MICHAEL BISHOP

For Thus Do I Remember Carthage

Michael Bishop is one of the most acclaimed and respected members of that highly talented generation of writers who entered SF in the 1970s. His short fiction has appeared in almost all the major magazines and anthologies, and has been gathered in three collections: Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden, and the recent Close Encounters with the Deity. In 1983, he won the Nebula Award for his novel No Enemy but Time. His other novels include Transfigurations, Stolen Faces, Ancient of Days, Catacomb Years, and Eyes of Fire. His most recent novel is The Secret Ascension. Upcoming is a new novel, Unicorn Mountain. Bishop and his family live in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

 

FOR THUS DO I REMEMBER CARTHAGE

Michael Bishop

1

Augustine wants no company, and the last person whom he expects to intrude is a troublesome astronomer from Far Cathay.

A fever has besieged the old man. In the bishop’s house next to the basilica of Hippo Regius, he mulls the imminence of his own death and the portentous events of this past year.

An army of 20,000 Vandals has besieged Hippo. Under their wily king Genseric, they seem inevitable occupiers. Boniface, Count of Africa, has held them at bay throughout the summer with a force of Gothic mercenaries and a few ragtag volunteers from among the male population of upper Numidia—but Genseric’s fleet has blockaded the harbor and Vandal soldiers have disabled the power plant providing Hippo with electricity. Augustine must read the psalms copied out and affixed to his bedchamber walls by the flicker of an olive-oil lamp rather than by the steady incandescence of one of Seneca the Illuminator’s clever glass globes.

“This earthly city cannot last,” the bishop tells himself, “but the City of God … the City of God endures.”

Possidius appears inside the door of his bedchamber with a tray of pears, bread, and marinated chick-peas.

Bishop of Calama, a town twenty leagues to the south, Possidius fled to Hippo last October to escape the oncoming barbarians. (Two Numidian bishops less wise than he were tortured to death outside the walls of their cities.) He has lived in Augustine’s episcopal quarters ten months now, but has been fussily nursing the brilliant old man for only these past two weeks.

“Go away, Possidius,” murmurs Augustine.

“A modest convivium. Excellency, you must eat.”

“Sometimes, Christ forgive me, it’s hard to remember why.”

“To maintain your strength, sir. And, this evening, you have a visitor.”

“But I’ve forbidden visitors. Especially physicians.”

“This isn’t a physician. Vindicianus has almost lost patience with you, Excellency.”

The old man in the loose black birrus says, “Whoever it is, is sadly unwelcome. Not for his shortcomings, but for mine.”

Tears streak Augustine’s face. He has been reading the Davidic psalm beginning “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,” and the balm of its verse “Thou shalt preserve me from trouble” has surely induced these tears. Frequently, of late, he weeps, and Possidius cannot tell if he does so from pity for the plight of Roman Africa, or from an unspeakable gratitude to God, or from some ancient shame for which only he of all men would scruple to indict himself. Undoubtedly, he weeps for many reasons, but the bishop of Calama is unable to sort them out.

“He’s a stargazer, Excellency, who hails—he declares—from the capital of Africa.” Possidius places the food tray on Augustine’s writing desk.

“Carthage?”

“So he says. But he’s spent the past thirty years looking at the stars from various high escarpments in Northern Wei.”

“Ah, yes. Flying machines and dragons aren’t the only miracles from that mythic land, are they?”

“Telescopes, Excellency. Horseless chariots. Boxes that talk, and others in which pictures dance like living people. Seneca the Illuminator says they’ve perfected machines in Cathay a century in advance of any made by the Daedaluses of Rome or Constantinople.

“But the greatest miracle, Excellency, may be that your visitor has returned to Numidia exactly when Genseric’s Vandals have come bearing down on us from Gibraltar and Mauretania. The astronomer sneaked through their siege lines to enter the city. Morally, sir, I think you should grant him the interview he desires.”

“Morally,” the old man mutters. On his feet for the first time since Possidius came in, he totters to his desk, picks up a pear, burnishes it on his robe. He lifts it to his face, sniffing it for submerged memories. He has lived three quarters of a century, and a year besides, and that Possidius should be defining morality for him—fabled Defender of the Faith against the errors of Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagians—stings. But God knows that he sometimes needs chastening, and perhaps Possidius is God’s flail.

“Does my would-be visitor have a name?”

“Iatanbaal, sir.”

