The Judge of Ages

Illiance had returned, and with him was Sir Guiden in his powered armor, his great helm doffed, his head visible above the wide neck ring. He was still wearing the metal coif and black cowl of the lesser or inner helmet. His face tattoos were turned up to their brightest setting, making him look like a Japanese demon; his white beard seemed almost dark by contrast, and his eyes unlit pits. Clinging to him like a grapevine to a strong tree was Oenoe, her slender feet twinkling as she walked, her walk a dance, her eyes wreathed in dreams of joy.

Behind them came Scipio in his splendid scarlet robes and absurd white wig, carrying a Blue Man energy pistol gleaming in either hand, and two more tucked in his belt. Trey Azurine was clinging to Scipio’s arm and smiling absent-headedly, healed now of her wounds, with deadly silks floating lightly about her, sparkling.

Next came also marching Buck Gamma Phyle, who carried a machine gun he had dismounted from the wall, with belts of ammo wrapping and re-wrapping his chest in crossed bandoliers. Behind sauntered Gload the Hormagaunt, picking the teeth of his huge midriff-mouth with a crowbar.

Sir Guiden came forward, and he and Drosselmeyer helped Menelaus back into the judgment seat. Sir Guiden sent silently over his implants, “You know that between me, Trey’s hunger silk, Gload’s strength and the Gamma Chimera’s skill, we could have crushed these Witches as easy as a brace of stallions trampling a snake. Not to mention Scipio is carrying as many pistols as Rada Lwa was—your family has an obsessive gun fetish I call hoplophilia, you know—but you told us to wait, so the heathen devil worshippers could point barrels and blades at your ugly face. How so, my Liege? Did you know it would turn out this way?”

Menelaus sent back, “Don’t be ridiculous. You’d have to be super-smarter than a human being, or be like an adult among heavily armed and highly emotional children, to be able to see and plan out something like that ahead of time. Remember to pick up your sword. Fatin dropped it.”

Scipio had a spare red robe from the voluminous wardrobe he had packed, and he threw this over Montrose like a blanket. Two Nymphs, Aea and Thysa, helped Montrose out of the scholarly undersuit, cutting the suit where the fabric was wedded to burn wounds. Keirthlin, having wheeled a coffin up behind the throne with the help of Soorm, now sent the tubes and metal tentacles of the internal coffin appliances moving up and down Montrose’s body, stripping away dead and burned tissue, and replacing it with new growth.

Somehow, even though the nerve sensations from those patches had been shut off—he had reprogrammed the Blue Men nerve mites and given them honest work to do—the process contrived at the same time to be uncomfortable because it was numb, and uncomfortable because it was painful.

“I have discovered the control channels to the extra platoon of digging machines Aanwen brought before she died. The automata are currently under my control and trying to dig us out. A simple calculation shows we cannot possibly get out of here before the Bell arrives—and who knows what that means?

“Soorm I can send down the cistern to follow Alalloel and try to find if we can float out through the flooded areas in coffins, which are watertight and contain their own life support.

“The other Blue Men and their dogs are all in coffins, being repaired or restrained until I can decide what to do with them. Yes, I stopped the Blues from doing in their dogs. In my house, one of my rules is that it is not lawful for a man to kill his wounded dog, not while I have veterinarian-coffins to spare.

“Also, no human suicides just because you’ve had a hard day. Betas, I am looking right at you. Oh, and yes, you can unbraid your hair now. Battle is over. You were brave. You did well.”

The girls sat on a lower tier of the dais, and started out happily enough combing each other’s hair and chatting, but soon their accustomed Chimerical stoicism and stiff-faced discipline broke; then had their arms around each other, and began to weep, ashamed and disappointed to have survived the battle, cheated of a glorious death.

Menelaus, meanwhile, said, “I regret to report that Happy the Kine had wounds beyond what my coffins can repair. You all seem to think I am superhuman, and I guess I am, a little, but there are things no one can fix. Larz, Franz, and Ardzl! Because you pummeled to death the dog which had bayoneted Happy, I give you my permission as ranking Beta to keep as rightfully named weapons the cutlasses taken from dog things. I reward your service with manumission: you are free men.”

