The Rim Mountains had swallowed the last light of the sun, and the Eye of the Preservers had risen a handspan above the trees along the edge of the river: the dull red swirls of its accretion disc; the pinprick black point at the center, the dwelling place of the Preservers.
“The Preservers watch us always,” Tullus said. “Pray with me, brother. Pray for our deliverance.”
No guards or machines were near. Pandaras made the necessary gestures of obeisance and whispered the responses, but his heart was empty. The Preservers had fled the Universe. Light fell faster than they, so that they could still watch their creation but could no longer interfere with it. They had set it in motion and abandoned it, as a child might turn away from a wind-up toy, leaving it to heedlessly march down the street. Praying was an empty gesture, and Pandaras felt as if there was a gulf a thousand leagues wide between himself and the man who prayed raptly and joyfully beside him.
The tragedy is not that we fall in love with that which does not love us, he thought, but that we cease to love. He was shivering. He thrust his good hand between his thighs, but he could not stop shivering.
Tullus said, “What is it, brother? Don’t be afraid. Say the final benison with me.”
“You say it, Tullus.”
“You young fool—You believe them, don’t you?”
“We are the strength of the city, Tullus. But why are we despised?”
“You are less than the Jackal,” Tullus said in disgust. “He only pretended to believe the heretics’ cant, but with you it is no pretense.” His face contorted and he spat on the deck between Pandaras’s feet. He said, “There are many like me. Tell anyone of this, betray me, and one of my friends will kill you.”
Pandaras slept badly that night, although Tibor promised to keep watch. When he woke near dawn he saw with a pang of dread that more than half the prisoners were gone. Tibor was sitting cross-legged in a kind of trance; it was the closest he came to sleep. When Pandaras shook him, the hierodule stirred and said at once that he had seen nothing.
“Perhaps they escaped to the shore,” Pandaras whispered.
Tibor said softly, “I do not think so, little master.” Tears were swelling in the hierodule’s downwardly slanting eyes.
Pandaras said, “You did see something. Tell me.”
“Everyone slept. Even I, who never sleeps, passed from this world for a little while. The machines may have had something to do with it. Then you woke me, and the men were gone.”
A little later, Pandaras said, “You could have helped them, Tibor.”
“My place is with you, little master. You have not yet recovered from your wound.”
“Would you have helped them, if I had ordered it? Could you have told the heretics’ machines to quit the lazaret?”
Tibor considered this, and at last said gently, “I am yours to command, little master, but I do not think I can command the machines of our captors. I was fitted with an induction loop when I entered the service of the temple, but it was designed to interface with shrines. Shrines are machines, it is true, but there are many kinds of machine.”
“You never tried?”
“It did not occur to me, little master.”
“They might still kill you,” Pandaras said. “Your entire life has been spent in the service of the Preservers. Surely that makes you a natural enemy of the heretics.”
“Not at all. As I told you before, I am seen as a great prize. In the first days after the lazaret was captured, little master, before you woke from your coma, the pedagogues spent a great deal of time talking with me. They hope to convert me, as they have already converted the captain of the lazaret.” Tibor pointed toward the flying bridge at the bow, at the big, jointed machine in its hammock. “It still hopes that I will join with it. But I already serve you, little master. I have no one else to serve. If the Weazel was not destroyed, then surely Captain Lorquital would have put in at Ophir with her cargo. But no one had seen her, little master, although I asked many people at the docks while I was waiting to board the ship which took me downriver to the lazaret.”
“They died quickly, Tibor, if that’s a comfort.”
“Except for Phalerus,” Tibor said.
The remaining prisoners were subdued. There were no discussion classes that day. Just before sunset, the barge entered a wide canal, and an hour later drew into the docks of Baucis, the City of Trees.
Chapter Ten
“Everyone now living may never die”
As soon as the barge had been made fast to the wharf, the guards began to move amongst the prisoners, telling them that they were free to go. “This is a city of free men!” they said, grinning fearsomely. “Take up your own lives. No one is responsible for you but yourselves.”
“If only Tullus had waited,” Pandaras said to Tibor bitterly, “he and his fellows would have had their wish.” Many of the prisoners were reluctant to obey the guards, fearing that this was a trick. One man went mad and refused to move when the guards started to force them toward the stern, where the gangways to the dock had been fixed. He sat down in the middle of the deck with his arms wrapped around his chest, rocking back and forth and screaming. A guard shot him in the head, picked up his body and slung it over the side. After that, the prisoners had no choice but to gather up their few belongings and walk out into the city.
Baucis had once been a patchwork of little woods and hills, but new roads had been driven everywhere without regard for traditional boundaries, and many of the woods had been cut down. In those that survived, the heart trees had been felled and the woven platform houses of the original inhabitants had been torn down and replaced by straggling encampments of tents and shacks. Sewage ran in open channels that were often blocked by the bodies of animals and men. The air was hazed with the smoke of thousands of fires. Floating platforms and streams of draft animals and crowds of men jostled along red clay roads in the harsh glare of arc lights strung from stripped tree-trunks. Steam wagons clanked and groaned and belched clouds of black smoke as they dragged three or four overladen trailers behind them. Stores and taverns, gaming palaces and whorehouses, all with tall, brightly painted false fronts, had been thrown up along the roads, and barkers and shills called to the crowds from platforms or windows or balconies. There were many apothecaries, surgeries and clinics. One offered, mysteriously, Whole Body Immersion and Electrotherapy; another, Intestinal Irrigation. Machines spun above the crowded roads, zipping about on obscure errands, and slogans were projected high in the air, in glowing letters each as big as a man. Seize The Day. Everyone Now Living May Never Die. Higher still were the archipelagoes of the floating gardens which had once been the homes of Baucis’s scholar-saints, strings of sharply stamped shadows in the orange sky-glow.
Pandaras was tired and his left arm hurt badly; Tibor had stripped the quasi-living dressing from the stump, leaving only a light bandage. He followed the hierodule without question, and presently found himself amongst the ruins of the city’s sacred wood. The circle of giant sequoias, said to have been as old as the world, had been cut down, and decads of men were sawing planks from their carcasses by the light of huge bonfires, but the shrine was still there. It was a black disc ten times Pandaras’s height, standing at the center of a big circular platform crafted from a hundred different kinds of wood. The platform was scarred with deep, charcoal-blistered trenches made by the reflected beams of energy weapons and pocked with thousands of splintered gouges and impact holes from ricocheting slugs and rifle pellets, and blasphemies and cabbalistic signs had been carved into the polished ancient planks, but the huge black disc of the shrine itself, being only partly of this world, was inviolate.