1. Maternity
Amphithöe led the two men to where a tent had been set up for them on deck. She bowed a deep bow, her pretty cheeks pink with shame. “Because we are unseen to the higher forms of intelligence connected to the Noösphere, our quarters, and, indeed, our lives, occupy the overlooked spaces of the civilization: the spandrels, so to speak.”
Montrose poked his head in the tent, and saw both things he knew, sleeping rolls and lanterns, and things he did not. He tapped a bowl on the deck doubtfully with his toe, and it started up speaking in a highly formal version of the Melusine airborne language from the Tenth Millennium. It was a spoken form of Glyphic, based on Monument symbol logics.
“Greetings, noble sir! I am a chamber pot! For all your needs, from excretion to the expulsion of vomit during seasickness, it will be my pleasure to sterilize and cleanse various biological expulsive material you might be pleased to extrude. If you would care for a demonstration, merely direct any organ of elimination toward the clearly marked orifice…” Montrose kicked it again to hush it. The sleeping roll seemed comfy enough, but he dared not touch it to test its cushion. He was afraid it would begin singing lullabies.
Meanwhile Del Azarchel, having no concern for creature comfort, was standing on deck next to the tent and asking Amphithöe, “Who assigned you to us? Are you an ambassador?”
She said, “I am your mother. You are children in this world, which is strange and dangerous to you, and therefore I have been chemically imprinted toward you, to care for your well-being. This tent and these things are my possessions.”
Montrose pulled his head back out. “You ain’t my mother, miss. You’re a damn sight too pretty.”
Del Azarchel scowled at Montrose. “You insult our mother quite cavalierly, sir. Mind your tongue.” To her, with a gallant bow, he said, “As your sons, we will do what is needed to protect your person, your interests, and the honor of the family name. But excuse our confusion! In our time, those who awoke from other eras, either thaws or star-farers returning, created friction because they were alien to the current time. We did not solve the friction between currents and revenants in such a fashion. You are selected at random? Without consulting us?”
Montrose said, “It’s like dropping someone down a chimney and just hoping the house where he lands in the ashes to take a shine to him.”
Amphithöe smiled mysteriously. “And how is a mother giving birth so different? Children appear as oddly as if found at the hearth, and—how did you phrase it?—they shine in our eyes.”
“Close enough.” Montrose shrugged.
“The custom dates back to the time of the Nymphs, I take it,” said Del Azarchel. Montrose scowled, because whatever clue Del Azarchel had seen to allow him to deduce that was opaque to him.
Amphithöe bowed yet again. “Both of you, Master that Was and Judge no Longer—”
“Call me Meany, Mom. Call him Blackie.”
“—Meany, both of you suffered from revenant friction back in your earliest years, the Master that Was from direct attack by space pirates when he approached Earth from the long-lost and legendary Diamond Star, and you, from, ah—”
“Direct attack by Blackie,” supplied Montrose.
Amphithöe said, “—from the difficult situation in which Black-ye was perhaps required, either forgivably or not, to place you.”
Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps the style The Elevated Nobilissimus del Azarchel would be more apt—”
Montrose pursed his lips and raised both eyebrows. “Watch your tongue, sir! Would you stand on ceremony with Ma?”
She finished, “—it is to avoid additional situations like yours, where those who wake find no place in a world grown strange to them, that our custom of proxy adoption was founded.”
Del Azarchel said, “Unless I mistake the spirit of my compatriot, madam, we are not to remain long in this world. We must soon return to our tasks in the outer Solar System.” He looked at Montrose quizzically.
Montrose said, “What the hell you talking about, Blackie? No more tasks for us to do.”
“How so?” Del Azarchel arched his fine black eyebrows.
“The aliens ain’t never coming back, the human race was not advanced enough to live as slaves, and the prediction of history says we are going to be wiped out long before Rania returns.”
Del Azarchel laughed like a golden bell. “Lies! If any of that were true then neither you nor I would triumph. Our endless duel ends in a draw. Ha! Let us not contemplate self-evident absurdities, my friend!” He shook his head wearily, but flashed a bright smile. “What weakness has entered your wavering soul?”
“Glad you are in a chipper mood, you maggot-ridden skunk,” said Montrose, standing now straight and shoulders wide, a smolder of spirit in his eye. “So, do you have some plan?”
“Not as such. But I think speaking to Tellus is now inevitable. I am convinced his mind and mine will find a strange sympathy.”
“We would have to augment our brains up to the Archangelic level. I ain’t about to do that. So what do you think Tellus will say?”
