The Architect of Aeons (44 page)

And the alteration in his mind, even if done awkwardly, counted as Refinement. It elevated him from a mere Rustic to a Gentleman-Farmer.

But not only was no reunification forthcoming, his family and his ghost became ever more strangers to him.

Svartvestra was so stung by the cruel rejection, she recorded a fornication performance just in mockery of his love-style. He could no longer go into public houses or pink sections of the dreamscape without encountering jeers and sneers from her subscribers, or hearing trained near-dogs whistle the theme song from her base sound track.

It drove him into his archetype indeed. His soul became iron: he turned off his emotions so often the parish peace officer Maier twice served him a writ for renouncing his humanity, and asked him sarcastically why he did not use Foxcrafty to become a Myrmidon entirely. Each time Norbert restored his emotion, bitter anger overcame him.

But the technique for assuming an aspect of that ideal stoicism was still open to Norbert. Brash thought patterns were permanently imprinted, and could not fade with time. He used to amuse himself by falling into that allegedly higher state of mind, and putting his ungloved hand above a candle flame until he smelled flesh burning.

The unremoved regret hardened into resolve, and he ate a dream-apple, opening his nervous system to strange influences, and fell in love again, this time with a hamadryad bound by land-marriage to a fertile valley near the North Pole, where the gentle shadows were always long and the sun never reached zenith, even at noon.

Her name was Rose, the most common name on the planet. She was in every way the opposite of the frivolous and glamorous Svartvestra, but the end was the same. He was too artificial for her, too willing to alter himself, yet, ironically, too unwilling to drink the mind-altering love potion that would make their emotion for each other permanent structures, buttressed by neuro-circuitry, in all their personalities. Exorbert objected to the love potion, and Norbert feared to overrule the objection, not knowing, if he fought in his thoughts with Exorbert, which meant fighting the entire No
ö
sphere of Rosycross, who or what he might end up evolving into.

He was brash, was he not? To remain himself, he fled the world, joined the Guild, took their coin, and signed the articles on the first vessel from Promixa.

Had he known how mad Tellus was, he would have waited longer, slumbered longer, and fled farther.

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 No
ö
sphere 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 No
ö
sphere 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 No
ö
sphere 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 No
ö
sphere, 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.

A tradition equally as old but far more annoying held that such notes had to be sticky, so that in zero gee they would adhere to the nearest surface. Consequently it was many minutes before Norbert managed to untangle the tiny, delicate sheet without ripping it.

ZOLASTO ZO, an entrepreneur of many fortuitous licenses

Member in Good Standing of the Entertainment and Procurers Guild

Avers he will
Astound! Delight! Astonish!

With Many and Varied displays and representations

THE WONDERS OF EARTH

Your long lost Mother!

Who does not adore the Home World?

PRIMAL ABODE OF MAN!!—NEVER BEEN TERRAFORMED!!!

——

SEE the dancing nymphs of ancient Arcadia!

HEAR mellifluous sonograms from extinct man-eating Whales!

THRILL to a military display of ancient weapon forms

by
Feroccio
our Master-At-Arms!

Including the discharge of an authentic black-powder caterpillar-gun!

——

BEHOLD Fruits, nuts and berries FIT FOR HUMAN MASTICATION

grown without intervention from the NATIVE SOIL OF MANKIND!

(Certificate on file to confirm that these are UNMODIFIED by any process,

exactly as savage hunter-gatherers of primordial agribusinesses

found them in the WILD!)

——

TOUCH the parchments of the Bible written by

King James, an avatar of divine Crishna!

WRITTEN IN THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH!

(The Quill Pen and Inkstand used by Mr. King to indite his famous work

is available for view for an extra charge of one grote.)

——

ADMIRE as the delicate and nubile Mademoiselle Pelisse Roquelaure

performs the traditional native dance of long-submerged New Orleans,

city famed in myth! The dance forms have been reconstructed

With Painstaking Archeological Accuracy
from postures and displays

found in LURID advertisements of the Anteposthuman period!

CERTAIN TO BE OF INTEREST TO THE GENTLEMEN

——

As an added courtesy to those of sober and scholarly attainments,

ZOLASTO ZO

Welcomes the curious Hieronymus to our noble troupe;

and this Most Interesting and Convivial Sacerdote is available to

REMOVE CURSES, and perform MIRACLE CURES,

while making a series of interesting remarks on the mysteries of the

calendar system, or other matters CURRENTLY FASCINATING

the Attention of the Public

of All Ranks and Species of Humanity.

——

Subject matters not fitting for ladies of elevation or gentle birth are so noted;

scholars and antiquarians are acknowledged as equals!

——

(Concubinage Contracts available for Negotiation by Certified Eugenicists.

Guaranteed Clean and Bio-compatible bloodlines. Fit for Breeding.)

5. The Best Interest of the Guild

Norbert smiled grimly. The effrontery of offering to earthmen to taste or see the fruits or views of the Earth seemed noteworthy only in its absurdity.

The purpose of such spectacles was to give gentlemen an opportunity to see nymphs and breeding girls posing and gyrating before purchasing their contracts; then as if by some accident, the slavegirls would be sent, drunk on aphrodisiacs, to the gentleman's privy suite instead of to his kennels. No one older than a child ever stopped to gape at the pasteboard and tinfoil and holograms of the sideshows.

Rectifiers and other local magistrates could not easily shut down any wandering showman who pretended to act under the academic latitude guaranteed by ancient right to lectures, reenactments, and edifying displays. For just such a reason, no doubt, Zolasto Zo tolerated this oddly named Hieronymus to travel with his band.