1. A Fine Shot
A.D. 51554
The rumor that a Vindictive sharpshooter had established himself in stable orbit among the rubble of the broken flotillas of hulks and habitats still called the Asteroid Belt, and had a commanding vantage of Earth, Venus, and Mars, was not denied by the Archangels, but anyone who read this news from a public data fountain had his name and biometric response noted.
First Humans were immune from Archangels because of covenants with the Sacerdotal Order whom, it was rumored, even the higher Powers feared; but this ancient immunity did not prevent the posthumans from reporting the capillary responses and pupil dilations, as well as changes in neural flows in the cortex, of various True Human readers to other Humans, including Humans Not So True. The Great Swan of Malta was known to have left his mountain peak in midst of the seas of Libya, traveling by night on wide and silent wings over the Mediterranean across the island chain that once was Italy toward Egypt, where the Hidden Queen of the Fox Maidens was said to be sojourning in disguise, perhaps to bedevil the archeologists and theonecromancers meddling with the corpse of a fallen orbital Archangel found there. It was no good news for the True Humans when a hermit of the Second Humanity roused himself from his endless cybernetic dreamstates, and sought to consult the sovereign of the Fourth Humanity. The Foxes were closer to humans in their emotional matrix, more prone to meddle in human life, and correspondingly more dangerous than reticent Swans or dispassionate Megalodons.
Perhaps the two consulted over the human interest in the Vindicator, or perhaps the two conspired with the Judge of Ages, who was rumored to have his throne buried under the pyramids, as well as slumbering armies and sleeping treasure cities.
In any case, cavaliers and ladies among the True Humans avoided showing interest in the topic of the sharpshooter. Among the lower orders, the discreet silence was not so strict. One wag walking the frozen canals of New Ximenopolis carried an umbrella bearing the slogan in bright red ideoglyphs for the benefit of eyes above the atmosphere: FRIENDLY! NO TARGET!
This was the year Minus 444 by the shortcount calendar, reckoning the time until the next Sweep by Hyades; it was Minus 17444 by the Unrevised Vindication Calendar; and it was Minus 18944 by the Anomaly Calendar; and the Sacerdotes called it Year of the Lord Plus 51554, even thought it was unchancy for them to say who or what was their lord, or say why this calendar, of all the calendars, counted up rather than counted down.
By the reckoning of the Unrevised Calendar, the Feast of the Fourth Ignition stood at Plus 154, and yet no cessation of the Years of Fasting which led up to the Feast Years had been announced. Even Academics living the shadow of the mile-high dome over the mountains of the Madagascar peninsula, prone to skepticism about the claims of the Sacerdotes, marked the tally off the calendar with thinly disguised hope, waiting for the long-delayed Energy Feast, when men could turn on lights and power again.
In mid-September of Minus 444, after the Paleo-Myrmidon City Complex east of Jerusalem was reduced to rubble and sucked into its own crater by a NAFAL singularity-event bullet, the radio messages from the Chimera of Mars said nothing other than that the situation was being investigated.
The bullet accelerated only at impact. It maintained its existence in normal spacetime for one-half a nanosecond, and massed (relative to the target) an estimated 30,000,000,000 pounds. This was long enough to pull the central mass of the city into a pinpoint and deposit it twenty miles below the bedrock, drawing a large part of the suburban infrastructure, cables and power stations, switching nodes and magnetic rail lines, behind it into the crater. The tangled mass of iron and carbon was superheated and compressed into a half-square-mile volume shaped like a very narrow cone.
But the nature of not-as-fast-as-light acceleration is that the mass increases only in the direction of motion. Objects even slightly away from the straight line suffer less relativistic distortion. Mass meters in Jerusalem itself barely registered the tidal effect.
And the bullet-life was not long enough to disrupt the geological integrity of the mantle, or to disturb the irritable and nervous Archangel called Demeter, which had established herself across the inner plates of the crust, with structures extending to the core, as the nursemaid and life support and repair crew for the renascent version of Tellus.
There were no earthquakes, and only a few storms: the disturbance to the Weather Control predictions was below intervention threshold. The Retaliation Mechanism established by Jupiter crouching at Mount Erebus in Antarctica trembled and stirred uneasily, and fearful gams and teams of watchful Melusine beneath the Ross Ice Shelf noted the energy systems all along the volcano cone tick over from their fifth standby awareness-level to their fourth, but the nightmarish Retaliator did not wake.
By all accounts, it was a fine shot, expertly executed.
So it was that when the traveling mountebank Zolasto Zo announced his troupe would add the apostate pontiff Hieronymus to their entourage, to give a series of lectures on calendar reform, the Ship Yard Assassin for the Starfarer’s Guild assigned to the Stratospheric Tower in Spanish Guinea, where the Forever Village slept, was much disturbed in his mind.
2. A Reluctant Starfarer
The assassin’s name and style was The Glorified and Refined Quaestor Norbert Brash Noesis Mynyddrhodian mab Nwyfre of Rosycross. He had crossed the Vasty Deep but once, starfaring to Senile Grandfather Earth from the one satellite of Proxima Centauri.
Less than four home-years had been compressed into a few ship-months’ journey during his faring. Technically speaking, regulation permitted him to affix the praenomen Venerable to his name, as if he were from an older time; but he could not have sat at mess and met the eyes of Starfarers from the Third Sweep Worlds, Chrysoar circling 51 Pegasi or Nightspore of Alpha Boötis, men who lost one-third or one-half a century of home-years in passage. And some had five or ten cruises under their belts: what was four years of time-exile compared to four centuries? Some were from aeons so long forgotten that they did not use the term, but put Lorentzed before their name, in the archaic style.
The only praenomens he insisted be observed were those he had earned. When still a youth, unexpectedly and inexplicably, the Noösphere of Rosycross had offered him full immortal honors, a record made of his brain down to the subatomic level. His thoughts would endure as long as civilization had power.
Afterward, despite the normal savant precautions of hypnocoding and chemical intervention, a divarication had struck, and Norbert was torn in two. The flesh-and-blood version of Norbert suffered a painful infatuation with a girl half his age, the sloe-eyed and red-lipped eroticist Svartvestra. His ideal was Stoic, archetype called Traditional Brash, of the Fiercely Individualistic Nonconformist phyle. It was not a type known for romantic weaknesses, so Norbert was ashamed at how he failed to fit in when others of his Fiercely Individualistic Nonconformist gathered for the soul-sharing rituals. He wanted to be exactly like all the other Fiercely Individualistic Nonconformists. But he wanted Svartvestra more.
Her ideal was Hedonist of the Meretricious Revelry Artiste archetype, the precise mismatch of his. On her part, she was delighted to toy with his affections, always promising and implying more than she meant, since it outraged her clan and delighted her fans, and brought her an intoxicating notoriety.
The xypotech version of Norbert disliked the girl, then despised. They fell out of synchronization, and suffered a sharp divarication. From Norbert’s point of view, Exorbert’s behavior became odd, then erratic, then grotesque: Exobert developed interests in esoteric cults, chaos mathematics, theosophy, imaginary energies, and the claims of those who said they could speak with the dead or deleted, or could find lost colony ships.
Exorbert began making calls to Norbert’s friends both natural and assigned, first by phone and then by dreamscape; tweaking Norbert’s subpersonalities on the flimsiest excuses; making unauthorized sales, manipulating apple genetics; altering work schedules; and sending strange training drugs into the foodstock of the farm Moreaus, or Norbert’s show-winning near-hound, Chymical Wedding.
Norbert fought unsuccessfully to undo all the strangeness and madness his ghostly twin was bringing into his life, and he vowed to fight forever. But when Norbert returned one winter Sunday to the family farm, and found all the farmhands celebrating the Wednesday Ciderfest, and his beloved near-hound giddy with stimulant and dancing on his hind legs on the baking table, crushing apple pies beneath his paws, Norbert’s resolve broke.
