“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 waste height from left to right, forming a cross.
He kicked the cross open and stepped through.
3
The Treason of Jupiter
1. Behind the Curtain
Behind the stage screen, the two men found themselves in what seemed a vestry or dressing room, but which apparently served as a consolation chamber for private audiences, because it was equipped with all the gewgaws and implements a magician needed to cast a cliometric extrapolation of the future history of any single individual gullible enough to believe that cliometric extrapolations could be cast for single individuals.
Around the vestry were tripods for anthracomancy, skulls for necromancy, mirrors for enoptromancy, or perhaps for putting on stage makeup.
A carpet inscribed with Monument notation was underfoot, one of those types written with hidden fortunes that the client could reveal depending on where he accidentally stepped. From the tentpoles overhead hung a line of marionettes dressed in the costumes of the various constellations, Aquarius with his ewer or Sagittarius with his bow and arrow, Libra holding up a balance scale in which he weighed a feather against a beating human heart.
Brazen mandalas with traces of neural charge still vibrating in their spirals, thinking caps cruel with clamps and brain-spikes, and small bottles of delirious essence winking mischievously were all present in the litter of the ceiling, as was a nine-foot-long stuffed crocodile with glass eyes, motionless and signal-neutral. Norbert thought the crocodile an eerie object: he could not recall the last time he had seen something that was entirely dead.
A narrow shelf ran in a complete circle just at eye level along the chamber sides. From it hung a line of ticking owl-faced clocks and murmuring calendars showing the time and the time-dilations of ships passing between Mother Earth and the Stepmother Earths of the three diasporas. The shelf was an astrological ribbon, to compare a client’s birth signs and houses against the position of fortunate and adverse ships. This shelf had raised itself to allow the tall men to enter, dropping again to eye level as they passed beneath, and the owl-faced clocks looked down on them with round, incurious, and unwinking eyes.
Midmost all this bright clutter was a round brass table inscribed with the sigils of the hexagram on a sliding outer ring. In the center of the table rested a crystal ball next to an open cedarwood box. In the box were a deck of computer cards painted with figures of the tarot. Above the table hung a glass hookah filled with luminous fluid from which the only light in the chamber came.
To one side was an ornate chair for the magician flanked by the traditional winged monkeys, who were wearing the traditional pillbox caps and braided scarlet and gold jackets. To the other side was a red silk couch for the magician’s client, fitted with straps and head-clamp and a dream induction box underneath.
Sitting in the magician’s chair, chewing a lump of tobacco and spitting into a nearby crownless skull, was a tall man in a green poncho wearing a high-crowned broad-brimmed black hat adorned with a hatband of jade chips. The man’s face was oddly ugly, but not ugly enough to have been designed that way. He had rough and bony features: a big, square jaw like the toe of a boot, two deep set eyes that never seemed to blink, ears like jug handles, and a hooked nose that looked like it had been broken and reset badly. His skin was dark and the hair above his ears was reddish stubble cropped close. Across his knees rested a sidearm nearly a cubit long, heavy as a blunderbuss, with a main muzzle surrounded by six lesser muzzles for escort bullets. Over his shoulder was a bandolier and a cavalry saber. On the heels of either boot were metal instruments of a type Norbert had never seen: a small hooked arm ending in a rowel like a jagged wheel.
Draped in sinuous curves atop the couch, but not strapped into it, as if she had flung herself down artlessly and merely by chance had assumed a curvaceous posture of dangerous sensuality, was a female figure in a red kimono and a purple obi, the dress of a Nymph. In a wide circle above her, as if to hide her from the marionettes hanging from the ceiling, was a living parasol, also of red; nine white pearls bathed in strange silver candleflames circled the rim of the parasol like blind bees, sometimes alighting on the spokes.
She wore her bloodred hair in a loose mass flagrantly piled atop her head, with escaping strands tickling her ears and jawline and neck. This coiffeur was pinned in place with long needles adorned with amber beads, fine chains of gold, and a coronet shaped like the moon, and what looked like a row of lit candles. The kimono collar was loose in the back to show off the line of her neck. Her fingers and wrists were slender and graceful and her arms were hidden in shining black opera gloves that ran past her elbow. Her feet were unshod, but hidden in stockings made of the same dark and shining substance as her gloves, and hid her legs to the knee. Her feet were too long and thin to be handsome, but they boasted a dozen gold and red-gold anklets and ankle-bells that chimed and tittered if she moved her feet. She toyed with a scarlet folding fan whose spines were needles.
Hers was a triangular face with very high cheekbones sharply defined, an acutely pointed chin, and a thin and very red smile shaped like the letter V. She smiled without opening her mouth. Her eyes were larger than normally allowed for humans, and the pupils yellow as amber, yellow as gold coins seen in a running fountain.
When Norbert kicked his way into the chamber, the two winged monkeys fluttered their wings and pounded the carpet with their truncheons, hooting and screeching and showing their fangs.
The tall man in the black hat kicked the monkeys, who shrieked and dropped their truncheons, putting their paws before their mouths. “Well, damnation and tarnation and all other nations! Ain’t you the loudassingest and lousiest assassin since Scaevola?”
