“Well and good, sir, but how does this allow you to deduce where our target is?”
“Zolasto Zo is a mountebank, and not allowed to sleep under a roof. Such is the Wandering Trickster archetype of Rosycross under which mountebanks fall. His is not an archetype that allows flesh to change, so he retains a Rosicrucian body, and therefore his eyes are like mine. He does not like bright lights. But he needs a field for his performance, and it needs to be a place where the local officers of this place and current officers of this time have no warrant to stop him, but every yokel with a bag of pence or a talent of silver can find the show, even if he heard only a rumor of it. The location is passed by word of mouth.”
On the far side of the friendly houses lit by electricity came a quarter filled with louder streets lit by neon of many colors, and the jackets of the passersby flared with slogans of long-forgotten commercial products or sexual factions, and from each man’s ear-gem came music of pounding drumbeats. The walks here were more crowded, the long skirts and elaborate headdresses of the women clearly distinct from the garish cummerbunds and multicolored leggings of the men, and each young man carried a spring-mounted dirk or a one-shot derringer at his padded codpiece, which lit up menacingly when another youth similarly armed stepped too close.
The noise of these streets deterred conversation. The assassin and his squire did not speak again until they passed into the next quarter.
Here, harsh atomic lights glared on wide streets paved in hard macadam. An oddly shaped one-wheeled vehicle sped by, its one lamp glaring like the eye of a cyclops, and the helmeted rider hunched over the steering bar carried torches on the shoulderboards of his armored jacket. The vehicle passed them with a roar, splashing them momentarily with light, and tilted alarmingly as it took a corner. Darkness and silence flowed after.
The squire said, “Did Zolasto Zo erect his tents somewhere in this village? The currents will not step on Spacefarer ground without our leave, since the Forever Village is under the banner of the Master of All Worlds.”
“That is a good first guess, End Ragon,” said Norbert. “I will make an assassin of you yet!”
“You mean ‘good guess but wrong’?”
“Not necessarily. It is possible Zo is here, which is why we are walking instead of defying the Swans and going by wing. But there is someone the currents fear more than they fear this mythical Master, and somewhere no authority ventures without his leave, but where all are welcome eventually.”
The next quarter outward was lit with a soft chemical glow that came from motes in the atmosphere, eerie and shadowless, the blue hue of moonlight. Here were half a dozen men and women of that era dressed in gauze, and their roads carried them where they would go without any noise at all. It was a wonder to see them floating down the street, silent as dreams, while that rider of their grandparent’s day, or greatgrandparent’s, roared and clattered so boisterously on his one-wheeled machine the next street over.
“A place where all are welcome, sir? Someone who is more feared than the Master of the World? I can think of none.”
“The legend of the Judge of Ages still haunts this senile old planet. No one steps on his ground. A place with no lights. Have you deduced it yet?”
The squire snapped his fingers (for spacemen who wear gauntlets practically from birth, an oddly archaic gesture to make). “A graveyard.”
“Exactly! You are quick on the uptake.”
“So I have always been told, sir.”
The final street was lit with lanterns that floated like fireflies above the road, or followed any individuals who seemed lost, and the colors flickered whenever enough men gathered to need traffic controls or segregation of the races. The streets were empty except for a few wandering vigilantes, who walked on gyroscopic stilts and wore tall miters of red fabric, and in their hands were long wands that glittered. Warned by the colors of the floating lanterns, the assassin and the squire avoided the vigilantes, who were busy trampling a porch garden of unorthodox design.
The original line of twenty-foot-tall black spikes demarking the edge of the Village was broken in many places, and the houses and shops of the Currents native to this era mingled freely with this last quarter. Their lanterns were smaller and swifter, like darting wasps of light, but otherwise not much changed.
Indeed some of the natives might have been old enough to recall nostalgic memories of houses of this shape and lights of this configuration in their youth; and, ironically, some of the native buildings or energy systems in the settlement beyond the fence line may have been older.
