The Judge of Ages: Book Three of the Eschaton Sequence

The Judge of Ages: Book Three of the Eschaton Sequence

by John C. Wright
The Judge of Ages: Book Three of the Eschaton Sequence

The Judge of Ages: Book Three of the Eschaton Sequence

by John C. Wright

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Overview

The year is 10,515 AD. The Hyades Armada, traveling at near lightspeed, will reach Earth in just four centuries to assess humanity's value as slaves. For the last 8,000 years, two opposing factions have labored to meet the alien threat in very different ways.

One of them is Ximen del Azarchel, immortal leader of the mutineers from the starship Hermetic and self-appointed Master of the World, who has allowed his followers to tamper continuously with the evolutionary destiny of Man, creating one bizarre race after another in an apparent search for a species the Hyades will find worthy of conquest.

The other is Menelaus Montrose, the posthuman Judge of Ages, whose cryonic Tombs beneath the surface of Earth have preserved survivors from each epoch created by the Hermeticists. Montrose intends to thwart the alien invaders any way he can, and to remain alive long enough to be reunited with his bride Rania, who is on a seventy-millennia journey to confront the Hyades' masters, tens of thousands of light-years away.

Now, with the countdown to the Hyades' arrival nearing its end, del Azarchel and Montrose square off for what is to be their final showdown for the fate of Earth, a battle of gunfire and cliometric calculus; powered armor and posthuman intelligence.

Judge of Ages is the wildly inventive third volume in a series exploring future history and human evolution from John C. Wright.


At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781429947121
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Publication date: 02/11/2014
Series: The Eschaton Sequence , #3
Sold by: Macmillan
Format: eBook
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 985,538
File size: 779 KB

About the Author

JOHN C. WRIGHT is an attorney turned SF and fantasy writer. He has published short fiction in Asimov's SF and elsewhere, and wrote the Chronicles of Chaos, The Golden Age, and The War of Dreaming series. His novel Orphans of Chaos was a finalist for the Nebula Award in 2005. Judge of Ages is his third novel in the Count to a Trillion series.


JOHN C. WRIGHT is an attorney turned SF and fantasy writer. He has published short fiction in Asimov’s SF and elsewhere, and wrote the Chronicles of Chaos, The Golden Age, and The War of Dreaming series. His novel Orphans of Chaos was a finalist for the Nebula Award in 2005.

Read an Excerpt

Judge of Ages


By John C. Wright

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2014 John C. Wright
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2929-5


