The Antepenultimate White Ship
1. An Empyrean in Sagittarius
“I am from the earliest strata of starfaring tradition, from before when the Guild was properly a guild. I was a crewman aboard the Sagittarius Arm Expedition, when the Master of All Worlds sent the Antepenultimate White Ship to the Omega Nebula.
“The White Ship was a half mile from bow to stern, massed one million tons displacement, and had a sail diameter of five thousand miles. Every inch was made of the artificial element alchemists call argent, which is brighter than diamond and harder than steel, armor to withstand the deadliest high-frequency energy or ultra-massive particle into which near-lightspeed flight transforms harmless light and dust.
“We launched in a.d. 15177 as the Sacerdotes reckon years, back when the Myrmidons were newborn, zealous and unafflicted with their deathlust; back when the Earth had lost her magnetosphere, and the sun was poisonous, so Man and Swan alike dared not emerge save in the dark hours of the Benighted Earth.
“We had resolved, as befits the ambition of starfarers, not to allow entropy, history, nor oblivion overtake us, but to prove our high purpose could oppose and overcome that grim assassin, Father Time.
“In a.d. 29024, after the Myrmidons fled to Cyan from the Ghost-haunted Hierophants, and the Graciousness ruled Earth in soft embrace, we were remembered of great Jupiter, and the Penultimate White Ship was launched toward us, across the gulf of starlessness severing the Orion Arm from the Sagittarius Arm.
“The miracle happened again, for although our descendants forsook us, Peacock the Power of Delta Pavonis recalled, and the Splendid Lords mortgaged their world to fund the launch of a.d. 40522. The newborn Fox Maidens were gnawing at the hawsers of civilization then, and at this time Tellus went mad. All his seas were filled with ink of alcahest, the sludge of sociopathic nanite swarms, and any ship or swimming man who ventured there was warped and made strange, and all the fish were nightmares.
“That ship was the Ultimate and Last. Broken and exiled, we returned in a.d. 50822, in time to precipitate the Snow Wars, and equip the Armigers and Ecologists to overthrow the haunted palaces beneath the sea.
“Therefore three tours I served, crossing five thousand years in a year. The steepest time-slips of the oldest hand on the swiftest ship here in the First Empyrean are as nothing to me.
“The Sagittarius Arm is a golden realm, richer in every way than this Orion Arm we occupy. That Arm is thick with giant molecular clouds and H II regions of partially ionized gas, useful for ramscoop flight. The short-lived blue stars born in these regional clouds shed copious ultraviolet light into the surrounding medium, which helps both planetary accretion and aids the condensation of interstellar amino acid precursor molecules. But the richest jewel in the Sagittarius Arm is the Omega Nebula, for it is the most massive star-forming region in the Milky Way. And where the stars are made in great numbers, so too are worlds.
“In the center of the nebula, orbiting the binary named Kleinmann’s Anonymous Star, was a living Monument. One star of the binary pair was made of terrene matter, the other of contraterrene: magnetically channeled shocks of solar wind produce a region of hard X-rays between them. Neither man nor machine could survive there: we removed the Second Monument to a gentler region.
“But the Anonymous Star was not abandoned! We craved the contraterrene fuel source. There I saw a world colder than Pluto and larger than Jupiter conquered, and that Gas Giant’s core was burrowed through with nanomachine and picomachines and made to come awake. We called him Villaamil. He was our god, and the first of our pantheon.
“Next came we to where, long ago cast out from the epicenter of the Omega Nebula by the violence of its own explosion, the blue hypergiant V4030 Sagittarius soared roaring through space, two hundred twenty thousand times brighter than the sun. Here we made our throne world, and called it Tintagel, towing the Second Monument to become its moon, so that all our scholars need but look up after sunset to see its hieroglyphs.
“And when the stellar eruptions of V4030 Sagittarius periodically grew too violent, we would retreat for a time to its twin sister star, the hypergiant V4029. There we colonized bright worlds and dark, and dubbed them Avalon and Aachen, Trethevy and Trevena, and redesigned our bodies to accommodate the sixty-four-day flare cycle. But brightest of all was Golden Tintagel, Tintagel the Beautiful.
“Between those two powerful stars, like migratory birds, we would sail our worlds and worldlets as living ships, bright as pearls on a chain of office, letting the atmospheres turn to ice during transit, and seas turn solid. Both these hypergiant stars had hundreds of failed stars of ordinary size and superjovians in their planetary clouds, material enough to make ourselves Gas Giant Brains to read the Second Monument, and penetrate the secrets of its eleven-dimensional interior volume.
“For pantheons we made. Merlin and Malagige we christened them our deities, Archimago and Atalanta, Lorelei and Logistilla, Vivian and Virgil. These were sages larger than worlds, comprising a volume greater than a million Earths.
“Sol was forgotten: our ambition was to create a new human history, established on wiser cliometric foundations than Earthly history could produce, and spread rapidly from world to world in the Sagittarian Arm, leaving the indentured Earth and her woes to oblivion. We had infinite wealth from a star made of antimatter, and the secrets of a Second Monument for our gods to read and contemplate—what could we not accomplish?
“Many ventures were made, and in the Omega Nebula we found worlds remarkably Earth-like, suited for Swans and Men, with blue skies and bluer seas, and finding asteroid belts absurdly rich with minerals, apposite for Myrmidons. It was almost as if a race of unseen fairies had stocked the larder of the universe with good things for our consumption, arranging a stellar nursery where Earth-like worlds could not help but be formed. Ninety new earths for man we formed or found.
“How brightly flamed the midnights on any one of them, those emerald-bright earths! As the gigantic and multicolored suns set across the towering landing craft or space elevators and cast purple twilight across the self-aware gardens with fall of night would rise, adorned with stars like the uplifted limbs of an odalisque with gems, the auroras and auras of the nebula as arms of fire more splendid than a peacock’s tail! How poor and blank is Earth’s dull sky to eyes that drank such wonders!
“But in a single day of wrath, those colonies died, every one, to the last child, the last bloodcell. As we sailed back from Presterion, the most distant of the ninety worlds, to our golden home in Tintagel, forty years in a single night, I heard the colonies perish, for our vessel passed through the expanding shock waves of the radio messages calling in vain, years of pain overheard in half a dozen sleepless watches.
“It was a strange beam that caught and decelerated us. I saw the smoldering hemispheres of our gods, the dust cloud blackening fair Tintagel, and everything destroyed by the Furies of the Sagittarian Arm. Theirs was a vessel that seemed like a wheel of fire half a solar system in diameter, and wheels within wheels, and eyes along each rim and at each hub.
“The vessel was too bright on any wavelength for any of our instruments to behold, and all our lenses cracked and recording chips burned. The wheel of eyes created sunspots and dark trails in the surface of the sun and wrote in the signs and sine waves of the Monument notation, and they commanded us, in the name of the Archon called Circumincession, who was the living mind housed throughout the stars and empires of the Sagittarius Arm, to cleanse our ruins again with all our hands, to leave behind no trace of our false polity save those too fine for the patientest archeologist to find: gather up our remnants and our dead, and be returned to the jurisdiction of M3 in the Orion Arm.
“The worlds we had occupied were already set aside for races not yet evolved, and filled by caretakers we had not noticed nor understood. We were too stupid to know that the green land on which we walked was brain matter, or the still lakes through which we swam were thinking fluid. We did not detect the immense energy they used to signal their distant masters. All the years of the flourishing of the Second Empyrean was merely the interval while the swiftest of messages reached the nearest of strongholds of the fleetest living vessels of the Fury.
“Why so swift? So terrible? We learned that the Orion Arm is a region which Sagittarius regards with distaste, for we are tainted by some ancient crime committed by the Dominions here before the dinosaurs walked the Earth.
“The Ultimate White Ship was flung back to Sol on a beam of contempt, as a message for Orion not to interfere with the terrain claimed by the more civilized arms of the Milky Way.