Franz raised one hand meekly. “Sir? And what rank of freedom would that be? How much freedom? I mean, are we Alpha or Beta, Gamma or Delta? I ain’t being no Epsilon. They stink.”

Ardzl asked in a voice less meek, “And when will we be issued breeding mates from the quartermaster? If we are free men, the Command has to carry on our breed, right? I want two of the Geisha girls in green over there.”

Larz, who was sitting in a coffin with only his head showing, said loudly to Montrose, “Whoa and woe! That’s powerful hard, brains of lard—we’z emotionally scarred! You just gunna toss us a loss and cut free on the street to beat feet? Free to starve under bridges? No, no, we won’t go, unless we got a life, and a wife or three. And those honeys cost money! Upkeep, and you got to dress them, and you have to bring in someone to beat them with a lash every now and again, because if a stud draws blood, that’s no good for domestic tranquilizers. Guys who know how to do it without leaving bruises cost coin too, and you gotta have Kine to draw the plough and raise the crop, or else freedom is just starvation, right?”

“Freedman Larz, I am delighted that you are alive again and that you have found a way to rewind up the motors of your mouth, and let me just say I hate your period of history like the red-lungrot plague, and you are not getting a damn dime out of me, because I do not pay men to be free. Earn it or starve. And, Sir Guy, maybe you can take the newly freed citizens off to one side and explain some basics of civilized law and civilized religion to them.

“Toil, Drudge, and Drench, the same applies. Any man who fights in my service, or takes up arms against my enemies, wins his liberty; and my laws last longer than the laws of merely earthly princes, whose laws of slavery die when they do. You are beholden to none.”

The three ex-Donors of the Hormagaunt Era immediately began whispering and laughing and cutting capers, and talking about the high-quality organs they would buy to replace those they had lost, or they would grow a house as big as dreams to dwell in, and fill it up with clones of themselves, as alike as eggs in a nest, or how fabulously rich they would become buying and selling children in the market.

2. Life and the World

Menelaus no longer bothered to hide his nature, and he increased the number of nerve firings to his eyes, so that the scene around him grew crisp and bright as crystal. He turned his painfully sharp more-than-human eyes left and right, and no one could meet his gaze.

“Anyone else have a complaint about life and the world? You Chimerae! Yuen thought the fault was mine that his civilization was fell apart. Kine Larz thought I shot the Last Imperator-General to make the World Empire shatter. You Nymphs thought I helped you overthrow the Chimerae by spreading the various addictions and the hedonism of Greencloak technology among the Lotus Eaters, because I love you so much. Prissy and Gload, I don’t know what you lay at my door, but it must be something. Illiance, you think I arranged for the Noösphere of the Locusts to crack into pieces, and you think this is praiseworthy, because I saved you from a life of permanent thought-enforced mental uniformity; and Keirthlin, you think the same thing, but you think this is blameworthy, because I ruined your life of permanent thought-enforced mental uniformity. Do I really need to go through the whole list of what really happened in each case? It would take forever, and we are out of time.”

Vulpina stood up, striking the dais sharply with the heel of her unstrung bowstaff. She looked very young and very fierce and warlike, despite her tear-stains, and her hair was loose about her face and wild. “Not the whole list. Just one thing.” She drew herself up. “Judge of Ages, the Chimerae of the Emergency General Command demand to know…”

“Will you knock it off, sister? All your Alphas are dead and your race is extinct. The Command ain’t giving no-one not no-more commands, not now, not forever and amen. We are all just people now, human people, and we all have the exact same rank: which is Screwpustulated, First Class. Just ask your damned question.”

She blinked but gathered her breath and spoke. “Why did you kill the Imperator-General? Larz said you shot the last Emperor in an act of assassination, and the Empire fell.”

“Act of assassination my ass—uh—assination. Shot him fair and square, blast pattern in the chest, eyes open, pistol in his hand, plenty of warning and in a good light. It was a duel. I ain’t no assassin. What was I supposed to do? Sue him in court? D’Aragó had his men break into the Tombs in Switzerland, found Thucydides Montrose, a relative of mine, and shot him in his coffin. Thucydides was a preacher man. Little old guy. Later he got poped or something. His men took a DNA sample back, and it was a close match, and they thought they had done me; so they told Draggy I was dead, so I had to go have some dealings with him to convince him of the error of his ways. That time, it was just personal. He killed kin, so I killed him.”