He could not struggle against the invisible superior twin. He had to forswear the girl. When the Noösphere offered to edit the memory chains related to his infatuation to drive Norbert’s personality closer to his archetype, and perhaps form a reconciliation between Norbert and Exobert, Norbert accepted the dangerous honor.
Against the wishes of the Noösphere and his father Yngbert, however, Norbert refused to have the process remove any sense of guilt or regret which might haunt him in later years.
And the alteration in his mind, even if done awkwardly, counted as Refinement. It elevated him from a mere Rustic to a Gentleman-Farmer.
But not only was no reunification forthcoming, his family and his ghost became ever more strangers to him.
Svartvestra was so stung by the cruel rejection, she recorded a fornication performance just in mockery of his love-style. He could no longer go into public houses or pink sections of the dreamscape without encountering jeers and sneers from her subscribers, or hearing trained near-dogs whistle the theme song from her base sound track.
It drove him into his archetype indeed. His soul became iron: he turned off his emotions so often the parish peace officer Maier twice served him a writ for renouncing his humanity, and asked him sarcastically why he did not use Foxcrafty to become a Myrmidon entirely. Each time Norbert restored his emotion, bitter anger overcame him.
But the technique for assuming an aspect of that ideal stoicism was still open to Norbert. Brash thought patterns were permanently imprinted, and could not fade with time. He used to amuse himself by falling into that allegedly higher state of mind, and putting his ungloved hand above a candle flame until he smelled flesh burning.
The unremoved regret hardened into resolve, and he ate a dream-apple, opening his nervous system to strange influences, and fell in love again, this time with a hamadryad bound by land-marriage to a fertile valley near the North Pole, where the gentle shadows were always long and the sun never reached zenith, even at noon.
Her name was Rose, the most common name on the planet. She was in every way the opposite of the frivolous and glamorous Svartvestra, but the end was the same. He was too artificial for her, too willing to alter himself, yet, ironically, too unwilling to drink the mind-altering love potion that would make their emotion for each other permanent structures, buttressed by neuro-circuitry, in all their personalities. Exorbert objected to the love potion, and Norbert feared to overrule the objection, not knowing, if he fought in his thoughts with Exorbert, which meant fighting the entire Noösphere of Rosycross, who or what he might end up evolving into.
He was brash, was he not? To remain himself, he fled the world, joined the Guild, took their coin, and signed the articles on the first vessel from Promixa.
Had he known how mad Tellus was, he would have waited longer, slumbered longer, and fled farther.
Tellus disturbed his mind.
3. A Discontented Consciousness
His consciousness, even his conception of what a consciousness was, perforce differed remarkably from that of a dawn-age man.
Basically there were three zones of thought in his mind: an inner zone which he thought of as himself, his own basic memories, ideals, reasoning processes, passions, appetites, and drives; an outer zone, which was the shared memories of the world-mind in which he lived, the spirit of the age; and a large middle zone where the two mingled, where he kept, as a mental menagerie, a wide variety of servant personalities, which he could use like masks to fend off unwanted thought-streams from the outer zone. There were well-worn channels in this middle zone reaching to the outer, where entities like family albums and social organizations kept their thoughts, or ghosts met in parliament to discuss matters too remote in the future to concern him. It was also a lively market for exchanging intellectual property, which logicians bred like livestock, or daring hunters recovered from deep in the outer zone.
Intellectually, he knew this outer zone extended infinitely, into the mind of the Noösphere like an atmosphere; but for all practical purposes, it was like the dome of the sky, mere backdrop. Every now and again the world changed, like blowing winds that changed his mood. The spirit of the age only took over his mind and body during Mass, or planetary consensus, or for a riot or military exercise, and this was as rare as rainfall.
What he had not expected, when coming to senile Tellus, was to discover how little of the innermost zone was actually his own, himself. Most of his opinions about everything had come from his family or had been written in by censor of the Lord of the Afternoon of Promixa Centauri.
His taste in women was dictated by the seamstresses guild; his taste in sport by the gamesters guild; his sweet tooth was entirely an invention of the pastry and confectioner’s guild.
Once on Earth, the outer zone was an alien atmosphere to him, with roaring shapes larger than gods moving through it; the middle zone changed suddenly, and was filled with moods and merchandise stranger than the bottom of the sea. He was told he would become used to the revolting practices of the Earthlings in time. Everyone had assured him, from his ghostly counselor to his personality advocate, to his libido coordinator, to his cliometry planner, that while Tellus was insane, many of the outer systems, telephone and memory reflex storage, were perfectly safe, sagacious and discreet.
But then one day he found himself without his clothing and feathered like a duck from crown to heel, having lost his skin in a haiku recital wager to a sly redhaired woman in a place that was a cross between a butcher shop and a gambling den. There, standing on naked feet in a stain of his own blood, he realized two things. First, he did not even like haiku, or, for that matter, the smell of duck meat. Second, everyone who so blithely said Tellus was safe was mad. Tellus was a world of fads and fashions and hysteria. Inviting the mind of Tellus into your mind was inviting disaster.
That same day he threw away all his receiver decks and augmentation sets, even the small coral button his mother gave him at birth. He sacked his advocate and coordinator and planner and reduced his interface to be the stark minimum necessary to carry out his duties as a Starfarer: public postal and library channels, navigation feeds, weather and riot reporting, navigational computation, and little beyond that.
He put in a request to be slotted to the Sky Island, which was a lighter-than-air platform in the stratosphere used for catching deorbiting cargo rigs, because it was the most dangerous and most highly rewarded duty station. He worked extra shifts, hoping a stray container, white hot with reentry heat, might accidentally miss the magnetic vortex, strike the cage, and crush his feathery body, which he hated. It was two seasons of frugal living, eating only noodles and vitamin slurry, until he earned enough to buy himself a proper human skin again. He deliberately bought one in a color modern fashion despised, a pinkish pale hue allegedly from a sunken land called Europe, very different from the jet-black, silver-eyed coloration of Rosycross.
Even after that, his austere habits remained. He spoke to no one save by voice, appeared on no bulletin board or staging boards, purchased nothing on credit, visited no calamity houses. And he never once used the Fox arts to turn himself into a dolphin during mating season, even though apparently every lunatic Earthling male in heat took to the seas in the spring, leaving the beaches empty save for hastily shed clothing. As far as the Noösphere of Earth was concerned, he was practically invisible.
So it was not surprising when the Proconsul for the Starfaring Guild approached him and asked if he wanted to be assigned to special operations, and kill men and exorcise ghosts. The duty was even more dangerous and despicable than being a longshoreman on the Sky Island, and so he accepted eagerly.
A decade later, when the verdict of the Interdict was announced, and communion with the Noösphere was denied to him, he had been living so austerely for so long that he should not have noticed it. It was like a Franciscan under a vow of poverty being sued at law for his possessions.
But the solitude still ached. Alone in his own mind, he was still surprised at how small and lonely a mind it was.
4. Fugitives of Interdiction
Such was his life, contented in small things, discontented in large. Norbert the Assassin was sitting in the sill of his huge round wide-open window-port staring at the lights of the Forever Village, and half dozing while half heeding a report being sung to him in plaintive tones, when a notice extruded itself from an anonymous slot on his desk, and a chime of tone and period whose meaning he did not recognize rang out.
Encoded as eerie Monument music, the report was of an extraordinary discharge detected between Sol and the star 20 Arietis. The chime interrupted the song and marred it, whereupon the singer (being as sensitive and fickle as abstract musician constructs tend to be) grew sullen and would not continue.
