"Confluence - 03 - Shrine Of Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

temper. Well, if I killed her, it is because she was responsible for the death of Ellphas, who so successfully led you to me. An eye for an eye, as the Amnan would say. How is your father, by the way? And the stinking little city he pretends to rule?"
Yama charged at the doctor then, and one of the flock of machines which floated in the big, airy room swerved and clipped him on the side of the head. One moment he was running headlong, the next he was sprawled on his back on the rubbery black floor, looking up at the ceiling. Pain shot through him. His chest and face had been badly seared by the backwash of the blast which had killed Tamora and Eliphas, and his ribs had been cracked when it had knocked him down. A splinter of rock had pierced his lung, too, and although he had been treated by a battery of machines, he tasted blood at the back of his mouth now.
Dr. Dismas smiled down at him and extended the claw of his left hand. Yama ignored it and laboriously and painfully got to his feet.
"You have spirit," Dr. Dismas said. "That's good. You will need it."
"Where are the others? Pandaras, and the crew of the Weazel. Did you leave them behind?"
"The Weazel? Oh, that's of no consequence. It is only you I am interested in, dear Child of the River. Are you all right? Not hurt by your fall? Good. Come and stand by the window with me. I have much to tell you, and we will make a start today."
Yama followed Dr. Dismas unwillingly. The room was part of a mansion hollowed out of one of the flanks of the floating garden. Its single window, bulging like an eye, overlooked a vast panorama. Far below, Baucis, the city of Trees, stretched away in the sunlight of a perfect afternoon. Other floating gardens hung at various heights above their own shadows, like green clouds. Some were linked together by catenaries, rope slides and arched bridges of shining metal. An arboreal bloodline had inhabited Baucis before the heretics had come; their city had been a patch-
work of ten thousand small woods separated by clearfelled belts and low, grassy hills. Now many of the woods had been cut down. New roads slashed through the rolling landscape, a network of fused red clay tracks like fresh wounds. The heretics had made their encampments on the hills, and a kind of haze or miasma of smoke from weapons foundries and numerous fires hung
over the remaining patches of trees.
Beyond the city, the vivid green jungle stretched away beneath the mist of its own exhalations. The floating garden was so high up that both edges of the world were visible: the ragged blue line of the Rim Mountains on the right and the silver plain of the Great River on the left, and all the habitable world between them, dwindling beneath strings of white cloud toward a faint hint of red. In the days since he had been captured, Yama had spent much of the time gazing at this scene, and had convinced himself that he could see beyond the fall of the Great River and the mountains at the midpoint of the world to the beginning of the Glass Desert.
Dr. Dismas exhaled a riffle of clove-scented smoke and said, "Everything you see is the territory of the heretics. Two hundred cities downriver of this one, and a hundred more upriver. Thousands of bloodlines are theirs now. And soon the rest, Yarnamanama. Soon the rest, unless something is done. Their triumph is great, but they must be prevented from completing it. They have meddled in much that they do not understand. They have tried to wake the great engines in the keelways of the world, for instance. Fortunately, they did not succeed."
Dr. Dismas looked sideways, but Yama said nothing. The apothecary had a habit of alluding to matters about which Yama knew little, perhaps in the hope of drawing out secrets, as a fisherman might scatter bait to lure fish to the surface. Yama had glimpsed something of the vast machines beneath the surface of the world when Beatrice had returned him to the peel-house by the old roads in the