Illiance said, “And did the same obtain of the Hermeticist De Ulloa? Had you some personal vendetta against him? I recall the testimony of Rada Lwa the Scholar.”

Menelaus said, “Nope. That was just professional, a courtesy call. His Witches decided to dig up all the slumbering Christians, bishops and popes and so on who were in medical hibernation, so I had to go beef him just to keep him out of my back yard.”

Oenoe said in a voice like throbbing woodwinds, “And what of Sarmento i Illa d’Or?”

Menelaus said, “Well, that was a different case entirely. Old Yellow Door was a strange guy. He thought he could talk me over to his side of things, talk me into accepting the Hyades as the master race, talk me into liking Blackie’s way of playing with people’s lives like puppets, forgiving the murder of Star-Captain Grimaldi, and talk me into not being in love with Rania anymore. See, he had all these good, sound, logical, persuasive-sounding arguments, and he wanted to lead me through every step of them, starting with definitions, axioms, and common notions. What a damn bore that man was. Oh, and the poxified, pestilential, disease-riddled, scab-oozing, leper whoreson dolled up a clone of my wife, my own damn wife, and sent her around to try to seduce me. He just took that same section of the Monument that defined Rania, and ran through the same calculation again. The idea being I will give up my fight with Blackie, and let the world be his personal bugger boy, provided I am getting my own urges soothed—but I found out old Yellow had plunged her measure before me, cherry-picking, and that without benefit of clergy, if you take my meaning.”

Oenoe said, “I don’t take your meaning, beloved Judge of Ages.”

“Nah. You wouldn’t. So he ’poons my wife’s twin sister, and then dangles her my way to play come-hither-eyes at me, and at that point I am fed up so I went to call him out.

“One of my rare miscalculations,” Montrose continued, shaking his head. “Don’t seem fair he should be sharp as a razor in math and be some super athlete with muscles like a bull. He says doing weights helps him think, and he thinks pretty hard. Thought of a way to pack his pistol better than mine. He was a pretty damn good shot, and cool as a cucumber staring down a barrel, so what can I say?

“By rights, I should be dead. I can show you the scar.

“My wife’s twin sister had two more sisters—they were trial runs, jobs that did not come out so perfect. Named Aura-Ah and Riana-Ah. They were still Rania clones, and looked a lot like her, and all programmed by the Monument to be able to read pretty damn far into the Monument. And the three ladies had read some mathematical model about the relationship of the mind and body that enabled them to make half a dozen breakthroughs in medical and biotechnological and bioneuropsychiatric sciences, including all the stuff that allowed the Nymphs to domesticate every damn living thing from inchworms to sharks, and train raccoons and fawns to do housework, giraffes to carry parasols, and kangaroos to carry parcels, and they even taught crows to sing.

“But their breakthroughs also included the stuff they did to bring me back from nine-tenths dead and put me back on my feet. So I made some deals with the ladies, and with their daughters, and they helped me revolutionize the hibernation process. I mean, their understanding of biology was, well, you know, unbepustulevable. And the Nymphs ruled the only period of history that did not care about the past and did not care about the future, and so they did not try to dig up my damn Tombs.

“That’s where all the stories about how much the Judge of Ages loves the Nymphs and their Natural Order of Man comes from. For once in all the millennia of time, in my buried house, I had a neighbor living on my roof, what you call your world, what was friendly and neighborly.

“And I could unload a hefty parcel of medical Thaws on them, and get my patients all cured-up, and some of them stayed for a season up topside to play with the native girls, but came down again to sleep and dream to a better future, and some of them got addicted and stayed topside for life.

“So the harlotocracy of Nymphland was sick and wrong, but never did wrong to me, and I let it be.”

3. The Game of Fates of Races and Empires

Expositor Illiance said, “The deaths you encompassed of your peers and fellow posthumans, the Hermeticists, are of biographical interest, indeed. But a deeper question hangs over every soul born since the time of the Giants, who knew the science of predictive history. It is a science you know, and the Hermetic Order, and so all human destiny, was shaped to your designs as a channel guides the canal-stream. We in this chamber represent all the races of Man. We need and yearn to know the answer to the riddle. This opportunity, to learn the mind of a mind beyond man, will never come again. Instruct us.”

