Launch Pad

by Jody Lynn Nye

  Lamboine—who had once been called Ion when they were boys together in a mountain village plentifully far away from the Holy Precincts—raised his eyes from the page. “There is nothing in this world I am not entitled to know, Bili.”

  “You understand me perfectly as always.”

  Those words summoned a small, sad smile, one that Quinx also remembered far too well from a youth lost six decades past. “That is why I am the Gatekeeper and you are my hound,” Lamboine replied. As ever, his voice was preternaturally patient. “I have always wondered why our friends among the Thalassocretes have never sought to place a man on the Footstool of the Increate.”

  Ion was one of the few remaining alive who could provoke Quinx to unthinking response. “Do you honestly suppose they never have done so? I am numbered among their rolls, after all.”

  “They think you their spy in the house of the Increate.” Another small smile. “In any event, I should think I would know if one of them had ever held my throne. My opinion is that they have never felt a need to. Truth is a strange commodity.”

  “Much like privacy,” Quinx almost whispered, echoing his own, earlier thoughts.

  The Gatekeeper shook his head. “Privacy is just a special case of truth, or its withholding. This …” His hand, palsied with the infirmity of age that had yet to over come Quinx, swept over the open book. “This is truth of a different sort.”

  “No, Your Holiness. It is not. It is only the Thalassocretes’ story. We have the Increate and the evidence on our side.”

  “What makes you think there are sides, Bili?”

  In that moment, Quinx saw Lamboine’s death. Flesh stretched tight and luminous across his face, the deep, natural brown of his skin paling to the color of milk in coffee, his eyes brittle as cracked opals. The man’s fires were guttering. “There are always sides, Ion. That has been my role these long years here, preserving and defending your side.” He paused a moment, then added: “Our side.”

  The Gatekeeper waited several measures of silence too long for comfort before replying. “I am glad you did not claim a side for the Increate. They are all, and They are everything.”

  “Of course.” Quinx bowed his head.

  A trembling hand descended in surprising blessing. Quinx had not even realized that the Gatekeeper had set the book down. “Do not rely too much on evidence, my oldest friend. It has a way of turning against you in time. Proof can change with circumstance. Faith is the rock upon which we must always build.”

  Quinx remained bowed until the Gatekeeper had departed, shuffling far enough down the spiral stairs to summon his attendants, who bore him away on a wave of soft whispers and perfume. After a time, he rose and set some incense alight before kneeling on a bolster with a small ricepaper copy of Librum Vita in his grip. It had been made in distant Sind, something of a curiosity, copied out in a firm hand by a man wielding a brush comprised of only a single hair. Act of faith? Dedication to art?

  It did not matter. The Increate’s words fit in the palm of Quinx’ hands. From there, he drew comfort as surely as he had from his mother’s grasp once so long ago.

  Or Ion’s.

  The relief of prayer drew him in then, toward the dim inner light that always filled Bilious Quinx when he sought the Increate in honest, faithful silence with open heart and empty thoughts.

  O O O

  Much later he trimmed the wicks in his office and lit the night lamp. Darkness had descended outside, the evening breeze bearing the itching scent of pollen and spring chill off the mountains to the east and south. Quinx opened his windows, their red glazing parted to let the tepid lamplight spill out and compete with the distant stars.

  The Lateran Palace had its own observatories, of course. Someone must demarcate the lines of the world. Even the almighty Thalassojustity had in the past been willing to leave the skies to the Church. The irony of that was not lost on Quinx in these late days. He was certain it was no less lost on the Thalassocretes in Highpassage and elsewhere.

  No matter his own initiation into their ranks; the Thalassojustity had always known who and what Quinx was, and whose creature he had been, body and soul. That Ion was dying now changed nothing of Quinx’ loyalties.

  He considered the prohibitorum, lying so carelessly open where the Gatekeeper had left it on one of the round room’s several curve-backed writing desks. The book was open to a map of the Garden of Ganj, annotated only as the heretics of the Thalassojustity would bother to do. This particular volume was a first printing of the Revised Standard Survey, Th. 1907. Almost a hundred years old, and their color plates a century past were as good as anything the Lateran presses could manage even today.