An icy plutino, a small body in interstellar space, had wandered into the line between Sol and 20 Arietis, and ignited, betraying the presence of an energy path. The star 20 Arietis was speculated to be a major nexus of Hyades internal communication. But who of Sol was sending communication there and why? The song had been about to reach the speculative conclusions of the report when the interruption came.
So Norbert glanced down in annoyance. He whistled for his desk. On its six stumpy legs, it lumbered over to the window where he sat. He had never before known that this slot was built into the desk. A query search returned a blank: the slot had no name or history in the local infosphere of the tower. (The tower ghosts were legally denizens of outer space, not part of the Tellurian Noösphere, and therefore open to him.) A wider search to a ship’s boat passing overhead like a shooting star was equally barren of results. One property of antiques was that their instruction manuals had vanished in earlier eons, and this was especially true on Senile Earth, where it was not unusual to come across loud public houses or snarky drinking vessels older than every man-made object on Rosycross.
The notice was printed on a sheet of fine onionskin. By tradition, everything of the Starfarers had to be of low mass, and have no electronic failure points: as if monstrous modern vessels made of invulnerable argent materials accelerated by beams of planet-obliterating strength fretted about acceleration costs, or worried about electromagnetic pulses from hull collisions.
A tradition equally as old but far more annoying held that such notes had to be sticky, so that in zero gee they would adhere to the nearest surface. Consequently it was many minutes before Norbert managed to untangle the tiny, delicate sheet without ripping it.
ZOLASTO ZO, an entrepreneur of many fortuitous licenses
Member in Good Standing of the Entertainment and Procurers Guild
Avers he will Astound! Delight! Astonish!
With Many and Varied displays and representations
THE WONDERS OF EARTH
Your long lost Mother!
Who does not adore the Home World?
PRIMAL ABODE OF MAN!!—NEVER BEEN TERRAFORMED!!!
——
SEE the dancing nymphs of ancient Arcadia!
HEAR mellifluous sonograms from extinct man-eating Whales!
THRILL to a military display of ancient weapon forms
by Feroccio our Master-At-Arms!
Including the discharge of an authentic black-powder caterpillar-gun!
——
BEHOLD Fruits, nuts and berries FIT FOR HUMAN MASTICATION
grown without intervention from the NATIVE SOIL OF MANKIND!
(Certificate on file to confirm that these are UNMODIFIED by any process,
exactly as savage hunter-gatherers of primordial agribusinesses
found them in the WILD!)
——
TOUCH the parchments of the Bible written by
King James, an avatar of divine Crishna!
WRITTEN IN THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH!
(The Quill Pen and Inkstand used by Mr. King to indite his famous work
is available for view for an extra charge of one grote.)
——
ADMIRE as the delicate and nubile Mademoiselle Pelisse Roquelaure
performs the traditional native dance of long-submerged New Orleans,
city famed in myth! The dance forms have been reconstructed
With Painstaking Archeological Accuracy from postures and displays
found in LURID advertisements of the Anteposthuman period!
CERTAIN TO BE OF INTEREST TO THE GENTLEMEN
——
As an added courtesy to those of sober and scholarly attainments,
ZOLASTO ZO
Welcomes the curious Hieronymus to our noble troupe;
and this Most Interesting and Convivial Sacerdote is available to
REMOVE CURSES, and perform MIRACLE CURES,
while making a series of interesting remarks on the mysteries of the
calendar system, or other matters CURRENTLY FASCINATING
the Attention of the Public
of All Ranks and Species of Humanity.
——
Subject matters not fitting for ladies of elevation or gentle birth are so noted;
scholars and antiquarians are acknowledged as equals!
——
(Concubinage Contracts available for Negotiation by Certified Eugenicists.
Guaranteed Clean and Bio-compatible bloodlines. Fit for Breeding.)
5. The Best Interest of the Guild
Norbert smiled grimly. The effrontery of offering to earthmen to taste or see the fruits or views of the Earth seemed noteworthy only in its absurdity.
The purpose of such spectacles was to give gentlemen an opportunity to see nymphs and breeding girls posing and gyrating before purchasing their contracts; then as if by some accident, the slavegirls would be sent, drunk on aphrodisiacs, to the gentleman’s privy suite instead of to his kennels. No one older than a child ever stopped to gape at the pasteboard and tinfoil and holograms of the sideshows.
Rectifiers and other local magistrates could not easily shut down any wandering showman who pretended to act under the academic latitude guaranteed by ancient right to lectures, reenactments, and edifying displays. For just such a reason, no doubt, Zolasto Zo tolerated this oddly named Hieronymus to travel with his band.
A sour note entered his mind. As he pondered, wondering why this notice had been sent him, Norbert realized that to discuss the calendar while the Earth was under fire might be considered an act of sedition, and not keeping in the best interest of the Starfarers.
He thought longer, seeking an escape from this conclusion, any escape.
While it was Guild policy in theory not to interfere with terrestrials’ affairs, it was also Guild policy in practice to minimize local disturbances in the cliometric calculus, to tamp down spikes or disburse strange attractors in the matrix of history, lest some revolution in technology or social continuity interfere with the smooth launching and landfall of the great ships.
Was this such an event? Even a few hundred thousand parallel calculations of six billion variables in his head showed that it must be an attractor basin, if not a vortex.
Norbert felt a suffocating moment, almost claustrophobic, when he realized that the decision was his. It could not be palmed off on any local or current authority, or any other member of the Guild, nor could he hire a bravo or roughneck to do the work. The verdict and its consequences would have his name affixed to it, and forever. He must find Zolasto, find Hieronymus, question the man, under torment if need be, run the calculations, weigh the dangers to the Guild, and spare or slay a human life. The ship ghosts were as unhelpful on the question of Zolasto Zo’s whereabouts as they were about the manual for the desk and its printing slot.
Fieldwork was needed. He rang for his adjutant.
The wrong man came.
6. Ar Thurp End Ragon
His adjutant was supposed to be Nochzreniye of Nocturne of Epsilon Eridani, a star famed for its theonecromancers, and haunted by the still-speaking fragments of a long dead Power. Nochzreniye’s people, the Zarya, were from the longitude of globe called First Hour, parallel to the motionless twilight terminator bisecting his world, and so their sun was always no more than a red-orange reflection against distant clouds and mountains. As their name implied, the Nocturnals were nocturnal, and Norbert appreciated being able to keep his cabin lights dimmed to a tolerable level.
Nochzreniye was also derived from a gene stock far removed from mankind’s monkeylike origins. Ironically for a tree-dwelling species, it was remnants and echoes of man’s monkey ancestors which made him prone to vertigo and fear of heights. When this gene-line had been removed from certain spacetraveling subspecies in order to correct for inner ear maladaptation to zero gee, it accidentally rendered certain lineages immune to fear of falling, Nocturnals and Rosicrucians among them.
Partly as a joke and partly out of the sheer bloody-mindedness for which the Brash archetype was famous, Norbert had removed the outer wall leading to his office and narrowed the resulting unrailed balcony to half a standard gangway width, leaving a windy ledge overlooking the Village rooftops so far below. It amused him to see earthmen, so proud of their base-stock genes, when summoned to his office, to come down the gangway, gripping the wall and taking baby steps, trying not to look down.
But this new adjutant was different. When he stepped out on the unexpectedly narrow and railless ledge, like an earthman he touched the wall and measured the depth of the fall with his eyes. His first step was tentative. But by his second step, he was gliding along with the goat-footed grace of a non-orthogonal biopsychological type like a Nocturne or Rosicrucian. But everything else about him, facial hair, number of teeth, vestigial tissue linking thumb and hand, even (if Norbert was any judge of footwear) separate toes, indicated a very conservative gene profile ergo an orthogonal brain structure.
