At that time, John had been only eight. Since then, Mizar had been his sole caretaker. In John’s worst moments, he felt himself incapable of any lasting devotion to another human being. If he could not love Mizar, who had fed and educated him, whom could he love? And now Mizar was an old man, one who soon would be in need of care himself. His face was a place where many things had happened and John suspected his mind was similarly beginning to deteriorate. He watched with some cloudy dissatisfaction as Mizar stood in the center of the room, still talking, gesturing up and down at the blue-clad prisoner. “This prisoner predicted the heavenly manifestation. He is the ‘who,’” Mizar was saying. He nudged the small man forward. The prisoner recoiled at the touch.
John took a breath. “What did you say?”
Mizar nodded once. “Yes, it’s true! This man, a self-taught surgeon and an accused traitor, was discovered by his jailer to have fainted dead away, just like yourself, sir, when he observed the comet in the sky this late afternoon. When he was revived he was heard to exclaim that his…” And here Mizar removed a slip of paper from his pocket and read from it an exact quote. “That his ‘prediction had come to pass and that this omen should not be ignored by the faithful, or by any one of us alive in these times, as it signifies a shift in our cosmic destiny.’”
John touched his temple. Mizar’s habit of writing every infernal thing down so he would not forget it was a great source of irritation, and yet daily it did prove to be useful. He narrowed his eyes at the prisoner, who was rather strikingly small, and who stood morosely with his black hair greased to his head in ugly whorls, and who had at some very absurd previous moment in his life decided to have a cluster of stars tattooed on the side of his face and who, even now, was making every attempt to hide this act of youthful abandon by affixing a swatch of hair over the area. He might have been thirty or thirty-two, and his blue overcoat and pants were fashioned from heavy, plush cloth, no doubt very expensive. But now, after days or months in the palace jail, they were torn and he looked quite like a penurious seizure of a person, the sort of man John might turn his eyes from if he were to spot him on the short ride from his own Urania castle to the king’s palace compound, which was in fact the only time John went outside his own gates at all, ever.
Although chained at the feet, this small prisoner did command something—if not an air of authority, he had at least some magnifying presence, which made him seem, in his current state, cruelly afflicted by their skepticism. He gazed at John eagerly.
John coughed. “Well? Exactly how did you predict this happening? What’s your name and where are you from?”
When the prisoner spoke it was as though he were continuing outward from the center of some already formed thought. His voice was nasal and all his words hit at the same pitch. “This whole world is filled with time, it seems like, but when time actually came to me I wasted it.” He shrugged glumly. “I’m half-convinced at this point that it’s because I was drinking too much back then, but you would have too if you were me. So anyhow, at my last … what do I call it? ‘Appointment’? If you could even call such a shit-pile of a job an ‘appointment’—and I think that’s roundly debatable—I had extra time at that job. Lots. And I wasn’t filling it the way I should have been.” He paused. “So yes, I admit that I was drinking. I told you that up front, remember that. And so one night I passed out and had the most amazing dream. You know how hard it is to explain dreams, so I won’t even try. But when I woke up I went to my mirror and looked at it, I was going to shave—” Here he reached up and felt his sparsely grizzled face rather thoughtfully. “Not that I probably needed to, so that adds a whole other layer to the mystery. I mean, it does if you know me.”
John glared.
The prisoner hurried up. “And a trance came over me while I was shaving, and when I came back to myself, I had written all kinds of things. By which I mean the most beautiful, predictive things.”
John continued to glare.
“And that is what really happened, I swear. I could show you, but these dickheads”—the prisoner gestured to the guards at the door but surely meant every person at the Cape, generally—“took everything from me when they threw me in prison and said they destroyed it. But I’m sure that’s a lie, because why would they destroy evidence? They’ll need it later if they want any semblance of justice, how else would they prove their charges at my execution? But what am I saying? You’re all liars, I know you are. You don’t need to prove anything.” He cast his glance at John and Mizar angrily. “If any of the things they took from me still exist somewhere you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.”
“You have something written down somewhere? Some proof? Is that what this rant is supposed to be communicating?” John rubbed at his forehead.
“I did. I do. Somewhere. They gave me charts and figures and et cetera.”
“Who gave you charts?”
The prisoner stared dumbly. “The angels. I thought I told you. Weren’t you listening?”
“Angels?”
The prisoner nodded, unfazed. “I dreamed about angels, I woke up in a trance, and wrote it all down. That’s the whole story.”
John’s airway compressed, as happened when he became nervous. “Please. Slow down. A moment ago you mentioned a mirror. A scrying mirror? Are those not prohibitively expensive while also being tremendously illegal for anyone but the Hierophant and his Orbital Doctors?”
John’s own favorite scrying mirror was a relic, a piece of black granite from the other end of Merritt Island, where nearly a thousand years before men had fashioned a stone mirror that faced the sky, bearing the names of all who had died in spaceflight. It was presumed to be a religious monument, but who really knew the motivations of the ancients? The sky mirror had broken over the centuries, but nevertheless it seemed concrete proof that men really had traveled outside the world, once.
