Planetary: Mercury, page 3
“Whose mirror? From what time-depth?”
“No information is available.”
That meant the mirror had been told not to tell her. She said, “Show me the hedge maze of Ts’ui-Pen. Current time.”
The gray image did not change. “Term not recognized. Unable to comply.”
There was an official name for that garden, but Circe could not remember it at the moment. Exasperated, Circe climbed from the pool, ordering the moisture to stay behind. She donned a short tunic leaving her limbs free, and a pair of sandals.
Then she stepped over to the nearest space mirror, tilted and focused it on the spot in the distance.
Most of the valley floor of the impact basin was flat except for the canals filling the radial canyons of Pantheon Fosse. But here or there a small mound or large hill rose above the gardens and arbors.
One such hill was in view in the distance, rearing its green head above rows and ranks of the surrounding orange or cedar groves. The sides of the hill were overgrown with a hedge maze of intricate concentric spirals. The hedges were grown from Schroedinger plants, so the maze paths became lost and uncertain when not observed.
Circe did not want to deal with the shape-changing maze, so she focused the image tightly on the crown of the hill where the monument was. She opened the glass and stepped through.
It was spring. The sluggish, giant sun stood at five degrees over the horizon. On earth, the sun would have climbed five degrees in twenty minutes, not two days. The breeze was blowing, and the scent of daffodils, tulip and crocus was in the air.
She did not want to stow her wand in its normal niche half a second out of phase with herself, just in case some meddlesome sibyl or stubborn mirror decided to freeze the time surface and render the niche out of reach. Safer to keep it in the same continuum with her, visible and tangible. She turned the wand into a flexible length of metallic cord, and tightened it around her waist as a tight belt with long dangling sashes.
Here before her was the statue of a Mandarin supported by images of Horae. Thallo and Auxo proffered a winebowl and a cornucopia of fruit, while, from behind, Carpo raised a sickle to smite him. The tall pedestal was carven with bas relief and surrounded by a line of pillars.
It was here that Circe, twenty-four hours ago, had convinced the troublesome ghost she was babysitting to play hide and seek, hoping the child would quietly crawl under a bush while Circe, instead of seeking, could sit on the grass with a romance novel and a bottle of wine.
She had only recently been permitted to drink, and the allure of forbidden, adult things clung to the act. She distinctly recalled using the helmet, tipped on its side, as an impromptu pillow behind her head as she lay on the grass. She had been staring up at the sky dome, wishing for the white clouds of earth.
Circe now began peering and poking about the area, particularly in the circular strip between the pillars and the monument base, where a bed of thyme and sorrel grew.
A young woman, nude save for a banner of golden hair flying about her, came into view from around the corner of the monument, spinning. She was dancing naked on the grass, her head thrown back, her arms lifted up. Her smile was bright and her eyes were empty.
The other woman spoke without preamble: “I have often thought that I could step back in time, find a younger self, torment or abuse her, but carefully erase all conscious memory of the event by forcing the helmet onto her head. No older version of me would remember and interfere.” She stopped dancing, and stood still smiling vacantly. “But then I began to worry. How often had I been abused? How often have I been molested? If there is no sign of it, no memory, it does not really count, does it?”
With her hair colored gold, Circe almost did not recognize herself. “When are you from?”
The girl giggled. “I am coming from April Fools’ Day. You are from March. Are you going to march down the aisle? Get it?”
“Not funny, April.” Circe was disturbed. Was this her self from a week in a future? Or a year plus a week? Either way, it seemed impossible that she would change so radically, and so much for the worse, in so short a time.
“No one understands my sense of humor,” said the blonde, pouting. “Well, March girl, let’s be off.” The blonde stepped close and took Circe’s arm, holding her very close, and leaning her weight on her. “Shall we?”
“You’ve been drinking.” The scent of wine was heavy on the blonde girl’s breath.