  Ion had left a scrap tucked in the center crease. Quinx plucked it out, his own hand trembling. It was a short note that must have been written before the Gatekeeper had come up to see him, in Ion’s lifelong careful copperplate hand, rendered edgy and strange by the exigencies of age.

  O O O

  Dearest—

  Do not let them elect you to the Gatekeeper’s throne after me. And do not be afraid of what may be proven. Farewell. I regret that I must go before.

  Always yours.

  O O O

  So he had seen truly into the Gatekeeper’s face. And Dearest. They had not used that word between them in over five decades. Quinx carefully burned the note, then stirred the ashes. After that he trimmed his night lamp back to darkness, closed and sealed the prohibitorum with a black ribbon, and took a chair by one of the open casements to watch the stars wheel slowly until just after midnight when the Lateran tower bells began to ring their death knells.

  When the great, iron bell of the Algeficic Tower tolled last and slowest of all, his tears finally flowed.

  O O O

  Love is the sin that will not be denied.

  —Librum Vita, Wisdoms 7:23;

  being the Book of Life and word entire of the Increate

  O O O

  The funerary rites for His Holiness Lamboine XXII began at Matins as the first flickering sweep of dawn glowed like coals in the eastern sky. In his role as Preserver of the Faith, and therefore fourth-ranking priest in the Lateran hierarchy, Quinx could have insisted on being the celebrant. The two men above him were already closeted deep in the electoral politics of the Primacy, those same delegates from around the world having received the Gatekeeper’s death notice by telelocutor for the first time in Church history.

  Quinx had a sick feeling that he would soon grow very weary of that last thought: the first time in history.

  Instead of celebrating, he chose to attend as a congregant, a man, a priest, a mourner. The Deacon of the Lateran High Chapel led the first round of services. He was a young man with a perpetually surprised expression, now properly dressed in a sweeping black cassock embroidered in gold and silver thread, though he’d begun the services in a nightshirt before being rescued by an acolyte with the right set of chamber keys.

  Incense, again, and the familiar tones of the chimes indicating the order of service.

  As the deacon struck them in turn, Quinx tried to put the memory of the tower bells away. Not to forget, for nothing could be forgotten by a man in his office, but to be set aside.

  Prayer was a valve opened to the comfort of the Increate, from Whom all things sprang and to Whom all things flowed. There were times when he could understand the attraction of the Aquatist Heresies, for all that their pernicious metaphors had nearly fatally tangled the Lateran Church in its own liturgies. There were times when he wondered what the Increate truly intended, as if They would speak directly to him in response. There were times when quiet refuge was the greatest gift They could give him. Quinx let the deacon’s droning voice lead him from grief to some other place where his cares could wait on the attentions of his heart.

  Somewhere in memory, two young men on a hillside scattered with sheep, goats, and bright blue flowers laughed under a summer sky and spoke together of all things great and small.

  O O O


  When fingers touched his shoulder, Quinx was briefly startled. He’d gone so far into meditation that he’d lost himself in the well-worn rituals of the service. Become the liturgy, as they used to say in seminary.

  He looked around. Brother Kurts, his lead investigator, stood as always just a bit too close.

  “Sir,” the monk growled. A big man, one of those pale northerners who somehow never seemed to advance far in the Church hierarchy, Kurts carried far more than his own weight. The man was a boulder in a snowfield. Here, in the midst of service, his blocky frame and the dark brown rough-spun habit of his Sibellian Order made him a brutal shout against the soaring of the silk-robed choir who must have filed in to the loft while Quinx had been meditating.

  “Kurts?”

  “You must come, sir. We have an urgent dispatch from Highpassage. By air.”

  “By air?” Briefly, Quinx felt stupid—an unusual sensation for him. Of late, matters of great urgency were transmitted via telelocutor. His own office had approved such innovation only three years earlier, well after the undersea cable had been laid between Highpassage and the Lateran, crossing beneath the Attik Main. Matters of great secrecy were handled quite differently, and always with utmost discretion.

