Beyond the crumbling stone walls of the candlelit quarter was a line of gas lamps, like stiff iron trees, overlooking houses of stone and lumber. Here were stalls for riding-dogs larger than ponies, white and stiff with night slumber; and also folded at their curbside posts were spiderish motor-tricycles and dog-traps whose thin and crooked legs grasped tall and slender tires at rakish angles; but there was no motion on the streets, since the men born of this era made it a point of principle to retire at dusk.
Norbert said, “What would an optimistic earthman assume about the year of Zolasto Zo’s departure?”
“Hm? That it was over twenty-four years ago, before the interdiction fell.”
“What? And Zo remained silent for a quarter century, putting on shows and antics for the idle, and only just now resolved to thrust himself in the controversy of the calendar, and defy the Lords of the Golden Afternoon of Man? No, let us be more pessimistic and assume his planetfall came after the interdict.”
“Which means this is not the real Zolasto Zo,” said the squire.
“An odd way of phrasing it, considering that we ‘real’ originals continue to change and age and degrade and die, but yes. This is the Xypotech version of Zo, the Exanthropos, and was doubtless smuggled by an encrypted signal to compatriots on Earth. Here he has descended back into the material realm, but somehow erasing all trace of his incarnation from the senile Noösphere of Tellus. Do not be deceived. We fight against not flesh and blood, but against a fallen angel.”
Beyond the quarter of the gas lamps and stone buildings was a set of streets lit by electrical lights, whose houses made of porcelain had wide windows and tall doors. Electrical cables, adorned with bunting, ran from house to house, held aloft on tall poles. There were a few pedestrians waddling abroad at this hour, or riding motorized divans or litters, dressed in clear plastic trousers and see-through capes, proudly displaying the perfection of bodies which adhered to a standard of beauty of a more corpulent and aliphatic era. At every street corner was an automatic zither playing plangent chords and a basket of fruit or heated bucket of meatballs from which the passersby ate freely, and the public fountains shed grog. There was no difference in dress or ornament between male and female, and all the men were beardless. These had been peaceful years: none of these Thaws carried visible weapons.
“Well and good, sir, but how does this allow you to deduce where our target is?”
“Zolasto Zo is a mountebank, and not allowed to sleep under a roof. Such is the Wandering Trickster archetype of Rosycross under which mountebanks fall. His is not an archetype that allows flesh to change, so he retains a Rosicrucian body, and therefore his eyes are like mine. He does not like bright lights. But he needs a field for his performance, and it needs to be a place where the local officers of this place and current officers of this time have no warrant to stop him, but every yokel with a bag of pence or a talent of silver can find the show, even if he heard only a rumor of it. The location is passed by word of mouth.”
On the far side of the friendly houses lit by electricity came a quarter filled with louder streets lit by neon of many colors, and the jackets of the passersby flared with slogans of long-forgotten commercial products or sexual factions, and from each man’s ear-gem came music of pounding drumbeats. The walks here were more crowded, the long skirts and elaborate headdresses of the women clearly distinct from the garish cummerbunds and multicolored leggings of the men, and each young man carried a spring-mounted dirk or a one-shot derringer at his padded codpiece, which lit up menacingly when another youth similarly armed stepped too close.
The noise of these streets deterred conversation. The assassin and his squire did not speak again until they passed into the next quarter.
Here, harsh atomic lights glared on wide streets paved in hard macadam. An oddly shaped one-wheeled vehicle sped by, its one lamp glaring like the eye of a cyclops, and the helmeted rider hunched over the steering bar carried torches on the shoulderboards of his armored jacket. The vehicle passed them with a roar, splashing them momentarily with light, and tilted alarmingly as it took a corner. Darkness and silence flowed after.
The squire said, “Did Zolasto Zo erect his tents somewhere in this village? The currents will not step on Spacefarer ground without our leave, since the Forever Village is under the banner of the Master of All Worlds.”
“That is a good first guess, End Ragon,” said Norbert. “I will make an assassin of you yet!”
“You mean ‘good guess but wrong’?”
“Not necessarily. It is possible Zo is here, which is why we are walking instead of defying the Swans and going by wing. But there is someone the currents fear more than they fear this mythical Master, and somewhere no authority ventures without his leave, but where all are welcome eventually.”
The next quarter outward was lit with a soft chemical glow that came from motes in the atmosphere, eerie and shadowless, the blue hue of moonlight. Here were half a dozen men and women of that era dressed in gauze, and their roads carried them where they would go without any noise at all. It was a wonder to see them floating down the street, silent as dreams, while that rider of their grandparent’s day, or greatgrandparent’s, roared and clattered so boisterously on his one-wheeled machine the next street over.
“A place where all are welcome, sir? Someone who is more feared than the Master of the World? I can think of none.”
“The legend of the Judge of Ages still haunts this senile old planet. No one steps on his ground. A place with no lights. Have you deduced it yet?”
The squire snapped his fingers (for spacemen who wear gauntlets practically from birth, an oddly archaic gesture to make). “A graveyard.”
“Exactly! You are quick on the uptake.”
“So I have always been told, sir.”
The final street was lit with lanterns that floated like fireflies above the road, or followed any individuals who seemed lost, and the colors flickered whenever enough men gathered to need traffic controls or segregation of the races. The streets were empty except for a few wandering vigilantes, who walked on gyroscopic stilts and wore tall miters of red fabric, and in their hands were long wands that glittered. Warned by the colors of the floating lanterns, the assassin and the squire avoided the vigilantes, who were busy trampling a porch garden of unorthodox design.
The original line of twenty-foot-tall black spikes demarking the edge of the Village was broken in many places, and the houses and shops of the Currents native to this era mingled freely with this last quarter. Their lanterns were smaller and swifter, like darting wasps of light, but otherwise not much changed.
Indeed some of the natives might have been old enough to recall nostalgic memories of houses of this shape and lights of this configuration in their youth; and, ironically, some of the native buildings or energy systems in the settlement beyond the fence line may have been older.
Both men, as if by unspoken signal, stopped just short of the line of broken spikes separating the Forever Village from the current town beyond. The quarter of the current town that crowded against the spaceman’s village was a place of gaud shops and beer gardens, biomodification parlors, dance halls, and, worse, hallucination stalls and calamity houses, where jaded men in borrowed bodies could enjoy dangers imaginary or otherwise. The two men stood on a slight upswelling of land, so that the village behind and the ground before them was clearly seen in the blue-green light of the dying moon.
In some places along the line of demarcation, a straggle of panels dark with morbid heraldic signs warning of long-defunct penalties still connected one morose and watchful spike with its neighbor, forming a visible fence. But here on the crest of this small hill, weathering or looters or playful Foxes had torn and trampled the panels of the fence, so they tilted at strange angles, leaving wide gaps between like the spaces in a crone’s teeth, or toppled over entirely, their circuits dead and lenses blind. Where this had happened, the fence was a fiction, and nothing stood between the starfaring men and the current world beyond.