Shrine of Stars

Chapter Twenty-Three The Gatekeeper

The ship walked with him down dark ways and sang to him of his sorrows. At first he did not know or remember who he was or what the ship’s sad, sweet songs meant, but slowly he understood that he had died, and now, after a long, dark sleep, he was healed. He was awake. It was time to rise.

It was as painful as birth. He was expelled from dreamy warm darkness into harsh light and chill air, naked and slimy, choking on the fluid which had for so long sustained him. It ran from his nostrils and bubbled at the bottom of his lungs. He coughed and spat and retched.

He was lying on his belly with night all around him, on an endless floor of glass punctuated by groups of enigmatic statues and machines that glimmered with foxfire. The Galaxy’s triple-armed spiral tilted below. Gradually, he realized that the dim shell of light around him defined the true size of the ship. It was as transparent as certain species of shrimp which lived in the deep waters of the Great River; the great glass plain was an illusion.

He laughed. All was illusion.

A woman came through a door which a moment before had not been there. She was naked and silver-skinned. One arm was swollen into a monstrous claw. “It took almost a year,” she said. “At the end, we thought you might die again.”

She was the regulator who had accompanied him to the surface of the red world. She was afraid that he would be angry because of the way he had been saved, but he still did not understand what had been done to him, except that he had died, and had slept, and had been healed.

Dazed by his long sleep, Yama sprawled for many hours in the middle of the room the ship had made for him, combing his fingers through the long hair and beard which had grown while he had slept, staring at the great wheel of the Galaxy below or the red whorl of the Eye of the Preservers above. A few dim halo stars were scattered across the black sky; a single bright star shone beyond the ship’s bow. He traced and retraced the scars which seamed his belly and his chest and his back, a secret history of pain printed on his body.

The regulator brought him food now and then, but although his stomach was empty he was not ready to eat. At last, he asked her to explain how she and the ship had saved him.

“It was the only way, master,” the regulator said. “Even so, we were not sure if you would survive storage or the surgical procedures. The medical facilities are very primitive. And that is why—”

“She has funny ideas,” the ship said, “about what is possible and what is not.”

“We brought it to term,” the regulator said. “We could not kill it.”

“I think I could,” the ship said. “I think I could kill it if you asked me to, master.”

It amused the ship to appear as a solemn, ghostly little girl of Yama’s bloodline, her skinny body sketched in faint lines of light against the black sky, her eyes two dim stars.

Yama said, “You had better show me exactly what you did.”

“At once,” the regulator said, and went through the door which appeared only when it was used.

Yama asked the skip where they were. It showed views of the spiral arm from which they had traveled, the great rising arc of their course. They had been traveling along the path plotted by the thing which had taken over Prefect Corin.

The trip through the shortcut had taken Yama deep into the past. Traveling back through ordinary space at close to the speed of light, the ship had taken a hundred and sixty thousand years to voyage between the star of the red world, deep within the Galaxy, and the star of Confluence, far beyond the Galaxy’s rim. But the ship’s speed had compressed time aboard it, and less than a year of ship-time had passed while Yama returned to the place from which he had set out.

He wanted to know at once where Confluence was. The ship became evasive, claiming that it had followed the course exactly. “Perhaps the instructions were wrong in some small detail,” it said. “I have located the star, and it is of the correct mass and spectral type, but there is no trace of a habitat orbiting it.”

There were no feral machines, either. Only the mouths of many shortcuts in lonely orbits around a lonely star. Yama was still thinking about this when the regulator returned through what he thought of as the occasional door. She was holding something, crooning to it in her throaty voice. Its head, with a vulnerable swirl of dark hair, was propped on her monstrous claw; its hands clutched at the air like a hungry starfish.

A baby.

He had died, and before the ship and the regulator had put his body into storage, they had taken a scraping from the inside of his mouth. They had quickened certain of the cells in the scraping and grown them into fetuses—there had been five, but only two had lived. Tissues had been harvested from one and used to grow replacement organs; these had been transplanted into Yama and then he had slept a long time, healing. But the ship and the regulator had not been able to bring themselves to kill the other fetus, and they had not put it into storage, for they had not been sure if it would survive. And so, while Yama had been revived and healed, it had grown to term.

It had been born just before Yama’s rebirth.

“It is exactly the same genome as you, master,” the regulator said, “and because of that we were unable to kill it.”

The baby chuckled in her arms. Yama gently took him from her, surprised by his mass and heat, the spicy odor of cinnamon and ammonia. The baby tried to focus his eyes on him, frowning with effort, then tried to smile.

Yama set the baby spinning around him, laughing as he gurgled with delight.

“We are in the future, and we must go back a little way into the past,” Yama said, a little later. “I think that the composite thing which took Prefect Corin wanted to return after the heretics’ war had ended, and claim Confluence from the victor. And the war is certainly over, for Confluence is no longer here. I know now how this should end. We must go back.”