Both men, as if by unspoken signal, stopped just short of the line of broken spikes separating the Forever Village from the current town beyond. The quarter of the current town that crowded against the spaceman’s village was a place of gaud shops and beer gardens, biomodification parlors, dance halls, and, worse, hallucination stalls and calamity houses, where jaded men in borrowed bodies could enjoy dangers imaginary or otherwise. The two men stood on a slight upswelling of land, so that the village behind and the ground before them was clearly seen in the blue-green light of the dying moon.
In some places along the line of demarcation, a straggle of panels dark with morbid heraldic signs warning of long-defunct penalties still connected one morose and watchful spike with its neighbor, forming a visible fence. But here on the crest of this small hill, weathering or looters or playful Foxes had torn and trampled the panels of the fence, so they tilted at strange angles, leaving wide gaps between like the spaces in a crone’s teeth, or toppled over entirely, their circuits dead and lenses blind. Where this had happened, the fence was a fiction, and nothing stood between the starfaring men and the current world beyond.
“The largest and oldest graveyard on the planet is within walking distance.” Norbert pointed.
In that direction were no fireflies at all. An unoccupied lane ran toward a broken well house. The only houses present near the well had folded themselves flat against the ground at sunset, in simple-minded obedience to the landscaping laws, centuries forgotten, of the Palatines who ruled before the rise of the Summer Kings.
Beyond were some nomadic tents occupied by Nemorals, little bubbles of leafy fabric that slowly moved across the grassy slopes keeping pace with a small flock of night-grazing ruminants. During the time of the Oneness, when all the trees and beasts of Earth had been a single bio-organism, their walking tents had been iron-sided pavilions covering acres and adorned with shields of warlords and skulls of foes. The Nemoral peoples had been more feared than earthquakes or asteroid strikes, and their hordes of mastodons doubled as cavalry, and the endless herds had trampled nations. These ghosts of forgotten conquerors loitered near spaceports, selling their daughters as breeding slaves to underpopulated worlds, while their sons played jigs for thrown pocket change, or told fortunes, or fixed cock fights, or cut purses. Long ago they had ceased to beg for passage to some far globe where they might find prairies wide and free.
Beyond this tent herd was a dark wood of pre-posthuman design called oak. The woodland fell away in a series of steep slopes and flat glades almost like steps. Perhaps some ancient river, now dry and vanished, had carved the land into oddly rectilinear shapes, or perhaps this was the residue of some ancient construction, or a convulsion of the layers of thinking material active beneath the planetary crust.
But in the further distance, a hill as flat-sided and steep-shouldered as a table stood out from the broken clefts and canyons of the woodland. In silhouette glinting in the aquamarine moonlight could be seen a tall steeple, peering between the trees.
“Behind the Chapel of Saint Joseph of Copertino is the Spaceman’s Yard,” Norbert intoned. “Yonder is the ossuary where the wealthy members of the order, driven mad with long faring across the Vasty Deep, insist on shipping their bones to this world to inter them. Think of the freight mass we could save if our guild brothers were less sentimental about the location of their last port of call!”
“And … have
you picked out a headstone, sir?”
“Hardly! If I die on this senile world with its hellishly bright sun, I am having my bonesticks shipped home to Rosycross, so the flarelight can bake them clean of all your filthy diseases and leftover nanites from forgotten wars. That is my home. Why do you grin?”
“This is not a grin but a smile of goodwill, sir. I also do not wish my bones to rest on this world, or, come to think of it, anywhere.”
8. The Worm of History
Norbert gazed at the squire speculatively.
“If you wish not to die, squire, then turn back.”
“Do you still doubt me, sir?”
“You are an enigma, Squire End Ragon. Enigmas are a source of doubt during a duty like this, and doubt means hesitation, and hesitation means death.”
“You, too, are an enigma, sir,” the squire retorted. “This soil underfoot is officially part of outer space as much as a space station, as timeless as a tomb. In one step, we are officially on Earthly ground and in the current year, and our mission most illegal. Turn back yourself, Praetor, find an unmarked coffin, and slumber until the interdiction on Rosycross lifts. All the wives of the starfarers awaiting their return preserve their youth in just this way: the whole village is built on coffins. Finding one is easy.”