2. Needless Names and Introductions
Norbert used the point of his knife to tip his spectacles back on his head. The fabric of the mask, sensing his mood, scuttled quickly down from his face and into a neck pocket; his hood likewise folded itself to his neck. The spectacles whimpered when the silent knife touched them. Norbert, squinting against the light, with a nod had the spectacles fall back into place across his nose.
“I need not be an assassin this hour, no more than you need be Feroccio the Master-At-Arms, nor she the Mademoiselle Pelisse. Shall we all end the masquerade and make our introductions? I am Norbert Noesis Mynyddrhodian of Rosycross, Glorified Endocist of One Donative, son of Yngbert Perpension Mynyddrhodian. I am a Praetor of the Ancient and Honorable Guild of Starfaring and Interstellar Pilgrims Errant who has been commanded by my superiors, absurdly enough, to render a verdict on the sixteen-thousand-year-old issue of the calendar reform. I assume the lady is Cazi, the immortal sovereign of the Fourth Humanity?”
Cazi inclined
her head graciously. “So I am!” Her voice was eerie, like the laughter of lutes, with a curious double note. The first was like the throb of a cello, husky, half-breathless, playful, mocking; the after-note was thin and high like a violin, sinister, deadly, and pure.
“Frankly, I thought you a mythical being, ma’am.”
“So I am, again! You may approach on your knees and adore me. Put my big toe in your mouth and suck on it.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I’d rather not. There will be no living report of you on Rosycross if you rip out my jugular, and that would be a criminal loss to your glory.”
Her tight-lipped smile widened when she opened her mouth to laugh, betraying the glint of very white and very pointed teeth before she covered her lower face demurely with her fan. Turning her head to her companion, she breathed. “Oh, Meany, I like him. He is quick, like one of my girls, and, like them, flatters without meaning it at all. Give him to me, please.”
The tall, bony-faced man said flatly, “Nope. Stop acting like a vixen: how often I gotta tell you you’re better’n that? There is something all balled up going on here, and I am thinking I just been outfoxed again.”
Norbert felt his brash nature rising to the fore. Taking another step forward, he said, “Not outfoxed. Foxes, I have it on good authority, lay their traps with a certain recognizable flavor of panache. Whereas this has a distinctive flavor of patience and large-scale misdirection of events. You have perhaps been overmastered.”
“What the plague does that mean?” growled the tall man.
“This man is my squire of marines attached to the Forever Village, named Ar Thrup End Dragon. I assume he really is a squire, since, as the Most Senior Grand High Master of the Starfaring Guild, his is the authority to appoint anyone, including himself, to that post, just as his is the authority to appoint me Praetor. Judge of Ages, this is the Master of the World. I think you know each other.”
The squire straightened up. The outer layer of what seemed a wooden sword shattered, and the splinters flew in each direction, revealing a silver sword beneath a-dazzle with jacinth and chrysoberyl. The hilts unfolded with a metallic snap. The blade was decorated with a red dragon entwining a white, and the words in gold letters, Ultima Ratio Regum. There was the heavy scent of the air before a thunderstorm issuing from it, which betrayed the presence of directed-energy weapons hidden in the blade.
His uniform dropped the medals and badges of a squire of marines softly to the carpet, but rippled and changed aspect and turned black with a silver cape, shot through with red and purple filiments like the veins of a leaf. On his wrist gleamed the red amulet of the Hermetic Order. He made an adjustment on the amulet. His false skin peeled off in long, strange, floating and curling strips, and the strips evaporated.
Menelaus Montrose looked at the other man, and said, “Arthur Pendragon? You shouldn’t use an alias that gives so much away.”
Ximen del Azarchel inclined his head to Menelaus, then bowed more deeply to Cazi, then grinned at Menelaus. “Should I take tips on inventing an alias from Captain Sterling of Space Command? Norbert did not recognize the name Pendragon. No one reads the classics.”
“I meant the name gives away how damned arrogant you are,” snorted Menelaus. Then Menelaus said to Norbert, “How did you figure out who was who?”
“She is unmistakable,” said Norbert.
The redhead squealed. “Oh, give him to me, Meany! I like him!”
“Hush up, Cazi, or I’ll set the poxed monkeys on you.”
The winged monkeys looked eager and clapped their forepaws.
Norbert said to Menelaus, “Rumor had it she was trying to dig you out of a tomb in Egypt. Also, the Master of the World spent the entire walk here talking about the Tribulations, how the predictions of history went off the rails.”
Montrose nodded, as if that explained everything, but Cazi, leaning forward half-sideways in a way that displayed the fine curve of her naked shoulder, said, “Pray tell, mortal man, how the conversation of the Nobilissimus on so interesting a topic betrayed his identity to you. Amuse me, and I will reward you with a treat!”
3. Interlude, with Fox
Norbert bowed. “Ma’am, I don’t know how to say it to sound amusing, or even to sound like I am not bragging. The Judge of Ages and the Master of the World used to be the smartest men in creation, but they are simply not above average anymore.”