  Sending an airship across the sea the night of His Holiness’ death was tantamount to lighting a flare.

  “By air, sir,” Kurts confirmed. “Matroit dispatched the messenger.”

  Matroit. The man was the very model of probity, and no more likely to panic than he was to fly to the moon. But the timing of the thing … It stank of politics. Quinx felt briefly ill. “Was the vessel a Thalassojustity airship?”

  The monk shook his head. “A racing yacht. I understand it was put about to have been sent on a dare by some of the young wastrels of the city.”

  Not an utterly unreasonable cover story, Quinx had to admit, for all that such defiance of the Thalassojustity was outrageous. Outrageous served as the stock in trade of a certain set in Highpassage. He set aside for later consideration the issue of how Lucan Matroit was connected to that set in the first place. For now, a dispatch this urgent would be a distraction to his grieving heart.

  How welcome or unwelcome remained to be seen.

  He did not bother to ask if Kurts had read it. The man would not have done so. In his entire life, Quinx had only ever trusted two men utterly. The first of those had passed on into the hands of the Increate last night. The other was here before him. Whatever Kurts’ many flaws, the monk was loyal to the bone. Blood and vows, vows and blood, as they used to say.

  Quinx gathered the skirts of his cassock and rose from the prayer bench. He gave an approving nod to the deacon, now well into the third iteration of the funerary mass and looking distinctly tired, before withdrawing from the High Chapel in the wake of his man.

  O O O

  They closeted themselves in a tiny dining room from which Quinx had by virtue of his office ruthlessly evicted four hungry priests. Plates of plain eggs and blackbread toast still steamed. He considered the contents of the envelope presented by Kurts. The seal had been genuine enough, to the best of Quinx’ rather well sharpened ability to determine. For something that had come rushing over hundreds of miles of open water, the letter within was sufficiently sparse as to seem laughable. A single sheet of creme-colored Planetary Society paper, with that slick finish favored by the very wealthy, though it would take few inks. A rushed hand, script rather than copperplate, the pigments a curious green that was one of Matroit’s affectations. And only a very few words indeed.

  But such dangerous ones.

  It was dated the previous day though no time was given. He realized on reflection that this missive must have been written before Ion’s death could have been known, just by judging the miles the message had flown even at the speed of the fastest air racing yacht.

  O O O

  Revered—

  The Externalist heresy was proclaimed again today in the Plenary Hall. To my surprise, the Thalassocretes have taken custody of the young man in question, but I have secured his work for the nonce. There is a possibility of empirical evidence.

  M.

  O O O

  Evidence.

  Proof.

  Had Ion known last night this letter was coming, known as he was dying? Or was it simply that now happened to be the world’s time for such trials? The cloying smell of cooling eggs provided no answer.

  Still, Quinx felt a swift trip to Highpassage would be in order. With their profound challenge to the roots of Lateran doctrine, Externalists were a far more troublesome heresy than the dissenters such as the Machinists or the Originalists. Putting paid to this renewed outbreak of Externalism before it had a chance to establish and multiply was an utmost priority. And that errand in turn would keep him safely away from the deliberations of the Assemblage of Primates, who would surely be meeting in camera the moment the Gatekeeper’s body had been sufficiently blessed. Death was an unfortunate pause in events, but politics continued forever.

  There was a young man to see, and a Thalassojustity to face down. Again.

  Why people insisted on resisting the obvious and holy truths of the Increate was one of those mysteries of free will that a priest could spend his lifetime contemplating without any success. If all the saints of ancient days could not answer such a question, surely Bilious Quinx would be no wiser.

  Questions he could not answer, but problems he could solve. “Brother Kurts …”

  “Sir?”

  “Does the airship pilot perhaps await our pleasure?”

  There was the briefest pause, then the slightest tone of satisfaction in the monk’s reply. “I have already made certain of it, sir.”

