It was Mizar’s habit to peck about fretfully. He was as boring as a woman, but John had long ago learned that Mizar had to be extraordinarily annoyed to raise his voice. “Do you like the new pond comets, sir! They only just arrived today. I acclimated them to the pool as instructed by the breeder, by submerging them in their own separate bowls over the course of five hours.” Mizar knelt beside his master and pointed at the pond. “That is one of the new ones, I believe, with the darker head. Have you ever seen such a lovely fish? I say they were worth every cent.”
“Look up, Mizar,” John said gloomily. Mizar glanced at him. John said, “At the sky, look up!” He shrugged upward.
Mizar looked. The white underglobes of his eyes shimmered blue with the condensed light of the skies. He looked back at John. Between them lay some fundamental gulf that John had only ever been able to guess at in moments like this, when he knew himself to be filled with the horror of the possible, and Mizar to be merely amused by it. “A real comet?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“Should that be there? I don’t remember anything on the calendar about a comet … not this year or … in the next many?”
“I know.” John thought suddenly of how he had spent the last several years intensively studying the old texts, revising charts and inventing new magics to determine the elusive Return Date. Over these years he had half-convinced the king and even himself that there was some way to divine it from nothing. Lately his search had grown more esoteric, and as he became desperate to prove to himself that the shuttles had in fact existed, he’d begun pursing the line of thought that the date might be revealed by some unearthly entity, through channeling. He also wondered if the date had already been disclosed—somewhere, somehow, to someone else—he only needed to learn where and how it had been communicated. It was a somewhat ludicrous hope, but anything was possible. Wasn’t it? He had once believed so.
But many nights in his office he had looked through his window, out onto his private courtyards and slumbering astronomical apparatuses, and had pounded his fists because he could not understand everything all at once. No, not even a sliver of it; his mind was simply too small. And he fell into despair that he had spent his life in pursuit of folly.
Mizar coughed. “Could it be a fall of metal, sir? Perhaps just an old object coming down from the orbits?”
“It could be.” John was himself an expert in Metal Falls, which occurred when fragments of the ancient satellites crashed back to earth. The recovery of these relics was deeply important to King Michael, who ordered each one studied and catalogued. John was less interested in the physical aspects of the heavens than in theoretical ones, and so had little energy for the king’s insistence that these misshapen twists of metal meant anything at all, but he understood their importance as devotional objects and so kept a collection of interesting specimens in a cabinet in his offices.
“Should I bring your telescope?” asked Mizar.
“I doubt it will help.”
“Do you want your books? This may be in the charts. Perhaps the printer of the calendar made the error, not yourself.”
“It’s not the printer’s fault.”
Mizar stood and his knees cracked. “Well, what should I do?” He looked unconcernedly again at the blazing arc.
John waved his arms as he was given to doing when he felt hopeless, standing up so quickly he felt dizzy. “What? You ask me ‘what’? Here we have some phenomenon of a magnitude I cannot gauge and you want to know ‘what’ is to be done? You know, Mizar, ‘what’ is a word I am just now rethinking, and I—” He put his head in his hands. “I need to go to my study. ‘What,’” he sniffed. “I am surrounded by low hideous persons with visions only of ‘what.’”
Mizar sneezed to cover a laugh. “What then should I ask, sir, if not ‘what’?”
“Well, certainly not the obvious: ‘why,’” John said, and squinted at the sky. “And any idiot might ask ‘how.’ You, Mizar, are not quite that much of an idiot, so I believe you will refrain from asking stupid questions, if only for my sake. But—” John felt his insides burning with confusion, for the reality of this streak of light was concrete: it existed, and he had not predicted it. “Perhaps even a half-wit such as yourself might stumble instinctively upon the correct question, or through a process of elimination might arrive at it. What, Mizar, do you think that question might be?”
Mizar’s cheeks did not flush—he was a good servant, impervious to verbal cruelty. John had, in times of greater despair than this, cast his fury upon Mizar like a club, pummeling him with the hugeness of his own fear and pain, while Mizar cheerfully clucked on about selecting an entrée for a dinner party, or the soil in the garden beds. It was easy for John to believe Mizar had no
