Queen Sashetah Irene sat up, pulling herself out from under the layer of cats. “On the subject of your retirement from field duty.” She leaned forward to tap the book on her nightstand: Heinrich Brugsch’s My Travels with Carl Richard Lepsius Through the Andean Wilderness and Reports of the Natives There. “Have you read this yet?”
“I have,” Mabruke said.
She held the book out to Oken.
Oken took it, focusing on the details. Then he opened to the first page and flipped through the rest with practiced concentration. He lingered over the photographs, complex drawings, and maps. He took about five minutes to do this, for it was a large volume, with many illustrations.
Queen Sashetah Irene and Mabruke waited, watching Oken as he scanned.
He closed the book at last and returned it to the Queen. “Thank you, madam. I look forward to reading it later.”
“We think you will find it most interesting.” The Queen stroked the cat curled up at her side, looking down at her and not at the men. She was silent, as if reviewing her intention; then she stood up, slipping her feet into the jeweled sandals waiting on their stand.
Both men rose at once. The lush purring of the cat was loud in the still room.
“First, we must go for a stroll in the moonlight, gentlemen. Come with us.” Her purple robe swirled out around her, revealing a flash of a slender ankle and jeweled sandal strap as she strode across the apartment toward the doors at the far side. “Our garden is at its most perfect during the full Moon.”
The only entrance to the Queen’s private garden in the palace was through her apartment. The garden was on a gentle rise of ground five hundred cubits across, skillfully landscaped with bonsai versions of imported trees and plants, creating in miniature a map of the world. Egypt was at the very top of the rise, with the rest of the world arranged around. Bodies of water were represented by solid masses of lush, green moss. The continents and nations were marked by their native trees and plants. An oak from Oken’s Spate of Mercia represented the Greater Britannic Isles. There were ginkgo trees and bamboo from Zhongguo; baobab, jacaranda, and cinnabar from southern Africa; tamarind from Andalusia; ash from Helvetia. There was even a stand of little sugar maples from the Confederations of the Turtle, and Persian oranges. A path of white stones, mapping out the course of the Nile, led to the top of the gently sloping mound.
The dome overhead was closer here and more transparent. The central point of the radial web was just above them. In the full light of the Moon, the garden seemed a place out of time, otherworldly.
Sashetah Irene picked up the cat who had followed them into the garden. “This garden is almost nine hundred years old,” she said with some pride. “The royal families have kept it unchanged. Queen Hathor Boadicea had this place built in 991, to commemorate the first millennium of the Pharoman Empire. The queen spent the rest of her life perfecting it. Egypt has spent the centuries since perfecting the empire around us. I think we have reached a time of something greater than just good gardening.”
“I have great faith in the future of the empire,” Mabruke said softly, with genuine feeling.
Oken was silently impressed with his friend. After such traumatic experiences, a lesser man might have lost that faith.
The Queen led them up the white pathway of the Nile. The feathery tops of shoulder-high palms were sprinkled with starlight lamps. At the top were chairs and couches with leather cushions arranged for comfortable conversation. Each piece was supported on a base of spunglass amber frogs, lit from within.
Oken noted with disappointment that Princess Astrid was not there. He wanted to hear her laugh once more. She had directed the tea service, arranged on low tables among the chairs. Individual teakwood- and-silver teapots steamed lazily amid cups, saucers, and spoons, and platters piled high with pastries and fruit. He could smell her perfume lingering over the tea set.
The Queen spoke as she took her seat. “I felt it would be more appropriate to discuss this here, in the Garden of the Moon. It is more secure here. I can drop that ‘royal we’ formality without incurring Lady Khamanny’s disapproval.”
The two men settled onto the glowing furniture on either side of her.
“I will be celebrating my fiftieth nativity next year,” the Queen went on. “I hope the two of you will be back from this new assignment well before the party. I can hardly imagine entertaining without you to deal with the ladies.”
“Fiftieth, madam, truly?” Mabruke said as the Queen poured out a cup of tea for him.
“The Queen of the world is ageless, madam, now and forever.” Oken was thinkingof another woman of an age with the Queen.