Menelaus said, “I don’t understand what your question is.”

“My question concerns human destiny. It is simple to ask.”

“Yes? What about human destiny?”

“—why?—”

A silence hung over the buried chamber. Menelaus looked at the gathered people.

He sighed and spoke. “I did a lot of things in your history; and every event in history, no matter how nice the intention, had bad side effects.

“Sorry, Scipio, but it started when I smashed the Cryonarchy. Blackie had your foot in the bear trap, and the only way out was to gnaw your foot off. He did to me what Rania did to him: set up a situation where the only solution was to step down. He tried to hang on to power, and so his Concordat was shattered forever. I gave power away, and it brought forth a race of Giants. Maybe you think I should not have done it. But it would have been worse had I done nothing. Do you still want to take a poke at me?”

Scipio, one arm around Trey Azurine, waved his hand in the air as if brushing away cigarette smoke. “What year is this again, Old Timer? I cannot stay mad at General Santa Anna about the Alamo and stay mad at you, too. Besides, you are FBC, and it ain’t right to paste no crazy man.”

Menelaus nodded thoughtfully, as if allowing the wisdom of those words. He went on: “Like I said, it would have been worse if I had done nothing; far worse. The world would have been covered in gold logic crystal, and Earth been nothing but a planet of ghosts, had I not released the first part of the Rania Solution to the Selfish Meme Divarication problem to Thucydides. The Self-Corrective Code was universal and philosophical, and it applied to every field of study: it could be used to fix Divarication in man and machine alike.

“Sorry, Ctesibius, if you thought the world of gold would have been Utopia. It would have been, but not for you. You know now that the Machine only meant to eat the Ghosts you donated to him.

“Sorry, Trey Azurine. I did not give the order to burn the world, but I made the Giants who gave the order, and I built the Xypotech, Pellucid, who could do a passing fair impersonation of me over the wire, and send out the evacuation plans. My authority and prestige was the only thing that made a hesitating world agree to such a mad and desperate plan. Everybody and his wife thought the posthuman was such a smart guy! Everyone trusted me! That was the last period in history anyone ever did. So it is my fault you never set foot in a house, never had neighbors, never walked down a street or slept in the same meadow twice.”

Trey stood with her head on the shoulder of Scipio, and she looked up, and smiled brightly. She spoke in a wondering tone of voice, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. “I don’t think about things like that. We are Drifters. We drift with the wind. Sometimes we fish. Or we interface with the fun-line. You can use up whole days playing yourself in little cartoons. Or we can drop into the sea and kill the whales. They serve the Machine. I hate whales. That Machine is satanic. It does not have a soul. Burning the cities was like amputation.” And she must have remembered Brother Roger the Jesuit astronomer, for she said: “If your eye offends you, pluck it out. It is better that a man enter paradise one-eyed than that he descend into hell with two eyes.”

At these words, Sir Guiden crossed himself; but Scipio scowled at him and shouted an amen; and Mickey the Witch scowled at them both.

Menelaus inclined his head to Trey, and raised his voice once more to fill the chamber.

“That universal Self-Corrective Code solution I mentioned allowed Blackie to make the Dreagh, the special posthuman Ghosts that have been running all the eras and aeons of history ever since, Exulloa and Exarago, Exillador and Expastor. And Ull’s emulation that replaced Expastor. So it is my fault that the last eight thousand years did not grow naturally, but were engineered into their shapes by the Hermetic Order.

“The second solution I released to save the Sylphs, because otherwise either the Giants would have killed them, or they would have fallen into total preindustrial barbarism. It allowed the serpentine Mälzels to copy each other’s solutions and perpetuate any useful change of code—forever. It was a bit of straight computer engineering, but I devised by accident an eternal form of self-repairing tool.

