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  I said, then, "That was petulant of me. Toby, you have a question."

  Instantly, he said, "What downstairs?"

  "Well, you know... the one at, like, the landing. The big windows, the flowering gardens, the suits of armor, the room with the Round Table with the squared-off edges, that bloody downstairs." What was this? Back to their damned mystery tour again?

  Lune tilted her head. "Ah. So you found a door on this floor, and went downstairs, and found yourself on the ground floor with windows looking out onto a garden in full bloom."

  It was obviously ridiculous, when you put it that way. Strange how inconsistencies even as great as the one Lune pointed out to me could skid away from your attention simply because each step of the journey had been so real, so unambiguous. In the moment that I realized the nature of the delusion, I saw as well that it was not a delusion after all. I had the sword for proof.

  "The door must have been a Schwelle," I said. "It sent me to some other place. Like I said. And that table—you were all sitting around it, your images I mean, except for Lune of course—it, it..." I trailed off. I forced myself to speak. "There were eleven sides. Then there were twelve. An empty seat. I presume it was for me." I looked from one to the other, and saw that they were as baffled as I. More so, perhaps.

  Toby rose. "Come with me, you two." He led us around a corner into the corridor where I've peeked impertinently into the disused rooms of his house. He walked briskly to the end of the corridor, spun, stood facing us with his hands on his hips. "The door was here?"

  "No, I mean the one to your left, at the end of the alc—"

  Rather like the jaw of my poor boneheaded dead friend whose sword I'd stolen, mine dropped.

  There was no alcove. No door with a palm lock in copper or bronze. The corridor came to a dead end.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SgrA*: 1976, Aged Thirty-Two

  Every time he steps from the air-conditioned blandness of Kingsford Smith airport into the sudden subtropical swelter of Sydney, his heart lifts. After Melbourne's gray-and-dusty-green sedate politesse, this great city on the harbor buzzes and roars. A public transportation bus lurches up, belching exhaust smoke. He carries his backpack onboard, pays the modest fee for a ticket to the heart of town. In Melbourne, it would be an airline coach or a taxicab, irritatingly expensive, as if air travel were still the privilege of the wealthy. The sky is a high, brilliant blue even through the scratched windows. They bounce across intersections, plowing through the clotted traffic. Jackhammers stammer. Angry drivers toot their horns. The bus driver sings out of tune, something Italian, something from an opera. He smiles, happy.

  From the bus terminal, pack on his back, he walks the several miles through Hyde Park and along the down-and-up, swooping stretch of car-clogged William Street to Darlinghurst, to the edge of wicked Kings Cross. Even in the bright winter sunlight, the huge Coca-Cola sign mounted at the top of William Street runs through its sparkling dance. A spurt of the thirst catches at the back of his throat; he grins at his own suggestibility. He sneezes. The air in Sydney, he has to admit, is full of aerosol crap, worse than Melbourne's, trapped by some appalling temperature inversion effect despite the sea winds off the harbor. Asthma town. He jinks sideways into the maze of streets to the south of the central thoroughfare, wends his way home to Palmer Street, once notorious for its brothels and streetwalkers. History is on the move, and the trendies are moving in. He suspects that he and Em won't be able to afford to rent this big place for very much longer; the demographics are against them. Up the hill in Oxford Street, the gays are replacing the sleaze, bringing color and money to this rough old neighborhood.

  Emily is working in her light-filled studio, daubed with spatters of paint, lurid bright specs of metallic confetti in her hair. Grinning, he flicks a piece or two from the tip of her nose, bends to kiss her mouth. She gives him a distracted smooch in return, careful not to get paint on his clothes. He dumps his pack on the kitchen table, brews coffee for them both. The kitty strokes past his leg, perhaps happy to see him, perhaps hoping for a treat. He lifts the cat up against his shirt, strokes her long, soft, Persian fur, checks for knots. Her purring grows louder; her eyes slit shut. It is a perfect day. He realizes, suddenly, to his intense surprise, that it's his birthday. Once, he had anticipated this annual event for weeks in advance. Now, with thirty behind him, midlife forty well off in the future, it seems that one year is like another. Everything important is the same, even as everything changes.