“The caravan of lesser ships and worldlets we were allowed to keep perished in the journey, or fell behind, or starved just beyond our reach, or to this hour wander somewhere, populations frozen in eternal slumber, in the wide and starless interrupt separating that arm of the galaxy from this.
“Sagittarius did not even realize, or did not care, that we acted independently of Hyades. The Hyades is held responsible for the interstellar history issuing from the Local Interstellar Cloud and the surrounding volume of space. If events occur which Hyades did not anticipate, Hyades must amend. If tiny seeds from tiny worlds escape from the wild, weed-choked and untended garden of Orion Arm into the neat and well-tended fields of our neighbors, the farmer, not the mustard seed, is blamed.”
The squire raised his eyes to the dark heavens, the blue-green moon, the cold scattering of stars, and cried out in mourning.
“Alas for Tintagel! How I remember her! Tintagel the Golden-Bright; Tintagel the Fair! We called her Chrysolucent and Mater Mundi and a hundred other names. The entire world from pole to pole was a fortress, every fulvous tree held a siege-gun, all yellow blooms antennae, tawny grass ranging gear, and the statues of heroes were heroes indeed, white with slumber and awaiting a day of war. Never before had so much of the military arts been lavished on one small globe, nor has any palace of a warrior king ever been so fair.
“She was snuffed like a spark between finger and thumb. The giant planet Villaamil was shattered into asteroids, and the debris fell into the variable star, provoking outrageous solar flares like rivers of fire across the inner system. I do not think the Furies even saw the tiny world of Tintagel as she was destroyed.”
Beneath his mask, Norbert turned pale. “Mankind is a small matter indeed.”
“We will not always be so. Better to burn the galaxy than to allow it to dismiss us.”
2. Conquering Constellations
The two men began to climb the oddly shelf-like rises of ground leading upward to the tableland on which the cathedral lay. In the distance to one side, like a black ribbon against the golden moon, could be seen the bridge connecting the tableland to the wheel-road leading from the Forever Village. There were no lights above the bridge at the moment, for it was empty of traffic.
The squire spoke, “Sir, do you still wonder why I am with you? I can be trusted because whatever you decide, I will support. None of the events of the First Empyrean Polity of Man, as you call your pathetic puddle of sixty-eight worlds of sixty-two stars, mean anything to me. I am perhaps the only man in all the Guild who cares nothing about the calendar reform, or about snipers lurking in the abandoned mansions of the asteroid belt.”
“So,” said Norbert finally. “You can be trusted because everything you love is dead?”
“Because everything I love is not yet born.”
“Meaning?”
“You told your dream, sir. It is only fitting I tell mine. The component races who form the architects and constituents of the intricate rivers and oceans of self-aware information flowing from star to star of Sagittarius were once, in times long past, biological creatures just as we are now. The Circumincession of Sagittarius has stood with my neck beneath its bootheel. In times to come, the proportion must be reversed, be that time soever long as it must be. That day is far, but it must come.”
“Revenge against minds that dwarf the constellations? You are mad.”
“All who love are mad, are they not?” said the squire with his most charming and disarming smile.
3. Calendar Revision
The two climbed a steep and barren slope to an oddly regular acreage of grasses and groves that stood up from the broken land around it like a table of greenery.
The final slope was so steep it was practically a cliff, and covered with loose pebbles and rotten rock, impossible to climb. The squire tapped the cliff and shouted out a command or two, and there was no response. The rock remained obdurate.
Norbert drew his glassy knife and made a shallow cut in the surface. There was no visible change, but a slight, small scent of ozone hung in the air, and the radioactivity detectors that were part of every spaceman’s uniform clicked a warning. Norbert said, “I have imposed a mandala of deception on the soil, and it thinks we are lawful. It will bear us.”
The squire looked honestly astonished. “Sir, I must ask, by what authority do you accomplish this? Where did you get that knife?”
Norbert said, “It is an ancestral blade.”
The squire again put his hand on the cliff face, and, with a grating whisper of noise, a series of knobs and handholds and well-spaced footholds appeared in the rock, as small segments rose or sank. This line of footholds upward blended in nicely with the surrounding landscape, no doubt obeying whatever regulations, left over from centuries or millennia past, which might be controlling the appearance and protecting the copyright of the original landscape.
During such a climb, dawn-age men would have been out of breath and unable to speak. Guild sailors were not so limited: both men increased the oxygen gain to their bloodstream from implanted capsules, and switched to silent nerve-radio signals.
“This channel is shielded and encrypted,” sent Norbert, “so that half of my own brain cannot tap the communication. We have tricks on Rosycross that mad Tellus has not dreamed.”
“Sir, with respect, it is not enough to fool Jupiter. The oaks are more sensitive to energy signals than to speech.”
“What do these human doings mean to him? Here is privacy enough for our business.”
“As you say. I am comfortable with your decision, sir,” sent the squire in a most uncomfortable voice.
“You say you have no concern for Earthly things. What do you know of the real roots of the Calendar Revision?”
“Those roots are very old indeed. The Heresiarch Lemur in the Forty-seventh Millennium, when the Shapetakers ruled the Earth, he did not begin the controversy; nor did the Prophetess Lares in the Thirty-eighth, who claimed to be in mental-energy contact with a self-awareness from beyond the rim of the galaxy.
“The trouble began earlier, before the Third Sweep,” the squire continued. “It was the Swan-Man halfbreed Photinus in the Thirty-sixth Millennium who is to blame, for it is he who first raised the possibility that Shcachlil the Salamander by interfering with the orbits of inner worlds, had thrown off the count of years since Rania’s departure, and he who first pointed out the inadequacy of records about her departure.
“Revisionism was put down bloodily, and then, as heresies do, mutated to preserve itself, divaricated, slept, sent out spores, and bloomed again. By the time of Lemur, it was not just calendar reform the Revisionists wanted, but the entire cliometric scheme of history rewritten from now until the Eschaton. They demanded the psychology of human and posthuman be standardized and simplified for ease of prediction and administration. For this reason the Eidolons were made, a failed attempt at creating a Fourth Humanity.”
Norbert said, “The Lemurians justified this crime by saying human history was too volatile. Thank goodness the Fox Maidens became the Fourth Men instead.”
The squire said, “Crime? I see you do not care for Eidolons.”
“They were not unknown on Rosycross. All their gestures the same, all their opinions the same, and their eyes are blank as corpses when they smile. They are born as brother-sister twins, each chemically programmed to mate with the other, and produce no more than two children. A more contumacious affront to the marriage laws of Rosycross cannot be imagined! I consider them less than beasts. What else do you know of Revisionism?”
“I know it is a disease that afflicts the great as well as the meek. I know the Lords of the Golden Afternoon themselves once fought duels over the calendar, using time as their weapon. I know Tellus and Jupiter and outer Potentates have allowed limited forms of warfare, fought with archaic weapons, and forced all sides to abide by agreed rendezvous of battle and armistice, both on Earth and interplanetary space. I know Odette and Odile of the double star 61 Cygni became involved in interplanetary battle, and after Splendor of Delta Pavonis and Nocturne of Epsilon Eridani sent crusaders Earthward when the Foxes called. I know mankind’s first and only interstellar war was fought with the punctilious chivalry one might expect, when the assaulted world has to be polite enough to ignite a deceleration laser and slow the vessels carrying enemy paladins and cataphracts destined for the field of honor.”
Norbert was surprised. “But how else could wars be fought? The besieged must spend the energy cost to welcome the attackers, or else they could not expect their counterattack to be decelerated and welcomed in return. Cliometry would punish whoever broke the chivalric code.”
“Perfect Starfaring logic, my dear sir! I am glad I have lived to see an era when men can no longer imagine any other way of conducting their business.”
Norbert said nothing, but wondered what kind of barbaric age this man came from.
The squire sent, “I happen to know Earth was driven insane because he sided with the Revisionists. The Foxes took him.”
Norbert said, “I was taught the Fourth Man theo-neurologists meant to expand the capacity of Tellus?”
“If so, they expanded Tellus beyond the bounds of sanity into weird new realms.”
