Paul Mcauley: Shrine of Stars

“Yes. Yes, I did. And after many adventures I am back, but only for a little while, and in secret. The Aedile must not know. No one must know but the people in this room.”

Ananda smiled. “Well, I am glad to see you again.”

Father Quine cleared his throat, and Ananda bit back his next question. “I think you should fetch the oil,” the priest told his sizar.

It did not take long; it was, after all, a metic marriage, the ceremony more in the nature of a blessing than a service. Afterward, Father Quine broke open a cruse of wine, and as they all sat around the kitchen table in the priest’s house, Ananda dug out a little more of Yama’s story. He was convinced that Yama had come straight back from Ys, and Yama did not disabuse him. There was not enough time.

“I will not see you again,” Ananda said at last, ending an uncomfortable pause.

“I do not think so. You will stay in the temple.” Yama meant that Father Quine and Ananda would be placed under house arrest when Prefect Corin came. The temple would be left standing when Aeolis was razed because it belonged to the Department. But he could not tell Ananda any of that.

“O yes,” Ananda said quietly. “And become priest after Quine.” He looked sideways at the priest, who was talking with Derev and her parents. He bent closer to Yama and added in a whisper, “Not that the dry old stick looks like withering away in my lifetime. I’ll be a hundred years sweeping out the naos and polishing the shrine while you and Derev are off adventuring. At least, that’s what you will be doing, I suppose.”

“We will make a home together,” Yama said, “with a little garden, and goats and doves. But not quite yet, I think. I am glad we met again, Ananda. I did not like the way we parted.”

“I had not attended an execution before,” Ananda said. “I was sick afterward. Quine was furious. Because I was sick, and because he knew then that I had broken the fast.”

“Pistachios,” Yama said, remembering that day.

Ananda grinned. “I have not eaten them since. Now, have some more wine.”

“It is time we said a prayer, I think,” Yama said. He drew Derev aside and told her to make her farewells to her parents.

They went together as man and wife before the shrine where so often as a child Yama had helped the Aedile perform the long and meaningless rituals which were part of the duties of his office, and where the aspect of Angel had first found him, so badly frightening the Aedile that he had damaged the shrine’s mechanism.

But it still functioned as a shortcut mouth. Yama and Derev stepped through to a place far away, a bubble hung above a vast chamber deep in the keelways. The chamber was hundreds of leagues long. Machines as big as cities crouched on its floor. Lights came on around the rim of the bubble; lighted windows opened in the air. Some showed views of similar chambers, one for each section of the world.

A voice spoke out of the air and welcomed Yama, and asked him what he wished to do.

And so the end of the world was set in motion.

Afterward, Yama called down the ship and it took them out in a loop that compressed forty years into a few days, so that they could glimpse the end of the world before plunging down a shortcut into the deep past. They emerged around one of the stars mentioned by the Gatekeeper when Yama had first returned to Confluence, a star which had moved closer to the star of Confluence after the Preservers had quit the Galaxy.

One of the worlds which orbited the star had been reshaped into something like the world which had been the cradle of the race which had, over millions of years, changed the orbit of every star of the Galaxy and become at last the Preservers. There were many such worlds, the ship told them; it was possible that one of them might even be the true, ancient Earth which Angel’s crewmates had left Confluence to search for. But Yama and Derev were content to explore the world they had, and afterward returned to Confluence, arriving fifty years before Yama cast his own self upon the waters of the Great River.

They found the tower at the far edge of the City of the Dead, in the foothills of the Rim Mountains. It was abandoned and open to the weather, and they spent some time restoring it before tracking Derev’s grandparents to a small town several hundred leagues downriver of Aeolis. They took new names from an ancient poem Derev loved. Her grandparents refused to take up the burdens of the Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead; their parents had given up their family’s traditional service because there was no longer any need for it, and they would not be persuaded to see a need for it now. But they had a son, ambitious and restless, and he remembered the story Beatrice and Osric told his parents. After they died, more than twenty years later, he sent a message to the new curators of the City of the Dead, saying that he would move to Aeolis if they could help him establish his business there.

“And a few years later he married, and a few years after that I was born,” Beatrice said. “Unless you want to put in the business about the goat, I think you are done, for nothing has happened to us since.”

“Perhaps I should say more about the end of the world,” Osric said.

“It will happen soon enough, and there will be enough stories about it, too. At least one for every world the great ships will settle.” Beatrice set aside the sheaf of paper and went to the window and opened the shutter a little and looked out. “It is still raining, but it looks like it might end soon. A long, cold, wet winter it has been, but at least we found something to fill it, eh, husband?”

“It is not very satisfactory as a tale. There are too many repetitions, and too many words wasted on adventures anyone could have had, or on diversions which led to nothing in particular.”

“Well, that’s how it always is with life. Cut short too soon, with too many loose ends.”

“I wonder about the Ancients of Days. Will they ever find Old Earth? And what about poor Dreen, the Commissioner of Sensch, who went with them?”

“There are many Earths,” Beatrice said. “No doubt they will find one to their liking, but people might already be living there. The Ancients of Days went the long way, remember. They are still traveling on it, and will not arrive anywhere for at least a hundred and fifty thousand years. Everyone else will fall through the shortcuts. Their descendants will be scattered across the Galaxy long before the Ancients of Days arrive.”

“Yes,” Osric said. “The Preservers abandoned the Galaxy and then the Universe, but the ten thousand bloodlines will inherit it. There will be room for everyone, even the heretics. There might be wars more terrible than the war I thought to end, but I do not think the heretics will survive for long. Their philosophy has been defeated before; it will be defeated again.”

“And the indigenous peoples. Do not forget them, husband. You always said that they were the hope that things would be different.”

“They are different. They are not marked by the Preservers. I wonder if that is what the Preservers wanted. We are the servants of the Preservers, but perhaps the indigenous peoples are their true heirs. Perhaps they will triumph over those from whom the Preservers fled. Or perhaps, by the working of some strange plan, they will become the Preservers’ nemesis.”

“We cannot know what the Preservers wanted,” Beatrice said. “But we can wonder about them. I wonder about the bloodlines who became enlightened too. About all those so holy that they vanished from the world. Perhaps they found a way through the event horizon of the Eye, and followed the Preservers to their new universe. We did not explore everything the shrines could do.”