“It’s going to be like this once you’re in charge,” the old man told him numerous times. “You’re the best there’s been for
decades. Almost as good as me. You’ll bring it all back to me, the power and the wealth.”
“This is the future?” Dariat asked. They were standing on a tall altar of polyp-rock, looking down on a circular starscraper
entrance. People were rushing about with a vigour and purpose not usually found in Valisk. Every one of them was wearing a
Magellanic Itg uniform. When he lifted his gaze it was as though the northern endcap was transparent; blackhawks flocked
around their docking rings, loaded with expensive goods and rare artefacts from a hundred planets. Further out, so far away
it was only a hazy ginger blob, Magellanic Itg’s failed Von Neumann machine spun slowly against the gas giant’s yellow-brown
ring array.
“It could be the future,” the old man sighed regretfully. “If you will only listen how.”
“I will,” Dariat said. “I’ll listen.”
The old man’s schemes seemed to coincide with the pressure of conviction and certainty which was building in his own mind.
Some days he seemed so full of ideas and goals he thought his skull must surely burst apart, whilst on other occasions the
dream man’s long rambling speeches seemed to have developed a tangible echo, lasting all day long.
That was why he enjoyed the long bouts of solitude provided by the unadventurous interior. Walking and exploring obscure areas
was the only time the raging thoughts in his brain slowed and calmed.
Five days after his fourteenth birthday he saw Anastasia Rigel. She was washing in a river that ran along the floor of a deep
valley. Dariat heard her singing before he saw her. The voice led him round some genuine rock boulders onto a shelf of naked
polyp which the water had scoured of soil. He squatted down in the lee of the boulders, and watched her kneeling at the side
of the river.
The girl was tall and much much blacker than anyone he’d seen in Valisk before. She appeared to be in her late teens (seventeen,
he learned later), with legs that seemed to be all bands of muscle, and long jet-black hair that was arranged in ringlets
and woven with red and yellow beads. Her face was narrow and delicate with a petite nose. There were dozens of slim silver
and bronze bracelets on each arm.
She was only wearing a blue skirt of some thin cotton. A brown top of some kind lay on the polyp beside her. Dariat caught
some fleeting glimpses of high pointed breasts as she rubbed water across her chest and arms. It was even
better than accessing bluesense AV fleks and tossing off. For once he felt beautifully calm.
I’m going to have her, he thought, I really am. The certainty burned him.
She stood up, and pulled her brown top on. It was a sleeveless waistcoat made from thin supple leather, laced up the front.
“You can come out now,” she said in a clear voice.
Just for a moment he felt wholly inferior. Then he trotted towards her with a casualness that denied she had just caught him
spying. “I was trying not to alarm you,” he said.
She was twenty centimetres taller than him; she looked down and grinned openly. “You couldn’t.”
“Did you hear me? I thought I was being quiet.”
“I could feel you.”
“Feel me?”
“Yes. You have a very anguished spirit. It cries out.”
“And you can hear that?”
“Lin Yi was a distant ancestress.”
“Oh.”
“You have not heard of her?”
“No, sorry.”
“She was a famous spiritualist. She predicted the Big One2 quake in California back on Earth in 2058 and led her followers
to safety in Oregon. A perilous pilgrimage for those times.”
“I’d like to hear that story.”
“I will tell it if you like. But I don’t think you will listen. Your spirit is closed against the realm of Chi-ri.”
“You judge people very fast. We don’t stand much of a chance, do we?”
“Do you know what the realm of Chi-ri is?”
“No.”
“Shall I tell you?”
“If you like.”
“Come then.”
She led him up the river, bracelets tinkling musically at
every motion. They followed the tight curve of the valley; after three hundred metres the floor broadened out, and a Starbridge
village was camped along the side of the river.
Starbridge was the remnants of the cults and tribes and spiritualists who had moved into Valisk during its formative years.
They had slowly amalgamated down the decades, bonding together against the scorn and hostility of the other inhabitants. Now
they were one big community, united spiritually with an
outrÉ
fusion of beliefs that was often incomprehensible to any outsider. They embraced the primitive existence, living as tribes
of migrants, walking round and round the interior of the habitat, tending their cattle, practising their handicraft, cultivating
their opium poppies, and waiting for their nirvana.