“Tellus asked it of them! Begged, if my loremaster’s lash back home is to be believed.”
“Implying Tellus partway insane to start,” the squire said sardonically. “The rest of the calendar heresies can be summed up in a word: astronomers have debated for ten thousand years the meaning of certain X-ray anomalies seen in the direction of Canes Venatici. Either Rania departed immediately or was long delayed. The evidence is thin, and even the Potentates do not agree; but there simply is no energy budget to ignite the beam at both times. One side or the other must prevail. The Guild dare not take sides. Hence the need for discretion, sir. It must look like an accident, or a lawful duel, or an act of the Judge of Ages.”
But Norbert sent, “The window during which we can compensate for a delayed ignition by lighting a brighter starbeam narrows and closes within the century. And what if the Revisionists are wrong?”
“Such is life.”
“Such is death, you mean. If the breaking starbeam is not ignited on schedule, then the Vindicatrix of Man will pass through the Solar System. From our frame of reference her ship is a scintilla shy of lightspeed, which means to us she would seem to be a disk-shaped black hole, flattened in the direction of motion like a pancake, so far red-shifted that her highest-pitched X-ray emissions will be radio too deep to detect, not even with an antenna half a lightyear long. And she will carry near-infinite gravity in her wake. Such an object passing through the system would throw the inner planets from their orbits. You still say the matter means nothing to you?”
“Sir, with respect, I saw ninety worlds die in Sagittarius. What are three more?”
“But you believe she returns?”
The squire sighed and looked upward. “As a man of honor, I can do nothing else but believe. I vowed long ago never to lose faith in the return of Rania or hope in the Vindication of Man.”
“Why such a vow?”
“An annoying upstart oaf, in each way my inferior, with a psittacine nose and an agrestic accent, would gain face and favor over me, if she returned and he held faith while I failed. My honor says she is returning even if Jupiter himself says otherwise.”
Norbert was surprised at the squire’s vehemence. “But Jupiter is wiser than all men and all lesser worlds combined.”
“Even so, he did not exist when she launched, so he does not truly know her.”
Norbert allowed himself to become distracted. This was a question he had often pondered. “Did civilization exist before Jupiter? A time when only Archangels ruled mankind?”
“There was a time when the Hermeticists ruled men, and before that, men ruled themselves.”
“And, before that, monkeys ruled men, I suppose? Absurd. Cliometric calculation is too complex for merely sub-posthuman minds to address—so how could there be any human history before there was control of history?”
“Men lived their history blindly in those days, not knowing what was coming.”
“You can hardly call that history.”
“Well, sir, if I may, the discovery of cliometry must by definition be an historical event cliometry did not make. In such times the strong make of history whatso they will.”
“The Summer Kings teach that cliometry is a survival from an ulterior and previous universe, one where time did not pass, on the grounds that cliometry must have existed before historical events for it to plan. The first event was the plan by the ulterior beings to create created reality.”
“There may be a paradox in that reasoning somewhere,” said the squire blandly.
“They also teach that Jupiter was created by the Salamander, who was created by Hyades, who was created in turn by higher beings created by this cosmic cliometry. Jupiter designed the Tellus at the core of the Earth who designed the Archangels of the surface, who designed the Angels and Ghosts of the Noösphere, who designed the Swans and other posthumans, who designed the lesser forms of Man, who designed the Dog Things, Cetaceans, and other Moreaus.”
The squire’s reply betrayed a restrained note of supercilious amusement. “I must say the theory has a certain hierarchical elegance to it.”
Now they climbed up to the brink of the cliff, and with some effort, calling a tree to bend a branch to help them (which it obligingly did), soon they stood on the edge of the grass-covered table of land. They did not pant and puff, but both restored the oxygen capsules in their bloodstreams with a mental command and a single very long indrawn breath.
They now could walk shoulder to shoulder. Norbert sent, “I have also heard what the Foxes teach. They say the Salamander did not make the Inner Worlds. They say Earth was built by man; although they never say where man stood to do this deed. They also say the Earth was once a horse.” Norbert saw the squire smile at that. He also saw the smile vanish when he continued: “And they also say men should be free.”
“Sir, with respect, you traffic with ideas best left untouched. Heresy clings like tar.”
Onward they passed through pathless wood, their footfalls as silent as those of stags.
4. The Tribulations
The cathedral was not visible, for tall trees blocked the view, but the squire’s internal navigation sense pointed the direction. Norbert hesitated, and the squire said, “Sir? There is a satellite feed. Can you not get a picture?”
“I am under Interdict. The Noösphere of Tellus is closed to me.”
“What? Just sign on under a different identity. Any wretched Fox vixen will aid a human to do this, if he merely commits one felony or three misdemeanors.”
“And do I sign on under a different code of honor? Perhaps one where I disobey lawful orders?”
“You are voluntarily disconnected?” Now the squire ignited his charming smile again. “I did not know being an assassin was so much like being a priest.”
They set off again, this time with the squire in the lead.
“The vow of abstinence is one I did not take, although, thanks to the erratic nature of earthwomen, it is one I suffer.”
“Ah! Women! Women cause difficulties.” The squire gave a shrug of fluid insouciance. “Some men are foolish enough even to fight rivals for mates, never imagining how the struggle will consume their souls and waste long years of time. Perhaps you are better off.”
“Life causes difficulties. Some men are foolish enough to struggle for it. Are the dead better off?” snapped Norbert.
“That deep question is the one I hope never to be in a position to answer. So, then, you have told me two different accounts of history. Between Summer Kings and Fox Queen, whom do you trust?”
“The Summer King version is more plausible. One need only glance at the Firstling forms of man, Nyctalops and Hibernals, and see that they were artificially designed. The Guild keeps alive half-extinct species, Sylphs and Chimerae and Giants, who are useful for the hardships of shipboard work. They are as clearly manmade as the ships themselves.”
“So you think mankind was designed, not evolved?” the squire asked wryly.
“During your horrible daytimes, I think so. How could humanity have evolved on a world whose sun no one could stand to see? At night, I do not doubt that man’s evolution had occurred here—I have suffered too many allergies to doubt that this world has been preying on man longer than any other—but I think to have selected this as the world on which to evolve shows a lapse in judgment.”
“We should lodge a complaint.”
“In any case, the formation of the planets is not natural: it can be no coincidence that Earth and Venus are exactly the right distance from the Sun to support life, and Mars just happens to have a surface crisscrossed with canals and a subsurface with volcanic heat-vents?”
“The Salamander of Hyades reengineered the Inner System. He created nothing.”
“Then you believe the Fox Maidens?”
“Not in every particular.” The squire spoke sardonically.
“You seem not to favor the Fourth Humans,” Norbert said.
“They inflicted madness on history, from the day when the Salamander was lost. It has been a time of tribulations since then.”
Norbert thought carefully over what the squire had said, turning the matter in his mind this way and that, wondering at this man’s strange combination of clear knowledge about great matters, but inexplicable dimness about simple matters like cloaks and trees and knives.
A wild speculation rose up like a wine bubble in him, so outrageous that, like a bubble, it threatened to tickle him to laughter. Through the surface of his capes shoulder fabric, he studied the man laboring through the pathless wood in the night next to him. Norbert was struck again by the strangely archaic nature of his features and body language.
“Speaking to you is an interesting experience, squire. I have never met someone so traditionalist in belief. You say the Master of the World is true, and so is the Judge of Ages, and the Swan Princess—and now the Salamander in the sun is also?”
The squire gave him an odd and sidelong squint. “Our histories are filled with their doings from the Second Space Age onward. The calendar counts down from the date of Rania’s launch.”
“You think these events literally happened? Duels between underworld judges and heavenly moons; the creation of the races; the burning of the world; the cursed tombs and promises of duels renewed; and stealing stars from the sky? The princess assumed into heaven with a promise to return and free mankind? All this is figurative, surely, based on myths of dying and returning grain gods. Science is based on evidence.”
“An eyewitness is not evidence?” asked the squire, with a twinkle of repressed mirth in his eye.