“More than that!” exclaimed the other, wiggling her hips in an odd and unpleasing way. “You can alter your brain chemistry with the biotic pool, did you know? Opium dreams and strange joys await. But do not think it is weakness. I have found enlightenment. Come along, March. March! It does no good to balk.”
Circe let the older girl pull her by the arm. The blonde walked with a swaying motion, humming.
“Where are we going, April?” Circe asked.
“I’ve come to get the ball rolling. One of us is supposed to see you properly dressed and to take you to the wedding rehearsal. You are going to be a flower girl! I get to be the bridesmaid this time. The focal point of my mirror is somewhere around here.”
The blonde had come to the opening of the hedge maze surrounding the hill crest, found a gap in the hedge with a small brass sign marked HOME, and plunged through. The tall green walls of waxy leaf of the Schroedinger plant loomed to either side. The breeze was cut off. Circe felt a moment of claustrophobia, and glanced back. The opening behind had already vanished, moving itself to another location.
The other girl put an arm about her waist, holding her rather tightly as they walked. She turned left at the first opening in the hedge, entering another row, then turned left again, then walked past other openings, down three stairs, and into another corridor of green. Before them now stretched a long row with no apparent openings, that simply seemed to follow the curve of the hill, and circle it endlessly.
Circe said crossly. “The way out is to follow the lefthand wall, and always go downhill.”
“Ah, is that so? Worldly wisdom is not for me.”
Circe grew more cross. “Why are you naked?”
The blonde spoke in a dreamy, drifting tone of voice. “I have achieved enlightenment, as I said. Through pharmacology.”
“What?”
“I learned it from him. Emotions are just brain chemicals, after all, and if the chemical states for unhappiness confound me, what is wrong with altering those states? Nudism shows my detachment for the need for personal possessions. I have also become a vegetarian. That way, I need never be responsible for the death of even the humblest living thing.”
The endless curving wall of leaf now had an opening in it. They made five left turns in rapid succession, and then trooped uphill and down though a series of switchbacks between the leafy walls that turned on themselves like the folds of the lower intestine.
“There are no animals on this planet, April,” said Circe crossly. “Nothing but fish. It is always Lent here. You’ve always been a vegetarian.”
“Well, I mean I have given up fish, too. I won’t eat fruit. I can sustain myself by introducing nutriment chemicals directly into the bloodstream from the biotic pool. I can live off of wine and wine alone.” The blonde giggled.
“What is so funny?”
“If the worm Ouroboros had only been a vegetarian, he would not have swallowed his own tail, would he?” The blonde was now leaning heavily on Circe, and had put her blonde head on Circe’s shoulder.
“Are you actually leading me anywhere?” demanded Circe.
“Sh-Hh!” the other girl hiccoughed. “What are you looking for? Just now? You came back to the garden of forking paths to hunt for it.”
Circe said, “You must remember. It has only been a year. I am hoping two. Tell me you are from some April further off than next April, yes?”
“A locket. Inside was a picture of a man. Hair of riotous, flaming red, and green eyes, but the eyes were so bright a green that they looked almost like twin lasers. I do not think I have ever seen eyes like that before. He looked like a man of the North. Perhaps with wild, Irish blood. I remember.”
The blonde sighed, smitten. Circe could not help but sigh also.
April said, “You never find that locket again.”
Circe said, “You mean it takes me more than a year to find it.”
“Who said I was from April of next year? And a sibyl with gray hair told me I would never see him again. Never.”
“Sibyls lie. They erase memories. They have to, in order to keep the time stream smooth.”
The blonde said, “I will make you a promise. I will make myself forget him, the man with the stormy green eyes, and so no sibyl downstream of me will remember or know what you are doing, or why. Now, keep in mind everything you do is fixed. It is all futile. We are all trapped like flies in amber. But if I forget, no one will step to the hour before your hour, and you can keep your memory for that hour. Enjoy this time now!”
