The Architect of Aeons (55 page)

Montrose said, “That Blackie is against Rania's return. He likes slavery, and the easiest way to keep mankind chained to the Hyades is to prevent the Vindication of Man.”

Del Azarchel raised an eyebrow. “I am taken by surprise. I had supposed all this to be
your
doing.”

Montrose looked sincerely outraged. “What?
Me
prevent Rania's return? You nuts?”

“No, not prevent her return, only to maneuver Jupiter into attempting to prevent her return, so that this forces me to destroy Jupiter, my own son and masterpiece. Otherwise, if she returns and mankind is freed from Hyades but not free from Jupiter, this would be gall to you—you have plans ready for the various eventualities occurring after her return, have you not? Or have I overestimated your subtlety?”

Cazi rolled her beautiful yellow eyes and said to Norbert, “You see what it is like, living with two insane conspirators who are insanely old. Every event not arranged by one, he thinks is the work of the other. They both think we are just props and bit-part players in their two-man epic. Even after the Swans spanked them like brats and sent them to stand in the corner at Jupiter, wearing conical dunce caps, they will not learn. They are stubborn.” She shrugged, which once again displayed the creamy curve of her shoulders to her advantage. “I hope they never learn. I like stubborn. It's cute.”

Norbert looked between Cazi and Del Azarchel. “You two have had dealings with each other?”

Cazi narrowed her eyes. She smiled such a thin smile and wide that it was alarming. “I was born in the Fortieth Millennium, and have been gnawing at the entrails of Tellus and Jupiter, the little slavedriver and the great, from that time to this. I once visited the Ximen at his home, to see if he was worthy of Princess Rania, because I was curious to see if he could make me betray my master Menelaus.” She licked her lips as if in great relish. “I stole something from him then, which he can never recover. He will not admit it, will you, Ximen? Not the proud Master of Everything in the World except himself. Do I not speak the truth, Ximen?”

Del Azarchel said to Norbert, “She never speaks the truth. Not the whole truth.”

Cazi pouted, “I speak the
fun
parts of the truth.”

Del Azarchel said, “She is not even the real Cazi. The race is composed entirely of totipotent cells, and they can rapidly grow and ungrow organs as need be, or turn their entire bodies into a thinking mass like a Myrmidon. They change shape and impersonate each other. Whoever best impersonates Cazi is elected Cazi.”

The fox woman sniffed in disdain. “I ate the dead brains of my predecessor and I am possessed by her ghost; we maintain continuity better than your crude Myrmidons. But now you made me say something that disgusts my pretty Norbert of Promixa, so now he will not love me! I should call my deadliest guards!”

There was a motion at the cross-shaped rip in the screen behind them. Two redheads came through the opening, smiling and laughing silently, their yellow eyes glittering. Both were less callipygious and buxom than a Nymph would be, being taller and more slender, but they had long and well-shaped torsos and pert and well-shaped breasts, with very red nipples, and their pale skins were freckled all over. Their bodies were naked, but they wore black gloves to the elbow and black stockings to the knee. They sported two oddities: one was that their feet were longer and more slender than human feet, with strangely elongated toes like those of a spaceman from days long past. The other was that a two-foot-long fox tail, red as flame and tripped with white, came curving up from the base of each woman's spine, like the flirtatious decoration of a showgirl. Hovering near their long, black-clad fingers were white pearls bathed in silver fire.

Del Azarchel stepped to one side, raised his sword and lit it, and a symbol of ill fortune appeared beneath his feet. In his other hand he held a globule of semitransparent golden goo, which seemed to have a writhing motion at its heart. He cocked his wrist as if ready to drop the orb.

“Cowhand, must things grow difficult? Control your pet.”

Montrose snorted. “As if I ever could. Cazi, don't hurt him.”

Cazi said in a cheerful voice, “Lady Gitsune and Lady Strega! When next he sleeps, be it in an hour or an aeon hence, I want him to wake with the head of an ass instead of his own upon his neck. Do not meddle with his nervous system, except to change his perception, so he does not notice the head, but thinks his look is normal.”