“Who knows? He may say that once mankind is dead, it falls to us to create new races, and people the Solar System in preparation for Rania’s return. Will not the Star Colonies flourish? We can re-people Old Mother Earth from any of these fourteen Stepmother Earths to which the deracination ships now sail. And when Jupiter arises…”
“Pshaw and pee-shaw. You mean find a way to wake up the Jupiter Brain before the predicted twenty bazillion years from now? You and your goddamn Great Work. Ain’t gunna happen. The Swans said so.”
“The Swans also made this world you see. Do you trust them?”
Del Azarchel raised his arm and gestured grandly toward the ship and its sails, the wide ocean beyond. There were icebergs floating in an equatorial sea, broken from pack ice which could be glimpsed as a white line on the horizon of the south. The sky was afire with curtains of purple and green auroras. There was a too-black cloud of an odd liquid consistency, as unnatural as an inkblot on a portrait, unearthly, the product of the Domination technology from Hyades, far off in the atmosphere to the stern of the white-sailed ship with her masts of fiberglass and diamond. “Is this what you envisioned when you set all the First and Second Human Races free from my sovereignty and power? To free them from the Hyades? Are you happy with the result?”
Montrose, as if struck by the thought, turned and looked at Amphithöe. “There is one thing I sure ain’t happy with. Hey, Mom! That Witch with the dumb nose rings called you a slave. Issat true?”
2. Involuntary Consent
Amphithöe, smiled serenely. “Do you mean the Intercessor? I am a handmaiden: I thaw and slumber, and do whatever is commanded me.”
“For pay?”
She blinked, looking scandalized. “For love.”
Montrose said, “Of your own will?”
Amphithöe had an oddly distant, cool look to her features. “Of course. The chemical balances in my nervous system are adjusted and redacted to produce the willingness.”
Montrose sighed. “Then you don’t want us to set you free?”
Del Azarchel interrupted sternly, “Do not listen to any answer she might give. I have already said I would uphold the family honor.”
Montrose said, “If it is some sort of chemical hypnosis, fine, let’s break her out of here. But if she wants to be a servant, how is that different from you wanting to serve the Hyades Domination? B’sides, we don’t know her.”
“She is our mother.”
“That’s just make-believe! They chemicaled her into having feelings toward us, so’d she give us her tent to sleep in. So if the mother feeling is legit, then her loyalty to her bosses is legit. Ain’t it?”
Del Azarchel sneered. “Come now. I thought you and I were the last creatures left alive on Earth who understand the meaning of honor. Am I alone? Come back to your senses.”
“You’re the guy who says the Earth should be enslaved to the stars! You like the peculiar institution!”
“I am Spanish. We perfected the institution. The New World would not have been colonized had it not been for the slave trade. But you are from backward Texas. You are the one who believes that all men are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights—inalienable means they cannot be bartered, lost, bestowed, bequeathed, appropriated, or sold. She cannot volunteer to be an involuntary being.”
Montrose felt his cheek burning; he was actually blushing. “I don’t need a lecture on what it means to be a Texan from you, Spanish Simon.”
“Evidently you do. Then you will help me free her?”
“Of course. It’s the first thing I said to her when I spoke. But you ain’t answered yet. I know why I’m doing it. Why are you? You like slavery!”
“Not for my mother.”
“But she is not really our mom!”
“Honor says otherwise. Will history remember this event? No one will cherish our names as worshipful if we pass by this opportunity.”
Amphithöe listened to this exchange with the bewilderment on her pretty features becoming fear. She flinched with surprise when Del Azarchel whirled on her. “Mother! Your master, if he be on this vessel, or whoso holds your indenture, who is it?”
“The ship owns my name, and the Nausilogue, Isonadey, is the ship’s voice,” she said. “When Isonadey speaks, I answer.”
“A man?”
“How could he not be? He is also captain of the crew.”
“Then take us on the instant to him!” said Del Azarchel.
Amphithöe took a folding fan from her sleeve, snapped it open, and hid her expression behind it. Her eyes would not meet theirs. “Surely this will produce the disquiet I was thawed to reduce.”
“Don’t worry,” said Montrose soothingly. “We just want to talk to him.”
“No, we don’t,” said Del Azarchel sharply. “Mother! As your son, I implore you! We seek your liberty, the only gift we can bestow the short time in this era we tarry!”
Montrose rolled his eyes and sighed. “I guess your mom in real life treated you better than mine did.”
Del Azarchel gave him a dark look. “She was thrown from her house and comfort, wealth, and position, for me. A saint who wed a devil! You see why I disapprove of miscegenation.”