“Enigma? I am lucidity itself: All these streets are all from Earthly history, and the lights, too glaring and too yellow, are meant for Terrestrial eyes. I cannot sleep here. The Guild is my only world now. The Guild is both my father and my ghost, and so I serve. But you are Earth-born. A thousand tiny clues betray you: every street through which we passed was strange to you. How can you be a stranger to all these years? The village is older than a millennium.”
The squire said, with a small smile, “A millennium is nothing.”
Norbert did not turn his head, but used sensitive pinpoints in his cloak surface to study the man’s face and form carefully, both on the visible light bands, and higher and lower on the spectrum. Uneasiness moved like a sea beast below the surface of his mind, a shapeless fear, and he called upon the artificial part of his nervous system to impose courage.
“Which way, sir?” the squire inquired. “The wheel-road through the wood is patrolled, and the bridge to the Spaceman’s Yard is watched, and the Swans forbid mortals to fly at night.”
For in the distance, to the north, was a long curving line of floating lamps, clustered perhaps above some traffic on an unseen road. The line of lights curved through the woods, swinging wide to avoid the area of clefts and steep-sided dells, then climbed in a series of switchbacks, and finally leaped across an unseen canyon in a smooth arch, paralleling a bridge that led to the high ground where the cathedral and the graveyard stood.
Norbert said, “We take a direct path. Avoid the oaks and walk near the dream-apple trees. The dream-apple is native to Rosycross, and will not report us. Did not the Starfaring Guild protect them from bio-revanchist Bacchants who sought to hew them down? The taller ones are old enough to remember that.”
The squire said, “It is said to be dangerous to approach any graveyard except by gate. The curse of the Judge of Ages falls on those who trespass.”
“Ah!” said Norbert. “The curse did not fall on Zolasto Zo, did it? If the curse is sensitive to bloodlines, it will spare me.”
“Just you? Do you have a means to protect a loyal adjutant in your service from this curse?”
“If you trust me to rewrite the information aura surrounding your shed skin cells, yes. But that requires you shut off your genetic spoofing protection, whatever you may have, and let me give you a temporary skin.”
Without a word, the squire tapped a command on the red amulet he wore on his wrist, doffed his glove, rolled up his sleeve, and offer his arm to the assassin. Norbert drew his knife and pierced the vein in the squire’s elbow. The squire scowled as cold sensations traveled up his arm to his heart.
“Interesting,” Norbert observed. “I could have programmed any disease or neural change imaginable into that injection. Your nanomachinery cannot combat my picotechnology.”
The squire said, “It is like a children’s game, is it not? Atoms undermine molecules which undermine machines which undermine men. But there is something that undermines us all, and that is eternity. And yet I hear there is one man who has vowed to defeat eternity.”
Norbert was wondering what the squire was driving at. “You speak of the Judge of Ages?”
The squire frowned, irked. “No. His vision is limited to the short term; his motive is mere animal attraction, that spasm of brain chemicals called love. I am speaking of the Master of the World, the Master of the Empyrean, the Master of History, the Master of the Hidden and Hermetic Knowledge! His goal is to overcome entropy! On that day, death itself shall die, and he shall call himself the Master of Life, the King of Infinite Space and Lord of the Eschaton!”
“I cannot fault him for a dearth of ambition,” said Norbert wryly. “But that is quite a jawful of titles.”
“Deserves he not all these and more? We would all be as extinct as apes were it not for him, nor either Monument ever been known, nor a single snowflake of antimatter been burned to uplift civilization. Our civilization sprang from him, and Jupiter is his son.”
Norbert nodded, then realized the gesture was invisible in his black mask and voluminous hood. He said, “I see! And legend also names him as one of the two founders of the Starfarer’s Guild. You seem to be asking if I am loyal to him. I am.”
