Shrine of Stars

Chapter Twenty-One Ship of Fools

A tremendous flood swept him forward. He thrashed toward light and air, but the water was already receding, a wave washing away in every direction.

He stood, water slopping about his ankles. The hide cloak was soaked through, and clung in heavy folds to his naked body. The light was dim, blood-red. The cold air tasted of metal. He was in a chamber so large he could not see its ceiling or any of its walls. Beneath the ankle-deep water was a floor of a smooth, slightly yielding black substance.

A shrine stood a little distance away. It was the biggest he had ever seen, a huge black disc that could have overtopped the tallest tower of the peel-house. Nothing woke when he addressed it, but he had the unsettling impression that its vast smooth surface somehow inverted for a moment.

Where was he now? And when? Was he in the keel of the world? Was this the time of its making? He flexed his toes against the black floor. It reminded him of a place Tamora had taken him to a lifetime ago, in Ys.

He chose a direction at random and walked a long time.

The water soon gave out. Once he shouted out his name, but the volumes of shadow and red light gave back no echo. He walked on, and a little time later felt the presence of machines far behind, and stopped and turned.

In the distance, tiny figures were moving at the base of the huge black circle of the shrine. He raised his arms above his head and shouted to them with sudden hope, and a narrow beam of intense white light swept out and pinned him. The figures were suddenly moving forward with impossible, inhuman quickness. Yama tried to question them, but their minds were opaque. Remembering the extensions of Dr. Dismas’s paramour, he turned and started to run, his shadow leaping ahead of him, and ran until he heard a faint whistle off to his left.

He stopped and looked back, half-winded and dazzled by the white light, and saw that the figures had already made up half the distance. The whistle came again, human, shrill and urgent. He turned toward it. The beam of light tracked him, and his shadow rose to confront him, thrown onto something that loomed out of the dim redness. A structure of some kind, a black blister or bubble no bigger than an ordinary house.

A figure jumped up right in front of him, throwing aside the cloth which had concealed it. Yama tried to dodge, but it was faster. A shoulder smashed into his belly, arms wrapped around his hips, and he was thrown to the floor.

He looked up in astonishment at a face so like his own it might have been his sister’s: pale skin, a narrow jaw, high cheekbones, vivid blue eyes. Her black hair was cropped short. Elaborate tattoos began at the angles of her jaw, reaching around under her ears to meet at the nape of her neck. She wore a loose, silvery, one-piece garment that clasped her ankles, wrists and neck. One of her calloused bare feet was planted on his chest, and she was pointing a slim wand at his face. He had the sense that it was a weapon. There was something odd about this strange yet familiar woman, a vacancy…

“What are you?” she said. She was breathing very hard. “A survivor from the holds or a stowaway?”

Yama had turned his head to hide the scarred side of his face. He was uncomfortably aware that he was naked under the heavy hide cloak. He said, “Am I in the keelways?”

“You mean the spine? Don’t fool. We lost those territories twenty generations ago. What are you?”

“A stranger to this place.”

“A savage on walkabout maybe. Whatever you are, I think you just killed us both.”

She let him stand. The figures were much closer now, silhouetted against the glare of the intense beam of white light, man-shaped, but oddly lopsided, running hard toward them.

Yama pointed at the blister and said, “What is inside this building?”

“An outlet. Even if we had a hot blade, we could not cut its skin.” The woman was folding up the black cloth which had concealed her. It made a surprisingly small square that went into a slit at the waist of her silvery garment.

Yama remembered the voidship lighter. The guard had done something to the material…

An opening puckered in the smooth black curve. The woman looked at him in astonishment, but followed him inside. The opening sealed behind them. For a moment they were in complete darkness, then the woman asked for light and a dim radiance kindled in the air.

They stood on a narrow walkway. It ran around a smooth-walled shaft that sloped down into darkness. The woman knelt and stared down into the shaft, then looked up at Yama. “That was a good trick,” she said, “but the regulators will get permission to unseal this soon enough.”

“What are they?”

“You don’t wear any mark. What family?”

“That is what I hope to find out.”

“You came through with the water, didn’t you? But we can’t stay here.”

“I will have to take off my cloak,” Yama said. “Then we will find out how far this falls.”

“A long way, I expect. It is one of the mains.”

Yama sat down at the lip of the shaft, took off the cloak and spread it out, hairy side down. He could feel the woman’s gaze move over his naked body. He said, “Sit behind me and hold onto my waist. The cloak will protect us.”

After a moment, she did as he asked. Her spicy scent and body heat gave him an erection; he felt a blush spreading across his face and chest.

