With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, which were as stiffly crooked as the claw of a crayfish, Dr. Dismas plucked the stub of his cigarette from the bone holder and crushed its coal. His left hand was almost entirely affected by the drug; although the discrete plaques allowed limited flexure, they had robbed the fingers of all feeling.
The Aedile waited while Dr. Dismas went through the ritual of lighting another cigarette. There was something of Dr. Dismas’s manner that reminded the Aedile of a sly, sleek nocturnal animal, secretive in its habits but always ready to pounce on some scrap or tidbit. He was a gossip, and like all gossips knew how to pace his revelations, how to string out a story and tease his audience—but the Aedile knew that like all gossips, Dr. Dismas could not hold a secret long. So he waited patiently while Dr. Dismas fitted another cigarette in the holder, and lit and drew on it. The Aedile was by nature a patient man, and his training in diplomacy had inured him to waiting on the whims of others.
Dr. Dismas blew streams of smoke through his nostrils and said at last, “It wasn’t easy, you know.”
“Oh, quite so. I did not think it would be. The libraries are much debased these days. Since the librarians fell silent, there is a general feeling that there is no longer the need to maintain anything but the most recent records, and so everything older than a thousand years is considerably compromised.” The Aedile realized that he had said too much. He was nervous, there on the threshold of revelation.
Dr. Dismas nodded vigorously. “And there is the present state of confusion brought about by the current political situation. It is most regrettable.”
“Quite, quite. Well, but we are at war.”
“I meant the confusion in the Palace of the Memory of the People itself, something for which your department, my dear Aedile, must take a considerable part of the blame. All of these difficulties suggest that we are trying to forget the past, as the Committee for Public Safety teaches we should.”
The Aedile was stung by this remark, as Dr. Dismas had no doubt intended. The Aedile had been exiled to this tiny backwater city after the triumph of the Committee for Public Safety because he had spoken against the destruction of the records of past ages. It was to his everlasting shame that he had only spoken out, and not fought, as had many of his faction. And now his wife was dead. And his son. Only the Aedile was left, still in exile because of a political squabble mostly long forgotten.
The Aedile said with considerable asperity, “The past is not so easily lost, my dear Doctor. Each night, we have only to look up at the sky to be reminded of that. In winter, we see the Galaxy, sculpted by unimaginable forces in ages past; in summer, we see the Eye of the Preservers. And here in Aeolis, the past is more important than the present. After all, how much greater are the tombs than the mud-brick houses down by the bay? Even stripped of their ornaments, the tombs are greater, and will endure in ages to come. All that lived in Ys during the Golden Age once came to rest here, and much remains to be discovered.”
Dr. Dismas ignored this. He said, “Despite these difficulties, the library of my department is still well-ordered. Several of the archive units are still completely functional under manual control, and they are amongst the oldest on Confluence. If records of the boy’s bloodline could be found anywhere, it is there. But although I searched long and hard, of the boy’s bloodline, well, I could find no trace.”
The Aedile thought that he had misheard. “What is that? None at all?”
“I wish it were otherwise. Truly I do.”
“This is—I mean to say, it is unexpected. Quite unexpected.”
“I was surprised myself. As I say, the records of my department are perhaps the most complete on Confluence. Certainly I believe that they are the only fully usable set, ever since your own department purged the archivists of the Palace of the Memory of the People.”
The Aedile failed to understand what Dr. Dismas had told him. He said weakly, “There was no correspondence.”
“None at all. All Shaped bloodlines possess the universal sequence of genes inserted by the Preservers at the time of the remaking of our ancestors. No matter who we are, no matter the code in which our cellular inheritance is written, the meaning of those satellite sequences are the same. But although tests of the boy’s self-awareness and rationality show that he is not an indigen, like them he lacks that which marks the Shaped as the chosen children of the Preservers. And more than that, the boy’s genome is quite different from anything on Confluence.”
“But apart from the mark of the Preservers we are all different from each other, doctor. We are all remade in the image of the Preservers in our various ways.”
“Indeed. But every bloodline shares a genetic inheritance with certain of the beasts and plants and microbes of Confluence. Even the various races of simple indigens, which were not marked by the Preservers and which cannot evolve toward transcendence, have genetic relatives amongst the flora and fauna. The ancestors of the ten thousand bloodlines of Confluence were not brought here all alone; the Preservers also brought something of the home worlds of each of them. It seems that young Yamamanama is more truly a foundling than we first believed, for there is nothing on record, no bloodline, no plant, no beast, nor even any microbe, which has anything in common with him.”
Only Dr. Dismas called the boy by his full name. It had been given to him by the wives of the old Constable, Thaw.
In their language, the language of the harems, it meant Child of the River. The Council for Night and Shrines had met in secret after the baby had been found on the river by Constable Thaw, and it had been decided that he should be killed by exposure, for he might be a creature of the heretics, or some other kind of demon. But the baby had survived for ten days amongst the tombs on the hillside above Aeolis, and the women who had finally rescued him, defying their husbands, had said that bees had brought him pollen and water, proving that he was under the protection of the Preservers. Even so, no family in Aeolis would take in the baby, and so he had come to live in the peel-house, son to the Aedile and brother to poor Telmon.
The Aedile thought of this as he tried to fathom the implications of Dr. Dismas’s discovery. Insects chirred all around in the dry grasses, insects and grass perhaps from the same long-lost world as the beasts which the Preservers had shaped into the ancestors of his own bloodline. There was a comfort, a continuity, in knowing that you were a part of the intricate tapestry of the wide world. Imagine then what it would be like to grow up alone in a world with no knowledge of your bloodline, and no hope of finding one! For the first time that day, the Aedile remembered his wife, dead more than twenty years now. A hot day then, too, and yet how cold her hands had been. His eyes pricked with the beginnings of tears, but he controlled himself. It would not do to show emotion in front of Dr. Dismas, who preyed on weakness like a wolf which follows a herd of antelope.
“All alone,” the Aedile said. “Is that possible?”
“If he were a plant or an animal, then perhaps.” Dr. Dismas pinched out the coal of his second cigarette, dropped the stub and ground it under the heel of his boot. Dr. Dismas’s black calf-length boots were new, the Aedile noted, hand-tooled leather soft as butter.
“We could imagine him to be a stowaway,” Dr. Dismas said. “A few ships still ply their old courses between Confluence and the mine worlds, and one could imagine something stowing away on one of them. Perhaps the boy is an animal, able to mimic the attributes of intelligence, in the way that certain insects mimic a leaf or a twig. But then we must ask, what is the difference between the reality and the mimic?”
The Aedile was repulsed by this notion. He could not bear to think that his own dear adopted son was an animal imitating a human being. He said, “Anyone trying to pluck such a leaf would know.”