Ancients of Days

Chapter Sixteen Of Miracles

Eliphas said, “I studied long on this when I was much younger. I came to the conclusion then—and I have found no reason to change my mind—that there are three classes of miracles.”

The old man was sitting with Yama and Captain Lorquital on the quarterdeck, in the shadow of the booming sail. It was the morning of the third day of the voyage. The wind had picked up in the night, blowing strongly from the upriver quarter of the far-side shore. Water rushed by the hull and the river sparkled out to its distant horizon, salted with millions of whitecaps. There was a lightning storm fifty leagues to starboard. Whips of light flickered under massed purple clouds, and now and again the sound of thunder rolled faintly across the face of the waters.

Eliphas ticked off categories of miracle on his long thin fingers. He said, “There are those events in which something happens that is contrary to nature, such as the sun failing to reverse its course in the sky at noon, but instead continuing on to the far-side. There are those events which may occur in Nature, but never in that particular order, such as a dead man returning to life, or the Eye of the Preservers rising at the same time as the Galaxy. And then there are those events which may occur naturally, but which in the case of a miracle do so without natural causation, such as this good ship dashing along with no wind behind her and no current beneath her. So we see that most miracles are quite natural processes, but without the usual causes or order.”

Ixchel Lorquital said, “Myself, I don’t believe in supernatural happenings. You’ll hear talk ashore that sailors are superstitious. But what it is, we’re careful because we can’t take anything for granted on the river. It seems to me that miracles happen because people are hoping they’ll happen. It’s mostly religious people who claim to have seen a miracle, as is only natural. They’re the ones who’ve the most to gain from it, even if they don’t think that way. What I’d say is, if someone says they saw something contrary to nature, then it’s more likely that they are mistaken.”

Eliphas nodded. “All you say is true, sister. The most difficult thing about miracles is not trying to explain them away, but trying to prove that something is a miracle, and not simply a manifestation of natural law or of ancient technology, or a trick cunningly set up, or an illusion dependent upon a willing suspension of belief on the part of the audience. In ancient times there were theaters of the mind in which participants could explore fantastic landscapes where miracles occurred as a matter of course, much as puppets in a street theater may be made to fly, or breathe fire, or rise from the dead. But of course those were not miracles, but illusions.”

“Then you might say that I only dreamed that the caryatid came to life,” Yama said, “or that I talked with the woman in the shrine of the Temple of the Black Well in a dream. Unfortunately, while it might be a comforting thought, I do not believe it to be true. The truth is that there are things in the world which are long forgotten, and somehow I am capable of waking them. The question is not how these things happened, but why they happened to me. If I knew the answer to that, I would be a happy man.”

Ixchel Lorquital said, “Before my husband died, before the war, we traveled up and down the Great River at least once a year. I reckon to have seen every bloodline on Confluence, including most of the indigenous tribes that haunt the Rim Mountains and the jungles and marshes down by the midpoint of the world. But I’m sorry to say I have never seen anyone like you, young man.”

Yama smiled and said, “I am comforted to think that I do not have to spend my time searching, for you have already done it for me.”

“Not even as sturdy a vessel as the Weazel could sail beyond the end of the river,” Eliphas said, “and that is where Yama’s bloodline may live now.”

“No one goes there,” Ixchel Lorquital said, “except for desperate prospectors and a few crazy pillar saints.”

Eliphas nodded. “Precisely, sister. What better place, then, to hide?”

Ixchel Lorquital laughed and clapped her hands. They were fleshy, with loose webs of skin linking the fingers, and they made a loud slapping sound. She said, “A gentleman as worldly as you could charm the fish from the water by persuading them that the air was safe to breathe. Fine words are wasted on an old woman like me. My daughter now, she’s a connoisseur of compliments. It would cheer her up to hear some of that shiny talk of yours.”

Eliphas bowed.

“I have to say that a pale skin like yours,” Ixchel Lorquital told Yama, “is not suited to the desert lands beyond the midpoint.”

Eliphas said, “The memoir found by my esteemed friend Kun Norbu, the chief of clerks of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons, suggests that they live in caverns beneath the surface of the deserts.”

Yama smiled. “My father is always digging to find the past. What better place to find the first people of the world than in an underground city?”

“Just so, brother, just so. Many years ago, when I was still a young man—if such a thing can be imagined—my friend Kun Norbu and I found a passage below a ruined cliff temple. It led far underground, to a chamber containing many vast machines which were no longer functioning, and the chamber stretched so far into the darkness that after two days we scrupled to explore no further. But perhaps we should have continued. I have often dreamed of it since, and sometimes in these dreams I have glimpsed such wonders that on waking I wondered if I had gone mad.”

Eliphas’s silver eyes held faint concentric patterns that widened and closed like irises. There was a fine grain, as of well-cured leather, to his smooth black skin. His fingers bunches of deftly articulated twigs. The neat whorls of flesh around the naked tympani of his ears. Yama realized that he really knew very little of this old man, who had insisted on following him for no other reason, it seemed, than to rekindle the adventurous spirit of his long-lost youth. Last night, he had discovered Eliphas crouched in the glory hole below deck, muttering to a small plastic rectangle, some kind of charm or fetish. What prayers, to what entity? Surely not to the Preservers. Tamora was right, Yama thought. He should not trust people so readily.

Eliphas returned Yama’s gaze. He smiled. “As for why you are able to do what you have done, brother, that’s quite another question. We must ask whether miracles are caused because the Preservers or their agents actively interfere in the world, or whether, because the Preservers created the world, miracles occur simply as part of a natural chain of causation that was ordained from the beginning.”