  He takes Em her coffee, hoists his pack, runs noisily up the stairs to their bedroom. On the white west wall, where it will catch the morning light, he finds that she has mounted a large portrait of him, his birthday present, rusted old and bright new metal, blurs of paint on twine and canvas, twisting out of the frame like a proof of four-dimensional spacetime. His heart lurches. There is nothing he regrets about leaving Melbourne for this remarkable city, this delightful wife of his. By the end of the year, his protracted long-distance doctorate will be complete. He'll shake off the dust of Melbourne, complete his move to the harbor city. He opens the French doors, steps on to the wood-and-iron lacework veranda overlooking Palmer Street. After a moment, he sneezes, his chest tightens, he sneezes again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Avril

  In a cold passion, the Sibyl Avril Seebeck raged.

  "That fool boy! Who ordered him?" She flung down her cards upon an onyx table covered in papers scratched with arcane symbols. Finger-worn, hues muted by years of handling, the deck scattered in the air like startled birds, spun and fell, splashed in water. Swan maidens moved to retrieve them, garments drifting behind them. "Three centuries of work! More! Utterly undone. All lost in chaos—"

  Ignoring her assistants, she arose, swept like a green storm from her sanctum to the broad staircase, descended its seventy-eight steps to the Great Hall. Beneath her bare toes, the warm, soft gold of the final twenty-two steps was soothing after cold granite, but she stumbled at the final step. Cold as ice, slippery under the balls of her feet. Avril glanced down in renewed irritation. Light struck up at her, prismatic, hard. The final step had changed from gold to a pure diamond.

  "Ancient damn it!" she shouted. "Juni, you idiot, what have your interfering little brutes done now?" But her sister was a Schwelle away, and her nano-offogs safely off the premises, presumably, until the Castle Keep required its next housecleaning. This change was a manifestation direct from the computational substrate. A declaration from the Ancient Intelligence. She looked away from the light-smashing brilliance, stepped carefully to the huge ouroboros pattern in the stone floor of Great Hall, stabbed by an intimation as cold and sharp as a diamond blade. Afternoon light entered the hall from high windows, dimly illuminated the tapestries hanging from the rough stone of the walls. Crossing the inscribed back of the immense World Snake gorging upon its own tail, she called for Blessing Mariel, her Principal Swan.

  "Your service, Madame Sibyl?

  "Prepare me for reverie."

  Mariel, usually imperturbable, sent her a sympathetic look. "Ma'am."

  ***

  Suspended between green and blue she hung, eyes half closed, arms extended, held from immersion and drowning by the lifting, secure touch of eleven swan girls' fingertips in the grand baptismal font of the chapel. Their touch was the merest breath, yet it burned like points of coal at occiput, shoulder, thigh, knee, heel. The young women sang in eleven-tone choir, eerie, atonal, elevating Avril to a mood of cooling detachment, less masking her rage than transforming it to a certain high purity. In the depths of her floating being, she sought communion with the Ancient Intelligence.

  "Hear me, Great Mother."

  As ever, she waited, senses straining uselessly as she commanded them to quietness, instructed her flesh in the ancient liturgy, felt her way into deep passages of mystery and uncertainty. Here, as ever, awaited the temptation of delusion, self-deception, babblings from the lost child within, mocking sneers, hopeful mutterings derive
d as much from her strengths as from her weaknesses and vulnerabilities. She emptied the vessel of herself into the nothingness of the void, the void that lifted and sustained her no less than the salt, watery embrace of the font, the burning coals of her swans' fingers. After a timeless time, something approached, placed its own impress upon her. She was the snake; she swallowed herself: knowledge came to her. And its price.

  What will you pay for illumination?

  As always, the Ancient Intelligence was blunt to the point of malice. Avril tensed, caught herself at the edge of resentment, took command once more of her breathing, slowed her heart. This was the cost; it had always been the cost. She was not sure how much more of it she could tolerate, and yet she was certain that this karmic penalty was both just and in her interests. No great truth might be had free of charge. There were no gifts, not in the Contest universe, which was the only universe accessible to her and the other Players, however infinitesimal that aperture must be—at least in the sight of the gods, the goddesses, the godthings, whatever the hell the Ancient Intelligence might be.

  "I am ready to meet the price," she said, words slurred and barely audible in her profound reverie. "May I ask what it is?"

  I find you more tractable than usual, the Great Mother told her, perhaps approvingly. You may choose your fee. I offer you a choice.