“Christ save us. A pagan name. Does this man have any Latin, Possidius, or am I to talk to him in my execrable Neo-Punic?”

Possidius smiles. “Latin is Iatanbaal’s first language. But for three decades he has spoken in the tongues of Babel.”

“‘Given of God,’” Augustine muses.

“Excellency?”

“In Neo-Punic, latanbaal means ‘given of God.’” He places the pear back on his desk and lapses into reverie.

“Father Augustine,” Possidius prompts.

The old apostle stirs. “Oh, yes. Our visitor. Iatanbaal. ‘Given of God.’ In that case, let him come in.”

2

It startles Augustine to find that Iatanbaal—why did he expect a younger man?—is hard on sixty. The astronomer, who drops to his knees to kiss the bishop’s hand, is as gray as he is.

The stargazer wears a tight tunic in decadent late-Roman style, but a pair of leggings—trousers—favored by Hsiung-nu horsemen in the service of the Wei Cathayans among whom he has lived since the turn of the fifth Christian century. Over one shoulder Iatanbaal carries a long leathern bag, and on his left wrist he wears a thin strap bearing on it an oblong jewel, very like obsidian.

This jewel is featureless, but when the astronomer stands, it strikes the edge of Augustine’s desk. Suddenly, a row of crimson characters ignites atop the black stone. However, the gleam dies quickly, and Augustine crosses his hands on his breast to stare at the enigmatic bracelet.

“Pardon me, Excellency,” the astronomer says, and their eyes lock. “This device is a miniature time-gem.”

The bishop realizes that he and his guest are the same height, with irises the same slaty Berber gray. In other circumstances—the besieging Vandals elsewhere, his own death a decade rather than days away—they might have been friends. Augustine lets his gaze fall again to the “time-gem.”

Each time that Iatanbaal depresses a metal stem on the device, tiny crimson characters appear. At first they say VII:XXXVIII. A moment later: VII:XXXIX. The astronomer explains that these numerals signify the hour and the minute, and that the horological artisans of Lo-yang made him a device with Roman digits—a feeble thrust at his homesickness. He reveals that the time-gem takes its power from a coinlike disc, or energon, within the jewel.

“Seven-forty,” says the bishop when new numerals—VII:XL—wink into view. “By what criteria do you establish the hour?”

“In Northern Wei, Father Augustine, scientifically. But while traveling, by sun and simple intuition.”

Augustine tacks about. “Why have you come, Master Iatanbaal?” His guest, he knows, wants to give him the time-gem, and he has no wish to accept it, either as token of esteem or as bribe. Death’s specter has carried him beyond flattery, beyond manipulation.

“Because in your Confessions—a copy of which the former bishop of Alexandria let me see—I found you have an unusual philosophy of time, rivaling in sophistication the theories of our most learned Cathayan astronomers.” Iatanbaal refastens his time-gem’s strap. “It leads me to suspect that you alone of all Romanized westerners may be able to comprehend the startling cosmogony of the Wei genius Sung Hsichien. Comprehend and so appreciate.”

“I wrote my Confessions a long time ago.” Augustine eyes the astronomer warily. What he had penned about time in that book was that before God made heaven and earth, neither they nor time itself had any existence. Time did not begin until God spoke the word that inaugurated creation. Before time, there was no time, and what God did then (the conjecture that He was readying Hell for pryers into mysteries being a jesting canard), no mortal mind may reckon. Is that so amazing a theory of time? Is it powerful enough to call a Carthaginian astronomer home from Cathay to praise him? Augustine can scarcely credit such a motive.

“But, Excellency, you repeat and extend your discussion of time in the eleventh and twelfth books of The City of God. I read that masterpiece in Alexandria, too, but this time during a brief stop on my trip home from the Orient. In the eleventh book, you write—I’ve memorized the words—‘the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time,’ while in the twelfth you argue against those who hold that history is cyclic and that this world is born but to die and rise again. Sung Hsi-chien has discovered empirical proof of your positions in his astronomical observations, and this, I think, is a brave coincidence of minds.”

“Empirical proof?” Augustine’s fever has made him woozy. He sits down at his desk. “Master Iatanbaal, what need of empirical proof has a faith predicated on reason?”

“Why, none, I suppose, but Sung Hsi-chien and five generations of Cathayan lens-grinders, astronomers, cosmogonists, and sky-ray readers have still provided it. Since I was lucky enough to help Sung with his researches, I can outline these proofs for you.”