keelways, but he had not known much about his powers then, and had not thought to try and question them. "Well, for now you will help the heretics," Dr. Dismas
said briskly. "You will provide a service for which we will later ask payment. Please. For your sake do not make any more sudden moves. My servants here are simple things and have very literal minds. I would not like to see you hurt because of a misunderstanding."
Yama's fist was so tightly clenched that his fingernails cut four points of pain into his palm. He said, "Whatever I was able to do has been taken away from me. I am glad that it is gone. Even if I still had it, I would never choose to serve you."
"Oh, it isn't a question of choice. And it is still there, somewhere or other. I'm sure it will surface again." "Do what you will. Invoke the thing you placed inside
me. Invoke your disease. But do not involve me. Do not try to make me take your side or see your point of view." Yama turned away and crossed to the bed and sat down.
Dr. Dismas remained by the window. Hunched into his frock coat, he slowly and carefully lit another cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke while gazing at the city spread below, like a conqueror at his ease. At last, without turning around, he said, "You have it easy, Yamamanama. I envy you. I was alone when I was changed, and my paramour was old and badly crippled. We both nearly died before the union was complete, and we nearly died again when we retraced my path across the Glass Desert. That was almost forty years ago. An odd coincidence, don't you think?"
Yama was interested, despite the loathing he felt toward the apothecary. He said, "I suppose that it was something to do with the Ancients of Days."
"Good, good. You have been learning about your past. It will save us much time. Yes, it had something to do with one of them. With the most important of them, in fact. All of the Ancients of Days were merely variations on a single theme, but the one who called herself Angel
was closest to the original. I believe that you have met her."
The woman in the shrine. The woman in white. Yama said, "It was the revertant of something five million years old, of a pathetic scared fool who failed at godhood and escaped her enemies by fleeing to a neighboring galaxy. She
found nothing there and returned to meddle with Confluence. She was the seed of the heretics, and was killed by her fellows."
"Indeed, indeed. But before she was killed, Angel left a copy of herself in the space inside the shrines. Her aspect-that was who you talked to. She wants you on her side, and so she told you her story. And told you how powerful she was, no doubt."
"I destroyed her, Doctor."
Dr. Dismas smiled. "Oh, I think not. You have much to learn about distributed information. She is stored as a pattern of interrupted light deep within the space inside the shrines. Perhaps your paramour will destroy her, when it is stronger, and if I so choose, but you destroyed only the copy of a copy." Dr. Dismas plunged his right hand into the pocket of his frock coat and brought out the plastic straws which he habitually cast when he needed to make a decision. He rattled them together, smiling craftily, and put them away. "The fate of gods in my hands--don't you find it amusing? Ali, you are a humorless boy, Yamamanama. It is not your fault. Anyone brought up by that stiff-backed narrow-minded backward-looking innumerate superstitious fool would--
Yama roared and ran at Dr. Dismas again, and again was knocked down by one of the machines, but before he fell he had the satisfaction of seeing the apothecary take a step backward. For a moment he was blinded by a silent roar of red and black that seemed to fill his head. He rolled onto his back, a ringing in his ears and the taste of blood in his mouth, and slowly got to his knees. When he stood, the room seemed to sway around him, and he sat down on the edge of the bed.








Dr. Dismas lit another cigarette and watched Yama with a genuine tenderness. "You'll need that spirit, Yamamanama," he said. "It is a hard road I have set you on, but you will thank me at last. You will be transformed, as I have been transformed. I will tell you how.
"It is a symptom of the disastrous reversal in the development of the peoples of Confluence that, although their technologies predated the creation of our world by five million years, the Ancients of Days were able to manipulate much that was hidden or lost to the ten thousand bloodlines. In particular, Angel was able to enter the space inside the shrines, and she learned much there."
"She destroyed the avatars," Yama said. "People believe that the heretics destroyed them, but it happened before the war began."
"Hush. This is my story, not hers. You already know hers, it seems. She tried to recruit you, but I know that you resisted, for otherwise you would not be here. You chose wisely. She is not our friend, Yamamanama. She is our ally, yes, but not our friend. Enobarbus submits to her without reservation, but we have our own plans. And besides, much of what she says is self-serving, or simply untrue. Angel did not destroy the avatars. That was the work of the copy of herself that she installed in the space inside the shrines. The aspect you talked to was a copy of that copy, but no matter. In any form, it is a poor deluded thing. After Angel died, it found itself besieged, and it lashed out. That was how the avatars came to be destroyed. The avatars, and many records, and most of the directories and maps within the space inside the shrines. That was the true war; the war fought since, between the heretics and the bureaucrats, is but its shadow. And so the bureaucrats were defeated before the first ship of fools sailed from Ys to put down the uprisings at the midpoint of the world.
"But that does not concern us. While Angel was traveling downriver toward the last and least city of Confluence, where she would plant the seed that would grow into the