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by the drug; although the discrete plaques allowed limited
flexure, they had robbed the fingers of all feeling.
The Aedile waited while Dr. Dismas went through the ritual
of lighting another cigarette. There was something of Dr.
Dismas's manner that reniinded the Aedile of a sly, sleek
nocturnal animal, secretive in its habits but always ready to
pounce on some scrap or tidbit. He was a gossip, and
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like
all gossips knew how to pace his revelations, how to string
out a story and tease his audience-but the Aedile knew that
like all gossips, Dr. Dismas could not hold a secret long. So
he waited patiently while Dr. Dismas fitted another cigarette
in the holder, and lit and drew on it. The Aedile was by
nature a patient man, and his training in diplomacy had inured
him to waiting on the whims of others.
Dr. Dismas blew streams of smoke through his nostrils and
said at last, "It wasn't easy, you know."
"Oh, quite so. I did not think it would be. The libraries
are much debased these days. Since the librarians fell silent,
there is a general feeling that there is no longer the need to
maintain anything but the most recent records, and so everything
older than a thousand years is considerably cornpromised
The Aedile realized that he had said too much. He was
nervous, there on the threshold of revelation.
Dr. Dismas nodded vigorously. "And there is the present
state of confusion brought about by the current political situation
. It is most regrettable."
"Quite, quite. Well, but we are at war."
"I meant the confusion in the Palace of the Memory of
the People itself, something for which your department, my
dear Aedile, must take a considerable part of the blame. All
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of these difficulties suggest that we are trying to forget the
past, as the Committee for Public Safety teaches we should."
The Aedile was stung by this remark, as Dr. Dismas had
no doubt intended. The Aedile had been exiled to this tiny
backwater city after the triumph of the Committee for Public
Safety because he had spoken against the destruction of the
records of past ages. It was to his everlasting shame that he
had only spoken out, and not fought, as had many of his
faction. And now his wife was dead. And his son. Only the
Aedile was left, still in exile because of a political squabble
mostly long forgotten.
The Aedile said with considerable asperity, "The past is
not so easily lost, my dear Doctor. Each night, we have only
to look up at the sky to be reminded of that. In winter, we
see the Galaxy, sculpted by unimaginable forces in ages past;
in summer, we see the Eye of the Preservers. And here in
Aeolis, the past is more important than the present. After all,
how much greater are the tombs than the mudbrick houses
down by the bay? Even stripped of their ornaments, the tombs
are greater, and will endure in ages to come. All that lived
in Ys during the Golden Age once came to rest here, and
much remains to be discovered."
Dr. Dismas ignored this. He said, "Despite these difficulties
, the library of my department is still well-ordered. Several
of the archive units are still completely functional under manual
control, and they are amongst the oldest on Confluence.
If records of the boy's bloodline could be found anywhere,
it is there. But although I searched long and hard, of the boy's
bloodline, well, I could find no trace."
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The Aedile thought that he had misheard. "What is that'?
None at all?"
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"I wish it were otherwise. Truly I do."
"This is--I mean to say, it is unexpected. Quite
unexpected."
"I was surprised myself. As I say, the records of my department
are perhaps the most complete on Confluence. Certainly
, I believe that they are the only fully usable set, ever
since your own department purged the archivists of the Palace
of the Memory of the People."
The Aedile failed to understand what Dr. Dismas had told
him. He said weakly, "There was no correspondence . .
"None at all. All Shaped bloodlines possess the universal
sequence of genes inserted by the Preservers at the time of
the remaking of our ancestors. No matter who we are, no
matter the code in which our cellular inheritance is written,
the meaning of those satellite sequences are the same. But
although tests of the boy's self-awareness and rationality
show that he is not an indigen, like them he lacks that which
marks the Shaped as the chosen children of the Preservers.
And more than that, the boy's genome is quite different from
anything on Confluence."
"But apart from the mark of the Preservers we are all
different from each other, doctor. We are all remade in the
image of the Preservers in our various ways."
"Indeed. But every bloodline shares a genetic inheritance
with certain of the beasts and plants and microbes of
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Confluence
. Even the various races of simple indigens, which were
not marked by the Preservers and which cannot evolve toward
transcendence, have genetic relatives amongst the flora and
fauna. The ancestors of the ten thousand bloodlines of Confluence
were not brought here all alone; the Preservers also
brought something of the home worlds of each of them. It
seems that young Yarnamanama is more truly a foundling
than we first believed, for there is nothing on record, no
bloodline, no plant, no beast, nor even any microbe, which
has anything in common with him."
Only Dr. Dismas called the boy by his full name. It had
been given to him by the wives of the old Constable, Thaw.
In their language, the language of the harems, it meant Child
of the River. The Council for Night and Shrines had met in
secret after the baby had been found on the river by Constable
Thaw, and it had been decided that he should be killed by
exposure, for he might be a creature of the heretics, or some
other kind of demon. But the baby had survived for ten days
amongst the tombs on the hillside above Aeolis, and the
women who had finally rescued him, defying their husbands,
had said that bees had brought him pollen and water, proving
that he was under the protection of the Preservers. Even
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