1
The Instrumentality of the Hyades
A.D. 10515
 
 
1. In the Tombs
“O Rania, I was better off dead,” muttered Menelaus Montrose, in English, a language which, he reflected, was also long dead. “Unearthed and outmaneuvered, how in pestilent perdition am I going to outsmart getting myself killed entirely? How am I ever going to see you again?”
Above, the sky was gray with snow clouds, and leaden. A storm was gathering along the southern horizon, above the glaciers now shrouding the Blue Ridge Mountains, the source of some immense, unnatural disturbance.
Downhill, the pines and frozen rocks were bare of life. The prison tents were empty, the deadly wire was motionless, and the odd seashell-shaped buildings beyond the wire were silent.
Directly underfoot, down a dizzying drop of catwalks and scaffolds, lay the darkness of the archeological dig. No coffins moved or fired. They were deactivated, returned meekly to their recharging plugs, and were no longer attempting to defend their precious, slumbering contents.
Instead, wild packs of the dog thing soldiers were dancing, whooping, and barking with elation among the ruins, whirling swords and pikes, flourishing muskets, in the triangle of light that spilled from the broken doors across the silent firing range. Montrose saw none of the dwarfish little bald Blue Men in their jewel-adorned coats.
He wondered how many hours he had before the persons of ordinary intelligence figured out that Corporal Anubis, allegedly a Beta-rank Chimera of the Sixth Millennium A.D., was instead Menelaus Illation Montrose, experiment in intelligence augmentation gone awry, of the Third Millennium A.D., the so-called Judge of Ages and Guardian of the Cryonic Tombs of the Slumbering Dead—or how many minutes before Del Azarchel figured it out.
(That man was surely still alive! Fate was not kind enough to have killed off mankind’s other experiment in human intelligence augmentation, mechanical rather than biological, during the thousands of years while Montrose slept in suspended animation. The two of them were still in mid-duel, a deadly fight momentarily put on hold during the immensities of human evolutionary history.)
Maybe they would not find the coffeepot, or his notebooks, or his gun collection, or his clothing closet. Of course, there was still the giant Texas flag he had pinned up, or the portrait of Rania, or his collection of history books, Witch idols, magazines and old coins with his image on them … sweet Jesus up a tree! There were a lot of clues lying around.
Montrose watched in helpless anger as Rada Lwa was taken from him. He had carried the unconscious albino Scholar over his shoulder from the torture cell of the Blue Men. Rada Lwa was placed by the dogs into a sling and lowered from platform to platform into the Tombs.
Back in A.D. 3090 (over seven thousand four hundred years ago by the calendar, but just shy eight years ago by his oft-interrupted inner biological clock) Rada Lwa had attempted to assassinate Montrose. It was unforgivable. And yet the man, by entering the Tombs of the Judge of Ages, was under Montrose’s protection. He was a client. To have Blue Men excavate Rada Lwa, thaw him, torture him, in Montrose’s book, merited execution. But not ten minutes ago, he had discovered to his shock that the Blue Men were Thaws as well; in theory, his clients also under his protection. He blamed himself for not seeing it earlier. In hindsight, it was obvious.
While the dog things were busy lowering Rada Lwa, Montrose spoke to them in Intertextual: “You know your masters ain’t really and truly archeologists, don’t you, you sons of bitches?”
The Blue Men, all but whoever was behind them, thought they were looking for the mythical founder of the Tomb system, the demigod called the Judge of Ages: so called because he condemned to death any age of history which dared forget the reason for the Tombs, the point of accumulating slumbering knights and scientists.
The mythical founder was no myth, but stood among their prisoners, unrecognized, helpless as a child, and angrier than hell.
Montrose was answered by snarls and a prod in his back with the muzzles of muskets. The captain of the dogs, a stately Great Dane of heroic build, pointed with his cutlass, motioning Montrose to descend.
Montrose, with a smirk and a shrug, politely raised his hands in surrender, and walked and climbed down the last length of scaffolding into the cleft.
He tried once again, this time only addressing the Great Dane by name: “Rirk Refka Kak-Et, you do know your masters are Thaws who just so happened to wake up earlier than their fellow clients, and looted our coffins and thawed us against our will?”
Looking down, he saw that the armor was gone, peeled away by some immense force, along with the bedrock and the first three levels of the Tomb. Avalanches and snowfall had toppled this first level onto the second, and the second had been cut or blasted open to reveal the third, leaving only a set of protruding decks to the east and west like bookshelves.
As he descended, he saw above a squad of dogs lowering an oversized coffin using a block and tackle. As it passed him, swaying in the wind, he was close enough to read its alert lights: The Giant inside was awake, only mildly sedated, fully thawed and healed. The coffin was being used as a claustrophobic prison, not a hibernation unit.
Creaking, the lines lowered the Giant’s coffin faster than Montrose (with dogs above him and dogs below) could negotiate the rungs of the synthetic tubing which formed the ladder. Montrose ached with the desire to speak with the Giant. His brain, due to its size, could match the feats Montrose’s, due to its composition, could perform. A short conversation with him, and the many mysteries plaguing Montrose might be answered.
The wind grew soft as the sky shrank to merely a narrow blue ribbon above, and the sunlight grew dim. It was cold between the narrow canyon walls of stone, and colder still between the metal walls of the Tomb.
“Your masters, they do not know any more than I do who or what—if anything—is alive out there in the snowy wilderness of the Ice Age. Some human civilization is still on the surface, perhaps extremely advanced, and they will surely notice this activity here.”
The armored floor here was all but gone, and at the lip of this huge hole, the scaffolding the dog things had erected led down to the third level. Roofless, the floorplan of the third level was exposed.
To one side, the southern half was a labyrinth of cells and corridors worm-ridden with smaller passages designed for coffins to slide easily through, where men must duck walk or crawl, and murder-holes and ambush vents led from the smaller passages to the maze of main corridors. The northern half of the floorplan was an empty space of metal like a firing range, overlooked by a massive door. This door was thirty feet tall, with gunblisters and energy emitters thick as grapes on a trellis on its massively armored doorposts and lintel. The beetling cliff above the door to the fourth level was intact, so that the door was like a metal plug at the back of a throat of stone.
And the door was open. Gold light poured up from shining stairs.
“You know that, right? You savvy? Thaws are clients of the ultra-long-term hibernation tombs—sleep in the ground, under the armor, for centuries, millennia, waiting for the End of Days when the star monsters come from the Hyades.”
Montrose did not mention that he, personally, was waiting for an event predicted to happen long, long after that. Driving off the Hyades invasion was meant merely to preserve the Earth in her Earthly state until Princess Rania returned.
He looked down at a noise. He saw Oenoe, garbed in her green mantilla, walking serenely between two lines of cavorting and howling dog things. The strange angle of the light from the open door cast the shadows of the dog things like angular phantoms across the walls, whose jerking dance was a thing from boyhood nightmares.
With her was Soorm the Hormagaunt, unconscious, or dead, being hauled limply in the metal clamps of a lumbering automaton. Preceptor Naar, looking bored, rode atop the walking machine.
“Did your little Blue bosses warn you about the star monsters? They will be here in a century. A dark mass, equal to a small gas giant, has been approaching us from Oculus Borealis for the last eight millennia.”
Down the final ladder, there was steel floor underfoot. Menelaus and his dog escort stood in a narrow corridor which connected both halves of the level. The connecting corridor was supposed to be the most dangerous spot here. To the east were powerhouses and storage vats for the dangerous nanomaterial used in biosuspension, as well as the main and secondary refrigerant systems. To the west were staff living quarters and utility rooms and guard stations with periscopes leading to the surface. This corridor was open both to the massive guns of the door, and to the sniper fire from the secretive coffins.
“When the Hyades arrive, the Master of the World, a posthuman named Del Azarchel—even you have heard of him, I see—and the externalized Machine Intelligence of Del Azarchel, Exarchel, wise beyond all the genius of the Blue Men, will sell mankind into slavery, and the Blue Men will be to the Domination of the Hyades as dogs are to men—no matter how smart, still just pets.”
The artificially anthropomogrified creature did not speak, but from the flex of its spine and the prick of its ears, Montrose saw that his words had struck home. Now the dog captain was listening carefully.
“Is that what you want for your masters? For Mentor Ull and Invigilator Illiance? Lives of servitude? Or worse?”
The dog thing said nothing, but looked at Montrose with eyes as hard as stones, ears laid flat against its skull.
“Do you know Ull and Illiance and all the Blues here are serving the Machine? Well? Did you know that?”
The Great Dane’s answer was to cuff him backhand across the mouth.
2. The Connecting Corridor
By the time Montrose had reached the level in the gloomy corridor where the other prisoners were being kept, the Giant’s coffin was out of sight. There was a splash of light on the wall opposite, a reflection of the golden light pouring out from the opened door, which was blurred and darkened for a moment with shadows as the bulky coffin of the Giant was maneuvered into the stairwell. A moment later the shadows passed, and the reflections gleamed again undisturbed.
At the northern mouth of the connecting corridor, the Blue Men had piled their sandbags, raised square shields of refractory reflex metal, pulled up floor plates, and dug in their gunnery nests. A second line of defense had been erected at the other end of the long corridor, to fend off still-active coffins that attempted from time to time to sally and dislodge them. Beyond this line of sandbags, the wreckage of such sallies clogged the labyrinth of corridors to the south.
Menelaus, his robes of metallic tent material clashing as he stepped, walked down the connecting corridor.
