raised a plume of white dust that feathered off into the blue sky.

So far, the excavation had uncovered only a few potsherds, the corroded traces of what might have been the footings of a watchtower, and the inevitable hoard of ceramic discs. Although the Aedile had no idea what the discs had actually been used for (most scholars of Confluence’s early history believed that they were some form of currency, but the Aedile thought that this was too obvious an explanation), he assiduously catalogued every one, and spent hours measuring the faint grooves and pits with which they were decorated. The Aedile believed in measurement. In small things were the gauge of the larger world which contained them, and of worlds without end. He believed that all measurements and constants might be arithmetically derived from a single number, the cipher of the Preservers which could unlock the secrets of the world they had made, and much else.

But here was Dr. Dismas, with news that would determine the fate of the Aedile’s foundling son. The pinnace on which the apothecary had returned from Ys had anchored beyond the mouth of the bay two days before (and was anchored there still), and Dr. Dismas had been rowed ashore last night, but the Aedile had chosen to spend the day at his excavation site rather than wait at the peel-house for Dr. Dismas’s call.

Better that he heard the news, whatever it was, before Yama.

It was the Aedile’s hope that Dr. Dismas had discovered the truth about the bloodline of his adopted son, but he did not trust the man, and was troubled by speculations about the ways in which Dr. Dismas might misuse his findings. It was Dr. Dismas, after all, who had proposed that he take the opportunity offered by his summons to Ys to undertake research into the matter of Yama’s lineage. That this trip had been forced upon Dr. Dismas by his department, and had been entirely funded from the Aedile’s purse, would not reduce by one iota the obligation which Dr. Dismas would surely expect the Aedile to express.

Dr. Dismas disappeared behind the tipped white cube of one of the empty tombs which were scattered beneath the brow of the hill like beads flung from a broken necklace—tombs of the dissolute time after the Age of Insurrection and the last to be built in the City of the Dead, simple boxes set at the edge of the low, rolling hills, crowded with monuments, tombs and statues of the ancient necropolis. Presently, Dr. Dismas reappeared almost at the Aedile’s feet and labored up the last hundred paces of the steep, rough path. He was breathing hard. His sharp-featured face, propped amongst the high wings of his black coat’s collar and shaded by a black, broad-brimmed hat, was sprinkled with sweat in which, like islands in the slowly shrinking river, the plaques of his addiction stood isolated.

“A warm day,” the Aedile said by way of greeting.

Dr. Dismas took out a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and fastidiously dabbed sweat from his face. “It is hot. Perhaps Confluence tires of circling the sun and is falling into it, like a girl tumbling into the arms of her lover. Perhaps we’ll be consumed by the fire of their passion.”

Usually, Dr. Dismas’s rhetorical asides amused the Aedile, but this wordplay only intensified his sense of foreboding.

He said mildly, “I trust that your business was successful, doctor.”

Dr. Dismas dismissed it with a flick of his handkerchief, like a conjuror.

“It was nothing. Routine puffed up with pomp. My department is fond of pomp, for it is, after all, a very old department. I am returned, my Aedile, to serve, if I may, with renewed vigor.”

“I had never thought to withdraw that duty from you, my dear doctor.”

“You are too kind. And more generous than the miserable termagants who nest amongst the dusty ledgers of my department, and do nothing but magnify rumor into fact.”

Dr. Dismas had turned to gaze, like a conqueror, across the dry slope of the hill and its scattering of abandoned tombs, the patchwork of flooded fields along the Breas and the tumbled ruins and cluster of roofs of Aeolis at its mouth, the long finger of the new quay pointing across banks of green mud toward the Great River, which stretched away, shining like polished silver, to a misty union of water and air. Now he stuck a cigarette in his holder (carved, he liked to say, from the finger-bone of a multiple murderer; he cultivated a sense of the macabre), lit it and drew deeply, holding his breath for a count of ten before blowing a riffle of smoke through his nostrils with a satisfied sigh.

