Tellus disturbed his mind.

3. A Discontented Consciousness

His consciousness, even his conception of what a consciousness was, perforce differed remarkably from that of a dawn-age man.

Basically there were three zones of thought in his mind: an inner zone which he thought of as himself, his own basic memories, ideals, reasoning processes, passions, appetites, and drives; an outer zone, which was the shared memories of the world-mind in which he lived, the spirit of the age; and a large middle zone where the two mingled, where he kept, as a mental menagerie, a wide variety of servant personalities, which he could use like masks to fend off unwanted thought-streams from the outer zone. There were well-worn channels in this middle zone reaching to the outer, where entities like family albums and social organizations kept their thoughts, or ghosts met in parliament to discuss matters too remote in the future to concern him. It was also a lively market for exchanging intellectual property, which logicians bred like livestock, or daring hunters recovered from deep in the outer zone.

Intellectually, he knew this outer zone extended infinitely, into the mind of the Noösphere like an atmosphere; but for all practical purposes, it was like the dome of the sky, mere backdrop. Every now and again the world changed, like blowing winds that changed his mood. The spirit of the age only took over his mind and body during Mass, or planetary consensus, or for a riot or military exercise, and this was as rare as rainfall.

What he had not expected, when coming to senile Tellus, was to discover how little of the innermost zone was actually his own, himself. Most of his opinions about everything had come from his family or had been written in by censor of the Lord of the Afternoon of Promixa Centauri.

His taste in women was dictated by the seamstresses guild; his taste in sport by the gamesters guild; his sweet tooth was entirely an invention of the pastry and confectioner’s guild.

Once on Earth, the outer zone was an alien atmosphere to him, with roaring shapes larger than gods moving through it; the middle zone changed suddenly, and was filled with moods and merchandise stranger than the bottom of the sea. He was told he would become used to the revolting practices of the Earthlings in time. Everyone had assured him, from his ghostly counselor to his personality advocate, to his libido coordinator, to his cliometry planner, that while Tellus was insane, many of the outer systems, telephone and memory reflex storage, were perfectly safe, sagacious and discreet.

But then one day he found himself without his clothing and feathered like a duck from crown to heel, having lost his skin in a haiku recital wager to a sly redhaired woman in a place that was a cross between a butcher shop and a gambling den. There, standing on naked feet in a stain of his own blood, he realized two things. First, he did not even like haiku, or, for that matter, the smell of duck meat. Second, everyone who so blithely said Tellus was safe was mad. Tellus was a world of fads and fashions and hysteria. Inviting the mind of Tellus into your mind was inviting disaster.

That same day he threw away all his receiver decks and augmentation sets, even the small coral button his mother gave him at birth. He sacked his advocate and coordinator and planner and reduced his interface to be the stark minimum necessary to carry out his duties as a Starfarer: public postal and library channels, navigation feeds, weather and riot reporting, navigational computation, and little beyond that.

He put in a request to be slotted to the Sky Island, which was a lighter-than-air platform in the stratosphere used for catching deorbiting cargo rigs, because it was the most dangerous and most highly rewarded duty station. He worked extra shifts, hoping a stray container, white hot with reentry heat, might accidentally miss the magnetic vortex, strike the cage, and crush his feathery body, which he hated. It was two seasons of frugal living, eating only noodles and vitamin slurry, until he earned enough to buy himself a proper human skin again. He deliberately bought one in a color modern fashion despised, a pinkish pale hue allegedly from a sunken land called Europe, very different from the jet-black, silver-eyed coloration of Rosycross.

Even after that, his austere habits remained. He spoke to no one save by voice, appeared on no bulletin board or staging boards, purchased nothing on credit, visited no calamity houses. And he never once used the Fox arts to turn himself into a dolphin during mating season, even though apparently every lunatic Earthling male in heat took to the seas in the spring, leaving the beaches empty save for hastily shed clothing. As far as the Noösphere of Earth was concerned, he was practically invisible.

So it was not surprising when the Proconsul for the Starfaring Guild approached him and asked if he wanted to be assigned to special operations, and kill men and exorcise ghosts. The duty was even more dangerous and despicable than being a longshoreman on the Sky Island, and so he accepted eagerly.

A decade later, when the verdict of the Interdict was announced, and communion with the Noösphere was denied to him, he had been living so austerely for so long that he should not have noticed it. It was like a Franciscan under a vow of poverty being sued at law for his possessions.

But the solitude still ached. Alone in his own mind, he was still surprised at how small and lonely a mind it was.

4. Fugitives of Interdiction

Such was his life, contented in small things, discontented in large. Norbert the Assassin was sitting in the sill of his huge round wide-open window-port staring at the lights of the Forever Village, and half dozing while half heeding a report being sung to him in plaintive tones, when a notice extruded itself from an anonymous slot on his desk, and a chime of tone and period whose meaning he did not recognize rang out.

Encoded as eerie Monument music, the report was of an extraordinary discharge detected between Sol and the star 20 Arietis. The chime interrupted the song and marred it, whereupon the singer (being as sensitive and fickle as abstract musician constructs tend to be) grew sullen and would not continue.

An icy plutino, a small body in interstellar space, had wandered into the line between Sol and 20 Arietis, and ignited, betraying the presence of an energy path. The star 20 Arietis was speculated to be a major nexus of Hyades internal communication. But who of Sol was sending communication there and why? The song had been about to reach the speculative conclusions of the report when the interruption came.

So Norbert glanced down in annoyance. He whistled for his desk. On its six stumpy legs, it lumbered over to the window where he sat. He had never before known that this slot was built into the desk. A query search returned a blank: the slot had no name or history in the local infosphere of the tower. (The tower ghosts were legally denizens of outer space, not part of the Tellurian Noösphere, and therefore open to him.) A wider search to a ship’s boat passing overhead like a shooting star was equally barren of results. One property of antiques was that their instruction manuals had vanished in earlier eons, and this was especially true on Senile Earth, where it was not unusual to come across loud public houses or snarky drinking vessels older than every man-made object on Rosycross.

The notice was printed on a sheet of fine onionskin. By tradition, everything of the Starfarers had to be of low mass, and have no electronic failure points: as if monstrous modern vessels made of invulnerable argent materials accelerated by beams of planet-obliterating strength fretted about acceleration costs, or worried about electromagnetic pulses from hull collisions.