“Because you asked us to.” Tygo said.
She smiled at him slowly. “So I’m just going to keep bleeding forever? How will I ever have Michael’s child then?”
Tygo’s eyes went up and down her body and John forced himself to look away, back toward the gate, where he noticed, to his surprise, Michael and Marvel Parsons standing together, deep in conversation. Michael, despite being an exceptionally tall man, the very physical ideal of a king, was dressed in unremarkable clothing: a plain white shirt with an open collar. He tended to wear his shirts until he’d sufficiently yellowed the armpits and neckband. He preferred the launderers to remove the stains with lemon juice rather than order a new shirt. The Hierophant wore his plain monk’s cassock. Beside him stood the young pale-haired guard who had come for Tygo the day before.
Of course Marvel was already at Michael’s ear. But saying what? What had he so needed Tygo for, when surely his time was better spent planning a defense against the outlaw carnival? Should that be needed. His presence annoyed John. Exhausted him.
He heard Tygo remark to Alyson, “Like I told you, pay no mind to the bleeding. It’s bound to happen when something large upsets the gravity of earth. Trust me,” he said, snickering. “I’m a doctor.”
“But the shuttles can’t be that big.” Alyson said, doubtful. “Big enough to upset gravity? In ancient times did all the women bleed whenever the shuttles came around?”
“Who said it was the shuttles?” Tygo asked.
“You did! I remember it.”
“I said it may be the shuttles.”
King Michael was pointing to the stella novae, and gesticulating. The Hierophant, nearly as tall as the king, waited patiently until Michael was finished, then shook his head at the three golfers as though they were intruding on some previously arranged event.
Tygo was saying, “The shuttles may not be like they were when they were first on earth. We don’t know what they’d be like, actually. They could be anything.” He sounded so confident that even John found himself believing. Tygo tapped his ball lightly and it fell into the cup with a pleasant clacking noise. “O good,” he murmured. “I’m getting better.”
John still couldn’t bring himself to look at them head on, but he sensed the queen had inched her body somehow closer to Tygo, who acted like he didn’t notice. “What did you see in your trance?” she asked.
“A trance is like … it’s like seeing different things out each eye at once.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Say you’re sleeping. You’re also dreaming. Inside the dream, you know you’re dreaming. You wake up and you remember you’ve had a dream, but you also know you were asleep in bed the whole time. You can’t remember the details, but you know you had a dream. You also know you stayed in bed for the duration of the dream. A trance is like that.”
She hit her own ball. “So it’s like having two present moments. One physical and one mental.”
“Exactly.”
Alyson giggled. “You’re good at this. Can I hire you instead of John Sousa to be our Astronomer?”
John swung at his ball with a manic, too-hard swing, hitting it into a pit of sand lounging smugly in a far corner. It would be hopeless to get it out without several more swings. They were on the eleventh hole. There were fifteen. He could leave soon.
He ran sweaty hands through his hair, stared somewhat cruelly at Tygo. “Your Majesty, it might behoove you to note that this man was a prisoner for treason against your own husband but a few days ago, and just yesterday he did confess to me that he was a con-man in a previous existence. Just last night he was unsure if he could even enter a trance, and now he’s speaking as though he’s some expert. I would say that the evidence I have suggests that he’s faking his visionary talent to save his own head.”
Tygo smiled again.
“You aren’t a man of religion, are you?” John sneered. “You’ve often reminded me that you abhor magic. Now you have the ability to enter trances? I think the evidence points squarely to these stella novae being ordinary comets whose paths have brought them nearer than usual to the earth.” He shrugged angrily. “Perhaps they will veer away and we’ll see them no more. Perhaps they will hit us.”
Tygo’s ball waited in the cup. He gestured for Alyson to go again before they moved to the next hole. “Well,” he said. “There’s an outlaw carnival camped at our gates. Maybe they know something. Has anyone asked them?”
John inhaled. “‘Our’? So you are one of us now?”
Tygo smiled thinly. He pointed to John’s ball in the sand pit. “Don’t you need to get that in before we move on?”
John stamped over to it. “I say they’re comets. Plain and simple. That’s what these things usually are, and we have no evidence as yet to the contrary. I say Tygo is an opportunist and that it was a grave mistake for us to have been taken in by his foolishness.” He hit the ball. It did not come out of the sand. He hit it again. Alyson watched, her eyes folding upward like a dancer’s arm. He hit the ball hard one last time. At last it flew out of the sand and back into the enclosure, where it nearly connected with Tygo’s head. Tygo ducked so quickly that he lost his balance and fell onto the ground. Alyson dropped her club and rushed to him, kneeling by him and taking his shoulders in her arms. Incredibly, he was laughing.
He seemed electrified by her closeness, but pulled back as her hands came to rest on his face, near his ear-holes. Tygo dusted himself off.
“Are you all right?” she whispered, touching his hair.
John turned away just in time to see the Hierophant and the king making strides toward them. Michael, jolly and tranquil as ever, took large steps upon the springy grass, but the Hierophant scowled at
