Paul Mcauley: Shrine of Stars

Yama’s fist was so tightly clenched that his fingernails cut four points of pain into his palm. He said, “Whatever I was able to do has been taken away from me. I am glad that it is gone. Even if I still had it, I would never choose to serve you.”

“Oh, it isn’t a question of choice. And it is still there, somewhere or other. I’m sure it will surface again.”

“Do what you will. Invoke the thing you placed inside me. Invoke your disease. But do not involve me. Do not try to make me take your side or see your point of view.” Yama turned away and crossed to the bed and sat down.

Dr. Dismas remained by the window. Hunched into his frockcoat, he slowly and carefully lit another cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke while gazing at the city spread below, like a conqueror at his ease. At last, without turning around, he said, “You have it easy, Yamamanama. I envy you. I was alone when I was changed, and my paramour was old and badly crippled. We both nearly died before the union was complete, and we nearly died again when we retraced my path across the Glass Desert. That was almost forty years ago. An odd coincidence, don’t you think?”

Yama was interested, despite the loathing he felt toward the apothecary. He said, “I suppose that it was something to do with the Ancients of Days.”

“Good, good. You have been learning about your past. It will save us much time. Yes, it had something to do with one of them. With the most important of them, in fact. All of the Ancients of Days were merely variations on a single theme, but the one who called herself Angel was closest to the original. I believe that you have met her.”

The woman in the shrine. The woman in white. Yama said, “It was the revenant of something five million years old, of a pathetic scared fool who failed at godhood and escaped her enemies by fleeing to a neighboring galaxy. She found nothing there and returned to meddle with Confluence. She was the seed of the heretics, and was killed by her fellows.”

“Indeed, indeed. But before she was killed, Angel left a copy of herself in the space inside the shrines. Her aspect—that was who you talked to. She wants you on her side, and so she told you her story. And told you how powerful she was, no doubt.”

“I destroyed her, Doctor.”

Dr. Dismas smiled. “Oh, I think not. You have much to learn about distributed information. She is stored as a pattern of interrupted light deep within the space inside the shrines. Perhaps your paramour will destroy her, when it is stronger, and if I so choose, but you destroyed only the copy of a copy.” Dr. Dismas plunged his right hand into the pocket of his frockcoat and brought out the plastic straws which he habitually cast when he needed to make a decision. He rattled them together, smiling craftily, and put them away. “The fate of gods in my hands—don’t you find it amusing? Ah, you are a humorless boy, Yamamanama. It is not your fault. Anyone brought up by that stiff-backed narrow-minded backward-looking innumerate superstitious fool would—”

Yama roared and ran at Dr. Dismas again, and again was knocked down by one of the machines, but before he fell he had the satisfaction of seeing the apothecary take a step backward. For a moment he was blinded by a silent roar of red and black that seemed to fill his head. He rolled onto his back, a ringing in his ears and the taste of blood in his mouth, and slowly got to his knees. When he stood, the room seemed to sway around him, and he sat down on the edge of the bed.

Dr. Dismas lit another cigarette and watched Yama with a genuine tenderness. “You’ll need that spirit, Yamamanama,” he said. “It is a hard road I have set you on, but you will thank me at last. You will be transformed, as I have been transformed. I will tell you how.”

“It is a symptom of the disastrous reversal in the development of the peoples of Confluence that, although their technologies predated the creation of our world by five million years, the Ancients of Days were able to manipulate much that was hidden or lost to the ten thousand bloodlines. In particular, Angel was able to enter the space inside the shrines, and she learned much there.”

“She destroyed the avatars,” Yama said. “People believe that the heretics destroyed them, but it happened before the war began.”

“Hush. This is my story, not hers. You already know hers, it seems. She tried to recruit you, but I know that you resisted, for otherwise you would not be here. You chose wisely. She is not our friend, Yamamanama. She is our ally, yes, but not our friend. Enobarbus submits to her without reservation, but we have our own plans. And besides, much of what she says is self-serving, or simply untrue. Angel did not destroy the avatars. That was the work of the copy of herself that she installed in the space inside the shrines. The aspect you talked to was a copy of that copy, but no matter. In any form, it is a poor deluded thing. After Angel died, it found itself besieged, and it lashed out. That was how the avatars came to be destroyed. The avatars, and many records, and most of the directories and maps within the space inside the shrines. That was the true war; the war fought since, between the heretics and the bureaucrats, is but its shadow. And so the bureaucrats were defeated before the first ship of fools sailed from Ys to put down the uprisings at the midpoint of the world.

“But that does not concern us. While Angel was traveling downriver toward the last and least city of Confluence, where she would plant the seed that would grow into the heretics, at that same moment, I was entering the Glass Desert. I had been trained as an apothecary—my family had been a part of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons for thousands of years—but I sought greater knowledge. Arcane knowledge hidden or forgotten or forbidden by priests and bureaucrats frightened by the true destiny of the world. As a child I had riddled the crannies of the Department’s library. This was before the hierodules within the screens of the library were destroyed along with the avatars, and written records were almost entirely unused then. There was a vast amount of trash, but I discovered a few gems.”

Yama said, “And that was where you met Eliphas.”

“No, not then. I knew him, in the way that a boy might glancingly know everyone who works in the place where he grows up, but until my return last year I doubt that I had ever exchanged a single word with him. Eliphas had long before given up searching for ancient treasures, although his friend and one-time partner, the chief of clerks of the library, did give me encouragement. He was interested in maps, but I found something better.

“It was the personal account of a traveling chirurgeon five thousand years dead. He had worked amongst the unchanged bloodlines at the midpoint of the world, and found a cluster of odd symptoms amongst certain of the nomadic clans which sometimes ventured into the ancient battlegrounds of the Glass Desert. It was unusual in that the same symptoms were exhibited by different bloodlines. Most clans killed or cast out those afflicted, but in some they were considered blessed by the Preservers and became soothsayers, prophets, oracles, mysts and so on.”

“This is the disease with which you infected me,” Yama said.

Dr. Dismas flung out an arm, pointed at Yama, and screamed with sudden violence, “Quiet! Enough interruptions! You will be quiet or I will—” His arm trembled violently, and he whirled around to face the window. His shoulders heaved. When he turned back he was smiling and there was honey in his voice. “This is my story, Yamamanama. Do not race ahead. You think you know more than you do.”

“Perhaps I am not interested in your story, and want to bring it to its end as quickly as possible.”