[1969]

That this City house was one of only three in the world equipped

with a complete Patent Cosmo-Opticon or Theatrum Mundi in more-or-

less working order, Hawksquill had known before she bought it.

It had amused her to think that her house would be capped by such

an enormous and iron-bound talisman of her mind’s heavens. She

had been prepared, though, neither for its great beauty, nor — when

it had been set in motion, and she had adjusted it in certain long-thought-

out ways — for its usefulness. She had been unable to learn

much about the Cosmo-Opticon’s designer, so she couldn’t tell what

he had conceived its function to be — entertainment only, probably

— but what he hadn’t known she supplied, and so now when she

bent to pass through the tiny door she entered not only a stained-glass-

and-wrought-iron Cosmos exquisitely detailed and moving

with spanking exactness in its clockwork rounds, but one which

presented to Hawksquill the actual moment of the World-Age that was

passing as she entered.

 

In fact, though Hawksquill had corrected the Cosmo-Opticon so

that it accurately reflected the state of the real heavens outside it,

it was still not quite exact. Even if its maker had been aware of it,

there was no way to build into a machine of cogs and gears as gross

as this one the slow, the vast fall of the Cosmos backward through

the Zodiac, the so-called precession of the equinoxes — that unimaginably

stately grand tour which would take some twenty thousand

years longer, until once again the spring equinox coincided with the

first degrees of Aries: where conventional astrology for convenience’s

sake assumes it always to be, and where Hawksquill had found it

fixed in her Cosmo-Opticon when she had first acquired the thing.

 

No: the only true pictures of time were the changeful heavens themselves,

and their perfect reflection within the powerful consciousness

of Ariel Hawksquill, who knew what time it was: this engine

around her was in the end a crude caricature, though pretty enough.

Indeed, she thought, taking the green plush seat in the center of the

universe, very pretty.

 

She relaxed in the warm pour of winter sun (by noon it would be

hot as hell inside this glass egg, something else its designer hadn’t

apparently taken into account) and gazed upwards. Blue Venus trine

with blood-orange Jupiter, each blown-glass figured sphere borne

between the Tropics on its own band; the mirror-surfaced Moon just

declining below the horizon, and tiny ringed Saturn, milky-grey,

just rising. Saturn in the ascendant house, proper for the sort of

meditation she must now make. Click: the Zodiac turned a degree,

lady Libra (looking a little like Bernhardt in her finely-leaded art nouveau

draperies, and weighing something in her scales that had always

seemed to Hawksquill to be a bunch of lush Malaga grapes)

lifted her toes out of the austral waters. The real Sol burned so hotly

through her that her features were obscured. As they of course were

in the blank blue sky of day, burned out entirely and invisible, but

still of course there behind his brightness.