The new adjutant gave a crisp salute, holding up his glove to his eyes, palm out, and had his orders flicker across his palm, along with his name and rank, duty station and other general data, licenses, qualifications, tolerances and immunizations. Norbert did not rise, but returned the ceremonial salute casually, holding his shining palm toward the data so that his uniform would have a record of the new man’s files and preferences. Both men lowered their hands when the gloves showed transmission sent and received, the new man sharply, Norbert by covering his mouth in a yawn.
“Ar Thurp End Ragon? By the dangling Bachelor, what kind of name is that? I don’t recognize the format. Which part is your privy name and which is your gene-line? And why is your age marked as classified? I’ve never seen anyone’s age marked classified.”
“A remarkably old name, sir. We put the family name last.”
The new man’s voice was surprisingly deep and melodic, rich with nuances of tone. Norbert did not know, even after so long on the senile homeworld of man, what archetypes the baselines and firstling folk used. But this man must have downloaded psychological structures for the magnetic personality type. The ringing voice was regal, genial, jovial, slightly sly, slightly dangerous. It was the kind of archetype that dumb kids eager for rank and ladies’ favors would like.
Norbert would have wagered that this was a guy who fenced with a blade, threw red roses to damsels, and invented sonnets in iambic pentameter to mock his foes after a swordfight but before escaping through a kicked-out window on a white silk line. Norbert knew enough about mudra and mandala to recognize the nerve-muscle traces of the type. It was something about the devilish twinkle in his eye.
And yet something did not fit. Norbert could not figure how the Firstling had adapted from baseline to non-orthogonal psychology so quickly. No one could swap out a sub-personality that promptly. It was almost as if the fellow had rewritten his base neural structural command sequences, his own instinctive reactions, on the fly.
“End Ragon, then?” said Norbert, attempting an avuncular smile. “Well, Able Starman End Ragon, the mission here concerns a calendar reformer. Describe the controversy to me.”
“Sir,” the squire said crisply, “according to the Unrevised Vindication Calendar, Jupiter should have ignited the Fourth Great Burn of the deceleration beam four hundred fifty years ago, but the Revised Anomaly Calendar says the Fourth Burn is not due for another one thousand five hundred fifty years, and we all must fast on short energy rations and conserve until then.”
Norbert nodded. “Go on.”
“The Revisionists say that since no flare of launch light from Canes Venatici was detected at the due time, an X-ray anomaly two thousand years later was the launch. Hence, the Swan Princess who stole a star doubtless tarried at M3, and the Vindication of Man will be long delayed. The Vindictive say the Vindication comes on schedule, but that the Authority at M3 has given some novel means of propulsion to the vessel, which humble Earthly science cannot detect; and they say the anomaly was some small exogalactic matter swept into the bowshock of her sail at near-lightspeed, suffering total conversion.”
“Perfect,” said Norbert. “Your answer comes straight out of the Political Officer’s Correct Attitude Manual. So the Vindictives are as mad as everyone on this mad world here, and curse the darkness of the deceleration beam, and are shooting at the cities of the machines in protest, to show one and all what near-lightspeed can do. Therefore, what is your opinion of the matter?”
“That it is an injudicious matter to discuss openly.”
“Correct! But if you are directly ordered to voice your opinion by a superior? What is your opinion then?”
“That, given the Treaty of Jupiter which ended the Crusades, every loyal man should follow the calendar of the local prince and current lord placed over him. For the Inner System of Sol, that means to follow the Summer Kings, who are Revisionists.”
“More correct! And what should we Starfarers do, since we sail from star to star, and are loyal to no local princes, but loyal only to the dream of the Vindication of Man?”
“We should not discuss the matter at all, and give our dates in the sacerdotal reckoning.”
“Most correct of all! But the Starfaring Guild does not like wars, revolutions, or reformations, because they disrupt the Launch Schedule. That means loudmouthed men, even men of the cloth, who discuss the calendar reform too openly must, for the good of the Guild, be silenced, because there is no Vindication for Man if the starships sail not.”
Norbert leaned back, waiting to see if the other man would say anything. The other man stood at ease with no expression on his face, and said nothing. Norbert took that as a good sign.
“How do you feel about killing priests, Able Starman End Ragon? They are notoriously Unrevised.”
“Actually, sir, if I may?”
“Mm?”
“It would be Squire, not Able Starman, since I am affixed to the Marine Family and Clan avowed to this base, practiced in the gentlemanly arts of blade, speaking whip, mudra, and shorepistol”—Norbert congratulated himself. He knew a bravo when he saw one.—“and assigned to you in your role as Special Airlock Operations Agent, not in your role as Praetor.” Special Airlock Operations was the archaic euphemism for Ship’s Assassin.
“What? Dangle it! I have no role as Praetor. I am a Quaestor.” Norbert held up his glove again, and performed the salute to send the data flow across his palm.
The new man held up his palm and saluted, this time more slowly, pausing the playback as his final orders appeared. “Actually, sir, if I may, I have been ordered to report to an officer named Norbert of ideal-type Brash of line, phylum and family Noesis Mynyddrhodian mab Nwyfre of Dee Parish, North Polar Continent, planet Rosycross, venerable of a.d. 51550, and the rank is Praetor. It seems you have been given a brevet increase in rank, at least temporarily, for this mission. Did the Noösphere not inform you?”
“Zznah?!” The Brash were supposed to be coolheaded, and take startling news nonchalantly, or with an airy jest, but this was so unexpected that Norbert emitted the shrill nasal noise of a true hillcountry Rosicrucian before the archetype habituation cells in his cortex could react. “I-im-imp-impossible! No one becomes a Praetor straight from Aedile! The rank of Quaestor interposes! And even for a Quaestor, there is supposed to be a board of review! A midnight vigil! An augury and—by all the Bachelors!—and I am not qualified! I don’t have the years lost or the years served! Unwed it! Un-WED!”
“Is that a swearword among your people, sir? It sounds stoop— Ah—it sounds mildly unusual.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to curl your virgin ears. We are married before we are born on my planet, so we don’t have anyone not helping to swell the underpopulation numbers. Since the first marriage is nonconsensual and never consummated, our sacerdotes permit an annulment of the first wife after you’ve been married to a second wife for a year. It is not so bad, since we are a Torch World, no more than a hundred thousand miles from our sun, so a year is about a week long.”
Norbert realized he was rambling, and snapped his mouth shut. But talking—especially talking about his home—had given him the moment he needed to deploy his Brash archetype structures in his cortex. The artificial nerve cells sent messages to his organic cells, released chemicals in his bloodstream, and so on. He could feel the change in his posture and body language like an actor settling into a character role. He was calm. He was unmoved and immovable, yet eager for action, equally willing to live for a laugh as die spitting in the executioner’s eye. He was brash!
“I get it,” said Norbert. “The ghosts of the old captains and shipmasters used their right of intervention for the sake of the Guild. No time for the proper ceremonies. So I get picked because I am a nobody. I kill the damned unwed Vindicator Breastbeater and shut his big mouth, for I have no family name here on Earth for anyone to retaliate against, right? What can the Summer Kings do, make it snow on me alone? And if I don’t kill him, or something gets flared up, I can be decommissioned for having exceeded my authority, and turned over to the currents. Jettisoned. Dropped out the waste lock.”
With no further word, he doffed the dark spectacles he wore at all times, buckled on a shoulder belt holding his weapons, and donned his full face mask of black smartfabric, and drew up his hood. The weapons were matched antiques like stilettoes with blades of blue glass and scorpion-tail grips; the weapons emitted a dour, mordant aura on the emotion channel, but never spoke. The entire surface of the mask and cloak, not just the area over his eyes, was light sensitive, and fed the images directly into his cortex, so he did not need to don his black spectacles again: but he liked the way they looked, for they gave his facelessness a memorable accent.
