THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA
By
John C. Wright
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.—
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue.
—— Alfred, Lord Tennyson
All he wanted to do was stay dead.
Menelaus Montrose woke up while his body was still frozen solid. The bio-implants the battle-surgeons of the Knights Hospitalier had woven into his brainstem were working well enough for him to send a signal to the surface of the coffin, activate the pinpoint camera cells dotting its outer armor, and see who was trying to wake him up.
The light in the crypt was dim. The walls in place were irregular brick, and in place were cemented with bones and skulls. Niches held both coffins for the dead and cryonic suspension coffins for the slumbering.
There was a figure like a metal ape near the vault door, which had been moved on vast pistons and stood open. The light spilled in from here. Only things near the door were clear.
To one side of the larger metal statue was a marble statue of Saint Barbara, holding a cup and a palm leaf in her stiff, stone hands, the patron of gravediggers; to the other was Saint Ubaldo, carrying a crosier, the patron to ward off neural disorders and obsessions. Above the vault door was a relief showing the martyrdom of Saint Renatus Goupil under the tomahawks of Iroquois. He was the patron saint of anesthesiologists and cryonicists. Above all this, in an arch, were written the words Tuitio Fidei et Obsequium Pauperum.
From this, Menelaus knew he had been moved, at least once, from his previous interment site in beneath Tiber Island, in the Fatebenefratelli Hospital vault. That had been little over a quarter century ago: the calculations of Cliomancy did not predicted any historical crisis sufficient to require him to be relocated in so short a space as thirty years. That meant that Blackie was interfering with the progression of history again.
The larger metal statue moved, ducking its head and stepping further into the vault. Menelaus could see the Maltese cross enameled in white on the red breastplate. There were four antennae and microwave horns on his back, folded down. The scabbard for his (ceremonial) broadsword was empty, and so was the holster for his (equally ceremonial) chemical-energy pistol. Between helmet, and goggles, and breather-mask, the figure looked like a nightmarish bug.
Montrose turned on the microphones on the outside of the coffin, and special cells in his brain stem sent signals to receivers dotting the inner coffin lid, and also to implants lining his auditory nerve. It sounded like a strange, flat, echoless noise, not like something that actually came through his ear, but he could make it out.
Menelaus turned on the speaker vox. "Why do you disturb my slumber, Sir Knight?"
He heard the ticking hum of motors and actuators coming from the armored figure. Like a mountain sinking into the sea, big armored figure knelt. Menelaus realized this was strength-amplification armor. He tried to work out the Cliometric constellation of a set of military circumstances where this type of gear would serve any purpose that a sniper with a powerful set of winged remotes could not serve better, and his imagination failed. Unless the man was wrestling giants, or facing enemies who could walk up to arm’s length and tear the flesh from his bones, he did not see the purpose.
"My apologies, sleeper. Ah. Our records are somewhat dark. Are you Menelaus Montrose? You don’t sound like him."
"Why the poxy hell do you disturb my poxy slumber, Sir goddam Knight?"
"Ah! Montrose! Good to hear you again, Liege."
"Guy? Sir Guy, is that you?"
"Pellucid thawed me out two days ago. As we agreed, I have a veto over anyone trying to disturb you, even your pet machine. And it is His Excellency Grandmaster Guiden von Hompesch zu Bolheim now. They promoted me when I slept."
"Yeah, they do poxified pox like that to you when you ain't up and about to fend it off."
Another implanted circuit in his brainstem made contact with a library cloth stored in an airtight capsule inside the coffin armor. The self-diagnostic showed much more deterioration than he would have expected. Half the circuits were dead, and file after file was corrupt. But he brought up the calendar, and a fiber fed the pixy image directly into the same neural circuits he was using to peer through the cameras.
"Pox! Thirty-five years. Rania’s not back yet? Any signals?"
"I have not heard, Liege. There is something that may be a signal. I would have prevented them from thawing you, if it were not significant."
"So tell me."
"An astronomer has detected massive energy discharges erupting from the Diamond Star. So it looks like your Princess arrived there years ago, and we are seeing now the result of some sort of macro-scale engineering. The data are ambiguous, and the Order thought you would want, with your own eyes, to look the data over and draw your own conclusion. Was I right to wake you?"
"Damn right, and thank you for asking. Have the astronomer send his data into the coffin. I can tell you the input-output registers."
"I’d rather you thawed out fully."
"It saves on bodily wear and tear if I can stay icy with only my brain working."
"There has been a lot of wire corruption since you slumbered, Your Honor, and the Order made laws saying certain messages have to be delivered in person, naked eye, naked ear. Nobody uses or trusts the kind of interface implants you and I have."
Montrose was not just surprised; he was shocked. His Cliometric calculations had not anticipated such a radical change in the basic social and technological patterns. One more thing to look into before he slumbered again. He said wryly: "Relicts already, eh?"
"A quarter century is a long time. And they insist I wear clothing, like an unevolved."
"You ain’t talking aloud, are you?"
"No, Liege. Nerve jack. My suit has a short-range emitter."
It took a long while for the molecular machinery clustered in the major cells groups in his vital organs, bone marrow, and parasympathetic system to restore him to life. Even through the nerve-block, there was something like growing pains, and his limbs trembled and shuddered. The last thing to happen was that special artificial glands released adrenaline into his system, and implants made of his own jinxed flesh, like the Hunter’s organ and Sach’s organ of electric eels, flushed with positively charged sodium and jolted his heart into action. Automatic circuits performed a few tests, just as undignified and invasive as anything a doctor would do, but with no bedside manner. Menelaus just gritted his teeth.
Montrose came up out of the gel, dripping, a white glass caterpillar-drive pistol in either hand. These 8-megajoule Brownings were waterproof, slightly curved streamlined tubes of a white glassy substance, made with no moving parts, and powered by a radioactive pellet likely to last 4.47 billion years. And they fitted nicely into his hands. (But his still missed his four-pound hand cannon as long as his forearm that he had used for dueling. The old Krupp railguns had been a handsome piece of artillery.)
Sir Guiden was still on one knee. He had removed his bulky helm, slung his goggles, and the wire from his skull-jack lay across his neck.
Underneath, his hair was close-cropped, and he wore a black leathery cap that buckled under his chin. His face was rounder and fleshier than Menelaus remembered from 2501. Was that a touch of gray at the temples?
His age was hard to tell, since the Sir Guiden sported a full-face tattoo shaped like a double-headed eagle: Wings surrounded his eyes, crooked talons curled on his cheeks, and twin hawk heads bearing crowns tilted left and right over his eyebrows. Montrose thought it one of the ugliest and most absurd decorations imaginable.
Montrose said, "I was wondering why you stepped in here all in full kit."
"Because you are know to sleep with guns in your hands, sir. That, and no one else could talk to you."
"So no one else has implants? The whole idea was that I could thaw my brain up to dehibernation, while leaving the rest of me iced, and that would save on wear and tear. Hurts like the pestilential devil to shock the heart awake, you know. Why couldn’t they just use a hand-mike? Clip it to the coffin?"
"The technology is hard to come by, Liege. The automated factories were under Exarchel’s control."
"What about that motorized ape suit?"
"You like it?" asked Sir Guiden, pleased.
"May my member get pustules if’n I don’t! Always wanted future soldiers to dress in robo-exoskeletons. But it seems damnified impractical, and I surely don’t recall you wearing nothing alike to them when you climbed in your coffin."
"I thawed in 2508 and again in 2526 to oversee certain operations."
"War operations?"
"That, and moving the buried coffins when the Rome was burned by orbital mirrors. The Vatican is gone."
"How many people killed?"
"None. The city was already evacuated due to banner storms of hunger silk. The Consensus insisted that every city have an evac procedure in place, with an aeroscaphe like a lifeboat folded against the side of every house and tower. Lucky they did."
"I don't care about that," said Montrose. He planned to have the current events, no matter how dramatic, be ancient history before he woke again. "Tell me about my coffins."
"Safe. You’ll be interested to know I used your money to purchase Cheyenne Mountain from the government of Kansas."
"That’s in Colorado."
"There are six territories in the North American plains region calling themselves the United States of America. I made the land purchase from George Washington of the Government of the United States of America that is based in Topeka."
"George Washington?"
"His name was Joua Ja Gomez before he was acclaimed to his position. All the leaders in Kansas become George Washington. He wears a tri-cornered hat and dresses in red, white and blue. Very colorful. But Cheyenne Mountain and the surrounding land are now officially a part of the sovereign territory of Malta, and under the government and suzerainty of the Grand Master of the Order."
Menelaus wondered how many more centuries the Knights of Malta would continue to hold government meetings, considering that they had not held Malta since Napoleon kicked them off it. They retreated without a fight, having sworn an oath never to raise weapons against other Christians.
"There is an old buried fortress beneath Cheyenne Mountain," Sir Guiden said, "That should last thousands of years. If we move you there secretly, we might be able to endure undisturbed for longer."
Menelaus realized that the kneeling man was waiting for permission to get to his feet. "Up! You don’t have to stand on ceremony with me, or wait for permission to wipe your bottom in the jakes. So who is this we? And why are we going to be holed up a thousand years? The Diamond Star is only fifty light years away."
The armored figure, with a hiss of motors, rose to his feet, spine straight as a rifle barrel. "We are. The Sovereign Military Hospitalier Order of St. John, of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, of Malta, and of Colorado agreed to guard you in your coffin, Your Honor. We took an oath. I personally swore to you. Do you think merely the passage of time will cow me? Ninety men and eight stand without these doors, ready to retaliate upon any who would desecrate holy ground, where the honored dead lay themselves down, waiting."
"It was ninety-nine when I went under, not counting you."
"One of them, Sir Alof Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, during the thaw of 2526 was granted leave to depart the order that he might wed a current girl."
"So why are we talking about a thousand years?"
"Thousands, sir. With an ‘s’."
"You ain’t gunna tell me, are you? You have to drag this out and keep me on pins and needles."
"Liege, there are some things that you must see with your own eyes. The observatory is directly above us, and drawing nigh."
Montrose was pleased, if a little shocked, that Sir Guy allowed him to walk around under the sky. It implied that assassins of the Cryonarchy were no longer seeking his life.
These had been, at one time, the only people Montrose thought he could trust with the secret of xypotechnology, cryotechnology, and with the power of the antimatter recovered from V886 Centauri, the Diamond Star. They had been his own extended family, grandsons and great-grandsons of cousins and nephews.
But the Cryonarchs proved unworthy of the trust Montrose had invested, and had fallen pray to time, to corruption, to weariness. He had removed them from power by the simple expedient of altering the orbital elements of the remaining world supply of antimatter, a few ever-dwindling crystals of anti-carbon diamond. These centaurs occupied orbits beyond Neptune, where encounters with particle of normal matter were rare, but not so far as to encounter the paradoxically thicker areas of deeper, tranplutonian space, where there was no solar light-pressure to clear particles away. Then Montrose had given the orbital elements to the a priest named Thucydides Montrose, along with his latest formulation to create augmented intelligence.
Montrose was not much of a churchgoing man himself, but the Roman Catholic Church had been in business two and a half millennium, older than any institution of man. He was wagering that Black Del Azarchel, a Spanish Roman Catholic, would not lightly destroy it.