Ixchel Lorquital took the stem of her unlit pipe from her mouth, leaned back in her sling chair, and spat over the rail toward the water rushing past below. She wiped her mouth on the back of her web-fingered hand and said, “Everyone knows that the Preservers have turned away from the world. It has carried on without them, for better or worse, so it never did need them to run everything. The same with everything else, I reckon. The stars were there before the Preservers came along—they just moved them into more pleasing patterns.”

“Just so,” Eliphas said. “But there are some who believe that the Preservers, when they withdrew from the Universe, did so in order to be able to extend themselves from first cause to last end. And so, by leaving us, the Preservers have in fact spread themselves throughout creation. They watch over us still, but in a subtler fashion than by manifesting their will through the avatars of the shrines.”

“There were riots when the last of the avatars were silenced by the heretics,” Ixchel Lorquital said. “Many temples were burned down. Those were black years.”

Eliphas said, “In truth, the avatars which survived the Age of Insurrection were so few, and most were so confused, that they were merely a last resort for people searching for answers to unanswerable questions. They were no longer the fount of all wisdom, and the guides of the governance of the world, as they were in the Golden Age before the Insurrectionists. Of course, those subroutines which acted as librarians were most useful. I still miss them. The written records are almost as extensive as those of the shrines, but less easy to search.”

“The avatars were the eyes and mouths of the Preservers,” Ixchel Lorquital said. “That was what I was taught as a pup, and I always did think it was put into our heads so we’d do as we were told, believing the Preservers were always looking over our shoulders in place of our parents.”

“Miracles need witnesses,” Eliphas said, returning to his original theme. “Perhaps the Preservers raise fish from the dead in the deeps of the river, or juggle rocks in sealed caverns in the keel of the world, but to what point? Miracles teach us something about the nature of the world and our own faith, by contradicting our understanding of that nature and by revealing some truth about the minds of the Preservers. Of course, our own minds may be too small to contain that truth.”

Ixchel Lorquital closed her translucent inner eyelids, as if to help her look into her own mind. She said, “To my reckoning, the only miracles are where there’s such an unlikely chain of circumstance that you have to believe something interfered to make it come out like that. Anyone that kind of thing happened to would have to change their way of thinking about their place in the world.”

“The world is large,” Eliphas said, “and the Universe is far larger, and far older. If anything is possible, no matter how unlikely, then there is no reason why it should not have happened somewhere.”

Ixchel Lorquital said stubbornly, “If something unlikely happens to you, especially if it happens to save your life, you’ll stop and think hard about why it was you and not some other culler.”

Yama said, “I am not so immodest as to believe that what I have been allowed to do—if I understand Eliphas right—is simply to shock me into changing my mind, or to teach me some lesson. Yet I do not want to believe that I am an agent who is being used by something I do not understand. It would mean that everything I choose to do is not by my own will, but by that of another. Must I believe that everything I do is willed elsewhere?”

What had happened, when the crowd had rioted? What had he said? What had he done? He could not remember, and did not dare ask because it would reveal his weakness and his shame.

“That is the question every self-aware person must ask themselves,” Eliphas said. “One thing we know for certain is that the Preservers took ten thousand different kinds of animals from ten thousand different worlds and shaped them into their own image and raised them to intelligence. And yet that was not enough, of course. Each bloodline still must find its own way to grow and change, and that is the one kind of miracle on which we can agree.

“Think of a single man in a city of an unchanged bloodline. He may be a poet or a painter, a praise-singer or a priest, but we will say he is a poet. Like his father, and his father before him, he has followed his calling without thought. He has written thousands of lines, but any of them could have been written by any other poet of his bloodline, living or dead. Like all the unchanged, he has less sense of his own self than he has of the community of like-minded brothers and sisters of which he is but a single element. If he was taken from this community he would soon die, much as a single bee would die if it strayed too far from its hive. Like a hive, the communities of the unchanged are sustained not by the meshing of individual desires, but by blindly followed habits and customs.

“On this one night, alone in his room amidst thousands of others who are so very much like himself, our poet has a thought which has never before been thought by any of his bloodline. He pursues this thought through the thickets of his mind, and by its light he slowly begins to define what he is, and what he is not. Think of a sea of lamps which are all alike, all burning with the same dim flame. Now think of a single lamp suddenly brightening, suddenly shining so brightly that it outshines all others. Our poet writes his thought down in the form of a poem, and it is published and read because all poems are published and read without thought or criticism. That is the custom of the city, and no one has ever questioned it until now. But the thought the poem contains lodges in the minds of our poet’s fellows and blossoms there as a spark lodges in a field of dry grass and blossoms into a field of fire. Soon there are a hundred competing thoughts, a thousand, a million! The city is at war with itself as its inhabitants struggle to define their own selves. Factions fight and clash in its streets. Those as yet unchanged, innocent and incapable of understanding the change, are winnowed. The survivors leave the battlefield, perhaps to found a new city, perhaps to scatter themselves along the length of the Great River.

“We know the change is caused by unseen machines that swarm in every drop of water, every grain of soil, every puff of wind. These tiny machines bloom in the brains of the changed. They increase the mind’s complexity while retaining its essence, as a city built over the site of a fishing hamlet may retain the old street plan in the arrangement of its main avenues. The machines are in the brains of the unchanged bloodlines, too, but they are quiescent, sleeping. It is not the process that is the mystery, but the cause. The thought that comes in the night, that wakes the machines and sets fire to a bloodline until it is burned out or changed. There is our miracle.”

It was Yama’s miracle, although he (or the woman in the shrine, working through him) had not forced the change upon one of the ordinary unchanged bloodlines, but upon one of the indigenous races, which, it was said, could never change. Were some miracles stronger and stranger than others? Was there a hierarchy of miracles, or were all miracles equally unlikely, and therefore equally wondrous? Yama thought about this for a long time, while Eliphas and Ixchel Lorquital talked of other things.