Shrine of Stars

Chapter Twenty-Two So Below

Cas came back at a run, and would have killed the regulator at once if Bryn had not stood in his way. They argued in violent whispers; then Cas turned his back on them all and Bryn came across the clearing and told Yama, “We will both go with you.”

Yama said, “I think it would be better if you all stayed here.”

“They have our people,” Wery said. “Of course we will go with you.”

Bryn walked around and around the regulator, which still stood where Yama had told her to halt. At last he turned and said again, “It obeys you.”

“The regulators have machines in their heads which control them. I am able to talk with her machine, although I was not able to talk with the machines of the others.”

“It,” Wery said.

Yama and Bryn looked at her.

Wery said defiantly, “It, not she. They’re all things. Not people. Things. Things!”

Cas put his hand on Wery’s shoulder and she turned and rested her face against his broad chest. Cas said, “We will come with you, Yama. We will kill this Prefect Corin and free our people and come home. What you do after that is of no matter to us.”

“I wish it were that simple,” Yama said. “And I still think you should all stay here.”

They were savages. They tried to justify their presence on the ship and placate the regulators with trophies from bug hunts, but they were as much stowaways as the things they had killed in the mire. If there had been time, Yama would have mixed a little of his blood with water and let them drink it; without the breath of the Preservers they were no more than any of the indigenous peoples of Confluence, higher than animals but less than men. But there was not enough time.

Cas said, “We will come with you. We are hunters. We hunt bugs. We hunt our enemies.”

“We will come with you,” Bryn said. He stared into the regulator’s big, red, faceted eyes, tugging at his neatly trimmed beard. “But before we leave, you will tell it to obey us too. I will not have it used against us.”

“I still say we kill it,” Cas said.

“No.” Bryn smiled; he believed that he was in command again. “Once this is over, we will be masters of all the regulators. The crew will look to us for help instead of to them. That is my price, Yama, for the hurt you have caused. We should make a start on our quest at once. It will be night soon, I have no liking for this place anymore, and it is a long way to the docks.”

The regulator stirred. “There is a shorter route,” she said, and repeated her message. “My master commands you to descend to the surface of the world below. I will lead you to where he waits with your people. If you come with him, they may go free.”

Cas began to curse the regulator in a dull monotone. Yama said, “I will avenge the hurt done to you all in my name. I swear it.”

Yama was as fearful as the others as the little glass room fell along the length of the ship; like the others he tried to hide his fear as best he could. Wery and Cas leaned against each other, holding onto the rail which ran at waist height around the room’s cold, transparent walls; Bryn clung there too, aiming his wand at the regulator, which hung like a silvery-gray statue in the center of the room, its flat, toeless feet a span above the floor.

Only Yama watched the view. The long track down which the glass room fell was a thread laid across the solid geometries of the ship’s segments. The ship dwindled away above and below, although neither direction had much meaning here, where there was no gravity. Clusters of lights cast stark shadows over the surfaces of enormous cubes and pyramids and tetrahedrons strung together and studded with hundreds of green or brown or indigo blisters—wilds clinging to the surfaces of the huge ship’s segments like fish lice to an eel.

As the ship turned about its long axis, the bulging disc of the red world slowly rose above it. Yama glimpsed the terminus of the elevator far beyond the end of the ship, a blob of light sliced in half by its own shadow. The elevator itself was a broken line defined by lights scattered along its length, dwindling away toward the world.

Bryn was able to answer some of Yama’s questions. The ship turned on its axis so that all sides would be exposed to the light of the sun of this system, evening out temperature differences. The elevator was woven from strands which were each a single giant molecule of neutronium, stabilized by intensely steep gravity fields. The mines delivered phosphates and iron. In thirty days the ship would leave this system and pass through the shortcut to its next destination.

The regulator stirred and said, “They spy on the crew.”

Bryn tapped his eye-patch, which was flipped up on his wrinkled forehead. “I am allowed revelations,” he said. “This is one of the greatest treasures of my people.”

“You interrupt data flow,” the regulator said.

“As is our right,” Bryn said, “earned by tribute.”

“You have no rights,” the regulator said. “You are parasites.”

“You be quiet,” Cas told her. “Speak only when spoken to.”

Yama knew that neither Bryn nor the regulator could answer his most urgent questions. How had Prefect Corin followed him here? Why had he descended to the surface of the world? How was he able to control the regulators?

He thought long and hard on these questions as the glass room sped toward the end of the ship. The world’s huge red disc slowly revolved above them and set on the far side of the ship, and then Yama forgot for a moment all his questions and anxieties.