Dr. Dismas was the apothecary of Aeolis, hired a year ago by the same council which regulated the militia. He had been summoned to Ys to account for several lapses since he had taken up his position. He was said to have substituted glass powder for the expensive suspensions of tiny machines which cured river blindness—and certainly there had been more cases of river blindness the previous summer, although the Aedile attributed this to the greater numbers of biting flies which bred in the algae which choked the mud banks of the former harbor. More seriously, Dr. Dismas was said to have peddled his treatments amongst the fisherfolk and the hill tribes, making extravagant claims that he could cure cankers, blood cough and mental illness, and halt or even reverse aging. There were rumors, too, that he had made or grown chimeras of children and beasts, and that he had kidnapped a child from one of the hill tribes and used its blood and perfusions of its organs to treat one of the members of the Council for Night and Shrines.

The Aedile had dismissed all of these allegations as fantasies, but then a boy had died after bloodletting, and the parents, mid-caste chandlers, had lodged a formal protest.

The Aedile had had to sign it. A field investigator of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons had arrived a hundred days ago, but quickly left in some confusion. It seemed that Dr. Dismas had threatened to kill him when he had tried to force an interview. And then the formal summons had arrived, which the Aedile had had to read out to Dr. Dismas in front of the Council of Night and Shrines. The doctor had been commanded to return to Ys for formal admonishment, both for his drug habit and (as the document delicately put it) for certain professional lapses. The Aedile had been informed that Dr. Dismas had been placed on probation, although from the doctor’s manner he might have won a considerable victory rather than a reprieve.

The apothecary drew deeply on his cigarette and said, “The river voyage was a trial in itself. It made me so febrile that I had to lie in bed on the pinnace for a day after it anchored before I was strong enough to be taken ashore. I am still not quite recovered.”

“Quite, quite,” the Aedile said. “I am sure you came here as soon as you could.”

But he did not believe it for a moment. The apothecary was up to something, no doubt about it.

“You have been working with those convicts of yours again. Don’t deny it. I see the dirt under your nails. You are too old to be kneeling under the burning sun.”

“I wore my hat, and coated my skin with the unguent you prescribed.” The sticky stuff smelled strongly of menthol, and raised the fine hairs of the Aedile’s pelt into stiff peaks, but it seemed uncharitable to complain.

“You should also wear glasses with tinted lenses. Cumulative ultraviolet will damage your corneas, and at your age that can be serious. I believe I see some inflammation there. Your excavations will proceed apace without your help. Day by day, you climb down into the past. I fear you will leave us all behind. Is the boy well? I trust you have taken better care of him than of yourself.”

“I do not think I will learn anything here. There are the footings of a tower, but the structure itself must have been dismantled long ago. A tall tower, too; the foundations are very deep, although quite rusted away. I believe that it might have been made of metal, although that would have been fabulously costly even in the Age of Enlightenment. The geomancer may have been misled by the remains into thinking that a larger structure was once built here. It has happened before. Or perhaps there is something buried deeper. We will see.”

The geomancer had been from one of the hill tribes, a man half the Aedile’s age, but made wizened and toothless by his harsh nomadic life, one eye milky with a cataract which Dr. Dismas had later removed. This had been in winter, with hoarfrost mantling the ground each morning, but the geomancer had gone about barefoot, and naked under his red wool cloak. He had fasted three days on the hilltop before scrying out the site with a thread weighted with a sliver of lodestone.

Dr. Dismas said, “In Ys, there are buildings which are said to have once been entirely clad in metal.”

“Quite, quite. If it can be found anywhere on Confluence, then it can be found in Ys.”

“So they say, but who would know where to begin to look?”

“If there is any one person, then that would be you, my dear Dr. Dismas.”

“I would like to think I have done my best for you.”

“And for the boy. More importantly, the boy.”

Dr. Dismas gave the Aedile a quick, piercing look. “Of course. That goes without saying.”

