Yama said, with reflexive politeness, “I have never seen a garden like yours.”
“Of course you haven’t. It is from some long-vanished world, perhaps even from Earth. Do you wish me to change it? I could live anywhere, you know. Or at least anywhere on file that hasn’t been corrupted. The servers are very old, and there’s much that has been corrupted. Atoms migrate; cosmic rays and neutrinos disrupt the lattices . . . Anyway, I like gardens. It stirs something in my memory. My original ruled many worlds once, and surely some of those possessed gardens. It’s possible she owned a garden just like this, once upon a time. But I’ve forgotten such a lot, and I was never really whole in the first place. There are peacocks. Do you know peacocks? No, I suppose not. Perhaps there are autochthonous creatures like peacocks somewhere on Confluence, but I don’t have the files to hand. If we talk long enough perhaps one will come past. They are birds. The cocks have huge fan-shaped tails, with eyes in them.”
Yama was suddenly overwhelmed by the image of an electric-blue long-necked bird with concentric arcs of fiery eyes peering over its tiny head. He turned away, the heels of his palms pressed into his eye sockets, but the vision still beat inside his head.
“Wait,” the woman said. Was there a note of uncertainty in her voice? “I didn’t mean . . . The gain is difficult to control . . .”
The sheaves of burning eyes vanished; there was only ordinary blood-warm darkness behind his eyelids. Cautiously, Yama turned back to the shrine.
“It isn’t real,” the woman said. She stepped up to the inner surface of the shrine and pressed her hands against it and peered between them as if trying to see through the window of a lighted room into a dark landscape. Her palms were dyed red. Paeonin. She said, “That it isn’t real is the important thing to remember. But isn’t everything an illusion? We’re all waves, and even the waves are really half-glimpsed strings folded deeply into themselves.”
She seemed to be talking to herself, but then she smiled at Yama. Or no, her eyes were not quite focused on him, but at a point a little to one side of the top of his head.
Yama said, prompted by a flicker of suspicion, “Excuse me, domina, but are you really an avatar? I have never seen one before.”
“I’m no fragment of a god, Yamamanama. The shape of my original ruled a million planetary systems, once upon a time, but she never claimed to be a god. None of the transcendents ever claimed that, only their enemies.”
Fear and amazement collapsed into relief. Yama laughed and said, “An aspect. You are an aspect. Or a ghost.”
“A ghost in the machine. Yes, that’s one way of looking at it. Why not? Even when my original walked the surface of this strange habitat she was a copy of a memory, and I suppose that would make me a kind of a ghost of a ghost. But you’re a ghost, too. You shouldn’t be here, not at this time. You’re either too young, or too old, a hundred thousand years either way . . . Do you know why you are here?”
“I wish with all my heart to find out,” Yama said, “but I do not believe in ghosts.”
“We have spoken before.” The woman tilted her head with a curiously coquettish gesture, and smiled. “You don’t remember, do you?” she said. “Well, you were very young, and that foolish man with you hid your face in a fold of his robes. I think he must have done something to the shrine, afterwards, because that window has been closed to me ever since, like so many others. There is much old damage in the system from the war between the machines. I could only glimpse you now and then as you grew up. How I wish I could have spoken to you! How I wish I could have helped you! I am so happy to meet you again, but you should not be here, in this strange and terrible city. You should be on your way downriver, to the war.”
“What do you know about me? Please, domina, will you tell me what you know?”
“There are gates. Manifolds held open by the negative gravity of strange matter. They run in every direction, even into the past, all the way back to when they were created. I think that is where you come from. That, or the voidships. Perhaps your parents were passengers or stowaways on a voidship, time-shifted by the velocity of some long voyage. We did not learn where the voidships went. There was not enough time to learn a tenth of what we wanted to know. In any case, you come from the deep past of this strange world, Yamamanama, but although I have searched the records, I do not know who sent you, or why. Does it matter? You are here, and there is much to be done.”
Yama could not believe her. For if he had been sent here from the deep past when his people, the Builders, had been constructing the world according to the desires of the Preservers, then he could never find his family or any others like him. He would be quite alone, and that was unthinkable.
He said, “I was found on the river. I was a baby, lying on the breast of a dead woman in a white boat.” He suddenly felt that his heart might burst with longing. “Please tell me! Tell me why I am here!”
The woman in the shrine lifted her hands, wrists cocked in an elegant shrug. She said, “I’m a stranger here. My original walked out into your world and died there, but not before she started to change it. And before she died part of her came here, and here I am still. I sometimes wonder if you’re part of what she did after she left me here. Would that make you my son, if it were true?”
Yama said, “I am looking for answers, not more riddles.”
“Let me give an example. You see the statues? You think them monuments to dead heroes, but the truth is simpler than any story.”
“Then they are not statues?”
“Not at all. They are soldiers. They were garrisoned here after the main part of the temple was built, to guard against what the foolish little priests of the temple call the Thing Below. I suppose that when the apses were remodeled many years later it was easier to incorporate the soldiers into the architecture than to move them. Most of their kind have been smelted down, and small pieces of armor have been cast from their remains, so in a sense they still defend the populace. But the soldiers around us are the reality, and the human soldiers who wear reforged scraps of the integuments of their brothers are but the shadows of that reality, as I am a shadow of the one for whom I speak. Unlike the soldiers, she is quite vanished from this world, and only I remain.”
Yama looked up at the nearest of the figures. It stared above his head at one of its fellows on the opposite side of the square apse, but Yama fancied that he saw its eyes flicker toward him for an instant. They were red, and held a faint glow that he knew had not been there before.
He said, “Am I then a shadow too? I am searching for others like me. Can I find them?”
“I would be amazed and delighted if you did, but they are all long dead. I think that you will be sufficient, Yamamanama. Already you have discovered that you can control the machines which maintain this habitat. There is much more I can teach you.”
“My bloodline was made by the Preservers to build the world, and then they went away. That much I have learnt, at least. I will discover more in the Palace of the Memory of the People.”
“They were taken back,” the woman said. “You might say that if I am a shadow of what I was, then your kind were a shadow of what you call the Preservers and what I suppose I could call my children, although they are as remote from me as I am from the plains apes which walked out of Afrique and set fire to the Galaxy.”
Someone had recently said something similar to Yama.
Who? Trying to remember, he said automatically, “All are shadows of the Preservers.”
“Not quite all. There are many different kinds of men on this strange world—I suppose I must call it a world—and each has been reworked until it retains only a shadow of its animal ancestors. Most, but not all, have been salted with a fragment of inheritable material derived from the Preservers. The dominant races of this habitat are from many different places and many different times, but they all are marked by this attribute, and all believe that they can evolve to a higher state. Indeed, many seem to have evolved out of existence, but it is not clear if they have transcended or merely become extinct. But the primitive races, which resemble men but are little better than animals, are not marked, and have never advanced from their original state. There is much I still do not understand about this world, but that much I do know.”