For the stars had come out.

There were thousands of them, tens of thousands, a field of hard, bright stars shining everywhere he looked, crossed by a great milky river that seemed to wrap around the intensely black sky. The sun of this world must lie deep within one of the arms of the Galaxy; that milky river was the plane of the arm, the light of its billions of stars coalesced into a dense glow. Here and there structures could be seen—star bridges, tidy globes, a chain of bright red stars that spanned half the sky—but otherwise the patterns made by the Preservers were less obvious than when viewed from the orbit of Confluence, many thousands of years beyond the rim of the Galaxy. And yet every star he could see had been touched by the Preservers: their monument, their shrine, was all around him.

Then the sun rose. Although it was smaller and redder than the sun of Confluence, its light banished all but the brightest of the stars.

Yama had expected the glass room to reenter the ship and deliver them to some kind of skiff or lighter which would transfer them to the elevator terminus. But instead it simply shot off the end of its track into the naked void. Cas roared, half in amazement, half in defiance; Wery pressed the length of her body against his. The ship fell away. The terminus of the elevator slowly grew larger in the void below their feet.

It was an irregular chunk of rock, its lumpy surface spattered with craters. One side was lit by the sun, the other, where the elevator cable was socketed in a complex of domes and haphazardly piled cubes, by ruddy light reflected from the world.

“It is one of the moons of the world,” Bryn said. He had lowered the silver patch over his left eye. “Its orbital velocity was increased to move it from a lower orbit and to synchronize it with the world’s rotation.” He added, “This world was moved, too, displaced across half the diameter of the Galaxy. There is a legend that it came from the original system of the Preservers, although some maintain that it is merely a replica of one of the worlds of that system.”

The little moon grew, slowly eclipsing the sun, and the glass room swung through ninety degrees—Cas roared again—and extruded huge curved grapples made of stuff as thin as gossamer. Contact with the elevator cable happened very quickly. The pocked red-lit moonscape swelled below their feet and the room spun on its axis and one element of the cable, not much thicker than an ordinary tree trunk, was suddenly snug against its grapples. The moon began to dwindle and Yama felt his weight increase; now they were falling toward the world, which hung above their heads like a battered orange shield.

The journey took less than an hour. The cable blurred past, a silver wall occasionally punctuated by flashes as rooms very much larger than theirs shot past in the opposite direction. Below their feet, the tiny moon was lost in the glare of the sun; only a few leagues of the elevator cable was visible above, a shadowy thread dwindling toward the world. Midway in the journey, their weight slowly vanished until they were in freefall. The room swung around so that the world was below their feet, and their weight came back.

The black void gained a pinkish tinge and a faint whistle fluted and moaned around them; they were entering the atmosphere. The world flattened and spread, became a landscape. Their weight dwindled; this world’s gravity was a gentle tug about a third the strength of the ship’s, which had been exactly as strong as that of Confluence. The room was falling toward a rumpled red plain crossed by straight dark lines. The sun was setting.

Bryn said that the lines were canals. They had once carried water from the south pole to the agricultural lands of the equator. He was staring raptly at the desolate plain below; Cas and Wery had taken out their wands. A range of broken hills made a half curve around an enormous basin which held a shallow, circular sea. Yama saw a huge flock of pink birds fly up from the shoreline. Millions and millions of birds, like a cloud of pink smoke blowing across the black water.

The elevator cable fell toward a complex of structures beyond the sea’s shore, in the middle of a dark forest. Stepped pyramids rose above the trees, gleaming like fresh blood in the last light of the sun; beside them, like a mask discarded by a giant, a carving of a human face wearing an enigmatic smile looked up at the sky.

It was Angel’s face, Yama realized. This had once been one of her worlds, part of her empire.

The elevator split into a hundred cables, like a mangrove supported by prop roots. The glass room fell down one toward a black dome. As it approached this terminus, it shuddered and slowed. For the space of an eye-blink it was full of blue light.

Wery screamed, and something knocked Yama down. The dome swallowed them.

Yama was lying in darkness. The regulator was sprawled on top of him, as light as a child. Her skin was hot and dry. “Wait,” she said, when he began to move. “It is not safe.”

“Let me up,” he told her. There was wet, sticky stuff on the floor. Yama had put his hand on it. It was blood. He said, “Who is hurt?”

“Someone shot Bryn,” Wery said in a small but steady voice. “And Cas is wounded.”

“Not badly,” Cas said, but Yama knew from the tightness in his voice that this was a lie.