The woman said, “I am Wery. If we survive this I’ll take you to my people and we’ll parlay. Bryn will want to ask you many questions.”

“Now,” Yama said, and they kicked off into the long steep slide.

Wery screamed all the day down—in delight, rather than fear. The surface of the shaft was almost frictionless, but even so the hide quickly grew warm beneath Yama’s bare buttocks. When at last the shaft straightened out and they came to a halt, he got up into a crouch and awkwardly fastened the cloak around himself again.

They walked a long way. The shaft was more than twice their height and perfectly circular in cross-section, lined with the same black stuff as the floor of the huge space they had escaped. Yama told Wery some of his story. “All my life I have been searching for my people,” he said. “I am so happy to have found you! How many others are there? And where is this?”

“You’ll find out, if you pass. You can trade questions with Bryn.”

“I can explain how I came here, and why I do not know where I am. The river was diverted—”

“No more talk now. We’re not safe here.”

At last, Yama discovered a place where he could make the black stuff pucker open. They clambered through into green light and hot, humid air. A rock face covered in creepers and thick lianas rose behind them, its top overhung by trees. A dry streambed snaked away between bushes and trees that leaned over it to form a kind of tunnel.

Wery looked all around, sniffing the air. “I think I know this wild. The others are not far away. You did well.” She stepped up to him, face to face. For a swooning moment Yama thought that she was about to embrace him, but instead she touched her wand to the skin behind his ear. A point of intense coldness swiftly spread across his scalp and face. His muscles loosened; Wery stepped out of the way when he fell.

Yama was woken by the screeching of birds high above. Two men stepped through the ragged rent they had hacked in the bushes that grew thickly along the dry streambed. Wery ran to the larger of the two men, embraced him, and said, “It wasn’t any bug that came through. I’m not sure what he is. He has a story so crazy it could be plausible, but he could be a medizer.”

“They killed all the medizers long ago,” the smaller man said, “after they killed the other tribes.”

“Hush,” Wery said. “He’s awake.”

Yama sat up. He smiled at the two men and spread his hands so that they could see that he was unarmed. He was so very happy to have found people of his bloodline that he could not believe that they would want to harm him.

The men were dressed in silvery one-piece garments like Wery’s, and both had similar tattoos across the backs of their necks. As with Wery, there seemed to be something lacking in them. It was as if they were not living people, but animated statues, or aspects cast in flesh rather than light…

The man Wery had hugged was a head taller than Yama, well-built and handsome. He had ripped off the sleeves of his silvery garment to show off his muscular arms; copper bands constricted his well-defined biceps. The other man was much older, and had a leather sack slung over one shoulder. His close-cropped hair and trimmed beard were white; his skin was papery and freckled with brown splotches. Deep wrinkles cut his forehead and seamed the skin around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. I will look like that if I live long enough, Yama thought, and wondered how long it would take, and how long he could live.

There was a silver patch over the old man’s left eye. He flipped it up and told Wery, “Something else came through, too. Regulators are swarming all through these decks. They know how you got away and sooner or later they will try to follow. We’ll have to move.”

The old man pointed his wand at Yama, and Yama’s muscles immediately locked in tetanic spasm. His body arched in a bow; his teeth ground against each other when he tried to protest.

The old man flipped the patch down over his eye and made several slow passes of his wand over Yama’s body. “He’s full of bits and pieces, but nothing I recognize. Stuff in his blood, too, but it isn’t regulator trace. Never seen anything like it. Maybe he really did come from somewhere else.”

Yama knew now what these people lacked. None of them had been touched by the breath of the Preservers. They might have been ghosts.

“The ship is very big,” the taller one, Cas, said slowly.

Wery shook her head. “From what he said, I think he’s from outside.”

The old man stood back. Yama’s muscles relaxed, then began to tingle. He stood slowly and said, “I really can explain everything.”

“Not here,” the old man said. “We shift, mates, find a berth and wait out the regulators.”

The old man, Bryn, was the leader of the three. They had been on what he called a bug hunt.

“Things come up with new cargo,” Bryn told Yama, “and sometimes they get loose. They have to be sly enough to get past the safeguards, so they usually cause trouble. We hunt them down.”

The big man, Cas, said, “Maybe he’s a bug that looks like a man.”

“No fooling, Cas,” Wery said. “This is important.” After they left the stream, they walked in silence a long way down a path that wound through the forest. Yama’s hide wrap dried slowly, stiffening around him. He was aware that it smelled of meat going bad. At last the path passed between two huge trees, and on the other side a white corridor stretched away to its vanishing point. They walked on for more than a league until Bryn said that it was safe to think of resting.

