What was self-evident from even a casual perusal of the book was how extensively the unreconciled Dominion had influenced the others. The languages of earth—English, Italian, Hindustani, and Chinese particularly—were known in some variation everywhere, though it seemed the Autarch—who had come to power in the confusion following the failed Reconciliation—favored English, which was now the preferred linguistic currency almost everywhere. To name a child with an English word was thought particularly propitious, though there was little or no consideration given to what the word actually meant. Hence Hoi-Polloi, for instance; this one of the less strange namings among the thousands Godolphin had encountered.
He flattered himself that he was in some small part responsible for such blissful bizarrities, given that over the years he’d brought all manner of influences through from the Succulent Rock. There was always a hunger for newspapers and magazines (usually preferred to books), and he’d beard of baptizers in Patashoqua who named children by stabbing a copy of the London Times with a pin and bequeathing the first three words they pricked upon the infant, however unmusical the combination. But he was not the only influence. He hadn’t brought the crocodile or the zebra or the dog (though he would lay claim to the parrot). No, there had always been routes through from Earth into the Dominions, other than that at the Retreat. Some, no doubt, had been opened by Maestros and esoterics, in all manner of cultures, for the express purpose of their passing to and fro between worlds. Others were conceivably opened by accident, and perhaps remained open, marking the sites as haunted or sacred, shunned or obsessively protected. Yet others, these in the smallest number, had been created by the sciences of the other Dominions, as a means of gaining access to the heaven of the Succulent Rock.
In such a place, this near the walls of the lahmandhas in the Third Dominion, Godolphin had acquired his most sacred possession: a Boston Bowl, complete with its forty-one colored stones. Though he’d never used it, the bowl was reputedly the most accurate prophetic tool known in the worlds, and now—sitting amid his treasures, with a sense growing in him that events on earth in the last few days were leading to some matter of moment—he brought the bowl down from its place on the highest shelf, unwrapped it, and set it on the table. Then he took the stones from their pouch and laid them at the bottom of the bowl. Truth to tell, the arrangement didn’t look particularly promising: the bowl resembled something for kitchen use, plain fired ceramic, large enough to whip eggs for a couple of souffles. The stones were more colorful, varying in size and shape from tiny flat pebbles to perfect spheres the size of an eyeball.
Having set them out, Godolphin had second thoughts. Did he even believe in prophecy? And if he did, was it wise to know the future? Probably not. Death was bound to be in there somewhere, sooner or later. Only Maestros and deities lived forever, and a man might sour the balance of his span knowing when it was going to end. But then, suppose he found in this bowl some indication as to how the Society might be handled? That would be no small weight off his shoulders.
“Be brave,” he told himself, and laid the middle finger of each hand upon the rim, as Peccable, who’d once owned such a bowl and had it smashed by his wife in a domestic row, had instructed.
Nothing happened at first, but Peccable had warned him the bowls usually took some time to start from cold. He waited and waited. The first sight of activation was a rattling from the bottom of the bowl as the stones began to move against each other; the second a distinctly acidic odor rising to jab at his sinuses; the third, and most startling, the sudden ricocheting of one pebble, then two, then a dozen, across the bowl and back, several skipping higher than the rim. Their ambition increased by the movement, until all forty-one were in violent motion, so violent that the bowl began to move across the table, and Oscar had to take a firm hold of it to keep it from turning over. The stones struck his fingers and knuckles with stinging force, but the pain was made sweeter by the success that now followed, as the speed and motion of the multifarious shapes and colors began to describe images in the air above the bowl.