The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

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 t
he 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.”