“I like the perspective of this half century,” the Queen said thoughtfully as she filled Oken’s cup. “I can see life as though from a higher tier on the Pyramid, a broader view. Relationships are more interesting than I could have understood at twenty-five or even thirty. From here, I see the dark shape of the unknown continent of the New World and its peoples. I see not an ominous darkness, rather an intriguing mystery. Our side of the world has been linked so thoroughly by Caesar’s highways. The world, wide as it is, has limits. We meet ourselves on the other side as we go around it. We cannot afford to go on defining that part of the world as the Dark Continent. The Moon may be our way into that dark.”
“The Moon, madam?” There was a note of genuine surprise Mabruke’s voice. He looked at her more closely over the rim of his cup as he sipped.
“Yes. I see the Moon from here more clearly, strange as that sounds. I know why they are reaching up to him.”
“Reaching up to him?” Oken sat up straighter. “Who is reaching up to the Moon?”
“I’m afraid I’m taking you out of retirement, Mikel.”
“Madam, no! Please, you can’t.”
“Something extraordinary has come up. The Throne needs you.”
“Madam!”
Oken was more curious than ever over the royal summons that had returned him to Memphis. Mabruke had retired from field service more than a year before, preferring to use his considerable talents at analyzing field data while teaching the next generation of Pharaoh’s Special Investigators. Mabruke wanted to let his cover as a professor of skin- alchemy become his real life. Oken suspected that the Queen was unaware of the secret pain that had driven Mabruke to change his role in the PSI Guild so drastically.
“Your work at the guild is invaluable,” the Queen said. “This assignment, however, cannot be trusted to anyone else. Now is the time, especially now. There was so much publicity over your rescue. The death and wounding of so many trained hounds was just too big a story. It was on the front page of every newspaper in Egypt, as well as every international page in the empire. I have invoked royal privilege so far as I could. You and Scott appear in their accounts of that night only as ‘foreign noblemen who were attacked by agents of the Red Hand.’ The Britannic and Nubian Embassies have been asked to keep you out of this in their rec ords. I implied to the ambassadors that the Red Hand will want revenge on both of you. Your lives might be in danger.”
She put her hand out and rested it across Mabruke’s. “You are in danger. Your cover is at risk of being exposed. We cannot afford to lose you from the guild!”
Mabruke was silent, his face too calm, as if he were debating inwardly. “Of course, madam, thank you.”
“You have read Brugsch’s account?”
Mabruke seemed surprised at her change of topic. “Not the edition you have, madam. I read the original reports, as they were sent to the Pharaoh.”
“It is a pity that Lepsius did not survive the adventure. There is a great deal here that makes that Dark Continent seem a most fascinating place.”
“Deadly, as well.”
“I suppose. Do you know of the extent of their use of aeroships for logging along the Orinoco River, or the volume of traffic through the Zotzlotl Aerodrome in centralMexicalli?”
“I learned considerably more than is in the book as released to the public, madam. The Pharaoh insisted that information about the aeroship industry was too important to international defense to be made public.”
“Yes—Dozey is afraid that if the Quetzals catch on, then the roads will deteriorate.” She regarded this thought with a slight frown.
“I have reassured him often, madam, that such a shift in economics was not likely in his lifetime.” Mabruke could be very reassuring, simply with tone of voice. “After all, they have already been in Africa and Europe for a century and more, yet the roads endure.”
The Queen glanced up at him. “Have you ever thought about traveling to Tawantinsuyu or Maya Land?”
“That is quite a change in topic, madam. Is Pharaoh planning to invade?”
“Invade? I hardly think so.” Sashetah Irene was amused. “I have received disturbing reports about something going on in Tawantinsuyu, the Empire of the Four Quarters, high up in the Andes mountains. They have made a secret alliance with Maya Land, in pursuit of an astonishing goal.”
“Any kind of alliance between those two would be astonishing,” Mabruke said calmly.
“The alliance appears to be directed by the temples and not by the palace. Somehow that alarms me more. I want you to find out what’s going on.”
“What kind of alliance, madam?” Oken said.
“They plan to send a man to the Moon.” Queen Sashetah Irene poured herself a cup of tea, while Oken and Mabruke looked at her in astonishment.
“A man to the Moon, madam? Indeed?” Mabruke set his cup back down on the table, staring at it as though expecting a signal from it.