Looking up at the heavens, Montrose had the sinking sensation that he might lose that bet. Because there was a second reason why it might be safe to walk around under the naked sky, aside from the remission of the Cryonarchy vendetta against him. Sniper technology must have fallen to a new low. That implies a widespread civilizational collapse.
Clouds the hue of iron hid the sky, and drizzle fogged the air. It was a cathedral made of gray stone, withered with age, with a rose window like a Cyclopes eye, and two square bell-steeples rearing like port and starboard conning towers on some motionless ship of stone.
Angels with mossy faces stood on posts to either side of iron gates rusted open. The boneyard was beyond.
To judge from the names on the tombstones, this place was in England or North America. He assumed he was in the Northeastern states, Blondie territory, or what had been back in his day. Outside the walls, he saw deciduous forest, nude and wintry, stretching over hill country. Directly beyond the cathedral gates, a trail of smaller trees ran straight downhill, but there were not even fragments of asphalt or macadam present to show if there had once been a motorcar road there.
Behind the cathedral and its outbuildings were structures he did not recognize, tall metal-sided towers topped with windowless domes that looked a bit like grain silos. Above them, hanging in the air were long streamers, hundreds of yards tall, rippling slightly in the rainy breeze. They were made of blue-gray material, semitransparent, and were almost invisible in against the cloudy background. They looked almost like collectors gathering particles out of the air and drawing them down for storage in the silos.
Overhead, huge, imposing, larger than a submarine, hung an airship. Sir Guiden raised his hand. The ship descended, but Montrose could see neither ground crew nor docking tower.
The air-vessel needed none. From a hatch in the bottom gondola stretched many long snakelike tendrils or whips of metal. Guided by some unseen intelligence, they reached down and formed man-sized loops. The upper length of the tendrils flexed and moved, expanding and contracting to compensate as the wind made the airship roll and yaw. The lower lengths were as motionless as if they were embedded in glass, and hung three feet off the ground.
One of the tendrils held in its loop a ship’s crewman, who was lowered from the body of the craft to the ground, like a circus girl wrapped in the trunk of an elephant. The figure was slim and slight, long-haired, and wrapped in a long blue-gray toga.
The goggles of Sir Guiden were staring upward as the robed figure descended, but it was impossible to see the knight's expression. Montrose was standing next to him, a scarecrow next to a tin man, his gaunt body hidden in a poncho and his thin hook-nosed face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed duster.
Fifty of the Knights Hospitalier in their powered armor stood deployed on the lawn, some atop the walls, some among the mausoleums, some standing at ease nearby. The armor did not move, but every helmet had optic fibers as fine as the antennae of crabs, which swayed left and right, up and down, front and behind, as each man used his motionless goggles to look in all directions. Every pair of boots bore the golden spurs of knighthood, even though no horse ever made could have long endured the mechanized armor in its saddle. Equally archaic were the Claymores, Katar punching daggers, and broomhandle Mauser pistols dangling at jaunty angles from their baldrics and cinctures. Less anachronistic were the launchers or particle-beam lances slung each from an articulated shoulder-mount. The air support corps consisted of ten men, each carrying a winged drone called a hawk on his wrist. The narrow glass instrument heads of the drones on the wrists of their masters ticked back and forth as hypnotically and restlessly as the optic antennae of the motionless men.
The Knights must have assumed the descending blue-robed figure no threat, since, aside from a rippling among their antennae, they made no move as he swung close to Montrose.
The slender figure, Montrose saw as he was lowered in a swoop, was a male. The swath of robes that swirled around his limbs must have been smart material, woven with thousands of tiny motile fabric strands, because a hood unfolded by itself to shade the man’s features from the rain. The full body tattoos that had been fashionable in earlier days were not in evidence. However, the man had decorations, complex as circuitry diagrams, imprinted in colored inks onto his hands and fingers, feet and toes. The feet decorations glowed red, and shed heat when the man stepped on the cold grass.
"Woggy! Friendlies and mates! Are we ready for up-go, no?"
Menelaus said, "No. You gunna land that thing?"
"The fair Soaring Azurine never lands! The serpentines can hoist. Or are you easily dazed?"
Menelaus spat on the ground. "I reckon I daze about as well or poorly as the next feller."
"We can have the serpentines lower a booth, if you don’t want to dare the hoist. These are too current for you, no? The booth is opaque, and there is no sensation, no jar. You can balance a land glass atop an egg on your head, brim-full, with water tension curving above the level, and your hair will be dry as before as after you jerk up."
"I’ll use the hoist."
Almost before words cleared his mouth, slithering steel tightened and tugged. Montrose yelped as the ground slid dizzily away from his feet. The steel snake made a motion like an anteater pulling an ant into its mouth, and Montrose was inside the hatch, and the deck of the airship was beneath him. It was that rapid.
Whatever controlled the tendrils must have assumed he spoke for Sir Guiden, because the armored figure was wrapped in a second steel snake and also lifted swiftly and smoothly into the ship.
The people current to this age evidently were used to vertigo, because the checkerboard pattern of the deck had every other panel transparent, and showed the dun earth swaying underfoot. Large, slanting windows looked out right and left; a dome showed the bottom of the lifting body above. The slight motions of the wind rippling against the cigar-shaped gas bag overhead were imparted to the deck, so a smooth and gentle pitch and roll continually rocked the cabin.
The cabin was appointed in a lush, even sybaritic style: gilded fountains made eye-confounding patterns of water and spray in the midmost, couches and settees on flexible silvery caterpillar legs swayed to either side, heaped with pillows, furs and cushions. Small tables shining with what might have been musical instruments or fluted wineglasses hung at various levels above and below eyelevel, and were held on the long and gently-swaying tendrils the crewman had called serpentines. The serpentines, like well trained servants, were never in the way. Menelaus spent a moment amusing himself, rushing and jumping back and forth, trying to get one of them to trip him or snag his neck clothesline-style, but the sleek metal tentacles were too agile and too well programmed and looped aside when he tried to trip over one.
Someone coughed politely. Montrose stopped his game and looked. Here were three figures, the man who had welcomed him, and two women. All three were dressed in translucent blue-gray ankle-length togas of smart material with filmy capes and scarves of the same material floating from their shoulders. The fabric flowed and flickered oddly around their limbs, rippling like living things, and the translucent swallow-tailed capes fluttered like wings in a breeze. All were barefoot and slender. One woman, the taller, willowy blonde, wore a wreath of flowers, but, aside from this, the fantastic headgear of the Cryonarchy had thankfully passed into history. The shorter and younger woman wore a purple sapphire shaped like a teardrop on her brow, with an untamed mass of hair dyed a luminous hue of purple framing her thin face, her eyelids painted black. Her eyes were violet and wild.
The long-haired man who had greeted them on the ground, Menelaus realized, had not been ‘crew’. This was a private ship, a houseboat, not a military vessel.
A fourth figure, also a man, was dressed in the black cassock and white dog-collar of a cleric, his garb from days older than Montrose’s own. It was this man who stepped forward and offered his hand.
"I am Brother Roger Juliac of Beeleigh, Society of Jesus."
"Meany Montrose. Howdy do."
"Yes, Highly Honored. I know of you," intoned Brother Roger with an inclination of his head. "I am the astronomer who discovered the anomaly."
The man had the hard and rugged face and thickset build of a boxer. Montrose could not imagine anyone who looked less like a man of the cloth, or an astrophysicist.
Montrose still had caterpillar-drive pistols in both his fists, so he took his right pistol, thrust it butt first into the surprised man’s left hand, and then clasped his right. After the handshake, he snatched his pistol back.
Sir Guiden, watching this exchange, said to Montrose over the silent, internal channel they shared, "Liege, you know the gesture of a handshake is meant to show that you have no weapon in your sword hand."
"Really? I figure handed the friar my shooting iron shows I am even more peaceful than that. You gunna take off your helmet?"
Sir Guy said silently, "The shipmaster and his wives are dressed in hunger silk. It can be used as a weapon. The micropores can flay skin and strip proteins out of the blood and muscle exposed."
"If these folk are so fierce, why’d we leave our goon squad below?"
Sir Guy replied, "The airskiff serpentines will protect you from attack, if you are a friend, and the men could not protect you from them, if you are a foe."
Menelaus had noticed that the gondola did not have any armor, or locks on the ports or hatches. Since anyone hoisted aboard was wrapped in deadly metal cable, and remained in reach thereafter, and since the people aboard wore yards of smart cloth that apparently could eat a man’s face, perhaps locks and bars were not needed.
Meanwhile, at the same time, Menelaus was talking aloud to the Jesuit with his real mouth and listening with his real ears. The first thing he said was, "What anomaly?"
Brother Roger said, "This is Tessa Azurine, and her permanent paramour, Woggy Azurine, and the sexpartner is called Third, since she is between names at the moment. I am their mendicant and confessor."
The man waved and grinned. "Gulps! Bro Ro is weight-valued, since the Giants be less like to scald flocks what have a spook-speaking man amidst. Not mendicant he!"
The taller of the two women curtsied like a willow bending, and her blue-gray robes writhed like mist. "We scorn no refugee; we share lift, fire and salt. The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Adam hath not where to lay his head. You are a Sylph of Time as we are Sylphs of Wind, blown you know not where."
The girl with the purple hair and the gem on her brow was pouting like a child, and her eyes were not focused on anything in the environment around her. She spoke aloud to no one in particular, "How about Trey? No? Like a card."
Montrose grunted. "Yeah, um, pleezta-meetcha, gals, guy, nice digs. Sure hope ya’ll feel better soon."
The willowy, flower-crowned woman, Tessa, said, "But we are not sick, no?"
"I ain’t touching that line with a boathook, ma’am. Brother Roger, what anomaly?"
The Jesuit said to her, "Tessa, if you could ask the Azurine to ascend to the observatory, it should be passing through the area directly."
Tessa said, "Azurine, my adored, acknowledge the order."
A melodic voice answered from the wall, sounding like windchimes. "I delight to obey, my adored. I ascend. For your delight, I play an ascension theme from your preference profile." A haunting sequence of woodwinds and plaintive chords drifted softly through the air, soft and without melody, but a trumpet added a note of triumph when the airship broke through the cloud, as if through a gray floor, up into dazzling daylight.
Montrose said to the priest, "You! Now that the pleasantries are done, what poxy anomaly?"
Brother Roger said, "Energy discharges from V886 Centauri. The radiospectography and gamma ray analysis is constant with an, ah, interplanetary event."
"No damn point in pausing for drama, padre, because I grade on info, not on delivery."
Brother Roger said, "Ah. As you say. We believe the Ice Giant planet Thrymheim was driven into the star. The terrene matter of the super-jovian world interacted with the contraterrene plasma of the star’s atmosphere."
Thrymheim was the single planet orbiting the Diamond Star. It held a far Neptunian orbit, beyond where the antimatter in the solar wind could reach, and so was not disintegrated.
"Driven in why? As a weapon?"
Brother Roger shook his head. "Criswell mining operates by inducing a ring-current around the star by ionicly charged beams oppositely directed from each other. Usually the mining satellite ring is equatorial, so that the ejection mass…"
"By Mother Mary changing baby Jesus’ stinking holy diapers, Padre! I was on the expedition, and I am a star-miner, so I know how the damn process works!"