“I don’t require them.”

“No, of course you don’t. But you of all philosophers should wish to learn Sung’s ‘New Cosmogony.’”

“Ague grips me. I’m dying, Master Iatanbaal.”

“Here, eat.”

The astronomer pushes Possidius’s tray toward the bishop, then hefts his long bag onto the opposite end of the desk. From it he pulls a tube of ivory and silver; an ebony box with a small glass port on its upper face; and two enameled packets, which Augustine decides are accessories to the ebony box. How he knows this, he cannot guess. But, sipping thoughtfully at his chick-pea marinade, he waits for Master Iatanbaal to explain.

“A telescope,” the astronomer obliges, pointing to the tube. “Outside Lunghsi, in a tower on the Great Wall, the Wei Cathayans have a telescope so much larger than this one, Father Augustine, that it dwarfs the pillars of the Parthenon. An instrument even bigger dominates a hill near Lo-yang, while the grandest device of all stares skyward from a dome outside Ching-chao. Such far-seers, manned by imperial astronomers and scientists, have altered most of our old notions of the heavens.”

Augustine dunks his bread in the piquant marinade. Telescopes larger than temple pillars? he thinks, working his bad teeth. This importunate scoundrel is lying.

“The Wei have also invented a type of colossal telescope that gathers and focuses invisible sky-rays from distant stars. The best is beyond Ku-shih, in the Takla Makan Desert, and Sung and his helpers visit it several times a year in a pterodrac—a mechanical flying dragon—commissioned by the Emperor. I myself have flown in this pterodrac, Father Augustine.”

A madman, the bishop thinks. Colossal telescopes and draconoid flying machines. Fantasies that he presents as Holy Writ …

Iatanbaal lays the telescope aside and seizes on his ebony box, shifting it so that its tiny eye points directly at Augustine. “A luminotype chamber,” he says, fingering a lever on its side. “With this, one can save the image of any object or person as it exists at the instant the operator depresses this lever. The Cathayans call such images—” the word worse than Greek to Augustine—“but I say luminopicts, ‘light pictures,’ and in Northern Wei scarcely a household is without a wall of such images in the family shrine.”

“Why do you regale me with lies?”

Iatanbaal, heretofore the mildest of guests, bristles at this, but remains civil. “Lies? No lies, Excellency. The opposite. Your entire life has been a quest for truth, your whole career as a bishop a battle for truth against pagans and heretics. My prime motive in coming here—in traveling such distance; in risking my life to defy the Vandal blockade—was to bring you the cosmogonic truths that I learned in Cathay. To instruct you in them so that you may append them—before you die—to The City of God, the most glorious philosophy of history ever conceived.”

“Magnum opus et arduum,” Augustine murmurs. But aloud he says, “That book is finished. I can add nothing to it.”

“I speak of The City of God in your mind, Excellency, not of dry words on paper. This grander City of God, the Platonic one you revise with every breath … unless I misjudge you terribly, that book will never be finished until your soul departs your body.”

This approach nearly disarms Augustine. But he concludes that Iatanbaal is patronizing him and says, “I fear my soul is soon to do that. Please, sir, precede it in departing. I tire.”

“By Christ, old man, I’ve not come all these years and all this distance to have you spurn my message!”

“Away, astronomer.”

“God does not will it!”

“Possidius!” Augustine cries. “Possidius, this man is—”

“You don’t believe me? Here, look!” Iatanbaal opens one of the packets beside his luminotype chamber. He thrusts at Augustine a smooth square of parchment: an image of five robed Cathayans.

These men are rendered monochromatically, in palpable light and shadow, their faces sharp but alien, the image of their robes as silken as the imaged garments. Augustine slides his thumb across the surface of this provocative square.

“A luminopict,” Iatanbaal says. “The older man, at center, is Sung Hsi-chien. The rest are students—gifted disciples.”

“A clever painting under an equally clever glaze.”

“This isn’t a hand-drawn artifact!” Iatanbaal says. “This is a luminopictic image from life, caught on a light-sensitive substance by the rapid opening and closing of this mechanical eye!”

“Do you destroy the box to remove the image? And must you make a second box to catch a second image?”

Possidius enters the bedchamber. Augustine wordlessly signals his fatigue to his fellow bishop, and Possidius, a wraith in black, approaches the astronomer.

“It’s time for you to go.”

