The Archivist shook his head.
Angel held out her hand, palm down, and tipped it back and forth. “This is the world. Everything lives on the back of a long flat plate which circles the sun. The plate rocks on its axis, so the sun rises above one edge and then reverses its course. I went to the edge of the world, where the river that runs down half its length falls into the void. I suppose it must be collected and redistributed, but it really does look like it falls away forever.”
“The river is eternally renewed,” the Archivist said. “Where it falls is where ships used to arrive and depart, but this city has not been a port for many years.”
“Fortunately for me, or my companions would already be here. There’s a narrow ribbon of land on the far side of the river. Nothing lives there, not even an insect. No earth, no stones. The air shakes with the sound of the river’s fall, and swirling mist burns with raw sunlight. And there are shrines, in the thunder and mist at the edge of the world.” Angel paused for effect, then said, “One spoke to me.” She could see that the Archivist was taken aback. He said nothing, staring past her in some private reverie. She grinned and said, “Don’t you want to know what it said to me? It’s part of my story.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
The Archivist looked at her. It was a look of helpless love; she knew then that like all the others he was hers to command. The thought disgusted her. She wanted him to be a friend, not a pet or a puppet. She passed her hand over the top of her head. She had had her hair cut close in the manner of microgravity construction workers, a style ten million years out of date. The bristly hair made a crisp sound under her palm. She said, “No. No, I don’t think I do. Not yet.”
Instead, she told him what the ship had showed her of the creation of the Eye of the Preservers. He seemed happier with this. It was something he understood. He said that it was just as it was written in the Puranas.
She said, “And is it also written there why Confluence was constructed around a halo star between the Home Galaxy and the Eye of the Preservers?”
“Of course. It is so we can worship and glorify the Preservers. The Eye looks upon us all.”
It was a stock answer, taken from the commentary at the end of the last sura of the Puranas. He had nothing new to tell her. No one on this strange world had had a new idea since its creation, but she would change that. If she was going to rule here, she must first topple the old gods.
The news that she had woken one of the shrines on the far-side shore spread through the city. The streets around her house became choked with curious citizens. She could no longer wander about the city, because huge crowds gathered everywhere she went. There was a story that she had been tempted with godhood, and that she had refused. It was not something she had told the citizens—they were changing her story to fit their needs. She tried to teach them that the Universe of things was all there was, that there were no gods capable of intercession, that everyone was responsible for their own destiny. Seize the day, she told them, and they made the slogan into their battle cry.
Her followers daubed slogans everywhere, and now many of the slogans were of their own making.
Somehow, the citizens of Sensch came to believe that they could use the far-side shrines just as she had, without intervention of priest or hierodule, and that personal redemption was within their grasp. They set off in their thousands on pilgrimages across the river; so many that the city’s markets closed because the merchants had moved to the docks to supply those making the journey across the river. Meanwhile, Angel became a prisoner in her house, surrounded by followers, her every move watched with reverence. She had to stand on the roof so that she could be seen and heard by all of them. She was trying to free them from their habits and their unthinking devotion to the Preservers, to shape them into an army that could be used against her ship when it finally came for her.
She built devices that might help her escape. A crude muscle-amplification suit. A circuit-breaking device that would interfere with the broadcast power on which the myriads of tiny machines fed. She tinkered with the gravity units of cargo sleds, and painstakingly reprogrammed a few captured machines. But all of this activity was marking time. It was almost a relief when her ship finally arrived.
Angel went up to the roof of her house when the ship drew near the city’s docks. It had reconfigured itself into a huge black wedge composed of stacked tiers of flat plates. Its pyramidal apex was taller than the tallest towers of the city. Angel knew that the ship would try to take her back, but she might be able to escape if she could use the powers of the ship against itself.
She insisted on going to the docks. The young men who were her closest followers were very afraid, but they could not disobey her. She had two of them carry the circuit breaker, and armed the rest with pistols. The streets were almost empty. Thousands upon thousands of citizens had gathered at the docks to greet the ship, held back by a thin line of magistrates and their machines. The people were restless; they made a humming noise that rose and fell in pitch but never ended. Machines swept their packed heads with flares of light. There had already been trouble, for those near the front were wounded in some way, fallen to their knees and wailing and clutching at their faces. And when Dreen, the Commissioner of Sensch, rode a cargo sled to the top of the ship to greet the men and women of the crew, the crowd pressed forward eagerly, held back only by the quirts and machines of the magistrates.
Angel knew then that this was her only chance to take the ship from the crew. She fired up the circuit breaker and every machine fell from the sky, burned out by the power surge. The magistrates were powerless to stop the crowd as it surged down the docks toward the ship. Angel saw Dreen’s cargo sled fly away from the top of the ship—it drew power from the world’s gravity fields—toward the floating gardens above the pink sandstone palace. The Archivist was coming toward her, struggling through the crowd. Angel ordered those around her to take him to the palace, and left to organize the siege.
Power was down all over the city. The population had lost all restraint, as if it was only the presence of the machines which had kept them in order. There was drunkenness and gambling and open fornication. Buildings were set on fire; markets were looted. But those citizens Angel encountered still obeyed her unquestioningly. They loaded up cargo sleds with batteries for a localized power system and marched on the palace and attacked the floating gardens, some using the modified sleds to smash away pieces of the gardens’ superstructure, others starting to grow towers into the air using self-catalyzing masonry. Angel was sitting in the middle of her followers on the palace roof, with the machines she had reprogrammed spinning above her head, when the Archivist was brought before her. He was bruised and disheveled, not badly hurt, but clearly terrified. She beckoned him forward and he drew on his last reserves of dignity to confront her. She said, “What should I do with your city, now that I have taken it from you?”
The Archivist said, “You have not finished your story.”
There was a hint of defiance in his voice, but then he added weakly, “I would like to hear it all.”
“My people can tell you. They hide with Dreen up above, but not for long.” Angel pointed to a dozen men who were wrestling a sled into the crude launch cradle and explained how she had enhanced its anti-gravity properties. “We’ll chip away that floating fortress piece by piece if we have to, or we’ll finish growing towers and storm its remains, but I expect them to surrender long before then.”
“Dreen is not the ruler of the city.”
“Not anymore.”
The Archivist dared to step closer. He said, “What did you find out there, that you rage against?”