Shrine of Stars

Chapter Twenty The Isles of Plenty

Some time after he had been brought back from the Glass Desert by the heretics, Yama had become aware that Prefect Corin was drawing near to the ruins of the city of Sensch. The man had enslaved several machines, and, in the days after Yama’s trial, had moved from place to place around the edge of the city and its huge garrison, presumably probing for weaknesses. Yama had been certain that the Prefect would try and rescue him from the heretics, but had not believed that he would be successful. At best, he might provide a useful diversion. But now it was clear that, once again, Yama had underestimated the Prefect’s resourcefulness.

Yama had his own plan of escape. He wanted to fall over the edge of the world into the shortcut where the river went, where past and present tangled together. The shortcut had been made when the world had been put together, and he thought that he could fall to its beginning and at last find his people. He had learned this from Dr. Dismas’s paramour. It had absorbed many lesser machines and many men and women, and hoarded their knowledge much as a pack rat will decorate its nest with scraps of glass and plastic and metal. That great store had poured into Yama in the moment the machine had tried to make him its own, a torrential flood that had almost washed away his own self. He had had only a little time in which to try and map its limits, but he knew now the secret of the Great River, and knew that in the beginning of the world lay its end, and that was enough.

It was easy to fool the minuscule brains of the sharpshooters’ carbines into thinking that they had discharged when they had not. It was harder to turn one of the swarm of machines which accompanied the barge, for they were imprinted with hundreds of interlocking shells of subselves, and each had to be painstakingly unpicked. But Yama knew that he would need a machine to cut his bonds after he was cast into the river, and he worked hard at it while the heretics prepared him for execution.

And then, as he hung naked on the execution frame, something blew the flier from the air and a motor launch rammed the galliot to his left and exploded. He guessed what was happening even as Enobarbus ran toward him, and used the machine he had laboriously subverted to kill the officer who held Pandaras. But instead of trying to escape, Pandaras ran to help his master, attacking Enobarbus as the warlord shot away the chains from which the frame was suspended.

And then Yama fell. The frame smashed down into the water and was at once whirled away from the barge. A sudden surge threw it into the air and crashed down into a wave that washed over Yama with bruising force, pulling his bound arms and legs in different directions. Yama managed to get a breath and then another wave struck the frame and he went under again and came up, gasping and blinking and wondering if he would drown before he fell over the edge of the world.

A shadow covered him: a floating disc. It tipped in midair and Prefect Corin slid down onto the frame and straddled Yama, bracing himself against the rock and roll of the waves. His staff was strapped to his back, over his fluttering cloak. He hit Yama four times with doubled fists, twice on the left temple, twice on the right. Something flashed as he raised his right hand. A knife. Yama, barely conscious, could only watch. The knife slashed the rope which bound Yama’s left hand to the frame. Prefect Corin’s face was a handspan from his. “We are here to help you, boy,” he said. He had to shout above the clash of white-water waves and the long unending roar of the river’s fall. “We will not lose you again. Say that you will come with us and we will free you.”

Yama tried to speak, but could not gather his thoughts. Spread-eagled and naked beneath his enemy, dazed and helpless, he felt all his old fears return. Prefect Corin was implacable, unforgiving, tireless. There was no escape from him. He would never stop, never give in, never die.

Prefect Corin laid his face against Yama’s. His pelt was wet and cold, his breath hot. His left eye was a puckered ruin. “You are ours, Child of the River. Now and always. Whether we live or die, we will do it together.”

Yama tried to focus on Prefect Corin’s face. Things kept slipping away, jumping back. He had not been afraid of falling off the edge of the world because he had known where he was going, but he was filled with dread now. He was more afraid of this man than of anything else on the world.

Prefect Corin smiled and whispered, “You do not want to die. That is a beginning.” He kissed Yama on the lips and sat back on his heels, ready to cut the other bonds, and his cloak suddenly flew sideways. Prefect Corin clasped his shoulder, then looked at the bright red blood and Yama remembered Enobarbus’s rifle. At the same moment something cracked the air like a whip on his palm, and a spray of blood struck Yama’s face. Prefect Corin grunted, toppled sideways, and was swept away in foaming crosscurrents. The floating disc tilted and swooped off, following its master. Yama watched it dwindle through pouring rain, and then a strong eddy caught the frame and swung it around.

Rain smashed through spray thrown up by clashing waves. Its cold needles stung relentlessly, bracing him awake. The air was half water now. A tremendous roaring filled every cell of his body. The frame groaned and flexed. Impossibly, it was rising, carried up a smooth slope of glassy water. For a moment, Yama paused at the top of the wave at the edge of the world, saw a barge and two foundering galliots beyond the skirts of the rain clouds, and a launch making a long arc away from them.