Impishly, he flexed his shoulders to trigger the silent billow and hem-floating of his cape. The New Guy did not flinch in instinctive decompression-fear as a spacer would have seeing the black cape a-billow, but he did not react as an earthman either, who would have noticed the glaring exception to the sumptuary laws with a raised eyebrow, or a studied attempt at nonchalance.
This squire fellow instead looked at the cape lining, and his eye motions did the typical posthuman jitter of rapid information absorption. What was going on? The guy was studying how a normal cape-circuit worked? He did not know about living thread?
Norbert could not even remember how long ago living thread had been invented. Was it before the rise of the Fourth Humans, or after? It was a Fox Maiden technology, something they spun from special glands their vixanthropic powers allowed them to control, wasn’t it?
The first Fox, Cazi, had been perfected somewhere near the year Minus 30000. The current year was Minus 17444. One hundred twenty-five centuries later.
How old was this squire? The most distant world in the Empyrean Polity of Man was Uttaranchal of 83 Leonis at fifty-eight lightyears hence. A voyage there and back would only let Einstein steal a century. Had this man made the long faring across the Vasty Deep one hundred twenty-five times? Then he would have been the most famed figure in history, not a squire of marines with some odd name.
Norbert grit his teeth. No. This year was not Minus 17444. Nor was it Minus 18944. The Guild was strictly neutral, which meant that all dates were adding up from some past salvation recalled by the sacerdotes, not counting down to the future salvation anticipated by cliohistorians. He dared not make a gaffe like that, showing favor to one side or the other, even in his thinking, lest he say or send something in an unnoticed moment damaging to the Guild. Killing men was excusable; slips of the tongue were not.
The other option was that this squire was not old, but young. He had been hatched out of some Fox Maiden’s cloning egg an hour ago. If he were too young to have seen clothing before, that explained his staring at the cloak. Also, if he were too young to have permanent structures in his brain, that explained his too-quick adjustment to his vertigo. This was a man with no family and no past, loaded with the earthman equivalent of brashness, the magnetic personality of a bravo. Another expendable. And that meant only one thing. Failure did not mean anything so sweet as being turned over to the seculars.
“So, Squire End Ragon! Is the plan that you kill me if I fail?”
Norbert, who thought he had this man pegged, was astounded. The man’s startled look, the change in his eye, in his stance, was so honest, spontaneous, and unprepared, that nothing could have convinced Norbert more deeply.
The squire was not just angry, he was offended. His sense of honor was wounded.
The man drew his sidearm and presented it to Norbert butt first, and at the same time sunk to one knee. “Many a cruel and untoward thing have I done in my life, and slain men both guilty and innocent as need required, but never in any underhanded way. I do not shoot foes in the back, nor without warning, nor without affording them time to pack their pistol, nor without witnesses! Do I shoot men like dogs? That would make me less than a dog! Shoot me with my own piece, drive a stake through my corpse and bury it at the crossroad, far from sacred ground, if that is the opinion my commanding officer has formed of me within the first few moments of my duty. Shoot me now, or never doubt me again, my lord!”
These were the words born of a mature sense of honor, not some imprinted set of gestures and gland-reflexes. Norbert, ashamed, revised his assessment. Whatever this man was, he was not some hour-old hatchling.
Norbert took the pistol and opened it. It was charged to power and occupied by a serpentine. “Do you vouch for this man?”
The weapon said, “Under these conditions, I would fire and kill him, since his request is lawful, and it is an affair of honor. Your accusation is a stain that his blood or yours must wipe out. The whole conversation from the moment you saw him must be removed from the records and archives of every object you own, including the blackbox recorder.”
“There is no place outside of a graveyard where anyone can find every recording object,” said Norbert. “But I do not balk at this being seen.”
Norbert handed the pistol back. Then he doffed his glove, drew a sampling needle, and made the smallest possible pinprick with the needle point in the ball of his thumb. The blood of Rosycross was black as ink, since the bloodstream was thick and sluggish with nanomachines meant to fend off radiation and fast-moving particles from the flares and sickening sunspots of Proxima. The blood hung from his thumb like a small black gem.
Norbert held the bleeding thumb toward the kneeling man, “Satisfied, Squire End Ragon?”
The man rose and holstered his weapon. “It is said blood erases all records, sir. If there is no recording, it never happened. There is a custom of dueling on your world?”
“Among the hillmen of Dee. We are one of the older parishes, and we all were born in the shadow of the towers of the First Sweep colonists, who perished to the last child. The flare times mummify the bodies by killing microbes, so children sometimes still find corpses if they play in the towers, which all the mothers tell them not to, and none of the boys obey. When you live beneath a boneyard that big and that old, you know life is for spending, not for hoarding. So, yes, my people duel, with sword or stick or sting, spray-torch, depending on their archetype, and any talking whips we find in the ruins.”
Norbert sighed and continued, “I know enough not to wake up the Swans or provoke the Archangels, not to use any weapon that might damage life support or invite the Retaliation. But by the useless Eunuch’s dangle do I hate this work.”
“Sir? Hate it?”
“I am delighted with the art of hunting of human prey, for no sport known to mortal man makes such demands on mind and soul and nerve and gut. Even the great Ghosts and Potentates and Powers have no such sport as this, for they cannot die!”
“Let us pray that is not so,” murmured the squire. Norbert’s hearing was designed to be more acute than the standard allowed to earthmen, who came from a noisier world with denser air, so Norbert was not sure whether he was meant to hear that murmur. Norbert knew many an earthman had a habit of talking to himself, especially if his nervous system lodged more than one personality.
He thought it politer to continue his sentence as if not interrupted. “… But I have blood on my hands, and ever since the Marriage Brokers unionized, murderers do not get invited to pay court on young ladies very often.”
“Being alone is not so bad, sir, surely.”
“Among my people, the word for an unmarried man is a swearword. Every other part of this dark business is honorable, even attractive to women of a certain type. So the only part of being an assassin I hate is the assassination. You smirk? Strikes you as funny?”
“No sir!” said the squire, with a charming grin and a cock of the head. His smile flashed like a white chevron of lightning in his black goatee. “It is assassins who enjoy their work I find disturbing.”
“I am trying to warn you that once you are marked as a killer, the sacerdotes may pardon you, but the virgins will not. The chrism cannot be washed off.”
“Your warning is too late by too many years to count. My first murder was a year before my first shave. I used the razor better in the former event, and was cut less painfully.”
Norbert stood. “It is time to depart. Any other questions?”
“Just one. Your family name is Mynyddrhodian mab Nwyfre?”
“Yes?”
“How does one pronounce Nwyfre?”
“Simple. It rhymes with Mwyfre. Dial your uniform to stealth settings, and especially your boots,” said Norbert. “We need no noise, and dare not use wings. Now back along the ledge and down the outer rungs.”
7. The Lights of the Forever Village
As the two descended the uncertain rungs of the tower hull in the darkness, cold, and wind, underfoot could be seen the colored lights of the timeless town called the Forever Village.
The tower base itself was on interstellar ground: the soil here had been brought, one handful at a time, from other worlds in other systems, and nothing earthly could grow in it.
Then the two men departed the tower and entered the village, whose soil was mundane. The Village was arranged concentrically, each younger quarter surrounding an older. The oldest street was hence the first they crossed, near the tower base. Around them shined the searchlights and robotic lamps of the bellicose era of the Snow Wars. Norbert wondered what wives and families slumbered or thawed here, awaiting sailormen to return from a thousand years of time loss. Were there any cruises so long?
