Paul McAuley: Child of the River

“I wish with all my heart to find out,” Yama said, “but I do not believe in ghosts.”

“We have spoken before.” The woman tilted her head with a curiously coquettish gesture, and smiled. “You don’t remember, do you?” she said. “Well, you were very young, and that foolish man with you hid your face in a fold of his robes. I think he must have done something to the shrine, afterwards, because that window has been closed to me ever since, like so many others. There is much old damage in the system from the war between the machines. I could only glimpse you now and then as you grew up. How I wish I could have spoken to you! How I wish I could have helped you! I am so happy to meet you again, but you should not be here, in this strange and terrible city. You should be on your way downriver, to the war.”

“What do you know about me? Please, domina, will you tell me what you know?”

“There are gates. Manifolds held open by the negative gravity of strange matter. They run in every direction, even into the past, all the way back to when they were created. I think that is where you come from. That, or the voidships. Perhaps your parents were passengers or stowaways on a voidship, time-shifted by the velocity of some long voyage. We did not learn where the voidships went. There was not enough time to learn a tenth of what we wanted to know. In any case, you come from the deep past of this strange world, Yamamanama, but although I have searched the records, I do not know who sent you, or why. Does it matter? You are here, and there is much to be done.”

Yama could not believe her. For if he had been sent here from the deep past when his people, the Builders, had been constructing the world according to the desires of the Preservers, then he could never find his family or any others like him. He would be quite alone, and that was unthinkable.

He said, “I was found on the river. I was a baby, lying on the breast of a dead woman in a white boat.” He suddenly felt that his heart might burst with longing. “Please tell me! Tell me why I am here!”

The woman in the shrine lifted her hands, wrists cocked in an elegant shrug. She said, “I’m a stranger here. My original walked out into your world and died there, but not before she started to change it. And before she died part of her came here, and here I am still. I sometimes wonder if you’re part of what she did after she left me here. Would that make you my son, if it were true?”

Yama said, “I am looking for answers, not more riddles.”

“Let me give an example. You see the statues? You think them monuments to dead heroes, but the truth is simpler than any story.”

“Then they are not statues?”

“Not at all. They are soldiers. They were garrisoned here after the main part of the temple was built, to guard against what the foolish little priests of the temple call the Thing Below. I suppose that when the apses were remodeled many years later it was easier to incorporate the soldiers into the architecture than to move them. Most of their kind have been smelted down, and small pieces of armor have been cast from their remains, so in a sense they still defend the populace. But the soldiers around us are the reality, and the human soldiers who wear reforged scraps of the integuments of their brothers are but the shadows of that reality, as I am a shadow of the one for whom I speak. Unlike the soldiers, she is quite vanished from this world, and only I remain.”

Yama looked up at the nearest of the figures. It stared above his head at one of its fellows on the opposite side of the square apse, but Yama fancied that he saw its eyes flicker toward him for an instant. They were red, and held a faint glow that he knew had not been there before.

He said, “Am I then a shadow too? I am searching for others like me. Can I find them?”

“I would be amazed and delighted if you did, but they are all long dead. I think that you will be sufficient, Yamamanama. Already you have discovered that you can control the machines which maintain this habitat. There is much more I can teach you.”

“My bloodline was made by the Preservers to build the world, and then they went away. That much I have learnt, at least. I will discover more in the Palace of the Memory of the People.”

“They were taken back,” the woman said. “You might say that if I am a shadow of what I was, then your kind were a shadow of what you call the Preservers and what I suppose I could call my children, although they are as remote from me as I am from the plains apes which walked out of Afrique and set fire to the Galaxy.”

Someone had recently said something similar to Yama.

Who? Trying to remember, he said automatically, “All are shadows of the Preservers.”

“Not quite all. There are many different kinds of men on this strange world—I suppose I must call it a world—and each has been reworked until it retains only a shadow of its animal ancestors. Most, but not all, have been salted with a fragment of inheritable material derived from the Preservers. The dominant races of this habitat are from many different places and many different times, but they all are marked by this attribute, and all believe that they can evolve to a higher state. Indeed, many seem to have evolved out of existence, but it is not clear if they have transcended or merely become extinct. But the primitive races, which resemble men but are little better than animals, are not marked, and have never advanced from their original state. There is much I still do not understand about this world, but that much I do know.”

“If you can help me understand where I came from, perhaps I can help you.”

The woman smiled. “You try to bargain with me. But I have already told you where you came from, Yamamanama, and I have already helped you. I have sung many songs of praise in your honor. I have told many of your coming. I have raised up a champion to fight for you. You should be with him now, sailing downriver to the war.”

Yama remembered the young warlord’s story. He said, “With Enobarbus?”

“The soldier too. But I meant Dr. Dismas. He found me long ago, long before I spoke with Enobarbus. You should be with them now. With their help, and especially with mine, you could save the world.”

Yama laughed. “Lady, I will do what I can against the heretics, but I do not think I can do more than any other man.”

“Against the heretics? Don’t be silly. I have not been able to speak to you, but I have watched you. I heard your prayers, after your brother’s death. I know how desperately you wish to become a hero and avenge him. Ah, but I can make you more than that.”

After the news of Telmon’s death, Yama had prayed all night before the shrine in the temple. The Aedile had sent two soldiers to watch over him, but they had fallen asleep, and in the quiet hour before dawn Yama had asked for a sign that he would lead a great victory in Telmon’s name.

He had thought then that he wanted to redeem his brother’s death, but he understood now that his prayers had been prompted by mere selfishness. He had wanted a shape to his own life, to know its beginning and to be given a destiny.

He realized that perhaps his prayer had been answered after all, but not in the way he had hoped.

“You must take up your inheritance,” the woman said. “I can help you. Together we can complete the changes my original began. I think you have already begun to explore what you can do. There is much more, if you will let me teach you.”

“If you had listened to me, domina, you would know that I pledged to save the world, not change it.”

Did her gaze darken? For a moment, it seemed to Yama that her strange beauty was merely a mask or film covering something horrible.

She said, “If you want to save the world, it must be changed. Change is fundamental to life. The world will be changed whichever side wins the war, but only one side can ensure that stasis is not enforced again. Stasis preserves dead things, but it suffocates life. A faction of the servants of this world realized that long ago. But they failed, and those which survived were thrown into exile. Now they are our servants, and together we will succeed where they alone did not.” Yama remembered the cold black presence of the feral machine he had inadvertently called down at the merchant’s house, and it took all his will not to run from the woman, as Pandaras had run at first sight. He knew now which side this avatar was on, and where Enobarbus and Dr. Dismas would have taken him if he had not escaped. Dr. Dismas had lied about everything. He was a spy for the heretics, and Enobarbus was not a champion against them, but a warlord secretly fighting on their side. He had not escaped when his ship had been sunk, but had been captured by the heretics and made into one of them. Or perhaps he had been granted safe passage because he already was one of them—for had he not spoken of a vision which had spoken to him from the shrine of the temple of his people? Yama knew now who had spoken to the young soldier, and knew what course he had been set upon. Not against the heretics, but for them. What a fool he had been to believe otherwise!