Norbert looked back and forth, expecting to see some energy or instrument in use, but if the naked Fox girls did anything aside from grin, it was not visible even to his eyes.

“Cazi! I told you to leave him be!” said Montrose angrily.

She batted her eyelashes at him. “No, you said not to
hurt
him. This will improve his virtue by diminishing his vanity.”

“Fine. Then this will improve your virtue,” snarled Montrose, and with a kick and a curse, he sent the flying monkeys to chase the naked girls from the room. Flinging excrement and swinging truncheons, the monkeys rushed at the two maidens. Both girls screamed in mock alarm and dropped to all fours and ran, and they had the fur and the shape of foxes before they had circled the chamber twice, knocking over braziers and smashing mirrors, and darted through the opening and fled outside, still pursued by hooting monkeys.

Del Azarchel had sheathed his sword, and now was staring at the red amulet on his wrist. “There has been a disturbance on the submolecular level with the skin and muscle and bone cells of my cranium. Montrose, please abate this nuisance that we might discuss our business here.”

“Hey, Blackie, it's not like I invited you into my parlor. I been living in graveyards all the years your pet Jupiter Brain was spying on the doings of the human race. Don't worry. If the strumpets jinxed your brain correctly, you won't be able to notice anything wrong with your head, so why let it bug you?” He turned to Cazi. “You mean him to have a burro head, right? Not a second buttocks? That would be crude.”

“Montrose,” said Del Azarchel, “you've had your little joke.…”

“Just don't go to sleep ever again, Blackie. Man of your learning, should be easy as peach pie.”

4. The End of the Story

Cazi clapped her hands. “But I want to hear the end of the story! Norbert was saying how he knew it was I because he knew Meany was Meany.” She turned to Norbert breathlessly and said, “But how did you know that?”

Norbert said, “Madame, it was the fact that the Master of the World who had come in person, risking death—he even handed me his pistol and dared me to shoot him—that let me know he was not coming for some servant or homunculi. He would not come in person except to see Menelaus Montrose in person. And who would make such efforts to come to see the Judge of Ages in person save for the Master of the World?”

Cazi said, “So you knew Meany had to be Meany because Ximen would not be looking for anyone but him, but you knew Ximen had to be Ximen because he would not be looking for anyone but Meany? That is circular!”

Norbert said, “I knew the man who came with me was not who he said, but he rather cleverly said just enough to keep me walking here. He knew all the secret history behind history. Esoteric secrets. The people of my world have a weakness for them. But he knew more than the Archangels. I do not know if he gave you the locations of the birthing moons left over from Jupiter, Lady Cazi, or slipped them to you without you knowing it was he, but in either case, the math used to create both the Foxes and Neptune came from the Second Monument, which came from the Nobilissimus. The final clue was that I overheard him praying that it would prove possible to assassinate a Power. He meant Jupiter. He, not you, is the source of all the opposition to Jupiter.”

Cazi said, “No, the Judge of Ages is the source. Why would Ximen fight his own son? His own mind?”

“I don't think I can explain it to you. I am still in love with Exorbert, whom I love as I love my own soul. He is my soul, we share a spirit, and yet I had to flee away to Tellus here to escape him. The Nobilissimus does not understand himself, but I do. He had to flee away from Jupiter almost from the moment Jupiter was born, and went all the way to the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy to do it.”

Cazi sad, “So you knew it was me because I was talking with Meany, the Judge of Ages. And once you saw the Judge of Ages, you understood why Ximen, the Master of the World, took so many mad risks to come see him in person. But how did you know it was the Judge of Ages?”

Norbert looked embarrassed. “Ma'am, it was the nose.” He said to Montrose, “I saw your nose when I slit the back of the tent, and recognized it. It is something of a signature of the Mynyddrhodian clan on Rosycross. My ancestors in Dee Parish were Space Chimerae, an artificial race created by the Iron Hermeticist, whose name is lost.”

“Narc
í
s Santdion
í
s de Rei D'Arag
ó
,” said Del Azarchel softly.

“Just call him Draggy,” said Montrose loudly.