“It is for the boy,” the Aedile said again. “His future is constantly in my thoughts.”

With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, which were as stiffly crooked as the claw of a crayfish, Dr. Dismas plucked the stub of his cigarette from the bone holder and crushed its coal. His left hand was almost entirely affected by the drug; although the discrete plaques allowed limited flexure, they had robbed the fingers of all feeling.

The Aedile waited while Dr. Dismas went through the ritual of lighting another cigarette. There was something of Dr. Dismas’s manner that reminded the Aedile of a sly, sleek nocturnal animal, secretive in its habits but always ready to pounce on some scrap or tidbit. He was a gossip, and like all gossips knew how to pace his revelations, how to string out a story and tease his audience—but the Aedile knew that like all gossips, Dr. Dismas could not hold a secret long. So he waited patiently while Dr. Dismas fitted another cigarette in the holder, and lit and drew on it. The Aedile was by nature a patient man, and his training in diplomacy had inured him to waiting on the whims of others.

Dr. Dismas blew streams of smoke through his nostrils and said at last, “It wasn’t easy, you know.”

“Oh, quite so. I did not think it would be. The libraries are much debased these days. Since the librarians fell silent, there is a general feeling that there is no longer the need to maintain anything but the most recent records, and so everything older than a thousand years is considerably compromised.” The Aedile realized that he had said too much. He was nervous, there on the threshold of revelation.

Dr. Dismas nodded vigorously. “And there is the present state of confusion brought about by the current political situation. It is most regrettable.”

“Quite, quite. Well, but we are at war.”

“I meant the confusion in the Palace of the Memory of the People itself, something for which your department, my dear Aedile, must take a considerable part of the blame. All of these difficulties suggest that we are trying to forget the past, as the Committee for Public Safety teaches we should.”

The Aedile was stung by this remark, as Dr. Dismas had no doubt intended. The Aedile had been exiled to this tiny backwater city after the triumph of the Committee for Public Safety because he had spoken against the destruction of the records of past ages. It was to his everlasting shame that he had only spoken out, and not fought, as had many of his faction. And now his wife was dead. And his son. Only the Aedile was left, still in exile because of a political squabble mostly long forgotten.

The Aedile said with considerable asperity, “The past is not so easily lost, my dear Doctor. Each night, we have only to look up at the sky to be reminded of that. In winter, we see the Galaxy, sculpted by unimaginable forces in ages past; in summer, we see the Eye of the Preservers. And here in Aeolis, the past is more important than the present. After all, how much greater are the tombs than the mud-brick houses down by the bay? Even stripped of their ornaments, the tombs are greater, and will endure in ages to come. All that lived in Ys during the Golden Age once came to rest here, and much remains to be discovered.”

Dr. Dismas ignored this. He said, “Despite these difficulties, the library of my department is still well-ordered. Several of the archive units are still completely functional under manual control, and they are amongst the oldest on Confluence. If records of the boy’s bloodline could be found anywhere, it is there. But although I searched long and hard, of the boy’s bloodline, well, I could find no trace.”

The Aedile thought that he had misheard. “What is that? None at all?”

“I wish it were otherwise. Truly I do.”

“This is—I mean to say, it is unexpected. Quite unexpected.”

“I was surprised myself. As I say, the records of my department are perhaps the most complete on Confluence. Certainly I believe that they are the only fully usable set, ever since your own department purged the archivists of the Palace of the Memory of the People.”

The Aedile failed to understand what Dr. Dismas had told him. He said weakly, “There was no correspondence.”

“None at all. All Shaped bloodlines possess the universal sequence of genes inserted by the Preservers at the time of the remaking of our ancestors. No matter who we are, no matter the code in which our cellular inheritance is written, the meaning of those satellite sequences are the same. But although tests of the boy’s self-awareness and rationality show that he is not an indigen, like them he lacks that which marks the Shaped as the chosen children of the Preservers. And more than that, the boy’s genome is quite different from anything on Confluence.”