When John was not even seventeen years old—a mere boy, still a student at the palace conservatory for astronomics—it dawned upon him that this relic might be where an attuned soul such as himself would be most likely to receive a revelation. So he’d stolen a shard from the ruins of this mirror; in fact it was Mizar who’d driven him in a horsecart to a dock on the far side of Merritt Island and bribed a skittish fisherman to row the young John Sousa through the festering rot that was the inner marsh, to wait while he chipped off a portion of the mirror large enough to be of use. The swamp was dangerous and malarial, alligator- and snake-ridden, and Mizar had given the fisherman a great deal of money to perform the feat and keep quiet about it.
Since then, John had been gazing every so often into his chip of stolen black mirror, looking for … what? And why? It was a mystery to him yet. He felt uneasy about it sometimes—there seemed a unique perversity in viewing vertical destiny on a chip of horizontalia, and this paradox had in recent years begun to seem irreconcilable. He could not reason his way around it, and John’s scrying had lately, inevitably, come to nothing. When an irrefutable sign did come—a comet, no less—it showed itself to him in his servant’s fishpond. Not upon an ancient monument. Not even a holy water table.
Such an irony was, in John’s opinion, so predictable that it was hardly an irony at all.
The small blue-dressed prisoner was shrugging now, his shoulders swimming in the coat like two nubby goldfish blindly hitting the sides of a bowl. “Yes, illegal and stupid on top of it. I loathe divination, let me tell you. The idea is so boring to me. That we pick something, anything, at random and ascribe an equally random meaning to it is pure lunacy.” He paused and seemed to wait for John to curse at him, but it did not happen, so he spoke again, this time with more warmth. “Listen, I am a Surgical Doctor, and I deal inside bodies. What can I say? If that makes me a traitor to you religious people then I’m a traitor, and you’ll execute me for it, but my point is this: I deal in the physical. I don’t abide your starworship. I don’t do ‘magic.’ I wouldn’t even know what it means to see an omen or predict a happ
ening. To my mind, that’s impossible.” He paused again. “So I can’t make you believe me because I can hardly believe myself.”
John nodded shallowly.
“Listen,” said the prisoner, apparently sensing the shift in John’s mood. “I saw this comet in a dream, and even though I don’t believe in your stupid rockets, I am here telling you that I predicted it, and it happened. And something changed, and inside me now there’s an outpouring of … of something … of knowledge, maybe, but it’s being choked to death by everyone’s disbelief, including my own. So there it is, I don’t even believe myself! Are you happy?” He was vibrating with what appeared to be rage, and thrust his mottled hands at his face to rearrange his hair again over the tattoos. John noticed, for the first time, to his amazement, that the prisoner had no ears.
“What happened to you there?” He pointed to the holes.
The man had surely known from the instant his ears had taken leave of his body that he would ever afterward be explaining their absence, thought John, and indeed he began nodding in earnest.
“Yes, that,” he said rather sadly. “That was obviously a punishment.”
“But why?”
He bridled. “Look it up. I’m sure somewhere in this disgusting place some record-keeping piece of goat shit has written down every single one of my offenses in hideous detail on my execution warrant. The ears, sir, happened many years ago, when I was in Dread Kansas, and I surely deserved it at the time, but these days I wonder if the punishment outweighed the crime, because now that I’m a visionary I’m thinking very different things about that period in my … ah, life. Let’s call it a life. Yes.” He smiled again, this time without pity. “Kansas is a place of hell.”
John was fading. Endless talk, it seemed his life was nothing but endless listening and talking. The bed and the room beyond it formed vast empty spaces and he wanted to be alone in them to gather his wits. But something about the prisoner interested him—there was a yearning in him that went beyond this undignified attempt to save his own life. John was not blind or stupid, but he was an insatiably curious man. Which was, he supposed, its own exquisite kind of stupidity. He folded his hands in his lap as he sat still on the bed. The man was probably lying about the comet. It didn’t matter. And he was dressed in clothes far too fine for a Walking Doctor, even a very successful one. Yet that didn’t matter either. His transparent motive remained, absent of any discernable use to John. If he had come to deceive, he was not very good at it, and he did not seem the sort of man likely to subject himself to anything he was not good at, even to save his life, so it followed that he must have come for some other reason.
The prisoner took a hobbled step toward John. “You must forgive me,” he said. “They will execute me here, certainly sooner rather than later. The Hierophant himself has already interviewed me once. I know I don’t deserve to die.”
“My job is not to pardon prisoners—”
“But I did foresee this calamity, and other things, and I know I could foresee more, with the right equipment and the right minds helping me interpret my visions. The fact of the matter is simple: I’m not educated in astrologics. Myself, I know the human corpus, I know medicines and surgeries and have been practicing them since I was a child at my mother’s side. I don’t know the skies and I understand even less about the voices I heard in my head.”
John said nothing.
“It’s been said … out in the country, I mean, not here … that you aren’t like other Cape men. That the head cutting and the bloodletting and Wonderblood are just a means to an end, anyway, for everyone, but you’re much more interested in the end. That’s the rumor about you.”