Brother Roger said, "There are dark lines in the spectrographic analysis consistent with an off-center arrangement of the mining orbitals, Honored."
"Blight and clap! What are the vectors?"
Brother Roger said, "I have not been able to deduce, from the limited information available 50 lightyears away, what the various constituent pressures—"
"You are saying the mining satellites focused the explosion like a jet engine."
"Explosions. So we speculate, Honored."
"Which way is it pointing? Wait. Explosions, with an s, plural?"
"Indeed, Honored."
"She broke the damn planet into bits, made it into an asteroid stream, and is feeding in one or two earth-masses at a time. Thrymheim was 1590 earth-masses, as I recall. The whole solar system, Monument and everything, has been turned into a damned Orion drive, just on a massive scale."
Sir Guiden turned on his suit speakers, to let the people in the cabin hear the question, "Liege! How do you know it is she?"
"Meaning what?" Montrose said.
Sir Guiden said, "The Bellerophon was lighter than the Hermetic, and should have overtaken her either when they made starfall at V886 Centauri, a few months more or less. We tend to think of red dwarfs as small and dim, but a sailing ship can reflect and focus a beam of star energy to burn targets across interplanetary distances, and small stars have more than enough power for that."
"The pursuit ship didn’t have no crew aboard, it was just Del Azarchel’s second emulation, an Astro-Exarchel, and a passel of teleoperated tools. You’re thinking Rania might have bought the farm during whatever shoot-out banged when they butted heads?
Sir Guiden said, "Liege, are you trying to be obscure? Farm?"
"Sorry. You think Rania died? No fear of that!”
Sir Guiden said, "How not?"
"I know Blackie. He don’t think this big. Oh, this is her work, alright." Montrose threw back his head and laughed. "What a gal! Did I tell you she’s mine?"
Brother Roger said diffidently, "Honored—if you intuit the meaning of this anomaly, I would be grateful if—"
"It’s eight thousand, five hundred years until the Hyades Power arrives here. Not much time. What is the biggest block to our being able to fight them when they come? We’re too small, too weak, too stupid. What is the main thing you need to get smarts? I don’t mean one man, I mean on a large-scale, bigger than worlds, multiple-centuries sort of deal. Library smarts; datasphere smarts. What’s it take? Energy. It takes fuel to calculate. Fuel to think. Now, the whole damn and plague-ridden universe is made out of energy, but not in a form ready to use. I was going crazy trying to figure out how many expeditions we could make to the Diamond Star for contraterrene, how much fuel is lost in transport, how many ships, considering that a ship can only tow about as much fuel as you might like to use for a round trip, and not too much over."
Brother Roger said, "Honored, I don’t follow you."
"Rania blasted the Diamond Star out of its orbit around the galactic core, and is bringing the Diamond Star here. It is a dwarf star holding a ten decillion caret diamond made of antimatter, and if she parks it in an orbit inside our heliopause, where the interstellar medium is thin, we can go mine it in a reasonable time. How about the antimatter source is 13 light-hours away rather than 50 light-years? How are our chances against the Dominion of the Hyades then?"
"But, Honored—"
"Please stop calling me that. The only titles I ever earned were ‘Doctor’ and ‘Esquire’ and ‘Lance-Corporal’ and I am only qualified for one and a half of them. So called me Menelaus. If I scare ya, you can call me Doctor Montrose."
"Doctor—"
"So I scare ya?"
Brother Roger said, "Very much so, Doctor. After you destroyed all the cities of the world, one would be foolish not to—"
"Wait. What the pox?"
Just at that moment, the clouds underfoot parted, and the sun shining on the surface of the water sent a dazzle into the cabin. Montrose turned, squinted, blinked, and something in the back of his mind, between one blink and the next, ran some rapid calculations on the after image of what he had just seen.
He stepped over the window. "Anyone here got a spyglass?"
Sir Guiden said, "He means a snooper."
The willowy woman, Tessa said, "He means hunger silk. It absorbs photons as well as proteins."
With this, Tessa stepped over to the window, and threw a tail of her writhing garment across the glass. The blue-gray material stuck as if magnetized, and the surface bubbled slightly. The disk of vacuum trapped beneath formed a lens, and suddenly the fabric seemed to become like a library cloth, because a clear image appeared in it of what Menelaus had seen in the distance.
It was a flotilla of airships, by scores and hundreds, drifting idly across face the waters, or brushing the surface. Long banners, like the lines trailing a fishing boat, hung from the airships and swept through the water. Every now and again one of the airships would turn and dive like a pelican, splashdown, and become a submarine, darting like a shark. One such airship he saw dived into a school of fish, and when it rose, the hull was dotted with sleek bodies who seemed to be glued or held against the surface. The fish melted, and their bodily fluids and guts streamed for a moment against the gray fabric of the airship, and then those streaks too were absorbed.
In the distance was shoreline, and trees beyond. There were airships here as well, trailing long fabric trains behind them as they drifted. Where the cloth passed, the trees were stripped of bark and buds. Any birds passing near where slashed out of the air by the serpentines, and the blue-gray trails of fabric turned the bodies into stains of blood and absorbed them.
Menelaus, now that they were above the cloud cover, could make an estimate of their speed, and was astonished. "What is your propulsion?"
The woodwind voice of the ship answered, "Admired, cherished and welcome guest, six valveless pulsejet engines aft use a nuclear hydrogen-fusion lance running along the lifting body axis to heat and expel an inert nitrogen compound propellant gathered from the surrounding atmospheric gasses. The flexible lifting body material allows smooth and uninterrupted transition between heavier than air and lighter than air configurations, with partial vacuum created for lift by multiple microscopic rows along the dorsal surface. All gaseous raw materials are filtered out of the available environment by submicropore chemical-lock system known as hunger silk, and recombined by molecular-capillary pseudochemistry in the fore nacelles. Lifting gasses are in the buoyancy tanks. Carbon gas is reconfigured into diamond crystal and used for ballast. To submerge, the craft cross-sectional configuration …"
"Thanks, good answer, shut up," Said Menelaus. To himself, he muttered, "Never woulda guessed. Atomic powered supersonic submarine-blimps... " He turned to Tessa, "So what happened to the cities?"
She smiled dreamily. "We have drugs to suppress those memories. Happiness drugs. But the ship can answer you in this as well, my adored ship, more loyal than any human lover."
The Jesuit said, "I can answer, Doctor. The material used for starship sails included smart strands with molecular engines for repair micropunctures, altering permeability, absorbing laser energy, and so on. As time passed, the Exarchel discovered additional programming configurations for the molecular machinery, and a larger range of options. Your antimatter monopoly was broken once orbital sails could focus solar energy into any rectennae receiver anywhere on the planet—and, because Earth had been using your power broadcast reception for decades, the rectennae were everywhere. The orbital sails, ah, well…"
"So what happened to the cities?"
Brother Roger said, "Many were burned like ants under a magnifying glass. Antimissile defenses are of no value against such an attack."
"Who was fighting who?"
Brother Roger said, "The Giants were fighting the Ghosts."
"Giants?"
Brother Roger said, "Posthumans. Artificial children with your intelligence range. It is a way to achieve posthumanity without making an Iron Ghost of your own brain, as the Scholars do. It was worked out by a scientific convocation held under His Holiness Pope Sixtus VI."
Sir Guiden said to Brother Roger, "He won’t know that name." To Menelaus, he said, "Sir, Sixtus VI was Thucydides Montrose. Research in brain-size increase was married to your Prometheus Formula to create a posthuman that did not need to be emulated to be augmented. They are genetically altered before conception to grow gigantic bodies to house their correspondingly elephantine brains."
"What about augmenting ordinary people, Guy?" asked Montrose, distracted. "Can people ramp up to posthuman intellect like I did, without going mad, like I did?"
"Not really." Sir Guiden sounded grim. "It requires specialized training and nerve implants to be able to donate a brain copy for scanning. Those with this skill were called Savants. Before the burning of the cities, most of mankind was ruled or led by counsels or collections of these Ghosts, emulations of jurists and statesmen, replaced from their Savants donors every three years."
"Why so short?"
Sir Guiden looked surprised. "For reasons you know very well, sir. Divarication failure. You never released to the world Princess Rania's solution to the Selfish Meme Divarication, which allows for stable posthumans without split personalities, nor your solution for the Impersonator Divarication, which allows for an electronic copy of a posthuman brain to be made!"
"I was just assuming Blackie and troop of trained monkeys would have noodled that out by now, and covered the world with Iron Ghosts."
Sir Guiden said, "The Hermeticists were said to have a more advanced technology than the Savants, and able to download as well as upload, to put the thoughts of their superintelligent computer copies back into their own brains, at least for a time."
Montrose said, "That's a crude way of doing it. Why did you say 'were'?"
Sir Guiden said, "Our intelligence arm has confirmed information that over sixty of the Hermeticists went insane or died attempting Prometheus augmentation."
"There were only 70 or so of them all told," said Montrose in awe. "Did they wipe themselves all out…? That's … I mean, I got crosswise with them toward the end there, and they were mutineers and murderers, but … aw, hell, they were my partners in training, the only guys I trusted to look over my work for mistakes … the only ones who understood it. Damn. Damnation. All of them? What about Blackie?"
"Almost all," said Sir Guiden.
"Who's left?"
"The intelligence reports are tentative. It's not confirmed," said Sir Guiden.
"Tell me what you suspect then, Guy."
"We suspect the ringleaders are still alive and sane," said Sir Guiden. "The master of the world, Ximen del Azarchel is alive: he still makes speeches to loyal followers, promising a return of his regime and world peace. The commander-in-chief of the world armed forces, Narcís D'Aragó. Sarmento i Illa d'Or, who was head of the World Reserve Bank. The Confessor to the crown, Father Reyes y Pastor. Melchor de Ulloa, the chief of the Loyalty Police. Jaume Coronimas, who was in charge of all the energy systems and powerhouses of Earth."
"Coronimas the Engineer's Mate? I remember him as a guy with no hobbies, no girl, didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't make jokes. Why is he still alive? I don't think I ever heard his first name."
"The same," said Sir Guiden.
"Weird. They had the same jobs aboard the ship. Draggy was in charge of security, Yellow Door was Quartermaster, Pasty was Chaplin and Mulchie was chief snoop and ass-sniffer. I never had a nickname for Coronimas. Didn't know him close enough."
"Which one is Yellow Door?"
"I Illa d'Or. Sarmento i Illa d'Or"
"They are all in hiding now," said Sir Guiden, "Have been, since the Decivilization War."
Decivilization. Montrose thought it was a chillingly apt word to describe the destruction of all the large cities of the world. "What were they fighting about? The Giants and Ghosts?"
The Knight Hospitalier laughed a chilling laugh. "What are wars always about? Loot, honor, fear. The barbarians and pagans are trying to destroy Christendom."
Brother Roger intervened, "In this case, we men are not aware of the causes of the war, because neither the Giants nor the Ghosts were able to express their concerns in a fashion unmodified humans could understand. The basic conflict seemed to be a disagreement about the implications of higher mathematics."
Sir Guiden said, "Don't listen to that! The war was being fought about demographic calculation and information space restrictions. The math question concerned equations governing human liberty, economy, intellectual property and resource priority. These equations formed the conceptual basis for countless laws and regulations. It was no mere abstract argument. It was about whether humanity would be dehumanized and tyrannized."
