Huldah’s visions revealed to her that her elder son’s blood was not recompense enough for the slaughter of his brother, who would have been named Prophet upon her death, nor for Hector’s denial of the beneficence of the Blood Rain. A larger sacrifice was in order. She meditated on this for several years, while she watched the world around her continue to die.
During this time of extreme darkness, Huldah was gifted. She saw in great detail the doctrine of Wonderblood, the rinsing of the world in blood for one Eon. She saw the legions of Heads, the stages for the executions, the blood running from the stone beheading blocks. She saw it and she commanded her followers do just as she had seen, and thus began the Eon of Pain. The first carnival was Huldah’s own daughter’s carnival, the Rain Carnival, and this miraculously conceived daughter became the next Prophetess, and it has been her line we have watched ever since for the emergence of the True King. Glorify!
The carnivals soon numbered many, each one believing a version of the story recorded above, although many are dangerously blasphemous and have veered from the truth. Still others are vectors only of violence and show no devotion at all, to Heaven or the shuttles or even the line of Prophets. These do none of the work for which they were originally intended: bathing the world in blood until the land lives again. They only are havens of sex magic and debauchery.
Cape Canaveral was the birthplace of a religion that found its perfection in another, sadder place: Kansas, the Center of the Universe. Only when the True King returns to the seat of Heaven, the throne at the Cape—where the men first took leave of this earth and journeyed into the cosmic openness—can the World begin anew. Until then, our carnivals merely staunch the flow of humanity’s evil. When the True King emerges, the shuttles will return for the faithful.
This is the only truth that one must accept in order to begin the journey toward salvation: that we will be perfected and transformed and taken upward through the ionosphere. When the True King has taken his rightful place at the Cape, the Holy of Holies, when he sits upon the throne in his holy city, then surely will the shuttles arrive soon afterward. These days will be called the Days of Heaven, when the shuttles will deliver the faithful from the Diseased earth and into the cosmos among our ancestors. Away from the earth. Away!”
She put down the book. The girl remembered her mother Gimbal suddenly, unbidden thoughts of her tumbling back—she had imagined Huldah in the story to be her mother. The long dirty white hair. Her doctor’s bag slung across her body as she went up and down the saferoads. On a personal mission that even the danger of the Disease couldn’t sway. It was the only image she could conjure of such a fearless person. Yet after all this, she had still not forgiven her mother. At all. She had forgiven Mr. Capulatio. Argento, even. But not her mother.
When she had ridden with Gimbal up to the carnival country two years before, her mother had said to her, Fortune is a kind of uncontrollable ignorance, girl. You will know this soon enough. Who says such a thing to a child, the girl wondered now, angry. Her mother had spoken in her ear, seated behind her on their white mule with the faceplate. The land was wide and calm—they were the only people for a hundred miles. That was what her mother had told her. Then Gimbal said, This trial will better you, will move you closer to understanding the blind indifference of the World. There is no magic, she’d said harshly. Only fortune, good and bad, which you can meet with ingenuity or ignorance.
The girl had argued. Where does fortune come from, though?
It’s a gift.
So it’s magic?
She’d clicked her tongue. Maybe the only magic in the world.
Her mother had taught her to rely on her own resourcefulness, which was a gift, to be sure. But from who? Mr. Capulatio said magic was all around.
Her fingers touched her oozing bandage, where she had branded herself with his sign of the rocketship. Curiously proud of the strength that had taken. She had changed his mind. She had done that herself. And the brand, a pain anyone would have dreaded.
She had done that herself, as well.
CHAPTER 18
THE GAME
John stood at the edge of Queen Alyson’s golf course. He had never actually stood on the course before, and he didn’t know anyone who had, besides Michael—but then, he did not talk to many other courtiers. He greatly disliked their chatting and rumor-mongering, and had been not in the least regretful to leave the compound for his own Urania.
Where at least he could work in peace.
Michael had razed a few courtiers’ homes to make the course: he had known she would like it. The king himself never played, but would sometimes gaze out at her from a window in his modest house while John calculated the horoscopes, and he’d remark upon Alyson’s beauty as she swung her club. Her long brown hair swaying with the strokes of the club. At these moments, John would pretend to look out the window as well, but really he fixed his eyes on some other point so he would not have to look at Alyson’s lovely form, the pin-straight hair, the slender waist, all of which caused his heart to sputter.
John stepped tentatively upon the damp grass, blinking and disorganized in the cloudy noon light. It had rained in the morning, he guessed, but now the two comets—stella novae, rather, since no one was yet sure what they were—twinkled weakly overhead. They did not appear any larger or brighter, but there were most certainly two of them. He searched for a third but could not see one, so he
