“How the boy suffered then! The roguish tailor’s publicists spread the word of his commission, and many were the celebrities and media stars who bribed their way in to watch. They would gape at the empty loom being worked, the empty spools spinning, the bamboo about which bolts of costly fabrics were supposedly wrapped. Then they would see the tailor strike the boy down to the ground before their eyes, and say to themselves, Ah the man is temperamental. He is an artist.
“Then — having committed themselves — they would praise the work in progress. For no one wished to admit he was a fool.
“By the time the work was finished, the tailor’s boy was half-mad from hunger and the drugs he took to stave off sleep. He was battered and bruised, and had he been thinking straight,
might well have killed his master. But the hysteria of the crowd was contagious, and he, no less than anyone else, thought himself honored to participate in such a seminal work.
“Finally came the day of the presentation. Where are my clothes? demanded the Emperor. Here, said the tailor, holding up an empty arm. Are they not fine? Notice the sheen, the glimmer of the cloth. We have woven so fine and cut so subtly that it takes a wise eye to even see the garb. To a fool, it is invisible.
“You might not think the Emperor would fall for so obvious a fraud. But it was all of a piece with the rest of his life. A man who believes in his own nobility has no trouble believing in a piece of cloth. Without hesitation, he stripped bare, and with the tailor’s help donned seven layers of purest nothing.
“A state holiday was declared in honor of the Emperor’s new clothes. The tailor was rewarded with so many honors, titles, and investment options that he now need not work ever again. He turned the boy out of his shop to beg in the street for his bread.
“Thus it was that, dazed, drugged, and starving, the boy found himself standing on the street when the Emperor and all his court passed in joyous procession, and the proletariat — none of whom wished to be thought fools — cheered for the beauty of the clothes.
“In the heightened state of awareness brought on by his deprivations, the tailor’s boy saw not an Emperor, but only a naked, rather knobby old man.
“Am I fool? he asked himself. Of course the answer, as he saw now, was yes. He was fool. And in his despair he screamed: The Emperor has no clothes!
“Everyone hesitated, paused. The procession stalled. The Emperor looked about him in confusion, and his courtiers as well. Up and down the street, the ragged people began whispering to one another. They saw that what he said, which none of them had wished to appear foolish by admitting, was true. The Emperor had no clothes.
“So they rose up and slew the Emperor, and his court, and all the civil servants. They burned the Parliament to the ground, and the Armory as well. They razed the barracks, churches, and stores, and all the farms and factories. The fires burned for a week. That winter there was famine, and in its wake plague.
“In the spring the new Republic began executing its enemies. The tailor’s boy was the first to die.”
Silence filled the cabin. Finally the bureaucrat said, “You’re no more entertaining now than you were alive.”
“Nothing that has happened to you since you arrived on Miranda occurred randomly,” the false Chu said. “Gregorian orchestrated it all. He taught you to see the black constellations and the pattern that contains them. It was Gregorian who arranged for you to meet Fox. It was Gregorian who put a witch in your bed and introduced you to the possibilities of the body. You may not have seen him, but he was there. He has taught you much.
“Now that I am dead, he has need of an apprentice. He wishes you to come to Ararat, to complete your education.”
“He actually thinks I would do that?”
“The first step in an apprenticeship is to destroy the seeker’s old value system. And this he has done, hasn’t he? He’s showed you that your old masters are corrupt and unworthy of your loyalty.”
“Shut up.”
“Tell me I’m wrong.” Veilleur laughed. “Tell me I’m wrong!”
“Shut him up,” the bureaucrat ordered, and his briefcase obeved.
Ararat rose from the marshes with all the natural inevitability of a mountain. Gently sloping terraces formed neighborhoods that merged in irregular planes. Above them the mercantile districts soared in yet steeper slopes. Finally came the administrative and service levels. The city was a single unified structure that slanted upward by uneven steps to a central peaked tower. Covered with greenery, it would have seemed a part of the land, a lone resurgence of the archipelago of hills that curved away to the south. Now, with the vegetation lifeless and withered, exposing windows and doorways black as missing teeth and sea-veined stone dark as thunderheads, it was a gothic monstrosity, a stage set for some lost tragedy from humanity’s habiline past.
“Can you land us in the city?” the bureaucrat asked.
“What city?”
“That big mound of stone dead ahead of us is what city,” the bureaucrat said, exasperated.
“Boss, the land in front of us is flat. There’s nothing but marshes for thirty miles.”
“That’s prepos — Why are we banking?”
“We’re not banking. The flier is level, and we’re headed dead south by the compass.”
“You’re bypassing Ararat.”
“There is nothing there.”
“We’re veering west.”
“No, we’re not.”
The city was shifting steadily to the side. “Accept my word for it. What explanation can you give me for the discrepancy between what you and I can see?”
The briefcase hesitated, then said, “It must be a hardened installation. There are such things, I know, places that have been classified secret and rendered invisible to machine perceptions. I’m ordered not to see anything, so to me it doesn’t exist.”
“Can you put us down by my directions?”
“Boss, you don’t want me to fly this thing blind into a hardened installation. The defenses would order me to flip it over, and I’d fly us right into the ground.”
“Hah.” The bureaucrat studied the land. Against the horizon, Ocean was a slug-gray smear squeezed beneath the clouds. Ararat was unapproachable from three sides, surrounded by dull, silvery stretches of water and mud. To the west, though, a broad causeway led straight from the city to a grassy opening in the trees. It was clearly a fragment of what had once been a major route into the city. A flier and as many as a dozen land vehicles sat abandoned in the meadow at its terminus. The bureaucrat pointed them out. “Can you see them?”
“Yes.”
“Then set us down there.”
The canopy sighed open.
“I can’t come with you,” the briefcase said. “As long as I’m patched in, I can suppress Gregorian’s incursions. But the machinery is rotten with unfriendly programming. Once I’m taken off, we run a good chance the flier will turn on us. At the very least it’s likely to fly off and leave us stranded here.”
“So? I don’t need you to do my work.” The bureaucrat climbed out. “If I’m not back in a few hours, come after me.”
“Got you.”
He faced the causeway. What had been obvious from the air was invisible from the ground. The roadbed was buried under sand and overgrown with scrub. A crude road, however, had been bulldozed down its center, the machine itself abandoned by the mouth like a rusting watchdog. He went from truck to landwalker to truck, hoping to find one he could ride into Ararat. But the batteries had been yanked from them all. He picked up a television set left on the front seat of a mud-jitney, thinking it might be useful to keep an eye on the weather. The city loomed enormous over him. It could not be far.