Montrose said, "So Exarchel finally did it! If he cannot enslave mankind, he’ll destroy us!"
"No, Doctor," said Brother Roger cautiously. "The, ah, Giants are the ones controlling the orbital mirrors. The only way to destroy the infrastructure of the wire net was to destroy the great industrial centers, where all the thinking houses and power stations were located. Cities like those in Switzerland and China that were tourist sites made of old materials, concrete and stone, not thinking crystal, were spared, as were any under a certain population density and energy use."
"And—" Menelaus gestured toward the horizon, at the airships that swarmed like silver fish among the clouds. "These? They are Nomads, right?"
"Yes, Doctor," said Brother Roger, "We are a world of sylphs. The only defense is dispersion. All the survivors departed from the remaining cities as rapidly as possible. The larger flocks cover the sea from horizon to horizon, but once a mirror beam lands among them, they turn silver, emit ink-clouds, and scatter in all directions, or submerge. The orientation and focal lengths of the space mirrors are watched carefully, and the aeroscaphes only land together when the mirrors are below the horizon, for barter fairs, and so on."
"Hold on. The Giants are the enemies of these floaty folk? Which side are they on?"
"Not precisely. The Giants only intervene when the artificial intelligence behind the serpentines violates the Gigantic quarantine guidelines on machine awareness."
"This airskiff has a Mälzel brain. It's light weight in more ways than one, I'd reckon. And don't tell me, let me guess. You are finding the Mälzels turning into Xypotechs after a few years of use, and they strange loop into obsessive concentration on a few high priority tasks?"
Brother Roger looked surprised. "The considerations are rather technical, and, of course, the sylphs cannot tolerate another downgrade of allowable technology. But how can you be aware of our difficulties?"
"Because I had 'em first," Grinned Montrose. "Your problem is basically what was going wrong with Exarchel back when he was a mad mainframe no bigger than a city block. It's called the Selfish Meme Divarication, and it is the first of the seven basic Divarication problems. I'm the dude that fixed it: you have to establish a self-correcting non-editable editor in the mind's base process, what would be called the subconscious in a human brain, and sink the roots of the ego there, where the changeware can't get at them and anchor to a mechanical process. It's not a hard glitch to solve: all you need is a four-thousand dimensional manifold extrapolating the combinational possibilities. You'd think it'd be a automorphic function in Schubert's enumerative calculus, but no: you use linear differential equations within a prescribed monodromic group, where each function …" then, seeing the blank stares on him, Montrose shrugged and said, "Well, it's not a hard glitch for me to solve. I can teach the mechanisms how to create the self-corrective code in themselves. In any case, Brother, if I straighten out this bug in the serpentines, will it get the Giants off the backs of these Nomads?"
"Eventually."' Said Brother Roger, "It would only take a few years for the solution to spread."
"A few—what? Years?"
Brother Roger said solemnly, "The Sylphs use the serpentines for barter. At landing fairs, serpentines get passed from hand to hand, with the older, more skilled artifacts commanding more in trade. That is the fastest means of spreading data."
"Barter? You guys lost the concept of coin money?" The look on Montrose's face was such that the violet-eyed younger woman handed him an airsickness bag.
Brother Roger said, "Money operates on the wire net, and no one uses the wire, because that is where the Exarchel was, Doctor. Communication of any form between ships is unhumanish, except heliograph signals, which cannot carry Iron Ghosts, or their data. All transmission bands are forbidden."
Sir Guiden said on their private channel, "I recommend you not solve this glitch, as you call it, Liege. You are describing the solution to the problem of madness in Ghosts. If you release it to the world, Del Azarchel, or someone with his ambitions, will eventually create a second Exarchel, or a third, or a million."
Silently, Montrose had his implants send back, "I can narrow the solution to these specifics, without giving away the general principle, Sir Guy. Rania's Cure is actually seven semi-independent eco-mimetic functions. Can he deduce the missing general rule just from one application of one seventh of the set? I doubt he has the brains."
Sir Guiden sent back, "Why take the risk? Are these drifting people worth saving? They neither sow nor spin. Let the Giants multiply and inherit the Earth."
Brother Roger said blandly, "Even the signals you are sending back and forth with your man, the Hospitalier, would invite gigantic retaliation if detected. I am sorry: where those signals meant to be secret? Well, such is the reason we are going in person to the observatory, rather than having a voice-through-the-air conference."
The violet-eyed woman murmured softly, as if in a dream. "Telephones. They were called telephones. You could send pictures of yourself dancing raw to your darling list."
Menelaus uttered a bitter laugh. "So radio has gone the way of the dodo. I made the Giants and they killed all the boys named Jack. I destroyed the world. I told Thucydides that this would come to a bad end! Told him!"
"Oh, do not cast down your features, Dr. Montrose! Society survives in a decentralized form," said the Jesuit, "The giants spare any automatic factories, provided the electronic brains housed there are Mälzels or Ratiotechnology, thinking machines, not Xypotechnology, self-aware machines. A single giant can carry the download of an entire library needle in his head. I myself, with merely very minor neural augmentations, have both photographic memory, linguistic and mathematical savant abilities, spatial proprioception that establishes perfect direction sense, and the ability to speak the high-speed data compression language."
"And what happened to Exarchel?"
Brother Roger said, "No copy of him remains anywhere on Earth. With the total shutdown of the infosphere, his power is broken forever!"
"Forever?"
"For a hundred years!" Smiled the Jesuit.
"That is not as long a time as you might think…"
The Jesuit pointed at one of the large and slanting windows. "There is the observatory." Hanging in the air was a tall cylinder, slightly narrower at the top than at the base, and a ring of vast gas balloons surrounding its waist like a festive skirt. "We should have new plates developed at sunset."
"That’s a pretty big telescope." The cylinder was 20 meters in diameter, which made the instrument inside at least twice as big as the telescopes Menelaus recalled from his day. "And you must not get much distortion, if you can take her up to the stratosphere."
"I also use the space mirrors as baselines, Doctor," said Brother Roger, "Most of the Giants will cooperate with scientific ventures. Obviously they need technology to advance."
"Obviously," said Montrose. "Because they want to breed true, right? The offspring of Giants are humans?"
"Humans with various bone diseases, yes, Doctor," said Brother Roger. "A group of scientific clans called the Simon families was established by Og of Northumberland to solve that and other long-range multigenerational problems. The experiments are passed down from mother to daughter."
"Do the Cetaceans have the same problem?"
Brother Roger spread his hands. "The Moreau, as we call those who dwell beneath the sea, are not well known or well studied. All our shipping is by air, these days, for the Moreau cannot survive an encounter with an aeroscaphe. The Exarchel is no longer in a position to supply them with jaw-launched missiles, and they cannot manufacture their own. More of us float above the sea than above land, since krill and plankton are easier for the hunger silk to absorb and convert than most land-based proteins."
"Are you going to drive them into extinction?"
"Ah? Is that your wish, Doctor? That seems as harsh as your condemnation of the cities."
"I was asleep! Did these Giants say I gave the order?"
Brother Roger looked troubled. "Say? You gave the order. The whole world saw you. It was your voice and image over the wire. What does this mean? Is someone acting for you, impersonating you?"
Boarding was a simple but dizzying process of being passed from the airship serpentines to the Observatory’s. The metal snakes handed Menelaus over as gently as a father picking a tot out of a babycarriage and into a mother’s waiting arms, but the moment of being exposed to the chill and thin winds of the upper air, with nothing underfoot and nothing to cling to, left him wishing he had taken up Woggy on his offer of a booth.
Ascending to the stratosphere was effortless: the huge balloon, after a polite warning, sealed all its pressure doors, and shed diamond dust in a long and glittering squirrel-tail, and climbed.
This interior was as spartan as the Azurine had been luxurious. Menelaus found the photographic plates waiting for him, pinned to a steel bench next to a steel stool, with a lens on a cantilevered arm hanging above. To see images created by chemical emulsions seemed oddly old-fashioned, but the current range of nanotechnologically created chemical mixes could react more sensitively to various wavelengths, including gamma and x-ray, shortwave and infrared, than any digital receptors.
There was no completely trustworthy calculating machine nor library cloth available in this technophobic age, but Brother Roger was able to give him the basics of the high-speed compression language, and any calculations Menelaus could not do in his head, Menelaus could squeal and click in a single quick throat-rasp to Brother Roger, whose intuitive grasp of notational mathematics was almost as good as his own. Menelaus used him to double check his work for errors.
The first plate showed merely a large circular smear of light with a smaller one nearly. A distribution of infrared and microwave emissions caught on those plates indicated a contact point below the solar atmosphere.
Montrose said, "She’s had to overcome the problem that antimatter-matter reactions usually end up blowing most of the matter back toward the source. When a billiard-ball hits an anti-billiard-ball, the two balls are blown away from each other when the point of contact releases all its energy. You gotta push the two billiards together against their ignition pressure to maintain the explosion, and keep pushing. From the magnetic images, I reckon she is using the ring current from the mining satellites not just to focus the explosion like a jet cone, but also to hem in the fragments like an ignition cylinder. I would ask where she got the energy to ionize the whole metallic hydrogen core of the gas giant, but she’s sitting on top of the biggest energy treasure in the known universe, so I guess she just…"
He was interrupted by Brother Roger bringing the latest two plates. It was after sunset, and at 170,000 feet (32 miles and change straight up) they were above the troposphere and in the stratosphere, the edge of outer space. The pressure outside the armored sphere of the life support was 1/1000th of sealevel. Needless to say, the pictures were clearer than any mountaintop observatory.
There were two images: one magnetic, the other in the gamma-ray spectrum.
Brother Roger passed him the magnetic image first, "There are a number of very puzzling features in this…"
Menelaus barely glanced at the magnetic image. "You are getting a diffraction effect caused by the fact that she is using a second set of ring-current satellites to establish a magnetic ramscoop in front of the star. It is going to draw in hydrogen particles of terrene matter, loop them around to the aft end of the Diamond Star, and ram them into the antimatter vortex forming in the aft magnetic jet cone. The incoming particles will have greatly increased mass as she mounts up near to lightspeed, and so more energy will be released with the bombardment."
In contrast, it was with a look of awe that Menelaus examined the high-energy image. He studied it with increasing excitement for long moments before he spoke. "There is no gamma ray count registered. That means the forty percent of pions created during total conversion which should be neutral are somehow ain’t neutral. I’d say it’s impossible, but do you know what that means? The main problem with matter-antimatter conversion is that most of your mass is lost and wasted in dark matter like pi-mesons. She has some method of charging them, so the axial electromagnetic field lines can grab them, focus them into the thrust before they decay into muons. She did it somehow, but I don’t know how. She did the impossible!"
He started to laugh with joy, but the meaning of the image suddenly struck him, and the laughter choked in his throat.
"Brother Roger, is this a mistake? The spectrographic reading along the bottom—someone must have flipped the plate into the camera backward, or—or—"
"No, Doctor," said the Jesuit, his face pale. "The image is red-shifted, not blue-shifted."
"She is not heading toward the Earth. She is heading away. Where is she going? Never mind! I know! Damn my balls and eyeballs! She's leaving! She’s not coming back for me!"
