The oldest of the flying men said that they would always care for this poor brother, and would never let it leave. They would show it compassion.
Yama nodded. The thing which had taken Prefect Corin might benefit from the humble simplicity of the flying men. He indicated the regulators and said, “These will be your guests until the ship comes again.”
The old man agreed. Yama embraced him and apologized for using his people, but the man told him that he had brought the hope for which his people had prayed for many generations.
“I fear I have brought you a great danger.”
The old man said that, like the god which had made his people, Prefect Corin was powerful and angry, so angry that he could not see the world clearly.
Yama smiled, realizing that the flying men had grown greater in wisdom and compassion than the thing which had made them, and that the Prefect could be left safely in their charge. If the thing inside him did not change, then the flying men would destroy it.
More and more flying men arrived, flocks that filled the forest around the plaza and the stepped pyramids. Their campfires were scattered amongst the dark trees like the stars in the sky above. Yama talked into the night with the men and women who led the flocks, tired but exultant. At last, as the sky above the mountains to the east began to grow brighter—how strange that the sun should set in one place and rise in another—he finished an elaborate round of farewells.
All this time, the Prefect had lain as still and unsleeping as a cayman, but now he suddenly surged up, throwing off the net he had cut with a spur of metal torn from his flesh. He stabbed one of the flying men in the eye, snatched the man’s spear and charged at Yama. Yama felt a tremendous blow in his back and half-turned, grasping at the point of the spear which protruded beneath his ribs. He could not get his breath. His mouth filled with blood. The Prefect embraced him, stabbing and stabbing with the metal spur. Then he was torn away and Yama fell, gargling blood as he tried to draw breath. He saw the Prefect borne backward, lifted by a decad of flying men into the red dawn, and then his sight failed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Gatekeeper
The ship walked with him down dark ways and sang to him of his sorrows. At first he did not know or remember who he was or what the ship’s sad, sweet songs meant, but slowly he understood that he had died, and now, after a long, dark sleep, he was healed. He was awake. It was time to rise.
It was as painful as birth. He was expelled from dreamy warm darkness into harsh light and chill air, naked and slimy, choking on the fluid which had for so long sustained him. It ran from his nostrils and bubbled at the bottom of his lungs. He coughed and spat and retched.
He was lying on his belly with night all around him, on an endless floor of glass punctuated by groups of enigmatic statues and machines that glimmered with foxfire. The Galaxy’s triple-armed spiral tilted below. Gradually, he realized that the dim shell of light around him defined the true size of the ship. It was as transparent as certain species of shrimp which lived in the deep waters of the Great River; the great glass plain was an illusion.
He laughed. All was illusion.
A woman came through a door which a moment before had not been there. She was naked and silver-skinned. One arm was swollen into a monstrous claw. “It took almost a year,” she said. “At the end, we thought you might die again.”
She was the regulator who had accompanied him to the surface of the red world. She was afraid that he would be angry because of the way he had been saved, but he still did not understand what had been done to him, except that he had died, and had slept, and had been healed.
Dazed by his long sleep, Yama sprawled for many hours in the middle of the room the ship had made for him, combing his fingers through the long hair and beard which had grown while he had slept, staring at the great wheel of the Galaxy below or the red whorl of the Eye of the Preservers above. A few dim halo stars were scattered across the black sky; a single bright star shone beyond the ship’s bow. He traced and retraced the scars which seamed his belly and his chest and his back, a secret history of pain printed on his body.
The regulator brought him food now and then, but although his stomach was empty he was not ready to eat. At last, he asked her to explain how she and the ship had saved him.
“It was the only way, master,” the regulator said. “Even so, we were not sure if you would survive storage or the surgical procedures. The medical facilities are very primitive. And that is why—”
“She has funny ideas,” the ship said, “about what is possible and what is not.”
“We brought it to term,” the regulator said. “We could not kill it.”
“I think I could,” the ship said. “I think I could kill it if you asked me to, master.”
It amused the ship to appear as a solemn, ghostly little girl of Yama’s bloodline, her skinny body sketched in faint lines of light against the black sky, her eyes two dim stars.
Yama said, “You had better show me exactly what you did.”
“At once,” the regulator said, and went through the door which appeared only when it was used.
Yama asked the skip where they were. It showed views of the spiral arm from which they had traveled, the great rising arc of their course. They had been traveling along the path plotted by the thing which had taken over Prefect Corin.
The trip through the shortcut had taken Yama deep into the past. Traveling back through ordinary space at close to the speed of light, the ship had taken a hundred and sixty thousand years to voyage between the star of the red world, deep within the Galaxy, and the star of Confluence, far beyond the Galaxy’s rim. But the ship’s speed had compressed time aboard it, and less than a year of ship-time had passed while Yama returned to the place from which he had set out.
He wanted to know at once where Confluence was. The ship became evasive, claiming that it had followed the course exactly. “Perhaps the instructions were wrong in some small detail,” it said. “I have located the star, and it is of the correct mass and spectral type, but there is no trace of a habitat orbiting it.”
There were no feral machines, either. Only the mouths of many shortcuts in lonely orbits around a lonely star. Yama was still thinking about this when the regulator returned through what he thought of as the occasional door. She was holding something, crooning to it in her throaty voice. Its head, with a vulnerable swirl of dark hair, was propped on her monstrous claw; its hands clutched at the air like a hungry starfish.
A baby.
He had died, and before the ship and the regulator had put his body into storage, they had taken a scraping from the inside of his mouth. They had quickened certain of the cells in the scraping and grown them into fetuses—there had been five, but only two had lived. Tissues had been harvested from one and used to grow replacement organs; these had been transplanted into Yama and then he had slept a long time, healing. But the ship and the regulator had not been able to bring themselves to kill the other fetus, and they had not put it into storage, for they had not been sure if it would survive. And so, while Yama had been revived and healed, it had grown to term.
It had been born just before Yama’s rebirth.
“It is exactly the same genome as you, master,” the regulator said, “and because of that we were unable to kill it.”
The baby chuckled in her arms. Yama gently took him from her, surprised by his mass and heat, the spicy odor of cinnamon and ammonia. The baby tried to focus his eyes on him, frowning with effort, then tried to smile.
Yama set the baby spinning around him, laughing as he gurgled with delight.