He opened a door Yama had not noticed, and they went through into a high-ceilinged, brightly lit room. Narrow slabs of ceramic floated in the air and gusts of hot, dry air blew from random directions. Feeding troughs were set in the floor along one of the walls, but the stuff in them had crumbled to dust. No one had been here for a very long time.

A voice welcomed them when they entered, and said that it could reconfigure to the requirements of their bloodline. Bryn told it to shut up. “We leave no traces,” he said to Yama. “Remember that and you might live as long as me.”

Yama sat next to the old man on one of the floating slabs and asked him how old he was. “Fifty-three years,” the old man said proudly. “You look surprised, and no wonder. It is older than anyone I know. I expect that no one in your family has ever lived as long, but it is possible, as you can see.”

Yama had thought that Bryn must be at least two centuries old, and the revelation disappointed him. It seemed that his bloodline was very short-lived, unless they aged quickly here because of hardship.

Cas and Wery were watching the door, their wands across their laps. “I hate this heat,” Cas said. “We should find one of our places.”

“The regulators will look in those places first,” Bryn said. “Shut up, Cas. Watch the door. I want to hear our new mate’s story.”

Wery said she had already heard it, and had not understood a word. Bryn shrugged. “She’s muscle,” he told Yama, “she and her husband. Good at killing, but not so bright.”

“You always got to think you’re cleverer than everyone else,” Cas said. He got up and began to prowl around, restless in the way of a man more comfortable with action than conversation.

Bryn said, “It’s well known that I am clever. I chose you two because I’m clever enough to know what you’re good at. Don’t break any of the machinery, Cas. That’ll bring the regulators at once.”

Cas said, “Good. I fight them.” But he set down the delicate construction of black rods he had been turning over in his big hands.

“Did you really come from Confluence?” Wery asked Yama, with a smile that broke his heart all over again. He had forgiven her for knocking him out; it had been a sensible precaution. She said, “It’s paradise, I hear. Like wilds that go on forever, but no regulators or bugs. You should take us all there.”

Her fierce, bold candor reminded him so much of poor, dead Tamora. Perhaps she would leave Cas for him; perhaps there were other women like her. In the swooning excitement of finding his people, he had forgotten his sweetheart, Derev, and the fervent promises they had made to each other before he had set out on the long road which had at last led him here.

Cas said, “The ship hasn’t been to Confluence for generations and generations. How could he come from there?”

Yama tried to explain.

The fastest way to travel from one point to another was in a straight line—or rather, over the long distances between stars, in a curved geodesic, for the mass of the Universe distorted its own space. But within the vacuum of space were holes smaller than the particles which made up atoms. As small as the smallest possible measurement, the holes appeared and disappeared in an instant, a constant, unperceived seething of energies that continually canceled themselves out. The holes had two mouths, and the space that tunneled between the mouths was compressed so that the distance between them was shorter inside the tunnel than outside it. The Preservers had found a way to grab the mouths of certain of these holes, to stabilize and widen them.

Bryn nodded. “The ship uses the shortcuts to get from world to world without traveling. It also uses them to replenish its air and water. You came out in one of the cisterns. Lucky for you it was one that isn’t used anymore, or you would have drowned. But I guess most of them aren’t used now. The crew is pretty skimpy these days.”

Cas was doing pushups as relentlessly as a machine. Sweat gleamed on his bare, muscular arms, pooled between the cords on his neck. Without pausing, he said, “All this is useless stuff. We don’t need to know anything outside the ship.”

“Let him tell all of it,” Wery said. “You never know when something might have a use.”

“She’s right,” Bryn said. “Set on, lad. Finish your story.”

The Preservers had constructed an intricate network of shortcuts between every star in the Galaxy, but the shortcuts could link points in time as well as space. It was done by fixing one mouth of a shortcut to a ship capable of traveling at speeds close to that of light itself. In the realm of light there was no time; or rather, there was a single endless moment which encompassed the beginning and the end of the Universe. As the ship carrying the shortcut mouth approached that unreachable realm, so time stretched about it; while only a few years passed aboard the ship, many more passed in the rest of the Universe. When the ship returned to its starting point, the two mouths of the shortcut now joined regions of space which were separated by the time debt built up during the journey. Someone passing through the mouth of the shortcut which had traveled with the ship would exit from the mouth which had remained where it was, and travel back to the time when the ship’s journey had begun. But they could not return by the same route, because their journey altered the past.