“Those old accounts were written long ago, by men who lack our modern views. As for evidence: Who has seen the Salamander?”
“No man has seen the Salamander in the sun, because it is no longer in the sun. So long ago that Beta Ursae Minoris was the pole star, without explanation, in a fashion neither Potentate nor Power predicted, the Virtue we call the Salamander set forth from the depth of Sol in an eruption of fire, sailed across the Solar System, and was never seen again. After this, the tribulations began, and the Long Golden Afternoon turned dark. Three millennia of misery followed.”
Something about his tone caught Norbert’s attention: what about those years was so significant to this squire, whoever he truly was? There could not be many men to whom those long-vanished years were still important.
It was a first clue. He could not be what he said. A crewman of the expedition in Sagittarius would indeed have no interest in recent history, no plans for the future. So who was he?
“Is that so?” Norbert said noncommittally. “Go on.”
“On? There is not much to say. Each scepter was worse than the previous, and the world groaned under the despotism or folly of Shapetakers, Immortals, Vassals, Lectors, Parthenocrats, and finally Palatials. The Golden Lordship was reduced to mere figurehead and ritual offices, controlling neither decision nodes nor cliometric attractor basins. Like the imperial family of the Japanese under the Shogunate or the Military or the Diet, the rulers watched helplessly as their so-called vicars reigned.”
“I don’t recognize those names,” said Norbert, still holding his voice casual. “Parthenocrats or Japanese. Earth is not my world.”
“The Shapetakers ruled when wild Fox Maidens interbred the castes and quadrupled the lifespan of man and quintupled the beauty of women. After them ruled the Immortalists, exiled from 61 Cygni, whose minds are far modified beyond the legal human norm, and claim not to need the fear of death to give their lives meaning. The Vassals were peasants whose fathers were talking animals. Their respect for expertise allowed them easily to be beguiled by the corrupt Lectors of the Analects, who ruled the Earth next with such brutal incompetence. Then cunning Fox Maidens wed to Swan Mages created the Parthenocracy, perhaps in imitation of the lost Heirophancy, perhaps in mockery, and seemed to tame the Foxes. This won Jupiter’s favor and patronage; so the Swan-Fox hybrids were granted strange powers by Jupiter, overturned the Lectors, and ruled both sea and sky and solar system.
“This decision Jupiter soon came to regret,” continued the squire, “for the Fox-blood half-breeds reappeared in later generations, and they were far more fierce and free than any reticent Swan could be. Against them, Jupiter stirred up the ghosts of long-extinct Cetaceans still dwelling in abyssal palaces beneath the sea. The Palatials squeezed honor and ancient liberties out from all charters, till every Fox, Swan, ghost, prince, yeoman, serf, dolphin, dog, arbor, tree, and flower wept. Such were the conditions before the Final White Ship returned, and the Master of the World, and we his men, descended in wrath, and saw to the overthrow of all these ages.”
“Unleashing hell.”
“The Snow Wars were but purgatory. It was three thousand years of anarchy and tyranny between the flight of the Salamander and the fall of the palaces beneath the sea.”
“But, honestly, Squire End Ragon, was anything accomplished? Is the world better now? Whoever defies a Summer King lives in winter, dies in famine, and tornadoes scatter all his flotillas or all his towers uproot—and none can petition the Retaliator of Jupiter, who crouches like a sphinx, vast and blind and smiling, at the South Pole, for weather control abrogates no weapon laws. This means the Golden Lords are still figureheads. Even the elevation of the Patricians to Lordship positions did not change that. The golden calculations no longer have the power to throw down tyrants. Do not the Summer Kings still retain a veto power over the prognostic nodes that form in the cliometric manifold?”
“The Golden Lords no doubt encountered some chaotic factor slowing their calculations. The Aestevalarchy is a transitional stage to the Golden return to power.” The squire shrugged, looking nonchalant. Norbert, through the sensor points in his cloak, detected the muscular and neural actions betraying the emotion in the other man as clearly as a red-face scowl of anger.
This was a second clue. One step closer to the center of the puzzle, then. The Long, Golden Afternoon of Man was precious to this man. Why?
5. Fate and Chaos
Norbert wondered how far he could dare. If this man suspected Norbert were sniffing at the edges of his disguise, what would prevent him from throwing off his imposture with a gesture of superb disdain, and drawing his deadly, cold-voiced pistol? Despite Norbert’s boast about picotechnology, a stiletto could not parry a pistol blast.
The danger lured rather than repelled. So Norbert said, “You said something had thrown off the cliometric calculations: a chaos factor. There are always rumors of minor adjustments needed for the Lords of the Golden Afternoon to thread their disagreement back into harmony, or recalculate unforeseen glitches in the manifold. But you seem to indicate it is worse than this?”
“I said no such thing,” muttered the squire.
“Can anything hinder the cliometry? It is not a human invention.”
“Something is hindering it. Why has the discovery of cliometry not long ago have reached a halt-state similar to the Cold Equations of the aliens? Their society never changes.”
Norbert said, “Nor does ours, except in eternals. Mankind repeats the same suicidal folly, eternally. History is the dragon who forever devours itself by its tail. Neither biotechnology nor xypotechnology nor any improvement in tools can change human nature.”
“You are mistaken. You must be.”
“Why?” asked Norbert.
“The duel between the Judge of Ages and the Master of the World prevents the end of history. We have never reached a stable and self-perpetuating future because those two cannot agree on a future. History ends when one of them kills the other,” said the squire.
“That will not end history. They are not so important. They are men. Underfoot and overhead are machines so much vaster of intellect than they, that we call them angels and gods.”
“Machines based on forms those two devised. History will reach an end, for better or worse. The better is that the Swan Princess returns from beyond the stars to restore the world to peace and truth. Mankind submits to the rules she imposes, and enters into the pleasures of the futures she designs for them. If that submission is unwilling at first, there will be one final war after which war will be forgotten forever, and any enormities committed then are justified by the joy and prosperity to follow. That is a happy ending.”
“What is the worse?”
“Mankind goes extinct, and the machine life made by the Master of the World replicates itself endlessly and spreads infinitely throughout timespace. That is a happy ending, but not for man.”
Norbert said, “Why has not Jupiter, if great Jupiter is so great, brought about one of these two halt-states of history, the serenity of peace or the serenity of extinction? If he is so godlike, why does he let us suffer?”
The squire looked left and right. In the gloom, there was an oak tree not far away, its thick and gnarled branches raised in a menacing fashion. “You know the local plans of Judges of Decades for each ten-year span, and the Judge of Centuries for each hundred,” he said blandly. “Men control their own fates.”
“What of plans for longer than mortal lifespans?”
The squire spoke in a voice polite and remote. “Such things concerns the Potentates and Powers, and mortals are unwise to fret.”
That was the third step closer. Norbert was not sure what was at the center of the maze, but its rough outline was clear enough.
Jupiter had lost control of human history.
6. The Second Power of Sol
Where was the source of opposition to Jupiter? Norbert dismissed the possibility that a Potentate or Archangel could outwit a brain larger than worlds. The opponent was a Power.
In his mind he counted off the other gas giants which had been converted to sophont matter between the Thirty-second and the Forty-third Millennium: Cerulean of 82 Eridani; Peacock of Delta Pavonis; Immaculate of Altair; Twelve of Tau Ceti; Vonrothbarth of 61 Cygni, the double star of the double planets Odette and Odile. Atramental of Epsilon Eridani he did not count, for the Gas Giant Brain created by the men of Nocturne had gone mad and destroyed itself.
And there was one other, not so far away. It had first revealed itself in the Fifty-first Millennium.
Norbert waited until they had walked farther, and no oak trees were near. “You speak of a chaos factor in history. The Foxes say that Jupiter is no friend of man, but that the newborn Power in Neptune is, and one day will supplant him. The Summer Kings call Neptune a rival to Jupiter, one never to equal him. When Neptune reaches full growth in the Sixty-first Millennium, his intelligence will be one hundred million, less than half what Jupiter currently enjoys.”
