The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight

by Jonathan Strahan

  He sighed and chuckled, relieved to be rid of both a small gray printed pamphlet, and his speech. Digges howled his gratitude, and read a passage aloud from the pamphlet and passed it to Dr. Dee, and pressed Rosary to pass on his thanks.

  Rosary began to recite again. "I am asked by Tycho Brahe to say how impress-ed with your work. Sir. To describe the universe as infinite with mathematical argument!" His English sputtered and died. "Is a big thing. We are all so amuzed."

  "Forgive me," said the young man. "Is it the universe or the argument that is infinite?"

  "Guy," warned Digges in a sing-song voice. He pronounced it with a hard "G" and a long eeee.

  "And is it the universe or the numbers that are amusing?"

  Mr. Rosary paused, understood, and grinned. "The two. Both."

  "We disagree on matters of orbitals," said Squire Digges.

  Vesuvius leaned back, steepling his fingers; his nails were clean and filed. "A sun that is the circumference of Terra." He sketched with his finger a huge circle and shook his head.

  Almost under his breath the young man said, "A sonne can be larger than his father."

  Digges explained. "My young friend is a poet."

  Vesuvius smiled. "I look forward to him entertaining us later." Then he ventriloquized in Danish, "And until then, he might eat with the servants."

  Mr. Rosary looked too pleased to care and beamed at Digges. "You… have… lens."

  Digges boomed. "Yes! Yes! On roof." He pointed. "Stierne. Stierne."

  Rosary laughed and nodded. "Yes! Stierne! Star."

  "Roof. We go to roof." Squire Digges mimed walking with his two fingers. Blank looks, so he wiped out his gesture with a wave.

  Vesuvius translated with confidence. "No stars tonight, too cloudy."

  "No stars," said Mr. Rosary, as if someone's cat had died.

  "Yes." Digges looked confused. "Stierne. On roof."

  Everything stalled: words, hands, mouths and feet. Nobody understood.

  Young Guy made a sound like bells, many of them, as if bluebells rang. His fingers tinkled across an arch that was meant to be the Firmament. Then his two flat hands became lenses and his arms mechanical supports that squeedled as they lined up his palms.

  Goldenstar gave his head an almost imperceptible shake. "What the hell is he doing?"

  Vesuvius: "I told you they have to mime everything."

  "No wonder that they are good with numbers. They can't use words!"

  "It's why there will never be a great poet in English."

  Rosary suddenly rocked in recognition. He too mimed the mechanical device with its lenses. He twinkled at young Guy. Young Guy twinkled back.

  "Act-or," explained Digges. "Tra-la! Stage. But poet. Oh! Such good poet. New poem. Venus and Adonis!" He kissed the tips of his fingers. Vesuvius's eyes, heavy and unmoved, rested on his host.

  "Poet. Awww," Rosary said in sympathy. "No numbers."

  John Dee, back erect, sipped his wine.

  Bessie entered, rattling plates and knives in terror. Goldenstar growled, and his hands rounded in the air the curvature of her buttocks. She noticed and fled, soles flapping, polishing no more.

  The Squire poured more wine. "Now. I want to hear more of your great relation, Lord Tycho. I yearn to visit him. He lives on an island? Devoted to philosophy!" He pronounced the name as "Tie-koh."

  Vesuvius corrected him. "Teej-hhho."

  "Yes, Tycho."

  "The island is called Hven. You should be able to remember it as it is the same word as 'haven.' It is called in Greek Uraniborg. Urania means study of stars. Perhaps you know that?"

  Digges's face stiffened. "I do read Greek."

  Rosary beamed at Guy. "Your name Gee. In Greek is Earth."

  Guy laughed. "Is it? Heaven and Earth. And I was born Taurus." He waited for a response. "Earth sign?" He looked at them all in turn. "You are all astrologers?"

  Dr. Dee said, "No."

  "And your name," said Guy, turning suddenly on the translator as if pulling a blade. "You are called Vesuvius?"

  "A pseudonym, Guy," said Digges. "Something to hide. A nom de plume."

  "What's that?"

  "French," growled Vesuvius. "A language."

  Rosary thought that was a signal to change languages, and certainly the subject. "Mon cousin a un nez d'or."

  Squire Digges jumped in to translate ahead of Vesuvius. "Your cousin has a…" He faltered. "A golden nose."

