Shrine of Stars

Chapter Four Hope

The young warlord, Enobarbus, and the rogue apothecary, Dr. Dismas, both wanted the same thing from Yama, but wanted it for different reasons. Enobarbus, champion of the aspect of Angel and traitor to the army raised against the heretics by the Department of Indigenous Affairs, wanted to conquer the world in the name of his mistress and overthrow the stasis imposed in the name of the Preservers by the vast civil service. After that, Utopia would follow as naturally as summer follows the rise of the Eye of the Preservers: everyone a suzerain and everyone living forever with the aid of old technologies which the heretics were busily reviving. Dr. Dismas wanted an end to stasis too, but what he wanted after that was more complex. He was a hybrid of man and feral machine, an agent of the faction whose rebellion had, during the Age of Insurrection, wrecked half the world and destroyed many of the avatars left by the Preservers to guide and enlighten the ten thousand bloodlines of the Shaped. He wanted an end to the belief that the Preservers were gods and a closer union between machines and men, but his motives remained opaque. Or rather, he gave so many different reasons that it seemed to Yama that he wanted only a glorious chaos, a soup of contingency, change for change’s sake.

Despite their differences, Enobarbus and Dr. Dismas agreed on one thing: Yama was the key to victory. Their quarrels ranged back and forth across his head like those of children squabbling over a toy.

Yama took little notice of them. He was growing less and less aware of the world. He was sinking into the battleground of his own body. The thing which Dr. Dismas had planted inside him at the beginning of his adventures was fully awake now, and its power was growing day by day, hour by hour. It was as if Yama’s self was an island or castle of light surrounded by a restless flood of darkness both malevolent and sentient. Not only was it rising, but it was constantly sending out stealthy filaments and tentacles, constantly probing for weaknesses. Yama felt that if he gave way to it for a moment, even in the dreams which possessed him in sleep (which were not truly dreams; nor was it truly sleep), then he would dissolve at once, like a flake of salt dropped in the Great River.

It was Yama’s worst enemy and his most intimate relation. More a brother than Telmon; more a lover than Derev; a greater enemy than Prefect Corin or Dr. Dismas. A secret sharer, a spectral reflection, a dark half: his Shadow.

Dr. Dismas explained that it was growing an interpenetrating neural network in parallel to the web of neurons in Yama’s brain—an exact duplicate, in fact, but on a much smaller scale, each pseudo-neuron no more than a hundred molecules wide, each pseudo-axon a whisker the width of six carbon atoms. Yama did not really understand this; he did not understand much of the apothecary’s gabble. But he knew that the Shadow had grown under his skin and was extending into the intimate cavern of his skull. His dreams were no longer his own. Most were kaleidoscopic visions of battlefields and cities under siege, but in one chilling reverie he saw a great, joyful crowd of people linking and relinking hands in a stately dance, and behind each of the dancers, aping every movement, was a malevolent starveling creature as thin as paper and as black as soot.

Yama knew that as the Shadow spread through his skull it had assumed control of his powers and was using them to subvert machines loyal to the cause of the Preservers, turning them against the army of the Department of Indigenous Affairs. He knew that it was speeding the tide of war toward Ys. The visions of battle were true visions of the Shadow’s interventions in the war far upriver, leaking from its consciousness to his. He could not stop the Shadow taking control of his power over machines, but he learned that he could follow it out into the world as a wren might steal a ride on the back of a lammergeyer or a mite on a spider. Awake, Yama could no longer even sense the presence of machines, much less bend them to his will, but in the grip of one of the deep trances that these days passed for sleep, riding the Shadow’s consciousness far from his unconscious body, he was able to take over a machine and steal away, fleeing from the terrible visions of clashing blades of light, fountains of fire, screams of men and beasts.

In this guise, the world seemed partly transparent; there were revelations everywhere Yama looked. Using the borrowed machine’s deep radar he could see the ancient dredgers in the deeps of the Great River, accompanied by schools of giant polyps which kept their ceramic carapaces clean and plucked tasty morsels from the silt they pushed toward the pipes which would carry it to the Rim Mountains. He could see the passages and great caverns beneath the skin of the world, the vast, unfathomable machines which labored there and the great engines in the keelways. And he could see the world itself by light above and below that narrow band in the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation used by living creatures; see the forests of the Marsh of the Lost Waters as a crumpled landscape of white, reflected heat with beasts and men bright sparks moving within it; see the myriads of machines which tended the world as intense specks of constantly rewoven electromagnetic patterns; see the distant cloud of feral machines which hung several million leagues behind the orbit of Confluence. In this form, at least, the feral machine he had inadvertently called upon for help was no more than any of the others, indistinguishable in the dim cloud of overlapping electromagnetic signatures.

As below, so above. Yama could hear the faint roar of the Universe’s birth-pang, the wailing ululation and popcorn crepitation of radio sources within the Galaxy beneath the world’s keel, the faint chirps of the halo stars. And hear too the song of the accretion disc around the Eye of the Preservers, the intense crackle of fusion in gravity-tied knots in the infalling gases, the fricative hiss of molecular hydrogen, the howl of tidally-heated matter reaching its last end at the event horizon of the black hole at the center of the disc, the great No from which nothing, not even the Preservers, who had willed their own incarceration, could escape until the Universe’s last end.

One night, Yama sensed something beyond the lines of the army of the Department of Indigenous Affairs. It was like a memory which would not take form, a melody he could not quite name. A far star that was fainter than any machine, yet which drew him as a weary traveler in a wide wasteland might at last glimpse the distant flicker of his own hearth, and hurry homeward with a gladdened heart. But even as he flew toward it, the machine he had borrowed speeding above the sullen waves of the night-dark river, the Shadow stirred and woke, and Yama woke too. (Far upriver, a machine suddenly found itself a few meters above the midway current of the Great River, falling down a gravithic geodesic toward Ophir. Braking so hard that its shell glowed red-hot with friction, it spun eccentrically on its axis—just as a hound might shake itself—remembered the task it was supposed to be executing, fixed the coordinates and sped off, dismayed and embarrassed.) And on waking, Yama knew what the thing which had drawn him must be. He held the knowledge close, drawing strength from the hope it gave him, and made a vow. I will find it, he thought, and find if Pandaras is still alive. No, he must be. The coin will not work unless he is holding it. Not all is lost.

It was a frail hope. For even if he found Pandaras, what could he tell him? And if Pandaras found him, what could he do?

A frail hope, yes, but all the hope he had.