The squire looked at him in puzzlement, but with no sign of suspicion on his features. “Neptune cannot be the source of the tribulations inflicted on mankind four thousand years before his creation. What is your question, sir? Speak more plainly.”
“Does Neptune hinder Jupiter, as the Fox Maidens claim?”
“As a lapdog hinders a bear, perhaps,” snorted the squire. “Neptune has entered a period of somnolence and internal reorganization which theopsychologists speculate is akin to REM sleep. They say he will not wake until the Fifty-sixth Millennium.”
“Neptune sleeps?”
“It was Jupiter’s doing. He imposed an indication of logic into a subduction layer of Neptunian psychology, which was slowly drawn into his core brain. It is the same fate Great Jupiter decreed to Atramental of Epsilon Eridani.”
“Why are men told nothing of this?”
“Men are happier when the doings of the Great Powers are unknown, lest they realize they are but cargo in the cattlehold of the vessel of time, and kick at the walls.”
Norbert thought of Nochzreniye, his adjutant. He must never come to know that the madness of the Power his people and their living planet Nocturne had slaved so diligently and lovingly for so long to create had been an act of murder. To love and lose a god was a sorrow civilizations did not throw off, not in numberless generations. The tragedy of Atramental hung behind the psychology, the songs and humor of solemn resignation for which the mournful Nocturnals were famed. But to have been inflicted deliberately?
Norbert sought for a way to reject the horror. “But Neptune speaks!” he said, weakly.
“Indeed. The high-level metasymbolic responses his orbital archangelic servants translate to mid-level symbols for Swans to carry as symbols to us all come from the first half-mile of his logic diamond surface, no deeper. These are as the words of a man talking in his sleep. To creatures of our humble intellect, of course, the difference between the statements of a fully formed intelligence at the one hundred million level, and the dazed or damaged intelligence fallen to the one million level, operating at one percent of capacity, cannot be discriminated.”
Norbert wondered how this man knew things hidden from the Archangels. His wild speculation was beginning to seem the only logical possibility.
7. The Fourth and Fifth Humans
Norbert said, “The origin of the Second Power is shrouded with mystery. There is no evidence of his existence before the Fifty-first Millennium of the Sacerdotal Calendar. Who built Neptune?”
“What do you know, sir?”
Norbert recalled an old annual from his middle-term memory. “It is said that the greatest of the Patricians, a segment of their sovereign mind named Cnaeus, once upon a time arranged the downfall of the Crusader Kingdom on the moon, without firing a shot. The remnant fled to Mars as the terraforming failed, and so began the slow loss of Luna’s artificial atmosphere, one of the Seven Wonders of the System. To this day, the seas founded by the Prestor Aiven are sublimating from ice to a vapor which escapes into space.” He pointed upward at the blue-green orb. “The moon, which has been the hue of an emerald for all of history, will one day pale to the hue of a pearl, and glare across your world like a skull.”
“It has not been all of history,” commented the squire pedantically, “but only since the Sacerdotes of Altair sent Knights Hospitalier to Sol thirteen millennia ago, and slew the followers of Lares. Perhaps when the frozen lunar seas vanish, now that the remnants of the Asmodel Cenotaph are gone, we will see the handprint again which once graced that globe, an emblem and an omen hung high over this world to show in whose hand this world rests. Ah! But pray continue the tale, sir.”
“Selene was in grief when her surface died, and imposed a strict penance. Cnaeus had exiled himself to the ring arcs of Uranus, far beyond where Potentate or Power could observe him, in order to suffer the purifying agony of isolation, to do the useful work of exploration, and remit the spiritual debt for distortions he had introduced into the cliometry of the inner system. Beyond all hope, he found a wonder: wandering moons left over from the chaos of the Second Sweep, including logic crystals of immense size containing the instructions to aid the birth of Jupiter. Convinced this was a sign, he armed the birthing moons and sent them on wide and secret orbits to collide with Neptune, striking the far side where no eyes saw.”
“Do you believe that story?”
“No. Assassins do not believe in coincidences. Someone sent Cnaeus the Patrician to the Outer System where no man goes, and someone set the moons for him to find. Whoever made the moons fathered Neptune. If Neptune is meant to supplant Jupiter, then the opposition issues from the race who opposes all forms of authority and control.”
The squire said, “The Second Humans?”
“No, squire. Swans merely withdraw when rules and regulations gather like vultures, for they are too fine and austere to fight superior beings themselves.”
“Who, then? The Fourth Humans?” But he said it too casually. The squire’s expression sharpened, as if he were balanced halfway between eagerness and caution.
“Indeed. Your tone betrays you. Would you have preferred the Eidolons to take the position of Fourth of Man?”
“Bah! I have no love for Fox Maidens.”
Norbert did not reply, uncertain what to say. Something of paramount importance to the squire was at hand, but what? Norbert felt it was another blind step closer to the center.
“Who designs a race of all women, who all reproduce by parthenogenesis?” the squire spoke suddenly and loudly. “Think of it! Females without husbands and fathers—what could they be but shallow and erratic? And malign!”
Norbert said mildly, “We have Foxes also on Rosycross, in wild areas. They hold down pests, and destroy the native ecostructure, making way for earthly apple trees. They sometimes return lost children found in the woods, and sometimes kidnap children who do not say their prayers. The race is benevolent, provided men stay well away from them.”
“Benevolent? You have an odd definition of the word.”
“Did the Foxes not restore humanity to the wretched Eidolons, and elevate the Moreaus? Did they not take down the walls of separation and bridge the biopsychological chasms between Man and Swan, Man and Myrmidon, Man and Ghost? I could not have departed the Noösphere of Rosycross had it not been for the Fox Maidens of Proxima.”
“They created an homogenous mess mankind has suffered for five thousand years. Thank goodness those days are at an end!”
“What end? The Fox Maidens retain the power freely to make inhuman forms of man finally into humans.”
The squire scowled. “They exist, but it will no longer warp events. The Fox Maidens and their madness ceased to be a factor in the calculus of destiny half a century ago, in the Year of Our Lord 51015, on the fifteenth day of May, at three hours past noon precisely, Greenwich Mean Time, fifteen hours since dawn, a date certain to delight numerologists forever.”
“The coronation of Nemenstratus the Patrician as the Lord of the Afternoon for the Triplanetary jurisdiction. Earth, Venus, and Mars are under his sway.”
“Ah! You do know your Earthly history after all,” said the squire.
“It was the first time a member of the Fifth Human Race had been so honored,” said Norbert. “The Patricians were created by the Foxes. Why would they create their own replacement?”
“Who can explain madness?” The squire shrugged. “The Fox Maidens were mad to topple the Golden Lords from power, and bring on five thousand years of war and woe.”
“Madness? Nothing is more sane. Can you not see the wrongness of this era?”
The squire looked wary. “Wrongness?”
“The soul-crushing hierarchy, the stiff forms of address, the division of men into noble and peasant, ghost and flesh, high and low, possessing classes and laboring classes, and the Sacerdotes occupying an unlikely monopoly on all spiritual vocations. I can think of a dozen periods in the long, sad history of man that have this wrongheaded medieval quality, starting with the Dark Ages. And I mean the Dark Age period after the Fall of Rome, not the one after the Burning of New York, nor the one after the Burning of the World.”
“I am not sure I see your point, sir,” said the squire testily. “The Long, Golden Afternoon seems to be a self-correcting equilibrium, a natural culmination of history, a high point of civilization, a happy ending.”
That was the final step. Norbert now thought he perceived, as a man who peers through fog, the looming mystery at the center of this ancient being.
8. The Foxes of Democracy
“History has not followed any natural culmination of anything since the day when Rania read the rules of historical prediction on the surface of the Monument—no matter! You called this era a happy ending. A high point. Yet here we are, you and I, stalking a holy man to kill him in secret, without trial, who has committed no other crime but to disagree with the opinion of the world about the date of the calendar. Does that sound civilized?”