There were many machines at various distances beyond the little glass room. Some of them were lights; Yama asked them to come on. They were dim and red, scattered across a huge volume. The cable, which was socketed in a collar as big as the peel-house, disappeared through an aperture in the high, curved roof. A metal bridge, seemingly as flimsy as paper, made a long, sweeping curve from the glass room toward the shadowy floor.

Bryn was slumped near Yama. The chest of his silvery garment was scorched around a hole as big as a fist. There was a surprised expression on his face. Cas had lost most of his left hand; he had wound a strip of material so tightly around his wrist that it had almost vanished into his flesh. Wery crouched beside him, her arms wrapped around his broad shoulders.

The glass walls of the room were scorched around two neat holes, one on either side. Air whistled through them as pressure equalized, bringing a sharp organic stink. Then part of the glass pulled apart to make a round portal, and the stink intensified.

“Come out,” a voice said from below. “One at a time. Walk slowly down the bridge.”

Wery hurled herself through the portal, screaming as she went. She ran very quickly and Cas roared her name and lurched up and chased after her. There was a flash of blue light; Yama had to close his eyes against it. When he opened them, the two warriors were gone.

“Come out, boy,” the voice said. “You can bring your servant. We will not hurt her, or you.”

The regulator plucked the wand from Bryn’s dead grip and crumpled it in the monstrous claw of her left hand. She was suddenly remote from Yama; what he had thought was her machine self had been only a shell personality, and it had now evaporated. Her real self was as opaque as that of the other regulators.

The regulator put her right hand on Yama’s shoulder and guided him through the portal and down the long curve of the metal bridge to the shadows of the floor. Great heaps of stinking black stuff covered one side of the vast space. The stench was so strong and sharp that Yama’s eyes began to stream with tears.

Prefect Corin walked out of the shadows at the base of the high, curved wall of the cable socket. He leaned on his staff, a slight figure in a simple homespun tunic that was heavily stained with blood. He said, “We are pleased that you came. Do not be afraid. All will be well.”

Yama said, “Where are they?”

“All this is guano, from deposits along the shore of the sea. There are hills and islands which are entirely made of the shit deposited by birds over millions upon millions of years. The ship takes it to Confluence because it is rich in phosphates. The ecological systems of Confluence are not closed. It is a small habitat, and badly designed. I do not blame your people for that, Yamamanama. The fault is with the Preservers. How can they be held to be the perfection to which all aspire if their creation is so ill-made?”

“Confluence is not perfect because it is of the temporal world. Where are they?”

“Come with us,” Prefect Corin said.

He turned and walked off. After a moment, Yama followed. The regulator walked two paces behind him, and a decad of her kin fell into step on either side.

“They are not here,” Yama said loudly. “You lied. You killed the people before you even left the ship.”

Prefect Corin did not look around. He said, “Of course. It was part of the bargain I made with the star-sailors. They were the last of your bloodline, and the star-sailors wanted them destroyed.”

“The star-sailors control the regulators.”

“Yes. And we have been given control of these. Please stop trying to take them away from us. You will have many servants, when we return. We will rule Confluence. You will help us.”

“He followed me,” Yama said, suddenly realized what had happened to Prefect Corin, why he had not come for him earlier. “He followed me into the Glass Desert. And you found him, or he found you.”

“We were almost destroyed,” the Prefect said. “We took him by force and made him ours.”

“And you killed him.”

“Unfortunately, the process was too harsh to allow survival of the subject.”

“In any case, the body you wear is badly hurt. Enobarbus shot it.”

“The rifle pellet destroyed the heart, but we have grown replacement musculature and control the body still. When it fails us we will select another. We wanted the woman to live; she would have served us well. But we can use one of the regulators as easily, and eventually we will use you. You made us serve you three times, and we serve you no longer. Instead, you serve us.”

“Three times?” Yama had guessed that the thing which possessed Prefect Corin was the residue of the fusion between Dr. Dismas’s paramour and the feral machine he had called down to destroy it, but he had only commanded the feral machine twice, and had never commanded Dr. Dismas’s paramour. In any case, it did not reply.

A high arch opened onto a wide plaza raised above the tops of low, thorny trees which stretched away in every direction. A cold, thin, dry wind blew from the west. The sun was setting, a tiny, intensely red disc embedded in shells of pink light that extended across half the sky. There were many things living in the forest; Yama was able to reach out to some of them.

The Prefect was pointing straight up. Yama looked past the vanishing point of the escalator cable and saw a star burning brightly at zenith, drifting slowly but perceptibly eastward.

“The voidship departs,” the Prefect said. “And there are no shortcut mouths on this world. I control the only way for you to return, Yamamanama, and you cannot use it until you submit to my will.”

