Shrine of Stars

Chapter Ten “Everyone now living may never die”

As soon as the barge had been made fast to the wharf, the guards began to move amongst the prisoners, telling them that they were free to go. “This is a city of free men!” they said, grinning fearsomely. “Take up your own lives. No one is responsible for you but yourselves.”

“If only Tullus had waited,” Pandaras said to Tibor bitterly, “he and his fellows would have had their wish.” Many of the prisoners were reluctant to obey the guards, fearing that this was a trick. One man went mad and refused to move when the guards started to force them toward the stern, where the gangways to the dock had been fixed. He sat down in the middle of the deck with his arms wrapped around his chest, rocking back and forth and screaming. A guard shot him in the head, picked up his body and slung it over the side. After that, the prisoners had no choice but to gather up their few belongings and walk out into the city.

Baucis had once been a patchwork of little woods and hills, but new roads had been driven everywhere without regard for traditional boundaries, and many of the woods had been cut down. In those that survived, the heart trees had been felled and the woven platform houses of the original inhabitants had been torn down and replaced by straggling encampments of tents and shacks. Sewage ran in open channels that were often blocked by the bodies of animals and men. The air was hazed with the smoke of thousands of fires. Floating platforms and streams of draft animals and crowds of men jostled along red clay roads in the harsh glare of arc lights strung from stripped tree-trunks. Steam wagons clanked and groaned and belched clouds of black smoke as they dragged three or four overladen trailers behind them. Stores and taverns, gaming palaces and whorehouses, all with tall, brightly painted false fronts, had been thrown up along the roads, and barkers and shills called to the crowds from platforms or windows or balconies. There were many apothecaries, surgeries and clinics. One offered, mysteriously, Whole Body Immersion and Electrotherapy; another, Intestinal Irrigation. Machines spun above the crowded roads, zipping about on obscure errands, and slogans were projected high in the air, in glowing letters each as big as a man. Seize The Day. Everyone Now Living May Never Die. Higher still were the archipelagoes of the floating gardens which had once been the homes of Baucis’s scholar-saints, strings of sharply stamped shadows in the orange sky-glow.

Pandaras was tired and his left arm hurt badly; Tibor had stripped the quasi-living dressing from the stump, leaving only a light bandage. He followed the hierodule without question, and presently found himself amongst the ruins of the city’s sacred wood. The circle of giant sequoias, said to have been as old as the world, had been cut down, and decads of men were sawing planks from their carcasses by the light of huge bonfires, but the shrine was still there. It was a black disc ten times Pandaras’s height, standing at the center of a big circular platform crafted from a hundred different kinds of wood. The platform was scarred with deep, charcoal-blistered trenches made by the reflected beams of energy weapons and pocked with thousands of splintered gouges and impact holes from ricocheting slugs and rifle pellets, and blasphemies and cabbalistic signs had been carved into the polished ancient planks, but the huge black disc of the shrine itself, being only partly of this world, was inviolate.

Pandaras sat down at the edge of the platform, on wood worn smooth by the footsteps of millions of pilgrims and petitioners. He said wearily, “Why have you brought us here?”

“We were told that nothing is forbidden, little master,” Tibor said, “so surely one might still consult the shrines.”

“What use is that, without a priest?” Pandaras said, and then he understood. “Will it speak with you?”

“The avatar of this shrine was destroyed ten thousand years ago, in the wars of the Age of Insurrection. But the shrine itself is still active.”

Pandaras sat in the shadows at the perimeter of the platform while Tibor attempted to commune with the shrine. He meant to keep watch, but it was long past midnight and he was very tired. He fell asleep, and woke with a start to find the hierodule squatting in front of him and a familiar warmth against his chest.

“There is no reply,” Tibor said mournfully. “Something has destroyed the indices.”

Pandaras reached inside his torn shirt and lifted out the ceramic coin. Little specks and lines of light filled it from edge to edge, frozen in a static pattern.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I know that my master is here.”