“The human mind is not content with too much civilization,” the squire mused in a philosophical tone. “More primitive neural structures demand that we abide by tribal norms. In order for the Golden Afternoon of Man to last, Man must have his helots and concubines to abuse: Moreaus beneath him to whip; Myrmidons to hate; luminous Swans to envy and revere; yes, and Ghosts to worship as ancestors, and Potentates of Earth and Powers of Heaven to adore as gods.”
“The Sacerdotes of rural Rosycross say there is one God, and to worship Him only. Do the Sacerdotes of senile Earth say otherwise?”
“The Sacerdotes exist to remove the pain from man of all the sins we are forced to commit to maintain so grand and farsighted a civilization, and to forgive our keeping helots and concubines, and killing Myrmidons, and falling down before living idols.”
“Why should we be forgiven? We now live in an age where the nobility alone go armed, and their dependents bow, their servants kneel, and their slaves fall on their faces.”
“Perhaps that is the natural way of things,” said the squire, with a smile of self-satisfaction.
“Nature says all men are equal.”
“She says the opposite. Read Darwin.”
“I read the Grand Charter of Liberty of my world, which all my ancestors swore to each other the day they were freed from the four hundred nightmare years spent in the dark, cramped, deadly dungeons, awash with murk, at the core of a cold Myrmidon moon flung across interstellar space. It says a man who slays a man with a knife is not less guilty for his lesser intellect than a Jupiter who slays an Atramental with an imposition of abstract logic.”
“Your world is young, and overrun with Foxes! Democratic ages always end quickly,” the squire said with great bitterness. “Democracy allows each man to rise to the level of his competence and greatness: it encourages high dreams and wide ambitions. That is their great boast over aristocracy, or any culture stratified by class. But democracy requires each man to fall to the level of his incompetence, does it not? And it is also a rule by majority, is it not? But the incompetent outnumber the competent by ten to one, or by hundreds to one. So democracy inevitably encourages ambitions which democracy inevitably then thwarts. A perfect engine for creating discontent!”
“Are men less discontented when kissing the boots that kick them?” Norbert asked savagely.
“The cold witness of historical cliometry says they are. The average man finds that while a democracy holds no ceiling overhead to halt his rise, it has no floor beneath him to halt his fall. But the average man is enfranchised with the vote, and so he votes in floors to prevent falls, laws concerning public welfare and minimum wages, and this forms the ceiling to prevent the rise of the poor under his feet. The wealthy above him, to secure their position, buy votes to do the same, making a floor of regulations for their industries and banks to prevent the middle from rising, and soon the hierarchy is back in place, but now it is sick and perverted, because all the so-called democratists are living a lie. His wealthy are not even required to dress and speak nobly, his poor are robbed of dignity, and no man feels the gratitude a man born in high position must feel, which spurs him to serve the highest ideal. They become plutocrats, not aristocrats. It is the same system, but less rational, less handsome, less honest, more fevered.”
Norbert said, “And when the aristocrats are logic crystals filling living worlds, what then? Only you earthmen know what it is like not to have ancestors living in the medical camps, when one race and then another was tested against the environments to be colonized on far worlds, and the losers exterminated to the last blood cell. Only our forefathers passed the trial by ordeal bloodthirsty Jupiter imposed, whereas your forefathers did not. But those camps were abolished by the Fox Maidens. If inequality is ideal, why did history not halt at points when Jupiter was supreme? Was not the inequality greater then?”
“History suffers expansion and contraction, boom and bust,” said the squire dismissively. “Democracy can endure during the fat years, but only an absolute power can allow the people to survive the lean years, when discipline is needed. Both are temporary deviations from the natural state of man, which is hierarchical, but not tyrannous.”
“Or perhaps the medieval form of life is a transition state from one to the other, which is why history can never find rest,” said Norbert. “The first Dark Age was a transition between the absolutism of the Roman Empire and the liberty of the Space Age; and the Second Dark Age was between the liberty of the Space Age and the absolutism of the Imperial Pentagon, and so on. The world favored by the Master of the World is unstable because he is unstable.”
“What?”
“Was I unclear, squire? Consider the Master of the World, whom you mentioned before. He is a man who with one hand plucks all the godlike powers of diamond stars from heaven, or Monuments of appalling antiquity and darkest knowledge up from hell; and then with the other hand creates the Second Empyrean Polity of Man in Sagittarius. Such a man surely has the ability to make the future howsoever he wills—what could Foxes or Judges or anyone do to oppose such a man? They are shadows to him! He has no foes but himself. History has not ended because he, the Master of Eternity, he simply cannot make up his mind!”
The squire in the dark dashed his foot against a stone, and uttered curses in some language long ago drowned in time. Norbert halted while the squire sat on a stump, drawing off his boot and nursing his foot. As Norbert suspected, he had separate toes, like something out of an archeologist’s rendering of primitive man. The squire folded back the cuff of his glove, revealing a red amulet. This was a museum-piece bio-prosthetic like those worn by Sacerdotes, who still dressed in the alb and surplice of Roman pontiffs. The squire tapped the surface, ordering the bones of his foot to regrow into a sterner configuration.
Eventually the squire looked up and said, “Why do you say the Master cannot decide the fate of man?”
“Why does he continue to maintain a biological body? Are not the copies of his soul stored in the core of mad Tellus and all-too-sane Jupiter enough for him?”
“That is a good question,” said the squire slowly.
“I know it is, because it is the last question my Exorbert asked me before I stowed aboard a lifting vessel, and begged the Guild master of the Space Island to grant me life.”
“You are a reckless man. Guild regulations say to thrust stowaways into the total conversion chamber, so that their excess mass is converted to thrust, to make for what their deadweight subtracted.”
“A great-grandfather on my mother’s side, a Rosselyn from Fludd Parish, was an apprentice for one term, which meant I had a bloodline claim to membership. That coincidence prevented me from being introduced to the inside of a mass converter. Do you see why I understand the Master of the World better than you, even though you served under him? He is too much like me for me to be deceived. Stand up! Time flies but we must walk!”
They trudged along in silence for a time.
Eventually the squire broke the silence. “Just out of curiosity, what is this insight you say you have into the mind of the Master of the World?”
“You say his White Ship was driven out of Sagittarius. But it could have sailed to any human world from Rosycross to Uttaranchal. Why here? Why was the White Ship brought to Sol? What was meant to be decided by this act? Here, where Jupiter is strongest?”
“Speak more plainly! What is your question, sir? What are you trying to imply?”
“Is the Master of the World the enemy of Jupiter?”
The squire made a thoughtful hum in his throat, and said, “Mm. Perhaps we should not speak so plainly. Some of these trees within earshot are oaks, and they are sacred to Jupiter.”
9. On Holy Ground
They trudged for a time in silence. Soon the old cathedral loomed over them. It was dark within, but not completely dark, for a few votive candles within glinted from the silver frame and glass petals of the rose window. This round window was just above the great carven doors, so that the cathedral looked like a cyclops with his head thrown back and his great mouth, peaked like the bill of a bird and pointing at the stars, hung open.
The necropolis lay behind it, and the tombs and monuments had spread beyond the original line of stone fence long ago; and beyond the line of now-motionless marble robots overgrown with moss; and also beyond the line of thinking spikes, some tilted and some fallen but one to two silently watchful, akin to what fenced in the Forever Village. Norbert was awed to contemplate how much older this building must be than even the Forever Village. Perhaps it was older than the Starfaring Guild itself. If the calendar of the sacerdotes were trustworthy, the orders that erected cathedrals and sanctuaries and basilicas was over fifty thousand years old.
The squire said, “Now we are free to speak.”
Norbert said, “Between the Revisionists and Vindicators, who is right? Give me no nonsense about Guild neutrality. You served under the Master of the World who studied the Second Monument with the help of godlike Powers, or so you said. Is he unable to unravel the conundrum? Or is he as confused as the rest of us?”
The squire stiffened, but spoke briefly. “He is not confused. The ancient count is correct. Rania departed M3 at the appointed time.”
“And the Revision? The attempt to rewrite the cliometric plan of history?”
