The Architect of Aeons (52 page)

“Or perhaps the medieval form of life is a transition state from one to the other, which is why history can never find rest,” said Norbert. “The first Dark Age was a transition between the absolutism of the Roman Empire and the liberty of the Space Age; and the Second Dark Age was between the liberty of the Space Age and the absolutism of the Imperial Pentagon, and so on. The world favored by the Master of the World is unstable because
he
is unstable.”

“What?”

“Was I unclear, squire? Consider the Master of the World, whom you mentioned before. He is a man who with one hand plucks all the godlike powers of diamond stars from heaven, or Monuments of appalling antiquity and darkest knowledge up from hell; and then with the other hand creates the Second Empyrean Polity of Man in Sagittarius. Such a man surely has the ability to make the future howsoever he wills—what could Foxes or Judges or anyone do to oppose such a man? They are shadows to him!
He has no foes but himself
. History has not ended because he, the Master of Eternity, he simply cannot make up his mind!”

The squire in the dark dashed his foot against a stone, and uttered curses in some language long ago drowned in time. Norbert halted while the squire sat on a stump, drawing off his boot and nursing his foot. As Norbert suspected, he had separate toes, like something out of an archeologist's rendering of primitive man. The squire folded back the cuff of his glove, revealing a red amulet. This was a museum-piece bio-prosthetic like those worn by Sacerdotes, who still dressed in the alb and surplice of Roman pontiffs. The squire tapped the surface, ordering the bones of his foot to regrow into a sterner configuration.

Eventually the squire looked up and said, “Why do you say the Master cannot decide the fate of man?”

“Why does he continue to maintain a biological body? Are not the copies of his soul stored in the core of mad Tellus and all-too-sane Jupiter enough for him?”

“That is a good question,” said the squire slowly.

“I know it is, because it is the last question my Exorbert asked me before I stowed aboard a lifting vessel, and begged the Guild master of the Space Island to grant me life.”

“You are a reckless man. Guild regulations say to thrust stowaways into the total conversion chamber, so that their excess mass is converted to thrust, to make for what their deadweight subtracted.”

“A great-grandfather on my mother's side, a Rosselyn from Fludd Parish, was an apprentice for one term, which meant I had a bloodline claim to membership. That coincidence prevented me from being introduced to the inside of a mass converter. Do you see why I understand the Master of the World better than you, even though you served under him? He is too much like me for me to be deceived. Stand up! Time flies but we must walk!”

They trudged along in silence for a time.

Eventually the squire broke the silence. “Just out of curiosity, what is this insight you say you have into the mind of the Master of the World?”

“You say his White Ship was driven out of Sagittarius. But it could have sailed to any human world from Rosycross to Uttaranchal. Why here? Why was the White Ship brought to Sol? What was meant to be decided by this act? Here, where Jupiter is strongest?”

“Speak more plainly! What is your question, sir? What are you trying to imply?”

“Is the Master of the World the enemy of Jupiter?”

The squire made a thoughtful hum in his throat, and said, “Mm. Perhaps we should not speak so plainly. Some of these trees within earshot are oaks, and they are sacred to Jupiter.”

9. On Holy Ground

They trudged for a time in silence. Soon the old cathedral loomed over them. It was dark within, but not completely dark, for a few votive candles within glinted from the silver frame and glass petals of the rose window. This round window was just above the great carven doors, so that the cathedral looked like a cyclops with his head thrown back and his great mouth, peaked like the bill of a bird and pointing at the stars, hung open.

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.