  Rosary pointed to his own nose. "Oui. Il l'a perdu ça par se battre en duel."

  "In… a… duel."

  Goldenstar thumped the table. "Over matematica!"

  Squire Digges leaned back. "Now that is a good reason to lose your nose."

  "Ja! Ja!" Goldenstar laughed. "Principiis mathematicis."

  "I trust we will not come to swords," said Digges, half-laughing.

  Rosary continued. "De temps en temp il port un nez de cuivre."

  Vesuvius translated. "Sometimes the nose is made of copper."

  Guy's mouth crept sideways. "He changes noses for special occasions?"

  Vesuvius glared; Goldenstar prickled. "Tycho Brahe great man!"

  "Evidently. To be able to afford such a handsome array of noses."

  Squire Digges hummed "no" twice.

  Rosary pressed on. "Mon cousin maintain comme un animal de familier un élan."

  Vesuvius snapped back, "He also has a pet moose."

  Digges coughed. "I think you'll find he means elk."

  "L'élan peut danser!" Rosary looked so pleased.

  Digges rattled off a translation. "The elk can dance." He paused. "I might have that wrong."

  Goldenstar thought German might work better. "Der elch ist tot."

  Digges. "The elk is dead."

  "Did it die in the duel as well?" Guy's face was bland. "To lose at a stroke both your nose and your moose."

  Rosary rocked with laughter. "Ja-ha-ha. Ja! Der elch gesoffenwar von die treppen gefallen hat."

  Sweat tricked down Digges's forehead. "The elk drank too much and fell down stairs."

  Guy nodded slightly to himself. "And you good men believe that the Earth goes around the sun." His smile was a grimace of incredulity and embarrassment.

  Dr. Dee tapped the table. "No. Your friend Squire Digges believes the Earth goes around the sun. Our guests believe that the sun goes around the Earth, but that all the other planets revolve around those two central objects. They believe this on the evidence of measurements and numbers. This evening is a conference on numbers and their application to the ancient study of stars. Astronomy. But the term is muddled."

  Guy's face folded in on itself.

  "Language fails you. Thomas Digges is described as a designer of arms and an almanacker. Our Danish friends are called astrologers, I am called a mage. I call us philosophers, but our language is numbers. Numbers describe, sirrah, with more precision than all your poetry."

  Shakespere bowed.

  "The Queen herself believes this and thus so should you." Dee turned away from him.

  "But the numbers disagree," said Shakespere.

  Bessie labored into the room backwards, bearing on a trencher a whole roast lamb. It was burnt black and smelled of soot. The company applauded nonetheless. The parsnips and turnips about it were cinders shining with fat.

  Digges continued explaining. "Now, this great Tycho saw suddenly appear in the heavens.…"

  Goldenstar punched the air and shouted over the last few words, "By eye! By eye!"

  "Yes, by eye. He saw a new light in the heavens, a comet he thought, only it could not be one."

  "Numbers by eye!"

  "Yes, he calculated the parallax and proved it was not a comet. It was beyond the moon. A new star, he thought."

  "Nova!" exclaimed Goldenstar.

  "More likely to be a dying one, actually. But it was a change to the immutable sphere of the stars!"

  "Oh. Interesting," said Shakespere. "Should… someone carve?"

  "You're as
slow as gravy! Guy! The sphere of the stars is supposed to be unchanging and perfect."

  "Spheres, you mean the music of the spheres?"

  Goldenstar bellowed. "Ja. It move!"

  "I rather like the idea of the stars singing."

  Digges's hand moved as if to music. "It means Ptolemy is wrong. It means the Church is wrong, though why Ptolemy matters to the Church I don't know. But there it was. A new light in the heavens!"

  Guy's voice rose in panic. "When did this happen?"

  John Dee answered him. "1572."

  Shakespere began to count the years on his fingers.

  John Dee's mouth twitched and he squeezed shut Shakespere's hand. "Twenty. Years. And evidently the world did not end, so it was not a portent." As he spoke, Vesuvius translated in an undertone.

  Squire Digges grinned like a wolf. "There are no spheres. The planets revolve around the sun, and we are just another planet."

  "Noooooooooo ho-ho!" wailed Rosary and Goldenstar.

