Child of the River Paul J. McAuley

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clutched her smoking hand. The knife embedded itself point
first in the grass, sizzling faintly and emitting a drizzle of fat
blue motes. Iachimo was holding his belly with both hands.
There was blood all over his fingers and the front of his
black tunic.
The merchant looked at the woman and she fell silent in
mid-scream. He said to Yama, "So die all those who think
to betray me. Now, boy, you'll answer all my questions truthfully
, or you'll join your two friends. Yes, they have been
captured. Not dead, not yet. We'll talk, you and 1, and decide
their fate."
Iachimo, kneeling over the knife and a pool of his own
blood, said something about a circle, and then the guards
seized him and jerked him upright and cut his throat and
lifted him away from the merchant, all in one quick motion.
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They dropped the body onto the neatly trimmed grass beneath
the light sculpture and returned to their position behind the
merchant's couch.
"You're trouble, boy, " the merchant said. The woman
tremblingly placed the mouthpiece of a clay pipe between his
rosebud lips and lit the scrap of resin in its bowl. He drew
a long breath and said, dribbling smoke with the words,
"Your people were the first. The rest came later, but you
were the first. I had never thought to see your kind again,
but this is an age of wonders. Listen to me, boy, or I'll have
you killed too. You see how easy it is."
Yama was holding the wine goblet so tightly that he had
reopened the wound in his palm. He threw it away and said
as boldly as he could, "Will you spare my friends?"
"They came to kill me, didn't they? Sent by my crewmates
, who are jealous of me."
Yama could not deny it. He stared in stubborn silence at
the merchant, who calmly drew on his pipe and contemplated
the wreaths of smoke he breathed out. At last, the merchant
said, "The woman is a cateran, and their loyalty is easily
bought. I might have a use for her. The boy is no different
from a million other river-rats in Ys. I could kill him and it
would be as if he had never been - born. I see that you want
him to live. You are very sentimental. Well then. You must
prove your worth to me, and perhaps the boy will live.
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Do
you know exactly what you are?"
Yama said, "You say that I am of the bloodline of the
Builders, and I have seen an ancient picture showing one of
my kind before the world was made. But I also have been
told that I might be a child of the Ancients of Days."
"Hmm. It's possible they had something to do with it. In
their brief time here they meddled in much that didn't concern
them. They didn't achieve anything of consequence, of
course. For all that they might have appeared as gods to
the degenerate population of Confluence, they predated the
Preservers by several million years. Their kind were the ancestors
of the Preservers, but with about as much relation to
them as the brainless plankton grazers which were the ancestors
of my own bloodline have to me. It is only because the
Ancients of Days were timeshifted while travelling to our
neighboring galaxy and back at close to the speed of light
that they appeared so late, like an actor delayed by circumstance
who incontinently rushes on stage to deliver his lines
and finds that he has interrupted the closing soliloquy instead
of beginning the second act. We are in the end times, young
builder. This whole grand glorious foolish experiment has all
but run its course. The silly little war downriver begun by
the Ancients of Days is only a footnote."
The merchant seemed exhausted by this speech, and drank
more wine before he continued. "Do you know, I haven't
th6ught about this for a long time. Iachimo was a very clever
man, but not a brave one. He was doomed to a servant's
role, and resented it. I thought at first you were some scheme
of his, and I haven't fully dismissed the thought from my
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mind. I do not believe that it was through simple carelessness
that he allowed the cateran to roam free, or that you were
allowed to carry a knife into my presence."
"I have never seen him before tonight. I am not the servant
of any man."
The merchant said, "Don't be a fool. Like most here, your
bloodline was created as servants to the immediate will of
the Preservers."
"We all serve the Preservers as we can, " Yama said.
"You've been in the hands of a priest, " the merchant said.
His gaze was shrewd. "You parrot his pious phrases, but do
you really believe them?"
Yama could not answer. His faith was never something he
had questioned, but now he saw that by disobeying the wishes
of his father he had rebelled against his place in the social
hierarchy, and had not that hierarchy proceeded from the
Preservers? So the priests taught, but now Yama was unsure.
For the priests also taught that the Preservers wanted their
creations to advance from a low to a high condition, and how
could that happen if society was fixed, eternal and
unchanging?
The merchant belched. "You are just a curiosity, boy. A
revertant. An afterthought or an accident-it's all the same.
But you might be useful, even so. You and I might do great
things together. You asked why I am here. It is because I
have remembered what all others of my kind have long for-
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gotten. They are lost in ascetic contemplation of the mathematics
of the manifolds and the secrets of the beginning and
end of the cosmos, but I have remembered the pleasures of
the real world, of appetite and sex and all the rest of the
messy wonderful business of life. They would say that mathematics
is the reality underlying everything; I say that it is an
abstraction of the real world, a ghost. " He belched again.
"There is my riposte to algebra."
Yama made a wild intuitive leap. He said, "You met the
Ancients of Days, didn't you?"
"My ship hailed theirs, as it fell through the void toward
the Eye of the Preservers. They had seen the Eye's construction
by ancient light while hundreds of thousands of years
out, and were amazed to discover that organic intelligent life
still existed. We merged our mindscapes and talked long
there, and I followed them out into the world. And here I
am. It is remarkably easy to make a fortune in these benighted
times, but I'm finding that merely satisfying sensual appetites
is not enough. If you're truly a Builder, and I am not quite
convinced that you are, then perhaps you can help me. I
have plans."
"I believe that I am no man's servant. I cannot serve you
as Iachimo did."
The merchant laughed. "I would hope not. You will have [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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