Yama drew diagrams in the dust, prompted by the remains of the Shadow, which was able to filter the vast store of knowledge he had taken from Dr. Dismas’s paramour. As Yama explained his story, he came to understand just what he had done.

The Preservers had cloned certain of the shortcuts, so that one mouth led to many different destinations, determined by slight changes in the potential energy of whatever entered. Aided by the Gatekeeper, Yama had fallen through the mouth of one of these cloned shortcuts, but he did not know where and when he had emerged. He knew only that his wish had been granted: he had been sent to his people.

Yama understood all about cloning, for it was how meat and work animals were bred, but he had to explain it several times before Wery understood. The notion disgusted her, and Bryn was amused by her disgust. “There are many different ways of living,” he said. “That’s why these rooms are all so different, because the passengers were once many different kinds of people.”

“They were all bugs,” Cas said indifferently. He was sitting on his haunches by the door now, polishing a bone dagger. “And we kill bugs.”

“Some bugs are the stock species from which the Preservers made people,” Bryn said. “Although I admit that there’s a bigger difference there than between child and man.”

“Bugs are bugs,” Cas said. “Kill ’em or be killed. Some are harder to kill, that’s all.”

“And you can eat some but not others,” Wery said.

Yama said again, “Because I fell through one of the cloned shortcuts, I do not know where I am.”

“On the ship, of course,” Wery said. “Somewhere about the waist, in an outer deck.”

“He means he doesn’t know if this is his past or his future,” Bryn said.

Bryn knew more about Confluence than the other two, but knew nothing of Ys or the Age of Insurrection, or even of the Sirdar, who had ruled Confluence when it was newly made. His people had been on the ship a long time; Yama suspected that their ancestors had fled here, or refused to leave once the construction of Confluence had been completed. They had been rebels, like the feral machines or Tibor’s ancestors.

Yama said, “I think this must be somewhere in the past. The star-sailors I met knew about my bloodline, but believed that it had died out long ago.”

Wery said with sudden anger, “We will destroy the regulators! They are only machines. They are as stupid as emmets.”

“Emmets have the run of parts of the ship,” Bryn said. “Intelligence is not necessarily a survival trait.”

“Then you cannot control these regulators?” Yama was surprised. He had supposed that all of his bloodline would be able to control machines, but it seemed that things were different on the ship. Wery had not been able to make the floor stuff flow apart, and even he had not been able to touch the minds of the things which had chased him in the cistern. He said, “I suppose that the machines here are not the same as the machines on Confluence.”

“Some say that we controlled the regulators once,” Bryn said. The old man seemed amused. “Maybe we still do, on other ships. It’s bad luck you arrived here.”

Cas said unexpectedly, “There is only one ship, Bryn. It loops through time and sometimes meets itself.”

Bryn said, “Only one ship in our universe, yes, but perhaps there are many universes, eh? A universe takes only one road, but if a man retraces his steps he cannot then return to the place from which he started. For the road splits at the place he traveled back to, and he must travel down the new road. It stops a man killing his grandfather and returning to find himself without existence.”

“Perhaps his grandfather was only the husband of his grandmother,” Cas said slowly, “and not his sire.”

Bryn tugged on his beard in vexation. “His grandmother then! You are an infuriatingly literal man, Cas. I only make a fancy to illustrate a point. There are as many universes as there are travelers. In many we live on into our new mate’s time, perhaps, but not in the time he came from.”

Yama nodded. “Then I would not have had to come here to look for you.”

Bryn said, “The problem is that you can go back to your future but not by retracing the same path, and so it will not be the place from which you started.”

Cas said sulkily, “We’ve stayed here too long, and all this talk is making my head hurt. Why should what one man does cause a new universe?”

“It is no easy thing, to travel back through time,” Bryn said. “But you are right. We should not stay here too long. The regulators might notice the change in carbon dioxide concentration.”

“I have good ventilation,” the room said.

“When I need advice from you,” Bryn said, “I will ask for it. Do your synthesizers still work?”

“Of course, but they are not suitable for your bloodline. I will have to change the settings.”

“I want clothing, not food. Yama, you must be properly dressed. Frankly, that hide of yours is beginning to stink. Do it, room, and then we will move on.”

“You are welcome to stay as long as you like,” the room said. “I miss the company of people.”

“We can’t stay unless you change your settings,” Bryn told it, “and the regulators will know if you do. Just make the clothes.”