Larz the Fixer, one of the prisoners, relaxed, chuckling to himself. Larz was lying on his back atop an impromptu cot of toppled sandbags with an enormously smug look on his face and his hands tucked behind his head. Next to him was a bowl and several small bottles of rice wine, some empty and some not.
This was the man, this worthless little man, a low-caste Kine from the time of the Chimerae, who had boasted to the Blue Men that he could force open the Tomb door.
Larz was not dressed in his prison overalls, but was in an extravagant civilian costume from the late 5900s: The half cloak of the overalls of the Kine, instead of bearing his name and assignment, was covered with gauds and bezants, with coils of braid at the shoulders and colored scarves hanging from the armpits. He wore the bright pink boots of a professional kick-fighter. The switchblades in the boot toes clicked open and shut like little blunt-nosed creatures flicking out their tongues as Larz idly drummed his heels against the deck.
The serpentine stolen from Yuen the Alpha Chimera was lying near his hand, and it was extended to its full length: it lay like a thread of silver water across the empty expanse of steel floor, winding here and there to avoid buried mines and pressure plates, reaching from the sandbags to the door controls, where it had found a compatible plug.
“Impossible,” Montrose muttered in English, his eyes narrowed. Larz could not have hacked his locks and wards. Either Soorm had opened the Tomb doors from the inside, or something equally unlikely. Could Larz be a Hospitalier in disguise?
He tried to stop and speak to Larz, but Larz, thinking him a Beta Chimera from his era, cowered back, whimpering and calling on the dogs to protect him, and the dogs in turn hustled Menelaus down the corridor past Larz.
Midway between the northern and southern defensive positions were bales of ammo and other supplies, as well as angry digging automata in need of minor repair.
Nearly a score of figures could be seen there, separated by armed automata and watched by their assigned guard dogs, who were looking with envy at their dancing brothers not far away, yapping and yammering, tails wagging.
The prisoners were all dressed in their period costumes. Menelaus wondered why the prisoners, now, had their garments returned to them. The Blue Men were very naïve and stupid in some ways, but sharply intelligent in others, close enough to posthuman in their thinking patterns that they could control lateral thought-techniques to see gestalt patterns in events. A man with his clothing and possessions on him altered his “tells,” his body language and subconscious reactions. All the Blues need do, if they were as smart as Menelaus thought they were, was observe the prisoner’s behavior in the Tombs, and compare this to the reactions of any undamaged information systems in the Tombs to the prisoners. Any wrong reactions would pinpoint the imposter. Had Montrose been visible to the Tomb systems, this tactic would have no doubt already revealed him.
Coming down the corridor, passing within perhaps three feet of Menelaus, was Invigilator Illiance in his jeweled coat. He gave Menelaus a polite nod, but did not pause to exchange any words.
In his hands was the coffeepot from Menelaus’ workroom.
Illiance glided down the corridor toward the silent firing range chamber. He was too small to block the light from the door when he went downstairs, or at least, not enough to alter the reflection of the light bouncing from a distant floor to the nearby wall, but Menelaus could hear the soft, light footsteps passing without hurry down and down.
Menelaus observed his fellow prisoners.
There were seventeen Thaws here: First was the waif perhaps named Alalloel from the Eleventh Millennium. Only four hundred years displaced from her native time. He attempted to contact her with his implants, but the signal did not generate any return. Perhaps she was ignoring him, or perhaps the Blue Men were wise enough to dampen her instruments.
Second and third were the two gray twins, a male and a female, from the Ninth Millennium. They were very similar to the Blue Men, but seemed to be a later development from them.
Next were two Hormagaunts, two Clade-dwellers, and three Donors from the Iatrocracy period in the Eighth Millennium.
After that were four Chimerae and three Kine from the Sixth Millennium.
The Thaws were not standing together, but rather were grouped by aeon, so that Alalloel had a group of cringing dogs around her, away down the corridor, out of sight; the gray twins were next, and armed dogs separated them from Alalloel on the one side and the Iatrocrats on the other.
There were more guards blocking the way between the Iatrocrats and the Chimerae, the group to which Menelaus was brought. He saw no Nymphs, nor anyone of earlier eras. He wondered if they had been taken below.
The Chimerae were closest to the line of sandbags facing the firing range; Alalloel was farthest. All prisoners were huddled against the eastern wall, since the wind was less there.
Now he was among the Chimerae. Here were three underfed and overworked Kine, muscular dark-haired men with dark and stoical expressions. There were subtle asymmetries and incongruities in their features, odd shapes to their teeth or ears, which hinted at experiments done on generations of their forefathers. Their names were Franz, Ardzl, and Happy.
Their native garb was not that different from the overalls the Blue Men provided, except that each sported a short half cape, where emblems showing their names and assignments were displayed. Menelaus was pleased to see, from certain irregularities in the way their overalls hung, that they had sharpened tent pegs into knives and had them hidden under their clothes.
Near them were two Beta maidens. Above knee-length skirts they wore tight, dark pinch-waisted jackets that buttoned up the side like fencing jackets, tight at the neck, with decorations on the exaggerated shoulder pads. Menelaus was reminded of doormen’s costumes at old hotels. Their world had been warmer than that of the gray twins: instead of boots, they wore sandals with laces that ran up their thighs.
The warrior maidens had carved serviceable bows out of the branches of yew trees and strung them with strands of their gene-modified, nigh-unbreakable hair. Each maiden had fletched a dozen arrows, feathered from slain owls, but knapping flint to make a workable arrowhead was beyond what their auxiliary corps girls’ schools had taught them. The arrowheads were shards of glass taken from shattered bottles from the infirmary tent, lashed to the arrow shafts with adhesive medical gauze. From the way their tunics hung, he guessed that wider strips of medical gauze had been used to bind their breasts flat: impromptu plastrons. More medical tape wrapped their left arms from palm to elbow, as protection against the bowstring, and their left sleeves were folded up and buttoned short.
Here also was a Gamma. His skin was peeling and pockmarked, a mixture of dark and white patches, and his lower jaw protruded like a Neanderthal’s. He had clipped a lock from his long brown hair and woven the strands into a functional Goliath-killing-type sling.
The sleeve of his uniform bulged, showing he kept the water-smoothed stones that formed his store of ammunition in his rolled-in shirtcuffs. His name was Buck Gamma Joet Goez Phyle of Bull Run, Lineage Discontinued.
The male uniform was severe and unadorned, except for a cloak of livid scarlet; shoulder boards extended a hand’s length beyond his shoulder, giving his costume something of the look of an ancient samurai’s. On these shoulder boards were small electric pins displaying his line, rank, and regiment. His only other adornment was a cloak pin of brass shaped like an upside-down letter L. On his head was a cap of leather and horn.
Alpha Lady Ivinia, splendid in the metal breastplate and tiara of her dress gear, a jet-black tunic decorated with silver skull ornaments, and a long black leather skirt hemmed with iron bosses, still carried her spear. Her red cloak was pinned with a letter shaped like a fish.
3. Reporting for Duty
In his role as Beta Sterling Anubis, he crossed over to her, and knelt, head bowed and hand out in a straight-armed salute. “Milady. Uh, reporting for duty, Ma’am.”
She bent and touched him on the shoulder, which surprised him; and drew him to his feet and kissed him on the cheek, which surprised and alarmed him. (She was a tall woman, but even she had to stand on her tiptoes to do this.)
Lady Ivinia said, “This is not I who gives you this kiss, Loyal and Proven Beta, but, rather, the motherhood of all the race, including your own mother, who is not present to give it.”
Menelaus touched his cheek, strangely moved. He knew what a horrid and bloodthirsty race the Chimerae were, and yet still they were human beings. Almost.
Lady Ivinia spoke in a hushed voice, with great dignity, “That is the farewell kiss of the race that bore you, for it may well be that we die this day, and reach the longed-for oblivion which will quench the memories of all our crimes and shortcomings in beautiful, unending nothingness. They have taken away Alpha Daae and greatly I fear for his safety. I charge you that should the chance come, his life must be saved, even at the expense both of your life and honor, and of his honor. No glorious death is to be his: Should he so command, and with the strongest oaths bind you, I charge you by the womb of the mother that bore you, and the paps that nursed, to betray that command, and break those oaths. If the name of Anubis must be sunk forever in shame and cursed, let it be so, but he must survive.” She did not even mention the name of Alpha Yuen.
Menelaus then realized that the Alpha Lady meant to marry, no doubt to begin the Chimera race again, and that her only choices for the next Adam were between gray-haired Daae and young Yuen. And she had selected Daae.
He felt both awed and saddened by the ambition of her daydream, and its unlikelihood. It was nearly as unlikely as his own dream of finding his own true love again.
Menelaus said, “Ma’am, I will do what I might to save him. The sacrifice of the name Anubis to shame I do not regret, nor will I hesitate.” (It was not, after all, his name.)
She inclined her head regally, but then turned her nose aside, to look at him sidelong, a strangely coy and demure look on the face of a woman whose normal expression was one of cold and direct ferocity. “You speak as one almost not fully a Chimera. There is more to you than seems at first inspection. And yet Yuen says you bested him…”
“By a trick, Proven and Loyal Ma’am. He is Alpha; I am Beta.”
“… but I am convinced you are loyal to the race. You do not apprehend how near the race teeters to being utterly expunged, nor your own role in these events.”
“My role? Beggin’ your pardon, my Lady?”