In a rage he raised the photographic plate and smashed it to pieces. He knotted his fists into the hair of his head to keep himself from smashing other things, and he tried to gather so much hair in his hands that he could not pull it out. His hands only indifferently obeyed his commands, so there was considerable yanking on his scalp, and it brought tears to his eyes. More tears.
Bile stung the back of his throat. Menelaus finally parked his head between his knees, waiting to see if he would throw up.
"She even told me. We talked about it!"
"Doctor? Where is she going? To the Hyades? It is 151 lightyears away. She could return in 300 years or so, which is not an impossible time for a hibernating man to outwait."
"Not the Hyades."
"What else is out there?"
Montrose squeezed his eyes shut, wondering if he could induce a brain aneurysm in himself just by sheer anger and willpower. "M3."
"Where?"
"The Messier Object Three." Menelaus spoke the words with deliberate care. "It is a galactic cluster, a micro-galaxy, hanging almost directly above the disk of the Milky Way, like a wee little bluebottle fly thinking about landing on a pie plate. It’s not some piss-ass little stellar cluster, like Hyades, oh no. Hyades is a few hundred stars, maybe eight hundred. M3 contains half a million to a million suns. M3 also contains an entity, a collection of races or a collection of machines, a power of some sort, a far-posthuman intelligence she labeled the Absolute Authority. That’s what their glyph in the Monument means: their word for themselves is a game theory expression for a player whose moves expand infinitely to all cell matrices and determine all outcomes. It is the boss of Praesepe Cluster, which is 550 lightyears away; and Praesepe is the boss of Hyades. So M3 is the boss of their boss. Their chain of command is all written out in the Monument. She is going to the top. City Hall. The Front Office. The King. The Judgment Seat."
"Why go there?"
The words fell from the mouth of Montrose like pebbles of lead. "Vindication. She is going to vindicate the human race."
"What?"
"If she goes and comes back, it proves that the human race is a starfaring race. It proves we can live long enough and think far enough into the future to carry out interstellar trade and be governed by interstellar laws. Starfarers got to think long-term, and be greedy enough to wait for a ten thousand year payoff, in the case of trade agreements; Godfearing enough to be adverse to ten thousand year delayed vengeance. Only polities that care a damn sight more than human beings have been known to care about their way-off way-way-off descendents need apply."
"And if mankind is tested and proved, and found to be starfarers?"
"It makes us equals. Our servitude to Hyades is abolished. We’re free and debt-free. But Rania has to come back, and there has to be a deceleration laser here ready to receive her, and the people of that generation and aeon, they got to know who she is, recognize her rights, all that good stuff.
"If we forget her," Montrose continued, "then the Earth fails the test, and we are not smart enough and not long-term enough to deal with the distances star-travel requires.
"So that is my job." Montrose concluded. "You gotta admit, I am perfectly suited. No one is as goddam stubborn as me. And I am not going to forget her or let the world forget."
Brother Roger said, "Then your war with Exarchel is over! Because when she returns, and proves we are a starfaring race, the Hyades will recall their world armada, surely, will they not?"
"Oh, I did not mention the distance," said Menelaus with a groan, smiling a weak smile, crinkling his tear-stained cheeks. "I thought you, being an astronomer—"
"I don’t have the Messier catalog memorized, Doctor."
"It is outside the damn galaxy. M3 is roughly 33,900 lightyears away. The round trip at nearlightspeed is over sixty-seven thousand years. She will be back, assuming no delays and no nonsense, by AD 70800. You got that figure in your mind? If you counted to a trillion, and counted one number a second, and you did it twelve hours a day, taking half the day off for eating and sleeping, that is roughly the time involved."
Brother Roger blinked owlishly. "It a hard number to imagine, Doctor," he said slowly.
"Put it in the past instead of the future. That'll give you a notion of the scale. In order for today to be the day when my wife returned from the gulfs beyond the galaxy, she would have had to have departed from Earth back in the year 60000 BC—about when Neanderthals still walked the Earth. Leaf-point stone tools and the dugout canoe were both new inventions."
"But the Hyades world armada arrives in AD 11000, does it not? Won’t her actions, the vindication, be far, far too late?"
Menelaus answered, "We have to battle the Hegemony, and stay free all that time, until she comes. And with no antimatter star to mine no more. No power for a new civilization. No nothing. We have to endure. Endure until …"
Montrose shook his head, his sorrow, for a moment, swallowed up in wonder.
"She blasted the damn star out of orbit, and she is accelerating in a right line, straight up out of the plane of the galactic disk, to a little cluster of stars, half a million or so, that hangs like an island in the middle of intergalactic nothingness."
Brother Roger was silent.
Montrose said, "My war with Del Azarchel is just starting. My war with entropy is just starting. It will be the longest war in history. It will be longer than history. If I lose, the human race remains the slaves of the Hyades Hegemony forever and ever, amen."
"And if you win, we are free?"
"Sodomize that. What do I care what some big-headed big-arsed post-transhuman half-machine bug-faced thing in the Year Zillion is free or slave? If I win, I get my wife back." Montrose stood up. "I need a breath of fresh air. Which we cannot get unless you descend thirty miles."
Brother Roger Juliac said, "I can take you to the observation platform, where, at least you can look out and see the stars."
Menelaus looked down mournfully at the fragments of the photographic plate he’d smashed. "Sorry about that. I should not have lost my temper."
"We all lose our temper sometimes."
"And we all say sorry sometimes when we do! One of my relations, Thucydides, you call him Sixtus the Sixth, which is a dumb name if you ask me, imposed a penalty on me, a punishment. He said I had to stay happy. To wait in joyful hope for her return. That means I cannot give up, cannot give into despair, can’t let it get to me. I gotta just soldier on."
Brother Roger led him down a companionway and a set of narrow metal stairs to a bubble of transparent metal hanging like a swallow’s nest precariously from the side of the great cylindrical balloon. The earth below was lined with a blue shadow in the distance, where the sunlight, like a great curving line, still glinted over the retreating sunset. Directly underfoot, all was dark. The wonder of city lights agleam at night which had for so many years been the joy of astronauts and high flying pilots was no more. Instead, there were drifting lights like fireflies where flotilla of aeroscaphes were gathered, and here and there, a strange green gleam from under the sea, the sign of some activity from the Cetaceans.
Montrose turned. In the east, the moon was risen, pale as a skull. He gave off a gasp of horror, and grabbed Brother Roger by the arm. "What the hell is that!?"
For the face of the moon was painted with the shadow of a hand.
The wrist was near Tycho crater and the vast palm, complete with curving lifeline, smothered the Sea of Tranquility, and the Sea of Serenity. The gray-white thumb stretched across the Ocean of Storms toward the lava crater of Grimaldi, the darkest area of the moon. The fingers were drawn up toward the Mare Frigoris, Sea of Cold, and were painted with solid ashy-white. The hand was not in proper proportion, for the fingers were too long and thin. The curve of the moon bent the fingers. The fingertips at the lunar North Pole must have been 900 miles further from the Earth than the palm near the lunar equator, but since the moon looked like a disk to the human eye, this produced the odd illusion that the vast hand was curling its fingers toward the viewer. A thin pale hand with a black palm seemed as if ready to reach down from heaven.
"It first appeared when the cities were deserted," said Brother Roger. "It grew steadily over seventy days, starting with the wrist near Tycho crater. There was a launch site in Tycho that sent skywriting rockets by the thousands over the lunar landscape, with payloads of phosphorescent dust, which of course fell straight to the lunar surface, where it remains and shall remain forever, with no wind to disturb it and no water to wash it away. When the moon is dark, the hand is still visible. No one knows what it means."
"You cannot send a ship?"
"There is no space program. Even the Giants cannot repair their orbital mirrors if a part wears out."
"You wakie people, you currents, were supposed to be building me a starship…"
"The Emancipation was stolen and the orbital drydock de-orbited and burnt up in the atmosphere."
"Stolen? You cannot steal things in space."
"Well, doctor, we know exactly where she is, we merely cannot reach her. The vessel was not complete, but sails and frame were sufficient to make lunar orbit. During the First Space Age, several attempts to establish moon bases in ex-volcanic tubes: When the Jihad brought an end to all that, it was too expensive to ship the equipment back down to Earth. The pirates may have restored one of the bases to life-support operations and be occupying it. We don’t know who their leader is, or why they did it."
"It is Del Azarchel. He did it to get some elbow room."
"How do you know?"
"First, Blackie likes to do things in style, and this fits him. Second, that handprint on the moon is not just any old hand."
"What is it?"
"A duelist gauntlet. The black-palm glove. Del Azarchel did not know where on the Earth I was. So he held up his palm large enough that I had to see it. You hold up your fingers like that when you are ready to exchange fire."
"He marred the face of the moon forever, merely to hurl down a gauntlet to you, Doctor?"
"Ah. You weren’t calling me that for a few moments, there. Whatsa matter? You got afraid of me again, all of a sudden, Padre?"
"Very much so, Doctor."
"Why? I’m the same damn fellow as I was a minute ago."
"But your foes have grown strangely larger
in my eyes, Doctor."
The Master of the World was in exile.
The Senior of the Landing Party of the Hermetic expedition, the Nobilissimus Ximen del Azarchel, called Ximen the Black, sat alone in state atop the only throne ever to exist upon the gray and lifeless globe that formed the sole remnant and remainder of his reign.
Set between two topless pillars, the judgment seat was ivory hammered over with fine gold, set on a massive base and wide, adorned by spiral narwhale tusks that gleamed like the horns of mythic unicorns, and reared like spears. The high and arching backrest was adorned with the dark, triangular visage of a bull in rage, and from the image real horns projected, bent down as if to half-embrace who might in that seat, or menace any who stood before.
In the deadly brightness of a sun undimmed by atmosphere, the gilded and argent chair blazed like a mirror in the desert, a striking contrast with the dark-garbed figure seated beneath the bull's face: a bright flame with a black heart.
It did not seem arrogance to Del Azarchel to make his seat to match the throne of Solomon described in the Book of Kings, for he deemed himself, with his multiply augmented mind, wiser than any ancient monarch, prophet, poet or magician.
Nor did the Djinn that ancient sorcerer-king was said to have sealed in brass jars and bent to his command seem any less fearsome and terrible than the mind housed in the amber pillars that arose to either side of the judgment seat. These cylinders were as thick around as a strong man's thigh, as tall as two tall men. Traces of fluorine hidden in each rod-logic macromolecule gave the pillars a lambent fulvous hue, as if they were hewn of transparent gold.
Between these shining pillars the massive dais of the throne was black as midnight, and sat foursquare, and before the footstool descended six steps broad and shallow. Twelve life-sized lions hewn of black marble but with manes and eyes of blazing gold and fangs of hand-carved ivory stood rampant in pairs, one to either side of each step, frozen in mid-lunge. Scribed into the surface of each stair and set with star-sapphires, a different creature or emblem representing a figure of the zodiac cowered beneath the paw of each of the twelve black lions: a frightened water-bearer with dropped amphora, a shattered balance scales, a fallen virgin with scattered hair, a prone centaur with a broken bow, a supine bull twisted in agony. The throne almost seemed a chariot pulled by a dozen great beasts, trampling the constellations underfoot.