Yama pulled on the one-piece silvery garment with his back to the others, although he was sure that Wery was watching. He knew that she belonged to another man, but he ached for her all the same. His blood raced in his skin when she showed him how to adjust the seals at ankles, wrists and neck. Her fluttering touch; her heat; her scent. Surely she must know how he felt…

She talked with him as they walked the seemingly endless white corridor. Cas went ahead, waving them forward at each intersection, then loping on eagerly.

“You don’t mind Bryn,” Wery told Yama. “He has too much learning in his head. He wants to bring back the old days. Thinks we can make the regulators our slaves. He’ll be making plans for you.”

Yama smiled. “This is like one of the old stories! Bryn is the magician, and you are the warriors helping him in his quest.”

“We’re hunting bugs,” Wery said. “What are you?”

“I do not know. A magical creature perhaps. But I do not feel magical. I am beginning to understand that magic is a matter of perception. Knowing how to do something takes away the mystery which can make it seem magical.”

“Maybe you can teach us how to make the floor open. That’s useful. Bryn is full of dreams, but dreams are for children. We kill bugs and regulators, or they kill us. That’s how it is. It can’t be changed.”

“Are the regulators a kind of bug?”

“They’re passengers. Like us.” Wery laughed at Yama’s astonishment. Her teeth were very white. One of the incisors was broken. “There used to be many different kinds of passenger. Now there’re only the regulators and us. And the crew of course, but no one has ever seen one of them.”

“I saw one. Well, two, in fact. But that was in another place.”

Wery smiled. “You can tell me all about Confluence, when we’re finished traveling.”

“I could take you there.” His heart turned, melting.

“Maybe. Now get this straight. Regulators killed all the other passengers, but we’re too smart. Too tough. We hunt bugs and regulators, they hunt bugs and us. That’s how it is. Makes the ship work better if its passengers have to prove their worth.”

“Survival of the fittest,” Yama said. It seemed as vile as the creed of the heretics. As if the Universe were without any ruling principle but death.

“That’s what Bryn says. I say you are either dead or alive, and dead doesn’t count.”

“How many of your people are alive? Where do they live? I want to know everything about them, Wery.”

Wery held up her left hand and opened and closed her fingers three times. “And us,” she said. “We’re a way from home, and it moves about anyway.” She added, “Cas has found something,” and ran off down the wide, white corridor to catch up with her husband.

Bryn dropped back to walk alongside Yama. He said, “We can’t tell you too much, lad.”

“I understand. Perhaps you can tell me how your people came to live here. That was a long time ago, and surely telling me an old story will not do any harm.”

“We served the Preservers,” Bryn said. “We were their first servants—the original crew of the ship, I think. Then the Preservers made all the other races and went away, and we lost our powers.”

“I thought that our people went with the Preservers,” Yama said, smiling because it was so thrillingly strange to say our instead of my.

“Perhaps most of them did. But this ship was left behind, and we are the descendants of those who flew it.”

“Perhaps they refused to leave their home,” Yama said.

“We are loyal servants of the Preservers,” Bryn said. “Do not think otherwise.”

“I meant no offense.”

“None taken, lad. But if we live in your past, and you know no others of your kind, where did you come from?”

“That is what I am still hoping to discover,” Yama said. “Perhaps I am the child of sailors of our bloodline who jumped ship long ago. I know of at least one star-sailor who did.”

“Borrowed a body, I suppose. They try that on board sometimes. The ship doesn’t like it, and lets us hunt ’em, like bugs. What have you found, Cas?”

The big man had stopped at a place where another corridor crossed the one down which they had been traveling. The black stuff of the floor was scored heavily there, ripped into curling strips. The strips were creeping over each other and softening at the edges, trying to mend the wounds.

“Bug trace,” Cas said, holding up fingers smeared with sticky clear liquid which had splashed and spattered across the white walls. “Reckon there was a fight and one ate the other. Not long ago, either.”

Wery grinned. “It’s wounded,” she said. “There’s a trail. We kill it easy.”

The trail of colorless blood led into another of the big, forested spaces. As before, the transition was abrupt. One moment Yama was hurrying along beside Bryn, who, despite his age, kept up a spritely pace, with Wery and Cas jogging eagerly ahead. Then the two warriors went around a corner and when Yama and Bryn followed they were suddenly in a dark, dank, dripping place, where huge tree-trunks reared up through a broken layer of mist that hung some way beneath a high, dark canopy.

