“I remember that the fireflies found it.”
“Because it had been changed. It had achieved self-awareness. Caphis saved my life, but he could not think anything that his people had not already thought ten thousand times over. I did not know then that I could change him, and now I want to rectify that. I want you to do it for me. A drop of blood, Pandaras. Change the indigenous peoples. Bring them to self-awareness.”
“I will do it only if you save yourself, master. Or else I will die with you.”
“The Preservers had a purpose in everything they did. Often we cannot understand it, or we think we understand it, but we see only what we want to see, and do not see what is really there. The indigenous peoples are despised because they cannot change. Until my father put a stop to it, the Amnan hunted the fisherfolk as they would hunt any animal. But the indigenous peoples are more than animals even if they are less than men. You will redeem them, Pandaras.”
“Come with me, master. This talk frightens me. I am only a pot boy who fell into this great and terrible adventure by mistake. I am your squire. I bring you food and mend your shirts and keep your weapons in good order. Do not make me more than I am.”
“You found me, Pandaras. And you followed me to the worst place in all the wide world, you found me and rescued me, and dragged me from the pit. Make you more than you are? We are all more than we are, if we only knew it.”
Yama had that faraway look Pandaras dreaded. He was casting through the muddle of his thoughts—his memories, the memories of the thing in the pit. He said, “There are places where time and space do not exist. They form a bridge between the present and the time when they were made. They bridge distances that light takes years to cross. The star-sailors know about them.”
“Master, do not torment yourself by trying to understand the lies of that thing—”
Yama gripped Pandaras’s arm, just above the stump of his wrist. “I am sure that Prefect Corin is still searching for me, but there are places I can go where he cannot follow himself. Perhaps I do not go there for the first time. The river swallows its own tail. Soon, Pandaras, I will see how it is done.”
Chapter Ninteen
The Execution
It was a fine, bright, hot day. Myriad small craft swarmed around the black barge which, with a sleek galliot on either side and a claw-shaped flier above, carried Yama and the judicial panel to the execution site. The event had a holiday air. The brightly colored sails of sightseers’ skiffs, pirogues, yaws, cockleshells, yachts and pinnaces cracked in the brisk wind. There was a raft carrying a hundred sweating, bare-chested drummers who beat out long, interwoven rhythm lines. Merchants in sampans and trows sold food and wine, souvenirs and fireworks. People held up their children to see the evil mage; other children threw firecrackers at the waves. Motorboats got in the way of sailboats and there were shouted arguments and exchanges of colorful insults. A whole raft of drunken men tumbled into the water when rocked by the wake of a chrome-plated speedboat’s buzzing disc. They swam back to the raft and clambered on board and drank some more.
The fleet passed a strange cluster of hexagonal pillars of black basalt; long fringes of red waterweed spread out from them, combed by the river’s strong currents. The far-side shore was the thinnest of gray brushstrokes.
Ahead, a line of black rain clouds marked the fall of the river over the edge of the world.
Yama was quite calm. He spent most of the journey speaking with Mr. Naryan, who wallowed in a glass tank of water on the barge’s weather-deck. They talked about Angel, of how she had come to Sensch and made herself its ruler, and changed the citizens in the first act of heresy which had set Confluence aflame with war.
“She spoke at the shrines at the edge of the world,” Mr. Naryan said in his soft, croaking voice, “but I never learned what she did there.”
Yama laughed. All his cares seemed to have lifted away in this last hour. He did not spare a single glance for the execution frame which stood on the platform at the bow of the barge, but it drew Pandaras’s eye again and again, and each time a cold shiver ran through him. Now in the moment of our death is the moment of our rebirth into eternal life. Pandaras glimpsed Usabio in a motor launch beyond the portside galliot and felt a grain of anger sharpening his resignation. Yama’s chambers had been stripped as soon as he had been marched out of them. The furniture had been reduced to matchsticks and the sheets cut into strips. No doubt the warden was here to make sure that the traders selling these souvenirs to the holiday crowd did not cheat him.
Yama told Mr. Naryan, “Angel called the last surviving avatars of the Preservers to her, and learned how to use the space inside the shrines. She made a copy of herself, the aspect that later destroyed the avatars. And I think that she made contact with the feral machines too.”
“She was always with me,” Mr. Naryan said. “I found her aspect in many of the shrines I visited, but she was fey and willful, and did not seem to remember much of what happened in Sensch. I have that honor.”
“You told her aspect that story. And so she was able to put it in my book.”
This amused Mr. Naryan, who rolled back and forth in his tank, barking sharply. Water slopped on the deck and a sprayhead flowered above him, soaking his exposed gray skin until it gleamed. A soft red light glowed at the center of the machine which clung to the ruined socket of his right eye. He said, “It is a fine irony. There are many stories about Angel, but only I remember the truth. Well, there is also poor Dreen, but he was seduced by the crew of Angel’s ship, and went with them when they left this world. I will meet him again one day, of course. The Universe is infinite, but there are only a finite number of worlds. I will find him and save him from his mistake.”
“You all want to live forever,” Yama said. “But you cannot live forever because the Universe will not live forever. I have always wondered: what will happen when time ends, and you meet the Preservers? Will you try and destroy them?”
The woman in the mirror-bright armor told Yama, “We will have destroyed the Eye of the Preservers long before then. There are ways of ablating black holes. Once it is small enough, an event horizon achieves closure and nothing can escape from it before it evaporates. At least, not into this universe. We will seize the last day and make it ours. But by then, of course, we will have already made the Universe ours. We will not falter as the Preservers faltered,” she said, with a look of pure, fierce conviction. “We will never cease in our striving.”
Yama smiled and said, “There are many universes. Or rather, many versions of one universe. Everything that can happen will happen. Perhaps even your victory.”
“We do not need to think of the far future,” Mr. Naryan said. “That dream is what paralyzed this world. Because the Preservers promised infinite life in the last moment at the end of all time and space, their foolish worshippers believe that there is no need to do anything in this life. Everything on this world has been bent by that false hope, mesmerized by it as a snake mesmerizes a mouse. But the future is not shaped by a promise; it is what each person makes of it.”
“We can agree on that at least,” Yama said. “After the feral machines rebelled, the civil service decreed that it must suppress any change, because change implied heresy. Yet the Preservers changed us all, and set us here in the hope that we would change ourselves.”
Even the indigens, Pandaras thought, with another cold shiver. The burden his master had laid upon him seemed impossibly heavy. He was only half-listening to this idle talk, paying more attention to the soldiers who stood nearby. He had resolved to try and grab a pistol or even a knife if Yama would not save himself. He would give up his life if he could free his master.