Norbert said, “And when the aristocrats are logic crystals filling living worlds, what then? Only you earthmen know what it is like not to have ancestors living in the medical camps, when one race and then another was tested against the environments to be colonized on far worlds, and the losers exterminated to the last blood cell. Only our forefathers passed the trial by ordeal bloodthirsty Jupiter imposed, whereas your forefathers did not. But those camps were abolished by the Fox Maidens. If inequality is ideal, why did history not halt at points when Jupiter was supreme? Was not the inequality greater then?”

“History suffers expansion and contraction, boom and bust,” said the squire dismissively. “Democracy can endure during the fat years, but only an absolute power can allow the people to survive the lean years, when discipline is needed. Both are temporary deviations from the natural state of man, which is hierarchical, but not tyrannous.”

“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.”