The houses here were built like metallic tortoise shells. At night their door valve and nanomachine-locks were sealed tight, and the snouts of ceremonial weapons peered out menacingly. The cobbled streets of this quarter of the village were empty of traffic or dogs or litter. The two men passed on their silent boots like shadows.
They passed another gate, and entered another generation of architecture and technology. Here gambrel windows were aglint with candlelight or burning peat beneath high-peaked roofs of red slate, from an age when wintertime still came.
The Aedile had decreed all the streets in the village eternal, commanding them to repair themselves forever back into their present look. The two men passed beneath a breed of particularly ungainly bird roosting on the eaves of a longhouse from the Forty-ninth Millennium. It would be restored from extinction again and again, merely so that any sailor from the era of the Ineluctable Curses could waken to the distinctive notes of its harsh dawn-caw.
It was a sad reminder of how low the technology could fall, but a proud testament to the fact that the Starfarers maintained continuity across even the darkest of dark ages, and continued to recruit men even from wounded and hopeless times to sail the stars and man the libraries.
Norbert broke the stillness. “Why were you assigned to this mission, if you are not my watchdog?”
“No doubt because of my willingness to do the work,” chuckled the other. “I will do any dark deed to preserve the Guild.”
“Why?”
“Because there is no Vindication of Man without the Starfaring Guild to ignite the deceleration beam to return the Swan Princess Rania to our frame of reference. All the work of history is wasted if we fail. What of yourself?”
“I am assigned to find Zolasto Zo because my grandfather’s sister went mad after eating an apple,” said Norbert.
The squire waited a moment, then squinted and said, “I don’t understand.”
“A dream-apple, from Rosycross. The first and only planet of Proxima, which the Swans call Alpha Centauri C?”
“I have heard of the world, sir. It is said to have a huge wall circling the equator.”
Norbert felt a pang of the emotion called hiraeth for which there was no direct earthly equivalent: it is partly homesickness, partly mourning for the unknown dead, but it also included the thirst for cider never to be drunk again, a hunger for bucolic beauty, and the sense of loss for the noble and legend-haunted past.
He had been to the great equatorial wall once, when he was apotheosized. The wall was shaped like some vast world serpent with curving sides. It circumnavigated the planet, occupying a cold volcanic canyon that ran rule-straight across field and meadow, cleaving mountain and bridging the dark and tideless ocean. Legend said the great wall had been formed when the space elevator of the long-lost first colony had collapsed.
The world-circling wall ran to and from a jagged quarter-mile-high stump of windowless metal that housed the Lord of the Golden Afternoon for Rosycross, a Hierophant named the Alarch of Eleirch. Here he and all his cliometric machinery which wove the world’s future lived. The rest of Rosycross was rural: highlands of small farms, or lowlands of large plantations crisscrossed by canals, hemmed by dikes. Everything was the hue of wine beneath the soft, dim nearby sun.
Norbert was homesick for where the eyes of women were silver-white like the eyes of angels. He longed to smell the scent of dream-orchards again, or to see the dragonfly-winged skiffs with their wise eyes sliding on their crooked pontoon legs across the black and tideless seas of that moonless world. But most of all wished once more to gaze at the face of a sun gentle and mild enough to watch the sunspots and swirled vortices drifting across many bands of fire, so unlike the unfriendly sun of Earth, which scalded his eyes when a forgetful moment tempted him to look the monster in the face.
Hatred of the Interdict that barred his home from him once again rose in his throat like bile. He often wondered what could have happened back home to cause a catastrophe such as radio silence. Had a whole generation been raised to be so selfish and shortsighted that they would no longer tolerate the expense of powering an orbital laser to send their annuals and world-journals to their neighbor stars? The rise of an ungrateful generation such as would be needed to betray the interstellar radio law would have been anticipated cliometrically. The Golden Lord of Rosycross should have taken steps a generation ago to prevent it. Why hadn’t he?
Norbert shook off the mood. “Yes. That wall is named the Honored and Ancient Spire Recumbent, or Stumblespire, for short. My great aunt is said to have emerged from the forest of Ashmole after having been outraged by a fertility incubus created by the Fox Princess Sortilage, pregnant with Ungbert Mynyddrhodian mab Nwyfre, who changed his name to Ung Zooanthropos mab Bwystfil. You understand?”
“Ah … Nothing has leapt shrieking into unambiguous clarity as yet, sir.”
“I had assumed the Noösphere of Tellus would have all the related information.”
“Some days Tellus is more lucid than others, sir.”
“Zooanthropos is the long form of the name Zo. From Ung come all the Zo families of Ashmole Parish, not to mention the high crime rate and births out of wedlock for which the Parish is famous. Zolasto Zo is my second cousin. I am a Rosicrucian.”
“An exile? Oh. Ah—sorry, sir.”
“No matter,” snapped Norbert curtly.
“Sir, I did not mean to bring up an unpleasant, ah—”
“No matter! I am aware that Jupiter’s decree exiles me from my beloved home. Yet without such penalties as interdictions and excommunications, how could a polity across interstellar ranges be maintained? You earthmen on your bright world with your steady sun are tempted ever to be the optimists, and think the universe is bright and steady. Rosycross is a dark world of an unsteady sun, so our view is truer to life.”
Beyond the crumbling stone walls of the candlelit quarter was a line of gas lamps, like stiff iron trees, overlooking houses of stone and lumber. Here were stalls for riding-dogs larger than ponies, white and stiff with night slumber; and also folded at their curbside posts were spiderish motor-tricycles and dog-traps whose thin and crooked legs grasped tall and slender tires at rakish angles; but there was no motion on the streets, since the men born of this era made it a point of principle to retire at dusk.
Norbert said, “What would an optimistic earthman assume about the year of Zolasto Zo’s departure?”
“Hm? That it was over twenty-four years ago, before the interdiction fell.”
“What? And Zo remained silent for a quarter century, putting on shows and antics for the idle, and only just now resolved to thrust himself in the controversy of the calendar, and defy the Lords of the Golden Afternoon of Man? No, let us be more pessimistic and assume his planetfall came after the interdict.”
“Which means this is not the real Zolasto Zo,” said the squire.
“An odd way of phrasing it, considering that we ‘real’ originals continue to change and age and degrade and die, but yes. This is the Xypotech version of Zo, the Exanthropos, and was doubtless smuggled by an encrypted signal to compatriots on Earth. Here he has descended back into the material realm, but somehow erasing all trace of his incarnation from the senile Noösphere of Tellus. Do not be deceived. We fight against not flesh and blood, but against a fallen angel.”
Beyond the quarter of the gas lamps and stone buildings was a set of streets lit by electrical lights, whose houses made of porcelain had wide windows and tall doors. Electrical cables, adorned with bunting, ran from house to house, held aloft on tall poles. There were a few pedestrians waddling abroad at this hour, or riding motorized divans or litters, dressed in clear plastic trousers and see-through capes, proudly displaying the perfection of bodies which adhered to a standard of beauty of a more corpulent and aliphatic era. At every street corner was an automatic zither playing plangent chords and a basket of fruit or heated bucket of meatballs from which the passersby ate freely, and the public fountains shed grog. There was no difference in dress or ornament between male and female, and all the men were beardless. These had been peaceful years: none of these Thaws carried visible weapons.
“Well and good, sir, but how does this allow you to deduce where our target is?”
“Zolasto Zo is a mountebank, and not allowed to sleep under a roof. Such is the Wandering Trickster archetype of Rosycross under which mountebanks fall. His is not an archetype that allows flesh to change, so he retains a Rosicrucian body, and therefore his eyes are like mine. He does not like bright lights. But he needs a field for his performance, and it needs to be a place where the local officers of this place and current officers of this time have no warrant to stop him, but every yokel with a bag of pence or a talent of silver can find the show, even if he heard only a rumor of it. The location is passed by word of mouth.”
