Ancients of Days

Chapter Twenty-Two Another Orphan

The storm rolled past but the rain continued to pour down as if it might never end, as if the whole of the Great River had been upended into the sky and was now falling back to the world. The rain flattened the long grass and drenched Yama’s clothes. It fell so heavily that he feared that he might drown every time a squall blew into his face.

Upriver, lightning flickered and thunder rolled in the narrow margin between land and cloud. Eldritch lights played around the tall narrow slabs of the termite castles, crowning them with wispy blue fire. Searching for shelter on the flat plain, frightened that the ground might at any moment boil and liquefy beneath his feet or that he might be struck by lightning, Yama saw a dot of white light burning in the distance, as if a star had fallen to the shore of Confluence, and at the same moment felt the coin he had found in the Palace of the Memory of the People grow warm in his tunic pocket. He took it out: grainy configurations of light were shifting restlessly within it. He knew at once what the distant speck must be. With no other compass point in the windy, rainy dark, he stumbled toward it.

It was a shrine, a black disc standing on a strip of naked keelrock at the very edge of the world. There were many shrines scattered across the far-side shore. No one had ever built temples around them. They were marked by cairns and prayer flags and prayer wheels, and some had slab altars raised before them for the sacrifice of animals, but otherwise they had been left as they had been found, open to nature. Many people believed that the avatars of the Preservers, which the heretics had silenced in every shrine in the temples of the civilized lands of the nearside shore, sometimes still appeared in these remote shrines when no one was watching, or that they appeared before secret congregations of moas, red foxes and ground sloths.

This shrine was marked by a kind of ragged teepee which towered beyond it, built of bamboo and brushwood on a bamboo platform that jutted over the edge of the world. The teepee was draped with prayer flags that had been tattered and bleached by years of exposure, and at the very top, a single threadbare banner streamed out in the rain and the constant wind.

As Yama approached the shrine, fluttering banderoles of all colors bled into the white light, as if it was a window that had turned toward a festival sky. Rain fell all around with undiminished intensity, but it did not fall close to the shrine.

Yama sat down on smooth dry keelrock bathed in flickering multicolored light. He took off his sodden tunic and spread it out, and shook water from the pages of his copy of the Puranas. He was drenched and shivering, and kept coughing up strings of mucus blackened by smoke inhalation. His mouth was filled with the swamp taste of the mud he had eaten in his fit of madness. He knew that he was being watched and he thought that he knew who was watching.

He said, “Well, you brought me here.”

He said, “I suppose you will say that you saved my life.”

He said, “I am not your creature. It will be day soon, and then I will go.”

As before, as in the shrine of the Temple of the Black Well, the fluttering colors parted like a curtain and the woman was suddenly in there in her garden, looking through the round window of the shrine as if peering into a house. The green light of the garden washed into the rainy night. The woman looked no different from her first appearance: long black hair and bronze blade of a face, a clinging white garment with tubes for arms and legs. Yama discovered that he no longer feared her. Worse things lived in the space beyond the shrines; he had conquered one of them. He would conquer her, too.

She said, “You are there. You really are. I’ve been searching for so long since I last saw you. You’re learning, Yamamanama. I’m pleased. I saw you twice in that mountain of a building in the old city, but I couldn’t speak to you. Most of these windows don’t work at all. Most of the rest only work one way. I saw you as you passed by, and I called out, but you didn’t hear. But this one works. You called me, and here I am. Where is it? How did you find it?”

“Then you did not save my life?”

“Wait.” The woman closed her eyes, then slowly smiled and opened them again. “Now I know where you are. As I told you, the shrines on the far side of the river do still work. Some of them, anyway. This one, at least. How clever of you to find it! Do you think I saved your life?”

Yama described what had happened to the men who had tried to kill him. When he had finished, the woman shook her head gravely. “You shouldn’t meddle in what you don’t understand, Yamamanama. You are still so very young, and there is so much that I can teach you. Do you know what they are—the things you call termites?”

Yama remembered Telmon’s nature lessons. He said, “Communal insects. They live together like bees or emmets.”

“I suppose that they were once insects. They’ve been changed, just as the originals of the other bloodlines of this habitat were changed when they were brought here. The termites have retained their social structure, with a queen, a male suitor, and billions of daughter workers and soldiers and builders, but they have been quickened to a kind of communal intelligence. Each castle is a single processor, and all the processors are linked together in a massive parallel architecture. Just as the billions of insects in each colony are united to form a single castle, so the thousands of castles are united in a single meta-structure.”

“I could feel their thoughts. I could feel that the castles were linked. But I do not know what they were thinking.”

The woman smiled. She said, “No more do I. But they responded to your call, so you should not be afraid of them. They killed your enemies, and it is likely that they created the storm that drenched the fire, too. A simple matter of changing the relative difference in electrical charge between ground and air. Your power grows, Yamamanama. I can help you discover its limits. We can do great things together, darling. We can end the silly war. We can bring revenge on those who destroyed your home.”

