They all look like Angel, with the same small sleek head, the same gangling build and abrupt nervous movements. Dreen's slight figure is dwarfed by them. It takes Mr Naryan a long minute to be able to distinguish men from women, and another to be able to tell each man from his brothers, each woman from her sisters. They are all clad in long white shirts that leave them bare-armed and bare-legged, and each is girdled with a belt from which hang a dozen or more little machines. They call to Angel, one following on the words of the other, saying over and over again:
"Return with us--"
"--this is not our place--"
"--these are not our people--"
"--we will return--"
"--we will find our home--"
"--leave with us and return."
Dreen sees Mr Naryan and shouts, "They want to take her back!" He jumps down from the sled, an act of bravery that astonishes Mr Naryan, and skips through the crowd. "They are all one person, or variations on one person," he says breathlessly. "The ship makes its crew by varying a template. Angel is an extreme. A mistake."
Angel starts to laugh.
"You funny little man! I'm the real one -- they are the copies!"
"Come back to us--"
"--come back and help us--"
"--help us find our home."
"There's no home to find!" Angel shouts. "Oh, you fools! This is all there is!"
"I tried to explain to them," Dreen says to Mr Naryan, "but they wouldn't listen."
"They surely cannot disbelieve the Puranas," Mr Naryan says.
Angel shouts, "Give me back the ship!"
"It was never yours--"
"--never yours to own--"
"--but only yours to serve."
"No! I won't serve!" Angel jumps onto the throne and makes an abrupt cutting gesture.
Hundreds of fine silver threads spool out of the darkness, shooting towards the sled and her crewmates. The ends of the threads flick up when they reach the edge of the sled's modified field, but then fall in a tangle over the crew: their shield is gone.
The crowd begins to throw things again, but Angel orders them to be still. "I have the only working sled," she says. "That which I enhance, I can also take away. Come with me," she tells Mr Naryan, "and see the end of my story."
The crowd around Angel stirs. Mr Naryan turns, and sees one of the crew walking towards Angel.
He is as tall and slender as Angel, his small high-cheekboned face so like her own it is as if he holds up a mirror as he approaches. A rock arcs out of the crowd and strikes his shoulder: he staggers but walks on, hardly seeming to notice that the crowd closes at his back so that he is suddenly inside its circle, with Angel and Mr Naryan in its focus.
Angel says, "I'm not afraid of you."
"Of course not, sister," the man says. And he grasps her wrists in both his hands.
Then Mr Naryan is on his hands and knees. A strong wind howls about him, and he can hear people screaming. The afterglow of a great light swims in his vision. He cannot see who helps him up and half-carries him through the stunned crowd to the sled.
When the sled starts to rise, Mr Naryan falls to his knees again. Dreen says in his ear, "It's over."
"No," Mr Naryan says. He blinks and blinks, tears rolling down his cheeks.
The man took Angel's wrists in both of his --
Dreen is saying something, but Mr Naryan shakes his head. It is not over.
-- and they shot up into the night, so fast that their clothing burst into flame, so fast that air was drawn up with them. If Angel could nullify the gravity field, then so could her crewmates. She has achieved apotheosis.
The sled swoops up the tiered slope of the ship, is swallowed by a wide hatch. When he can see again, Mr Naryan finds himself kneeling at the edge of the open hatch. The city is spread below. Fires define the streets which radiate away from the Great River; the warm night air is bitter with the smell of burning.
Dreen has been looking at the lighted windows that crowd the walls of the vast room beyond the hatch, scampering with growing excitement from one to the other. Now he sees that Mr Naryan is crying, and clumsily tries to comfort him, believing that Mr Naryan is mourning his wife, left behind in the dying city.
"She was a good woman, for her kind," Mr Naryan is able to say at last, although it is not her he is mourning, or not only her. He is mourning for all of the citizens of Sensch. They are irrevocably caught in their change now, never to be the same. His wife, the nut roaster, the men and woman who own the little tea houses at the corner of every square, the children, the mendicants and the merchants -- all are changed, or else dying in the process. Something new is being born down there. Rising from the fall of the city.
"They'll take us away from all this," Dreen says happily. "They're going to search for where they came from. Some are out combing the city for others who can help them; the rest are preparing the ship. They'll take it over the edge of the world, into the great far out!"
"Do they not know they will never find what they are looking for? The Puranas--"
"Old stories, old fears. They will take us home!"
