Paul Mcauley: Shrine of Stars

“Most likely they became so holy that they simply died out, like the people of Gond. But what is the use of speculating on things we cannot know? We cannot know about the fate of the Preservers because they fled the Universe so completely that nothing can return from them, not even light. You will waste your life, husband, thinking on questions which have no answers because they could have any answer.”

“And there is the ghost ship,” Osric said stubbornly. “I had thought that it would be me who would help save the boy when he escaped Enobarbus and Dr. Dismas. That I would invoke the vision of the ghost ship which stopped them from chasing the boy after he jumped overboard. But I forgot. I went directly to you. Perhaps the boy will not escape Dr. Dismas and Enobarbus, wife, and so will not come here. This may be a different time-line.”

Beatrice was putting on her yellow oilskin. She said, “Every story must have a mystery, husband. No one likes a story in which everything is explained. How could you explain why people do the things they do, for instance? Now, I am going to see to the goats. Will you be all right while I am gone? Will you watch the fire?”

“Yes, of course,” Osric said, as she went out.

But he was thinking of the ghost ship, and the way it had dissolved into a bank of fog which had hid him from the pinnace commanded by Enobarbus after he had escaped from it. The ghost ship had surely been an illusion conjured by a machine, for he had seen a machine rising out of the fog. But who had commanded the machine? Perhaps it had been his first miracle, and he had not known it. Or perhaps the machines he believed to be his to command had been working for some other power’s subtle plan, of which he was but a part. But it did not do to think of these things. If anything was possible, then everything was possible. No. What will be must be. He had made that the core of his life when he had chosen to find Derev, and had closed his part of the tale by beginning the end of the world.

He remembered seeing how it would end. They had gone there after he had woken the great engines in the keelways. The ship had hung high above the long plane of the world and they had watched as it broke apart. At the beginning of his adventures, he had seen a picture slate which had shown one of his bloodline at the time of the construction of Confluence (he would have to find that slate, Osric thought). Behind the man had been a hundred shining splinters hung against a starry sky, but he had not realized then what they were: the elements of the world, the great ships which the Builders had joined together in the first act of the creation of the world.

He had reversed the process. He had saved the world and its people by destroying it. The Great River had failed; the engines in the keelways had been woken from their long slumber and had slowly resumed their functions. It took forty years. And then the shrines woke and warned the peoples of the world, telling them what would happen, and where they could find shelter. And less than a year later the world broke apart into its original sections, and those sections fell in different directions across the sky toward the expanding throats of the shortcuts: a field of blue rings flowering in the empty blackness of space and a cloud of splinters shining in the light of the lonely star.

How many had died, in the last days of Confluence? There had been terrible famines when the river had finally run dry, and earthquakes had thrown all of the cities into ruin. Certainly almost all of the heretics had died, for they had silenced most of the shrines in the cities they had captured, and so had no warning of the world’s end. But many others had died, too, and many more would die when the great ships reached their destinations, and the reoccupation of the Galaxy began.

But many more would live, and prosper, and multiply. He dozed a little, and woke, and remembered that after the boy came they would have to think of Pandaras. The boy would find Pandaras in Ys (or had it been the other way around?) and take him on his adventures, and Pandaras’s own story would begin when the boy’s ended. Although he had been charged with changing all the indigenous peoples of Confluence, Pandaras would not stop searching for his master. He would return at last to Ys, the place he loved most and knew best. They would track him down by the coin he carried, and explain how his master’s story had ended. He must remember to tell Beatrice, Osric thought, and fell asleep again.

The door banged open and Beatrice came in, shaking water from her long hair. Osric stirred. “Look,” she said. “See what I found.”

It was a bunch of violets. She found a bowl and set them in it. Their sweet scent slowly filled the kitchen, promising the end of winter and the beginning of spring.

Soon the story would be over, and they could leave. They would find Pandaras, and call down the ship. They would embark for the last time. Where would they go? To the deep past, or to the deep future? All of history stood before him like a book. He could open it at any page.

He would have to think hard about it. Spring had only just begun, but soon Derev would find the boy in the ancient tomb in the Silent Quarter of the City of the Dead, and bring him here. And the story would begin again, and in its beginning would be its end.