Oken was, almost involuntarily, seeing flashes of the maps and diagrams he had just memorized. He shrugged. “They do know a lot about flying.”
“It is time for us to get involved,” the Queen said. “This comes under the heading of ‘so impossible, it just might work.’ ”
“To the Moon, madam?”
“You could learn a lot along the way.” Oken had not yet consciously assimilated the mass of material he had scanned. He spoke from an unconscious instinct in response to the imagery. The idea appealed to him.
“We could.” The Queen sipped at her tea, gathering her thoughts before she spoke again. “The alchemist who created radiance technology, a thousand years ago, discovered the material for the suncatchers because he was looking for a sacred Grail that could absorb light, then reflect it back in the dark, just as the Moon reflects back the light of day. We know that he began with a silly notion, but examine the results of that silly notion.”
She gestured to the dome overhead. “The panels in that dome are made from the first generation of suncatchers, and to this day they produce the power for everything in the palace. Our spinglass technology was first developed in the twelfth century by an Andalusian mystic who had a vision that he could dissolve light in water and store it there, if he could only create the correctly shaped glass vessel. Today, we light our homes and streets with spunglass lamps. We can see, close up, the stony face of the Moon and the raging face of the Sun because of the farscope technology that grew from these fantastic visions. Who knows what technology they will create while they are trying to fly to the Moon? We cannot afford to be left behind in this.”
“Am I going as an ambassador or as a spy, madam?” Mabruke’s face was impassive. Oken heard the trace of excitement in his tone of voice.
“First, as a spy.” She sipped her tea again. “I need to know if this idea has a real chance, or if it is just a spiritual vision that we should encourage, even if only out of politeness.”
“If there really is something to it, then I become an ambassador, is that the idea?”
The Queen nodded. “We keep our radiance technology as secret as humanly possible—they keep their aeroship technology secret. We sell them spunglass lamps and radiance products. We just don’t tell them how we manufacture them. We can build our own aerodromes and mooring towers, but we cannot buy Quetzals from them. We can only lease them. Building and repairing them, and the crew to fly them, are a New World exclusive, as well.”
“I see,” Mabruke said. “If this Moon venture is genuine, then we are going to negotiate a treaty to be involved, in return for agreeing to help them with our technology. Is that it?”
“As usual, you think these things through quickly. I am counting on you to gather the details. You went to school with the ambassadors, the LeBrun brothers. They should prove invaluable once you are there.”
“I have considerable work to do here, madam,” Mabruke said in mild protest. “Exploring the Red Hand network and directing the analysis of the tunnel infrastructure alone will take months.”
“You were the only one capable of rooting out the secret of those tunnels, even if only by accident. The follow-up can be done by lesser minds than yours, perhaps not so brilliantly, nor so swiftly, yet well enough to serve. There is no one else in our employ whom Dozey and I can trust for this mission. You are the only mind and eye whom we would dare to send into that dark place. You are the only one who will recognize what you are seeing. You will know what is harmless mysticism, and what is genuinescience.”
She leaned forward slightly, clasping her hands in her lap in a formal gesture that told both men this was not a matter of debate.
“There are fewer than ten thousand Egyptian citizens in the New World at any given time. What has become clear is that royalty and one’s rank in the nobility are vital issues in Tawantinsuyu. You will find that your position in the Nubian Royal Court opens doors for you, and silences protest at your requests. You also happen to be most suited to this, at this particular moment, precisely because of the curious coincidence of your rather public adventures with the Red Hand. The headmaster of your college has been sent a letter from your personal sakhmetician. In this letter, it is suggested that Professor Mabruke, although fully recovered and sound of body, nonetheless, should be encouraged to take a lengthy rest leave. His nerves have been seriously stressed by the events of his ordeal.”
“I see, madam. Not so far from the truth of it, actually.”
Sashetah Irene continued, reciting from memory. “ProfessorPrince Mikel Mabruke, the eminent skin- alchemist and Head of the Department of Perfumes, Salves, and Unguents at the College of Alchemy, will be taking a leave of rest from his classes, traveling to far corners of Andalusia in search of new perfumes, oils, and spices for his research. He hopes to return with many exotic samples to share with his students.”