“Meaning me and Rania? Them’s fightin’ words, Spanish.”
“Then come fight, Texan. Look!”
For Amphithöe had turned and moved in a gliding movement, surprisingly poised and swift considering the constriction of her green kimono and the pitch and roll of the deck, and leaped up the ladder to the poop deck, graceful as a gazelle.
And they both marched after the fleeing Nymph, double time.
3. Voice of the Ship
The two men came to the upper deck, and found Amphithöe pleading with the anthropoform Melusine captain, Isonadey, in a language neither Montrose nor Del Azarchel understood.
Isonadey stood glaring down at her with his all-black eyes glistering, and his sixfold antennae rising and falling in agitation. With him were the first mate, also a Melusine; two harsh-faced Chimerae in bright red coats; and six child-sized ebon-skinned bald dwarves, Locusts, dressed in heavy tunics with white scarves, their antennae twitching in unison, who were gathered near the navigation equipment.
Del Azarchel took a stance before Isonadey, threw his silver cloak back, and put his hand on his longsword. “We demand the manumission of Amphithöe, our mother!”
Menelaus grinned, which showed his overlarge teeth and Adam’s apple. “You just figuring on sockdolaging any rancid whoreson who gets in our way, just like that? Hot damn! But you are one brassy-swinging groin-clanger!” And he stepped up to Del Azarchel’s left shoulder, put his hands on the grips of his white glass pistols, but did not draw. “No parley nor argument nor nothing!”
Del Azarchel gave him a glance of surprise. Menelaus then realized that by we Del Azarchel had not meant the two of them. He had been speaking in his capacity of World Suzerain. It was the royal we. But Del Azarchel then grinned his devilishly handsome grin at Menelaus, and said, “That was the parley, all that need be. The captain must surrender! Here I have the final argument of kings.”
Isonadey flattened three pairs of antennae against his head, so that they rested along the ponytail of his hair, and raised his hand. He spoke in ponderous tones: “Violence is both impermissible and inadvisable. The allocation of resources, whether self-aware or not, is determined by the cliometric calculations. Amphithöe of Lily falls under the Concubine Vector, which is a pleat manifold in the attractor basin describing exocollateral interpersonal relations. Ancient report says you gentlemen are both master cliometricians, who shaped the manifold of destiny? Then contemplate the shape as it would be for those whose hibernation fees fall below any predicted future income. Slavery is objectionable; surely to kill those useless to the social order is worse?”
While he spoke, the two Chimerae standing behind Isonadey merely squinted and, aiming lasers built into their tear ducts placed small round dots of light atop various spots on the heads and chests and torsos of Del Azarchel and Montrose. Metallic ornaments the Chimera wore on shoulder belts also clicked open and pointed small barrels and emission apertures at the two men.
Whips made of silvery metal came slithering out of hidden sheaths in the sleeves of the Chimerae, and the whips giggled and whispered in soft voices to each other in the Sylph language.
Del Azarchel exchanged a glance with Montrose. “What do you say, Cowhand?”
“I say one of us can beef highpockets here before the Chimerae lads cut us to bits.” Then Montrose said to Isonadey, “Cap’n! What does your social order these days do for wills and reputations? You got family?”
Isonadey narrowed his black-within-black eyes, and his golden antennae swayed on his head in annoyance before he flattened them again. He opened his tongueless mouth, and three voices issued from his throat. “Of course I have family! Am I not human?”
“They be able to live down the shame of being related to the guy who killed two famous historical antiques? Where’s your sense of hospitality? Didn’t we, between the two of us, I mean, invent your planet or something?”
Every crewman on deck, including the two Giants, now turned eyes toward the scene on the high rear deck, and several had drawn Chimera-style serpentine weapons, or pistols built around serpentine cores. Serpentines were the Sylph technology of self-repairing artificial brains housed in sinuous metallic cords. They were an absurdly old technology, and absurdly perfect, able to repair and restore themselves indefinitely without error.
Isonadey seemed frozen in thought. The antennae on his head now stood, twitching, as if he were frantically radioing some other point.
With a slither of steel, Del Azarchel drew his sword. The words Ultima Ratio Regum were written on the blade, along with the emblem of a horned circle of olive leaves surmounting a cross: the royal insignia of the Hermetic Order. At the same moment, Montrose raised his glass pistols.
The Chimerae, moving with one accord, a blur of lizardlike speed, darted in front of Isonadey, blocking Montrose’s line of fire. Montrose stepped back, holding his pistols wide, trying to get a clear shot. During this moment of distraction, however, Del Azarchel had the tip of his sword at Isonadey’s throat.