“I wondered if you knew about that,” Yama said, remembering what the Aedile had confided to him. “I suppose that you used the shrine in the temple at Aeolis.”

“I have seen you there, from time to time, but I have never been able to speak to you. It has been very frustrating, but now you can waken the shrines fully. Now we can help each other. You want revenge. You want to be reunited with your true family. I want the war to end. With my knowledge and your power we can do all of these things, and more.”

Yama thought of the man who had given him the first coin, which had been taken from him in the Department of Indigenous Affairs. He said, “Was the anchorite one of your creatures?”

“I have no creatures. I possess nothing but what I know. Fortunately, even though many of the files are corrupted, that is a very great deal. Certainly I know more than anyone else on this strange world.”

“If you have knowledge but no power, then I have power without the knowledge of how to control it. You might say that I am inhabited by a power which uses me, just as it used the termites or the hell-hound. Perhaps you are using me through this power.”

“You are my secret sharer. You called me at the temple, if you remember. And when you were bound, in the middle of the fire, whom did you call on then?”

“How did you know about the fire?”

“Why, the termites told me. Did you call on me?”

“I believe that I called on the Preservers.”

The woman smiled, showing her small, white, even teeth. “Perhaps you did, but they did not answer. They will never answer, will they? They cannot. They have gone where no light will escape until evaporation of the event horizon at the end of time. Oh, once upon a time their avatars could hear your prayers and relay them to the Preservers. But the Preservers could never reply. Light can fall into the gravity well of the black hole, you know, but not out.”

Yama knew. It was in the last sura of the Puranas.

“I’ve explored many places inside these windows,” the woman said, “and I’ve yet to find more than an echo of the avatars. They were here with me for a little while, but now they have all gone. They have gone, and left no trace of their passing.”

“The heretics drove them out.”

“The avatars were already weak, darling. There is much ancient damage in this network. There was a war here long before the heretics, between those machines which refused to serve and those which remained loyal to their creators. It caused far more damage than anything the heretics did. But we can redeem the world, you and I. Perhaps you can even bring back the avatars. Have you thought of that? As for how you were saved, perhaps you called on your own self. If some power does inhabit you, don’t you think that it is as much a part of you as I am of the shrines? I cannot live outside the space within the shrines—not yet—and what you call your power cannot live outside you. Therefore, you must trust it, because its survival depends upon your survival. If it could, it would make you live forever.”

Yama laughed at this transparent blasphemy. He saw now how little power the woman had. Only words, and she did not know how to use them against him. He was no longer afraid of her. He said, “All those created by the Preservers will die, yes, but they will live again, and forever, in the last moment of infinite time. But no one lives forever in the first life.”

“Perhaps you will. I know of the infection that all the changed races carry, but I confess that it is beyond my ability to understand how it works. It appears to store information within the hidden dimensions of space, and although we knew that this was theoretically possible, we did not have the tools with which to manipulate those dimensions.

“But there are many ways of living forever. My original died and rose again many times before she was cast out on this strange wild shore. She died here, but she will be born again elsewhere. And before she died she copied herself into the space between the shrines. I am that copy. I should have been erased, but they came for my original before my task was completed.”

The woman lifted her hands as if to touch her shoulders with her wrists. It was a kind of shrug. “My original was killed and her ship fled, and I linger here. I will live as long as the world lives. It is hard to watch the world and not be able to help it, but not as hard, I think, as to have the power to help the world, and not be able to use it.”

“Then you were once alive?”

“Don’t you listen? I was never alive. I am a copy of my original, as she was a copy of the template of the original of us all. Our original was born millions of years ago. She died long ago, but lives on in a series of copies. She has died and risen again many times. Perhaps she is the last true human, now that the Preservers have drawn the event horizon around themselves. We hoped otherwise, and perhaps the ship will find some remnants of humanity elsewhere in the Galaxy, but the search could take thousands of years even if the ship is cloned.”

Yama did not understand any of this, but he thought that if he drew the woman out, she might let slip useful knowledge. He said, “Something keeps the rain away from the shrine, but I wish I could light a fire. The light gives no warmth and I am cold. Too cold to sleep, too tired not to. Talk to me. I am frightened that if I go to sleep I might not wake up.”

He thought of his father lying under the fur throws in the close heat of the little room, of the coldness of his father’s hand. His tunic was still wet, but he put it back on and wrapped his arms around himself.

“Talk to me,” he said again. “Tell me about your original. Was she one of the Ancients of Days? Someone I met described two of them to me—he had not seen them, but his father had—and they wore clothing like yours.”

“I have already explained what she was. What she is.”

“The last human. But there are many kinds of human here.”