Her eyes grew vivid as she stared at his face. “Alpha Daae realized that the Blue civilian named Illiance interrupted our briefing, and took you from us, merely to have you away from the field of action, while the camp was broken down and withdrawn with all personnel to the belowground here. You were meant not to be present when Kine Larz forced the great door to the lower levels. They did not return your uniform to you. This was not to shame you: they understand you are significant.”
Menelaus did not mention that he had not been buried with a uniform, Chimerical or otherwise.
He looked again at the Beta girls with their bows, Phyle with his sling; not to mention the belt capsules of the gray twins, or the poisonous oil in the hair barbs of Zouave Zhigansk.
Menelaus wondered at the nonchalance of the Blue Men. Perhaps the Blues wanted the Thaws to be armed, to have an excuse to slaughter them that would ease their consciences.
It took him a moment to realize that something more was involved in returning the native period garb to the prisoners. They had been allowed to retain their makeshift weapons in order to provoke a disturbance in the behavior patterns of the prisoners.
With hope of violence in the air, their actions would be tested under stress, and once again anomalies in behavior would be more obvious. It was a dangerous tactic meant to flush out the imposter among the prisoners, and it bespoke desperation on the part of the Blue Men.
Something was terrifying them into rash action.
4. Hairdressing
The Chimerae also sensed the terror in the air, and it gladdened their hearts. The Chimerae were relaxed, which was an odd sight, like seeing a pack of wolves suddenly learn how to smile. A certain degree of informality seemed to have overcome them: they did not address each other by rank.
Lady Ivinia whistled and doffed her tiara, pushed back Menelaus’ hood, and gestured for him to sit on the cold metal floor beside her. Then the Chimerae took out oils and combs and began dressing each other’s hair. Gamma Joet Phyle stood behind Lady Ivinia, who maintained a stoical expression as her hair was yanked by the apologetic Phyle. Vulpina and Suspinia stood behind Menelaus and began combing his hair, marveling at how short he wore it. The three Kine, Happy, Ardzl, and Franz, backed away on their knees, bowing, as far as the dog things would permit, frightened to see their master race wax merry.
Lady Ivinia said, “Brothers and sisters! For you are all ennobled to my blood this day: The oblivion we crave is upon us now! Let us each, in our hearts, curse the nonexistent God for his indifference, and dare him to destroy us! The more lingering the death inflicted, the longer the time to display the stoicism and bravery by which our descendants and lineages shall be judged by future Eugenics Boards…”
Her voice trailed off. Her words had no doubt been something she had been wont to say, a habit, and spoken before she could catch herself. A pall of silence hung in the air after this; no one of the Chimerae was willing to say that there would be no more Eugenics Boards, and no lineages, forever.
Menelaus stirred and said, “Well, don’t give up hope yet; it’s possible we can talk our way out of this. We all might make it out alive, if we only keep our heads…”
They looked shocked for a moment, and then, suddenly, the Chimerae opened their mouths and laughed peals of laughter, Gamma Phyle in bass, Lady Ivinia in a contralto, the two Beta maidens in sopranos.
Phyle, the scabrous-skinned Gamma, spoke up, “Good one, Sterling! Had me going!”
Vulpina, behind him, giggled and shrieked and said, “Oh, Anubis, you are too funny!”
Suspinia, the other Beta adolescent, said doubtfully, “He wasn’t really, I mean, not for real, wanting to live, right? It was just a rec hall prat, right?”
Lady Ivinia said, “Of course, my sister. Merely a comical word to unknot the tension! All Chimerae know that life is pain. Life is grief. The only joy of life is to inflict death on those who want so desperately to live. The only peace in life is to yearn for death, so that those who inflict death on you are cheated of this same joy. That is the Chimera way. In our blood, and in our genes, we are half beasts, and we despise the nature of pure men, who love good things.” But she said this not in a stern tone, but lightheartedly, as if she were speaking sentiments known to all; reminding, not instructing.
Menelaus jumped when Beta Vulpina spoke in his ear. He had not forgotten that the hands rubbing oil into his hair belonged to the maiden pressing against his back, but now her lips were dangerously near his ear, and he felt the intimate tingle of her breath on his cheek. She said softly, “Listen to the Alpha Lady! We must learn to love pain, and to love to inflict it!”
“Lovely,” muttered Menelaus in deadpan sarcasm. “How old are you, what, sixteen? Fourteen?”
“I am as old as I will ever be! This hour you and I will die together! Won’t that be fun? If we time it right, we can have the entrails of our corpses mingled together in a huge pool of blood. I ask this as my dying request. Do you really think me lovely?” And she kissed him on the ear.
He brushed her lips away from his neck like a man brushing a fly. “I am still married until death us do part, sister. I appreciate the offer—who does not like a romantic double murder-suicide in battle?—but let’s keep our guts inside us to digest food, and spill theirs on the floor.”
She pouted. “You un-face me! If I were not about to commit suicide in battle, I’d commit suicide just to spite you!”
Lady Ivinia was done with her coiffure, and now she had Vulpina sit down before her, and began combing out the girl’s hair with practiced, businesslike strokes. “Sister Vulpina! Self-demotion is a sacred rite among us! And too good for you!”
All the Chimera laughed again, and Vulpina turned beet-red, but she also laughed, and did not draw her suicide dirk and plunge it into her own throat.
Lady Ivinia said, “The duty of virgins is to survive combat and be raped by their conquerors, so that they may bear male children, teaching them to slay their fathers and avenge us. Remember this! I am the mother of seven I can name with pride and others I do not name. My duty to the race is fulfilled, and painful death in melee is an honor I can claim.”
Suspinia said in a saucy voice, “Well, you’re too old to get raped anyway!”
Instead of drawing a weapon and killing her on the spot, Ivinia threw back her head and emitted a peal of laughter, and Gamma Phyle slapped the ground, guffawing, and said, “Aye! But them blue Kine ain’t got no wagglies bigger’n my pinky nohow, so who could they plumb?”
Menelaus said, “Since we are all about to die, let me just be frank and say, Chimerae are a sick, sick race. The only thing that is really good about Chimerae is that we are not as disgusting as Nymphs.”
Suspinia sniffed and snapped her fingers under his nose. “Well, that’s not fair! Chimerae have good points! We love fighting, for one thing. And we are tidy. Have you seen how squared away our tents and grounds in the prison camp are, compared to those sloppy Witches’?”
More laughter. Vulpina chimed in, “She is right! The Witches don’t even walk in step when they walk. They are like toddlers who haven’t learned how to march. At dawn they are still in their sleeping rolls when the dogs blow reveille—except unless they stayed up all night!”
Phyle said, “Anubis! You’re not saying aright, Brother Beta! Chimmers are the best o’ the best. ’Specially our womenfolk. I figures there be but two kinds of frails, those what like getting beaten a bit before bunk-up time, and those what stab their men in the kidneys with a stiletto whiles we’re asleep. Meek and feisty. Both have their good points, mind you! But both kinds likes them to kill strays and ferals like whats facing us here in this place, so I’ll bet you that these two girls and the lady will kill more of the foe than all the others in the room combined! If I win the bet, I cut off your left nut; and if you win the bet, you cut off mine! What’ya say?”
Stray and feral meant any one not bred according to the sound principles of eugenics.
Menelaus clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Joet, you’re a man after my own heart! And I do appreciate you wanting to stick up for the womenfolk—that’s right gentlemanlike of you. Unfortunately, I just found out early today that wagering is an undue complexity of life. On another topic, let me explain what these archaic words in the long-dead language called English mean: engaging-in-copulation, guano-of-bats, not-sane. Now, each separately means nothing, but, taken together as a phrase, the stalwart men of Texas in elder times used this expression (abbreviated FBC) to refer to anyone like yourself, who was (well, if I can be frank one more time) simply Fu—”
Lady Ivinia interrupted, “Do not be frank, Sterling! It erodes discipline, and in any case our cause will prevail, despite any losses. The Judge of Ages is real—Alpha Daae has convinced me of it—and will hand us victory.”
Menelaus wished he were equally confident.
5. Separated
The widow Aanwen, Preceptor Naar (along with four of his automata that had been outfitted with steam-powered machine guns), and a squad of excited and yammering dog things rose out of the stairwell, and crossed the metal floor of the firing range. Larz favored them with an airy salute of his wine-bowl.
They entered the connecting corridor. Naar uttered a command in his singsong language. The dog things lowered the bayonets and began urging the cold-faced and defiant Chimerae toward the big door. The Blue Woman, Aanwen, gestured toward Menelaus. Not him.
Like wolves separating a stray from the herd, a trio of dog things thrust their way, snarling, between Menelaus and Lady Ivinia. She brandished her spear. The Kine fell to the deck, hands over their heads, whimpering. The two Beta teenagers, blithely ignoring the ferocious dogs and their threatening bayonets, stopped and strung their bows. The Gamma soldier, Phyle, shrugged, and as if by magic, dropped his sling out of his sleeve, stone already in the pocket, and set his shoulders as if ready to sling a stone at the nearest Blue Man.
Menelaus saw that resistance was suicide. The metal walls of the narrow corridor would scatter ricochets and shrapnel in every direction, and any intact panels of reflex armor would ignite grenades and petards in counter-fire, chopping everything in the corridor to bits neatly as a steel thresher on overdrive. The gray twins might have nerve weapons that would stun or benumb Naar or Aanwen, or the Hormagaunts release spores that would sicken or slay the dog things, but neither one could affect the automata, nor prevent all the dogs from opening fire; nor could the sling, arrows, spear, and knives of the Chimerae damage the machines.
Menelaus estimated that a trained fighting-Chimera could kill ten or twelve armed dog things barehanded; but Gamma Phyle had been recently released from the infirmary tent, and was not in top shape, and Lady Ivinia and the teenaged girls could not match even his performance.