On the far side of the friendly houses lit by electricity came a quarter filled with louder streets lit by neon of many colors, and the jackets of the passersby flared with slogans of long-forgotten commercial products or sexual factions, and from each man’s ear-gem came music of pounding drumbeats. The walks here were more crowded, the long skirts and elaborate headdresses of the women clearly distinct from the garish cummerbunds and multicolored leggings of the men, and each young man carried a spring-mounted dirk or a one-shot derringer at his padded codpiece, which lit up menacingly when another youth similarly armed stepped too close.
The noise of these streets deterred conversation. The assassin and his squire did not speak again until they passed into the next quarter.
Here, harsh atomic lights glared on wide streets paved in hard macadam. An oddly shaped one-wheeled vehicle sped by, its one lamp glaring like the eye of a cyclops, and the helmeted rider hunched over the steering bar carried torches on the shoulderboards of his armored jacket. The vehicle passed them with a roar, splashing them momentarily with light, and tilted alarmingly as it took a corner. Darkness and silence flowed after.
The squire said, “Did Zolasto Zo erect his tents somewhere in this village? The currents will not step on Spacefarer ground without our leave, since the Forever Village is under the banner of the Master of All Worlds.”
“That is a good first guess, End Ragon,” said Norbert. “I will make an assassin of you yet!”
“You mean ‘good guess but wrong’?”
“Not necessarily. It is possible Zo is here, which is why we are walking instead of defying the Swans and going by wing. But there is someone the currents fear more than they fear this mythical Master, and somewhere no authority ventures without his leave, but where all are welcome eventually.”
The next quarter outward was lit with a soft chemical glow that came from motes in the atmosphere, eerie and shadowless, the blue hue of moonlight. Here were half a dozen men and women of that era dressed in gauze, and their roads carried them where they would go without any noise at all. It was a wonder to see them floating down the street, silent as dreams, while that rider of their grandparent’s day, or greatgrandparent’s, roared and clattered so boisterously on his one-wheeled machine the next street over.
“A place where all are welcome, sir? Someone who is more feared than the Master of the World? I can think of none.”
“The legend of the Judge of Ages still haunts this senile old planet. No one steps on his ground. A place with no lights. Have you deduced it yet?”
The squire snapped his fingers (for spacemen who wear gauntlets practically from birth, an oddly archaic gesture to make). “A graveyard.”
“Exactly! You are quick on the uptake.”
“So I have always been told, sir.”
The final street was lit with lanterns that floated like fireflies above the road, or followed any individuals who seemed lost, and the colors flickered whenever enough men gathered to need traffic controls or segregation of the races. The streets were empty except for a few wandering vigilantes, who walked on gyroscopic stilts and wore tall miters of red fabric, and in their hands were long wands that glittered. Warned by the colors of the floating lanterns, the assassin and the squire avoided the vigilantes, who were busy trampling a porch garden of unorthodox design.
The original line of twenty-foot-tall black spikes demarking the edge of the Village was broken in many places, and the houses and shops of the Currents native to this era mingled freely with this last quarter. Their lanterns were smaller and swifter, like darting wasps of light, but otherwise not much changed.
Indeed some of the natives might have been old enough to recall nostalgic memories of houses of this shape and lights of this configuration in their youth; and, ironically, some of the native buildings or energy systems in the settlement beyond the fence line may have been older.
Both men, as if by unspoken signal, stopped just short of the line of broken spikes separating the Forever Village from the current town beyond. The quarter of the current town that crowded against the spaceman’s village was a place of gaud shops and beer gardens, biomodification parlors, dance halls, and, worse, hallucination stalls and calamity houses, where jaded men in borrowed bodies could enjoy dangers imaginary or otherwise. The two men stood on a slight upswelling of land, so that the village behind and the ground before them was clearly seen in the blue-green light of the dying moon.
In some places along the line of demarcation, a straggle of panels dark with morbid heraldic signs warning of long-defunct penalties still connected one morose and watchful spike with its neighbor, forming a visible fence. But here on the crest of this small hill, weathering or looters or playful Foxes had torn and trampled the panels of the fence, so they tilted at strange angles, leaving wide gaps between like the spaces in a crone’s teeth, or toppled over entirely, their circuits dead and lenses blind. Where this had happened, the fence was a fiction, and nothing stood between the starfaring men and the current world beyond.
“The largest and oldest graveyard on the planet is within walking distance.” Norbert pointed.
In that direction were no fireflies at all. An unoccupied lane ran toward a broken well house. The only houses present near the well had folded themselves flat against the ground at sunset, in simple-minded obedience to the landscaping laws, centuries forgotten, of the Palatines who ruled before the rise of the Summer Kings.
Beyond were some nomadic tents occupied by Nemorals, little bubbles of leafy fabric that slowly moved across the grassy slopes keeping pace with a small flock of night-grazing ruminants. During the time of the Oneness, when all the trees and beasts of Earth had been a single bio-organism, their walking tents had been iron-sided pavilions covering acres and adorned with shields of warlords and skulls of foes. The Nemoral peoples had been more feared than earthquakes or asteroid strikes, and their hordes of mastodons doubled as cavalry, and the endless herds had trampled nations. These ghosts of forgotten conquerors loitered near spaceports, selling their daughters as breeding slaves to underpopulated worlds, while their sons played jigs for thrown pocket change, or told fortunes, or fixed cock fights, or cut purses. Long ago they had ceased to beg for passage to some far globe where they might find prairies wide and free.
Beyond this tent herd was a dark wood of pre-posthuman design called oak. The woodland fell away in a series of steep slopes and flat glades almost like steps. Perhaps some ancient river, now dry and vanished, had carved the land into oddly rectilinear shapes, or perhaps this was the residue of some ancient construction, or a convulsion of the layers of thinking material active beneath the planetary crust.
But in the further distance, a hill as flat-sided and steep-shouldered as a table stood out from the broken clefts and canyons of the woodland. In silhouette glinting in the aquamarine moonlight could be seen a tall steeple, peering between the trees.
“Behind the Chapel of Saint Joseph of Copertino is the Spaceman’s Yard,” Norbert intoned. “Yonder is the ossuary where the wealthy members of the order, driven mad with long faring across the Vasty Deep, insist on shipping their bones to this world to inter them. Think of the freight mass we could save if our guild brothers were less sentimental about the location of their last port of call!”
“And … have you picked out a headstone, sir?”
“Hardly! If I die on this senile world with its hellishly bright sun, I am having my bonesticks shipped home to Rosycross, so the flarelight can bake them clean of all your filthy diseases and leftover nanites from forgotten wars. That is my home. Why do you grin?”
“This is not a grin but a smile of goodwill, sir. I also do not wish my bones to rest on this world, or, come to think of it, anywhere.”
8. The Worm of History
Norbert gazed at the squire speculatively.
“If you wish not to die, squire, then turn back.”
“Do you still doubt me, sir?”
“You are an enigma, Squire End Ragon. Enigmas are a source of doubt during a duty like this, and doubt means hesitation, and hesitation means death.”
“You, too, are an enigma, sir,” the squire retorted. “This soil underfoot is officially part of outer space as much as a space station, as timeless as a tomb. In one step, we are officially on Earthly ground and in the current year, and our mission most illegal. Turn back yourself, Praetor, find an unmarked coffin, and slumber until the interdiction on Rosycross lifts. All the wives of the starfarers awaiting their return preserve their youth in just this way: the whole village is built on coffins. Finding one is easy.”
“Enigma? I am lucidity itself: All these streets are all from Earthly history, and the lights, too glaring and too yellow, are meant for Terrestrial eyes. I cannot sleep here. The Guild is my only world now. The Guild is both my father and my ghost, and so I serve. But you are Earth-born. A thousand tiny clues betray you: every street through which we passed was strange to you. How can you be a stranger to all these years? The village is older than a millennium.”