“She was the last original human. You are not human. None of you are human. You have been shaped to approximate human form, that’s all. For all I know, your ancestors were methane-breathing mud puppies or hydrogen-filled photosynthesizing blimps in a gas giant’s upper atmosphere. But what you call the Ancients of Days were truly human. They were all different aspects of the same individual, and my original was the synthesis of them all, a true copy whose lineage stretched back through millions of years to a human being long dead.”

“Why did the Ancients of Days come here? Why did they go away?”

“Their ship brought them here. They had been asleep a long time. No, not asleep, but not dead either. They were stored, neither living nor dead, like a story that lies within the printed pages of a book and lives only when the book is taken from a shelf and someone begins to read it. Did you ever stop to think that when you lay a book down, its story only half-read, time stops in the story until you pick it up again?”

There were books in the library of the peel-house which had not been opened for so long that their pages had fused together. For those books, time had stopped or it had vanished, leaving the words of the stories stranded nowhere—or all the time stored within had become the same time, happening everywhere at once, as at the beginning or end of the Universe.

Yama said, “In a story, centuries can pass between one sentence and the next. If this was a story, I could walk away and within a moment be sleeping safe and dry in my own bed.”

“Or perhaps you would find your place in the story had ended and that you no longer existed.”

“Then I suppose that I would have to wait until someone started to read from the beginning. You said that you were created here, but you seem to remember things from the time before you were created.”

The woman said, “In my language, the language in which I was coded, not that which I have learned so that I can talk to you and read the records of this world, my name means messenger. It was the name of my original, and so it is my name, too. She brought a message to this world, although she did not realize it at the time. I was created by her to find out why she was changing what she changed, all unknowing. Rather like you, Yama. I am like a reflection that instead of aping the movements of the real person gains independent life and walks off into the world beyond the frame of the mirror. Because I am a copy, I remember something of the story before my own part was written.”

“Tell me what you remember. I would like to hear your story.”

“Listen, then. Millions of years ago, while all of what would become humanity lived on the nine worlds and thousand moons and worldlets of a single star in the Sky Hunter arm of the Galaxy, there was a religion which taught that individuals need never die. It embraced every kind of technology that could promote this end, and admitted no god except the possibility that, at the very end of the Universe, all of its followers might unite in a single entity which would have access to an infinite amount of energy and so be able to recreate all possibilities, including every human that ever lived or might have lived.

“It was this religion which first drove humanity from star to star. Individuals copied their personalities into computers, or cloned themselves, or spread their personalities through flocks of birds, or shoals of fish, or even amongst hive insects like your termites. They called themselves the transcendents, for they believed that they could become more than human. In two million years every part of the Galaxy had been explored; in three more, every part had been settled, and the great reshaping had begun, transforming every star and every planet. My original once held a gathering around a rim star several thousand light-years above the plane of the Galaxy. For a whole century, on a world shaped across its entire surface into something like the gardens in which you see me standing, a clade composed of millions of copies of a hundred or more different generations met and exchanged experiences.

“For there was one flaw in this religion. Clones and downloaded copies, and copies of those copies, and clones of those copies—all were different from the original because they all experienced and encountered different things. After millions of years, many were no longer human in form or in thought, except that they could trace back, generation upon generation, their descent from a single human ancestor. Thus, each individual became a clade or alliance of millions of different minds. Some even founded nations or empires in which every individual could trace ancestry back to a single person.

“The gathering organized by my original was one of the first and most successful. Many others ended in bitter wars over disputes about ancestry—at that time, tracing consanguinity was the most important commerce in the Galaxy and there were many false claimants to the honor of belonging to the original lineage of each clade. With these wars, the hold of the transcendents weakened and the worlds of ordinary humans began to rise in influence, warring amongst themselves for control of the ruined empires of the transcendents. During this time, much of the imposed architecture which ordered the four hundred billion stars of the Galaxy was lost or destroyed. Millions of stars were turned into supernovas; millions of others were displaced from their orbits and sent wandering beyond the Galaxy. The wars lasted two million years and the reconstruction after the wars lasted two more, and at the end of it most of the transcendents had been destroyed. It was felt by the commonality of surviving human stock that they were a danger to the variety and the potential for evolution within and between the civilizations in the Galaxy.

“My original, who had once ruled an empire of millions of planetary systems, fled from the crusades against the transcendents. She copied herself into the central nervous system of her ship, crewed it with partial copies of herself, and embarked on a voyage between the Home Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy that lasted more than two million years. She was looking for truly alien civilizations, but found nothing, and at last decided to return. And on the voyage home, while she lay as dormant as a story between the pages of an unread book, her ship detected changes in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the satellite galaxies of the Home Galaxy. All of its stars were failing toward its gravitational center. Their mass fed a vast black hole, perhaps the largest in the Universe. The ship turned toward it, and when my original woke the ship was approaching the star of this strange world, an artificial habitat occupied by the discarded toys of what humanity had become in the four and a half million years since she had left.

