Paul Mcauley: Shrine of Stars

“Ah, but you are interested. I know you are. Besides,” Dr. Dismas added, in the same overly sweet, wheedling voice, “if you do not listen I will slice off one of your ears as a lesson. Now, where was I?”

“You had discovered an old traveler’s tale.”

Yama was interested, despite himself. Dr. Dismas’s story was similar to the lies Eliphas had used to lure him downriver. Eliphas had claimed to have found a traveler’s account of a hidden city in the Glass Desert, a city inhabited by people of Yama’s bloodline. The documents he had shown Yama had been fabrications, but perhaps the old question runner’s lies had been rooted in truth after all.

Dr. Dismas said, “I returned again and again to this poorly written memoir until I had it by heart. I even made a copy of it. But I was a child, with many long years of study ahead of me. My fascination faded and I turned to other matters. When at last I qualified and was sent to my first post, I took only the tools of my trade, in a leather wallet bequeathed to me by my grandfather, and the standard catalogue of electuaries, panaceas, simples, urticants and so on. I did not take the copy of the memoir which I had made, for I had set it aside with other childish things.

“I will not trouble you with the details of my first posting, nor those of my second. I was a foolish and naive young man, eager to do good in a world where goodness can gain only small and temporary victories. But at my third posting, fate intervened. I do not believe in the Preservers, Yamamanama. Or rather, I do not believe that they exist any longer in the phenomenological universe. But it was as if something, some agency, touched my life then, and changed it forever. Perhaps my paramour’s reach was longer than it seemed.

“I was dispatched to a mean little town in the mountains beyond the fall of the Great River, close to the border of the Glass Desert. And it was there that I encountered the symptoms of which I had read and reread with wonder as a child.

“Of course, my interest was rekindled at once. Traveling with a caravanserai, I visited the summer camps of unchanged nomads and learned much of the course of the disease. I marked its progression from simple plaques and associated loss of sensation to mania, blindness and death. I was able to dissect the fresh corpse of a haruspex—I had to break into her tomb to do it—and chart the growths and nodes along her nervous system. And by conflating the routes of the various clans of nomads through the margin of the Glass Desert with the incidence of the disease, I was able to plot its focal point.

“I will not trouble you with a long catalogue of the hardships I endured to reach my goal. I went alone because I trusted no one, and that almost killed me. The Glass Desert is a terrible place. There is no free water beyond the mountains of the Great Divide, for the river which was the mirror of our Great River failed after the wars of the Age of Insurrection. It is a place of glare and heat, of endless sand dunes, saltpans, alkali flats, vitrified craters and devastated terrain. Nothing grows but stoneworts and a few hardy plants which are more like machines than living organisms—when I first saw them I knew then the memoir had not lied, and I was almost killed when, in my excitement, I went too close to a clump of them.

“I took a string of camels and a mule, but the camels contracted a falling sickness and I had to leave most of my supplies with their corpses. The mule survived until a great dust storm blew up. The storm lasted twelve days and all that time the mule was tethered outside my tent. When at last I emerged, with the sun a bleary spot in a sky still stained ocher by suspended dust, I found that the poor beast had been flayed to its bones, and things like turkey vultures were quarreling over what remained. They too were partly machine, and I had to kill them when they turned on me. One clipped me with the tip of a wing, and its serrated flight feathers opened a great gash in my side, clear down to the cartilage sheaves of my chest cage.

“I went on, weakened by my wound and carrying what I could, knowing that I did not have enough water or food for the return journey. I walked at night, and by day sheltered from the heat and from dust devils and fierce little storms of knife-sharp crystallized silica. It was burning-hot by day, and so cold at night that with each breath little puffs of ice crystals fell, tinkling, from my lips. The sky was utterly clear; I felt that I could see past the distant smudges and specks of galaxies to the afterglow of the hatching of the cosmic egg. I walked like this for four days, until I found the place I had been searching for.”

Dr. Dismas lit another cigarette. His hands were trembling badly. Yama watched him closely. He was caught up in the story because what had happened to Dr. Dismas then was happening to him now. The red and black flickering which troubled his vision had intensified; it was as if he was peering through banners which flew on an impalpable wind. Terror beat within him on great steel wings. He had the sudden strange notion that instead of being captured by Dr. Dismas outside the shrine, he had fallen off the edge of the world and was falling still, that this was a terrible dream from which he might at any moment awaken to worse horror.

“O Yamamanama,” Dr. Dismas said at last. “Child of the River. How I envy you! It was so long ago that I have only a few bright memories, worn smooth by my constant handling like pebbles in the bed of a mountain stream. It was so terrible, and so wonderful! Such pain, and such joy! Such joy!”

Yama was amazed, for the apothecary was weeping. Dr. Dismas’s expression was haunted yet ecstatic. “O yes,” he said. “Tears. Poor weak human tears. For what I was. For what I became, in the embrace of my paramour. I was reborn, and it was painful and bloody and wretched. And out of it such glory, such joy. Such joy.”

He blotted the tears from his brown, plaque-stiffened cheeks with the claw of his left hand and sniffed hard. Usually, Dr. Dismas displayed emotion as a theatrical puppet might hold an appropriate mask before its immobile, painted face. (Was it part of the Preservers’ plan, Yama suddenly wondered, that almost all of the bloodlines shared the same facial expressions and bodily postures which expressed fear and hope, rage and love, happiness and sorrow?) His real thoughts were unguessable. But for the first time he appeared to be wholly possessed by human feeling.

“Ah,” Dr. Dismas said at last, sniffing delicately, “it moves me still to think about it. I had come upon the place without realizing it. I was delirious by then. My feet were blistered and badly bleeding. I had heat sores all over my body. My joints were swollen and I was so badly sunburnt that my skin was blackened and cracked, and constantly wept blood and pus. It was dawn. A fierce hot wind was blowing, sucking moisture from my body. I had reached a place of chaotic terrain. The land was like rough-cast glass, dissected by a maze of wandering ridges and canyons. I was lost, and too ill to know that by the end of the day, or by the end of the next day, I would surely be dead. I stumbled into the shade of a deep ravine and threw up my tent and crawled inside.

“My paramour had heard my footsteps leagues away, listening with a thousand whiskers grown across the land. It had watched me from decads of different eyes, some fixed like crystals in the rock and glass, others mounted on scuttling extensions it had cleaved from the wreckage of its own body.

“It was those extensions that came for me, in the heat of noon. There were hundreds of them. They were like spiders or mantids fashioned out of black glass. They moved with stiff scuttling motions. I woke when the first cut through the material of my tent. In a fevered panic, I killed decads with a single shot of my energy pistol and stumbled from the blazing wreckage of my tent. More waited outside, clinging to the vertical rock-face beneath which I’d camped. They fell on me, stung me insensible, and spun a cocoon around me.