And then the world tilted backward and he fell away from it.

It was noon. Mr. Naryan had decreed that it was an auspicious moment for the execution. The sun shone straight down, turning the far-side edge of the world into a golden knife blade that cut away half the sky. A wall of water fell past it, twisting into itself as it fell, a spout that shone silver against the blue of the envelope of air which wrapped the world, dwindling down toward the mouth of the shortcut which swallowed it and took it elsewhere. Yama could feel the tangled gravity fields like threads tugging at his limbs. He struggled to focus, to find the machines which generated the fields, and felt a cold, ancient intelligence far below, squatting at the mouth of the shortcut like a toad at the bottom of a well.

A dizzying surge of hope filled him then. It was all true! Vast skirts of cloud hung about the wall of falling water, as white as freshly washed linen. Archipelagos of violet and indigo specks were scattered in arcs at different levels within the clouds, each casting a long shadow streak. The Isles of Plenty.

Yama reached out, manipulating gravity fields. The frame flew toward the outermost island of the nearest arc. He laughed as he swooped down, remembering his childish dreams of flying and the dream he had had in the tomb of the Silent Quarter of the City of the Dead.

Past and future came together in a moment of exquisite richness.

He fell through a veil of cloud. Fog streamed around him, soaking him with clinging cold vapor. Out into sunlight again, falling at the same speed as the constant rain. He could no longer see the island and tried to spin the frame around; then it crashed into soft tangles of dull red tubes which collapsed around him, exuding a strong, acrid scent.

He was still trying to unfasten the ropes around his ankles—the knots had shrunk in the water—when the rain people found him.

The Isles of Plenty were continually drenched with rain and mist. Everything—the soft, interwoven masses of bladderweed and the transparent, hydrogen-filled bladders that swelled at their fringes, the knotty mats of black grass, froths of algae and elaborate nests of ferns—was sopping-wet. Water dripped from the spiky tips of indigo and violet fronds, percolated between interwoven root mats, collected in channels that ran into deep cisterns and pools, and poured in a hundred streams from the ragged edges of the islands. Sometimes it rained so hard that the air seemed to turn to water. Fish clambered about the soft mounds of vegetation, using prehensile fins at the edges of their flattened bodies, opening their rich red feathery gills in the downpour as they hunted maggot-flies, worms and beetles.

It was never brighter than twilight. As the world tipped back and forth on its long axis, the sun appeared above the far-side edge at noon and below it at midnight, and even then the permanent cloud cover around the endless fall of the river obscured what light there was, only occasionally parting for a moment to reveal a sudden shaft of sunlight ringed by a hundred perfectly circular rainbows. Surges of air rubbed against each other, creating thunderstorms which were the greatest danger for the inhabitants of floating islands: a lightning bolt could ignite the hydrogen-filled bladders which buoyed the islands and blow them apart. But even in death there was life. Fragments of the communal organisms which wove together to form the floating islands were widely dispersed by these rare explosions; some would grow into new islands to replace those that dropped out of the currents of air which blew around the wall of water—the Great River turned through ninety degrees and falling toward its end and its beginning.

The rain people who inhabited the Isles of Plenty were not, as Yama had dreamed, of Derev’s bloodline. They were an indigenous race. They were roughly half Yama’s height, with smooth gray skin, oval heads dominated by large black eyes, thin arms and legs, and long, flexible, three-fingered hands. They were cold-blooded and moved in abrupt bursts punctuated by slumberous pauses in which, except for the slow blink of nictitating membranes across their great eyes, they stood as still as statues.

Even as some of the rain people helped Yama free himself from the frame, others started to dismantle it; hard wood was as precious as gold in the Isles of Plenty. He was guided along paths smashed through wet, pulpy vegetation to a village built on platforms at the leading edge of the island. The main platform straddled a stream which tumbled noisily between banks of dome-shaped mosses and fell into the void below. Smaller sleeping platforms were built around the rigid stems of horsetail ferns which burst into great fans of knotty black strands overhead. The fern canopy was the only shelter from the constant rain. Water dripped everywhere, running across the slick resin of the platforms and falling into the vegetation below.

The rain people gave Yama a hide blanket to wrap around his naked body and fed him with a salty mash of uncooked fish flesh and the chopped tips of a variety of water weed whose brown straps grew parasitically on bladderweed stripes. Yama explained to them where he had come from and where he wanted to go. They listened patiently. Although they were naked, he could not tell which were men and which were women, for they had only smooth gray skin between their legs. Several pairs leaned against each other companionably. One of these couples, Tumataugena and Tamatane, the eldest of the family clan of the island, told Yama that only a few men from the world above had ever reached the Isles of Plenty, and none had ever left. But he was the first to understand that the river swallowed its own self, they said, and they realized the importance of his quest.

