After the Gods Die

by Jules

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

We ascend to the reservoir that was once my glass city. The place smells strange. Heady. Like fermented juice. Our surroundings are lush, over-grown, the dark fruit trees and flowering vines drinking shamelessly from the reservoir.

“It’s so quiet,” Gil observes. It is, to him. The star people did not like wildlife. Even after they left, the battle around the perimeter kept animals away. Those towers even shot birds out of the sky. We are the only creatures to walk here in almost a thousand years. Some of the machinery is still humming, deep underground. I can sense it even if Gil cannot. I guide Gil to the water’s edge. Small waves suck at the shore near our feet. Stones grind against one another, making a sound like whispers.

“I’ve never seen so much water all in one place,” he tells me. “Even the river has been choked off since my great-grandfather was a boy.”

“This was a river valley. The star people created this lake by damming the river,” I tell him. The water is still and clear. Spires of submerged buildings rise above the surface. They look like patterns of scales and feathers, colored blue and gold by salts added to the glass. Red sunlight slides down the spires like drops of fruit juice.

I cannot look at them for long. I turn my face to where the mountains rise further and further away until they look like rocky folds. “If you were to cross to the middle and look down below, you would see banks of sand washed over roads. You’d see domes and towers among ghost-forests waving in the current. You’d see houses with water-snakes swimming through the windows and fish in the furnaces...”

Gil puts his arm around my shoulders. My augments gather data below my awareness and give me their summary. They smell concern coming off Gil’s blood and skin but they cannot tell whether he is concerned for me or himself. He asks me, “You lived down there?”

“Yes.” In my ancestors’ palace. It made sense for the star-people to move into the seat of power. They seemed wondrous before I was old enough to realize what was going on.

We follow the shore to where the dam stretches between two mountainsides. I lead Gil inside. The walls down here are living rock and smooth artificial surfaces. Banks of machinery radiate heat. They are powered by water. We pass through big working spaces, preserved in a way the ruins above are not. The star people placed their art here. The uncanny resemblance to things I think I know makes the hairs on my arms prickle.

We arrive at a glossy wall with rippling colors under the surface like the membrane of an eye. Pressure from the refined glass circuits in my hand brings a selection of symbols swimming to the surface. I give my augments energy. They transfer it to the wall, which slides slowly aside.

“Control room,” I tell Gil. “We can set the river free from here.” My eyelids are heavy. I want to sleep, and not just because the air in the control room is heavy, damp and warm. Hypnotic nets of reflected light dance across the smooth walls and the glassy ceiling. An acrid and terribly clean smell comes off the water, so strong I can almost swallow it.

One great, curving window overlooks the lake. The other overlooks the sheer cliff of the dam. Pipes, polished to a reflective shine despite their age, make a forest between ceiling and floor. There is a wide pool in the middle of the room.

I point to the wall across the pool, visible through the pipes. “Those are the controls for the dam. If we can—”

Water froths as the creation I know as Dozorsi rises from the surface. It is in constant motion, like the dancing light reflected off the water. Patterns of iridescent colors ripple over its body. Knobby growths sprout up from above his eye and grow like branches, only to be reabsorbed and emerge elsewhere. Dozorsi’s watery form stretches and collapses and folds before I understand the changes. The only feature that remains constant is his round green eye, which burns the way the space station used to. Even its eye rolls and tosses around his length.

The star people didn’t make that art and scatter it around a workplace. Dozorsi did.

“I thought I’d seen the last of you, Nemiva.”

“How do you know him?” Gil demands.

Dozorsi answers, “From when he was taken in by the same people who created me to maintain the dam until they return.”

Gil is stunned. “They’re coming back?” His voice echoes hollow in the forest of pipes.

“Yes,” says Dozorsi

“No,” I say.

“When are they coming?”

Dozorsi makes a harsh, wordless sound, as if Gil’s question is the height of ignorance.

“The star people aren’t coming back,” I tell him. “I know it and their resident pipe-cleaner knows it. They’ve finally destroyed their station and abandoned the solar system. The colony was always a reach. Too far away to be practical.”

“Ungrateful. You wouldn’t know there was a solar system if it wasn’t for us.”

“Us?” I hear myself laugh. Dozorsi isn’t one of them any more than I am. “That reminds me. The humans downriver have already forgotten your great makers existed. They turned the station into a reflection of their leader’s necklace.”

Dozorsi rises and falls. “Wherever you go, you’ll be a sign they were here, whether or not you open your smart mouth to tell it. You’d be dead as the rest of your kin if they hadn’t made you a reflection of themselves. A very poor one, as it turns out.”

“Not all my kin are dead.” I stand arm-to-shoulder with Gil.

Gil glances at me. He sees the bone structure under my citrine eyes and twisting silver horns the way he saw the layers of the glass city under the lake and tree growth. He knows I could be his long-ago cousin. He grips his ancient sword.

“I can control the flow of the river for you,” Dozorsi tells Gil, “you can fool those other humans, but I know the truth. I know all your power came from the same people who made me and made Nemiva.”

Gil’s free hand rises to the dulled talisman around his neck.

“What good is wearing a burned-out bauble that signifies nothing except itself? Your crown is broken. Your power flowed away like sand through your fingers. A river, though... a river that makes cities grow... that is a power that will never be forgotten.”

“Never is a long time,” I tell him.

“Imagine that a chain of cities downriver will be yours, flourishing or diminishing as you see fit,” says Dozorsi.

Gil yanks the chain, breaks it, and drops his talisman into the water. Dozorsi draws itself up almost as tall as the ceiling.

“I think,” says Gil, “I would rather be remembered as the one who returned the water than as the one who withheld it.”

Dozorsi cannot bear my smile. The ancient water guardian lashes out between the pipes. I throw myself forward and a heavy limb smashes into the tile wall behind me. Gil hews at the limb with a great two-handed swing. His sword goes straight through and rings off the floor.

He looks wildly at me. If not his sword, then what?

Dozorsi’s watery limb lashes backward into Gil’s chest and knocks him into the nearest pipe. Another tries to batter him and smashes into the pipe as he ducks behind it. Long protrusions seek him in the pipe forest.

I dart to the other side of the wall and bring up a series of shining, colored squares by tapping my hand against the surface. Dozorsi realizes what I’m doing, too late. The pool drains, the pipes dump. Dozorsi is sucked away with the water into the workings of the dam. Its eye glares green murder at me before it vanishes into one of the pipes.

The dam interacts with my augments and knows what I want almost before I do. I don’t want a massive flood. I want to give the ground time to absorb the water and form a river again before the valley drains. Gil approaches, holding his ribs. He looks out the window-wall.

“Come see,” he says.

I am thinking about the time it will take my valley to drain. I can’t see it from here. My augments start the complex calculation that will give me an answer that maps onto the different buildings at different levels of the valley.

“Come look,” Gil says again, “it’s working.”

How many months, how many years until I can go home?

Gil shakes my shoulder. “Nemiva, listen. I want to make the fields black with grass and trees. I want flowers to open like eyes. I want you to help me rule whatever chain of villages grows up along the river. More people will mean building more structures and resolving bigger conflicts. I’d like to hear what you’ve got to say about them.”

So I turn from the thought of my ancient home and look down at the water flowing from way down at the foot of the dam. The river bed is turning slowly red in the sun. I tell my augments to stop calculating. I shut them off to watch the future change.