  Digges bounced up and down in his chair, still smiling. "The stars are so far away we cannot conceive the distance. All of them are bigger than the sun. The universe is infinitely large. It never ends."

  The Danes laughed and waved him away. Goldenstar said, "Terra heavy. Sit in center. Fire light. Sun go around Terra!"

  "Could we begin eating?" suggested Guy.

  "Terra like table. Table fly like bird? No!" One of Goldenstar's fists was matter, the other fire and spirit.

  "I'll carve. Shall I carve?" No one noticed Shakespere. He stood up and sharpened the knife while the philosophers teased and bellowed. He sawed the blackened hide. "I like a nice bit of crackling." He leaned down hard on the knife and pushed; the scab broke open and a gout of blood spun out of it like a tennis ball and down Guy's doublet. The meat was raw. He regained his poise. "Shall we fall upon it with lupine grace?"

  Vesuvius interpreted. "He says you have the manners of wolves."

  Rosary said, "Hungry like wolves."

  The knife wouldn't cut. Guy began to wrestle the knuckle out of its socket. Like a thing alive, the lamb leapt free onto the floor.

  "Dear, dear boy." Digges rose to his feet and scooped up the meat, and put it back on the board. "Give me the knife." He took it and began with some grace to carve. "He really is a very good poet."

  "Let us hope he is that at least," said Vesuvius.

  Digges paused, about to serve. "He's interested in everything. History. Ovid. Sex. And then spins it into gold."

  He put a tranche onto Goldenstar's plate. Knud did not wait for the others and began to press down with his knife. The meat didn't cut. He speared it up whole and began to chaw one end of it. The fat was uncooked and tasted of human genitals; the flesh had the strength of good hemp rope. He turned the turnip over in his fingers. It looked like a lump of coal and he let it fall onto his plate. "I suggest we sail past this food and go and see the lenses."

  Rosary tried to take a bite of the meat. "Yes. Lenses."

  Thomas Digges's house stood three stories high, dead on Bankside opposite the spires of All Hallows the Great and All Hallows the Lesser. Just behind his house, beyond a commons, stood Henslowe's theater, The Rose, which was why Guy was such a frequent houseguest. Digges got free tickets in the stalls as a way of apologizing for the groundlings' noise and litter and the inconvenience of Guy sleeping on his floor. Guy didn't snore but he did make noises all night as if he were caressing a woman or jumping down from trees.

  No noise in February at night. The wind had dropped, and a few boats still plied across the river, lanterns glowing like planets. The low-tide mud was luminous with snow. The sky looked as if it had been scoured free of cloud.

  Over his slated roof, Digges had built a platform. Its scaffolding supports had splintered; it groaned underfoot, shifting like a boat. The moon was full-faced and the stars seemed to have been flung up into the heavens, held by nets.

  The cold had loosened Guy's tongue. "S-s-s-size of lenses, you look with both eyes. No squinting. C-c-can you imagine f-f-f-folk wearing them as a collar, they lift up the arms and have another set of eyes to see distant things. W-w-w-would that make them philosophers?"

  "The gentlemen are acquainted with the principle, Guy." Digges was ratcheting a series of mechanical arms that supported facemask-sized rounds of glass.

  "But not the wonder of it. D-do you sense wonder, Mr. Rosary?"

  Rosary's red cheeks swelled. "I do not know."

  "Many things I'm sure, Rosie, are comprehended by you. Are you married, perchance?"

  "Geee-eee – heee," warned Digges. He bent his knees to look through the corridor of lenses and made an old-man noise.

  Goldenstar answered. "Married."

  "As am I. That signifies, b-b–but not much." Guy arched back around to Rosary. "Come by day the morrow and walk alongside the river with me. The churches and the boats, moorhens, the yards of stone and timber."

  Vesuvius shook his head. "We have heard about you actors."

  Goldenstar said, "We leave tomorrow." Rosary shrugged.

  Digges stood up and presented his lenses to them. "Sirs." Vesuvius and Rosary did a little dance, holding out hands for each other, until the Count put a collegial hand on Rosary's back and pushed. Rosary crouched and stared, blinking.

  Squire Digges sounded almost sad. "You see. The moon is solid too. Massy with heft."

  Rosary was still. Finally he stood up, shaking his head. "That is…" He tried to speak with his hands, but that also failed. "Like being a sea." He looked sombre. "The stars are made of stone."