Tumataugena said, “The fall of the river diminishes year upon year.”

Tamatane said, “The mouth of the snake flickered two generations ago. It swallows water still, but we fear that it spits it elsewhere.”

Tumataugena said, “The same happened to the river of the other half of the world.”

Tamatane said, “Unless a hero comes, this half of the world will become a desert too, as it was once before.” Speaking in turn, Tumataugena and Tamatane told the story of how the river of the inhabited half of the world had once been a long pool which flowed nowhere and soon became stagnant. A cistern snake drank it up, but this snake was two-headed and had no anus, so the water remained in its belly, swelling it into a smooth blue-green mountain range full of water that lay along one side of the world, opposite the Rim Mountains. One head lay amongst the Terminal Mountains at the endpoint of the world; the other hung over the midpoint. The world became tinder-dry. Animals were dying of thirst; plants became wrinkled and sere. Several of the bloodlines which lived there attempted to make the snake disgorge the water by making it laugh, but since snakes have no sense of humor this came to nothing. But inside the cistern snake were certain parasitic worms, and as the snake swelled so they grew. By the will of the Preservers, they became the progenitors of the rain people. They broke off bone splinters from the snake’s many ribs and fashioned them into knives. Working together, they cut the snake in half from within and set free the water it had swallowed. The great flood washed one of the snake’s heads over the edge of the midpoint of the world. It hung in the air, receiving the waters that fell after it. The snake’s other head remained lodged in the Terminal Mountains, and the water swallowed by the first head was vomited from the second. And so the Great River was formed, and the curves of its course preserved the last wriggles the cistern snake made in its death throes.

When the story was done (soft rain fell all around, like applause), Yama said, “I heard a riddle long ago, and now I know that I have found the answer to it. For that, as well as for my life, I am in your debt.”

Tamatane said, “We became as we are now because we saved the world from drought. Yet we are still less than any of the peoples of the surface.”

Tumataugena said, “If we help you save the river, then perhaps we will be rewarded again.”

“Perhaps,” Yama said.

The rain people asked Yama many questions about his adventures in the world above, but at last he could stay awake no longer. He slept beneath a shelter of woven bamboo leaves. He fell asleep quickly, even though he was soaked through and very cold, but he was awoken after only a few hours by Tamatane and Tumataugena.

“Something bad walks the air,” they said. “Perhaps you know what it is.”

The floating island was in the middle of a dense belt of cloud. It was close to midnight; light shone from beneath the island, diffused through white vapor. As Yama disentangled himself from the wet, heavy hide, something flashed far off in the mist, an intense point of brilliant blue light that faded to a flickering red star, falling through whiteness and gone even as Yama glimpsed it. A moment later, the whole island trembled as a clap of thunder rumbled through the air.

Yama shivered. He thought that he knew what had caused the blue light and the thunder.

As he clambered down from the sleeping platform, something loomed out of the mist: a dark spot that grew and gained shape, a red triangle with a kind of frame beneath it. It tipped through the air and stalled above the edge of the main platform; its pilot swung down from its harness and ran a little way across the platform with the last of its momentum, collapsing the bamboo frame and the hide stretched across it.

High-pitched whistles rose on all sides. The rain people gathered around the pilot, who stood in the center of the platform and stared up in wonder at Yama.

The pilot, Tumahirmatea, was from a shoal of floating islands which hung far above this one. Something terrible was loose in the air, Tumahirmatea said, a monster which spat flame and could destroy an island with a single breath.

“I know it,” Yama said. “It is not a monster, but a man. I thought him dead, but it seems that nothing in the world can kill him. He is looking for me. I must leave at once.”

The rain people talked amongst themselves, and then Tumataugena and Tamatane came forward and offered their help.

Tamatane said, “You wish to fall through the mouth of the snake.”

“I could jump from the edge of this platform in an instant,” Yama said, “but I am not certain of my target.” His stomach turned over at the thought. He was not at all sure that he could manipulate the machines which generated the gravity fields with enough precision to reach the mouth of the shortcut. If he missed, he would fall beyond the envelope of the world’s air, and suffer the same horrible death as Angel.

Tumataugena said, “We have several kinds of flying devices. The simplest are sacks full of bladders harvested from the edges of the island, but those will lift you rather than allow you to fall. So instead we will give you one of our kites.”

It was brought out of store and unwrapped. Yama thanked the rain people and asked for a knife and a cup of water. Tumataugena gave him a bodkin fashioned from the spine of a fish, with a handle of plaited black grass; Tamatane gave him a gourd brimming with sweet water.

