Child of the River

Chapter Twenty-Four The Woman in White

Yama turned, and streamers of blazing white light suddenly raced through the shrine’s black disc. He raised an arm to shade his eyes, but the white light had already faded into a swirling play of soft colors.

Pandaras’s clenched paw fluttered under his open mouth. He said, “Master, this is some horrid trick.”

Cautiously, Yama stepped through polychromatic light and touched the shrine’s slick, cold surface. He was possessed by the mad idea that he could slip into it as easily as slipping into the cool water of the river.

Like a reflection, a hand rose through swirling colors to meet his own. For a moment he thought that he felt its touch, like a glove slipping around his skin, and he recoiled in shock.

Laughter, like the chiming of small silver bells. Streaks and swirls and dabs of a hundred colors collapsed into themselves, and a woman was framed in the disc of the shrine.

Pandaras shouted and ran, flinging himself in a furious panic through the black mesh curtains which divided the apse from the main part of the temple.

Yama knelt before the shrine, fearful and amazed. “Lady . . . what do you want from me?”

“Oh do get up. I can’t talk to the top of your head.”

Yama obeyed. He supposed that the woman was one of the avatars of the Preservers, who, as was written in the Puranas, stood between the quotidian world and the glory of their masters, facing both ways at once. She was tall and slender, with a commanding, imperious gaze, and wore a white one-piece garment which clung to her limbs and body.

Her skin was the color of newly forged bronze, and her long black hair was caught in a kind of net at her right shoulder.

A green garden receded behind her: smooth lawns and a maze of high, trimmed hedges. A stone fountain sent a muscular jet of water high into the sunlit air.

“Who are you, domina? Do you live in this shrine?”

“I don’t know where I live, these days. I’m scattered, I suppose you could say. But this is one of the places where I can look out at the world. It’s like a window. You live in a house made of rooms. Where I live is mostly windows, looking out to different places. You drew me to this window and I looked out and found you.”

“Drew you? Domina, I did not mean to.”

“You wear the key around your neck. You have discovered that, at least.”

Yama lifted out the coin which hung on the thong around his neck, the coin which the anchorite had given him the spring night when Dr. Dismas had returned to Ys, and everything had changed. Yama had gone out to hunt frogs, and caught something far stranger. The coin was warm, but perhaps only because it had lain next to his skin.

The woman in the shrine said, “It works by light, and briefly talked with this transceiver. I heard it, and came here. Don’t be afraid. Do you like where I live?”

Yama said, with reflexive politeness, “I have never seen a garden like yours.”

“Of course you haven’t. It is from some long-vanished world, perhaps even from Earth. Do you wish me to change it? I could live anywhere, you know. Or at least anywhere on file that hasn’t been corrupted. The servers are very old, and there’s much that has been corrupted. Atoms migrate; cosmic rays and neutrinos disrupt the lattices . . . Anyway, I like gardens. It stirs something in my memory. My original ruled many worlds once, and surely some of those possessed gardens. It’s possible she owned a garden just like this, once upon a time. But I’ve forgotten such a lot, and I was never really whole in the first place. There are peacocks. Do you know peacocks? No, I suppose not. Perhaps there are autochthonous creatures like peacocks somewhere on Confluence, but I don’t have the files to hand. If we talk long enough perhaps one will come past. They are birds. The cocks have huge fan-shaped tails, with eyes in them.”

Yama was suddenly overwhelmed by the image of an electric-blue long-necked bird with concentric arcs of fiery eyes peering over its tiny head. He turned away, the heels of his palms pressed into his eye sockets, but the vision still beat inside his head.

“Wait,” the woman said. Was there a note of uncertainty in her voice? “I didn’t mean . . . The gain is difficult to control . . .”

The sheaves of burning eyes vanished; there was only ordinary blood-warm darkness behind his eyelids. Cautiously, Yama turned back to the shrine.

“It isn’t real,” the woman said. She stepped up to the inner surface of the shrine and pressed her hands against it and peered between them as if trying to see through the window of a lighted room into a dark landscape. Her palms were dyed red. Paeonin. She said, “That it isn’t real is the important thing to remember. But isn’t everything an illusion? We’re all waves, and even the waves are really half-glimpsed strings folded deeply into themselves.”

She seemed to be talking to herself, but then she smiled at Yama. Or no, her eyes were not quite focused on him, but at a point a little to one side of the top of his head.

Yama said, prompted by a flicker of suspicion, “Excuse me, domina, but are you really an avatar? I have never seen one before.”

“I’m no fragment of a god, Yamamanama. The shape of my original ruled a million planetary systems, once upon a time, but she never claimed to be a god. None of the transcendents ever claimed that, only their enemies.”

Fear and amazement collapsed into relief. Yama laughed and said, “An aspect. You are an aspect. Or a ghost.”

“A ghost in the machine. Yes, that’s one way of looking at it. Why not? Even when my original walked the surface of this strange habitat she was a copy of a memory, and I suppose that would make me a kind of a ghost of a ghost. But you’re a ghost, too. You shouldn’t be here, not at this time. You’re either too young, or too old, a hundred thousand years either way . . . Do you know why you are here?”

“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!

He said, “The world cannot be saved by contesting the will of those who made it. I will fight the heretics, not serve them.”

Silver bells, ringing in the air all around. “You are still so young, Yamamanama! You still cling to the beliefs of your childhood! But you will change your mind. Dr. Dismas has promised that he has already sown the seeds of change. Look on this, Yamamanama. All this can be ours!”

The shrine flashed edge to edge with white light. Yama closed his eyes, but the white light was inside his head, too.

Something long and narrow floated in it, like a needle in milk. It was his map. No, it was the world.

Half was green and blue and white, with the Great River running along one side and the ranges of the Rim Mountains on the other, and the icecap of the Endpoint shining in the sunlight; half was tawny desert, splotched and gouged with angry black and red scars and craters, the river dry, the icecap gone.

It floated before Yama, serene and lovely, for a long moment. And then it was gone, and the woman smiled at him from the window of the shrine, with the green lawn and the high hedges of the garden receding behind her.

“Together we will do great things,” she said. “We will remake the world, and everyone in it, as a start.”

Yama said steadfastly, “You are an aspect of one of the Ancients of Days. You raised up the heretics against the will of the Preservers. You are my enemy.”

“I am no enemy of yours, Yamamanama. How could an enemy speak from a shrine?”

“The heretics silenced the last avatars of the Preservers. Why shouldn’t something else take their place? Why do you tempt me with foolish visions? No one can rule the world.”

The woman smiled. “No one does, and there is its problem. Any advanced organism must have a dominating principle, or else its different parts will war against each other, and it will be paralyzed by inaction. As with organisms, so with worlds. You have so many doubts. I understand. Hush! Not another word! Someone comes. We’ll talk again. If not here, then at one of the other transceivers that are still functioning. There are many on the far-side shore.”

“If I talk with you again, it will be because I have found some way of destroying you.”

She smiled. “I think you will change your mind about that.”

“Never!”

“Oh, but I think that you will. Already it has begun. Until then.”

And then she was gone, and with her the light. Once more, Yama could see through the darkly transparent disc of the shrine. On the far side of the apse, the curtain of black mesh stirred as someone pushed it aside.