Yama looked back and saw a sliver of white light between two boulders propped against each other. It was the only point of brightness in this gloomy place. Pale fungi raised tall fans above ankle-deep ooze. Vines dropped from somewhere beyond the mist and slowly quested about the floor, pulsing with slow peristalsis as they pumped ooze upward. Yama saw that the giant trees were in fact conglomerations of these vines, twisted around each other like so many stiffened ropes. Parasitic plants wrapped pale, meaty leaves about the bases of the vines, and things in burrows spread feathery palps across the surface of the ooze; something bright red and thin as a whip shot from a hole and snapped at Yama’s ankles.

Bryn laughed. “This is one of the mires, lad. Everything passes through here eventually.”

Wery and Cas found a sign of the thing they were tracking, and disappeared into the gloom between the trunks of the giant tree things. There was a squalling noise in the distance. Bryn drew something from his sack and tossed it underhand to Yama.

It was a knife. When Yama caught it by the haft, its curved blade sparked with blue fire. Bryn stared and Yama grinned. “I know this at least,” he said, “and it knows me.”

Had the knife he had found—or which had found him—in the tomb in the Silent Quarter originally come from the ship? Was this perhaps the very same knife, destined to come into the possession of the dead warrior in whose tomb Yama had confronted Lud and Lob?

The squalling rose in pitch. Bryn and Yama sloshed forward through the ooze. Something thrashed beyond a tall ridge of white fungus, then suddenly reared up. It was three times the height of a man, and sprang over the fungus and ran at Yama and Bryn with preternatural swiftness.

Yama had a confused glimpse of something in black armor, all barbs and thin legs with cutting blades for edges, a narrow head dominated by wide jaws that opened sideways to reveal interlocked layers of serrated blades rotating over each other. It did not look so much like an insect as a dire-wolf chopped and stretched into a poor imitation of an insect. It made its high squalling noise again. Acrid vapor puffed from glands that ran along each side of its long, hairy belly.

The bug knocked Yama down with a casual flick of a foreleg and pounced on Bryn, spraying black ooze everywhere. Wery suddenly appeared behind it and threw a long, weighted rope that tangled around its forelegs. Yama jumped up, ooze dripping from his silvery garment, and ran beneath the bug’s belly as it snapped at Wery. He stabbed the knife’s blade, blazing with blue fire, through the membrane at the articulation of one of its sturdy rear legs. The knife whined, burning so eagerly through horn and flesh that it almost jerked out of his hands. Clear, sticky blood gushed; the bug half collapsed, its leg almost completely severed. Cas stepped between its flailing forelimbs and stabbed the point of his wand between its eyes. It shuddered and kicked out and died.

While the others worked at severing the bug’s head, Yama noticed that a kind of belt was fastened around its narrow waist, slung with pouches and bits of shaped stone or bone. Tools.

Bryn saw his look and said, “It would have killed us if it could.”

“It was intelligent.” Yama thought of Caphis, the fisherman he had found in a trap set by one of the Amnan. People preying on other people. The strong on the weak, the clever on the stupid.

Bryn tugged at his beard. “It was bright enough to get onto the ship. But not bright enough to survive.”

Yama handed the knife to the old man, hilt-first. “I have had enough of killing, I think.”

Cas tugged hard and the armored head came free. Clear liquid gushed from the neck; the legs thrashed in a final spasm. Hand-sized creatures as flat as plates, thready blue organs visible through their transparent shells, skated over the muck to get at the spilled blood. Red whips had already wrapped around the bug’s legs, melting into its horny carapace.

Yama expected the three hunters to carry their grisly trophy in triumph back to their home, but instead they dumped it in the corridor directly outside the entrance to the mire and went on.

“The regulators will find it and mark it,” Bryn said. “Our task is done.”

The lights of the ship, slaved to a diurnal cycle, dimmed soon after they left the mire. They slept in a little room Bryn found off one of the corridors. This one was more suited to their kind. Beakers of distilled water and tasteless white cubes of food extruded from a wall at Bryn’s command. The floor humped into four sleeping platforms. “If you want to piss or shit,” Bryn told Yama, “do it in the corner there,” and ordered the room to dim its light.

Yama was woken from a light sleep by Wery’s giggle. Sounds of flesh moving on flesh, breath at two pitches gaining the same urgent rhythm. He lay awake a long time, lost and lonely and frightened, while the two hunters made love a few spans from him.

They walked along the endless white corridor for much of the next day. Wery walked at point with Cas, while Bryn asked Yama many questions about Confluence, most of which he could not begin to answer.

They traveled steadily, drinking from tubes set in the necks of their silvery garments, which recycled their own sweat as distilled water. At last, they left the corridor for one of the jungle wilds, and after an hour’s walk down paths so narrow they must have been made by animals, Wery insisted on showing Yama something.

