Mr. Capulatio unfastened his cape and stood before them both in his beautiful clothes. He opened his arms. After a time, Orchid slipped into them, all the while eying the girl with a look not of hate but of gigantic loss—fresh-cut, still squirting. She was not finished with her objections, far from it. The girl was more scared of her than before. With Mr. Capulatio’s back to her, all she saw of him was the way his shoulders curved around Orchid’s body, how they formed the top of an inverted triangle, and she saw how strong he was, and she again felt a thrust of agonic jealousy, so she turned her eyes away and did not watch them as they kissed in the low lamplight. She heard their mouths touching wetly together, and when she did finally look she saw Orchid’s eyes blazing at her over his shoulder.
CHAPTER 4
THE COMET
It was a lonesome truth that John D. Sousa, Chief Orbital Doctor, astronomer, and scholar of holy texts, named as he was after ancient magicians both celestial and musical, had still not discovered how to make that which was unvisible visible. Though he used ancient mirrors and water tables and though he fasted and studied and sacrificed and calculated, he had not yet, in all his years, been able to call down any real revelation. Not a single one.
He was now nearly forty, and it was recognition of this monstrous failure that drove him at present to discount the manifold wonders he had created over the course of his life. During his tenure at court, John had adjusted and re-cast thousands of pages of his predecessors’ charts, compiling them finally into what was considered the foremost work of scholarship of the age—a vast New Cosmology of Orbits. The book was expansive and contained information from hundreds of places, translated and reinterpreted and reimagined. It was a beautiful work. But now, when John looked at the book, he felt only revulsion. Huge and ungainly, it signified nothing but a torturous waste of his talents—as precise as it was uncreative. They were scientific but not revelatory. They declared, in short, nothing that was not already known.
He continued to pour over texts and pray as though he might yet make some discovery that could give meaning to his life. He still rose every day at the golden dawn and worked some nights straight through until morning again. But in those sweaty torch-lit hours John had begun to understand what was perhaps the most lonely truth of all: failure meant something far worse than he’d imagined as a younger man. For John had tried his entire life to predict the exact day and hour of the return of the rocketships, but recently, he found himself pursuing this vocation with not a little fear and trembling in the face of the what-if, for what-if he had indeed succeeded—not in predicting the exact day and hour—but what-if he had proved inadvertently that there were no shuttles to begin with? That no such artifacts ever existed?
Did John anymore believe it was even possible that the shuttles (which were supposed to convey the chosen heavenward into the forever of forevers) were really and truly coming back? If they had ever existed to begin with, why should they return? From where? They would come back to earth, past the dome of heaven? Preposterous. The only objects that ever descended were ragged pieces of burnt-up metal from the ancient past. And meteorites. And rain and wind. What-if all his scrying and magic and pursuit of the illusory had already revealed an answer? An unpalatable one, but an answer nonetheless? This was the bleak possibility that troubled him more each day.
It so happened that in the almanacs John drew up yearly for the court, he included all the changes an observer of the heavens might have occasion to witness, should he turn his eyes to the sky on any given night of the year—constellations, meteor showers, phases of the moon, star-risings and star-settings. Though valued by King Michael, who was particularly fond of divination, these predictions were an art to which John had not devoted considerable time in years; the formulas had been worked out centuries before his birth by men with more mathematical genius than himself, and John merely applied them diligently, like a fastidious clerk. They did not engage his imagination or advance his larger quest, which was of course the discovery of the Return Date.
So when, on the fourteenth day of November, after a tedious day of calculating horoscopes for friends and enemies of the crown, John crossed his own small courtyard and happened to glance into his newly filled reflecting pool, he was astonished to see shining in the center of the glassine water a bright, unfamiliar orb. He bent down and looked closer. Under the water were brocaded carp, just purchased for his new manor house. They were arm-thick tubes of variegated flesh, with fins wavering gently in the currentless pond. But atop them, on the water’s surface, John saw the unmistakable curve of light that indicated a celestial body in motion.
For a long moment, he gazed at that radiant bend and felt nothing. Then a thin panic leapt into his throat and he realized he had been holding his breath. His heartbeat sped up. He had not forecast this—whatever it was. John flopped back on his behind in the sandy earth and looked upward finally, searching the sky.
He called in a hoarse voice for his servant Mizar. The man emerged shortly from the gardening shed and brandished a small box, talking as he approached. “You can see,” Mizar barked, “how wonderfully the new