Yama pricked the ball of his thumb and allowed three drops of blood to flutter into the water. He said, “If you wish to become more than you are, to become as the peoples of the world above, then drink a mouthful of this. When the change is complete you will be able to change others in the same way. If you decide not to do this thing, then wait a day for the water to lose its potency and then dash it over the edge of the island.”

Was Pandaras safe? Would he perform this miracle for the indigenous peoples of all the long world? But perhaps it did not matter. Already the mirror people and the forest folk were changed. And they would change others.

The rain people talked amongst themselves; at last, Tamatane and Tumataugena announced that they would do this thing at once. They passed the gourd around, and the last person to drink from it, the stranger, Tumahirmatea, pitched it into the void.

“You will have a fever,” Yama said, “and then you will sleep. But when you awake all will be changed. You must find your own way after that. I can do no more for you.”

It did not take long to learn how to fly the man-kite. There was a harness which was lengthened to accommodate him, and a frame hung at the balance point which he could grip and tilt to the left or right. A ribbon at the point of the kite indicated the direction of air currents; rudders pushed by his feet spilled air from the leading edges of the diamond-shaped lifting surface to bring it to stalling speed for a safe landing. But he would not need to land, only to stoop down like a lammergeyer.

There was no ceremony of farewell. He was strapped into the kite and helped to the edge of the platform, then took a breath and jumped off. The underside of the island fell past, tangles of tough holdfasts studded with transparent hydrogen bladders. The kite jinked in air currents, wrenching at his shoulders.

He kicked, got his feet in the stirrups of the rudders, leaned to the left. And began to breathe again.

Tumahirmatea followed Yama as he stooped down, the red kite matching the yellow wingtip to wingtip.

They fell through vast volumes of cloud, breaking through streaming mist and rain into clear air. In one direction the dark wall of the edge of the world rose through decks of cloud and curtains of rain; in the other, empty blue air deepened toward the black void in which the world swam. Between, the silver column of the falling river twisted down toward its vanishing point, a hundred leagues below. The air was brighter there: it was night on the surface of the world, and the sun was walking its keel. Lightning crackled around the silver twist of water, vivid sparks flashing against their own reflections. Floating islands made broken arcs at different levels, receding into blue depths of air.

Yama swooped down in a great curve, yelling as he fell. For those few minutes, he was utterly free. Tumahirmatea left him once they had fallen past the lower edge of the clouds that ringed the falling river. The red kite tipped from side to side in farewell and tilted away, already rising on an updraft. Yama fell on alone.

The column of water, twisted within intricate gravity fields, was closer now. The air was full of electricity generated by the friction of its fall. Every hair on Yama’s head stirred uneasily; the thunder of lightning storms constantly shivered the air. He tacked several leagues out from the water column, then swung the kite around it. The world was a wall reaching above and below as far as he could see.

After one more full turn around the falling river, he would reach its vanishing point. Looking straight down, he could see a throat of velvet darkness wrapped around the root of the column of water. He could feel the thing which controlled the shortcut. It was awakening, reaching toward him through the babble of the machines which manipulated the gravity fields.

Take me to the beginning of the world, he told it. Take me to my people.

He had expected difficulties. He had expected to have to use the full force of his will and all of his wits to break it. But it yielded at once. Filtered through the remnant of the Shadow, its voice was his own. Of course, it said. You have returned. Do not be surprised. I live in the place where the river meets itself. Of course I know you. I hope that I will see you again.

There was no time to frame questions. He was caught in air currents which sheared off the falling water. They buffeted him hard as he cut through them. The lifting surface of the kite boomed and shivered. The frame wrenched in his grip as if suddenly possessed of a will of its own.

You will not need the flying thing. I will guide you. Yama kicked his feet out of the rudders, unbuckled the harness. And gave himself to the air.

The kite slammed away above him, bucking and folding up as conflicting air currents caught it, a fleck of yellow that whirled upward, was gone. Yama arranged himself in the rush of air, his feet pointing down, his arms by his sides. It was the way he had so often dived into the deep water at the rocky point of the bay of the little city of Aeolis.

Something other than air gripped him. He drifted slowly toward the column of water. It was as smooth and dense as glass. It seemed to rise above him toward infinity. Beneath his feet was a rim of darkness, at one moment as flat as a ring of paper, the next infinitely deep. The tube of water narrowed as it swooped down. Water was not compressible, but somehow the river’s vast flow was squeezed into a tube so narrow that two men could have embraced it and touched fingertips.

Space-time distortion. The flow here is extended through time as well as space. It is easier than extending the size of the shortcut’s mouth.

Yama did not understand the words which appeared in his head.

He was falling faster now. Air ripped past. His cloak of uncured hide streamed up behind his head. He saw structures around the rim, geometric traceries of intense electric blue that extended wherever he looked.

And then he was gripped, turned, accelerated. There was an instant of intolerable pressure and brilliant light.