Del Azarchel said, “In your cliometric calculations, Captain, I decree that the laws make an exception when imperial blood is concerned. Any mother assigned me is gentled and ennobled by that assignment, becomes an empress, and is manumitted at public expense.”
Isonadey said coolly, “A dozen weapons are on you. You cannot escape alive.”
Del Azarchel grinned. “Escaping alive is the highest priority of a man without honor.”
Isonadey’s eyes grew wide. Less coolly, he said, “You cannot fight the whole ship, the whole human world!”
Del Azarchel laughed like a madman. “Can I not? History says otherwise!”
Montrose said to the captain, “Ha! You flinched!” and to Del Azarchel, “He’s yellow. Stick him.”
Unexpectedly, Isonadey threw himself forward, as if trying to impale himself on the sword of Del Azarchel. But, no, he was not throwing himself forward; he was crumpling up in a ball, clutching his head. At the same moment, the Locusts fell to the deck and curled into foetal positions.
The cold-eyed Chimerae flourished their whips, whose metal lengths began to buzz with energy, but they did not strike.
Del Azarchel stepped back and lowered his sword. He said to Montrose, “Whatever answer his message provoked must be alarming. Hold your fire.”
“Dammit, Blackie! I don’t take orders from you!”
“Then fire at will to each point of the compass, Cowhand! Burn the whole of the established Earth with your puny pistols!”
Montrose snarled and tucked his guns away. The Chimerae did not put their whips away, but they did tighten the metal lengths into spears, holding them at the ready. With the typical rage of their race, their eyes were glittering points, hot as coals, teeth clenched so hard their gums were white, and yet with the typical self-control of their race, without an order to kill, they did not attack.
A voice that was two voices said, “Even could he defeat the world with a hand weapon, she who speaks is not of the world.”
4. Carmelite Satellite
Montrose and Del Azarchel turned.
The shoulders and head of a Giant were looming above the edge of the poop deck, roughly at their eye level. He was fifteen feet tall, and he leaned on a staff of smart-graphite steel. His coat was blue, and his coolie hat was the size of a wagon wheel, and even then seemed small on the Giant’s over-bloated and strangely delicate skull. The coat was coated with logic-crystal gemstones after the fashion of the Simplifier Order from thousands of years earlier. His skin was tainted blue.
The Giant’s voice was oddly twyform: it came both from his throat, somewhat high and thin, almost childlike, and from his chest, where it rumbled like whale song. The slight nuances of pitch and tone and word choice between the two voices added additional dimensions to the language, and allowed for high information density.
Without turning his immense head, the Giant raised his wand so that the two rings joining the Celtic cross atop it jangled with a clear chime, and pointed at the crescent moon. It was dusk, and in the darkening sky, the multicolored crescent hung like a drawn bow above a line of cloud. The cloud bank was painted into pale contours with moonlight above, red with the setting sun below, dark between. The moon was the oddly amber-gold hue of its glacier coat of logic diamond and marked with the labyrinthine swirling discolorations of Monument notations. Within the horns of the crescent, two pinpoints of acetylene-white light appeared, and then a third.
Montrose calculated the power needed to make so visible a flare from that distance: it was equivalent to a multimegaton explosion.
“I am Friar Sancristobal of the Remnant Order of the Post-Final Stipulation and a Brother of Penance of the Third Order of St. Frances,” the Giant said, his golden eyes growing brighter as he stared at Montrose and Del Azarchel. “The Archangel of the Moon casts an energy shadow into this area. It is interfering with the neurotelepathy of the local human infospheres.”
Del Azarchel said, “The Lunar Mind is super-posthuman. She is beyond us, we mere posthumans, in mental configuration. Surely she is part of the Noösphere! Why is she trying to communicate with us? Are we not phantasms to her?”
Montrose, leaping to the conclusion more quickly than Del Azarchel, laughed hoarsely and slapped his knee. “Wouldn’t my old ma be a-scorning me for my unchurchgoing ways! And lookit here! The moon is a nun!”
Del Azarchel stared at Montrose a moment, and then squinted at the crescent moon as if he could pierce to the lunar core with his naked eye. “You are saying she is in communion with you, Friar? The moon is a mendicant?”
The Giant flicked his eyelids in the gesture his race, with their thick-necked and immobile heads, used for a nod. “Mother Superior Selene serves as an Abbess of the Order of the Discalced Friars of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. The whole lunar sphere is sacred ground now, for none but hermits and monks departed of worldly things would dare dwell in such arid wastes.”