“Pseudo-scientific hogwash which, if put into effect, would eliminate the practice and knowledge of cliometry from the human race, thus making the race easier to control.”
“Then the triumph of Revisionism would be a return of the Hermetic Millennia,” mused Norbert, “with Jupiter in the role of Exarchel.”
The squire smiled a sharply pointed smile. “In one sense, Jupiter is Exarchel. When the Golden Lords resume their rightful place as shepherds of utopia, the natural hierarchy of which we spoke earlier will emerge.”
“But such ignorance would require an obliteration of the past. There are only two places the past is stored beyond the reach of revision or rewriting. Hence, the victory of the Revisionists means the destruction both of the hopes held in the starfaring vessels of heaven and the memory held in the tombs of the underworld.”
“What is your point, sir?”
Norbert turned his hood toward the man. “In this matter, your mythical Judge of Ages and the Master of the World are natural allies.”
“Allies against whom?”
“Who introduced the Eidolon vector? Who sustains the Revisionist heresy, millennia after millennia, despite all changes of laws and races and customs and conditions?”
The squire said sharply, “There can be no one. It must be a natural by-product of some hidden variable, a self-replicating effect. The Judge of Ages is not so bloodthirsty as to destroy the Solar System!”
“Not the whole system. Jupiter would survive.”
“What are you saying?”
“Rania’s vessel, if passing through the Solar System at near-lightspeed, would throw the inner planets out of orbit and destroy them, remember? But a Gas Giant is much more massive.”
“Jupiter sides with the Master of the World! For that purpose he was designed. He would not betray his father! It would be betraying himself!”
“Review your logic again, squire. There are only two players, the red and the black. Each one has set in motion races and potentates and powers loyal to his side. But if there are only two players, and they both agree on the Vindication Calendar, then why has the question of Calendar Revision plagued mankind with a plague that even the Hierophants of the Long Golden Afternoon cannot cure? There must therefore be a third player.”
“From where? It cannot be the aliens. In all human history, there are only two camps: the forces of knowledge, majesty, glory, order, rule, hierarchy, and survival, and the big-nosed insanity opposing his rule.”
“Then one of the two camps was betrayed from within.”
The squire frowned. “You cannot prove Jupiter is guilty!”
Norbert said solemnly, “And you cannot shake your fear that he is.”
The squire wore the look of a man who wishes to contradict an accusation, but cannot.
“My ghost went mad,” said Norbert. “Nor could I discern it, because Exorbert was so much wiser than I. Perhaps he is only what I would have become had I never fallen in love; a theosophist mathematician obsessed with esoterics, non-Euclidean calculus, and Ptolemaic astronomy, believing every report of a sighting of a Maltese Knight. We divaricated. Few are the savants who survive such loss. I have that special look on my face, though you cannot now see it. But I see it on yours. You are a man who lost his soul. Jupiter divaricated.”
“Nonsense.”
“Jupiter has betrayed you. He has betrayed us all.”
Then he straightened, spread his arms, turned his mask toward the night sky netted with dark branches, and called out. “Hear me! Jupiter has betrayed mankind!”
He waited, arms wide.
The squire said, “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for the lightning bolt,” said Norbert calmly.
“Are you mad?”
“Mind yourself, squire! You meant to say ‘Are you mad, sir’?”
“Fair enough. Are you mad, sir?”
“By earthly standards, I am. The Rosicrucians of old handed down neuropsychological alterations which would never be permitted in orthogonal humans. Why am I not dead?”
“Jupiter’s spies are not listening.”
“Ah! So you told the truth about that. I see why scientists delight in successful experiments! The certainty after doubt is feast after famine.” With a slow and dignified gesture, Norbert lowered his arms, and continued to walk the paths deeper into the graveyard.
10. Dreaming Apples
The graveyard was very large, and reached for acre after acre across this table of land. There were hills occupied by looming mausoleums and valleys whose green slopes were adorned with marble walkways beneath sad poplars, at whose feet slabs or cubes of stone marked the rest of the dead. On raised walls were urns carrying ashes, and beneath panes of black glass set into the grass were interlocked sets of bones, or grinning skulls from whom wax death-masks slipped.
The hills were small and the dales were gentle, but the graveyard of space went on and on, and slowly the cathedral steeple behind them was lost to sight. In one place they crossed a gently arching bridge of stone that overleaped a rill of water flowing in a marble channel along the spine of a valley.
Both men stopped, because their internal navigation at that moment shut off.
The squire said, “We must be close. But I hear nothing.”
Norbert said, “Nor did anyone hear me. Why was I not struck dead for my blasphemy? How did you know Jupiter would not allow his myriad loyal angels and beasts and motes and microbes to hear us?”
The squire sighed. “Because he is the same man as Ximen del Azarchel, a man who respects the sanctity of the Church, which is the only thing in human history older than he is, and yet still lives.”
“The myths say the Master of the World killed the Sacerdotal Order of the old days, the Church, in order to give the world to the Witches. He hunted down and killed the last priest, a man named Reyes y Pastor, one of his loyal servants, and his father confessor.”
“You cannot believe all myths so unskeptically! What man kills his own father confessor? To whom would he confess the crime? I am sure the Master of the World only punished the Church for crossing him. The fact that Ximen del Azarchel is a loyal son of the Church surely shows that no matter how black a villain is painted, there must still be some good in him, if only a spot of white.”
“Or else it surely shows that joining in rituals with lip service and knee tribute does not brighten a dark soul even by so little as a spot. Come! Zolasto Zo is near.”
“Sir, if I may: how do you know? I hear nothing.”
“Use your nose. Do you catch the scent of the jet-black greenery of my world? It thrives above the bodies of the dead. Yonder is Cagliostro Lilly, Forget-Me-Soon, Black Nasturtium, and Goat Rue. But do you see those trees with branches dark as iron? The calycine leaves? The fruit that glows like the faces of the dead in the moonlight?”
“We have been following them all night.”
“These are the tradition-protecting trees of my world, the sustenance of my forefathers, and so many forms of cider and tart and dreaming pies are made from them that any sane man would sicken.”
“Once again, sir, I do not follow you.”
“But I follow them. The trees will lead me,” said Norbert. As they walked, he mused aloud, “What we did on Rosycross in the early days would never be allowed now. To preserve valuable memories across the generations our pantropists made the apples and the humans neuro-readably compatible, so any pioneer who learned a useful survival skill, after death would have the dream seed in his skull break forth and grow out into such a tree as this. Rosicrucians in the early days could eat the apples from the graveyard and instinctively know our land of red hills and black rills better. Nowadays, between genetic drift and physicians unwilling to abide by tradition, the apple strain is not maintained, nor the human. Rarely now do the apples send good dreams: we get garbled messages, or fragments, or hallucinations, or nothing. Out of memory, for saving our forefathers, they are sacred. When many of my departed kin are gathered, there will be a grove of such trees, and, if Zolasto Zo is as homesick as I, there he will pitch his tents.”
“Why is there no music and commotion wafting from his tents?”
“Zo would have surrounded his camp with tissues finer than gossamer through which men can walk, but programmed to block sound. I will ask the trees to part the veil.”
11. The Camp of the Mountebank
At that moment there came floating over the headstones, mausoleums, and solemn statues of winged beings the sound of drums, sackbut, taborine, and timbrel, the rattle of crotales and the whoop of brass trumpet. It seemed far in the gloom, but it was closer than it seemed; they spied a cluster of floating lanterns, flashing their lights in gay displays of cerise, amber, purple, and white, hanging above a thick grove of black-trunked trees with white fruit and oddly cup-shaped leaves. The headstones to the left and right of the grove radiated a stern disapproval, and several of the winged statues were frowning.
Through these trees, as the men approached, could be glimpsed what seemed to be the leafy fabric of walking tents, but garish and bright with many colors, hung with red berries as if in obedience to the rhythm of an autumn from another world; and the tents were not walking but dancing a spry jig, while children in festive colors chased them, and dancers in motley kept time.