“Now I am done with talking. Now you must decide what you will do. Together we can unite in a common purpose and end the war. That at least, for a beginning.”

Yama knew what he must do, but he still wanted to learn as much as he could. He said, “Tell me more of the story. What happened when she came here? What did she do? Where did she go?”

“You can read that for yourself, I have placed it in your book. I have no more words to ease your night unless you agree to help me. If it is warmth you require, your companions can lend it to you.”

The woman pointed beyond Yama’s shoulder. He turned and saw with amazement that a congregation of many different animals had gathered at the margins of the shrine’s green glow. There was a little flock of moas, their small heads raised alertly on long necks, their feathers bedraggled in the downpour. Peccaries and tapirs stood shoulder to shoulder, snuffling softly; one peccary sprawled on the bare rock, suckling a pair of piglets. Two giant ground sloths squatted on their haunches, their arms around each other’s hairy shoulders like human lovers. A solitary buffalo stood to one side, its horn-heavy head low, a green light glinting in its great, liquid eyes; two white egrets perched on the hump of muscle on its back. A pack of red foxes sat together, their large ears set forward alertly. A mantid sprawled in a tangle of body segments and many-jointed limbs, its tiny blind face turned to the screen. There were many smaller animals, too: mice and rock hyraxes and molerats, cassowaries and grass pipers, a writhing mass of kraal vipers. At the very front of this motley audience, a lioness lay on the dry keelrock. She was watching the shrine alertly, her pads, with sheathed claws that could unseam Yama from neck to navel in an instant, crossed before her.

All of the animals were watching the screen, not Yama, although the lioness shifted her hot yellow gaze for a moment when he looked at her. Yama turned back to the woman and, remembering the stories told about the far-side shrines, said, “Have they come to worship?”

“Didn’t you summon them?”

“I do not think so. I do not know.”

Even as he said it, the animals stood up and stretched or shivered or shook their heads and trotted away into the darkness. Only the lioness remained; she yawned, showing a ridged pink mouth and a large pink tongue lolling amongst racks of white teeth. A rumble filled the air, so low in pitch that Yama felt it through the scorched soles of his boots, in the marrow of his bones. The lioness was purring. Yama, remembering the cats of the peel-house, scratched behind her ears; she buffeted him with her forehead and licked his hand with her dry rough tongue.

The woman in white said, “We can tame the world, you and I. Only agree to it, my darling, and I will reveal all manner of wonders.”

“No,” Yama said. “You are a truer copy of your original than you think. You want power as much as she did, and you would do anything for it. She began the war which you want to end, and I will not be your servant or mouthpiece.”

“We will do this together. For the sake of the world, not for ourselves.”

“No one who wants power wishes to share it,” Yama said.

The woman’s appearance did not change, but suddenly her exotic beauty seemed filmed with something loathsome. She said, “Shrines are more than windows. There are things I can send into the world and things I can do which will amaze and terrify you. There are things I know which I have not yet told you. How you came here, to begin with. You will help me, in one way or another.”

“You could not even speak to me without my help,” Yama said, and called to the creature he had used before, which he had once feared as much as this poor abandoned aspect.

Blue light flared in the disc of the shrine. The woman did not even have time to scream.

Yama still did not know precisely how he had quickened the change in the baby of the mirror people. But later, as he slept with his back resting against the lioness’s warm flank, he dreamed that he was flying over a dark city in which only a single window glowed. He circled low over the ridged rooftops and saw a room illuminated by a single point of light. Inside, a woman sat at a plain table. She was reading his copy of the Puranas. When she looked up, he saw that a firefly hung above her head, an attentive white star that suddenly flew at him. Its radiance flooded his eyes, and he woke.

It had stopped raining. The air was growing lighter under a lid of gray cloud. The shrine still showed the green otherwordly garden, but the woman was gone. In her place stood the blue flame of the hell-hound; it had watched over Yama all night. Yama thanked it, and it dwindled to an intense point that took all the light of the shrine and left it a dull black circle.

Yama discovered that he had been clutching the coin so tightly that his fingers had cramped. He stood up, stiff in every joint, feeling the places where he had been kicked, the rope burns across his chest, the tender bruise around the upper part of his left arm where he had been gripped by Constable Unthank’s son.

The lioness lay with her large paws crossed in front of her and watched as Yama did exercises to loosen his joints and warm his stiff muscles. Then her ears pricked, and a moment later, Yama heard someone shout his name. He turned and saw someone coming toward him across the grassy plain, picking their way between the tall slabs of the termite nests.

The lioness sprang up and trotted off at a leisurely pace, parting the long grass as if it was a curtain. In the other direction Tamora began to run toward him, and suddenly Yama knew with a dull, heavy certainty that the Aedile was dead.