The violence with which Iatanbaal shrugs aside Possidius’s hand alarms Augustine. “Even the prodigal son received a warmer welcome than the one you hypocrites have tendered me!” Tears of resentment and frustration squeeze glistening from his lower lids.

“The basilica of Hippo Regius has a hostel for visitors,” says Possidius. “Many now staying in it are refugees, but you, too, may shelter there. So why defame our hospitality?”

“Your flea-ridden hostel be damned!”

“Sir,” says Possidius. “Sir, you try our—”

“I have no intention of deserting Father Augustine—not until death itself abstracts him from history!”

The old bishop, stunned by the astronomer’s presumption, pounds his fist on the desk. “What gives you the right to impose yourself on a dying man in this unconscionable way?”

“One thing only: I’m your son, old man. I’m your son.”

The fever in Augustine makes his head feel like the inflating hood of a cobra. He can think of nothing to say.

“Once, Father, you wrote of me, praising my virtues but taking no credit for them: ‘I had no part in that boy, but the sin.’ More recently, supposing me dead and quoting Cicero, you declared, ‘You are the only man of all men whom I would wish to surpass me in all things.’ A most poignant declaration.”

“But you are dead,” the bishop manages, woozier than ever with both brain heat and the fever of incomprehension.

“Iatanbaal means ‘given of God,’ Father. Adeodatus does, too, and my name—my true name—is Adeodatus.”

3

Augustine remembers Carthage. There he acquired a concubine, a woman not of his class. The happiest issue of that union was the boy whom they named Adeodatus, ‘given of God.’ In those days—Christ be merciful—Augustine was a Manichee, a dualist proclaiming his belief in two contending gods, one benevolent and caring, one so malign and cruel that you could fix on it every sort of calamity plaguing the world. That was sixty years ago. Recently, a letter from Paulinus, bishop of Nola, has accused Augustine (facetiously, of course) of championing dualism again:

“What is The City of God but a manifesto dividing Creation into two camps? It seems, Aurelius Augustinius, you’ll never completely elude the ghosts of your wayward past.”

One such ghost has just popped up. Adeodatus—the boy he thought had died with the noble Nebridius in the undertow off the beach at Ostia—has reentered his life. He has done so only days before a mortal fever will—how did “Iatanbaal” put it?—oh, yes, abstract him from history. A reunion that renders mundane even the Gospel parable of the prodigal son.

How did Adeodatus survive those currents? And did Nebridius, Augustine’s dearest companion after Alypius, also survive?

A single oil-burning lamp hisses in the bedchamber. Possidius has retreated to his own room. Genseric’s soldiers shout obscene challenges along the inland walls of the city: shouts that clash, echo, fade, resurge.

Augustine’s son—a “boy” of sixty—sits cross-legged on the floor, recounting in a monotone the story of his and Nebridius’s adventure off the Italian coast. Adeodatus had been sixteen and his father’s friend thirty-five.

“Nebridius, Father, had no adventure. I’m certain he drowned. I, though, was whipped out to sea. Prayer kept me afloat. Libyan pirates picked me up west of Naples. For the next nine years I was a helpless witness to their raids around the coastal towns of the Mediterranean. Finally, unwisely trusted to carry out a theft on my own, I escaped into the arms of some Greek mariners. These kind Greeks transported me to Alexandria.…”

Heavy-lidded and hot, Augustine listens to Adeodatus with half his attention. The details of his story are not important; vitally important, however, is the fact that after venturing to Cathay from Alexandria and living there an adult lifetime, his son has returned to Numidia. To keep filial vigil at his deathbed and to bring him … well, the Truth.

The old man feels his son’s dry lips kissing his forehead; his own papery eyelids flutter open.

“Sleep, Father. In the morning you’ll easily comprehend all the miraculous things I intend to tell you.”

“Adeodatus—”

“Sleep. I’ve come home to stay.”

Augustine remembers Carthage. He dreams of it. There he met his son’s low-born mother. There he deceived the blessed Monica, his own mother, by boarding a ship to Italy while she supposed him awaiting a fairer wind. City of rowdy “scholars,” pagan shrines, vain theatrics, and vulgar circus shows. In his dream—his fevered memory—Carthage rises again, raucous with trade and pageantry. He sees it as it was then, four decades before the globes of Seneca the Illuminator set its streets and windows ablaze even at deepest midnight. His memory, carried into dream, quickens every emotion—the four great perturbations of the mind—that he experienced as a self-conscious youth in Carthage.