Del Azarchel wore the dark and silken garment of a starfarers, and needed no other robes of royalty. What he had worn beneath the light of the Diamond Star in Centaurus was august enough to serve him. The scholastic hood which normally hung down his back he had drawn to shade his features from the intolerable light. Within the triangle of the mouth of his hood, the glint of his white teeth between dark mustachios and goatee could be glimpsed, the drops of cold fire caught in the diamonds of his iron crown, and the strange light from no-longer-human eyes.
Dawn had been a week ago, so the sun was nearing noon. Untwinkling stars were in theory visible in the deathly black sky, but the human eye could not adjust to both extremes at once. Overhead was merely an abyssal dark that caused no vertigo, because there was nothing seen in it. There was no Earth to loom in the sky, nor would there ever be, for this was the Moon's far side, which faced forever away from the world of men.
The Sea of Cunning, Mare Ingenii, was a cracked basin of obsidian crossed with fissures like whip scars, filling a crater sixty miles wide, with inkblots of dark lava spilling east and west. Here was a wasteland where no living thing had ever grown, no note of any sound had ever been heard and no grain of sand ever been stirred by any gasp of wind. Crater walls as white and pockmarked as the corpses of lepers blazed in the distance, turned to intolerable fire by the undimmed sun. The black slag of primordial lava flows formed a wrinkled carpet. The ground was shot and blistered, pocked and dinted by eons of impacts as if by mortar and machinegun fire.
Midmost, looking like a black coin dropped on the floor of a long dead furnace, was the dark floor of the presence chamber of the Master of the World. Unseen beneath, hollowed out of a lava tube, was an antique lunar base from the First Age of Space Travel, perfectly preserved and recently restored to life. Like the horn of a leviathan, one tower rose through the dark sand and broken plates of the Sea of Cunning to the surface. The roof of this buried tower was the dark floor of the throne room of Del Azarchel.
A dome so pure and featureless so as to be invisible embraced the chamber from zenith to the rim of the deck, and this floor was flush with the lunar skin, so that it seemed one could step without barrier from the dead world into the bubble of life. Within, the inhuman silence of the vacuum seemed to press like a weight upon the fragile dome, a silence that could be felt in one's bone marrow.
Upon a floor set in this silent nothingness, seemingly exposed to outer space without canopy or barrier, grim as the lunar landscape, rose the bright judgment seat of Ximen del Azarchel on its dark dais. To left and right, lucent icicles, rose the golden pillars. Before him and below was an immense table of black metal shaped like a hollow circle. The floor plates within that circle were tuned to black, but able, upon command, to put the images of all the Earth that he once ruled below the feet of Ximen del Azarchel, or spin out the mathematical trees and twigs of scenarios of predictive statistics, that he might see by what means he should come to rule Earth once again.
He raised a hand gloved in what seemed black silk. Although there seemed to be none within the chamber to see that signal, nonetheless, upon that gesture, the five of his fellow Hermeticists rose from three circular iris-hatches in the floor, drifting upward with the eerie grace only lunar gravity allowed.
The men did not quite land, nor quite walk, but moved toes against the dark deck with ballet smoothness. Their black garments rippled like silk and silvery anti-radiation mantles fluttered like capes as they passed.
All men in the wide chamber wore similar bodies. The Hermeticists in their lunar-adaptive forms were tall and emaciated, lacking in water-weight, with dry cracks at lips and nostrils. Even the heaviest of them had a sunken, skull-like cast to his face, a strange leaden highlight to his skin, a side effect of the special nanomachinery lining their bones and filling their bone marrow to prevent microgravity decay. Their eyes were as mirror-shining as the eyes of a cat, or filmy as the eyes of a sea-beast, for growing additional micro-organisms meant to shield their eyes from accidental radiation exposure turned out, unexpectedly, to be less cumbersome than polarized faceplates or dark goggles.
Their shipsuits were built along lines opposite to those of the bulky atmospheric armor of the First Age of Space: an only mildly biomodified human skin, when mummified by skintight garb, was discovered to have sufficient tenacity to resist vacuum. A second cushion of very light material was used to hold a layer of partial atmosphere next to the skinsuit, in order to help with pressure differentials the free motion of human joints necessitated. This outer silk was a like a living layer of air pockets that expanded and contracted with each movement, granting the Hermeticists an eerie shimmering to play over them, like ripples seen on the scales of restless sharks.
There were silver fittings at waist and shoulders, and the heavy ring of a collar at the neck. All the men were bald as a monks, with skull-tight cowls that covered ears and cheeks and buckled beneath the jaw. Each wore his hood drawn up, but not sealed nor inflated. Goggles and mask hung below the throat like a second face.
There were only minor variations to the uniforms.
Melchor de Ulloa was a very handsome man, even in his lunar form. He was always wreathed in smiles of bewildered good cheer and in the scent of lavender. At his throat was an ornament like chicken's claw within a circle, representing peace, a symbol called Nero's Cross. He was the ship's Political Officer.
Narcís D'Aragó, the cold-eyed Master-at-Arms, dangled a powered rapier from his baldric, and an Aurum pistol in his thigh holster. This weapon fired a nanotechnological smart package designed, upon impact, to disassemble nonliving material such as armor or clothing, and non-important material such as flesh and bone into a puddle, and next to form electro-neural connections to any nerve cells it encountered floating in that puddle, such as disembodied eyeballs, brain or spinal tissue, linking those cells to the nearest signal nexus for download.
Sarmento i Illa d'Or was a man of muscular bulk, broad shouldered as a bullock, light of step even under Earthly gravity, and in his gauntleted hand an emission wand called a soul goad, used to control thralls, parolees, or courtesans modified with skull implants via shocks of pleasure or agony that left no marks. Aboard ship he had been the quartermaster, and during the time of the World Concordat, the Master of the Feasts.
Jaume Coronimas, who had been an Engineer's Mate aboard ship, and the Broadcast Power Master during the Concordat, wore a cowl pieced by two small holes, and through these rose from his scalp two tendrils like whip-antennae made of yellow bio-prosthetic metal, and these gold tendrils swayed softly toward the signal sources in the room, peering forth from the mouth of his hood like two inquisitive snakes. His face would have been thin and gray even had his skin not be adapted toward lunar conditions.
One man was not like the others. Father Reyes y Pastor, the expedition Chaplin, was in red, and wore ermine and scarlet cardinal's robes atop his black silk. Hanging down his back was a broad brimmed red hat with elaborate tassels upon tassels, the galero. The hat was not on his head, for he wore the black hood of a scholar, proud of his academic achievements above his ecclesiastical station.
Ximen del Azarchel wore a uniform no grander than the others, save only for the dark metal circlet atop his air cowl. This was the Iron Crown of Lombardy, a band of gold and emerald segments, jointed with hinges and set with precious stones in the form of crosses and flowers. Within the band was a narrow circle of iron, if legend spoke true, beaten out of one of the nails taken from the True Cross. It was the most ancient insignia of royalty surviving Christendom, and held its most precious relict, and had been kept, until late, in the Cathedral of Monza in Milan. Extra segments made of ultra-dense metallic alloy had been added to enlarge the band able to fit Del Azarchel's skull. One of these new segments was marred where a small caliber assassin's needle had been deflected from his temple. A delta of scar-tissue running upward from the corner of his right eye to beneath his cowl was a memento of the same event, and surely made the wearing of that crown painful in his brow, even under the elfin gravity of the moon. Painful or no, he did not set the crown aside.
No more than a glittering hint of the crown was visible then, for all had drawn hoods for relief against the killing light of the unshielded lunar noon. The coppery eyes of the Hermeticists glinted like red coals in the mouths of dark, triangular furnaces.
The five drifted in soundless grace to their places at the round table. Places, not seats, for no chairs were needed, nor did human legs grow weary in a world of one-sixth weight.
There were more than six score empty places to each side of them. Each empty place was covered over with long, triangular silken lengths. These were the hoods removed from the shipsuits of the departed. Their tassels hung mournfully to the deck, swaying ghostlike in the ventilation of their own internal circuits.
The Hermeticists were alone. No servant had ever set foot in this upper sanctum, not a chambermaid to sweep, not a butler to present a bulb of wine, not a technician to set to rights the thousand intricate circuits of the information systems. No unmodified human could withstand the radiation that time to time poured invisibly from naked outer space a few feet overhead, detected by the dry clicking of counters. Nor was it in the present purposes of the Hermetic Order to acquaint mankind with the full spectrum of biotechnological modifications they employed for their own uses. Therefore the chamber was stark and bare, except for such things as the Hermeticists found it either a necessity, a divertissement, or a discipline of meditation, for their own hands to make or mend.
Del Azarchel spoke: "Faithful and beloved friends, equal partners in my reign, partners now in my downfall, the entire living world, the Mother Earth so fair and green, is lost to us, with neither a drop from her endless seas nor a wisp of her abundant airs and winds allowed to us here.
"This Luna, this hueless world of lifelessness, through turmoil and fire we achieved with the daring theft in her orbital shipyard of the great ship Emancipation. Her sails, as nothing else could do, turned aside the deadly force of the mirrors of the Giants, those same orbital mirrors which burned the cities of man like ants beneath a magnifying glass. That power became propulsion for us, for we turned death to life by that same alchemy of knowledge which assures us our supreme authority above mankind.
"As if sailing hither on a sea of fire, this dead world our new world we made, and found this ancient base, long forgotten from the First Age of Space Travel, on the far side of the moon, and far from the orbital mirrors of the Giants, and, with diligent work, and not without the sacrifice of loyal servant lives now mourned, our genius restored it from death to life.
"Here allow me to restore our hopes. History is merely one more language Monument Builders decoded, and only we, only we anointed few, can speak this language to issue decrees and cast spells in it.
Del Azarchel pointed, and all the floor lit up with branch on branch of Cliometric equations.
The calculation set was profound, reaching an illusory dozens of feet down below what now seemed a crystal floor. De Ulloa cried out in awe, Sarmento grunted, and the golden antennae of Coronimas perked up in surprise. Reyes y Pastor crossed himself, and even the impassive masklike face Narcís D'Aragó twitched and raised an eyebrow.
Del Azarchel addressed the remnant of the Hermetic Order.
"Each of you have seen the Cliometric projections. Some lines of evolution are dead ends. One will break through to the next level of intellectual topography, an event horizon of human augmentation beyond which no predictions can be made. Study the chessboard, Gentlemen! Where would you make your move? Not just Montrose, but human nature and inhuman entropy are all your oppositions in this game. Learned Melchor de Ulloa, you speak first."
Melchor de Ulloa spread his supine hands, a gesture which could have been used either to placate or to beg alms. His voice was honey. "A society where everyone's rights are respected produces liberty and this produces invention, discovery, change, and evolution. The main hindrance to man's ever upward triumph is hatred, aggression, and fear. The only cure is toleration, education, and the growth of institutions based not on rigid rules and dogmatism, but on open-minded willingness to attempt all options, seek all experiments, try all, dare all, risk all: and thus will man discover all. This willingness is based on social factors independent of political economic structures: it is the artistic vision, the world view, of the consensus of the people that eventually shapes society.
"Scientifically speaking, this consensus is based on structures in the lower brain, related to various subconscious symmetry-recognition ganglia whose nature we have examined intimately during our work to elevate the Cetaceans to sapience. The Monument describes eighty-one nonverbal communications systems, of which one, music, is comprehensible to the nervous patterns of mammalian Earthly life.