“But apart from the mark of the Preservers we are all different from each other, doctor. We are all remade in the image of the Preservers in our various ways.”

“Indeed. But every bloodline shares a genetic inheritance with certain of the beasts and plants and microbes of Confluence. Even the various races of simple indigens, which were not marked by the Preservers and which cannot evolve toward transcendence, have genetic relatives amongst the flora and fauna. The ancestors of the ten thousand bloodlines of Confluence were not brought here all alone; the Preservers also brought something of the home worlds of each of them. It seems that young Yamamanama is more truly a foundling than we first believed, for there is nothing on record, no bloodline, no plant, no beast, nor even any microbe, which has anything in common with him.”

Only Dr. Dismas called the boy by his full name. It had been given to him by the wives of the old Constable, Thaw.

In their language, the language of the harems, it meant Child of the River. The Council for Night and Shrines had met in secret after the baby had been found on the river by Constable Thaw, and it had been decided that he should be killed by exposure, for he might be a creature of the heretics, or some other kind of demon. But the baby had survived for ten days amongst the tombs on the hillside above Aeolis, and the women who had finally rescued him, defying their husbands, had said that bees had brought him pollen and water, proving that he was under the protection of the Preservers. Even so, no family in Aeolis would take in the baby, and so he had come to live in the peel-house, son to the Aedile and brother to poor Telmon.

The Aedile thought of this as he tried to fathom the implications of Dr. Dismas’s discovery. Insects chirred all around in the dry grasses, insects and grass perhaps from the same long-lost world as the beasts which the Preservers had shaped into the ancestors of his own bloodline. There was a comfort, a continuity, in knowing that you were a part of the intricate tapestry of the wide world. Imagine then what it would be like to grow up alone in a world with no knowledge of your bloodline, and no hope of finding one! For the first time that day, the Aedile remembered his wife, dead more than twenty years now. A hot day then, too, and yet how cold her hands had been. His eyes pricked with the beginnings of tears, but he controlled himself. It would not do to show emotion in front of Dr. Dismas, who preyed on weakness like a wolf which follows a herd of antelope.

“All alone,” the Aedile said. “Is that possible?”

“If he were a plant or an animal, then perhaps.” Dr. Dismas pinched out the coal of his second cigarette, dropped the stub and ground it under the heel of his boot. Dr. Dismas’s black calf-length boots were new, the Aedile noted, hand-tooled leather soft as butter.

“We could imagine him to be a stowaway,” Dr. Dismas said. “A few ships still ply their old courses between Confluence and the mine worlds, and one could imagine something stowing away on one of them. Perhaps the boy is an animal, able to mimic the attributes of intelligence, in the way that certain insects mimic a leaf or a twig. But then we must ask, what is the difference between the reality and the mimic?”

The Aedile was repulsed by this notion. He could not bear to think that his own dear adopted son was an animal imitating a human being. He said, “Anyone trying to pluck such a leaf would know.”

“Exactly. Even a perfect mimic differs from what it is imitating in that it is an imitation, with the ability to dissemble, to appear to be something it is not, to become something else. I know of no creature which is so perfect a mimic that it becomes the thing it is imitating. While there are insects which resemble leaves, they cannot make their food from sunlight. They cling to the plant, but they are not part of it.”

“Quite, quite. But if the boy is not part of our world, then where is he from? The old mine worlds are uninhabited.”

“Wherever he is from, I believe him to be dangerous. Remember how he was found. ‘In the arms of a dead woman, in a frail craft on the flood of the river.’ Those, I believe, were your exact words.”

The Aedile remembered old Constable Thaw’s story. The man had shamefully confessed the whole story after his wives had delivered the foundling to the peel-house. Constable Thaw had been a coarse and cunning man, but he had taken his duties seriously.

The Aedile said, “But my dear doctor, you cannot believe that Yama killed the woman—he was just a baby.”