  Avril's pulse quickened once more. She was frankly terrified. No rule of reason guided demands placed upon her by the Ancient Intelligence; all was caprice, all was pain or loss fancifully proffered.

  "Thank you," she said, acquiescent in word but rebellious in the core of her belly. For months, she had worked in the loneliness of her fastness under the torment of daily headaches that crushed her brain, knotted the muscles of her shoulders and neck. They find me rude and unyielding; well then, let them choose such suffering. Unfair, some part of her protested. Unfair that this burden fell always upon her, never upon her brawling siblings. Least of all that brat, that absurd child of parents she had thought dead. The Great Mother ignored her inner, unspoken reservations.

  Here is your choice: a gnawing and griping at your guts—

  The Sibyl felt her entrails tighten, the acids of anxiety spurt into her. No! No, this Promethean agony was not to be borne. She cried out: "The other option?"

  You must abandon the memory of all you have learned in the last decade. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

  Mystery upon mystery wrapped around an offer so cruel, so paradoxical, that for a long moment Avril forgot to breathe. And cried out, then, in agony: "I cannot! Great Mother, it is your work I do. It is for your glory, to bring forward the day of your triumph, the completion and victory of the Contest. How can I—" Again she caught herself. Meshed with the caprice, the cruelty, some deep, strategic essence was worked in her mind and body, in all the Players, the Seebecks, the Ensemble, the innumerable rest of them. Perhaps, she thought with a shudder, in the deformers, too. That being so, paradox ruled itself out. True, the fruits of her researches for the years passed, perhaps for centuries rather than the single decade she was being asked to forfeit, were spoiled by the appearance of the brat, spoiled and distorted in ways she could not remedy, could not yet detect. So the loss of that work was truly no loss. And yet—

  "I—can't. How can I give it up? How can I abandon—" Tears flowed from her closed eyes, ran down the sides of her face into the salty, tear-tasting waters of the font. With a gasping sigh, she said, "Give me the pain. Quickly now."

  It entered her chest beneath her breasts like a nail thrust into a bed of dragging, hurting weight.

  What is your question, child?

  For hours she had struggled to frame her question most tactically. Now all that pith and precision was lost. Avril blurted: "The time is out of joint. The center will not hold. What's happening, Great Mother, and why?"

  Her senses shut down. She did not gasp and flail; this was her recurrent exclusion, at once a theft of world and an elevation above it, or perhaps, rather, a burrowing deep beneath it. This was not darkness and silence but nothingness. Avril waited.

  The Tarot deck shuffled in her phantom hands, riffled face to face. She readied her spirit to lay out the family cards. A table extended before her made all of emptiness and stars. Dreamily, she knew that she must select and put down eleven cards, one for each member of the Seebeck family, excluding her absent parents. A shiver ran through her bodiless body. No, twelve cards. The brat. The wretched, disruptive—

  The first card she placed directly before her, turned it over, considered its ancient design. Card 10, the Wheel of Fortune. The image swallowed her.

  Hanging in space without breath, without the necessity of breathing, she studied the inner Solar System. Here was the Earth, overlapped upon itself innumerably often in the super-space of quantum alternatives, mostly blue and white and lovely, the jewel of life in an empty cosmos. Within Earth's orbit, the hot, white, poisoned globe of Venus curved away. Beyond Venus, the melting, pockmarked, lunar ball of Mercury. And at their center, blazing in brilliant power, the diamond clarity of the Sun.

  This was no literal-minded telescopic image, nor was it an astrological convention of the sort she studied every day, seeking to capture vagrant wisps of insight from the deep workings of the Ancient Intelligence. Now she saw the immense, muscled curve of the Midgard serpent, the ouroboros, Typhon's scaled snake, wrapped around the whirling worlds, bearing life and extravagant complexity from the substrate to its material expression. On the far side of the Solar System, a being as great as any traditional god moved in orbit, jackal-headed Hermes, intelligence aspiring forever to attainment greater than mere cleverness. Avril shuddered. A change! Always before this had been Ruth's card; now, distressingly, she found that it was her sister Juni's. And see, here she was, sitting above the display in the likeness of a sphinx, beautifully dressed, a cloud of offogs about her head. Very well: Juni as material Wisdom. The Sibyl felt her non-self ease. This much was unfamiliar but not impossible. This, in the Kabbalah, was now Juni's grounding presence as Malkuth.