Desire, joy, fear, and sorrow.

I knew them all there, the dreaming Augustine reflects. I know them all again every time I reenvision the city.

God, too, he discovers and rediscovers in memory and dream, as he inwardly quests for the One Thing to fill the emptiness created by his own temporary amnesia. That One Thing is God. If he ever forgets God, he finds Him again in memory, a fact that seems to the bishop a rational proof of His existence. For you cannot remember what you have wholly forgotten. God, however, resides within; and when you trip over That Which refurnishes the emptiness, you say to yourself, “This is it,” and you know that the processes of your own mind have led you ineluctably back to Him.

As memory can resurrect the Carthage of old, Augustine dreamily reasons, so can it reacquaint us with our changeless Father.…

Adeodatus has made a pallet for himself in the bedchamber. He is using his doubled-up telescope bag for a pillow.

The cries of the barbarian heretics beyond Hippo’s walls—Arian Christians who deny that Father and Son share the same substance—buzz in Augustine’s head like evil flies. When he moans, his own son touches a wet cloth to his brow.

And another thing, Augustine thinks: As my memory holds every unforgotten moment of my life, God contains every possible reality, but without possessing either a past or a future. Everything that has ever happened, is happening now, or will happen tomorrow abides in Him. He foreknew—knows, rather—that Adeodatus would return as I lay on death’s threshold, and He has ever known what he will tell me tomorrow about Sung Hsi-chien’s “New Cosmogony.”

Dear God, you are indeed an unpredictable dramaturge.

4

Morning. Augustine’s fever has broken. He offers a prayer of thanksgiving and another for deliverance. Then he and Adeodatus eat the pears that Possidius brought to him last night.

“The universe is far vaster than any Greek or Roman astronomer has ever told us,” Adeodatus says.

It would not surprise Augustine if the universe were infinite in size. Can the omnipotence of the Creator have limits?

“And far older,” Adeodatus continues. “And far stranger than even Ptolemy himself supposed.”

Augustine has read—long ago—Claudius Ptolemaeus’s great book on astronomy. Once, in Milan, he even perused a Latin translation of a star catalogue compiled by Hipparchus, much of whose original work, in Greek, Ptolemy summarized and supplemented in his own book.

But Adeodatus has already begun his recitation:

“First, the Earth circles the Sun, just as Aristarchus of Samos posited. Second, beyond Saturn are three planets that no Western observer has ever beheld. Third, there is a force that I can best call attractiveness that governs the movements of both planetary bodies and stars. Fourth, the Sun is but an unprepossessing minnow of a star in an enormous school of stars that the Cathayans call the Silver Whirlpool. Fifth, as many of these ‘schools’ of stars swim through the universe as do solitary stars in our local Silver Whirlpool. The Cathayans have their own picturesque word for these enormous stellar families, but let me simply call them lactastrons, for they resemble whirlpools of curdled milk. Sixth, light travels at a speed—accurately determined a century ago by an Eastern Chin astronomer named Wang Mi—that is a universal constant. Seventh, this speed, altogether peculiarly, does not increase if you add any other velocity to it. Eighth—”

Just as I first supposed, Augustine thinks. My visitor—my son—is a madman. Flesh of my flesh, a lunatic.

Aloud he protests: “How can you add something to something else without making it larger?”

Adeodatus hesitates. “I don’t know. But Wang Mi conclusively determined that nothing exceeds the speed of light, and from this discovery eventually sprang Sung Hsi-chien’s … well, I can only translate these remarkable constructs as his ‘Postulatum of Temporal Comparativity’ and his ‘Postulatum of Attractive Comparativity.’ From them, Father, Sung and his best students were able to go on to the formulation of a ‘New Cosmogony,’ and it is that great truth—with its implications for faith and eschatology—into which I want to initiate you.”

“Add one to ten,” Augustine growls. “It sums to eleven. You cannot add something to something else without enlarging it.”

Adeodatus puts a hand on his father’s forearm. “Add Christ to God, Father. Have you made the Almighty greater?”

The old man is stymied. “No” is the only orthodox answer. To say “Yes” would be to embrace a heresy akin to Arianism, the chief spiritual error of Hippo’s besiegers.