Cazi tilted her head with an angular smile, and looked at Norbert from the corners of her half-lidded eyes, and spoke in a light, lilting voice. “Oh, I would not say that. Ximen believes he is exceptional because he exposed himself to the Monument, and it altered his brain, but he would be exceptional even otherwise. Meany believes he is exceptional because he exposed himself to true love, and it altered his brain, and he would be nothing otherwise. But please feel free to brag! Humble men are dull! They are so hard to play with. They have no strings for fierce, gay foxes to pull.”
“I’ve been educated under the canes of remorseless lore masters, back home,” said Norbert. “And I have a lump of murk in my brain smaller than a hummingbird’s egg but with more calculation power than ever was enjoyed by the nun in the moon. So I know the cliometry. I did a few calculations in my head while we walked.”
“That is not braggy enough!” pouted Cazi.
“I will try to sound more arrogant, ma’am,” said Norbert politely. “Because I have a right to brag about this. The Nobilissimus kindly gave me clues enough to puzzle out what has been hidden from humans for millennia.
“The first clue was his anger at the Shapetaker’s Millenium: When the Salamander fled from the sun, unknown to mankind, history went off the rails. Why? The Tribulations began when the Fourth Humans ushered in a revolution in biotechnology and biosociology, so that anyone could take the shape of any race, hence any rank. And the enfranchised underlings mingled with their betters, interbred, prospered, and quadrupled their lifespans.
“That was not in anyone’s plan. The carefully balanced utopia had ended, but no human was told. We all thought the heresies and tumults were a necessary adjustment period, but still all part of the cliometric Grand Scheme of Things imposed by our Golden betters.
“But the history planners had gone quite blind.
“Who would this anger more than the main history planner of all history? And who was he angry at? Whose actions, whether guided by mercy or madness or what, shattered the caste system of the Long Golden Afternoon of Man? Who unchained us all from the golden chains of time? It was the Foxes.”
Cazi applauded by clapping her folded fan into her other palm. “Hear, hear! All living things must praise the Fox Maidens! Dead things, too! It is a wonder to hear how wonderful we are, me and all my girls! Tell me more.” She giggled. “You do not have to mean it.”
“Yes, ma’am. The next clues were his frustration that the reign of the Golden Lords has not returned. Some chaotic factor was throwing off the calculations. Now, what is the most chaotic thing in Earthly history in the last two thousand years?”
“Foxes!” exclaimed Cazi brightly.
“And what factor got factored out once the Foxes put one of their creatures, a Patrician, in the purple as a Lord of the Golden Afternoon?”
“The Fox factor!” exclaimed Cazi, bouncing up and down and applauding. Strands of wild red hair escaped from her coiffeur, and the jouncing pulled loose some ribbons of her kimono in the front, exposing a dangerous glimpse of cleavage.
“Right again. The Nobilissimus implied that Jupiter lost control of history, but boasted that history regained its sight and destiny when the Patricians rose to authority, presumably not under Jupiter’s control. This leads to a strange conclusion indeed: The unpredictable Foxes created a race able to predict them. That defeats this special ability. But who is so insane as to erase themselves from history?”
“Foxes! Foxes! FOXES!” screamed Cazi, leaping in the air and performing a complete backflip, while folds of her ruby-bright kimono came undone, and l
it candles or pointy hair ornaments flew out of the unwinding mass of her hair, stabbing the frightened carpet, who blushed.
Norbert continued: “That led to an even stranger thought: the question of means. How was it done? Not by human science. It stands to reason that anyone who knows how to do a thing knows how to undo it. The Monument Builders discovered how to predict the large-scale self-aware multiple-component interactive events we call history. If there were a means to unpredict it, to rewrite destiny like a scroll, not even Jupiter could anticipate such a means or counteract it. No man and no potentate, not the Nobilissimus and not Tellus his Ghost is wise enough to outsmart Jupiter. Only the Monument Builders are. They are from some higher level of intellectual topography inhabited by Dominions, or Authorities, or Archons, beings for which we have only hypothetical names.
“Then there was the question of timing. Neptune was created after the Ultimate White Ship returned, presumably based on this anti-cliometric math the Jupiter Brain could not analyze or counteract; and Neptune was created by the Patricians, who in turn were created by the Fourth Humans; and the Fourth Humans in turn were created after the previous Omega Nebula expedition returned with the Penultimate White Ship, presumably based on a simpler form of the same math.”
“Fox math!” shouted Cazi, arms high and wide, standing on one toe in midair and spinning rapidly. Norbert could not see what was holding her up, but he did not expect to understand the posthuman races. A bushy red tail had unfolded from behind the wide many-folded bow of her sash and was whipping about in the air, and little flickers of white fire fell from it.
Cazi’s head stopped turning, even though her body continued to spin rapidly, as if her neck were suddenly no longer interested in anything her body was doing. Norbert could not see any seam, discontinuity, or elastic twist in the neck, so the sight was both unsettling and inexplicable. The un-rotating head quirked an eyebrow at Norbert. “Is fox math a real sort of math?”