“You’ll like it. Really you will. You won’t have seen anything like it.”

Yama demurred. He was still embarrassed and disconcerted by overhearing her lovemaking.

“Go on,” Bryn said, with a sly smile. “You will see where you are.”

Yama and Wery climbed a grandfather tree that rose through the dense green canopy, its surprisingly small crown of dark green feathery fronds silhouetted against sky glare high above. Its rough bark provided plenty of easy hand- and footholds. They climbed a long way. Cool inside his silvery garment despite the fetid heat, but quite breathless and with his pulse pounding heavily in his head, Yama sat at last in the crutch of a massive bough on which Wery balanced with heart-stopping ease.

And saw that the jungle stretched away for several leagues on all sides, a rumpled blanket of green studded here and there with splashes of bright orange or yellow or red where trees were in flower. A line or chain of tiny, intense points of white light hung high above the treetops: the little suns which fed the jungle’s growth. But that was not what Wery wanted him to see.

The jungle grew on the outer skin of the ship, seemingly not enclosed by anything at all—perhaps gravity fields held in the atmosphere, as they contained the envelope of air around Confluence, or perhaps it was domed with material so transparent that it was invisible. The rest of the ship could be clearly seen all around the jungle’s oval footprint.

Yama, remembering the voidship lighter which had docked at Ys, had thought that the ship would be some kind of sphere, bigger certainly, but more or less of the same design, much as a dory resembles a carrack. But now he saw that the ship was a series of cubes and spheres and other more complex geometrical solids strung like beads along a wire, and that it was many leagues long—impossible to tell how many. In all their journeying, they had traversed only one part of one segment. There was room enough for any number of wonders to be hidden here.

But he knew that he could not stay. He had thought about it last night. He had found people of his bloodline, yet they were stranger to him than Pandaras or Tamora or Derev. They lacked the breath of the Preservers and so could not be anything other than what they already were, enslaved forever by their circumstances. This was not his home. That was on Confluence. It was with Derev. She and Yama had sworn a compact, and he knew now that it meant more to him than life itself. He would find the cistern and the shrine, and force the Gatekeeper to take him home. And then he would end the war. He had known how to do it ever since he had seen the picture in the slate which Beatrice and Osric had shown him at the beginning of his adventures, but he had not known he had known it until he had absorbed the knowledge hoarded by Dr. Dismas’s paramour.

Standing before him on the broad branch high above the jungle, Wery clapped her hands over her head and laughed. Yama realized for the first time that she was older than him, perhaps twice his age. The achingly brilliant light of the chain of miniature suns accentuated the wrinkles around her eyes, showed where flesh was beginning to loosen and sag along the line of her jaw.

It did not make her less desirable.

“Look starboard,” she said, and pointed at the distant edge of the ship.

Something stood far beyond the jungle. A red line—no, a dome, the top of a structure bigger than any of the wilds. It was lengthening and growing in height, as if it was crawling toward them.

A vast creature, big as a mountain…

Yama looked at Wery, wondering if he had finally been driven mad, and she laughed again and said, “That’s the mine world the ship orbits.”

Yama realized then that the growing blister was part of a disc. Not advancing, but rising—it was a world as round as the sun, just like those described in the opening suras of the Puranas. Or not round, but a sphere, a globe, a battered red globe rising above the ship’s horizon. Yama laughed too, full of wonder. Its pockmarked red surface was capped top and bottom with white, and scarred by a huge canyon that pointed toward three pits. Or no, they were the tops of huge, hollow mountains. At the very edge of the world’s disc was a fourth, so big that it rose above the narrow band of diffracted light which marked the limit of the world’s atmosphere.

Wery said that it was time to descend. They walked down narrow paths through understory trees and bushes that divided and divided again in an endless maze which Cas, who took the lead, seemed to know well, for he set an eager pace.

Now it was Yama’s turn to ask questions. Bryn said that mined mass was moved from the surface of the world to the ship by something called an elevator, a chain or cable that hung down from a point many leagues above the world’s surface. It took a while for Yama to understand why the cable did not collapse. The world was spinning, so that its surface moved at a certain speed, and the cable was grown from a point high above that also moved at the same speed, so that it was always above the same place on the surface. Hoppers moved up the cable and the material in them was slung out like pebbles from a catapult, to be caught by the ship and stowed away.

Ahead, Cas paused at a place where the path split into three. He turned and waved and went on.

