Angel laughed. None of them understood. They were not human—how could they understand her, the last human in the Universe? She said, “I’ll tell you about rage. It is what you have forgotten, or never learned. It is the motor of evolution, and evolution’s end, too.”
She snatched a beaker of wine from one of her followers and drained it and tossed it aside. Its heat mixed smoothly with her angry contempt. She said, “We traveled for so long, not dead, not sleeping. We were no more than stored potentials triply engraved on gold. Although the ship flew so fast that it bound time about itself, the journey still took thousands of years of shipboard time. At the end of that long voyage we did not wake: we were born. Or rather, others like us were born, although I have their memories, as if they are my own. They learned then that the Universe is not made for the convenience of humans. What they found was a galaxy dead and ruined.”
Angel took the Archivist’s hands in hers and held them tightly as she told him of the ruin of the neighboring galaxy, the disrupted nebulae, the planets torn from their orbits by gravity stress, the worlds torched smooth by stars which had flared because of infalling gases. She told him what she had learned.
“Do you know how many galaxies have endured such collisions? Almost all of them. Life is a statistical freak. Our galaxy has never collided with another like it, or not for a long time, long enough for life to have evolved on planets around some of its stars. It must be unique, or else other civilizations would surely have arisen elsewhere in the unbounded Universe. As it is, we are certain that we are alone. We must make of ourselves what we can. We should not hide from the truth, as your Preservers chose to do. Instead, we should seize the day, and make the Universe over with the technology that the Preservers used to make their hiding place.”
The Archivist said, “You cannot become a Preserver. No one can, now. You should not lie to these innocent people.”
“I didn’t need to lie. They took up my story and made it theirs. They see now what they can inherit—if they dare. This won’t stop with one city. It will become a crusade!”
She stared into the Archivist’s black eyes and said softly, “You’ll remember it all, won’t you?”
The Archivist said nothing, but she knew that he was hers, now and forever. It seemed to make him unbearably sad and it broke her heart, too, to have to use him so badly when she had wanted him to be her friend.
Around them, the crowd of her followers cheered. The sled rocketed up from its cradle and smashed into the underside of the hanging gardens. Another piece of the gardens’ substructure was knocked loose. It spilled dirt and rocks amongst the spires of the palace roof as it twisted free and spun away into the night. The crowd cheered again, and Angel saw that figures had appeared at the wrecked edge of the habitat. One of the figures tossed something down, and a man brought it to Angel. It was a message tube. She shook it open: Dreen’s face glowed on the flexible membrane. His voice was squeezed small and metallic by the tube’s induced speaker. Angel listened to his entreaties and was filled with joy and hope.
“Yes,” she said, but so softly that perhaps only the Archivist heard her. She stood and raised her hands above her head, and when she had the attention of her followers she cried out, “They wish to surrender! Let them come down!”
The cargo sled dropped. They were all there, the men and women who were closer to her than sisters and brothers, shining in their white clothes. Angel’s followers jeered and threw rocks and burning brands and clods of earth, but her partials had modified the sled’s field and everything was deflected away into the night. Angel smiled. She had anticipated that trick.
The partials called to her, pleading with her to return, to join them and search for their long-lost home. Dreen jumped from the sled and dodged through the crowd of Angel’s followers. The little Commissioner caught the Archivist’s hand and told him breathlessly, “They are all one person, or variations on one person. The ship makes its crew by varying a template. Angel is an extreme. A mistake.”
Angel laughed. So Dreen had been subverted by the partials! “You funny little man,” she said. “I’m the real one—they are copies!”
She turned to the partials, who were still calling out to her, pleading with her to come back, to join them in the search for their lost home. None had dared follow Dreen. “There’s no home to find,” she told them. “Oh you fools! This is all there is! Give me back the ship!”
She knew they would never agree, but she wanted to give them the chance. It was only fair.
“It was never yours,” they chorused. “Never yours to own, only yours to serve.”
Angel jumped onto her chair and signaled to the man she had entrusted with the field degausser. It shot hundreds of fine silvery threads at the sled. For a moment, she thought it might not work, for when the threads reached the edge of the field their ends flicked upward. But then the threads drained the field—there was a great smell of burning as the degausser’s iron heat-sink glowed red-hot—and the threads fell in a tangle over the partials. Angel’s followers, seeing what had happened, began to pelt the crew with rubbish, but Angel ordered them to stop. She wanted to defeat the crew, not humiliate it.
She said, “I have the only working sleds. That which I can enhance, I can also take away.” The partials could not follow her now. The ship was hers for the taking. She turned to the Archivist triumphantly. “Come with me, and see the end of the story.”
That was when one of the partials walked away from the grounded sled, straight toward Angel. She confronted him. She told herself that there was nothing to fear. She had won. She said to him, “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Of course not, sister,” the man said.
He reached out and grasped her wrists. And the world fell away.
The acceleration was so brutal that Angel almost passed out. A rush of air burned her clothes and scorched her skin… and then there was no more air. She was so tall above the world that she could see across its width, tall mountains on one side and a straight edge on the other, stretching ahead and behind to their vanishing points. The world was a dark line hung in an envelope of air. Angel saw the brilliant point of the sun come into view beneath it. Vacuum stung her eyes with ice-cold needles; air rushed from her nose and mouth; her entire skin ached. The man embracing her pressed his lips against hers, kissing her with the last of his breath, tasting the last of hers.
There were only two pictures after that. Neither spoke to Yama. They were only pictures.
The first showed a vast room within the ship of the Ancients of Days. There was a window which displayed the triple spiral of the Home Galaxy. Two men stood before it, one grossly corpulent, the other wide-hipped and long-armed, as small as a child. The Archivist of Sensch, Mr. Naryan, and the Commissioner of Sensch, Dreen.
Dreen was pointing at the glowing window. He was telling Mr. Naryan something.
The second picture was from a point of view above Dreen, who stood at the edge of a huge opening in the ship, looking down at the river far below. A figure hung halfway between the hatch and the river. It was Mr. Naryan.
So Angel had died—although if her ship wished, she could be born again—but her ideas lived on. They had escaped with Mr. Naryan, and Yama knew that, with the help of the aspect Angel had downloaded into the space inside the shrines, the old Archivist had spread Angel’s story far and wide. The revolution in Sensch was only the beginning of the heresy which had set one half of Confluence against the other.
Shoreward, the sky grew brighter. The floating line of the Rim Mountains freed the platinum disc of the sun. A widening lane of sunlight glittered on the river, like a golden path leading to infinity. Yama watched the play of light on water and thought for a long time about the things that the changed pictures in his copy of the Puranas had shown him.