“The legend says the Iron Hermeticist was trying to mimic certain imponderable traits found in Menelaus the Mad Hermeticist. My lineage has always been proud to be blood relations of the Judge of Ages. That is why we kept the nose.”

“Who is ‘we'?” Montrose asked.

“Our family. Yours and mine. Mynydd is our word for Mountain. Rhosyn is Rose. I am a Mount-Rose, a Montrose. That is why, when I was a child, the Nobilissimus here arranged to have me glorified into the No
ö
sphere of Rosycross, and made immortal. I had always wondered why a youth of no accomplishments such as I was then was so honored. I also wondered about what looked like a hiccough in the records, which said I had a long dead relative in the Guild, which let me join the Guild as a stowaway. Lucky break? Or someone looking out for me? Someone who wanted me for something later in life?

“It was so that I could approach you. My genes would allow me to pass your defensive measures. My knife can suppress certain signals, so I was ready to smother a yelp when I cut a slit on your tent. But instead it let me cut it. Because it looked at my blood, and thought I was family.

“Then there was the fact that I was a savant, which would prevent Tellus from looking into my mind or taking over my body, since my world is under interdict, and so my mind, which is legally part of the No
ö
sphere of Rosycrosss, cannot be placed in contact with the No
ö
sphere of Tellus. Rosycross conveniently came under interdict when she ceased to maintain her radio house, and fell under excommunication—or”—Now Norbert turned toward Del Azarchel, hefting the knife in his right hand as if hefting the idea of plunging it into him.—“or perhaps Rosycross has been broadcasting all this time, and it just so happens that the
Emancipation,
or the
Flying Dutchman,
or one of those imaginary starships of the far past is occupying the line of sight between Promixa and Sol, with sails deployed widely enough to intercept any radio laser. What say you? That would also be convenient, and would explain why the last broadcast from Rosycross contained no hint of the social upheaval or economic collapse needed to shut an entire star system off the air.”

Del Azarchel said, “A few decades without communication with Sol is a small enough price to pay. And I could have been more honest and caused a civil war or economic ruin on Rosycross to achieve my aims, but I will use deception when deceit is more efficient. What is more efficient than having a star vessel raise her sails? Then I simply ordered my admirals on Rosycross not to launch the next starfaring vessel until communication had been restored with Sol. Ah! But I see you glower, Praetor. You object? It is the inability of lesser men to see the large aims which alone grants me my right to rule, even if recent events have deprived me of my full exercise of those rights.”

Norbert turned his face away from Del Azarchel. “As I said, the Foxes have a distinctive flavor to their handiwork. So does the Master of the World. No one else works on such a grand scale with so little concern for the ordinary lives he ruins. So, by the way, do you, Your Honor. Legend says you have the habit of sacrificing pieces on the chessboard of history: First the Giants, then Pellucid the Potentate. You created the Fox race to introduce chaos into history, and then the Fox race created the Patricians, so that their chaos would become predictable again. I ran a few figures through my head just now. The Foxes will go extinct in less than a thousand years.… I assume the Judge of Ages did not tell you that,” he concluded, nodding his head toward Cazi.

She shrugged a pretty shrug. “He did. We have no secrets from each other.”

“I am sorry, ma'am.”

“There is no need for sorrow. I am not in love, like Meany, nor in hate, like Ximen, and so there is no one else for me to live for. Why should I live longer than my life? For what should I live, once life is ended? For what should my race live? We have served our purpose. I will use my totipotent cells one last time, and alter them to become cells that can no longer alter; I will diminish, and become human, and no fox will eat my brains and become me.” She ceased to smile, so that she looked almost human, and her eyes twinkled with mirth, but there seemed to be tears in them. “You must admit our custom is disgusting. I ate my predecessor's brains fried in butter, with garlic sauce, and it was still disgusting. I will be human, and pass the test, and pass away.”

Norbert said, “What test?”

Cazi said, “Every race of man, from the First to the Fifth, faces the same test, and the monsters who dwell in the stars beyond Taurus likewise. After so many years of emptiness, of being a Fox Maiden, I will be maiden no more, but wife and mother. I will be loved and will love, and the terrible burden of living for myself alone will be taken from me.”