“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 th
e 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.
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