  Goldenstar adopted a lunging posture as if grounding a spear against an advancing horde. "This could get us all burnt at the stake."

  John Dee answered in Danish. Vesuvius looked up in alarm. "Yes, but not here, not while my Queen lives."

  Shakespere understood the tone. "Everything is exploding, exploding all at once. When I was in Rome – it's so important to g-g-get things right, don't you think? Research is the best part of the j-job. Rome. Verona. Carthage. I was in a room with a man who was born the same year I was and his first name was the same as his last, G-G-Galileo Galilei. I told him about Thomas and he told me that he too has lenses. He told me that Jupiter has four moons and Saturn wears a rainbow hat. He is my pen pal, Galileo, I send him little things of my own, small pieces you understand –"

  Vesuvius exploded. "Please you will stop prattle!" He ran a hand across his forehead. "We are meeting of great astrological minds in Europe, not prattle Italian!"

  Digges placed an arm around Guy as if to warm him. Rosary phalanxed next to them as though shielding him from the wind. "Please," Rosary said to Vesuvius.

  John Dee thought: People protect this man.

  * * *

  Guillermis Shakespere thought:

  I can be in silence. My source is in silence. Words come from silence.

  How different they be, these Danes, one all stern and leaden, forceful with facts, the other leavening dough. Their great cousin. All by eye? Compromise by eye, just keep the sun going around the Earth, to pacify the Pope and save your necks. Respect him more if he declared for the Pope forthrightly and kept to the heavens and Earth as we knew them. Digges digs holes in heaven, excavating stars as if they were bones. Building boats of bone. He could build boxes, boxes with mirrors to look down into the heart of the sea, show us a world of narwhales, sharks, and selkies.

  All chastened by Mr. Volcano. All silent now. Stare now – by eye – you who think you see through numbers, stare at what his lenses show. New eyes to see new things.

  How do rocks hang in the sky?

  How will I tell my groundlings: the moon is a mountain that doesn't fall? The man with gap in his teeth; the maid with bruised cheek, the oarsman with rounded back? What can I say to them? These wonders are too high for speaking, for scrofulous London, its muddy river. Here the moon has suddenly descended onto our little eye-land. Here where the future is hidden in lenses and astrolabes. The numbers and Thomas's clank
ing armatures.

  "Guy," says old Thomas, full of kindness. "Your turn."

  I bow before the future, into the face of a new monarch of glass who overturns. I look through his eyes; see as he sees, wide and long. I blink as when I opened my eyes in a basin of milk. Dust and shadow, light and mist cross and swim and I look onto another world.

  I can see so clearly that it's a ball, a globe. Its belly swells out toward me, a hint of shadow on its crescent edge.

  It is as stone as any granite tor. Beige and hot in sunlight. The moon must see us laced in cloud but no clouds there, no rain, no green expanse. Nothing to shield from the shriveling sun. No angels, nymphs, orisons, bowers, streams, butterflies, lutes. Desiccated corpses. No dogs to devour. A circle of stone. Avesbury. A graveyard. Breadcrumbs and mold.

  Not man in the moon, but a skull.

  Nothing for my groundlings. Or poetry.

  I look on Digges's face. He stares as wide as I do; no comfort there. He touches my sleeve. "Dear Guy. Look at the stars."

  He hoists the thing on some hidden bearing, and then takes each arm and gears into a new niche. The lenses rise and intersect at some new angle, and I look again, and see the stars.

  Rosie was right, it is an ocean. What ship could sail there? Bejewelled fish. That swallow Earth. Carry it to God. I can see. I can see they are suns, not tiny torches, and if suns then about those too other Earths could hang. Infinite suns, infinite worlds, deeper and deeper into bosom of God, distances vast, they make us more precious because so rare and small, defenseless before all that fire.

  Here is proof of church's teaching. God must love us to make any note of us when the very Earth is a mote of soot borne high on smoky gas.

  My poor groundlings.

  John Dee watched.

  The boy pulled back from the glass, this actor-poet-playwright. Someone else for whom there is no word. In the still and icy air, tears had frozen to his cheeks. Digges gathered him in; Rosary stepped forward; Goldenstar stared astounded. Only the spy stood apart, scorn on his face.