Then, suddenly, the blonde shoved her though an opening in the hedge, and ran the other way, around a corner and out of sight. Circe stumbled, and sat a moment, dazed. Then she leaped up. Which way had April fled? “Stop! Wait!”
A voice came from the hedge separating them. Circe could see the nude girl’s white flesh winking at her through the leaves. “I am helping you! Trying to remember where you were in a maze will do you no good, will it? This is the one place no sibyl can find you!”
“What are you doing?”
“If only Eve in Eden had owned the Mirror of Circe, she could have stepped back, and stopped herself from eating the apple!”
“Come back here, damn you!”
“I have learned to live like her, unburdened, free from want, fretting about no tomorrow, regretting no yesterday! When I think of all the worries people seem to find, and how they’re in a hurry to complicate their minds…”
Circe sped around the corner, but saw no one. “Where is the way out? Come back!”
The other girl’s voice floated over the tops of the hedges. “… by chasing after power, and dreams that can’t come true! I am glad that I am different. I’ve better things to do… Sha la la la, live for today! Yay! Sha la la la…”
The singing voice grew soft with distance, and faded.
May
Circe unwound her metal belt, turned it back into a rigid wand, and scowled at it. April must have left an open mirror leading back to her own time period a week from now. “Point to the nearest source of time reflections.”
The wand wiggled in her fingers, and the tip pointed.
“What is the distance?”
“Four hundred and four days. The aperture opens into Friday, May Third of A.D. 3011, Gregorian calendar. Age Seventeen. Watch Sixty-One of Year Seventy, Mercurial calendar.”
Circe scowled. It was not the date from which the blonde came. That meant the blonde was from next week. Something in the next seven days would turn her into that lunatic she just met. A sense of growing dread made her limbs feel heavy, the breath in her lungs feel turgid and slow.
“I meant the distance in space.”
“The aperture is at the bottom of the hill, mistress, in the poplar grove.”
She held the wand overhead, so that its tip was above the hedge tops, and told it to keep scanning. This prevented the Schroedinger plants from closing or opening any new paths. With the wand acting as a compass, always pointing one direction, it did not take her so very long to find her way out.
Free of the maze, she passed through a row of orange trees, and stopped to drink from a fountain. She followed the stream down the valley slope past green rose beds (it was too early in spring for them to bloom) toward the poplar tree grove.
In the near distance, the susurration of tumbling water told that the stream tumbled over the canyon brink to join one of the many radial rivers running through the Parthenon Fosse toward the central lake.
She entered the grove. Here was a clearing midmost, a patch of tangled lawn in the center of the grove, where stood a moss-covered rock, green and soft.
Also here in the middle was a shining oval, like a window, that her wand could make visible to her. She stepped into it.
The scene changed. The giant sun was in the west, perched between noon and dusk. Many colored leaves crackled dryly underfoot, and the sharp tang of the air of autumn was in her nose. The scent of smoke was here also. The trees were gone, hewn down. Here was a circle of jagged, blackened and broken stumps instead.
With the trees hewn away, the tall shape of the Tower of Promised Immortality could be seen clearly. It gleamed in the distance, shining above its own reflection in the central lake.
Circe stared in horror. About the feet of the tower, the smashed roofs and shattered windows of the museums and archives lay torn and crumpled, and broken pillars jutted upward at crooked angles. Oily and opaque black smoke was pouring up.
Even as she watched, a ray of fire came down from the dome of the sky, bright as the beam of a spotlight, transfixed a colonnade, passed across the gables, cupolas and windows and struck one of the smaller towers. Walls exploded outward in sprays of flaming dust and debris. Glass and metal sagged and ran. Rivulets of sluggish molten material fell into the lakewater. Steam rose up in rushing clouds and hid the view.
From close at hand came now, a low, throaty laugh she recognized as her own. Circe turned.
Herself at seventeen was dark haired once more, dressed in a short leather jacket with padded shoulders, adorned with metal studs. She wore man’s trousers rather than a skirt, and high-button boots. Her hair was tightly braided as if she were ashamed of its dark, shining, and gorgeous length and rich volume. Atop this was perched a little red beret. Without lipstick or blush, her face seemed pale and pinched.