The Gatekeeper woke as the ship approached the nearest of the many shortcut mouths which orbited the lonely star. A light dawned far off across the illusionary glass plain, a bright star growing into the shape of an old man of Yama’s bloodline. At first, he was a giant bigger than the ship, walking steadily toward it as if against a great wind, but he grew smaller as he approached, so that when he entered the room (not by the occasional door, but through an angle Yama had never seen before) he was exactly Yama’s height.

There was nothing remarkable about the old man’s aspect. He had a pale, wrinkled face framed by long white hair and a beard of silky white curls. He wore a white robe girdled by a broad leather belt from which bunches of keys of all sizes hung. Yet it hurt Yama to look at him directly, and when he spoke, his words echoed directly in Yama’s mind.

We meet again, Child of the River.

Yama said, “Where am I? I mean, how much time has passed since I left Confluence?”

A little more than forty years.

“And the world? Was it destroyed, or was it—”

It has moved on. I remained here to wait for you.

“How did you know that I would come here?”

I stand at every door.

“Then you must know that I have to go back,” Yama said, thoughtfully stroking his beard. The regulator had suggested that she trim both his hair and his beard, but he had refused. He said, “I have to go back to the recent past, and the beginning of my story.”

The old man fingered through a bunch of keys at his waist. His eyes were dim red stars, framed by his flowing white hair.

For most of my existence, I would have said that what you ask would be very difficult to do. There were once two kinds of shortcut. Those of the first kind have been sundered from their origins, and lead to the deep past in places far from here. Those of the second kind link places in space not separated by more than a few seconds. Or they did, before the world was taken away.

“Then you will not help me?”

You could choose one of the long routes. The ancestors of the Preservers rebuilt the Galaxy after the wars with the Transcendents, but after the Preservers quit the Galaxy, the orbits of the stars have been untended. They brought the mouths of many shortcuts here, but the stars to which the shortcuts lead have drifted; and some have drifted closer to the star of Confluence. The time debt between the ends of the shortcuts remains the same, but the distance between them in ordinary space is less than it once was.

Yama thought about this. He said, “Then the ship could pass through one of these shortcuts and travel back through ordinary space in less time than it took to drag the two mouths of the shortcuts apart.”

There are, as I have said, several examples of these. I can guide you through one, as a last boon.

“But it will still take a year of ship-time to return. No, that is too long.”

Indeed. But now there is another other way. The mouth of a shortcut with a time debt of only forty years appeared a few days ago. I have informed the ship. We will not meet again, for that which I served for so long has moved on. I remained here only to meet you for this final time. Now that is done, and I am free at last. I thank you for my freedom.

“Where will you go?”

The old man pointed toward the Eye of the Preservers. I will follow my masters, of course.

“Then perhaps you can answer the question which has puzzled the mystagogues and philosophers since the Preservers set the ten thousand bloodlines on Confluence. Where have they gone?”

I do not know, except that it will be a better place than this.

“To the far end of time, when all will live again in the best of all possible worlds?”

It is not in this universe. The woman who called herself Angel was wrong. There are many other intelligent species in the Universe, but they are hidden from us because they are at distances greater than light has been able to travel since the Universe’s creation. At present they are unreachable, but they will be brought together as the Universe contracts toward its last end. The Preservers foresaw a great war at the end of time and space, and decided on another way. And so they constructed the huge black hole at the heart of the Eye of the Preservers and withdrew from the Universe. They left Confluence in the hope that its peoples might grow greater than they. How it must have saddened them when it began to fail, and yet because they had withdrawn they were unable to interfere. The first war stopped all progress on Confluence; the second might have destroyed it. But you are their avatar, and you have saved it.

“Not yet, I think.”

In this place and time, it has already happened. But I suppose that there are many time-lines where you did not prevail and the heretics were victorious, only to destroy Confluence when they quarreled amongst themselves over the spoils of their victory. If by mischance you return to one of those time-lines then I grieve for you. And yet in all of them I will be free!

“You have not told me about where you will go.”

As species compete and evolve, so do universes. Those in which the formation of black holes is possible can give rise to other universes, for energy which disappears through black holes reappears elsewhere. That is where the Preservers have gone. Rather than fight for the last moment of infinite energy at the end of this universe, they have departed to create a new universe, one more suited to them than this. And now I go to discover it. Farewell, Child of the River.

“Wait!” Yama said again.

There was so much more he wanted to ask, but the old man was already fading, leaving behind only two points of faint red light that quickly receded beyond the boundary of the ship.

The ship’s chiming laughter filled its transparent volumes. “You must trust me, master. I know now what to do.”

The end of the new shortcut was only a few minutes’ travel away. It hung within a vast cloud of water-ice particles that refracted the sun into a billion points of twinkling light as the ship fell through it.