“Melchor de Ulloa used this technique and applied it to living things, such as for re-copying iterations of Witch genetic information back onto unraveled telomeres, and returning cells to totipotency, and performed parallel experiments in uplift to create more Moreaus than just whales. Horses and elephants and dogs and swine: soon everything was talking. And taking orders. And on the backs of the slave armies of animal people, the labyrinthine edifice of the Witches reared its envious head.

“I interfered again. At the time of the Nameless Empire, I meddled with the Moreaus, and introduced by viral vector a gene-rewriting intron. It was an unselfish gene, a cooperation code. I had to make it so that the intelligent lion could lie down with the intelligent lamb in a democratic republic, because nothing else could ever stir the endless tyranny of the Wise over their fellow creatures and their fellow men.

“It worked for a while, but you know the next twist in that story: Narcís D’Aragó took that exact same bit of biotech engineering I had devised to make for himself new creatures, cooperating on a molecular level, half lion and half goat and all snake, and they ate up the lambs.

“A fourth solution was biochemical rather than biotechnical. It was used to formulate the original portable neurochemical biofeedback backpack systems called Greencloaks, which was my attempt to copy in a crude way the things done by the red amulets of the Hermeticists. It was not passed from father to son, because the Chimera eugenicists controlled who passed what from father to son. I had to do an end-run around their whole game. My game was a needle you stuck in your head. My signature move.

“Thanks to Sarmento, the boys in green, guys like Larz, who is right now drinking the medical fluid out of the coffin he is in trying to get his bender on, the next generation really liked sticking needles of all kinds up their heads; or whatever else they could take with alcohol, or patch or inhale or stuff up a nostril, or as a suppository. That was one civilization whose fall was not my fault: Sarmento was the exception again. He hated D’Aragó and wanted his little tin empire of little tin soldiers smashed as soon as possible and replaced it with Whoreworld, the Garden of Addict. Sarmento’s notion of paradise.

“The Wintermind techniques I taught to the Nymphs when their weather control system began to fail. This fifth solution was biosoftware—the training must be ingrained via training and biofeedback to establish the nerve paths, because obviously anything that comes out of a needle or in a pill, the Nymphs could control and block and make to do backflips. I broke their hold over their people so that those people would wake up out of their drunk drug-dreams, see the world was getting colder, and come up with a way to save themselves.

“Once again, I had to do it, because otherwise the society would crash and never recover. There were no metals left in digging range anymore, so if civilization did a Humpty Dumpy, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—Does anyone here know who old Humpty is? That would make Alice sad. Yeah, Trey, Alice in Wonderland! I am glad that book survived as long as your era.

“Soorm scion Asvid, you know the next part of the story. Wintermind can be used not just to break unnatural additions, love philters, and memory snares the Nymphs impose; the technique can break the addictions Mother Nature kindly puts in us so that mothers love their babies and fathers love their mates, the sex drive and the family drive and the thing that makes man a political animal. Reyes y Pastor trained a generation of gladiators to kill and eat each other, and to use the Wintermind to abolish their addiction to human affections.

“And so I had to do something again. Prissy Pskov—your people, the Clades, exist because of me. The sixth solution was bioeconomic. The Hormagaunts could have controlled anything I introduced that was genetic or based on pheromones, but what I introduced was a fractional genetic banking system, a set of techniques that made it easier to reproduce by parthenogenesis than to try to find a wife you were not allergic to, and everyone was born in clusters with spare organs in all their twins, who suddenly had no strong reason to prey on each other. The Clade unity was a terrible solution, a hack, a kludge, but there was no other way to preserve civilization from the deluge of blood Reyes had unleashed, except in an Ark made of twins and triplets.

“But when the floodwaters of blood receded, there was nothing but that terrible, overwhelming need for unity. That is why Locusts are born oriented toward hive mind thinking and total altruism. They were just a logical extension of the notion of the Clades that, since toleration of differences proved impossible, total conformity is the price of peace.

“Expositor Illiance, you know what happened after that. Yes, I did break the Noösphere of the Locusts. I did it deliberately, and with malice aforethought. It was the most evil thing a man like me can imagine: mankind as an ant farm. A monster army with a million bodies with a million giraffe necks leading to one giant head like a bobbing balloon above them.