Dariat looked out on the collection of ramshackle tepees, stringy animals with noses foraging the grass, children in rags
running barefoot. He experienced a contempt so strong it verged on physical sickness. He was curious at that, he had no reason
to hate the Starbridge freakos, he’d never had anything to do with them before. Even as he thought that, the loathing increased.
Of course he did, slimy parasites, vermin on two legs.
Anastasia Rigel stroked his forehead in concern. “You suffer yet you are strong,” she said. “You spend so much time in the
realm of Anstid.”
She brought him into her tepee, a cone of heavy hand-woven cloth. Wicker baskets ringed the walls. The light was dim, and
the air dusty. The valley’s pinkish grass was matted, dry and dying underfoot. He saw her sleeping roll bundled up against
one basket, a bright orange blanket with pillows that had some kind of green and white tree motif embroidered across them,
haloed by a ring of stars. He wondered if that was what he’d do it on, where he’d finally become a real man.
They sat crosslegged on a threadbare rug and drank tea, which was like coloured water, and didn’t taste of much. Jasmine,
she told him.
“What do you think of us?” she asked.
“Us?”
“The Starbridge tribes.”
“Never really thought about you much,” Dariat said. He was getting itchy sitting on the rug, and it was pretty obvious there
weren’t going to be any biscuits with the tea.
“You should. Starbridge is both our name and our dream, that which we seek to build. A bridge between stars, between all peoples.
We are the final religion. They will all come to us eventually; the Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists, even
the Satanists and followers of Wicca; every sect, every cult. Each and every one of them.”
“That’s a pretty bold claim.”
“Not really. Just inevitable. There were so many of us, you see, when Rubra the Lost invited us here. So many beliefs, all
different, yet really all the same. Then he turned on us, and confined us, and isolated us. He thought he would punish us,
force us to conform to his materialistic atheism. But faith and dignity is always stronger than mortal oppression. We turned
inwards for comfort, and found we had so much that we shared. We became one.”
“Starbridge being the one?”
“Yes. We burned the old scriptures and prayer books on a bonfire so high the flames reached right across the habitat. With
them went all the ancient prejudices and the myths. It left us pure, in silence and darkness. Then we re-birthed ourselves,
and renamed what we knew was real. There is so much that old Earth’s religions have in common; so many identical beliefs and
tenets and wisdoms. But their followers are forced apart by names, by priests who have grown decadent and greedy for physical
reward. Whole peoples, whole planets who denounce one another so that a few evil men can wear robes of golden cloth.”
“That seems fairly logical,” Dariat said enthusiastically. “Good idea.” He smiled. From where he was sitting he could see
the whole side of her left breast through the waistcoat’s lace-up front.
“I don’t think you have come to faith that quickly,” she said with a trace of suspicion.
“I haven’t. Because you haven’t told me anything about it. But if you were telling the truth about hearing my spirit, then
you’ve got my full attention. None of the other religions can offer tangible proof of God’s existence.”
She shifted round on the rug, bracelets clinking softly. “Neither do we offer proof. What we say is that life in this universe
is only one segment of the great journey a spirit undertakes through time. We believe the journey will finish when a spirit
reaches heaven, however you choose to define that existence. But don’t ask how close this universe is to heaven. That depends
on the individual.”
“What happens when your spirit reaches heaven?”
“Transcendence.”
“What sort?”
“That is for God to proclaim.”
“God. Not a goddess, then?” he asked teasingly.
She grinned at him. “The word defines a concept, not an entity, not a white man with a white beard, nor even an earth mother.
Physical bodies require gender. I don’t think the instigator and sovereign of the multiverse is going to have physical and
biological aspects, do you?”
“No.” He finished the tea, relieved the cup was empty. “So what are these realms?”
“While the spirit is riding a body it also moves through the spiritual realms of the Lords and Ladies who govern nature. There
are six realms, and five Lords and Ladies.”
“I thought you said there was only one heaven?”