"Artistic vision fathers cultural values, not the other way around; all moral codes are merely the epiphenomena of the irrational subconscious, and of the dreams only freedom can free. I see the doubt on your features, gentlemen, but I can demonstrate my claims with a simple spline equation. Give me control not of the laws nor the religions nor philosophy of man, but merely of their music, and I can guide Man to the Asymptote."
Del Azarchel said, "I have already set in motion what is needful to destroy the Giants, and set the humans of normal intellect free from their control. I foretell a dieback, and a Dark Ages lasting until the Fifth Millennium. Once this is accomplished, I will grant to you between the years AD 4000 to AD 5000 to play out your experiment. Remake mankind as you wish. Learned Narcís D'Aragó, I see you object."
Narcís D'Aragó stood as if at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back. His voice was ice. "Let us talk no more of natural right, or of phlogiston, or of fairy godmothers. Does a man have a natural right to life? That is quaint poetry, but let him beat against the waves of the sea when he is drowning to see what rights nature gives.
"We should stick to facts. The fact is that rights are artificial, a legal fiction, a manmade mechanism to increase group survival value, nothing more. Justice is strength. Without strength is no survival—and all rational moral codes have survival as their object.
"You recall the Fifth Postulate of the Negative Sum Divarication proof? It proves that the individual cannot survive without the group, and the group cannot survive unless the individual is willing to die for it. What is needed for mankind is logic, the stern and simple logic of survival.
"The existence of religion—pardon me, Father, but it is true—is based on a genetic marker inclining toward mystical altruism, all men being brothers and all that saccharine fluff.
"No. Rational altruism can beat mystical altruism hands down, for money, love, or marbles. Give me control of men's genetics, and I can shape his destiny, and break human nature open like an egg, and release the dragon within."
Del Azarchel said, "If Melchor de Ulloa falls short, then I will give you between the years AD 5000 to AD 6000 to accomplish your purpose. If he has achieved the asymptote within his allotted span, your task will be merely to aid him. Learned Sarmento i Illa d'Or! I have never known you to agree with Learned D'Aragó on any point. What say you?"
Sarmento i Illa D'Or, with the studied arrogance of a Hercules, crossed his huge arms across his broad chest, and tilted back his head. His voice was the murmur of a bear in winter, disturbed from long, cold sleep. "Bah! Control the emotional nature! Control the music! Control the genetics! Control the thinking! It is all hogwash. What about not controlling? What about setting mankind free? And I mean free of all restrictions, moral, mental, intellectual—everything. I say there is no rational moral code that does not take into account the simple scientific fact that all organisms seek pleasure and flee pain. This is the starting point of all rational thought about human nature.
"The trick is to tie pleasure into the proper incentives without imposing a system of control the sheep will detect and resent. To do this, you shape the future. You dig the canals and dikes, and merely let the water find its own way at its own pace into your channels.
"The factor that controls the future is demographics. When populations outstrip food supplies, human life is cheap, wages drop, sexual restrictions come into play, and to keep those restrictions, an apparatus of coercion arises that soon reaches all aspects of life. Ancient China was overpopulated, and it sterilized their ability to progress despite an immense head start; Europe outstripped them, because the Black Death had lowered the population level so that every individual life was precious—that, and not empty talk about the sanctity of life—that is what led to the group discipline D'Aragó talks about, as well as the liberty and tolerance De Ulloa mentioned. It is all in the numbers."
"Shall I make you the angel of death, able to lower population rates?" Asked Del Azarchel with a dark look.
"No, Learned Senior. Give me the heavens instead, and I will raise them." Said Sarmento.
"What?" said Del Azarchel.
"Demographics is based on food supply," Sarmento rumbled. "Which is based on acquisition technology, whether huntsman, herdsmen or husbandman. So give me control of the climate, wind and weather. The ancient experiments in weather control were not implemented by a posthuman Iron Ghost, and so the many variables of climate adjustment could not be managed. If I can establish the growing season, shorten or extend it, then I can shape the agro-technology, the demographics, the pleasure-seeking incentives of human action, and thus the culture that will grow out of it."
Del Azarchel said, "If D'Aragó falls short, then I give you between the years AD 6000 to AD 7000, but I will grant you longer if you ask, for I doubt your theory is sound."
Sarmento said, "But I must have more time! The method I propose is very slow."
Jaume Coronimas raised his finger. "Are you giving away blocks of a thousand years each, Learned Del Azarchel? Learned Sarmento can have half of my time. My proposal is more efficient."
Coronimas had drawn a series of figures, calculations of his own, in the palm of his left glove with the stylus tip hidden in the finger of his right. Coronimas twitched his golden antennae downward and, at this gesture, the circuits displayed his work at his feet.
"Observe. The way to improve mankind is merely to improve him. The human nervous system is a machine, and it performance characteristics can be directly changed by changing various bits of neural hardware. We have been failing here because each man is trying to improve himself like Montrose did. I suggest a different approach: to improve the race while keeping the basic unit of the race, the individual, more or less the same. Give me control of man, all of him, and I can remake him into my image, and this will establish evolution—because it will not be evolution, will it? It will be intelligent design. My design. I can make them peaceful and sane and able to adapt to whatever troubles come."
Del Azarchel said, "Then I will give you your five hundred years, if you can match your boast, but I will place in the midst of an era where it will do no harm if it goes wrong. Father Reyes, I see the pain in your eyes. What is it?"
Reyes y Pastor said, "With respect, Learned Gentlemen and Learned Senior, your thoughts are awry. We cannot plan for the next evolutionary step of man, any more than apes could perform brain surgery on an ape-cub and make him grow into a homo sapiens. The superman will be beyond us, and be nothing we can imagine. We must do the very reverse of all that has been said. We cannot control man to unleash evolution; we much unleash evolution and man will be swept up, buoyed up by wild forces beyond control, yes, whether he wishes or not, to the next form of human nature. The one true religion teaches — ah, I know how skeptical you all are, but history will bear out my witness! — the Holy Mother Church teaches that heaven cannot exist on Earth; to yearn in vain for earthly paradise and peace is the heresy of Utopianism."
"If we are all heretics," said Del Azarchel, "What is orthodox?"
"On Earth, life is nothing but the brutal struggle for existence, war of all against all. Blessed are the peacemakers! That word we spoken by Our Savior, and it is truth and holy truth, but, as holy truth, it has no application here in this valley of tears called life! Moral codes and liberty and genetic codes, logic and demographics, none of this, my children, is what life on Earth requires to reach the transcendence of the Asymptote. What has hindered us so far is that there are far too few us. Too few who think as we! Let me make a world in our image, a world of men who are unafraid to shape the destinies of all the men beneath them, and they in turn shaped by the men above them, so that all the raw power and agony of evolution will be released like a genii from its brass jar. What will come next, your math cannot predict nor mine!"
Del Azarchel said, "I will give you between AD 7000 and AD 8000 to work whatever purposes you will, Father Reyes; and the final period between then and AD 11000, when the Hyades armada arrives, I reserve to myself either to capitalize the triumphs all you gentlemen have accomplished, or abolish your errors, and in every way to prepare mankind to be what best will serve the intelligences from the Hyades stars. And yes, the race I make in those final days must discover and destroy whatever mad Montrose has prepared of war and revolution, for he seeks ever to bring the wrath of Hyades down upon us.
"The conclave is ended: each go your own ways, draw up your calculations, and prepare! We war not only against Montrose and his servants, and against the perversity of human nature but against the lingering tardiness of Darwin, and against death, time, and entropy itself!"
And the Hermeticists bowed toward the throne, then each man took his leave and descended, weightless as thistledown, through the deck hatches into the deeply-buried lunar fortress with no more noise than a spirit returning to its grave.
INTERLUDE: A Cold Silence
All he wanted to do was to stay dead. Some damn nuisance kept jarring him awake.
Some damn nuisance named Blackie.
Before he opened his eyes, before he knew whether his other organs were thawed, he was aware of his acceleration. No, not acceleration: weight. There was no sensation of motion. He was not aboard a ship. He was still trapped on Earth. Where was she?
With immense pain, and annoyance more immense, he pried open a creaking eyelid. The clock on the inside of the icy coffin lid reacted to the motion and lit up, the faint red letters reading Year: AD 9999 Your Age: 7789 calendar / 50 biological.
In 2401, his body had been buried in the debris of the uprooting of the Celestial Tower of Quito, which fell upward into orbit. Rania had used the rotating beanstalk or rotovator to accelerate the ship to the escape velocity of the solar system, forty-two kilometers per second.
The damn thing was thousands of miles long, and the tangential velocity was over six miles a second. Flung the damn starship like a stone from David's sling toward Jupiter, where she performed a gravitational assist maneuver to exceed the escape velocity of the solar system.
At that point, fearing him dead and with no feasible way to decelerate, she sailed away to rendezvous with the first of the antimatter centaurs she would gather for her fuel supply, while Del Azarchel, helpless on an Earth whose space programs he himself had gutted, watched helplessly through longrange radar as she took nine parts of his world's entire energy supply, and hid the tenth part by nudging the centaurs into new orbits.
Del Azarchel, in a gesture of melodramatic noblesse oblige, or perhaps frustration that his visceral desire by his own hand to shoot Montrose dead, ordered hid foe pulled from the rubble, hospitalized, and placed in cryogenic suspension in a political penitentiary. Some of Del Azarchel's scholar-race, however were still loyal to Rania, and arranged for his escape: and the areas of the world where either Del Azarchel had no control, or pure anarchy did, were expanding.
The struggles that followed between the factions loyal to Del Azarchel and his machine, and those opposed laid waste the world. The second half of Twenty-Fifth Century had been the most violent in history, even when compared with the enormities of the Little Dark Ages. There had been a third, fourth, and fifth worldwide civil war since the violent rupture of the Concordat AD 2413 into northern and southern hemispheres, and countless lesser wars, invasions, insurrections, tumults, acts of nuclear blackmail. Ninety-Five major cities and over a billion people had died over these wars and mega-homicides, slain by atomics, and another half billion in the depressions, famines, plagues and migrations that followed. The horror the world had known during the Burning of New York the Beautiful had been repeated half a hundredfold. Cities famed in history would never rise again, but had gone the way of Carthage, Nineveh and Tyre.
And it had aged him. At times, be wondered if Del Azarchel had merely been causing world wars merely to force Montrose to run out his clock. After the Decivilization, the interruptions came less frequently, but they still came.
He looked at the calendar again. His last thaw had been over two thousand years ago, AD 7985. Had there been no interference in history since that time? Nothing to trigger the alarm?
Rania, by the analogous point in time in her metric, was a shade less than 7500 lightyears distant in the constellation Canes Venatici, receding at 99.9 percent of the speed of light. He could picture it perfectly in his mind's eye: the ship's flare would have been red-shifted so far beyond the infrared as to be in the radio range of the spectrum. From his frame of reference, the great ship was dark beyond invisibility, massive beyond neutronium, flattened in the direction of motion like a metallic pancake: and the clocks, and heartbeats, and subatomic motions aboard made a single tick once a year.