“Someone got rid of him,” Dr. Dismas said. “Someone who could not bear to kill him. Or was not able to kill him.”

“I have always thought that the woman was his mother. She was fleeing from something, no doubt from scandal or from her family’s condemnation, and she gave birth to him there on the river, and died. It is the simplest explanation, and surely the most likely.”

“We do not know all the facts of the case,” Dr. Dismas said. “However, I did examine the records left by my predecessor. She performed several neurological tests on Yamamanama soon after he was brought to your house, and continued to perform them for several years afterward. Counting backward, and allowing for a good margin of error, I formed the opinion that Yamamanama had been born at least fifty days before he was found on the river. We are all marked by our intelligence. Unlike the beasts of the field, we must all of us continue our development outside the womb, because the womb does not supply sufficient sensory input to stimulate growth of neural pathways. I have no reason to doubt that this is not a universal law for all intelligent races. All the tests indicated that it was no newborn baby that Constable Thaw rescued.”

“Well, no matter where he came from, or why, it seems that we are all he has, doctor.”

Dr. Dismas looked around. Although the nearest workers were fifty paces away, chipping in a desultory way at the edge of the neat square of the excavated pit, he stepped closer to the Aedile and said confidingly, “You overlook one possibility. Since the Preservers abandoned Confluence, one new race has appeared, albeit briefly.”

The Aedile smiled. “You scoff at my theory, doctor, but at least it fits with what is known, whereas you make a wild leap into thin air. The ship of the Ancients of Days passed downriver twenty years before Yama was found floating in his cradle, and no members of its crew remained on Confluence.”

“Their heresies live on. We are at war with their ideas. The Ancients of Days were the ancestors of the Preservers, and we cannot guess at their powers.” Dr. Dismas looked sideways at the Aedile. “I believe,” he said, “that there have been certain portents, certain sips . . . The rumors are vague. Perhaps you know more. Perhaps it would help if you told me about them.”

“I trust you have spoken to no one else,” the Aedile said. “Talk like this, wild though it is, could put Yama in great danger.”

“I understand why you have not discussed Yamamanama’s troublesome origin before, even to your own department. But the signs are there, for those who know how to look. The number of machines that flit at the borders of Aeolis, for instance. You cannot hide these things forever.”

The machines around the white boat. The woman in the shrine. Yama’s silly trick with the watchdogs. The bees which had fed the abandoned baby had probably been machines, too.

The Aedile said carefully, “We should not talk of such things here. It requires discretion.”

He would never tell Dr. Dismas everything. The man presumed too much, and he was not to be trusted.

“I am, and shall continue to be, the soul of discretion.”

Never before had Dr. Dismas’s dark, sharp-featured face seemed so much like a mask. It was why the man took the drug, the Aedile realized. The drug was a shield from the gaze and the hurts of the world.

The Aedile said sternly, “I mean it, Dismas. You will say nothing of what you found, and keep your speculations to yourself. I want to see what you found. Perhaps there is something you missed.”

“I will bring the papers tonight, but you will see that I am right in every particular. Now, if I may have permission to leave,” Dr. Dismas said, “I would like to recover from my journey. Think carefully about what I told you. We stand at the threshold of a great mystery.”

When Dr. Dismas had gone, the Aedile called for his secretary. While the man was preparing his pens and ink and setting a disc of red wax to soften on a sun-warmed stone, the Aedile composed in his head the letter he needed to write.

The letter would undermine Dr. Dismas’s already blemished reputation and devalue any claims the apothecary might make on Yama, but it would not condemn him outright. It would suggest a suspicion that Dr. Dismas, because of his drug habit, might be involved with the heretics who had recently tried to set fire to the floating docks, but it must be the merest of hints hedged round with equivocation, for the Aedile was certain that if Dr. Dismas was ever arrested, he would promptly confess all he knew. The Aedile realized then that they were linked by a cat’s cradle of secrets that was weighted with the soul of the foundling boy, the stranger, the sacrifice, the gift, the child of the river.