Adeodatus resumes his lecture. He talks of lactastrons—milky clans of stars—thousands of annilumes away. The Cathayans, he says, have so refined the arts of lens- and mirror-making that they can see the microworlds at their fingertips as profitably as they can the cosmos annilumes beyond our own whirl of planets. Indeed, they have discovered the basic units of matter (atoms, to follow Democritus) and ordered the various earthly elements on a graph now used as a vital pedagogic tool in their science academies.

Yet another device—Adeodatus, with a Greek twist, translates it as chromoscope—enables Cathayan astronomers to deduce the physical composition of celestial bodies and so to classify them. What they know about the creation of the heavens and the Earth beggars the imagination; not even the poetry of Genesis is grand enough to hymn the boldness of their discoveries.

“You’re insane,” Augustine says. “These outlandish lies reveal your contempt for me. They blaspheme the Creator.”

“Father Augustine, I’m not asking you to deny God or to betray Christ. Once, Catholicism struck you as ridiculous. You were a Manichee who dismissed the faith of your mother, Monica, as beneath the consideration of the educated. Yet today, caught in orthodoxy, you spurn the knowledge I bring from Cathay because it seems—at first—contrary to your current thinking. When, Father, did your mind petrify? Don’t you see that not one item in my catalogue of wonders sabotages your faith at any essential level?”

Where does this graybeard boy get the audacity to prate of the petrification of my mind? Augustine asks himself. Why, from me, of course. He inherited it.…

Later that day, three men try to pay Augustine their respects: Possidius, who brings the prandium, a midday meal of cheese, fruit, and wine; Eraclius, the priest who succeeded Augustine in the basilica’s pulpit; and Vindicianus, a physician who wants to apply a poultice of grape hulls and olive oil to Augustine’s forehead.

Following his father’s wishes, Adeodatus allows the prandium to enter, but not the man who brought it. He also turns away Eraclius and Vindicianus. On departing, the latter announces that Augustine probably won’t live to regret declining his poultice.

The bishop eats another pear—forbidden fruit, it seems to him, and therefore gloriously sweet—while his son takes the cheese and most of the watered wine. As they refuel themselves, Adeodatus continues his recitation:

In addition to planets, stars, nebular bodies, and lactastrons of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of energy production, the cosmos contains such perplexing phenomena as “invisible abysses” (dying stars whose own terrible “attractiveness” has led them to collapse into colossal stellar deadfalls) and “quasistrons” (“almost-stars” which a Northern Wei observer, Hong-yi Chiu, detected twenty-five years ago with the sky-ray-gathering telescopes in the Takla Makan Desert). These latter phenomena, Adeodatus tells Augustine, appear to be the most distant objects in all the created universe. That they should even be detectable suggests that they are pouring into the void more candlepower and invisible-ray emissions than all the suns in the entire Silver Whirlpool. Perhaps each quasistron is a battlefield in the war between the fallen angels in Lucifer’s camp and the seraphic host still loyal to God.

“Those battles occurred near time’s nativity,” says Augustine. “Even if they continue today in every human breast, they began long before God made Adam.”

“Exactly. The light from quasistrons has been en route to us from five to ten billion years; we are peering not only to the far periphery of the universe but also to its temporal infancy. We are retro-observing the pangs of Creation.”

Augustine’s temples throb. He cannot say if he is exhilarated or demoralized by this news. Or even whether he believes it.

“Undoubtedly, most of the quasistrons Hong-yi Chiu has found and indexed don’t even exist anymore.” Adeodatus shows his father the luminopict again. “Look. This is Hong-yi. This stout, youthful fellow standing next to Sung. It was in his household that I lived for the last six years of my sojourn in Cathay. He believes that quasistrons—the term almost-stars was his coinage, and even Sung came to approve it—are the hearts of forming lactastrons, and that quasistrons derive their power from invisible abysses—‘attraction pits’—eating all the interstellar matter around them. If angelic war preceded the generation of lactastrons, Father, it was a war of unholy violence. But, on the macrocosmic level at least, that war has been over for billions of years.”

“More mendaciousness,” Augustine counters. “Reckoning by our sacred scriptures, we know that not six thousand years have passed since Creation.” But the authority with which Adeodatus states his case has sabotaged the old man’s certitude.

“The scriptures are often metaphorical, Father, and Sung’s New Cosmogony invalidates their chronology.”

Augustine refrains from crying blasphemy; he has already done that. “Stop temporizing, then. Tell me Sung’s theory.”

