Norbert nodded, then realized the gesture was invisible in his black mask and voluminous hood. He said, “I see! And legend also names him as one of the two founders of the Starfarer’s Guild. You seem to be asking if I am loyal to him. I am.”
“Then this is a day to rejoice.…”
“Of course,” Norbert continued, musing, “the other founder is the Judge of Ages. I am loyal to him, too, I suppose. To both of them, if they were real. Hm? Why am I rejoicing this day?”
“Merely to the opportunity to serve an undying purpose of our Guild and her wise and majestic founder. And her other founder, somewhat less majestic. But you doubt their reality? You think two such extraordinary men never lived?”
“I think Menelaus Illation Montrose and Ximen Santiago Matamoros del Azarchel are real men,” said Norbert, “about whom many unreal legends have gathered. And I also think that you are an abnormally trusting fellow.”
“For believing in legends?”
“For letting me put you-know-not-what into your system.”
“No, sir, I am only an abnormally good judge of character. Are we not both loyal to the Guild? And if I am wrong, and you have imposed a neural worm or a cataleptic trigger, you have less cause to mistrust me.”
“Well, your skin will itch abominably over the next twenty minutes, and do not scratch it, lest you break the skill and forfeit the imposture. Any nanite landing on you for a gene sample will think you are kin to Zolasto, hence whatever Zolasto has done to stupefy the defensive measures will protect you, too.”
Norbert turned his back on the man and walked on, tense and uncertain. He summoned up his brashness to clear his mind and halt his glandular capacity for fear.
The two moved through the tangled brush of the forest. Crooked branches seemed to catch the blue-green moon in a net, and the shadows of branches and twigs were thick enough that the squire, whose eyes could not pierce this gloom, walked in the footsteps of the assassin, whose eyes could.
Norbert made sure the other man was close behind him, too close for Norbert to parry a blow or a dirk in the dark should it come.
The ground was also rough and steep, and both men spent time scrambling down and scrabbling up pebbly slopes. Norbert noticed how easily one of them could have cast the other down a steep hillside to his death. He climbed as unwary as he believably could, and gave the other man every opportunity.
Norbert assumed that if the man were a Fox Maiden in disguise, and if all he had wanted was an immunity to pass into the Spaceman’s Yard, Norbert was no longer necessary and would be struck down from behind.
But minutes passed and no attack came. That meant he was not a Ghost inhabiting a human body, hungry for human sensation, nor a Fox bent on mischief wearing the outward shape of a man.
That left two possibilities. One was that the squire was exactly what he seemed: a shallow Guild bravo from some very dangerous barbaric age assigned by the ship ghosts to help Norbert kill a holy man at a carnival.
The other was that this man was stranger than any Fox.
At the top of one of these sheer-sided slopes that broke the country the assassin paused. Norbert, a dark figure in a dark cloak, half invisible against the night sky, turned and pointed at the tall tower of the Starfaring Guild rising up bleak as a sword from the village lights.
Norbert said, “Look yonder. What do you see?”
“The Tower of the Guild. At its crown in the stratosphere is the port where the Sky Island docks. At its feet is the Forever Village, where the wives and dependents of sailors on cruise await their return, frozen in slumber. Sir? What has this to do with our mission?”
“I see the Tower of the Guild, the one unchanging stability rising above the Forever Village, where time makes all hopes vain and all dreams false. Do you know my dream, squire?”
“Sir? I would not presume—”
“We are going into danger and death. Let us know each other. My dream is this: A hearth of my own, and a fertile wife and a fertile orchard, and a myriad of children to carry my soul into futurity; a sun into whose eye I can as an equal gaze; and, best of all, never to tread the stars again, nor sail the dizzying abyss of night. This means I must not die because of some dangerous or useless officer who replaced my trusted adjutant.”
“My dream is somewhat larger, sir, involving more people and a greater span of time. But it also involves a woman, a wife I have picked out for myself. I will explain myself if you trust me so far as the graveyard.”
Norbert now turned away from the distant lights of the village, stepped down from the crown of the slope, took the squire’s elbow. “Fair enough. Answer without dissimilation what I ask of you. If I prove unable to judge your character, I rule me unfit to judge Hieronymus the Sacerdote, and recuse myself.”
The squire made an elegant half bow, and waved his hand with a flip of his wrist toward the distant steeple. “Lead on. The grave awaits. Perhaps we will find the mountebank there, or old friends and lovers. I will tell my history as we go, and all will be made clear.”
2
The Antepenultimate White Ship
1. An Empyrean in Sagittarius
“I am from the earliest strata of starfaring tradition, from before when the Guild was properly a guild. I was a crewman aboard the Sagittarius Arm Expedition, when the Master of All Worlds sent the Antepenultimate White Ship to the Omega Nebula.
“The White Ship was a half mile from bow to stern, massed one million tons displacement, and had a sail diameter of five thousand miles. Every inch was made of the artificial element alchemists call argent, which is brighter than diamond and harder than steel, armor to withstand the deadliest high-frequency energy or ultra-massive particle into which near-lightspeed flight transforms harmless light and dust.
“We launched in a.d. 15177 as the Sacerdotes reckon years, back when the Myrmidons were newborn, zealous and unafflicted with their deathlust; back when the Earth had lost her magnetosphere, and the sun was poisonous, so Man and Swan alike dared not emerge save in the dark hours of the Benighted Earth.
“We had resolved, as befits the ambition of starfarers, not to allow entropy, history, nor oblivion overtake us, but to prove our high purpose could oppose and overcome that grim assassin, Father Time.
“In a.d. 29024, after the Myrmidons fled to Cyan from the Ghost-haunted Hierophants, and the Graciousness ruled Earth in soft embrace, we were remembered of great Jupiter, and the Penultimate White Ship was launched toward us, across the gulf of starlessness severing the Orion Arm from the Sagittarius Arm.
“The miracle happened again, for although our descendants forsook us, Peacock the Power of Delta Pavonis recalled, and the Splendid Lords mortgaged their world to fund the launch of a.d. 40522. The newborn Fox Maidens were gnawing at the hawsers of civilization then, and at this time Tellus went mad. All his seas were filled with ink of alcahest, the sludge of sociopathic nanite swarms, and any ship or swimming man who ventured there was warped and made strange, and all the fish were nightmares.
“That ship was the Ultimate and Last. Broken and exiled, we returned in a.d. 50822, in time to precipitate the Snow Wars, and equip the Armigers and Ecologists to overthrow the haunted palaces beneath the sea.
“Therefore three tours I served, crossing five thousand years in a year. The steepest time-slips of the oldest hand on the swiftest ship here in the First Empyrean are as nothing to me.
“The Sagittarius Arm is a golden realm, richer in every way than this Orion Arm we occupy. That Arm is thick with giant molecular clouds and H II regions of partially ionized gas, useful for ramscoop flight. The short-lived blue stars born in these regional clouds shed copious ultraviolet light into the surrounding medium, which helps both planetary accretion and aids the condensation of interstellar amino acid precursor molecules. But the richest jewel in the Sagittarius Arm is the Omega Nebula, for it is the most massive star-forming region in the Milky Way. And where the stars are made in great numbers, so too are worlds.