Circe inspected herself critically. The cut of the weirdly mannish jacket and trousers did nothing to flatter her figure. She seemed a little hefty in the hips. Had she put on weight?
May was seated on the pelt of a black bull that was flung over the mossy rock in the center of the grove. Except that the mossy rock was no longer mossy, but gray, for all the moss had died.
“Have you ever wondered about the past?” said May. “It is where all the filth is. Think about it. Nothing in the present has any consequences at that time, so no evil consequences follow. By definition, any act from which no evil follows is allowed, right? Any future evils that might happen, might not happen, for the path could go another way. You might die. Anything. But the past evil are set in stone. The only thing to do is break the stones then, right?”
May flourished her wand. Another beam of fire came from the energy dome above, and smote another part of the museum. The central tower defended itself with a mirrored force field, so the destructive beam was reflected away and ignited another segment of the surrounding edifice.
Circe had not seen this specific gesture before, but she recognized it as being part of the energy systems control grammar. May was opening a pinpoint in the dome above and letting a ray of the naked sunlight in.
Circe exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
“Erasing the past. Erasing evil. You see, I have learned to grow a spine. To think for myself. I am called this hour to be the maid of honor. Four times, during my blonde period, I went to go as a bridesmaid, and each time was worse than the last. The details sink in on you. So you are from before the blonde year! I remember always having that stupid, scowling look on my face, like the world owes me something.”
“That’s not fair!” said Circe, scowling.
“I was told to get you dressed in your flower girl dress, and escort you to the rehearsal. But, as I recall, you get scared, freak out and run away and make me come looking for you. Then you take up drinking and vegetarianism and nonsense.”
Circe said stubbornly, “Nothing you say will scare me.”
The older girl snorted.
Circe said, “I thought you were enlightened?”
“No, just foolish. I was trying to run away from my own life. Now my eyes are opened, and there is no light, anywhere. There is no love, no comfort, nothing like that. You doubt me? You will see. So let’s get on with it. Do you see this skin I am sitting on?”
“Is that cow leather? We don’t have them here.”
“Bull, actually. I found Cayle of Glay, the time traveler from the Forty-Eighth Century, turned him into a steer, and sent him into the ring to face a matador. Sort of funny that the Glorious World Empire still maintained the custom of bullfighting. The golems skinned and dressed him for me.”
“Wait. I turn into you? I am a murderess?”
“Killing people is murder. Killing animals is called slaughter. I always turn them first. Makes it easier.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“Mzilikazi I make into a pair of doeskin boots. Bartolomeo Corsi is to become a muff of rabbit fur. Sempronius is mutton. Khephnes is kept alive as a gelding, to be ridden about the park twice a day. Olathoë I turn into a dove and is torn to bits by my falcon.”
Circe recognized all those names.
Mzilikazi was a far-famed war leader of the macrocephalic peoples who held the Cape of Africa in 50,000 B.C. against the remote ancestors of the Zulus. His ability to divine the future ordained unbroken victories.
Corsi was a monk of twelfth-century Florence who wrote the first treatise on chronic optics and mirror-travel.
Titus Sempronius Blaesus had been a quaestor in Sulla’s time, and the keeper of the Sibylline books.
Khephnes was a necromancer of Egypt of the 14th Dynasty, who learned the secret of time travel in a way so uncouth that Circe shivered as she tried not to remember.
Olathoë was the hero-king and visionary of a vast polar empire reaching from Siberia to Greenland in 24,000 B.C, when these lands were lush and warm. He drove the half-ape troglodyte cannibals found there fleeing into the jungles of Canada, and founded a proud and fair-walled city bearing his name. Here he erected nine hundred fanes to the friendly goddesses of seasons, festivals and fates, delicately columned with the ivory of mastodons.
