Paul Mcauley - Shrine of Stars

The ship said nervously, “It sees through me.”

Yama reassured it, and told the machine that it must leave now. It would not come to him until it was asked again, and meanwhile it would tell its fellows not to interfere.

There are several of us stranded across the world , the thing said sulkily. I cannot intercede with them.

“I will deal with those when the time comes.”

I will help you now. The world can be yours, with my help. Leave this poor vessel. Let me show you.

“Be still! The world is already mine. You will do what I ask, and no more.”

Then, I do nothing , the machine said, and gladly. But tell me first why my mark is on you.

“You will help me twice more, and then you will be free. I promise.”

The feral machine fell away into the sky, even as other machines accelerated toward the disturbance it had created. But these, the keepers of the world, still loyal to the Preservers, found nothing. The feral machine had already returned to its station far beyond the world, and the ship was falling downriver toward the nearest shrine.

The Gatekeeper had said that there were two kinds of shortcut; Yama had guessed where the entrances to those which spanned only space were hidden.

The glacier ended at a small, mountain-rimmed sea continually crossed and re-crossed by waves caused by falls of ice from cliffs two leagues high. Bergs and bergy bits churned and crashed amongst the waves. Melt-water spilled from the sea and meandered away in a thousand rivers and a million streams, through chains of lakes and raised bogs and drumlins, feeding the marshes which drained at last into the head of the Great River.

The shrine stood on a long, low island in the middle of one of the lakes, its black circle set on a shelf of bare rock raised above dwarf birches that were just coming into leaf; their thin black branches, laden with golden buds, swayed stiffly in the clean cold air. Gnarled junipers hugged the ground, red berries brilliant as drops of blood against the dark green of their needles, growing around boulders splattered with orange and black and gray stoneworts. Although it was summer, a cold wind blew from the edge of the glacier, and pockets of snow still clung in shady places on the island. Clear, ice-cold water tentatively fingered the pebbles of the shore, over and over. The sun was setting beyond range after range of mountains, touching every peak with a dab of light, painting long shadows amongst the fir trees that marched down to the shore of the lake, gilding its slow ripples. A skein of geese flew across red stripes of cloud that stretched on either side of the sun, honking each to each.

The world! So wonderful in its variety, so beautiful in every particular detail.

The ship had changed shape, spreading wide flat wings which delicately manipulated the world’s gravity fields. It floated down to the island’s shore, and Yama stepped from one of the wings onto the little gravel beach beneath the shrine. He leaned on Prefect Corin’s staff, which the regulator had saved. He was still very weak. Freezing water lapped his bare feet; wind tangled in his long hair and beard. The clean, cold air was as bracing as good wine. The regulator followed with the baby, which was bundled in silvery cloth so that only the tip of its nose showed.

The regulator had unstitched the badly ripped and bloodstained silvery garment Bryn had given Yama, and made it into a kind of cloak to wear over the black tunic and leggings the ship had provided. She had reserved a small piece to swaddle the baby. She did not need any kind of clothing, she claimed, and seemed unaffected by the icy wind. She had refused to stay with the ship, saying that Yama did not know how to look after the baby.

“Males of your bloodline cannot give suck. I have started a flow of milk, master, and he feeds happily. Do not take that from him.”

Yama made sure that the ship knew what it had to do. He felt that every step might break the world, change it into something other than that which it must become. He told it, “Take the cloned mouth of the shortcut and make a loop at light-speed forty years long. Make sure that you arrive back at the point in space from which you started, a few days before we first arrived. The Great River will flow through the shortcut into the future and we will be able to travel through it into the past. Are you sure that you can do this?”

“Of course,” the ship said primly. “Shortcuts were brought here in the first place by my kind.”

“Forty years, no more, no less. That is important.”

“It will happen, or you will not be here. I know.”

“There may be many time-lines where it may not have happened, because you carelessly misunderstood my instructions.”

“You can trust me,” the ship said. “You should trust me to take you to Ys also. I know that the mooring towers still stand, and I can have you there in a minute.”

“I do not want you to be seen. This way will suffice. You remember where we will meet?”

“Downriver, ten days—what you call a decad—from now. At the far edge of the City of the Dead. As if no one will see us there.”

“There are things in Ys I do not wish to awaken. Or at least, not yet.”

“The river will not cease to flow here once I have diverted it into the future. Not at once. There is much ice above us.”

“I know. But the glaciers will flow more and more slowly because there will no longer be new snow and ice pushing them forward. I already know how long it will take, and when it should begin. Go now.”

The ship rose, turning and dipping as it rose. It swept quickly across the lake, setting a flock of wildfowl to flight, then angled straight up. A moment later a boom echoed across the wide sky, and Yama saw the white streak which marked where the ship was accelerating toward the mouth of the shortcut at the end of the Terminal Mountains, where the river fell back into the world.

Yama felt a mixture of apprehension and a kind of existential dizziness. Nothing was fixed. This was not the world from which he had begun: the Universe would not end, as he had been taught all his life, in a single infinite moment, when all the dead would be reborn into the perpetual grace of the Preservers. All was change, a constant flux. Even the Preservers sought to change, in universe after universe without end.

He said, “Perhaps I should do nothing. Perhaps it should end here, for else I condemn myself to becoming no more than a machine toiling away at the same endless task. I have set the Great River free from its unending cycle, but how can I set myself free from the circle of my own history?”

The regulator was a practical person. She said, “You have already begun, master, by sending the ship on its mission. Who can say how it will end?”

“You are right, of course.” Yama smiled. “You remind me of a dear lost friend. Perhaps I might see him again. Yes, it has begun, and I must go on as I must. And Derev, too…”

As he climbed up to the shrine, it began to flow with banners of light. He stepped into the light, and the regulator followed him.

Ys was suddenly spread below him. On one side the sun was falling behind the Rim Mountains; on the other, the Great River was painted with golden light on which the black motes of thousands of boats and ships were sharply drawn, as if by the most exquisite calligraphy. The river was fuller than Yama remembered it, lapping at the margin of the city, covering the shore where in the near future there would be wide mud flats and a scurf of shanty towns. And between mountains and river was the immemorial city. Ys: the endless grid of her streets and avenues sprawled wantonly beneath a brown haze of air pollution, sending up a shuddering roar in which the brazen clash of the gongs of one of her many temples and the shrill song of a ship’s siren emerged as sharply as points of light.