Closer they came, and both men could hear a barker’s voice, calling out the names of the mysteries and wonders to be presented in the central tent, the luscious women and heroic men to perform antics and startling techniques. They could not make out the words, but Norbert recognized the broad vowels and trilled syllables of a Rosicrucian dike-country accent, from a Parish of the Northwest continent called Paracelsus, downhill and downstream from the rugged uplands of Dee.
The squire was surprised when Norbert put out his hand, and halted them both.
“Sir? Is that not the very voice of our target?”
“Zolasto Zo is not the target, but Hieronymus the Apostate. He will be in one of the side tents. If he is a man of dignity, he will not allow his tent to jig and gyrate, but it will exhale an aura of dignity, mystery, awe, and divine terror, such as priests possess and magicians mock. For a man of learning, to be reduced to telling fortunes and selling sham medicines will be hard, and so his tent will be less enthused than the others of the sideshow.”
Norbert began to pace in a curving path around the grove, not approaching it. The squire peered and stared, but the density of the branches deceived his sight, and he saw nothing aside from fragments of festivity: a moving sway of colored tent-cloth; a leaping child dressed in flame, a musician with a balalaika, an acrobat standing head-downward on a wheel; a naked and purple man of huge proportions from Epsilon Indi wrestling with a hippopotamus from Egypt; a sharp-faced redhead in a scarlet kimono carrying a parasol ringed by burning pearls; a group of laughing maidens in masks who had tied intoxicating lights into their hair shaking their tresses at others in the throng, so that whoever over-stared at the lights staggered and displayed dream-haunted and empty smiles.
Norbert suddenly stopped and pointed at something the squire could not see. “There. Your dueling pistol is loaded?”
“No, sir! It is considered improper to pack a pistol before a duel, lest an unscrupulous opponent introduce a contaminant into the chaff mix.”
“Have you other weapons, silent weapons, in case we met roughnecks or roustabouts?”
The squire drew a blade like an unadorned length of wood, and in his hands heat as from a black stove issued from it.
“I did not tell you to draw. Still the blade, but keep it in your hand,” said Norbert.
The wooden sword grew cold.
The squire heard the slight, sticky sound as Norbert drew one of his glassy knives from his nano-locked sheath. Norbert pushed his way between the trees of the grove, making his way to where a dark tent of many gables loomed. Its neighbors, gaily lit in pink and cerise and creamy white, kept swaying up to it and dancing away, leaving behind the smell of sugared candy, burning beeswax, and brandy-wine. It was the only tent that was not dancing.
At the pinnacle of the black tent was the image of the Coptic Eye, fortunately facing away from them, and above the tent a three-dimensional image of the major stars of Canes Venatici burned. The door of the tent was guarded by a pair of pale figurines, two fathoms tall: the muse Urania holding an astrolabe, and the titan Saturn holding a scythe. The tent had a wooden door shaped and painted with an image of a dark hand with a white palm, with the lines of palmistry labeled in small letters outlined in red.
When the hand moved to admit a patron, an interior lit by fiery torches was visible for a moment. A low stage or podium could be glimpsed with a lectern of black glass, and a line of folding pews facing it, already filled with a hushed and silent audience, while behind was a screen bright with an image of the rim of the Milky Way, and the dandelion puff of the globular cluster at M3. The line of Rania’s flight and return was shining in purple light. The magical significance of the various stars near her flight path was noted in yellow light, along with notes both astronomical and astrological, and tables comparing the past events and future events each passing star signified.
Norbert continued skulking through the tree shadows until he was directly at the rear of the tent, so that the ominous door and ancient figurines were not visible. The back flap of the tent was pressed up against the branches of the trees through which Norbert slid to reach it. All the lights and noise were on the far side of the tent. No carnival-goer nor roughneck, unless he happened to crawl under these trees, was likely to see Norbert in this location.
With a tiny motion of his knife, entirely without noise, Norbert cut a slit less than an inch wide in the tent fabric. Then he made the blade grow longer, and pushed just its tip into the tent, using the camera dot in the tip to look carefully left and right.
The moment seemed to hold its breath, and it grew longer, and Norbert did not move. The squire saw or sensed camera dots along the spine of Norbert’s dark cloak watching him sardonically. A minute passed, then several, and still the assassin did not move by so much as a hair. Finally, the squire said along the silent nerve channel they shared, “Sir? Your orders?”
Norbert stepped backward, and traced the knife back along the slit. The picotechnology in the blade evidently had very fine control over the nanotechnology it was usurping, for the slit became whole with no visible seam. “I have determined that Hieronymus the Apostate is innocent of any threat to the Guild, as shall be, very soon, all heretics seeking to reform the calendar.”
“What did you see in there?”
“One of the larger mysteries of the universe,” said Norbert. “Come! We need no longer skulk.”
Norbert walked around to the front of the tent, in full view of the multicolored bonfires burning in the center of the dancing encampment.
As soon as he stepped into the grove, he spread his arms, and let his cloak billow around him as if he were in a high wind, although there was no wind. “It is I! Norbert son of Yngbert of Rossycross! The Starfarer’s Guild in culminant arrogance unparalleled hereby usurps and treads upon both Earthly and sacred jurisdictions! I am here to slay the innocent! All heretics, dissenters, and unorthodox mathematicians step forth and present yourself!”
The bonfire went out, as did all the torches. The music fell silent. There was a moment or two of light, while the floating lanterns all sank to the grass and winked out. The dancers were still. There was a rustling sound, as of many bodies sitting, kneeling, or falling.
There was a noise of a confused trumpeting from the hippopotamus as it broke free from the limp arms of the purple-skinned wrestler and crashed through the grove and thundered away across the lawns of the graveyard, surprisingly swift for its size.
Norbert turned. Only the five-foot-tall hand guarding the entrance to the magician’s tent was still lit, pale as moonlight shining on ice, ominous with its white fingers and black palm. Norbert entered the tent. The squire, one eyebrow raised in a wry expression, followed.
The audience seated at the pews were all motionless. Norbert put his hand into the cleavage of a young maiden dressed in silks.
“Sir? You seem to have the lady at a disadvantage.”
“She is a doll.”
“Quite attractive, sir, but I am not sure groping her while unconscious is an unambiguous compliment. Her clothing will record and report the breach of decorum.”
“Do not toy with me. I mean she has no heartbeat. All here are dolls. This audience, the performers, and the crowd outside, all of them are grown from totipotent blood cells. It is Fox technology. We’ve been foxed.”
“Your Zolasto Zo seems quite the performer.”
“As are you.”
“What? Do you think I am Zolasto Zo?”
“Not at all. He never left Rosycross, which is a planet under interdict. Nor did his ghost. There is no conspiracy of secret pirate satellites, and Zo is too good a showman to attempt to lure the earthmen to view the wonders of Earth. The only thing that came from that planet was a reproduction of one of his publicity bills, which you sent to my desk.”
“The Archangels of the living ships sent it.”
“At your command.”
Silently, the tall pale hand now turned and faced inward, and closed across the entrance. There was a slight change in the air pressure as the tent sealed itself shut. It was now entirely dark in here.
A weft of light, a breath of metallic heat, began issuing from the wooden blade in the squire’s hand.
Norbert turned his black spectacles toward the glowing blade with a curious tilt of the head. “So this is not your trap, then, is it?”
The other man said, “Mine are less showy. As you said, it is Fox work. They have a certain panache that is unmistakable.”
“When one is caught in a trap of the Fox-women, it is too late to flee or pull away. Flight only drives the barbs of the snare home. Instead one seeks the center of the maze. Sometimes the Foxes can be prevailed upon by entreaty or whim.”
“What do you mean?”
Norbert jumped onto the stage. “I mean it is time to look behind the curtain and examine the stage machinery.”
Norbert drew his glassy knives with a flourish, one in each hand, and spun them in his fingers so that they caught the pale, faint light shed from the wooden blade. He made one slash in the screen from overhead to knee-high, and the other slash at waist height from left to right, forming a cross.
He kicked the cross open and stepped through.