Relieved, the graybeard boy talks of sky-ray transmission, the ongoing sibilance of the void, and a law whose discovery he credits to Hong-yi Chiu’s father, Hong-yi Pang, who stated it thus: “All lactastrons but the nearest are fleeing from our Silver Whirlpool at velocities in harmony with their distances.”

The “Formula of Hong-yi Pang,” as Adeodatus terms it, implies that every lactastron in the cosmos had its beginning in a compact central locale. Time and matter alike were frozen together in a lump in this primeval place. Presumably, upon God’s command they exploded like a many-vented volcano, flinging the ingredients of Creation out into the virgin dark.

But it was old Sung Hsi-chien who formed this idea from his own theories of comparativity, the observations of four generations of Cathayan stargazers, the hypotheses of a forward-looking school of microtheoreticians, and the lactastron law of the elder Hong-yi. Sung called his simple but startling explanation of the origin of the cosmos the “Earliest Eruption Postulatum.”

Adeodatus, Augustine senses, places more faith in Sung’s theory than in the opening verses of Genesis. Oddly, however, his son’s enthusiasm for the Cathayan’s cosmogony excites him, too. Excites and frightens …

He gropes for a response: “Billions of leagues, billions of years. Adeodatus, you play among these enormous figures like a boy stirring a stick in an anthill. How did Hong-yi Chiu, this friend of yours, arrive at the absurd conclusion that his ‘almost-stars’—his quasistrons—are so preposterously far away?” The bishop has realized that the vast stretches of time in Sung’s cosmogony depend for their validity—granting the accuracy of Wang Mi’s calculation of the speed of light—on the reliability of Cathayan assessments of interstellar distances; and so he seeks, halfheartedly perhaps, to attack the postulatum at this point.

A strategy that fails to disconcert his son. Adeodatus speaks of measuring the distance to stars by noting their differences in observed direction when viewed at different times in the Earth’s orbit about the Sun. Again translating from the Cathayan, he calls this difference the transprox of the star. He goes on to talk of the chromolume patterns of heavenly bodies and of how those of his friend Chiu’s quasistrons disclose a sanguineous conversion typical of celestial bodies receding at high speeds. The evidence for the existence of great distances and of vast stretches of time in the constitution of the universe, he implies, is overwhelming; only an illiterate reversionary would question it.

“Now when I set out for home from Ku-shih, Father,” Adeodatus concedes, “a dispute was raging between my friend Chiu and another of Sung’s disciples, An Hopeh, about the meaning of the sanguineous conversions shown by Chiu’s quasistrons. Did the lengthening—the reddening—of the light rays from these almost-stars result from their rapid recession from us or from curious attractional effects that would permit us to think them much nearer our own lactastron, possibly even within it?

“This was an important dispute. If the reddening derived from recession, it would confirm Sung’s Earliest Eruption Postulatum: the universe is ever inflating. If, on the other hand, it results from a discordant attractiveness in Chiu’s quasistrons, the enemies of Sung’s postulatum—those who believe that something other than a primeval eruption began the universe—could rightfully take heart. Further, they wouldn’t have to explain from where the quasistrons gather all the ‘fuel’ to burn so brightly for so long. Because the almost-stars would be nearer than Chiu believes, they wouldn’t be as perplexingly bright as he has always claimed.

“In any event, Father, An Hopeh had many allies, astronomers jealous of old Sung or simply unhappy with the notion of a universe forever expanding. Not long before I left, however, the dispute seemed to be resolving itself in Hong-yi Chiu’s favor. Two of his pupils at the Lo-yang Academy of Sky Studies found some quasistrons surrounded by a faint, glowing pilosity. A luminous hairiness. It had the precise look of very distant lactastrons, and chromoscopic surveys of the light from this pilosity show it to exhibit the same sanguineous conversion—reddening—as the almost-stars embedded in it. This seems to prove that Chiu’s quasistrons are truly billions of annilumes away and that Sung is right in crediting the origin of the universe to a primordial eruption.”

“Enough of this,” Augustine murmurs, clutching his head in his gnarled hands. “Please, Adeodatus, no more today.”

“Forgive me, Father. I’ve spoken in such detail only because I wanted you to see that your theory of time coincides with Sung’s. So does your belief in the linearity of history. You reject the Greek notion of cycles; so do Sung and his disciples, who believe the universe will die of cold, a plethora of icy, black lactastrons wobbling out into the darkness forever.”