Wery chased after her husband. A moment later, frantic whistles pierced the green quiet of the jungle. Bryn broke into a run and Yama followed. They scrambled down a steep fern-laden bank and splashed across a muddy stream, clambered up the bank on the far side and burst through a screen of tall grasses into the brilliant light of the miniature suns.

A huge tree had fallen here long ago; Yama and Bryn had emerged at the top of a wide, deep bowl, grown over with rich green grass, which had been torn out of the earth when the tree’s roots had been pulled up by its fall. Here and there bodies lay in the long grass. Human-sized, human-shaped, clad in silver.

Yama’s heart turned over. But then he saw that the bodies were naked; the silver was the color of their skin. “Regulators,” Bryn said, and sat down beside one of the bodies and bowed his head.

Cas and Wery were standing at the far edge of the clearing. When Bryn sat down they looked at each other and then ran off in opposite directions.

“Wait,” Bryn said, when Yama, made to follow Wery. “There may be traps.”

“This is the home of your people.”

“They were camped here. Perhaps they moved on before…” Bryn bowed his head once more, and clasped his hands over the white hair on top of his head.

Yama moved from body to body. All were quite unmarked. They were very thin. Their right hands were three-fingered, but their left hands were all different: one like pinchers made of black metal; another extended into a bony scimitar with a jagged cutting edge; a third had hinged blades, like monstrous scissors. The silver of their skin had a gray cast. Their eyes were huge, the color of wet blood, and divided into hexagonal cells. Although they were dead, something still seemed to be watching Yama behind these strange eyes. It was like the men whom the rogue star-sailor had enslaved by putting machines in their heads; the machines had lived on after the men had died, and so here.

Wery appeared at the far end of the clearing, shouted that everyone was gone, and ran off again. Bryn got up slowly, straightened his back, took a deep breath, and said, “We will see what has happened.”

The bowl of the clearing was a hundred paces across, twice that in length. The rotting carcass of the fallen tree lay at one end, extending into bushes and young trees which grew all around. Butterflies which might have been made of gold foil fluttered here and there in the bright light. Cas caught one as he came down the slope toward Bryn and Yama, and crushed it in his massive fist.

The encampment was no more than a few panels of woven grass leaning against the trunk of the fallen tree. A scattering of mats and empty water-skins, neatly tied bundles of dried leaves, a frame of tall sticks in which a stretched hide had been half-scraped of its hair. A blackened cube in a hearth of bare earth still radiated heat; a bowl of something like porridge had dried out on top of it and was beginning to burn. Yama picked up a hand-sized bit of flat glass. Glyphs began to stream and shiver inside it, but they were of no language he knew.

Wery said, “There were three regulators waiting for us. Cas killed two. I killed the other.”

Bryn said, “The others?”

“Gone,” Wery said. She dabbed angrily at the tears which stood in her eyes. “All gone.”

Cas pointed at Yama with his wand, and Bryn got in front of Yama and said, “No. It could not be him.”

“There would only be three of us if you killed him, Cas,” Wery said.

Yama understood. Their family was the last of the bloodline on the ship; that was why they had been so amazed to see him. And now they were the last of their family.

Bryn flipped his patch down over his left eye. He turned in a slow, complete circle and said, “Where are the bodies, Cas?”

“I have not found them. I will look again.” Cas trotted across the clearing and plunged into the bushes on the far side.

Wery said, “Do you think they might still be alive?”

Bryn lifted the eye-patch. “Ordinarily the regulators would have killed them at once. But there is no blood, and there are no bodies.”

“Perhaps the regulators took the bodies,” Wery said.

“But they left their dead companions,” Yama said.

Wery and Bryn looked at him. And at the same moment a regulator parted a clump of tall ferns and stepped into the clearing, mismatched hands held up by her shoulders. The left was swollen and bifurcate, hinged like a lobster’s claw.

“Stop!” Yama said, and knocked Wery’s arm up as she aimed her wand at the regulator. Something went howling away into the bright sky. Wery turned on him, the wand swinging in an arc that would have ended in his chest if he had not stepped inside it. He gripped her elbow and bent her arm behind her back until she had to drop the wand; bent it farther until she had to kneel.

“Cas will kill you,” she said, glaring up at him.

“Be still,” Bryn told her, and she stopped struggling at once. Bryn was pointing his wand at the regulator, but he was looking at Yama. He said, “It obeys you.”

“Yes, but the others did not.”

The regulator still had her hands raised. Her flat breasts hung like empty sacs. She fixed her huge red eyes on Yama and said, “I have a message from Prefect Corin.”