“Then this is a day to rejoice.…”
“Of course,” Norbert continued, musing, “the other founder is the Judge of Ages. I am loyal to him, too, I suppose. To both of them, if they were real. Hm? Why am I rejoicing this day?”
“Merely to the opportunity to serve an undying purpose of our Guild and her wise and majestic founder. And her other founder, somewhat less majestic. But you doubt their reality? You think two such extraordinary men never lived?”
“I think Menelaus Illation Montrose and Ximen Santiago Matamoros del Azarchel are real men,” said Norbert, “about whom many unreal legends have gathered. And I also think that you are an abnormally trusting fellow.”
“For believing in legends?”
“For letting me put you-know-not-what into your system.”
“No, sir, I am only an abnormally good judge of character. Are we not both loyal to the Guild? And if I am wrong, and you have imposed a neural worm or a cataleptic trigger, you have less cause to mistrust me.”
“Well, your skin will itch abominably over the next twenty minutes, and do not scratch it, lest you break the skill and forfeit the imposture. Any nanite landing on you for a gene sample will think you are kin to Zolasto, hence whatever Zolasto has done to stupefy the defensive measures will protect you, too.”
Norbert turned his back on the man and walked on, tense and uncertain. He summoned up his brashness to clear his mind and halt his glandular capacity for fear.
The two moved through the tangled brush of the forest. Crooked branches seemed to catch the blue-green moon in a net, and the shadows of branches and twigs were thick enough that the squire, whose eyes could not pierce this gloom, walked in the footsteps of the assassin, whose eyes could.
Norbert made sure the other man was close behind him, too close for Norbert to parry a blow or a dirk in the dark should it come.
The ground was also rough and steep, and both men spent time scrambling down and scrabbling up pebbly slopes. Norbert noticed how easily one of them could have cast the other down a steep hillside to his death. He climbed as unwary as he believably could, and gave the other man every opportunity.
Norbert assumed that if the man were a Fox Maiden in disguise, and if all he had wanted was an immunity to pass into the Spaceman’s Yard, Norbert was no longer necessary and would be struck down from behind.
But minutes passed and no attack came. That meant he was not a Ghost inhabiting a human body, hungry for human sensation, nor a Fox bent on mischief wearing
the outward shape of a man.
That left two possibilities. One was that the squire was exactly what he seemed: a shallow Guild bravo from some very dangerous barbaric age assigned by the ship ghosts to help Norbert kill a holy man at a carnival.
The other was that this man was stranger than any Fox.
At the top of one of these sheer-sided slopes that broke the country the assassin paused. Norbert, a dark figure in a dark cloak, half invisible against the night sky, turned and pointed at the tall tower of the Starfaring Guild rising up bleak as a sword from the village lights.
Norbert said, “Look yonder. What do you see?”
“The Tower of the Guild. At its crown in the stratosphere is the port where the Sky Island docks. At its feet is the Forever Village, where the wives and dependents of sailors on cruise await their return, frozen in slumber. Sir? What has this to do with our mission?”
“I see the Tower of the Guild, the one unchanging stability rising above the Forever Village, where time makes all hopes vain and all dreams false. Do you know my dream, squire?”
“Sir? I would not presume—”
“We are going into danger and death. Let us know each other. My dream is this: A hearth of my own, and a fertile wife and a fertile orchard, and a myriad of children to carry my soul into futurity; a sun into whose eye I can as an equal gaze; and, best of all, never to tread the stars again, nor sail the dizzying abyss of night. This means I must not die because of some dangerous or useless officer who replaced my trusted adjutant.”
“My dream is somewhat larger, sir, involving more people and a greater span of time. But it also involves a woman, a wife I have picked out for myself. I will explain myself if you trust me so far as the graveyard.”
Norbert now turned away from the distant lights of the village, stepped down from the crown of the slope, took the squire’s elbow. “Fair enough. Answer without dissimilation what I ask of you. If I prove unable to judge your character, I rule me unfit to judge Hieronymus the Sacerdote, and recuse myself.”
The Architect of Aeons Page 36