Menelaus called out in two languages not to attack, and the dogs, annoyed by the noise, struck at his face and chest with their musket butts, knocking him from his feet. He had hardened the substance of his cloak before the blows landed, and he stayed on the ground, hood over his face, unwilling to show himself lest Aanwen and Naar realize that Menelaus could not be harmed by the weapons present.
He heard the noise and commotion of footsteps receding as the other Chimerae were herded away. To his surprise, he heard no noises of struggle, smelled no blood.
Dimly, he was amazed that they had been persuaded by him, and then he realized to his chagrin that they had not been persuaded. He was the ranking male present, and by Chimera law, women were noncombatants and must obey—including armed women who were ready to fight in combat. And, of course, Beta outranked Gamma, and freemen outranked Kine.
The dog things pulled him to his feet, and pushed him to stand with the gray twins. Alalloel was not far away, and stood to one side, and the Hormagaunts and their Clades and Donors stood to the other.
6. The Gray Twins
The Grays were blue-haired: the male wore his short, and the woman’s reached past her shoulder blades. The male had no trace of facial hair. The pair were also slightly taller than the Blue Men or the onyx-skinned Locust men, and the gestures more fluid and graceful.
The woman wore a fur-trimmed black parka of a smartmetal substance not unlike the tent material, trimmed and lined with seal fur and webbed with heating elements. From her belt hung a fur muff, as well as gold capsules Menelaus’ implants told him contained energy sources. Her boots had soles of smartmetal as well, and could probably be programmed to various degrees of friction or traction, or to form snowshoes, cleats, or skates, depending on the substance underfoot. Her twin was likewise wearing a parka of black metal of the same design; heavy fur gloves were tucked in his belt. Gold capsules hanging from his belt likewise gave off a faint radio signature. Both wore snow-blindness goggles with thin slits over their eyes, giving them a sharply alien look.
Menelaus studied the energy contour coming from the golden capsules clamped to their belts, and realized it was consonant with certain types of nonlethal, short-range electroshock weapons, or radiant neural agents. The gray twins were armed.
Menelaus was burning to speak with them, because of Alpha Daae’s cryptic unfinished sentence: “It is far more important that we get underground as soon as possible. You see, we found something dreadful. The gray twins discovered it…”
What had they said to Daae?
Said? Rather, since they shared no language in common, what had they shown him?
Menelaus turned to the man and the woman, and said in Intertextual, “Do you happen to understand this language?”
Seen closely, the gray skin was many-hued and subtle, like the color of a pigeon’s wing, or silvery silk. Highlights and subtle shadings of pearl and platinum differentiated the eyelids, cheekbones, and jawline, lending the faces a peculiar exaggeration and vivacity. This close, Menelaus could see through the slits of their goggles that the pupils of their eyes were as silvery-white as polished foil. The blue and cerulean hair formed a handsome contrast. Their faces were like works of art, and their features were stamped with the signs of refined and energetic personalities.
The man said, “All Locusts are programmed with the applicable prenatal speech templates.”
Menelaus, with some surprise, said, “You are Locusts?”
A smile answered him: “Yes, if isolated individuals without tendrils, and with no connection to any outside mental environments, can be called Locusts. I am Linder Keir and this is my daughter Linder Keirthlin. We call ourselves ‘Linderlings’ or Reestablishmentarians, since we still hope to restore the disintegrated Noösphere to working coherence. We adhere to protocols devised by a man named Elton Linder, and became Inquiline. As nonessentials, we entered hibernation at the time of the Reductions, in order to escape the coming of the ice.”
Menelaus looked back and forth. Daughter? She looked like a twin sister. Cloning? Gene manipulation? It implied a longevity technique that not merely slowed aging, but halted it altogether. That implied a sophisticated genetic correction system, which, in turn, implied Xypotechnology.
Eager as he was to learn what they had shown to Daae, he thought it best to follow up this other thread first.
Menelaus said, “An inquiline is a bug that lives in an ants’ nest or termite mound without being one of them.”
Keir said, “Such is the relation of our order to the planetary neurocybernetic mental hierarchy. Inquiline are in the Noösphere but not connected to it.”
Keirthlin spoke up for the first time. “Do you also speak English?” She had a flawless Oxonian accent.
Menelaus looked even more surprised. “I’ll be hornswoggled. How could y’all possibly know English?”
Keirthlin said, “Earlier, we were placed in close confinement with the Savant called Ctesibius. He has a fully functioning emulation broadcast path woven into his brain from cortex to brainstem, with pinpoint emitters that were only switched off, not removed. I was able to pick up a signal through a short-range resonance, and induce signal flow from his cache. The traces were enough to use a holographic memory technique—you understand this technique works both for endogamic and exogamic memories?—to build up a perception of his language structure.”
“He only spoke Pre-Anglatino.”
“But the earlier language forms can be deduced from traces, residuum, and atavisms. I used a negative information intuition procedure to fill in the patterns. It took the better part of a day. Language patterning is not my strong suit.”
Keir patted her hand with fatherly affection. “There, there. Under less adverse conditions, results would have differed; and we judge by intention and effort, which you can control, rather than by any result influenced by factors no one can control.” He lowered his slitted goggles onto his nose, and, peering over the top of them, transfixed Menelaus with his bright, silvery eyes. It seemed an oddly avuncular or professorial gesture. “Can you understand us at a conversational level?”
“Uh, sure. It was an ancient language in my day, but I reckon I can speak it well enough.”
Keirthlin fixed him with a particularly penetrating gaze, her head tilted to one side, as if toying with a thought. “You reckon so, do you? It is your native language. I cannot determine whom you want to fool. I assume it is the Witches. Anyone from a time later than the Chimerae would see your deviations from their behavior standards. As for contemporaries, well, Mr. Slewfoot Larz the Pinkerton—that is the correct term in English?—the Pinkerton knew immediately you were not a Chimera when you failed to punish him for remaining seated while you stood…”
Menelaus said, “Wait, wait. You saw my interview with Larz?” Thunderstruck, he realized these two had some implanted system to pick up what the Blue Men were recording or sending to each other with the gems on their coats. They had been spying on the camp. They knew the Blue Men’s plans. “What are the Blue Men planning?”
Keir said placidly, “Our ability to intrude is hindered by those rather complex codes of behavior that the Blue Men have decided no longer to follow. Some of their information is proprietary, and since the Blue Men have violently trespassed on our integrity, we can audit certain streams of it, in certain ways, but our retaliation has to fulfill specific requirements before we can act more directly. Take my daughter’s hand.”
Menelaus shook her hand. It was small and slender in his fist. Keir looked at his daughter, and said, “Well?”
She puffed out her cheeks in a sigh. “I can detect that he has a short-range electromagnetic aura of the first complexity. It should allow him to neurointerface with certain simple circuits and switches, but he lacks the direct thought-to-thought inputs of a Locust. He is not legally an Inquiline because he has some active wiring, but he is not ethically or aesthetically one of us, because we can never reciprocate his mental information. But I think we have to trust him in certain areas, more than what would be expected by the intersection of our limited altruism precept against zone-of-privacy considerations.”
“Do you guys run through this kind of rigmarole every time you decide to answer a question?” Menelaus asked sardonically. “My rock-bottom respect for the Blue Men has lifted a half centimeter from the floor of hell. You are the people they are trying to live more simply than?”
Keir said sternly, “The complexity you mock is the byproduct of a successful attempt to sculpt laws and customs to a sufficient level of detail as to allow for both world peace and personal liberty, considering both the complication of every possible scenario of human interaction and considering the innate depravity of the human race. The difficulty of all previous cultural systems was that they were insufficiently tailored to reality: all laws had to be broad stereotypes to be simple enough to rational men to anticipate what conduct was permitted, but Divarication ensured laws soon would become corrupt. In contrast, Xypotechnological modeling and emulation of major possible behavior patterns is more efficient than having legislators make laws, or allowing blind chance to establish arbitrary or historically specific customs and cultural habits. The Noösphere makes this level of detail possible.”
Menelaus said sharply, “Your Noösphere was based on Xypotechnology?”
Keir said, “We are reconciled to a certain degree of cooperation with the Exarchel Machine, and allow it to influence our legislative modeling process.”
Menelaus said, “The Machine means to exterminate the human race. Ctesibius thinks it has already done so, and that now all that need doing is to clean up the biological life left—us relicts from the past, in other words.”
Keir said, “If the humans are guided slowly and gently to underpopulation, and then extinction, where is the harm? If the process is voluntary on all sides, no specific rights are being violated.”
Menelaus said, “It’s still wrong.”
Keir said, “The thought-process of biological life will continue in the nonbiological matrix, if needed. The Noösphere is not simply the Exarchel Machine. It is the conceptual unity of all thinking systems, both human and posthuman, machine emulation and neural emulation. Our brainpaths are not like yours. We have a solid mass of three-dimensional logic tissue rather than ordinary gray matter. Within this matrix we can construct or emulate any number of minds of human levels of complexity, to suit our needs and interests. The system is completely fluid: basically, in my head, I could make a virtual version of any sort of nervous system or brainpath and emulate it, play it out. That is what Illiance did when the Naturalist Oenoe forced him to accept emotional communion to her story, when she was being interviewed; you translated for them. You recall the event?”
“Sure. That’s when he turned off his weirdness chip, and I started liking him.”