Mr Naryan laboriously clambers to his feet. He understands that Dreen has fallen under the thrall of the crew. He is theirs, as Mr Naryan is now and forever Angel's. He says, "Those times are past. Down there in the city is the beginning of something new, something wonderful--" He finds he cannot explain. All he has is his faith that it won't stop here. It is not an end but a beginning, a spark to set all of Confluence -- the unfallen and the changed -- alight. Mr Naryan says, weakly, "It will not stop here."
Dreen's big eyes shine in the light of the city's fires. He says, "I see only another Change War. There's nothing new in that. The snakes will rebuild the city in their new image, if not here, then somewhere else along the Great River. It has happened before, in this very place, to my own people. We survived it, and so will the snakes. But what they promise is so much greater! We'll leave this poor place, and voyage out to return to where it all began, to the very home of the Preservers. Look there! That's where we're going!"
Mr Naryan allows himself to be led across the vast room. It is so big that it could easily hold Dreen's floating habitat. A window on its far side shows a view angled somewhere far above the plane of Confluence's orbit. Confluence itself is a shining strip, an arrow running out to its own vanishing point. Beyond that point are the ordered, frozen spirals of the Home Galaxy, the great jewelled clusters and braids of stars constructed in the last great days of the Preservers before they vanished forever into the black hole they made by collapsing the Magellanic Cloud.
Mr Naryan starts to breathe deeply, topping up the oxygen content of his blood.
"You see!" Dreen says again, his face shining with awe in Confluence's silver light.
"I see the end of history," Mr Naryan says. "You should have studied the Puranas, Dreen. There is no future to be found amongst the artifacts of the Preservers, only the dead past. I won't serve, Dreen. That's over."
And then he turns and lumbers through the false lights and shadows of the windows towards the open hatch. Dreen catches his arm, but Mr Naryan throws him off.
Dreen sprawls on his back, astonished, then jumps up and runs in front of Mr Naryan. "You fool!" he shouts. "They can bring her back!"
"There's no need," Mr Naryan says, and pushes Dreen out of the way and plunges straight out of the hatch.
He falls through black air like a heavy comet. Water smashes around him, tears away his clothes. His nostrils pinch shut and membranes slide across his eyes as he plunges down and down amidst streaming bubbles until the roaring in his ears is no longer the roar of his blood but the roar of the river's never-ending fall over the edge of the world.
Deep, silty currents begin to pull him towards that edge. He turns in the water and begins to swim away from it, away from the ship and the burning city. His duty is over: once they have taken charge of their destiny, the changed citizens will no longer need an Archivist.
* * *
Afterword
This story began with an invitation from Greg Bear, who asked if I would consider writing something for an anthology of original stories concerned with the central themes of SF. Naturally, I was flattered; more importantly, it forced me to consider just what the central themes of SF are. It seems to me that every SF writer has a different set, just as every writer probably has a different working definition of SF itself (which is, perhaps, why we can never agree on a definition). This story suggests that my own themes -- or, if you like, obsessions -- are aliens, the far future (which is to say a future in which our own time is invisibly distant), cosmology, messiahs, and what Roz Kavney has labelled Big Dumb Objects. Certainly, readers of Eternal Light or Red Dust may find echoes of the themes of those two novels in this clash between the Hindu and Christian mythologies on a Big Dumb Object orbiting a manufactured black hole beyond a Galaxy so rich in ten million years or more of human history that the orbits of every star have been altered.
It is a story that takes seriously Frank Tipler's hypothesis, explained in detail in his The Physics of Immortality, that in the unimaginably far future the entire Universe will have been re-engineered so radically that it will have become a substrate for a collective intelligence that will be as omniscient as God. Indeed, the Universe will be God, a God of the end times rather than of creation, and we and everything that has ever lived will be recreated as a trivial but necessary exercise. The Preservers of this story are not that God, although it is possible that they are of God.
* * *
© Paul J McAuley 1995, 2000. This story first appeared in New Legends, edited by Greg Bear and Martin H Greenberg (Tor, 1995). It has since been reprinted in: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirteenth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois; Tales in Space, edited by Peter Crowther; and in Paul's collection, The Invisible Country.
* * *
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
fiction - 17; and Inheritance.
nonfiction - Paul J McAuley interviewed by Nick Gevers; reviews of Pasquale's Angel and Eternal Light.
features - about the author.
Elsewhere on the web:
Paul J McAuley at Amazon (US) and at the Internet Bookshop (UK).
The ISFA site features a profile of Paul.
Another profile and bibliography can be found in the Anachron City Library.
Find out what readers think of Paul's work with these reviews.
ISFD bibliography.
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Recording Angel - a novelette by Paul J McAuley Page 4