Jannes and Mambres have lost track of humanity among their charts and epicycles, a not-uncommon occupational hazard for the magician. Plague has come again with the hot moist breath of summer, and both tempers and lives are running short.

“The city cannot go on like this,” pants Jannes, melting and barechested and miserable beneath the window screen. “Everything is shut down, and all the best people have fled to the country. It’s impossible to live these days; everyone is so anxious.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” drawls Mambres, who glories in the heat and the humidity like a lizard. “If you look at restaurant bookings and sports attendance, we’re at 85-95% of what we were before the plague. People have accepted the occasional buboe as the price of living.”

“I haven’t seen anyone except you in ages, except for a few brief picnics around the vineyards, and even then you know we’re all so spaced out that it’s not the same. You do what you can, and everyone is pretending as best they can, but it’s so different. I miss our lives before.”

“Love, you are simply extracting too much from our own circumstances; we are, after all, out of touch with the average person by design.”

Things go rather downhill from there, and they don’t speak for nearly a week. For the best, perhaps; daily new cases double yet again over those seven days (observes Jannes, gloomily) but corpse fires barely tick up (notes Mambres, cheerfully). The river rolls on.

Above Troy, above Jericho, above Amba Aradem, above Tumebamba:

Mambres, the tourist: “Good movement on the southern flank. Don’t think it’ll matter, though.”

Jannes, the scholar: “No, certainly not. They’ll be overrun. It’s written so.”

“Oh, good show! Bravely done! Is there anything we can do for that one?”

“Maybe on the margins; they’ll be dead in three days, or four. The specific timeline is unclear.”

“I hope we’re getting all this.”

“I think so. It’s always hard to tell, at the moment. Can’t always say what’ll get recorded, and what won’t.”

“Well, cover them with glory today, until they break. Maybe that’ll help shine a light.”

They watch in silence for a spell, hair and beards grown together, each the other’s sofa. The sun, despite everything, moves across the sky in its accustomed track. The familiar stars wheel beneath their feet.

Jannes and Mambres, cautious mathematicians, do not predict what will be, only what might. What will be cannot be changed, or avoided, or mitigated, it can only be. Such certainty is limited to the gods, and not always to them — and to their new planted counterparts among the slaves, which rankles Jannes (but not Mambres); he thinks it gauche. No, they stay among the mutable stars and human planets, things knowable but changing, the avoidable dooms, the almost fates.

“Here, look here, Mambres,” says Jannes, eyes adrift with formulae. “Riots along the river tonight, I think, maybe? A shortage of beer among the laborers, short tempers, long hours, a fight over a man. Yes? No?”

Mambres sweeps the thinning hair out of his eyes, leans in, traces his partner’s work with one heavy-jointed finger, lips moving. “Hrm,” he says, “yes, I think that’s right. Let me run these numbers on my own — can I take this? — good, yes, thank you.” Clack of counting; he peruses the elaborate, meaningful border of a table. “Yes, that’s right.”

They summon a runner from the dim chaos of the hallway, send him off to the priests, to the guards. The guards will stand watch along the river, the priests will send beer and dreamers, one to soothe the body, the other to soothe the mind. The river will roll on to flood undisturbed, death and punishment alike kept from the hands of men. The quiet stars spin on, one decennial wing beat after another.

The magicians sip mint tea from colorless glasses made of sugar, and when they are done, they eat the glasses, crunch. They sit on balconies overlooking the sea and toy with the vines growing through the metalwork. A cacophony of music rises up from the streets and bursts out of the subway tunnels in spasms of commuters, guitars, flutes, drums, strange instruments cobbled together out of garbage and remaindered paint.

Jannes traces constellations in his notebook, calculates aphelion, perihelion, declension and ascension. “I am hoping,” he murmurs, half to himself, “to live long enough to see another planet.”

Mambres is down among the dishes, trying to work out the significance of bread crumb positioning. “Oh, I doubt it,” he says. There are 124 crumbs on the table, mostly concentrated on his side — Jannes doesn’t care for lemon wafers — and they cast shadows of doubtful import. “They’ve only just put a few simulacra down on Kolob. It’ll be centuries yet before anyone has enough of an idea of the place to send someone over.”

“You never know,” Jannes protests. “We are not exact scientists.”

“No, you never know,” sighs his partner, “but we — we can guess.”

At work in the orrery. Walls thick with charts, tables, diagrams: dense sprawl of their calculations, Jannes’ handwriting neat and precise, Mambres’ expansive and looping.

They have seen for millions of years in either direction, world without beginning, without end. Ink-stained lips on Mambres. Bad habit; Jannes has often reproached him for chewing on his nibs. Black teeth and tongue.

Mambres writes:

…our own eyes attest the constant flux of all things. Mountains erode, streams rise and fall, as do nations and empires, each in its turn. So to us time seems a straightforward journeying from the past to the present; but we see neither clearly nor far. Time’s arrow bends: an arc bending toward a circle, a serpent growing fat on the meat of its tail…

Comforting tick of gears. They have built heaven in miniature, traced its ellipses but not its distances. Inlaid in the stone of the floor, the equinoxes precess. They have figured a 26,000 year cycle as a summer’s exercise.

…for example, the phoenix; (he writes) forever ancient, forever new. Renewed in fire and rare perfumes, a solar bird… driven by the same mad passions, we are born again, driven to the same obscure ends. This, my complex mathematics: the world ends as it begins, forever…