The squire said, with a small smile, “A millennium is nothing.”
Norbert did not turn his head, but used sensitive pinpoints in his cloak surface to study the man’s face and form carefully, both on the visible light bands, and higher and lower on the spectrum. Uneasiness moved like a sea beast below the surface of his mind, a shapeless fear, and he called upon the artificial part of his nervous system to impose courage.
“Which way, sir?” the squire inquired. “The wheel-road through the wood is patrolled, and the bridge to the Spaceman’s Yard is watched, and the Swans forbid mortals to fly at night.”
For in the distance, to the north, was a long curving line of floating lamps, clustered perhaps above some traffic on an unseen road. The line of lights curved through the woods, swinging wide to avoid the area of clefts and steep-sided dells, then climbed in a series of switchbacks, and finally leaped across an unseen canyon in a smooth arch, paralleling a bridge that led to the high ground where the cathedral and the graveyard stood.
Norbert said, “We take a direct path. Avoid the oaks and walk near the dream-apple trees. The dream-apple is native to Rosycross, and will not report us. Did not the Starfaring Guild protect them from bio-revanchist Bacchants who sought to hew them down? The taller ones are old enough to remember that.”
The squire said, “It is said to be dangerous to approach any graveyard except by gate. The curse of the Judge of Ages falls on those who trespass.”
“Ah!” said Norbert. “The curse did not fall on Zolasto Zo, did it? If the curse is sensitive to bloodlines, it will spare me.”
“Just you? Do you have a means to protect a loyal adjutant in your service from this curse?”
“If you trust me to rewrite the information aura surrounding your shed skin cells, yes. But that requires you shut off your genetic spoofing protection, whatever you may have, and let me give you a temporary skin.”
Without a word, the squire tapped a command on the red amulet he wore on his wrist, doffed his glove, rolled up his sleeve, and offer his arm to the assassin. Norbert drew his knife and pierced the vein in the squire’s elbow. The squire scowled as cold sensations traveled up his arm to his heart.
“Interesting,” Norbert observed. “I could have programmed any disease or neural change imaginable into that injection. Your nanomachinery cannot combat my picotechnology.”
The squire said, “It is like a children’s game, is it not? Atoms undermine molecules which undermine machines which undermine men. But there is something that undermines us all, and that is eternity. And yet I hear there is one man who has vowed to defeat eternity.”
Norbert was wondering what the squire was driving at. “You speak of the Judge of Ages?”
The squire frowned, irked. “No. His vision is limited to the short term; his motive is mere animal attraction, that spasm of brain chemicals called love. I am speaking of the Master of the World, the Master of the Empyrean, the Master of History, the Master of the Hidden and Hermetic Knowledge! His goal is to overcome entropy! On that day, death itself shall die, and he shall call himself the Master of Life, the King of Infinite Space and Lord of the Eschaton!”
“I cannot fault him for a dearth of ambition,” said Norbert wryly. “But that is quite a jawful of titles.”
“Deserves he not all these and more? We would all be as extinct as apes were it not for him, nor either Monument ever been known, nor a single snowflake of antimatter been burned to uplift civilization. Our civilization sprang from him, and Jupiter is his son.”
Norbert nodded, then realized the gesture was invisible in his black mask and voluminous hood. He said, “I see! And legend also names him as one of the two founders of the Starfarer’s Guild. You seem to be asking if I am loyal to him. I am.”
“Then this is a day to rejoice.…”
“Of course,” Norbert continued, musing, “the other founder is the Judge of Ages. I am loyal to him, too, I suppose. To both of them, if they were real. Hm? Why am I rejoicing this day?”
“Merely to the opportunity to serve an undying purpose of our Guild and her wise and majestic founder. And her other founder, somewhat less majestic. But you doubt their reality? You think two such extraordinary men never lived?”
“I think Menelaus Illation Montrose and Ximen Santiago Matamoros del Azarchel are real men,” said Norbert, “about whom many unreal legends have gathered. And I also think that you are an abnormally trusting fellow.”
“For believing in legends?”
“For letting me put you-know-not-what into your system.”
“No, sir, I am only an abnormally good judge of character. Are we not both loyal to the Guild? And if I am wrong, and you have imposed a neural worm or a cataleptic trigger, you have less cause to mistrust me.”
“Well, your skin will itch abominably over the next twenty minutes, and do not scratch it, lest you break the skill and forfeit the imposture. Any nanite landing on you for a gene sample will think you are kin to Zolasto, hence whatever Zolasto has done to stupefy the defensive measures will protect you, too.”
Norbert turned his back on the man and walked on, tense and uncertain. He summoned up his brashness to clear his mind and halt his glandular capacity for fear.
The two moved through the tangled brush of the forest. Crooked branches seemed to catch the blue-green moon in a net, and the shadows of branches and twigs were thick enough that the squire, whose eyes could not pierce this gloom, walked in the footsteps of the assassin, whose eyes could.
Norbert made sure the other man was close behind him, too close for Norbert to parry a blow or a dirk in the dark should it come.
The ground was also rough and steep, and both men spent time scrambling down and scrabbling up pebbly slopes. Norbert noticed how easily one of them could have cast the other down a steep hillside to his death. He climbed as unwary as he believably could, and gave the other man every opportunity.
Norbert assumed that if the man were a Fox Maiden in disguise, and if all he had wanted was an immunity to pass into the Spaceman’s Yard, Norbert was no longer necessary and would be struck down from behind.
But minutes passed and no attack came. That meant he was not a Ghost inhabiting a human body, hungry for human sensation, nor a Fox bent on mischief wearing the outward shape of a man.
That left two possibilities. One was that the squire was exactly what he seemed: a shallow Guild bravo from some very dangerous barbaric age assigned by the ship ghosts to help Norbert kill a holy man at a carnival.
The other was that this man was stranger than any Fox.
At the top of one of these sheer-sided slopes that broke the country the assassin paused. Norbert, a dark figure in a dark cloak, half invisible against the night sky, turned and pointed at the tall tower of the Starfaring Guild rising up bleak as a sword from the village lights.
Norbert said, “Look yonder. What do you see?”
“The Tower of the Guild. At its crown in the stratosphere is the port where the Sky Island docks. At its feet is the Forever Village, where the wives and dependents of sailors on cruise await their return, frozen in slumber. Sir? What has this to do with our mission?”
“I see the Tower of the Guild, the one unchanging stability rising above the Forever Village, where time makes all hopes vain and all dreams false. Do you know my dream, squire?”
“Sir? I would not presume—”
“We are going into danger and death. Let us know each other. My dream is this: A hearth of my own, and a fertile wife and a fertile orchard, and a myriad of children to carry my soul into futurity; a sun into whose eye I can as an equal gaze; and, best of all, never to tread the stars again, nor sail the dizzying abyss of night. This means I must not die because of some dangerous or useless officer who replaced my trusted adjutant.”
“My dream is somewhat larger, sir, involving more people and a greater span of time. But it also involves a woman, a wife I have picked out for myself. I will explain myself if you trust me so far as the graveyard.”
Norbert now turned away from the distant lights of the village, stepped down from the crown of the slope, took the squire’s elbow. “Fair enough. Answer without dissimilation what I ask of you. If I prove unable to judge your character, I rule me unfit to judge Hieronymus the Sacerdote, and recuse myself.”
The squire made an elegant half bow, and waved his hand with a flip of his wrist toward the distant steeple. “Lead on. The grave awaits. Perhaps we will find the mountebank there, or old friends and lovers. I will tell my history as we go, and all will be made clear.”