E-Book Overview
In Child of the River and Ancients of Days -- brilliant, visionary works of science fiction -- award-winning author Paul J. McAuley carefully exposed the intricately beautiful weave of Confluence, a war-torn and dying man-made world seeded with ten thousand genetically manipulated bloodlines. Now a terrible destiny is illuminated -- and the massive scope of the vanished Preservers' ancient dream is finally revealed -- in the concluding chapter of a masterful epic of god-playing, fate, and future,Years before the birth of Yama -- the last descendant of the revered Builders who constructed the artificial world of Confluence -- humans appeared from out of the depths of time and space to tip its fragile balance. These were the Ancients of Days, ancestors of the long-absent Preservers themselves, carried forward across eons by the relativistic paradox of interstellar light-speed travel. What the Ancients of Days brought to Confluence was heresy and doubt, setting bloodline against bloodline, machine against machine, and igniting the terrible flames of civil war that still ravage the world.Alone among all the living things that populate Confluence, Yama holds the power to end this war. Whichever side controls him controls the myriad machines of the world, Held captive and helpless, infected by the cruel consciousness of a great feral machine allied with the heretic cause, Yama is being forged into a weapon of terrible power and consequence.Yet the unique fire that burns within him will not be extinguished, and, as Yama struggles to reclaim his soul, he realizes that the path he'd thought he was traveling freely may have been mapped since before his birth. And at the end of all things, should he accept his destiny or exert his free will?
E-Book Content
Shrine of Stars The Book of Confluence Volume 3
Paul J. McAuley
Eos Imprint of Harper Collins Children's Books 1350 Avenue of the Americas New York NY 10019 USA ISBN: 0-3809-7517-3
Chapter One THE PYRE THE TWO [GARBLED]-HATCHED men were working in a small clearing in the trees that grew along the edge of the shallow reach of water. The larger of the two was chopping steadily at the base of a young blue pine. He wore only ragged trousers belted with a length of frayed rope and was quite hairless, with flabby, pinkish-gray skin and an ugly, vacant face as round as a cheese. The head of his axe had been blackened by fire; its handle was a length of stout pine branch shucked of its bark and held in the socket of the axe head with a ring of carefully whittled wedges. His companion was unhandily trimming branches from a pine bole, using an ivory-handled poniard. He was slender and sleek-headed, like a shipwrecked dandy in scuffed and muddy boots, black trousers and a ragged white shirt with an embroidered collar. A ceramic coin hung from his long supple neck by a doubled leather thong, and a circlet woven from coypu hair and studded with tiny black seed pearls was loose on his upper arm. Now and again he would stop his work and stare anxiously at the blue sky beyond the treeclad shore. The two men had already built a raft, which lay near the edge of the water. It was no more than a pentad of blue pine logs lashed together by a few pegged crosspieces and strips of marsh antelope hide, and topped by bundles of reeds. Now they were constructing a pyre, which stood half-completed in the center of the clearing. Each layer of cut and trimmed pine and sweetgum logs was set crosswise to the layer below, and dry reeds and caches of resinous pine cones were stuffed in every chink. The body of a third man lay nearby. It was covered with fresh pine boughs, and had attracted the attention of a great number of black and bronze flies. A fire of small branches and wood chips burned beyond, sending up white, aromatic smoke; strings of meat cut in long strips dangled in the smoke, curli