Dr. Dismas said with sudden anger, “I’m no house servant, boy,” and his hand flashed out and pinched a nerve in Yama’s elbow. Yama’s head was filled with pain as pure as light. He fell to his knees on the mesh floor of the cage, and Dr. Dismas came around the table and caught Yama’s chin between long, stiff, cold fingers.
“You are mine now,” he said, “and don’t forget it.” He turned to the twins. “Why are you two still here? You have your orders.”
“We’ll be back tonight,” Lud said. “See you pay us then.”
“Of course, of course.” Once the twins had gone, Dr. Dismas said to Yama in a confiding tone, “Frankly, I would rather work alone, but I could hardly move amongst the crowd while everyone thought I was in the tower.” He got his hands under Yama’s anus and hauled him up. “Please, do sit. We are civilized men. There, that’s better.”
Yama, perched on the edge of the flimsy metal chair, simply breathed for a while until the pain had retreated to a warm throb in the muscles of his shoulder. At last he said, “You knew the Aedile was going to arrest you.”
Dr. Dismas resumed his seat on the other side of the little table. As he screwed a cigarette into his bone holder, he said, “Your father is a man who takes his responsibilities seriously. Very properly, he confided his intentions to the Council for Night and Shrines. One of them owed me a favor.”
“If there is any problem between you and my father, I am sure it can be worked out, but not while you hold me captive. Once the fire in the tower burns out, they will look for a body. When they do not find one, they will look for you. And this is a small city.”
Dr. Dismas blew a riffle of smoke toward the mesh ceiling of the cage. “How well Zakiel has taught you logic. It would be a persuasive argument, except that they will find a body.”
“Then you planned to burn your tower all along, and you should not blame me. I expect you removed your books before you left.”
Dr. Dismas did not deny this. He said, “How did you like the display, by the way?”
“Some are convinced that you are a magician.”
“There are no such creatures. Those who claim to be magicians delude themselves as much as their clients. My little pyrotechnic display was simply a few judiciously mixed salts ignited by electric detonators when the circuit was closed by some oaf stepping on a plate I’d hidden under a rug. No more than a jape which any apprentice apothecary worthy of the trade could produce, although perhaps not on such a grand scale.” Dr. Dismas pointed a long forefinger at Yama, who stifled the impulse to flinch. “All this for you. You do owe me, Yamamanama. The Child of the River, yes, but which river, I wonder. Not our own Great River, I’m certain.”
“You know about my family.” Yama could not keep the eagerness from his voice. It was rising and bubbling inside him—he wanted to laugh, to sing, to dance. “You know about my bloodline.”
Dr. Dismas reached into a pocket of his long coat and drew out a handful of plastic straws. He rattled them together in his long pale hands and cast them on the table. He was making a decision by appealing to their random pattern; Yama had heard of this habit from Ananda, who had reported it in scandalized tones.
Yama said, “Are you deciding whether to tell me or not, doctor?”
“You’re a brave boy to ask after forbidden knowledge, so you deserve some sort of answer.” Dr. Dismas tapped ash from his cigarette. “Oxen and camels, nilgai, ratites and horses—all of them work under the lash, watched by boys no older than you, or even younger, who are armed with no more than fresh-cut withes to restrain their charges. How is this? Because the art in those animals which yearns for freedom has been broken and replaced by habit. No more than a twitch of a stick is required to reinforce that habit; even if those beasts were freed of their harness and their burden, they would be too broken to realize that they could escape their masters. Most men are no different from beasts of burden, their spirits broken by fear of the phantoms of religion invoked by priests and bureaucrats. I work hard to avoid habits. To be unpredictable—that is how you cheat those who would be the masters of men.”
“I thought you did not believe in the Preservers, doctor.”
“I don’t question their existence. Certainly they once existed. This world is evidence; the Eye of the Preservers and all the ordered Galaxy are evidence. But I do question the great lie with which the priests hypnotize the population, that the Preservers watch over us all, and that we must satisfy them so that we can win redemption and live forever after death. As if creatures who juggled stars in their courses would care about whether or not a man beats his wife, or the little torments one child visits upon another! It is a sop to keep men in their places, to ensure that so-called civilization can run on its own momentum. I spit on it.”
And here Dr. Dismas did spit, as delicately as a cat, but nevertheless startling Yama.
The apothecary fitted his cigarette holder back between his large, flat-topped teeth. When he smiled around the holder, the plaques over his cheekbones stood out in relief, their sharp edges pressing through brown skin with the coarse, soft grain of wood-pulp.
Dr. Dismas said, “The Preservers created us, but they are gone. They are dead, and by their own hand. They created the Eye, and fell through its event horizon with all their worlds. And why? Because they despaired. They remade the Galaxy, and could have remade the Universe, but their nerve failed. They were cowardly fools, and anyone who believes that they watch us still, yet do not interfere in the terrible suffering of the world, is a worse fool.”
Yama had no answer to this. There was no answer. Ananda was right. The apothecary was a monster who refused to serve anyone or anything except his own swollen, pride.
Dr. Dismas said, “The Preservers are gone, but machines still watch us, and regulate the world according to out-of-date precepts. Of course, the machines can’t watch everything at once, so they build up patterns and predict the behavior of men, and watch only for deviation from the norm. It works most of the time for most of the people, but there are a few men like me who defy their predictions by basing important decisions on chance. The machines cannot track our random paths from moment to moment, and so we become invisible. Of course, a cage such as the one in which we sit also helps hide us from them. It screens out the probing of the machines. I wear a hat for the same reason—it is lined with silver foil.”
Yama laughed, because Dr. Dismas confessed this ridiculous habit with complete solemnity. “So you are afraid of machines.”
“Not at all. But I am deeply interested in them. I have a small collection of parts of dead machines excavated from ruins in the deserts beyond the midpoint of the world—one is almost intact, a treasure beyond price.” Dr. Dismas suddenly clutched his head and shook it violently for a moment, then winked at Yama. “But that’s not to be spoken of. Not here! They might hear, even in this cage. One reason I came here is because machine activity is higher than anywhere else on Confluence—yes, even Ys. And so, my dear Yamamanama, I found you.”
Yama pointed at the straws scattered on the table. They were hexagonal in cross-section, with red and green glyphs of some unknown language incised along their faces. He said, “You refuse to acknowledge the authority of the Preservers over men, yet you follow the guidance of these bits of plastic.”
Dr. Dismas looked crafty. “Ah, but I choose which question to ask them.”
Yama had only one question in his mind. “You found something about my bloodline in Ys, and told my father what you had learned. If you will not tell me everything, will you at least tell me what you told him? Did you perhaps find my family there?”