“I did. The realms are not heaven, they are aspects of ourselves. The Lords and Ladies are not God, but they are of a higher
order than ourselves. They affect events through the wisdoms and deceits they reveal to us. But they have no influence on
the physical reality of the cosmos. They are not the instigators of miracles.”
“Like angels and demons?” he asked brightly.
“If you like. If that makes it easier to accept.”
“So they’re in charge of us?”
“You are in charge of yourself. You and you alone chose where your spirit roams.”
“Then why the Lords and Ladies?”
“They grant gifts of knowledge and insight, they tempt. They test us.”
“Silly thing to do. Why don’t they leave us alone?”
“Without experience there can be no growth. Existence is evolution, both on a spiritual and a personal level.”
“I see. So which is this Chi-ri I’m closed against?”
Anastasia Rigel climbed to her feet and went over to one of the wicker baskets. She pulled out a small goatskin bag. If she
was aware of his hungry look following her every move she never showed it. “These represent the Lords and Ladies,” she said
as she sat back down. The bag’s contents were tipped out. Six coloured pebble-sized crystals bounced on the rug. They had
all been carved, he saw; cubes with their faces marked by small runes. She picked up the red one. “This is for Thoale, Lord
of destiny.” The blue crystal was held up, and she told him it was for Chi-ri, Lady of hope. Green was for Anstid, Lord of
hatred. Yellow for Tarrug, Lord of mischief. Venus, Lady of love, was as clear as glass.
“You said there were six realms,” he said.
“The sixth is the emptiness.” She proffered a jet-black cube, devoid of runes. “It has no Lord or Lady, it is where lost spirits
flee.” She crossed her arms in front of herself, fingers touching her shoulders, bracelets falling to the crook of her elbows.
She reminded Dariat of a statue of Shiva he’d seen in one of Valisk’s four temples; Shiva as Nataraja, king of dancers. “A
terrible place,” Anastasia Rigel murmured coolly.
“You don’t think I have any hope?” he asked, suddenly annoyed at this primitive paganish nonsense again.
“You resist it.”
“No, I don’t. I’ve got lots of hope. I’m going to run this habitat one day,” he added. She ought to be impressed by that.
Her head was shaken gently, hair partly obscuring her
face. “That is Anstid deceiving you, Dariat. You spend so much time in his realm, he has an unholy grip upon your spirit.”
“How do you know?” he said scornfully.
“These are called Thoale stones. He is the Lord I am beholden to. He shows me what is to unfold.” A slight, droll smile flickered
over her lips. “Sometimes Tarrug intervenes. He shows me things I should not see, or events I cannot understand.”
“How do the stones work?”
“Each face is carved with the rune of a realm. I read the combinations, how they fall, or in the case of the emptiness where
it falls in relation to the others. Would you like to know what your future contains?”
“Yeah. Go on.”
“Pick up each crystal, hold it in your hands for a moment, try to impress it with your essence, then put it in the bag.”
He picked up the clear one, naturally. Love Lady. “How do I impress it?”
She just shrugged.
He squeezed the crystals one at a time, feeling increasingly stupid, and dropped them in the goatskin bag. Anas-tasia Rigel
shook the bag, then tipped the crystals out.
“What does it say?” Dariat asked, a shade too eagerly for someone who was supposed to be sceptical.
She stared at them a while, eyes flicking anxiously between the runes. “Greatness,” she said eventually. “You will come to
greatness.”
“Hey, yeah!”
Her hand came up, silencing him. “It will not last. You shine so bright, Dariat, but for such a short time, and it is a dark
flame which ignites you.”
“Then what?” he asked, disgruntled.
“Pain, death.”
“Death?”
“Not yours. Many people, but not yours.”
Anastasia Rigel didn’t offer to sleep with him that time.
Nor any of his visits during the month which followed. They walked round the savannah together, talking inanities, almost
as brother and sister. She would tell him about the Starbridge philosophy, the idiosyncrasies of the realms. He listened,
but became lost and impatient with a world-view which seemed to have little internal logic. In return he told her of his father,
the resentment and the confusion of loss; mainly in the hope she’d feel sorry for him. He took her down into a starscraper;
she said she’d never been in one before. She didn’t like it, the confining walls of the apartments, although she was fascinated
by the slowly spinning starfield outside.