whole wing was, yes, for sure, him; and it was chill, and pregnant.
“What about these lectures?” a member said, interrupting her survey.
She looked at him coldly. “God,” she said. “You have transcripts of them all. Is that what I’m to concern myself with? Can you read?” She paused then, wondering whether her contempt was merely a mask for her own failure to encompass her quarry. “When he speaks,” she said more graciously, “they listen. What he says you know. The old amalgam designed to touch every heart. Hope, a limitless hope. Common sense, or what passes for it. Wit that releases. He can draw tears. But many can. I think…”It was as close as she could come now to a definition, and was not close: “I think he is less or more than a man. I think we are Somehow dealing not with a man but with a geography.”
“I see,” said a member, brushing a moustache pearly-gray like his tie.
“You do not,” Hawksquill said, “because I do not.”
“Snuff him out,” another said.
“His message,” said another, drawing from his supple case a sheaf of papers, “is not one we object to, though. Stability. Vigilance. Acceptance. Love.”
“Love,” said another. “All things degenerate. Nothing works any more, everything misfires.” There was a desperate quaver in his voice. “There is no force left on earth found stronger than love.” He burst into strange sobs.
“Do I see, Hawksquill,” someone said calmly, “decanters on your sideboard there?”
“One is cut-glass, and has brandy,” Hawksquill said. “The other is not, and has rye.”
They calmed their associate with a taste of brandy, and declared the meeting closed,
Pictured Heavens
When she had shown them out, Hawksquill’s servant stood in the hall, gloomily contemplating what seemed to be a pale stain of dawn showing in the barred glass of the door, and complaining inwardly of her state, her subservience, her brief glows of nighttime consciousness worse almost than having none at all. All this while the gray light grew, and seemed to stain the unmoving servant, to subtract the living light from her eyes. She raised a hand in an Egyptian gesture of blessing or dismissal; her lips sealed. When Hawksquill passed her on her way upward, day had come, and the Maid of Stone (as Hawksquill named this ancient statue) was all marmoreal again.
Hawksquill climbed up within the tall, narrow house, four long flights (a daily exercise that would keep her strong heart beating till great old age) and arrived at a small door at the very top of the house, where the stairs narrowed sharply and ran out. She could hear the steady noise of the great mechanism beyond the door, the drop of heavy weights inch by inch, the hollow clicks of catchments and escapements, and felt her mind already soothed. She opened the door. Daylight, many-colored and faint, poured out; the music of the spheres, like soft-soughing wind among clicking bare branches, became distinct. She glanced at her old, square-faced wristwatch, and bent to enter.
That this City house was one of only three in the world equipped with a complete Patent Cosmo-Opticon or Theatrum Mundi in more-or-less working order, Hawksquill had known before she bought it. It had amused her to think that her house would be capped by such an enormous and iron-bound talisman of her mind’s heavens. She had been prepared, though, neither for its great beauty, nor—when it had been set in motion, and she had adjusted it in certain long-thought-out ways—for its usefulness. She had been unable to learn much about the Cosmo-Opticon’s designer, so she couldn’t tell what he had conceived its function to be—entertainment only, probably—but what he hadn’t known she supplied, and so now when she bent to enter the tiny door she entered not only a stained-glass- and-wrought-iron Cosmos exquisitely detailed and moving with spanking exactness in its clockwork rounds, but one which presented to Hawksquill the actual moment of the World-Age that was passing as she entered.
In fact, though Hawksquill had corrected the Cosmo-Opticon so that it accurately reflected the state of the real heavens outside it, it was still not quite exact. Even if its maker had been aware of it, there was no way to build into a machine of cogs and gears as gross as this one the slow, the vast fall of the Cosmos backward through the Zodiac, the so-called precession of the equinoxes—that unimaginably stately grand tour which would take some twenty thousand years longer, until once again the spring equinox coincided with the first degrees of Aries: where conventional astrology for convenience’s sake assumes it always to be, and where Hawksquill had found it fixed in her Cosmo-Opticon when she had first aquired the thing. No: the only true pictures of time were the changeful heavens themselves, and their perfect reflection within the powerful consciousness of Ariel Hawksquill, who knew what time it was: this engine around her was in the end a crude caricature, though pretty enough. Indeed, she thought, taking the green plush seat in the center of the universe, very pretty.
She relaxed in the warm pour of winter sun (by noon it would be hot as hell inside this glass egg, something else its designer hadn’t apparently taken into account) and gazed upwards. Blue Venus trine with blood-orange Jupiter, each blown-glass figured sphere borne between the Tropics on its own band; the mirrorsurfaced Moon just declining below the horizon, and tiny ringed Saturn, milky-gray, just rising. Saturn in the ascendant house, proper for the sort of meditation she must now make. Click: the Zodiac turned a degree, lady Libra (looking a little like Bernhardt in her finely-leaded art-nouveau draperies, and weighing something in her scales that had always seemed to Hawksquill to be a bunch of lush Malaga grapes) lifted her toes out of the austral waters. The real Sol burned so hotly through her that her features were obscured. As they of course were in the blank blue sky of day, burned out entirely and invisible, but still of course there behind his brightness, of course, of course… Already she felt her thoughts becoming ordered as the undifferentiated light of heaven was ordered by the colors and marked degrees of the Cosmo-Opticon; she felt her own Theatrum Mundi within open its doors, and the stage manager strike the stage three times with his staff to signal the curtain rising. The enormous engine, star-founded, of her Artificial Memory began to lay out for her once again the parts of the problem of Russell Eigenblick. And she felt, sharp-set for the work, that there had not ever been among all the strange tasks her powers had been bent upon a task as strange as this one, or one which was more important to her herself; or one that would require her to go as far, dive as deep, see as widely, or think as hard.
In the cards. Well. She would see.
II.
Auberon was awakened first by the crying of a cat.
“An abandoned child,” he thought, and went back to sleep. Then the bleating of goats, and the raucous,