  O O O

  The advantages of the reflecting telescope over the refracting telescope cannot be overstated, and should be obvious to any thinking man. While the great refractors of the past century have multiplied our understanding of the Increate’s work amidst the heavens, the practical exigencies of glass-making, gravity, and the engineering arts limit the refracting mirrors to less than fifty inches of diameter. Advances in the philosophy of the reflecting telescope have produced designs by such luminaries as Kingdom Obasa’s son and successor, BruneI, for mirrors of a hundred inches or greater! Even now, the Planetary Society raises a subscription for such a heavenly monster to be placed upon Mount Sysiphe north of High passage, that we might enumerate the craters of the moon and count the colors of the stars to better understand the glories of Creation. A true union of Science and Faith can only prosper from such noble endeavors.

  —Editorial in the Highpassage Argus-Intelligencer,

  November 2nd, H.3123, Th.1997, L.6011

  O O O

  “Lesser Bench” was a misnomer. Morgan knew that. Everybody knew that. The Greater Bench met only in solemn conclave on the beach to hear capital cases, and certain classes of piracy accusations. Everything else that transpired in the Thalassojustity took place under the purview of the Lesser Bench.

  The question was which of those benches.

  The two Marines dragged Morgan into the interior of the Thalassojustity Palace.

  The main nave soared to the roof, some eighty feet above, and was lined with enormous statues of sea captains and Thalassocretes through the ages. The joke ran that the bodies remained the same and the heads were switched from time to time. What ever the truth, the sculpture represented one of the greatest troves of Classical art in the world, with continuous provenance stretching back well before the onset of consistent recordkeeping.

  Glorious, strange, and too large for the world—that was the majesty of the Thalassojustity, encapsulated in the dialectic of art.

  At the moment, Morgan was feeling inglorious, ordinary, and far too small. Even the marble flags here were oversized, designed to intimidate.

  He was scooted a bit too fast past the massive altarpiece at the far end of the nave, through a bronze door wrought with an overly detailed relief of some long-forgotten
naval battle, and into a far more ordinary hallway that could have been found in any reasonably modern commercial building in Highpassage. Electricks flickered overhead, giving a reddish-yellow cast to the light. Entrances lining each side of the hallway were so mundane as to be aggressive in their plainness—dark brown, two paneled doors, each relieved with frosted glass painted with the name of some bureau or official. Cocked-open transoms above each provided some relief from a warmth that must be stifling in high summer.

  Only the carpet, a finely napped deep blue that Morgan could not put a name to, betrayed the true wealth of this place.

  Well down the hall he was propelled into an intersecting corridor with doors set much farther apart. Larger rooms for larger purposes? The Courts of the Lesser Bench, he realized, as they passed a door where gold-flecked lettering proclaimed “EXCISE BENCH.”

  The door he was pushed through was marked “LOYALTY BENCH.”

  Morgan’s heart stuttered cold and hard. The treason court. Where offenses against the Thalassojustity itself, or against the common good, were tried.

  The door slammed behind him. No Marines. Morgan whirled, taking in the small gallery, the judge’s podium, stands for witness and examiner, the interrogation chair, glass cabinets where evidence or exhibits might be stored.

  And no one present. No judge, no advocates, no clerks of the court, no bailiffs, no witnesses, no one at all but himself. Defendant?

  The walls rose high, two or three stories, though not as tall as the nave. These were paneled with inlays of half a dozen different colored woods to create a pleasing abstract pattern. Electrick chandeliers dangled overhead. Their fat iron arms signaled their gas lamp history.

  Morgan ceased gaping and sat down in the gallery. He had no desire to approach the front of the courtroom. As nothing seemed to be taking place, he simply closed his eyes for a moment. His heartbeat calmed for the first time since stepping to the podium back at the Plenary Hall of the Planetary Society.

  Without sight, other senses sharpened. He smelled the furniture polish and floor wax of the courtroom, along with the faint ozone scent of the electricks. All of it masked the underlying accumulation of human stress and fear. Perspiration had left its indelible mark in the air.