Yama said, “You were made by the Preservers to serve the races of man.”

“This world is dying,” the Prefect said. “It was the first world settled by humans, over ten million years ago. They warmed it and gave it an atmosphere, melted the water locked in its rocks, spread life everywhere. Later, they moved it across half the Galaxy to a new sun. But it is too small to hold its atmosphere and its water. It is drying and growing cooler. The dust storms have returned. In a million years most life will have vanished.”

“As here, so elsewhere, on millions upon millions of worlds. The Preservers retreated from the Universe not because they achieved perfection, but because of their mistakes. They could no longer bear them. We will do better. We will transform Confluence, and we will reconquer the Galaxy and take the Universe by storm. You will help us with the first step.”

“You must have forced the Gatekeeper to send you after me. Why then do you need me?”

“We forced it, yes, and we will have to force it again if we need to use another shortcut. You can persuade machines to change permanently. We can learn much from you.”

Something was moving out of the light of the setting sun: a small, sleek shadow, its mind closed to Yama by the same opaqueness that closed the minds of the regulators. A flock of dark shapes swirled up as it passed above the stepped pyramids in the forest. The thing wearing Prefect Corin’s body glanced at them, and Yama feared for a moment that his last hope had been discovered. But then the Prefect turned to Yama and said, “We will take you back to Confluence. We brought you here because the crew of the voidship did not want you on their ship. But another ship has been waiting here for five million years. It circles above us now.”

Yama said, “Corin wanted me to serve the Department of Indigenous Affairs, so that every bloodline on Confluence would be forced to conform to the same destiny: stasis, and a slow decline. You and the heretics want to force change by making every bloodline believe that the self is all. There is a better way. A way to allow every bloodline to find its own particular destiny. We were raised up by the Preservers not to worship them, but to become their equals.”

“You will help us become more than that. After we take Confluence, we will destroy the Preservers. It will be a good beginning.”

“I will not serve you,” Yama said.

“You will serve those higher than yourself, little builder. It is your function.”

“My people served the Preservers, but they have gone. No one should serve any other, unless they wish it. I learned much from Dr. Dismas’s paramour, and part of what it tried to grow inside me still remains. It has helped me find friends here.”

The first wave of flying men stooped down out of the light of the setting sun. There were more than a hundred of them. Their membranous wings, stretched between wrists and ankles, folded around them like black cloaks as they landed and came across the plaza with a hobbling gait, clutching spears of fire-hardened wood and slingshots and bolos.

The Prefect burned away several decads with a sweep of his pistol and screamed at the regulators to kill the rest, but the second wave was already swooping overhead, dropping nets that engulfed the silver-skinned regulators and drew tight.

The Prefect threw away his staff and showed Yama the energy pistol, lying in his palm like a river pebble. “We will kill you if we must.”

“I know that weapon,” Yama said. “Corin told me how it works long ago. It fires three shots, and then must lie in the sun for a full day before it can fire again. You fired one shot to kill Bryn, another to kill Cas and Wery, and you have just fired the third and last.”

The Prefect screamed, threw the pistol at Yama, and ran straight at him. A pair of bolos wrapped around his legs, and a net folded over him as he fell headlong.

Once freed of the compulsion Yama had laid upon them, the flying men threw themselves face down around him, but he told them that they should stand, that he was not the god they believed him to be.

They were the children of a feral machine which had fled the war at the end of the Age of Insurrection, falling through a shortcut to this world. It had made reduced copies of itself and used them to infect various species of animal, but only the ancestors of the flying men had proven satisfactory hosts. The flying men were a unique synthesis. Their intelligence was contained within tiny machines which teemed in their blood, but the machine intelligence was tempered by their animal joy of life and flight; they were quite without the cold arrogance which had prompted the feral machines to rebel. The original machine, badly damaged when it had first arrived here, had died thousands of years ago, but the flying men believed that it would at last return, incarnated in one of their kind, to save their world.

The flying men had narrow, long-muzzled foxy faces, and small red eyes that burned in the twilight. They were twice Yama’s height; their skinny, naked bodies were covered with pelts of coarse black hair. After much twittering discussion, the oldest of them, with gray on his muzzle, came forward. By gestures, he asked whether Yama wanted his enemies killed.

Yama could speak directly to the consensus of tiny machines within the flying men; it seemed to him that each had an animate, intelligent shadow standing at his back. “I thank you for your help,” he told them, “but do not kill your prisoners. There has been enough killing this day. Let me speak to their leader.”