Keir said, “There is no physical computer chip in his brain. It is a complex of logic crystal energies tainting his nervous system in a delicate balance of path preferences. You are speaking metaphorically, I assume?”
“Very metaphorically,” agreed Montrose. “Unduly so.”
Keirthlin said, “Oenoe the Naturalist did not know what she was asking. It is a classic example of symmetrical misunderstanding across two mutually incomprehensible mental texts.”
At that moment, once again, a squad of dog things accompanied by four clanking automata came up out of the fourth door, passed where Kine Larz lay, and herded the Hormagaunts back down into the depths, along with their Clades and Donors.
7. Last of the Iatrocracy
Montrose watched as the Iatrocrats were marched past him down the cold, dim, and roofless corridor.
Two looming Hormagaunts glowered at the guard dogs, eager to slay and careless of being slain. One was a man who looked like a leopard walking upright, thin and wiry, with elongated legs, walking on his toes, with an impressive array of barbs, spines, and knife-points growing from his spine. His neck was like that of a boneless giraffe or monster snake; his head like that of a saber-toothed tiger. This was Crile scion Wept.
The other had no head at all, merely a lump of bone between his shoulders, and he had placed his eyes in his chest, his shark-toothed mouth like a zippered band across his stomach. His body was apelike but hairless, squat and low to the ground, and his back was a tortoise shell. His tail was an armored limb of muscle tipped with an orb of bone. His genitalia and buttocks cheeks were bright red, like those of a baboon. This was Gload scion Ghollipog.
Scurrying after them were three nondescript and cringing men, dull-eyed and sullen, covered with the scars of old surgeries. These were the slaves “Anubis” allegedly had freed when he bargained with Soorm to form an alliance between the Hormagaunts and the other prisoners to cooperate in an escape attempt. With a pang, Menelaus realized that he had done nothing of the sort, having had no time to train the Donors out of the grip of their mental habit of servitude, or even to explain the new situation to them.
Prissy of Clade Pskov was from the same period as Crile and Gload. With her was a male of her subspecies, a Clade-dweller who looked more human than the Hormagaunt caste. Both Clade-dwellers had hawklike, high-cheeked features, and masses of bushy hair set with spines and quills trailing down their necks. The two stood as far apart from each other as the laxity of the dog guards would permit. The male was Zouave of Clade Zhigansk.
Prissy Pskov wore a blue fur coat embellished along the shoulders and upper back with amber and bezants of golden ivory. A wide scarf of woven zigzag pattern gathered the fur coat hem beneath her breasts, exposing them, but a diaphanous veil of antiseptic fiber modestly covered her nose and mouth. Her apron and skirts were embellished near the hem with clattering scrimshaws of horn and tusk. Her buckles and bracelets and the bells that fringed her shawl were all made of wood or pearl or enamel or horn: her metal-poor era made little use of gold or iron. She had tied a fan of colored feathers and beads in her hair, which would stand like a peacock’s tail when she spread her quills.
By contrast, the garb of Zouave Zhigansk was simple and severe: a bear pelt pelisse worn over a dark tunic, with split skirts below. His only ornaments were the bear claws that adorned the toes of his fur boots. He had the mouth-cup of a filtermask made of black ivory hanging by a strap around his neck, but he did not have it over his mouth and nose at the moment, because he was menacing the dog things with his retractable fangs. The porcupine quills that rose from his hair were glistering as if with oil: he had combed additional poisons into their tips, to make them more sweetly scented, and deadlier.
Seeing his eyes on her as she was hustled past, Prissy Pskov said aloud, “Anubis! These culls here-now understand not my speech. My kit has been returned, and primary formulations are mine to command. I can release a spore that will induce seizures in the dogs and leave the humans nauseous but mostly alive.”
Blackie del Azarchel was obviously expecting a fight between the Thaws and the Blue Men. But why? On general principle, it was better not to let him get his way.
“Do nothing! Nothing!” he shouted back to Prissy Pskov. “Await my signal.” But this shouting attracted the anger of the dog things, who brandished their muskets and cutlasses in his face and barked furiously. Menelaus raised his empty hands, backing away.
His voice roused the Hormagaunts, who roared and reared, and at their barking, more dog things rushed up to subdue the Hormagaunts.
So large a number of dogs escorted the Hormaguants down the stairs that only a dozen were left to guard Menelaus, Keir and Keirthlin, and Alalloel.
8. The Principle of Absolute Trust
Events were coming to a head. Menelaus turned back to the two strange and strangely elfin gray-skinned people. “You have to help me. For starters, tell me what you told Alpha Daae.”
Keirthlin took off her slitted goggles, revealing a pair of lovely yet eerie silvery-white eyes, fringed with long, dark lashes. She said, “Wear this. Look within.”
Menelaus did not don the goggles. “An image? Live or locally stored?”
Keirthlin looked uncomfortable, but did not answer.
Menelaus said, “You showed Daae a picture, right? But he could not ask you what data system you were using for transmitting the picture. If you have access to the Blue Man logic crystal system, you may be able to deactivate their weapons and energy sources, and trace their lines of information back to their real boss. How broad is your format? Can you make contact with the Tomb brains? And give me control of the major weapons systems?”
In the eyeslits of his goggles, Keir’s eyes of silver glinted with a stern light. “Your purposes are warlike, violent, and that behavior is unendurable to us. Even our right to retaliate in self-defense is severely curtailed by an overarching principle of long-term utilitarian altruism. We can only make local and limited exceptions under closely defined circumstances, which do not here and now obtain. We must respect the ethical claim of the Simplifiers.”
Menelaus said sharply, “Ethical claim? You mean you could meddle with the automata and muskets, maybe even deactivate them—and you choose not to? So you are the ones in charge of the camp, but you are sitting on your gray little butts, doing nothing while they run rampant?!”
Keir said loftily, “Our choice was defined when our order vowed devotion to world and racial reunification across all the disparities, mutations, and violent recriminations which the shattering of the Noösphere brought forth. That is the great evil we are oathbound to undo. The Linderlings are devoted to rapprochement even with Inquilines who reject mental unification, and so we are enjoined to nonreprisal, nonaggression, and noninterference.”
“Why do the tomb-robbers have a greater claim to your moral protection than the innocent clients here?” Montrose shouted.
Keir drew back fastidiously. “How innocent are any here? In any case, the Blues are a cousin species to the Grays, and we must reestablish our broken communion with them. We were designed for this cause by our creator-parents’ cells.”
Menelaus gritted his teeth. “The cause you serve is long dead. These Blue Men are killers. Your indifference aids and abets their crimes. They killed the three Locusts who tried to help me when I first woke up. I promised to save them, and I failed to do it. The least I can do is make sure blood is paid out for blood spilled.”
“Their names were Crucxit, Axcit, and Litcec of Seven-Twenty-One North Station. They were from a century when the Inquiline and nonjurors were not recognized as independent entities with any right to exist. They overstepped the ethical claim I respect, attempted to suborn the mental environment of the Blue Men, and were murdered in retaliation. Shall you indeed retaliate for that retaliation? If so, be deliberate and cautious: perspectives of differing ages disclose differing aspects of the complex edifice of proper conduct.”
Menelaus said, “The Blue Men are trespassing on the Tombs.”
Keir said, “If the Tomb system were functioning, it would not have brought us forth by accident in a time when the human world is dead. The failure of the Judge of Ages to carry out his obligations must be taken into account. There is no current civilization. Hence the Blue Men must trespass on the Tombs for supplies. They are compelled by necessity, which is your excuse for the deceptions you practice.”
Menelaus spat, “Nothing here has been an accident. There is a current civilization; and your damned Machine you love so much, Exarchel, that ran your age, is still active and no doubt running this one. He just has not shown his hand yet.”
“You speak in ignorance. Exarchel was merely one participant in a complex social and mental organization, treated warily, hemmed in by certain checks and balances and…”
“… And actually running things because he is smarter than you.”
Keirthlin interrupted. “Father, I submit that we are operating on partial information, and should assume the negative information space of the missing data matches the contour in the fashion most favorable to the case leading to the minimal-maximal solution to the conflict of ethical-legal claims here.”
Keir said to her, “You are urging we both act on the principle of absolute trust? But I cannot deduce his motives.”
Keirthlin said, “That is because our minds are complex, whereas his motive is simple. He is, in his own person, what the Blue Men artificially attempt to be: a man with no affectations or ulterior motives. The moral category distortions are caused by circumstances, not by him. The Blue Men are, after all, tomb-looters! That is the crucial trespass that defines and limits the possible legal resolutions.”
Keir said, “Violence is unthinkable!”
She flashed him a pert glance of her odd, metallic-white eyes. “Then don’t think about it.”
He said, “My internal emulation of you is not reaching the same conclusions you are. What additional thing does the real you know that my projection of you does not?”
Menelaus looked back and forth, his face almost blank with wonder, as if too many conflicting emotions, wonder and impatience among them, had canceled each other out on his features.
Keirthlin said, “I know his energy aura contains keys compatible with the coffin mechanisms.” She pointed a finger at Menelaus dramatically, accusingly. “The speculation of Aanwen must be correct. This is one of the Tomb Guardians. That means he is under a moral obligation to protect the revenants, including us, and including the Simplifiers; which means in turn we are under a moral obligation, even at our own expense, to assist him. Did we not take advantage of the Tombs to escape an era of glaciers? Is there no reciprocity for that?”
Father and daughter stared at each other. His eyes were troubled; hers were bright.
