“No sir!” said the squire, with a charming grin and a cock of the head. His smile flashed like a white chevron of lightning in his black goatee. “It is assassins who enjoy their work I find disturbing.”
“I am trying to warn you that once you are marked as a killer, the sacerdotes may pardon you, but the virgins will not. The chrism cannot be washed off.”
“Your warning is too late by too many years to count. My first murder was a year before my first shave. I used the razor better in the former event, and was cut less painfully.”
Norbert stood. “It is time to depart. Any other questions?”
“Just one. Your family name is Mynyddrhodian mab Nwyfre?”
“Yes?”
“How does one pronounce Nwyfre?”
“Simple. It rhymes with Mwyfre. Dial your uniform to stealth settings, and especially your boots,” said Norbert. “We need no noise, and dare not use wings. Now back along the ledge and down the outer rungs.”
7. The Lights of the Forever Village
As the two descended the uncertain rungs of the tower hull in the darkness, cold, and wind, underfoot could be seen the colored lights of the timeless town called the Forever Village.
The tower base itself was on interstellar ground: the soil here had been brought, one handful at a time, from other worlds in other systems, and nothing earthly could grow in it.
Then the two men departed the tower and entered the village, whose soil was mundane. The Village was arranged concentrically, each younger quarter surrounding an older. The oldest street was hence the first they crossed, near the tower base. Around them shined the searchlights and robotic lamps of the bellicose era of the Snow Wars. Norbert wondered what wives and families slumbered or thawed here, awaiting sailormen to return from a thousand years of time loss. Were there any cruises so long?
The houses here were built like metallic tortoise shells. At night their door valve and nanomachine-locks were sealed tight, and the snouts of ceremonial weapons peered out menacingly. The cobbled streets of this quarter of the village were empty of traffic or dogs or litter. The two men passed on their silent boots like shadows.
They passed another gate, and entered another generation of architecture and technology. Here gambrel windows were aglint with candlelight or burning peat beneath high-peaked roofs of red slate, from an age when wintertime still came.
The Aedile had decreed all the streets in the village eternal, commanding them to repair themselves forever back into their present look. The two men passed beneath a breed of particularly ungainly bird roosting on the eaves of a longhouse from the Forty-ninth Millennium. It would be restored from extinction again and again, merely so that any sailor from the era of the Ineluctable Curses could waken to the distinctive notes of its harsh dawn-caw.
It was a sad reminder of how low the technology could fall, but a proud testament to the fact that the Starfarers maintained continuity across even the darkest of dark ages, and continued to recruit men even from wounded and hopeless times to sail the stars and man the libraries.
Norbert broke the stillness. “Why were you assigned to this mission, if you are not my watchdog?”
“No doubt because of my willingness to do the work,” chuckled the other. “I will do any dark deed to preserve the Guild.”
“Why?”
“Because there is no Vindication of Man without the Starfaring Guild to ignite the deceleration beam to return the Swan Princess Rania to our frame of reference. All the work of history is wasted if we fail. What of yourself?”
“I am assigned to find Zolasto Zo because my grandfather’s sister went mad after eating an apple,” said Norbert.
The squire waited a moment, then squinted and said, “I don’t understand.”
“A dream-apple, from Rosycross. The first and only planet of Proxima, which the Swans call Alpha Centauri C?”
“I have heard of the world, sir. It is said to have a huge wall circling the equator.”
Norbert felt a pang of the emotion called hiraeth for which there was no direct earthly equivalent: it is partly homesickness, partly mourning for the unknown dead, but it also included the thirst for cider never to be drunk again, a hunger for bucolic beauty, and the sense of loss for the noble and legend-haunted past.
He had been to the great equatorial wall once, when he was apotheosized. The wall was shaped like some vast world serpent with curving sides. It circumnavigated the planet, occupying a cold volcanic canyon that ran rule-straight across field and meadow, cleaving mountain and bridging the dark and tideless ocean. Legend said the great wall had been formed when the space elevator of the long-lost first colony had collapsed.
The world-circling wall ran to and from a jagged quarter-mile-high stump of windowless metal that housed the Lord of the Golden Afternoon for Rosycross, a Hierophant named the Alarch of Eleirch. Here he and all his cliometric machinery which wove the world’s future lived. The rest of Rosycross was rural: highlands of small farms, or lowlands of large plantations crisscrossed by canals, hemmed by dikes. Everything was the hue of wine beneath the soft, dim nearby sun.
Norbert was homesick for where the eyes of women were silver-white like the eyes of angels. He longed to smell the scent of dream-orchards again, or to see the dragonfly-winged skiffs with their wise eyes sliding on their crooked pontoon legs across the black and tideless seas of that moonless world. But most of all wished once more to gaze at the face of a sun gentle and mild enough to watch the sunspots and swirled vortices drifting across many bands of fire, so unlike the unfriendly sun of Earth, which scalded his eyes when a forgetful moment tempted him to look the monster in the face.
Hatred of the Interdict that barred his home from him once again rose in his throat like bile. He often wondered what could have happened back home to cause a catastrophe such as radio silence. Had a whole generation been raised to be so selfish and shortsighted that they would no longer tolerate the expense of powering an orbital laser to send their annuals and world-journals to their neighbor stars? The rise of an ungrateful generation such as would be needed to betray the interstellar radio law would have been anticipated cliometrically. The Golden Lord of Rosycross should have taken steps a generation ago to prevent it. Why hadn’t he?
Norbert shook off the mood. “Yes. That wall is named the Honored and Ancient Spire Recumbent, or Stumblespire, for short. My great aunt is said to have emerged from the forest of Ashmole after having been outraged by a fertility incubus created by the Fox Princess Sortilage, pregnant with Ungbert Mynyddrhodian mab Nwyfre, who changed his name to Ung Zooanthropos mab Bwystfil. You understand?”
“Ah … Nothing has leapt shrieking into unambiguous clarity as yet, sir.”
“I had assumed the Noösphere of Tellus would have all the related information.”
“Some days Tellus is more lucid than others, sir.”
“Zooanthropos is the long form of the name Zo. From Ung come all the Zo families of Ashmole Parish, not to mention the high crime rate and births out of wedlock for which the Parish is famous. Zolasto Zo is my second cousin. I am a Rosicrucian.”
“An exile? Oh. Ah—sorry, sir.”
“No matter,” snapped Norbert curtly.
“Sir, I did not mean to bring up an unpleasant, ah—”
“No matter! I am aware that Jupiter’s decree exiles me from my beloved home. Yet without such penalties as interdictions and excommunications, how could a polity across interstellar ranges be maintained? You earthmen on your bright world with your steady sun are tempted ever to be the optimists, and think the universe is bright and steady. Rosycross is a dark world of an unsteady sun, so our view is truer to life.”