Fantastic Metropolis

4. Confluence’s Plot

The manic pace of Confluence conceals the text’s lessons even as it reveals them; but Yama, however headstrong and error-prone, does learn them. Having set out to solve the mysteries of his own existence-prominently how it was that he, a member of a long-dead lineage believed responsible for Confluence’s construction, could appear suddenly as a Moses-style foundling floating on the River-Yama is pursued by both sides in the war. Prefect Corin and Dr. Dismas are aware that Yama has an innate ability to control machines, to communicate with and instruct anything from the town of Aeolis’ docile “watchdogs” to the huge feral war machines that linger in space near Confluence. Either party could win the war with Yama’s assistance, and both initially hope that his youthful pliancy will allow him to be captured and tamed. But his command of machines is a deus ex machina; he can escape virtually any trap, virtually any captivity. And so he leads the hunters on a long and merry chase, acquiring allies and increased wisdom along the way.

McAuley employs all the resources of the adventure quest genre in telling this story: there are Yama’s boon companions, a loyal young sidekick and a gruff female mercenary; there are stock wily or arrogant villains, such as a monstrous star-sailor Yama stalks to his lair; there are inevitable melodramatic confrontations with the same villains, who always orate at length before Yama escapes or destroys them; there are abandoned cities, sinister shrines, a staircase down the world’s edge, ancient ships of the River and of space, horrible betrayals, amorous interludes, battles fought with weird baroque weapons. All are recounted with formidable gusto and fine polish. But amidst the tumult Yama assembles vital clues: the urgent need to conserve the past and so understand it; the folly of philosophical inflexibility; the value of integrity; the rational foundation of authentic wisdom; the necessity that any resolution of the world’s ills embrace and incorporate the interests of the many. Sometimes merely a questing hero driven by the exigencies of survival, Yama becomes steadily capable of being far more: he is even Christlike at times, bringing a benison of higher awareness to the indigenes of Confluence, beings who cannot Change in the manner of the bloodlines. The clues build into an answer, an answer to the dilemma of the cycle and the line.

This answer is intrinsic to the climax of Confluence’s plot. Without giving too much away, it can be said that Yama, moving about in time as Severian does in THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN, unleashes forces that promise the peoples of Confluence new beginnings on new worlds; thus the linear principle is indulged, in a far more constructive way than the heretics envisaged. But a compromise is being struck: the cycle exacts its price, as Yama is obliged to accept an existence that is a self-recursive loop in time, a sacrifice that sets all others free. And the bloodlines are going forth to repopulate the Galaxy that the humans abandoned when they ascended into their black hole; a greater Cycle is coming round again, as galactic history resumes. Ouroboros lives on, even if the Great River does not.

5. Confluence’s Novelty

But this grand and elegant resolution is not the whole story. Even as he mimics the strategies of Gene Wolfe, McAuley gives his predecessor a grand comeuppance. In an interview with the present writer, McAuley has observed that he structured Confluence as a progression from Fantasy (Child of the River) through Science Fantasy (Ancients of Days) to Science Fiction (Shrine of Stars). This turns The Book of the New Sun on its head, for whereas Wolfe implies a divine miraculous Providence behind the material appearances of this cosmos, McAuley rebuts the explanations latent in myth and religion, asserting rationality, the secular rule of cause and effect. Yama explodes myths as he emerges from the mists of Fantasy; the theistic aura surrounding the Preservers is dispelled by his investigations; and McAuley cannily sets conventions of Fantasy at war with those of Science Fiction, a conflict only SF can win. In this light, baptism becomes an infusion of nanomachines; Dr. Dismas’ alchemical contrivances acquire a much more probable gloss; and as McAuley has emphasized, when a heroine out of Sword and Sorcery encounters a flying saucer at the close of Ancients of Days, she inevitably perishes. Confluence is a breaking of the chains of theocracy in literature as much as in the world; it is Science Fiction triumphant, the pupil audaciously and successfully defying its teacher, Fantasy. This is Confluence’s most cogent claim to originality.

After the agency of magic in Vance, after Wolfe’s ornamental Parousia, after Aldiss’ utopian mysticism and after Park’s majestic surrealism, McAuley adds a potent dash of rigour to the formula of the Grand Planetary Romance. Sweeping, captivating, and finally very much itself, Confluence is Paul McAuley’s masterpiece, and a masterpiece for all SF.