“We are in the future, and we must go back a little way into the past,” Yama said, a little later. “I think that the composite thing which took Prefect Corin wanted to return after the heretics’ war had ended, and claim Confluence from the victor. And the war is certainly over, for Confluence is no longer here. I know now how this should end. We must go back.”
The Gatekeeper woke as the ship approached the nearest of the many shortcut mouths which orbited the lonely star. A light dawned far off across the illusionary glass plain, a bright star growing into the shape of an old man of Yama’s bloodline. At first, he was a giant bigger than the ship, walking steadily toward it as if against a great wind, but he grew smaller as he approached, so that when he entered the room (not by the occasional door, but through an angle Yama had never seen before) he was exactly Yama’s height.
There was nothing remarkable about the old man’s aspect. He had a pale, wrinkled face framed by long white hair and a beard of silky white curls. He wore a white robe girdled by a broad leather belt from which bunches of keys of all sizes hung. Yet it hurt Yama to look at him directly, and when he spoke, his words echoed directly in Yama’s mind.
We meet again, Child of the River.
Yama said, “Where am I? I mean, how much time has passed since I left Confluence?”
A little more than forty years.
“And the world? Was it destroyed, or was it—”
It has moved on. I remained here to wait for you.
“How did you know that I would come here?”
I stand at every door.
“Then you must know that I have to go back,” Yama said, thoughtfully stroking his beard. The regulator had suggested that she trim both his hair and his beard, but he had refused. He said, “I have to go back to the recent past, and the beginning of my story.”
The old man fingered through a bunch of keys at his waist. His eyes were dim red stars, framed by his flowing white hair.
For most of my existence, I would have said that what you ask would be very difficult to do. There were once two kinds of shortcut. Those of the first kind have been sundered from their origins, and lead to the deep past in places far from here. Those of the second kind link places in space not separated by more than a few seconds. Or they did, before the world was taken away.
“Then you will not help me?”
You could choose one of the long routes. The ancestors of the Preservers rebuilt the Galaxy after the wars with the Transcendents, but after the Preservers quit the Galaxy, the orbits of the stars have been untended. They brought the mouths of many shortcuts here, but the stars to which the shortcuts lead have drifted; and some have drifted closer to the star of Confluence. The time debt between the ends of the shortcuts remains the same, but the distance between them in ordinary space is less than it once was.
Yama thought about this. He said, “Then the ship could pass through one of these shortcuts and travel back through ordinary space in less time than it took to drag the two mouths of the shortcuts apart.”
There are, as I have said, several examples of these. I can guide you through one, as a last boon.
“But it will still take a year of ship-time to return. No, that is too long.”
Indeed. But now there is another other way. The mouth of a shortcut with a time debt of only forty years appeared a few days ago. I have informed the ship. We will not meet again, for that which I served for so long has moved on. I remained here only to meet you for this final time. Now that is done, and I am free at last. I thank you for my freedom.
“Where will you go?”
The old man pointed toward the Eye of the Preservers. I will follow my masters, of course.
“Then perhaps you can answer the question which has puzzled the mystagogues and philosophers since the Preservers set the ten thousand bloodlines on Confluence. Where have they gone?”
I do not know, except that it will be a better place than this.
“To the far end of time, when all will live again in the best of all possible worlds?”
It is not in this universe. The woman who called herself Angel was wrong. There are many other intelligent species in the Universe, but they are hidden from us because they are at distances greater than light has been able to travel since the Universe’s creation. At present they are unreachable, but they will be brought together as the Universe contracts toward its last end. The Preservers foresaw a great war at the end of time and space, and decided on another way. And so they constructed the huge black hole at the heart of the Eye of the Preservers and withdrew from the Universe. They left Confluence in the hope that its peoples might grow greater than they. How it must have saddened them when it began to fail, and yet because they had withdrawn they were unable to interfere. The first war stopped all progress on Confluence; the second might have destroyed it. But you are their avatar, and you have saved it.
“Not yet, I think.”
In this place and time, it has already happened. But I suppose that there are many time-lines where you did not prevail and the heretics were victorious, only to destroy Confluence when they quarreled amongst themselves over the spoils of their victory. If by mischance you return to one of those time-lines then I grieve for you. And yet in all of them I will be free!
“You have not told me about where you will go.”
As species compete and evolve, so do universes. Those in which the formation of black holes is possible can give rise to other universes, for energy which disappears through black holes reappears elsewhere. That is where the Preservers have gone. Rather than fight for the last moment of infinite energy at the end of this universe, they have departed to create a new universe, one more suited to them than this. And now I go to discover it. Farewell, Child of the River.
“Wait!” Yama said again.
There was so much more he wanted to ask, but the old man was already fading, leaving behind only two points of faint red light that quickly receded beyond the boundary of the ship.
The ship’s chiming laughter filled its transparent volumes. “You must trust me, master. I know now what to do.”
The end of the new shortcut was only a few minutes’ travel away. It hung within a vast cloud of water-ice particles that refracted the sun into a billion points of twinkling light as the ship fell through it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The White Boat
And emerged at a high place amidst blowing water spray turning to snow, so that at first Yama did not realize that the transition had been made. But then the ship moved out of the snow cloud and Yama saw a great tongue of ice stretching away, dazzling white beneath dense white clouds and a constant snowfall that blurred and softened the edges of everything. The ice filled the steep chute of a valley of adamantine keelrock a hundred leagues across, a frozen river moving with majestic slowness, throwing up broken chunks as big as cities along its edges.
The ship rose through the clouds, revealing a landscape of mountains islanded by cloud, mountains rimming the wide valley and spreading away on either side, sharp peaks of bare black keelrock rising out of clouds and snow and ice, whiteness everywhere touched with blue shadows, the sun a brilliant diamond set in a clear blue above a distant range of even taller peaks that must be the Rim Mountains. Directly below the ship, a waterfall fell from nothing, leagues wide and hung with a decad of rainbows, falling slowly and softly into clouds torn from its own self.