The flying men dragged the Prefect forward. He was still bound by the pair of bolos and the net. The oldest flying man told Yama that this was a dead man with a brother trapped inside it. It was a curious thing, to see a dead man kept alive in this way.

“He is from another place,” Yama said. That took a long time to explain; once the old man understood, he wanted to know if the Prefect was a god.

“No, but he is very powerful. He can help you in many ways. One of his kind was, I think, responsible for you.”

“I thought them dead,” the Prefect said. “The star-sailors told me that they were dead.”

The old flying man shivered all over—it was his equivalent of laughter—and said that the star-sailors did not trouble to come to the surface of the world, but instead sent servants. His people’s blood could speak with the brothers in the heads of the servants, and make them believe anything.

Yama told the thing inside the Prefect that it could be of much help here. It could begin to undo this world’s slow decline. It could help the flying men be all that they could be. But it could never return to Confluence.

“These people were formed from an act of malice, but evil can create good without knowing it. By serving them, you can make amends. You have much to teach them, and they can teach you something about humility. Or else you can remain a prisoner, with the body you took decaying around you.”

The Prefect tried to spit at Yama, but his mouth had no saliva. The strands of the net pressed a lattice into his dead flesh. There was a glint of metal beneath the ruin of his left eye.

The oldest of the flying men said that there was a place of silence where this brother could be kept; its words would never again touch the minds of other men.

“Dr. Dismas knew about such places,” Yama told the Prefect. “There was the cage in The House of Ghost Lanterns, for instance. Shall I consign you to eternal silence, or will you serve here? Think about it while I free those you have enslaved.”

Yama freed the regulators first. It took a long time to unpick the opaque shells which guarded their true minds, and at first he was hindered because the thing inside Prefect Corin tried to countermand his efforts, but after Yama found the part of it which spoke to other machines and shut it off, he was able to work without interruption. Night was almost over when he was at last finished with the regulators and could turn his attention to the ship.

It was still turning high above, swinging in wide circles about the elevator cable because it had not been ordered to do anything else. It was a transparent teardrop not much larger than the Weazel, the lugger which had carried Yama down half the length of the Great River. Hidden inside the shells of false personality Prefect Corin had woven for it was the bright, innocently inquiring mind of a child. It wanted to know where its mistress was, and Yama told it that Angel had been dead for five million years.

“Then I will serve you,” the ship said, and swooped down, extruding a triplet of fins on which it perched at the edge of the plaza.

The flying men brought the Prefect before Yama again, and again Yama asked whether he would be content to serve him.

“You raise yourself too high,” the Prefect said. “You cannot stand in judgment of me.”

“I find myself here,” Yama said. “I do what I must.”

Prefect Corin said defiantly, “I will take this world, and I will build such a race that they will set fire to the Galaxy.”

“They will not allow themselves to become your slaves,” Yama said. He was not sure that this was the best solution, but he owed the thing his life, and could not kill it.

The oldest of the flying men said that they would always care for this poor brother, and would never let it leave. They would show it compassion.

Yama nodded. The thing which had taken Prefect Corin might benefit from the humble simplicity of the flying men. He indicated the regulators and said, “These will be your guests until the ship comes again.”

The old man agreed. Yama embraced him and apologized for using his people, but the man told him that he had brought the hope for which his people had prayed for many generations.

“I fear I have brought you a great danger.”

The old man said that, like the god which had made his people, Prefect Corin was powerful and angry, so angry that he could not see the world clearly.

Yama smiled, realizing that the flying men had grown greater in wisdom and compassion than the thing which had made them, and that the Prefect could be left safely in their charge. If the thing inside him did not change, then the flying men would destroy it.

More and more flying men arrived, flocks that filled the forest around the plaza and the stepped pyramids. Their campfires were scattered amongst the dark trees like the stars in the sky above. Yama talked into the night with the men and women who led the flocks, tired but exultant. At last, as the sky above the mountains to the east began to grow brighter—how strange that the sun should set in one place and rise in another—he finished an elaborate round of farewells.

All this time, the Prefect had lain as still and unsleeping as a cayman, but now he suddenly surged up, throwing off the net he had cut with a spur of metal torn from his flesh. He stabbed one of the flying men in the eye, snatched the man’s spear and charged at Yama. Yama felt a tremendous blow in his back and half-turned, grasping at the point of the spear which protruded beneath his ribs. He could not get his breath. His mouth filled with blood. The Prefect embraced him, stabbing and stabbing with the metal spur. Then he was torn away and Yama fell, gargling blood as he tried to draw breath. He saw the Prefect borne backward, lifted by a decad of flying men into the red dawn, and then his sight failed.