“That isn’t what I believe!” Augustine rages. “We’ll have our end not in ice, but in judgment and transformation!”

“You speak of the soul, Father, but I of the palpable world all about us. And Sung has found too little attractive force among the lactastrons to halt the universal expansion and to draw all matter back into a lump that may again erupt, to begin this cosmic vanity anew. His position coincides with yours—a ‘No!’ to the periodic rebirth of worlds. In that, you’re kindred thinkers.”

“We’re brothers only in our shared humanity!” Augustine says. “What religion does he have?”

Adeodatus thinks. “I’m not sure. His work, perhaps.”

“I’ve listened to you for as long as I can, Master Iatanbaal. Harangue me no more. Have mercy upon me and go.”

The astronomer—his son—reluctantly obeys, and Augustine notes with wary surprise that darkness has fallen and that he himself is chill-ridden as well as feverish. Genseric’s soldiers rattle their weaponry outside the city gates, and both the Roman Empire and the bishop’s careworn body seem destined for the charnel heap.…

5

An uproar in the corridor. Possidius is arguing with somebody who speaks Latin with a peculiar accent. Augustine, his intellect a scatter of crimson coals, sits up to see a tall black man pushing into his bedchamber past the flustered Possidius. The black man wears only a soiled tunic and sandals. Over his shoulder, a large woven bag as filthy as his tunic.

“You can’t do this! The bishop is gravely ill!”

“I had a dream,” the black man keeps saying, dancing with the frantic Possidius. “My dream told me to come to Augustine.”

Augustine gathers the coals of his mind into a single glowing pile and looks at the Ethiop. This business of the dream touches him: He has never been able to dismiss the requests of those who have dreamed that he could help them. Indeed, Monica, his mother, envisioned his own salvation in a dream.

“Let him stay, Possidius.”

The black man bows his head respectfully and says, “My name, Excellency, is Khoinata. Thank you.”

“Where’s my son?” Augustine asks Possidius.

“In the hostel, Excellency. He has assured me that he won’t intrude on you again without your direct summons.”

“A policy that I urge you, too, to adopt, Possidius.”

As soon as Possidius, visibly wounded, has left, Augustine asks the Ethiop what distance he has traveled and why he thinks that the bishop of Hippo can help him. Like Adeodatus, Khoinata has sneaked through Vandal lines to enter the city, and he has come all the way from the farthest Kush, a great African kingdom, for the privilege of this interview. He believes that what he has brought with him will prove to the imperious Romans that the Kushites are a people with an admirable history and a civilization deserving of the prose of a Tacitus or a Suetonius.

“What do you have?” Augustine asks him.

Instantly, Khoinata gets down on all fours, opens his bag, and begins assembling with impressive dexterity and speed the skeleton of a creature that seems—to Augustine’s untutored eye—a troubling conflation of human being and ape.

“My brothers and I found these bones far south of Meroe. They belong to an early kind of man, a kind almost certainly ancestral to you and me. Notice: the curve of these foot bones—the way they fit with these other bones from the lower legs—that shows that the creature walked erect. And the skull—look here, Excellency—its skull is larger than those of apes and yet not quite so large as an adult Roman’s. One of our wisest chieftains, Khoboshama, shaped a theory to explain such strangeness. He calls it the ‘Unfolding of Animal Types,’ and I believe it should greatly interest teachers of natural history from Carthage to Milan.”

Augustine merely stares at Khoinata.

Khoinata says, “We know these bones are old—very, very old—because Khoboshama counted the rock layers in the declivity where we found them. In addition, he…”

Augustine spreads out the coals of his mind. He cannot keep them burning under Khoinata’s discourse. He both sees and does not see the skeleton that his guest has arranged—as if from dry, brown coals—on the floor of his bedchamber. The creature has been dead for almost two million years—yes, that’s the figure that the man cites—but it lives in Khoinata’s imagination, and Augustine has no idea how to drive it from thence.

“Excellency, are you listening?”

“No,” the bishop replies.

“But, Excellency, only you of all Romanized westerners are wise enough to grasp the far-ranging implications of…”

The old man feels a foreign excrescence on his arm. He glances down and finds that Adeodatus has strapped his Cathayan time-gem to his wrist.

Heedless of Khoinata, he depresses the stem on the side of its obsidian jewel, and these characters manifest on the black face of the tiny engine: XII:I.

The hour is one minute past midnight.

Something old is ending. Something new is beginning.