Menelaus said mildly, “Is this how your whole society worked? It is amazing anyone ever did anything. How did you decide when to take a coffee break, or when it was OK to filch a cigarette from the pack your brother kept hidden under his bed? Just curious.”
Keirthlin turned toward Menelaus, her eyes flashing. “Will you trust me, completely and absolutely, if only for a short time?”
Menelaus looked taken aback, but spoke in the voice of a man who comes to a quick decision. “If you are servants of the Machine, you would not know how Exarchel has been manipulating your memories or perceptions. But I will trust you now. I am desperate. It’s not like things can get much worse.”
“Then tell me your identity and motives.”
He put out his hand. “Okay, maybe they can get worse. I’ll make you a deal. You trust me first. Your personal infosphere is carried in capsules on your belts. Hand me one, attune it to me, and establish a link to any working Tomb channels. Once I am armed and dangerous, I can tell you who I am and what I mean to do.”
She unclipped one of the little cylinders at her belt and put it in his hand. Immediately he felt an ache in his back teeth as the two semi-incompatible systems worked out mutual formats and eventually—almost four seconds later—shook hands.
He clicked open the little golden tube with his thumb. It was a line of gems, just like the ones the Blues wore on their coats, held together one atop the next, like a finger wearing so many rings it could not bend: sardonyx, carnelian, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth.
From his implants, he received two sets of signals. The main and secondary power on the level where he was had been locked out. There was no response except for a simple denial signal. However, from the next level down, he could log on to the secondary and nonlethal weapons. Something or someone was blocking him from reaching the main batteries of the heavier weaponry. He gritted his buzzing teeth in frustration. Something in the Tomb brain was broken, or corrupted, or someone else was active in the system. He knew not which it was.
If he could get the dogs to carry him belowground, he would be within range to give commands to at least some nonlethals and automatics. It was something.
Like a whisper, he then picked up a third signal, a blank carrier wave. He moved his eyes without turning his head. It was coming from Alalloel. His implants, by themselves, had not been able to reach the strange-eyed woman. Whether she had been ignoring him or the Blue Men had been jamming him was still not clear, but these Gray instruments had opened a channel of communication.
He spoke in a low tone. “Your guess falls short. I am no servant. I am Montrose, the Judge of Ages. My men are buried here, and are starting to thaw. As soon as they wake, I will enact a bloody vengeance on those who trespassed in my Tombs. The horror of my retribution must be so great that it will echo through history for thousands of years, that generations yet unborn will fear to trespass again.”
Keir said in a voice hollow with horror, “You are the one who condemned the Noösphere to destruction. You introduced Cliometric variables into the scope of history to preordain its disintegration!”
Menelaus said roughly, “You should be grateful. That world was one big termite hive. It was one creature with infinite bodies and only one head. Well, brother, that one-headed world creature had only one neck, to make it easy for Exarchel to snap a collar on it, and then hand the leash to the Hyades. Whatever ain’t an individual ain’t rightly human.”
The gray twins stared at him with wide and silvery eyes. He could not tell if they were afraid because they thought him mad or speaking lies, or thought him sober and speaking truth.
He said, “Machinophiles or not, I will spare you. I will protect you and all innocent clients of the Fancy Gap Hibernation Facility, without reservation to the best of my ability, and yes, if there is a way to spare them, I will try to save the guilty clients too—but only if they surrender, and restore each thing they have looted or touched, and only if the persons directly responsible for the deaths of the three black Locusts are executed. Can you deduce my motives now?”
Keirthlin looked at her father.
Keir was scowling darkly. “All you have said is inconsequential. There is no need for vengeance. There will not be any future generations.”
An icicle of dread formed in the pit of Menelaus’ stomach. “What did you see?”
“The First Sweep. Look within. This is a true image.”
9. Raleigh
He seemed to be in midair, and snowy hills, green with pine, were flowing by underfoot. Menelaus said, “This image is coming from the missing wind-craft that Mickey launched.”
Keirthlin’s voice was at his ear. “The serpentine that your friend cycled into its more primitive and self-aware phase of behavior gave out its normal call and response to find other mechanisms loyal to the Machine. Those process codes, being in the public domain of our Noösphere, were part of our Confraternal heritage.”
Kier added, “We violate no precepts by availing ourselves of the information content.”
Menelaus said, “You are telling me that even back in the Witch days, Exarchel had all the ratiotechs bugged?”
She said, “From even earlier. The Gigantic precautions limiting Sylph ratiotechnology to isolated handheld systems were not an overreaction. I will now show you an earlier image.”
The wind-craft hung like a kite over the scene.
Blocks of glacier, hundreds of feet high, reared above a ruined city. Even softened by shapes of snow, the soaring towers and lofty domes of glass gave the metropolis an air of classical beauty. The traces left by boulevards showed a clean gridwork of streets, and four public squares surrounded by a central square. He could see statues hooded with ice and the broken feet of triumphal arches mounded high with snow. He looked closer, and realized that those towers were merely stumps of what must have been superscrapers, and the domes were no more than surface vents for deeply dug geothermal power taps. From the arrangement, he guessed that these were an example of the very pyrohydroponic gardens whose quests to reach ever deeper levels long ago forced Pellucid to sink into ever more cautious secrecy.
Then he realized that the high, square shapes of white looming like titans above the scene were not glacier cliffs, but arcologies: massive, windowless buildings not meant for human life, containing nothing but mostly buried cubic miles of logic crystal. These were the Granoliths Pellucid had mentioned in his final report. These vast rectilinear monasteries represented land-based biological man’s last desperate attempt to understand and control the multiple-minds of the Melusine, semiartificial seagoing creatures apparently constructed from men, sea mammals, and Xypotechs.
The image seemed melancholy, but nothing to put a fright into so stolid a soul as Alpha Captain Daae.
Then he wondered if he was looking at the wrong part of the image. It was not until he turned his head that he realized this image was from a 360-degree camera, a global lens. Turning the goggles brought other parts of the recorded image into view.
Away to the south, past the barren white hills beyond, Menelaus saw what seemed to be giant dark thunderclouds gathered.
Menelaus realized there was something odd about the cloud. There was a band of blue sky (slightly brighter in hue than the sky to the left and right) issuing from the top of the thunderhead. It looked like a blue road, or perhaps a crack, as if the sky were pure blue glass that had developed two perfectly parallel, perfectly vertical fissures several miles apart, reaching directly upward.
Menelaus craned back his head, tilting the view from the goggles upward. The road of lighter blue sky receded in the upper distance. The far ends seemed to converge, the way the parallel rails of a track seem to meet at the horizon. Only here, there was no horizon. Directly overhead, the dome of the sky was cloudless, and the highest midpoint of the dome, the very zenith, was the point to which the lighter blue stripes converged. So the whole atmospheric disturbance or optical illusion or whatever it was looked like a very narrow and very tall triangle, perhaps a few miles wide at its storm cloud base, and hundreds of miles high as it reached to the top of the sky. Because of the fact that, to the human eye, the sky does seem to be a dome, the triangular stripe of lighter blue color seemed to bend like a hook or a claw, as if a Titan with his shoulder at the horizon were reaching a curved arm up and overhead, to place a menacing finger at the zenith.
It was certainly ominous looking, as if an immeasurably immense tower shaped like a half circle were about to topple on the scene.
Keirthlin, who could see him tilting back his head, gave a noise smaller than a sigh, as if anticipating what Menelaus was about to see. That small noise came just as his eyes adjusted, or perhaps his brain, and he realized what he was seeing. Perhaps he consciously noted now how disturbed the thundercloud was, or how large it was, or how far away. Perhaps he glimpsed, where the black clouds parted, the vast and round metallic surface of the lower part of the structure.
It was not blue, not really, any more than mountains seen on the horizon are blue. Mountains seem blue at a distance because of the hue of the mass of the intervening air. When they are closer than the horizon, of course, there is less air, and therefore the color is not as dark.
What he was seeing was a solid object. It was a cylinder, too large and far away for any surface details to be distinguished, reaching from the cloud level, perhaps five hundred feet off the ground, up and up through the atmosphere and stratosphere and perhaps beyond. The clouds parted as it advanced, and the air masses being displaced were condensing into a large hurricane and thunderstorm at the bottom of its foot.
The bottom was a circular plain of metal dotted with irregularities, surrounding the vast emptiness of a portal or mouth opening into the immeasurable cylindrical interior of the structure. Threadlike arms or instruments hung down, looking like the trailing tails of jellyfish.
Minutes passed, and more could be seen. The armored body of the cylinder itself was punctuated here and there with cross-shaped altitude jets, or black dots of weapon ports or antennae or instruments of some sort, about one every five or ten square miles. To be visible at this distance, the rocket cones must have been larger than skyscrapers.
Some segments of the vast curving surface were flat and dark like the oceans of the moon; others were stubbled with a pattern of irregularities, almost invisible at this distance, which may have been buildings, encampments, fortresses, or aerodromes larger than any major metropolis, their towers horizontal rather than vertical. There were some craters large enough to be visible on the sections higher in the atmosphere, or perhaps these were scars from strikes by old nuclear missiles.