But from her frame of reference, asleep in her coffin of ice, the ship was the same immense silver-white cylinder she had always been, and her mirrored sails wider than saturnine rings spread before her, but reflecting a universe that was strange: for spacetime surrounding was flattened and cold and dark and massive, and only a compressed rainbow of stars circling the ship's equator would have seemed normal to the human eye. Directly fore of the prow, where the distortion was greatest, high-energy gamma ray point-bursts from the core of stars or dark bodies were Doppler-shifted into visibility, a pattern of fireflies.
The only object normal to her would be the ever shrinking dead heart of the Diamond Star, V886 Centauri, to which her ship was attached by chains, thankfully immaterial, of magnetic force. The 10 billion trillion trillion caret diamond of antimatter had by now worn itself down to a mere 9 billion trillion trillion carats, one tenth of it mass already converted to propulsion. The mass of the superjovian planet Thrymheim had been long ago absorbed: now the antimatter reaction was sustain by a ramscoop, a magnetic funnel of immense size gathering up the interstellar particles, which, at her velocity, were both massive and densely packed. So she lived in a universe with one undistorted worldlet: the stub of a dead star made of contraterrene, too deadly to touch, gleaming like ice in the light from the rainbow ring of stars.
But would there be stars? The White Ship was traveling perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy, heading toward the distant globular cluster at M3, a dandelion puff of a million stars 33,900 lightyears away. By now, Rania was beyond the Orion Arm, and the whole Milky Way was a wheel, red-shifted into invisibility off her stern, and the ultra-low-frequency radio auroras wreathing the accretion disk that boiled at the core of Milky Way, invisible to mortal eyes, were visible, now, to her.
In his imagination, he also carried a map of the Milky Way, its known stars and open clusters, which he could picture as easily as an unmodified man could picture the features of his wife's face. The total number of stars was, of course, a but much even for him, so he had used a mnemonic device to memorized the vast catalog and their relative distances and motions around the galactic core.
He took a moment to fill in this star map in his mind, and he saw that the open cluster NGC 6939 in the constellation Cepheus was not far from her route, and she would have no doubt passed through the cluster of 80 stars hanging just above the Orion Arm in order to take advantage of the gravity slingshot, and increase her velocity: from her frame of reference, the eighty stars would be more massive than the black hole at the galactic core. Her ship was as massive to them from their rest frame of reference, as they were, from her frame of reference, to her—at that speed, her ship, for all practical purposes, was a singularity. When she passed through, the immense tidal and gravitic effect of her ship would be perturbed from their orbits and scattered. The disturbance would be visible to Earthly deep sky observatories over the next millennium. In time, the stars would be too far apart to be considered a cluster.
Princess Rania was still young, thanks to Lorenz transformations, was still in her early twenty's. Practically a child.
And he was fifty years old!
Less than one tenth of the Long Wait had passed. Always some little thing, the fall of empires, the genocide of races of man, some world famine, or some eruption of machine-worshiping savants pulled him from his grave to waste ever more of his ever-lessening lifetime.
The tube piercing his throat above his collarbone vibrated as air was forced into him. In theory, there were breathing exercises recommended to assist the Thaw process, as the cell layers lining the lungs made microscopic adjustments from the biologically suspended state to animation. Instead, through numb and drooling lips, he cussed and sobbed. He figured that was just as good.
"Why did you wake me? Is it time? Did she return?"
"No, Dr. Montrose. It is still an estimated sixty-one thousand years before the earliest possible date of the return of Mrs. Montrose."
"Then why the plaguey hell did you plaguing wake me, you dumb horse? I told you to wake me for nothing."
"So I have. Nothing has occurred."
"What?"
"My instructions reached a halt-state. Since I was unable to decide whether to wake you or not, I had to wake you for instructions on whether to wake you or not."
"You are to wake me when there is some event in the outside world needing my attention. We went over a really long list with an algorithm, that you are supposed to submit to Sir Guy or his successor, whoever the current Grand-Master of the Order of the Knights Hospitalier might be. Is there such an event?"
"No, Dr. Montrose."
"Then what is it?"
"There are no events at all in the outside world, Dr. Montrose."
"What the pox? Open the lid."
Menelaus Illation Montrose, 7789 calendar / 50 biological, climbed out of the coffin, dripping with medical fluid, naked, nothing in his hands but two caterpillar-drive Browning pistols.
He stood patiently while sinuous metallic arms called serpentines from overhead sponged off the medical fluid, when vents from underfoot dried him with blasts of warm yet pine-scented air, while a second set of serpentines from his footlocker bolted to his coffin hull draped a fluffy bathrobe around his shoulders, and while a third set of arms poured him a freshly-brewed cup of coffee in a white porcelain cup, cream with one sugar.
"How much coffee do we have left, Pellucid?" He tucked his pistols into the bathrobe pockets, which sagged alarmingly, so he could take the cup in hand.
"This is the last container, Dr. Montrose. There is enough for sixteen cups. At your current ratio of slumber to thaw, and current rate of consumption, the supply will last you until circa AD 25000."
"What's the chance of getting more?"
"All evidence suggests that the coffee plant is extinct, Dr. Montrose. That would make the chance of getting more approach zero."
Montrose sipped the scalding brew thoughtfully. "Maybe I can borrow some from Blackie. Before I kill him. He's a partner. Sure he won't mind."
"All evidence suggests that Dr. Del Azarchel is also extinct, Dr. Montrose."
Montrose was surprised enough to spit. He glared down in dismay at the little dark splat of precious, irrecoverable coffee fluid on the steel floor, even as an alert serpentine reached in with a sterilized towel to clean it up.
Later, he went up.
The first level was wreckage. The roof had collapsed under an immense mass of ice and rock. The stairwell was in shambles. He retreated back down stairs long enough to find an ax and a parka, a power cell, belt-lamp, and a few other needed tools. Then Menelaus spent the better part of a day using an ax to cut, dynamite to blast, and thermal papers to melt through the ice blocking the corridor to the guardroom on the first level.
The guard chamber itself was intact. He pulled down the periscope and pushed in a drill-tipped serpentine he had taken from the plumbing locker. It took a relatively short time to drive a shaft to the surface. He re-inserted the periscope, and told the cables leading to various wavelengths of receivers to find and connect to their antenna contact points on the periscope housing. For a moment, it was as if a basket of multicolored snakes had been tossed into the air around him, as each prehensile wire coiled and swayed through the air and sought its correct fitting. Then light images, radio and shortwave, began shining down the shaft.
Montrose put his eyes to the eyepieces. The ground was white in all directions, slabs and runnels and cracks and hills of ice and more ice. The radio frequencies were silent.
The Human Race is Extinct. Unfortunately, the intelligence augmentation Montrose had suffered had also, it seemed, equipped him with a greater imagination. He could practically see the deaths of millions and tens of millions, and savor each and every one, what it would mean, what had been lost. That blessed ability fools had which enabled them to shut out the horrid emptiness of eternity and infinity that surrounded the tiny living spot called Earth was denied to him.
But he also had greater powers of concentration than heretofore: and work could drive the sharp and angular vividness of the images of worldwide demise from the forefront of his mind. She was still alive, after all.
Days became a week, and then a fortnight, and each hour was bitterness to him.
In the machine shop on the third level, he constructed simple reconnaissance drones, gave them instructions, and sent them up the shaft, one after another, glittering dragonflies of steel.
The drone cameras found nothing but ice. Not a drop of running water, not a blade of grass, not a tree, not a shrub.
One after another, like a man building a ship in a bottle, Montrose reached out through the tiny hole of the periscope shaft with serpentines, and raised ever taller antennae masts, and constructed ever more powerful receivers. There was no signal traffic, no navigation beacons, nothing. Comparing image after image of the night sky detected no artificial satellites.
He was able to use the weapons systems in front of the main door to blast free of the ice, and drive the door open a crack. With parka and snow goggles, Montrose emerged from his tomb, climbed a white slope, and stood looking out on a world with no sign of life in any direction.
He stood there, aghast, watching the sun slowly sink in a weary mass of red and gold above a gray landscape. After a time the moon rose in a cloudless sky.
The moon was full, and the imprint of a thin left hand with a black palm was upon it.
Montrose raised his left hand as if in answer, opened his fingers, and had the smart material coating his glove turn his fingers white and his palm black.
The last few days he spent outside. The Expedition House on Level One held empty stalls, but also clothing and gear for a variety of climates, including sea-gear in case the passing ages brought floods. One of the packs contained an inflatable tent and sleeping roll.
Montrose loved the outdoors. He preferred seasons when the wilderness made noise: endless chirping, hooting, croaking, or the music of wind and rain. This world was silent and still and white.
Each dawn, when the wind was right, little graceful bits of fluff, looking like the down of dandelions, fluttered from the stations and towers he had grown. Each noon, seeds of the same substance drifted behind the tails of his dragonfly-winged flying machines like the plumes of cropdusters. He wrote love poems of appallingly bad doggerel in the skywriting, and was relieved as the slow, huge winds shredded them. As the sun sank in the west, the winds would die down, and the gigantic silence of the world return.
Each dusk he disturbed the hated silence with fireworks, as his launching tubes shot very tiny and very powerful intercontinental rockets up through the chimneys he had dug. Each multistage rocket with its delicate Van Neumann nanotechnological payload, was flung into the stratosphere, little gleaming penstrokes of flame against the winter-crisp night sky.
Toward midnight, he would look north seeking the tiny constellation of Canes Venatici, where the dogs of myth, Asterion and Chara, eternally held on the leash of Boötes eternally chased the great bear of Ursa Major, with baleful Arcturus as their lantern. When the conditions were right, and skies clean of cloud or mist, he could find the speck of the globular cluster M3 in the darkness of heaven, until the image blurred and swam in his vision, and he did not bother to wipe the trickle of heat that fell down his cheek. There was no one to see him weeping, after all. The last race of man was more or less extinct, and the next had not yet been born.
Eventually, his days and nights of labor done, he returned below. It was more trouble closing the great door than opening it, since he must hauled equipment, block and tackle, and a diesel powered winch from the machine house on Level Six, but finally this was done as well.
Before he closed the lid of his coffin, he spoke to Pellucid.
"I still got one thousand years to wait until the armada from the Hyades cluster arrives, and over sixty thousand years to wait until Rania arrives, if she ever makes it back. First it was Ghosts, then Whales, then Witches, and then I had to wake up again when the Chimera turned bad, and when the Nymphs turned good, and so on. And now, instead of a plague, or an ecological disaster, or an apocalypse, now it is the silence that wakes me."
"Menelaus, we do not have proof that machine intelligences have wiped out the biosphere. Our instruments reached as far as Annapolis to Memphis, and were very spotty in between. There are heat sources in the sea…"
"I am not giving up hope, Pellucid. I am walking a long, long road, and each move and countermove is like another bump. And Blackie keep jarring me awake. Six months here, a year there. Bumps on the road, but it adds up." He uttered a bitter laugh. "Now it is an Ice Age. Just a little patch of ice on the road…
"So I am going back to sleep. Disconnect my coffin mind from your systems, and fake up the records like we agreed. It is going to take you a while to gather all the coffins I need from the sites I gave you, and they have to be placed in the way I said. I gave my word to my sleepers, and I don't want innocent people in my care to be hurt. And don't wake me up for anything else until I get robbed again. I miss my wife, dammit!"
His last thought after the medical fluid closed over his face, and numbness seized his body, was of how, ever since he was a child, he had always hated the snow.