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that these things fought against the Insuffectionists."
"More likely they were made in the likeness of great generals
, " Yama said, looking up at their grim visages.
"Don't worry, " a woman's voice said. "They've been
asleep so long they've forgotten how to wake."
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THE WOMAN IN WRITE.
Y A N A T U R N I D, A N D streamers of blazing white light suddenly
raced through the shrine's black disc. He raised an arm to
shade his eyes, but the white light had already faded into a
swirling play of soft colors.
Pandaras's clenched paw fluttered under his open mouth.
He said, "Master, this is some horrid trick."
Cautiously, Yama stepped through polychromatic light and
touched the shrine's slick, cold surface. He was possessed by
the mad idea that he could slip into it as easily as slipping
into the cool water of the river.
Like a reflection, a hand rose through swirling colors to
meet his own. For a moment he thought that he felt its touch,
like a glove slipping around his skin, and he recoiled in
shock.
Laughter, like the chiming of small silver bells. Streaks
and swirls and dabs of a hundred colors collapsed into themselves
, and a woman was framed in the disc of the shrine.
Pandaras shouted and ran, flinging himself in a furious panic
through the black mesh curtains which divided the apse from
the main part of the temple.
Yama knelt before the shrine, fearful and amazed. "Lady ...
what do you want from me?"
"Oh do get up. I can't talk to the top of your head."
Yama obeyed. He supposed that the woman was one of
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the avatars of the Preservers, who, as was written in the
Puranas, stood between the quotidian world and the glory of
their masters, facing both ways at once. She was tall and
slender, with a commanding, imperious gaze, and wore a
white one-piece garment which clung to her limbs and body.
Her skin was the color of newly forged bronze, and her long
black hair was caught in a kind of net at her right shoulder.
A green garden receded behind her: smooth lawns and a maze
of high, trimmed hedges. A stone fountain sent a muscular
jet of water high into the sunlit air.
"Who are you, domina? Do you live in this shrine?"
"I don't know where I live, these days. I'm scattered, I
suppose you could say. But this is one of the places where
I can look out at the world. It's like a window. You five in
a house made of rooms. Where I live is mostly windows,
looking out to different places. You drew me to this window
and I looked out and found you."
"Drew you? Domina, I did not mean to."
"You wear the key around your neck. You have discovered
that, at least."
Yama lifted out the coin which hung on the thong around
his neck, the coin which the anchorite had given him the
spring night when Dr. Dismas had returned to Ys, and everything
had changed. Yama had gone out to hunt frogs, and
caught something far stranger. The coin was warm, but perhaps
only because it had lain next to his skin.
The woman in the shrine said, "It works by light, and
briefly talked with this transceiver. I heard it, and came here.
Don't be afraid. Do you like where I live?"
Yama said, with reflexive politeness, "I have never seen
a garden like yours."
"Of course you haven't. It is from some long-vanished
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world, perhaps even from Earth. Do you wish me to change
it? I could live anywhere, you know. Or at least anywhere
on file that hasn't been corrupted. The servers are very old,
and there's much that has been corrupted. Atoms migrate;
cosmic rays and neutrinos disrupt the lattices ... Anyway,
I like gardens. It stirs something in my memory. My original
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ruled many worlds once, and surely some of those possessed
gardens. It's possible she owned a garden just like this, once
upon a time. But I've forgotten such a lot, and I was never
really whole in the first place. There are peacocks. Do you
know peacocks? No, I suppose not. Perhaps there are autochthonous
creatures like peacocks somewhere on Confluence,
but I don't have the files to hand. If we talk long enough
perhaps one will come past. They are birds. The cocks have
huge fan-shaped tails, with eyes in them."
Yama was suddenly overwhelmed by the image of an electric
blue long-necked bird with concentric arcs of fiery eyes
peering over its tiny head. He turned away, the heels of his
palms pressed into his eye sockets, but the vision still beat
inside his head.
Wait, " the woman said. Was there a note of uncertainty
in her voice? "I didn't mean . . . The gain is difficult to
control ...
The sheaves of burning eyes vanished; there was only ordinary
bloodwarm darkness behind his eyelids. Cautiously,
Yama turned back to the shrine.
"It isn't real, " the woman said. She stepped up to the
inner surface of the shrine and pressed her hands against it
and peered between them as if trying to see through the
window of a lighted room into a dark landscape. Her palms
were dyed red. Paeonin. She said, "That it isn't real is the
important thing to remember. But isn't everything an illusion?
We're all waves, and even the waves are really half-glimpsed
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strings folded deeply into themselves."
She seemed to be talking to herself, but then she smiled
at Yama. Or no, her eyes were not quite focused on him, but
at a point a little to one side of the top of his head.
Yama said, prompted by a flicker of suspicion, "Excuse
me, domina, but are you really an avatar? I have never seen
one before.
"I'm no fragment of a god, Yamamanama. The clade of
my original ruled a million planetary systems, once upon a
time, but she never claimed to be a god. None of the transcendents
ever claimed that, only their enemies."
Fear and amazement collapsed into relief. Yama laughed
and said, "An aspect. You are an aspect. Or a ghost."
"A ghost in the machine. Yes, that's one way of looking
at it. Why not? Even when my original walked the surface
of this strange habitat she was a copy of a memory, and I
suppose that would make me a kind of a ghost of a ghost.
But you're a ghost, too. You shouldn't be here, not at this
time. You're either too young, or too old, a hundred thousand
years either way ... Do you know why you are here?"
"I wish with all my heart to find out, " Yama said, "but
I do not believe in ghosts."
"We have spoken before." The woman tilted her head [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]