With the effortless power and grace of a god, serene as a ship in full sail, the unimaginably titanic artifact moved across the face of the Earth, and the disturbed clouds formed eddies and swirls, larger than provinces, behind it as it came.
A little nimbus of glittering glints fluttered before the mouth of the cylinder, and tiny specks as if something was traveling up through the air into it.
The wind-craft that had recorded the image swooped closer to the city. Menelaus could see something being lifted up from the ground and into the opening of the cylinder.
Once the wind-craft was close enough, Menelaus could use a cortical interpretation technique to resolve the vision into meaningful shapes.
Machines, swarms of machines, on the ends of long lines like spiders on threads, descended from and ascended to the mouth of the cylinder. They were carrying buildings. Even the arcologies were but toy blocks compared to the size of the cylinder. Menelaus saw vehicles like trains, pulled out of the ice that had preserved them, drawn like links of sausage up and upward. Or they may have been lines of cable or pipe.
He saw oak trees and sculptures being lifted up. A geodesic dome, and many, many lesser buildings. Houses. Mansions. Gardens. Museums. Edifices he did not recognize.
The wind-craft moved closer to the great Bell, passing beneath the mouth. The cameras could see that inside the mouth of the Bell, the various components of the city were being put back together again, like a children’s puzzle, on a series of shelves that ringed the inner hollow space.
Keirthlin said in English, “It was Raleigh, one of the cities of the Carolinas.”
Menelaus snatched the goggles off. “The base of the machine was above fourteen thousand feet. The upper reaches must be above the atmosphere…”
Keirthlin said, “I estimate it to be 116 million feet high, or 19,100 nautical miles. To hold its own coherence under its own weight, descending from orbit to the surface, the material must exceed 200 gigapascals of tensile strength and elastic properties of over 1 terapascal. The degree of tapering between the geosynchronous altitude and the Earth’s surface depends on the material: for steel, it is tens of thousands to one, whereas for diamond, twenty to one. In this case, there was no visible tapering, which indicates a strength of material above what is possible for molecular bonds: the strength is akin to the strong nuclear force. By any normal understanding of Earthly science, what we saw was impossible.”
“Plague and pestilence! Who on Earth could build such a thing? The space elevator Rania took off with was just a frail spider-thread compared to that. How far out into space does it go? Is it anchored to a geosynchronous asteroid? And if it is—sucking abdominal wound of Jesus Christ!—how can they maneuver it?”
Keir said, “Have you not studied the Monument? The great east-southeast cartouche element of the Pi hieroglyph segment displays image-algorithms, pictoglyphs, and other representations describing the tools the Hyades Dominion uses for its deracination, as well as other schematics of traditional mechanisms and systems. This Bell is identical to one of the instrumentalities so pictured. It is a device for absorbing into confinement a planetary population along with various tools and physical artifacts of their culture, and sufficient layers of the ecosphere to sustain them, and for placing the populations as payload in Clarke orbit pending solar sail launch outsystem. Different mechanisms than this are preferred by the Hyades for deracinating superterrestrial and subjovial worlds. This contrivance seems to be a Hyades war-object that arrived far in advance of the promised World Armada.”
“Impossible,” said Menelaus.
Keir said, “How can we know what is impossible for them? We are as ants.”
“The laws of nature are the same for ants as for bigger things. No one can exceed the speed of light; no one can create energy from nowhere.”
Keirthlin said, “Someone sent out an extremely low frequency signal to attract the Bell, and it answered in Monument hieroglyphs, describing its rendezvous with this location. The Bell should be here shortly. If you note the cloud cover gathering, and the drop in temperature, and the howling of the wind, you will deduce that the near rim of the mouth of the Bell is already visible above the local horizon. Would you care to see a view from the logic crystals in the camp?”
Numbly, Menelaus handed back the goggles. He had seen enough.
Keirthlin said, “Why did you call them here? What did you intend? What do these events mean?”
Menelaus said, “I am the smartest man on the planet, and I have no damnified and pustulating idea what is going on. The Currents, whoever they are, if they had the technology to create such a thing, would surely have left some sign, some energy signal, that the Locusts would have detected, or my radio. Are they hiding?”
Keirthlin said, “While I am not a Simplifier, I do admire the directness of their approach. In this case, the simple approach is best. If you are curious about the motives of the current generation, why not ask?”
Menelaus goggled at her. “You are the Currents?”
Keir made a curt, negative gesture with his hand. “We are not. She is.” And he nodded toward Alalloel. “Everyone else here is from our past. Only her energy signals contain fine emission nuances we cannot penetrate. Observe the small motions of her eyes and hands. She is a posthuman.”
10. Girl from the Eighteenth Configuration
Menelaus still felt an astonishment, great as anger, burning in his belly. He spun and glared across the space separating them at Alalloel.
He looked at the ornamental clasps adorning her shoulders, wrists, and waist. They looked like seashells. The tiny patterns of striations showed they had been grown using the same method as the shell-like buildings outside.
You! You are a Current, aren’t you? World hasn’t changed that much in four hundred years, has it? You are a Melusine! You are in contact with them! You know what’s going on! Where is the world? Where did the human race go? What is that—that thing outside?”
The gold, silver, and blue antennae on her head stirred, and the second pair of ears below her human ears opened like little pink parasols, and tilted toward Menelaus as if tracking the source of the noise. But she said nothing, and there was a mocking look in her blind-seeming eyes.
He probed the clasps on her uniform with a signal from his implants; this time he used the Gray logic gems to heterodyne his signal onto the carrier wave he had detected earlier. From the energy echo, he realized she had the range and the power to reach not only the Bell, but whoever was in charge of this period of history, including whatever libraries and infosphere contained the answers to his questions. Questions she was not answering.
Menelaus adjusted the nodes the Grays had given him, and sent a signal strong enough that Alalloel winced. Aloud, he said the same words: “Who are you?”
She raised an eyebrow. She opened her tongueless mouth. From her throat issued a voice.
“Alalloel u lal rir Lree, u lal rir Enlil-Urthlolendthril.”
“Nope. If the Linderlings can pick up this language at their speed, you can at yours.”
The throat-voice changed, and now spoke with the same modulation, accent, and rhythm as Keir, but at a slightly higher pitch. The perfection of the impersonation was eerie. “Alalloel of the Lree of the Eighteenth World Mind Configuration.”
“You hid that you can grasp our talk? Why?”
“It would lack symmetry were you, given your actions, to criticize the pretense of ignorance to lure others to speak unguardedly.”
“You started to speak to me in the mess tent.”
“I started to offer you my name; you offered me in return a lie. Absent reciprocity, conversation halts.”
Menelaus said angrily to Alalloel, “Lady, you better tell me where is the human race.”
“Measured in terms of the majority of intellectual activity, the human race is no longer significant. The Eighteenth Configuration is no longer significant. The Earth itself is self-aware.”
He didn’t know if that referred to Pellucid filling the core, or the self-aware Del Azarchel snow-coating the outside of the planet. He said, “Go on.”
“The mentality involved has not yet achieved coherence. Rather, the conflicting polities have thought-structures issuing from two epicenters, creating mutual interference. Nobilissimus Del Azarchel and the historical and mental events he sets in motion occupy one epicenter; you and yours occupy the other. But who are you? The archives refuse to confirm that you are the Judge of Ages, Menelaus Montrose, despite your claim. There is an information lapse or blind spot when the inquiry is made. Something nulls the reply. Who are you?”
Menelaus realized she must be at least partly contaminated by Exarchel, or her archives were. He said, “What happened to the people? Where is everyone?”
She looked at him with her strange, blind-seeming eyes. “You are not forthcoming? I reciprocate. Do not resist when the Simplifiers emerge to hale you below. They make an identity error.”
“What?”
“I speak now for the Final Stipulation of Noösphere Protocols, which supersedes even the Eighteenth Configuration: the Finality imposes an imperative to permit resolution of the various deceptions and aggressions involved that minimizes collateral damage to persons or historically valuable objects, information, or arrangements.”
“What the poxy hell you talking about, lady?”
“The Finality requires that you go below. All events are arranged; all contingencies foreseen. Do no damage to our Tombs.”
Your Tombs! Pestilential hellish pox!”
But there was no more time. The dogs raised their muskets as Illiance, glittering in his blue coat, glided smoothly up and out from the gold shining stairs leading below. He pointed and whistled and the dog things eagerly leaped to obey. Paws grabbed Menelaus by the arms and half dragged, half frogwalked him across the wide steel floor to the shadow of the great doors.
Illiance regarded him with mild curiosity, and said in a quiet voice, “Beta Sterling Anubis.”
Menelaus counted the gems on the Blue Man’s long coat. “Hello, Preceptor. Got your rank back, did you? Congrats.”
“Thank you, Corporal. My peers happen to admire the elegance with which an armed insurrection in the camp was averted, thanks to my forethought, and to my correct assessment of your maneuvers. You were preparing an act of insurrection, were you not? You would have killed the Followers we sent to guide you. The crime is an abomination.”
“Yeah. Almost as bad as tomb-looting, theft, trespass, kidnapping, maiming, assault, torture, and murder.”
Illiance said, “Now, please come this way. Your talent for translating dead languages is needed. We have found the Judge of Ages.”
“Oh, this I got to see.”


 
Copyright © 2014 by John C. Wright

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Judge of Ages by John C. Wright. Copyright © 2014 John C. Wright. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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