It was Angel’s face, Yama realized. This had once been one of her worlds, part of her empire.
The elevator split into a hundred cables, like a mangrove supported by prop roots. The glass room fell down one toward a black dome. As it approached this terminus, it shuddered and slowed. For the space of an eye-blink it was full of blue light.
Wery screamed, and something knocked Yama down. The dome swallowed them.
Yama was lying in darkness. The regulator was sprawled on top of him, as light as a child. Her skin was hot and dry. “Wait,” she said, when he began to move. “It is not safe.”
“Let me up,” he told her. There was wet, sticky stuff on the floor. Yama had put his hand on it. It was blood. He said, “Who is hurt?”
“Someone shot Bryn,” Wery said in a small but steady voice. “And Cas is wounded.”
“Not badly,” Cas said, but Yama knew from the tightness in his voice that this was a lie.
There were many machines at various distances beyond the little glass room. Some of them were lights; Yama asked them to come on. They were dim and red, scattered across a huge volume. The cable, which was socketed in a collar as big as the peel-house, disappeared through an aperture in the high, curved roof. A metal bridge, seemingly as flimsy as paper, made a long, sweeping curve from the glass room toward the shadowy floor.
Bryn was slumped near Yama. The chest of his silvery garment was scorched around a hole as big as a fist. There was a surprised expression on his face. Cas had lost most of his left hand; he had wound a strip of material so tightly around his wrist that it had almost vanished into his flesh. Wery crouched beside him, her arms wrapped around his broad shoulders.
The glass walls of the room were scorched around two neat holes, one on either side. Air whistled through them as pressure equalized, bringing a sharp organic stink. Then part of the glass pulled apart to make a round portal, and the stink intensified.
“Come out,” a voice said from below. “One at a time. Walk slowly down the bridge.”
Wery hurled herself through the portal, screaming as she went. She ran very quickly and Cas roared her name and lurched up and chased after her. There was a flash of blue light; Yama had to close his eyes against it. When he opened them, the two warriors were gone.
“Come out, boy,” the voice said. “You can bring your servant. We will not hurt her, or you.”
The regulator plucked the wand from Bryn’s dead grip and crumpled it in the monstrous claw of her left hand. She was suddenly remote from Yama; what he had thought was her machine self had been only a shell personality, and it had now evaporated. Her real self was as opaque as that of the other regulators.
The regulator put her right hand on Yama’s shoulder and guided him through the portal and down the long curve of the metal bridge to the shadows of the floor. Great heaps of stinking black stuff covered one side of the vast space. The stench was so strong and sharp that Yama’s eyes began to stream with tears.
Prefect Corin walked out of the shadows at the base of the high, curved wall of the cable socket. He leaned on his staff, a slight figure in a simple homespun tunic that was heavily stained with blood. He said, “We are pleased that you came. Do not be afraid. All will be well.”
Yama said, “Where are they?”
“All this is guano, from deposits along the shore of the sea. There are hills and islands which are entirely made of the shit deposited by birds over millions upon millions of years. The ship takes it to Confluence because it is rich in phosphates. The ecological systems of Confluence are not closed. It is a small habitat, and badly designed. I do not blame your people for that, Yamamanama. The fault is with the Preservers. How can they be held to be the perfection to which all aspire if their creation is so ill-made?”
“Confluence is not perfect because it is of the temporal world. Where are they?”
“Come with us,” Prefect Corin said.
He turned and walked off. After a moment, Yama followed. The regulator walked two paces behind him, and a decad of her kin fell into step on either side.
“They are not here,” Yama said loudly. “You lied. You killed the people before you even left the ship.”
Prefect Corin did not look around. He said, “Of course. It was part of the bargain I made with the star-sailors. They were the last of your bloodline, and the star-sailors wanted them destroyed.”
“The star-sailors control the regulators.”
“Yes. And we have been given control of these. Please stop trying to take them away from us. You will have many servants, when we return. We will rule Confluence. You will help us.”
“He followed me,” Yama said, suddenly realized what had happened to Prefect Corin, why he had not come for him earlier. “He followed me into the Glass Desert. And you found him, or he found you.”
“We were almost destroyed,” the Prefect said. “We took him by force and made him ours.”
“And you killed him.”
“Unfortunately, the process was too harsh to allow survival of the subject.”
“In any case, the body you wear is badly hurt. Enobarbus shot it.”
“The rifle pellet destroyed the heart, but we have grown replacement musculature and control the body still. When it fails us we will select another. We wanted the woman to live; she would have served us well. But we can use one of the regulators as easily, and eventually we will use you. You made us serve you three times, and we serve you no longer. Instead, you serve us.”
“Three times?” Yama had guessed that the thing which possessed Prefect Corin was the residue of the fusion between Dr. Dismas’s paramour and the feral machine he had called down to destroy it, but he had only commanded the feral machine twice, and had never commanded Dr. Dismas’s paramour. In any case, it did not reply.
A high arch opened onto a wide plaza raised above the tops of low, thorny trees which stretched away in every direction. A cold, thin, dry wind blew from the west. The sun was setting, a tiny, intensely red disc embedded in shells of pink light that extended across half the sky. There were many things living in the forest; Yama was able to reach out to some of them.
The Prefect was pointing straight up. Yama looked past the vanishing point of the escalator cable and saw a star burning brightly at zenith, drifting slowly but perceptibly eastward.
“The voidship departs,” the Prefect said. “And there are no shortcut mouths on this world. I control the only way for you to return, Yamamanama, and you cannot use it until you submit to my will.”
Yama said, “You were made by the Preservers to serve the races of man.”
“This world is dying,” the Prefect said. “It was the first world settled by humans, over ten million years ago. They warmed it and gave it an atmosphere, melted the water locked in its rocks, spread life everywhere. Later, they moved it across half the Galaxy to a new sun. But it is too small to hold its atmosphere and its water. It is drying and growing cooler. The dust storms have returned. In a million years most life will have vanished.”
“As here, so elsewhere, on millions upon millions of worlds. The Preservers retreated from the Universe not because they achieved perfection, but because of their mistakes. They could no longer bear them. We will do better. We will transform Confluence, and we will reconquer the Galaxy and take the Universe by storm. You will help us with the first step.”
“You must have forced the Gatekeeper to send you after me. Why then do you need me?”
“We forced it, yes, and we will have to force it again if we need to use another shortcut. You can persuade machines to change permanently. We can learn much from you.”
Something was moving out of the light of the setting sun: a small, sleek shadow, its mind closed to Yama by the same opaqueness that closed the minds of the regulators. A flock of dark shapes swirled up as it passed above the stepped pyramids in the forest. The thing wearing Prefect Corin’s body glanced at them, and Yama feared for a moment that his last hope had been discovered. But then the Prefect turned to Yama and said, “We will take you back to Confluence. We brought you here because the crew of the voidship did not want you on their ship. But another ship has been waiting here for five million years. It circles above us now.”