Paul Mcauley: Ancients of Days

“They celebrate the beginning of winter. They dislike the summer’s heat.”

“Ah. In any case, although the Eye is named because it has the appearance of the organ of sight, it does not share the function of its namesake. Anyone with a little learning knows that when the Preservers vanished beyond the horizon of the Universe, they left behind servants to watch over us, their poor creatures. Were not the shrines once the homes of countless avatars who guided and inspired us? Are not all of the changed bloodlines infected with the particles of the breath of the Preservers, who will cherish our memories after we die?”

“I am glad to see the Eye. I have always preferred summer to winter. Is it what you brought me to see?”

“I would like to talk with you in private. Do not be afraid. This walkway has stood for longer than the Department. It was built long before Confluence entered its present orbit.”

But Yama felt a chill vertigo, for they were now so far out that the buildings heaped along the hem of the Palace were directly below. A cold wind buffeted him; the walkway hummed like a plucked wire. All he could see of it was that part of its mesh floor beneath his feet, illuminated by the intense light of the single firefly above his head.

He could lose his grip on the slender rail and fall like a stone through someone’s roof. Slip, or perhaps be pushed.

“You are the first to come here with me,” Syle said, “but then, you are a singular young man. Take your firefly, for instance. You should have allowed them to choose you, and not taken the brightest anyone has ever seen.”

“But it did choose me.” Yama had kept others from joining it because he feared that he would be blinded inside their ardent orbits.

“Some say that fireflies multiply in dark places hidden from our sight, but I think not. Every year there are fewer and fewer people in the Palace proper—by which I mean the corridors and chambers and cells, and not the newer buildings built over the lower floors. Once, even the least of bloodlines were crowned with twenty or thirty fireflies, and the Palace blazed with their light. Now, many fireflies are so feeble that they have become tropically fixed on members of the indigenous tribes which infest the roof, or on rats and other vermin. I doubt that there is another firefly as bright as the one you wear, except perhaps within the chambers of the Hierarchs. It will attract much attention, but it is fixed now, and will not leave you until you leave this place.”

Yama said, “I hope that it does not put me in danger.”

He could order the firefly to leave, and then choose others more ordinary—but that might be worse than having selected it in the first place.

Syle did not answer at once. At last, he said, “You know that I find the cateran is very amusing, but I do not think that she will be able to marshal a successful defense of the Department.”

Yama remembered what Rega had said. “If you gave us more men—”

“How would you train them? Indigenous Affairs will send an army of its best troops to enforce the quit claim.”

“That is what Tamora thinks, too.”

“Then at least she has some sense. But she is an ordinary cateran. I believe that you are capable of greater things.”

Yama said warily, “You do?”

Yama’s wise but unworldly stepfather had not known what Yama was. He had sent the apothecary, Dr. Dismas, to the Palace of the Memory of the People to discover what he could about Yama’s bloodline, but Dr. Dismas had lied to the old man and claimed to have found nothing, and then tried to kidnap Yama for his own purposes. For the first time Yama wondered whether Syle, kin to his sweetheart and to one of the curators of the City of the Dead, who had shown him that he was of the bloodline which had built the world according to the will of the Preservers, was part of their conspiracy.

Syle said, “We have forgotten how to speak plainly here. In a department as old as this, words raise such echoes that their meaning might never be clear. Forgive me.”

“But we are in the open air now.”

“Luria has been pythoness for more than a century, but the Department is more than two hundred times older. I must be loyal to the Department first.”

Yama saw the man’s distress. He said, “No one can overhear us here.”

“Except the Preservers.”

“Yes. We must always speak truthfully to them.”

Syle gripped the fragile rail and stared into the night, toward the first light of the Eye of the Preservers. He said, “The truth then. I know what you are, Yama. You are one of the Builders. Your bloodline was the first of all the bloodlines the Preservers raised up to populate Confluence, and the machines which maintain this world have not forgotten your kind. All machines obey you, even those that follow the orders of other men. Even those which will not obey anyone else.” He laughed. “There, I have said it. Rega thought I could not, but I have. And the world has not ended.”

Yama said, “How did you find out what I am?”

Wind blew Syle’s white, feathery hair back from the narrow blade of his face. He said, “Our library is very extensive.”

Yama’s heart turned over. Perhaps his quest was already over, before he had hardly begun. He said, “I came to Ys to search for my bloodline, and would very much like to see that book. Will you show me now?”

Syle said, “No, not yet. The library is closed to all but the pythonesses and the highest officers of the domestic staff. I would show you all I can, Yama, but I fear that I am more in need of help than you. I’m told that the Preservers act through you. If that’s true, then whatever you do cannot be evil. You cannot help but do good. Don’t deny the powers you have. I know, for instance, that the Temple of the Black Well was burned down on the day you entered the Palace. It seemed that someone woke the thing in the well and then destroyed it. As for us, a lesser miracle would suffice.”

Yama had encountered two feral machines since he had arrived in Ys. In a desperate moment, he had called down the first without knowing what he was doing. The second had fallen in the wars of the Age of Insurrection, and men had later built a temple over the hole it had burnt through the keelrock. The machine had lain brooding within a tomb of congealed lava for an age, until woken by the same call which had brought down the first. With the help of the ancient guardians of the temple, Yama had reburied it.

Machines like those had destroyed half the world in the Age of Insurrection, and although their time was long past, and their powers had faded as the lights of the fireflies had faded, they were still powerful. They shadowed the world from which they had been expelled, waiting, some said, for the Preservers to return to begin the final battle when the just, living and dead, would be raised up, and the damned thrown aside.

Beyond dismissing the fireflies which had eagerly flocked to him when he had entered the Palace, Yama had not tried to influence a machine since. He was scared that he might inadvertently wake more monsters from the past. He told Syle, “I signed as a cateran, for a cateran’s wages. That is the duty I will discharge to you, dominie, nothing more and nothing less. What you have learned from your library is your own affair. You have not shared it with the pythonesses, or you would not have brought me here to talk in secret. Perhaps I should ask them about it.”

Syle turned to Yama and said with sudden passion, “Listen to me! If you can help me, then I can help you find out about your bloodline. True pythonesses can see the past as well as the future. Just as our actions and wishes contain the seeds of the future, so the present also holds the echoes of actions and wishes of the past. Indeed, since there was only one past but there are many possible futures it is easier to read the past from the present than it is to predict the future. It is said that the Preservers could travel from the future into the past as easily as starships slip from star to star, but that they could not travel into the future because from the point of view of the past the future does not yet exist. And so with prediction.”