Seeing Montrose’s blank look, Del Azarchel said, “She’s a Barefoot Carmelite.”
“Seeing how’s an airless satellite what’s got no feet, I guess that makes sense,” said Montrose, shrugging. “What’s a Carmelite? Type of sticky candy?”
The Giant said, “As a Whitefriar, Mother Selene has taken vows of poverty and nonconnectivity. Although in reality visible to the Noösphere, as a member of a human sacerdotal order, she is legally considered of the human intellectual strata, and politely ignored. Neither her thoughts nor mine are transmitted into the information systems of the many levels of posthuman consciousness interpenetrating the Earth. Do you have instruments to detect and interpret her instructions? She forbids you from continuing in your act of piracy.”
“Forbids?” Del Azarchel bristled. “By what authority?”
“No authority aside from what your own conscience calls right. Forswear your suicidal pride. How will you contend with higher powers? Will you pierce the moon with your sword? The day when you were the paramount intelligence of Earth is past, sir. You are as a dullwit child, here.”
Montrose said, “Blackie, those lights we see on the unlit hemisphere of the moon? I assume there is about a mile-wide circle of ocean being painted. That is a triangle of ranging beams. If Selene turned up the power, this boat will go up like matchwood.” Montrose turned to the Giant. “Brother Sancristobal, I take it Selene did not take a vow of peace?”
The Giant said pleasantly, “How much of her most warlike mother, Diana, is still within Selene is a matter of speculation. The fiberglass deck of the ship will reflect the lethal dose of radiation. But she would not harm the Swan, who is part of the interconnected mental life of Earth, a living vessel of the living data streams.”
I will harm no one, if the Nobilissimus and the Judge of Ages will accept my offer of sanctuary on the moon. There is a basilica in Tycho crater, from which, by an ancient and significant law, no slave nor indentured servant can be haled. The tip of the sword of law is broken at the doors of the Holy Church.
It was Captain Isonadey speaking. He was supine on the deck. The voice was not his. His eyes were open. Since every part of his eye, pupil and sclera and all, were black as midnight, whether or not the eyes were focused on anything was a matter of conjecture. The Chimerae were inching away from their master, spears trembling in their hands.
Menelaus crossed his arms on his chest. “Blackie, this place strikes me as right medieval. The moon’s done joined up with the preachers.” He laughed and shook his head. “Every acre of lunar surface has an intelligence range above three hundred thousand. Lives by begging. Obeys a human priest—am I right, Brother Sancristobal? How did you work the baptism?”
Captain Isonadey rose, or was pulled, to his feet. The motion was swift, somehow managing to look both unnaturally smooth and inhumanly awkward. The voice rang from his mouth. I am the Abbess and Mother Superior. I occupy the core, not merely the surface. Immersion, albeit preferred, is not necessary. The Bishop Hymir blessed an incoming comet, which was redirected to my surface. The crater formed is the site of a chapel dedicated to Saint Teresa of Ávila. There, Amphithöe may reside if she will join our order, or else slumber undisturbed until this current Concubine Vector passes. It would not be well for her to accompany you into the undisclosed far future. In any case, I will set her free. You may assist me in certain matters.
“What matters?” said Montrose; almost in unison, Del Azarchel said, “What if we don’t agree to this exchange?”
“It proves we’re stupid,” said Montrose loudly, rolling his eyes skyward. His expression of exasperation turned intent. “The iron core of the moon is fourteen sextillion grams or so, and forty percent of that, whatever used to be molten, I am guessing is now sophont matter. One big plaguey logic diamond. Why does a mind with an intelligence clearly past the ten thousand mark want help from us humble posthumans?”
It is no exchange, spoke the voice, answering Del Azarchel. I shall grant sanctuary to Amphithöe because it is the right thing to do. You will assist me because it is the right thing to do.
Del Azarchel said, “I can agree to nothing blind. Tell us the nature of this assistance we can offer? And answer the other mysteries that confound us. Why did Domination of the Hyades, so far above us in the evolutionary scale, attack us merely to depart again? Why did they not stay and rule, as is there right? Why? What purpose is served? Will they never come again? Must man ever be alone?” And into his voice there crept a note of inner torture.
But there was no reply from Captain Isonadey, who was even then clutching his head, and speaking in his own strange three-part Melusine voice again. Montrose looked up. Beneath the horns of the crescent moon, all was dark once more. The three flares of extraterrestrial light had winked out.