John raised his eyebrows and Mizar shrugged. Who knew what people said? It wasn’t any of John’s concern, though he did not put much effort into fitting into Cape society. It was quite possible the man wasn’t just trying to flatter him.
The prisoner went on. “When this light struck by outside my window today, I knew I was still alive for this reason. To tell you—specifically you, Lord John Sousa—what I saw in my vision. I truly believe I’m alive right now to bear witness to my prediction coming true.” He opened and closed his fists thoughtfully.
These words congealed around John and he quivered fruitishly inside them. Talking, talking! But outside, still, that comet, entirely there, entirely not going away. And here before him, a man who might (yes, terror—might!) be able or at least who might believe himself able to explain this marvel. It was that belief, which seemed itself marvelous and humble in spite of everything, that moved John so awfully. So that his heart skipped again, this time down into his feet where it remained, and he had to gasp for a new breath. O, his body, so frail a thing when pitted against the tireless lashings of his mind! He clutched the bedpost and leaned forward as if to vomit.
“Yes, yes,” John replied. “Perhaps it does mean something. Nameless sir, we who love the truth are bound to be undone by it, as it seems always to be melting just as we grab for it. You are telling me you think you can see more and better things than I can in my own scrying mirror? Is that what I hear you saying?”
“It was just one time. I was in a trance. But … yes, I do.”
“Where did you get your mirror?”
The prisoner glanced over his shoulder. “A simple—very legal—shaving mirror.”
John waved his hand. “I know you’re lying about predicting the comet. You’re lying to save yourself from the executioner, but I don’t care about that because I think you’re not lying about being able to predict the comet.” He spread his hands. “I would like nothing more than to give you unending moments of my time, but as it is I have so much work to do, and your views are so against my own philosophy that I cannot see what more there is to be gained from this … suggested partnership. That is what you’re suggesting, correct? That we work together?”
The prisoner coughed. “Will you give me a chance to prove myself?”
This was what John had been casting for, some desperate act to match his own desperation. He felt himself begin to smile but instead he hacked phlegm into a ball of wadded-up bedsheet. “Go ahead, then.”
The man glanced up and out the window at the coral sky and for a long time he seemed on the verge of weeping. Unfair, the weight of expectation, John thought, but then each one of us is given his own special dreadfulness to endure. Better perhaps to have been born as he himself had been, the seventh son of third-generation Chief Orbital Doctors, and better perhaps to have been raised inside the faith, rather than however this man had been raised—surely only inopportune circumstances could have led him to such a pitiful line of work.
But John felt no special sympathy for the downtrodden. He accepted things as they came to him, and sometimes they were good and other times they were unsatisfying. He supposed he had some persistent wish that others should do the same. After all, he’d worked all his life at something he could neither see nor touch, and there was dignity in that—he knew it existed somewhere—but he could not expect a man like this prisoner, who’d spent his life elbow-deep in human guts, to understand that.
After a long silence, the prisoner closed his eyes and began to twitch like worm cut in half, one side of him shrinking from the other as if in awful pain. John watched. The show revealed as much as the prophecy. The prisoner was a good performer at least. But presently he collapsed in a heap on the desk chair and said, “I can’t, I can’t, sir, I can’t see anything right now.”
“Ah well. Would that we could call down precognition when it suited us. Mizar—” he began. “Take this fellow back to the jail—”
“But what if I were to tell you something I already saw? It’s real, I have it written in my notes that they confiscated, I can prove to you I wrote it a long time ago.”
John leaned back on his elbows and into the fluffy boat of the mattress and didn’t speak.
The prisoner’s eyes widened, and a peculiar blush went over his face. He looked to his shackled feet.
“I don’t know if I should say it.”
“Then don’t say it, man. I haven’t got time for dithering, I’ve wasted hours already in a damnable swoon.”
The prisoner nodded. “What I saw, or part of what I saw, when I was in the trance months ago, was a feminine wildfire ripping through this very spot, in tandem with the comet, or rather in relation to the comet, and I know that if you were to check with the, ah, ladies of this court you would find that they are all, to a woman, ah, bleeding at present.”
John raised an eyebrow, his habit since childhood, which he had learned from imitating Mizar. He detested this gesture now but could not stop doing it. “O yes?”
The prisoner winced. “It’s true. Check. I have full confidence.”
John frowned. But then shook his head. “You believe these angels—you called them angels, correct?—revealed that to you? That the ladies are bleeding? And you’re certain you’re not insane? Who cares about the menses of the palace women?”
The prisoner said, “I am only a mouthpiece. Which is why you must see this as proof of my visionary skill. Even when I didn’t know what I was seeing, I was seeing something. Now it all makes sense. The angels told me.”
“That we shall certainly see.” John said with a dry snort. But the prisoner’s claim was so extraordinarily bewildering that he found he could not rightly select a look appropriate to the situation—he felt his face begin to twist downward into an even deeper frown, but just as quickly he tightened back up the edges of his mouth. Could it be true? It was easy enough to verify and after all, what had his own prayers and magic revealed? Ever?
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