John touched his temple. Mizar’s habit of writing every infernal thing down so he would not forget it was a great source of irritation, and yet daily it did prove to be useful. He narrowed his eyes at the prisoner, who was rather strikingly small, and who stood morosely with his black hair greased to his head in ugly whorls, and who had at some very absurd previous moment in his life decided to have a cluster of stars tattooed on the side of his face and who, even now, was making every attempt to hide this act of youthful abandon by affixing a swatch of hair over the area. He might have been thirty or thirty-two, and his blue overcoat and pants were fashioned from heavy, plush cloth, no doubt very expensive. But now, after days or months in the palace jail, they were torn and he looked quite like a penurious seizure of a person, the sort of man John might turn his eyes from if he were to spot him on the short ride from his own Urania castle to the king’s palace compound, which was in fact the only time John went outside his own gates at all, ever.
Although chained at the feet, this small prisoner did command something—if not an air of authority, he had at least some magnifying presence, which made him seem, in his current state, cruelly afflicted by their skepticism. He gazed at John eagerly.
John coughed. “Well? Exactly how did you predict this happening? What’s your name and where are you from?”
When the prisoner spoke it was as though he were continuing outward from the center of some already formed thought. His voice was nasal and all his words hit at the same pitch. “This whole world is filled with time, it seems like, but when time actually came to me I wasted it.” He shrugged glumly. “I’m half-convinced at this point that it’s because I was drinking too much back then, but you would have too if you were me. So anyhow, at my last … what do I call it? ‘Appointment’? If you could even call such a shit-pile of a job an ‘appointment’—and I think that’s roundly debatable—I had extra time at that job. Lots. And I wasn’t filling it the way I should have been.” He paused. “So yes, I admit that I was drinking. I told you that up front, remember that. And so one night I passed out and had the most amazing dream. You know how hard it is to explain dreams, so I won’t even try. But when I woke up I went to my mirror and looked at it, I was going to shave—” Here he reached up and felt his sparsely grizzled face rather thoughtfully. “Not that I probably needed to, so that adds a whole other layer to the mystery. I mean, it does if you know me.”
John glared.
The prisoner hurried up. “And a trance came over me while I was shaving, and when I came back to myself, I had written all kinds of things. By which I mean the most beautiful, predictive things.”
John continued to glare.
“And that is what really happened, I swear. I could show you, but these dickheads”—the prisoner gestured to the guards at the door but surely meant every person at the Cape, generally—“took everything from me when they threw me in prison and said they destroyed it. But I’m sure that’s a lie, because why would they destroy evidence? They’ll need it later if they want any semblance of justice, how else would they prove their charges at my execution? But what am I saying? You’re all liars, I know you are. You don’t need to prove anything.” He cast his glance at John and Mizar angrily. “If any of the things they took from me still exist somewhere you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.”
“You have something written down somewhere? Some proof? Is that what this rant is supposed to be communicating?” John rubbed at his forehead.
“I did. I do. Somewhere. They gave me charts and figures and et cetera.”
“Who gave you charts?”
The prisoner stared dumbly. “The angels. I thought I told you. Weren’t you listening?”
“Angels?”
The prisoner nodded, unfazed. “I dreamed about angels, I woke up in a trance, and wrote it all down. That’s the whole story.”
John’s airway compressed, as happened when he became nervous. “Please. Slow down. A moment ago you mentioned a mirror. A scrying mirror? Are those not prohibitively expensive while also being tremendously illegal for anyone but the Hierophant and his Orbital Doctors?”
John’s own favorite scrying mirror was a relic, a piece of black granite from the other end of Merritt Island, where nearly a thousand years before men had fashioned a stone mirror that faced the sky, bearing the names of all who had died in spaceflight. It was presumed to be a religious monument, but who really knew the motivations of the ancients? The sky mirror had broken over the centuries, but nevertheless it seemed concrete proof that men really had traveled outside the world, once.
When John was not even seventeen years old—a mere boy, still a student at the palace conservatory for astronomics—it dawned upon him that this relic might be where an attuned soul such as himself would be most likely to receive a revelation. So he’d stolen a shard from the ruins of this mirror; in fact it was Mizar who’d driven him in a horsecart to a dock on the far side of Merritt Island and bribed a skittish fisherman to row the young John Sousa through the festering rot that was the inner marsh, to wait while he chipped off a portion