  Avril drew another Tarot card, the second of the Major Arcana: her own card, the High Priestess, Yesod. Joy flooded her. Formerly, dangerously, this had been Marchmain's card, the Foundation. Perhaps all was not lost. Beyond the image, she watched herself, seated on a throne intaglioed with hermetic symbols, the immense, black-marble pillar of Boaz flanking her right hand, the white-marble pillar of Jachin to her left, life energies flowing between them, cathode to anode. The Moon placed upon her head, moving the waters of the world. On her lap a document containing that which she had always sought, which she might yet attain: the automata rules underlying all four Tegmark levels of the computational universe. Avril unconsciously took one step forward, her hand stretched hungrily toward the scroll. Instantly she shook her head in self-rebuke, stepped back from the tempting image, seated herself once more at the dark table splattered with starlight.

  The third card she placed above her own and to the left. No longer Jan as Splendor. Marchmain now, of course. Hod, the Magician. Her brother was naked under a gaping white lab coat stained with fresh blood. In his right hand he held aloft a scalpel with a red bead upon the razor edge; his left hand stretched down to toggle the controls of the magnetic resonance drum rotating at his back with its terrible noise and auric confusion. In her reverie, Avril seemed to smile. These were ancient symbols, long-antiquated yet standing in good stead for the subtle machines and instruments of which March was master. On the workbench before him stood a grail betwixt an inscribed pentacle, a wand, a gleaming sword with a jeweled hilt. Effortlessly, Avril brought to mind the symbolism: Fire, Earth, Air, Water. In their proper order, and with their proper names, Solid, Liquid, Gas, Charge. Or more exactly still, and in the reverse cosmogonic ranking: gravity, strong force, weak force, electromagnetism. All of those, in turn, unified into the profound Xon force whose embodiment was signalized by the symbol above Marchmain's head: the lemniscate, the infinity sign, the Mid
gard serpent yet again gulping down his own tail. A dreadful stomachful, that. Even in the nothingness, detached from the flesh, Avril felt a pang at her center. Something within her cringed at the promise of waking agony. Something within her shrugged; this was the price, she had accepted it. Live with it. For as long, at any rate, as the Ancient Intelligence deemed fit to inflict it.

  She turned over the Empress card, and placed it upon the seventh node of the Tree of Life, Netzach. With a gust of relief, she found it unchanged. Who else but Maybelline stood under the sign of Venus? May reclined in a field of extraordinary vegetation, nothing of Earth, but abundant, fruitful, eagerly drawing in the light of the nearer Sun. The Sibyl had never seen her sister so arrayed in beauty in the real worlds, but the symbolism of the card suited her: a loose robe richly decorated, seven pearls at her neck, a crown of eleven stars. No, no. Once more this disruptive, unnerving alteration. This time May wore twelve stars woven in her hair.

  Agitated, Avril found and flung down the next card upon the node of Tiphareth, at the very heart of the Tree of Life. What she found soothed her agitation. Ever before, that dubious bishop Jules had stationed himself upon the symbol, making mock, in her view, of the beauty and compassion anciently signified by the Sun, the Hanged Man. Now he was replaced by Janine, and Avril found herself smiling. Well, of course. Was not The Hanged Man her sister's whimsical name for her dark energy Kabbalah starship, the vessel that had borne her not to the Sun but to a greater stellar enigma, the Xon star? Yes, this was appropriate, this gave hope. Perhaps the changes wrought by the upstart were not all ruinous. Perhaps the end they portended might be turned, with her own sibylline guidance, to the Contest's end.

  The next card fell upon the fifth node, Geburah, the Tower, reversed. Here, under this reversal, was a place of judgment, where a Rock might stand. Once again, to her bafflement, the identity of the card seemed an inevitable fulfillment rather than a betrayal of tradition. Always before, this had been Juni, grounded in the material world, subject to temptation and frivolity. Now brother Toby regarded her: foursquare, trustworthy, truly a tower of strength. It came to her that she had tended to disparage Toby in the past, to overlook him, regard him as a bucolic bookworm in retreat from the Contest proper. This card was an alert. She said a prayer of gratitude to the Ancient Intelligence and an unvoiced apology to her brother.