“The seventh and last solution was the most subtle of all my moves in this great game. It was not philosophical, nor computational, nor genetic, nor biochemical, nor neurolinguistic, nor bioeconomic. It was legal and informational—a set of universal protocols establishing a format for information exchanges across nonuniform data-regimes. It created very quickly a very powerful incentive for diversity within the mental environment: a good reason for the nest to tolerate useful inquiline species. An Inquiline Protocol.

“And Coronimas perverted my work, and used it to concoct this horrible cellular-level mind-control system, which the Melusine eventually perfected to make their remote control of other people’s minds and souls perfect and inescapable.

“I had a counter to that. I tried to introduce a new vector into the course of evolution five hundred and six years ago, which should have made this helotry of total mind control a dead end, and forced the whole species into a radical new direction. My mistake was a simple one: I released the viral carrying agent onto the oceans of the Earth, because that is where I thought the men would be living, and that they would carry it into the land areas, or any other place other members of their race would go.

“So it was my damn cleverest move yet—but nothing happened. I should have won by now. Instead the Melusine, as best I can tell, were totally unaffected, and they remain totally loyal to Ximen del Azarchel, who is in charge of the planet, or what is left of it.

“Alalloel of Lree—man, that is a hard name to say—she tells me each Tomb has a Melusine officer assigned to it, called a Paramount, who was going to thaw us all and absorb us into their gestalt, like Locusts.

“So we are buried alive here, waiting for the Melusine to come eat our brains. They will keep our memories and minds and personalities intact, and put us into a slavery so profound that it cannot even be imagined. A helotry of the mind, where the helot rejoices in his invisible chains, or thinks or believes whatever else the Paramount programs him to do, including loving his slavery.

“There you have it. There were a lot more maneuvers within each move, but that was the general outline of the chess game of history.

“You asked me why, Expositor Illiance. There were two sides in the game. My side was the side of human life, civilization, and liberty. Whenever that was threatened, I acted. His side was the side of machine existence, slavery, and for some reason I did not learn until today, barbarism.

“That is the why and the wherefore of it. Why did I interfere with your lives, and the lives of your ancestors and descendents over and over again? Why did I preserve the sick and the lost and those who fled into the exile of time here in my buried house where no time passes? That answer is really simple.

“Turn your heads and look at the portrait of the young lady yonder. I did it for her.

“She is my why.”

Menelaus was silent a moment, his head down, his eyes downcast and solemn. No one in the chamber spoke.

Without looking up, he said, “Expositor Illiance, is your question answered?”

Illiance said, “The question why can never be fully answered, because all answers open deeper questions yet. But I am content.”

Mickey the Witch said, “I am not content, Judge of Ages! Because magicians have vowed not only to dare all and to know all, but to achieve all, until the pinnacle of secret knowledge is ours, never to be shared. You have unfolded to us the hidden history of the world, of races and empires, and they rose and fell as you moved our fates like chessmen against each other.”

Menelaus said apologetically, “The Monument had the Cliometric calculus equations printed on it. Once we read, the genie could not be put back in the bottle. Letting nature take its course was simply not an option: it was either let Blackie be the undisputed Master of the World, or dispute it.”

Mickey said, “That is not my question at all. I ask: Where do things stand now? What is the next move in the Great Game? And what is my role in it?”

When that comment was translated by the talking boxes, there was a murmur of admiration, even applause, in the chamber. The Chimeresses looked eager for battle; the Witches seemed bitterly angry to learn how badly their gods had betrayed them; Illiance looked proud; and Gload looked hungry.

Menelaus answered in a voice of grim despair, and his words marched out of his mouth like soldiers assigned to firing squad detail.

“I hate to say, but it looks like my side, our side, ladies and gentlemen, monsters and Witches, has lost.

“Alalloel implied the world is under a regime of absolute mind control. Such a regime, once in place, if firmly in place, can never be removed, because you need to think to plan a rebellion. And it does not have the usual inefficiencies of slavery, because the slaves can be programmed to be content, or happy, or enthusiastic, or devout, or serene, or whatever else strikes your fancy. Hell, you can even let them stage a successful revolt once every fifty years as a kind of Jubilee, if it amuses you. And then turn it off after.

“So the chess game is over.

“Only two questions remain in my mind. First, I don’t know why I lost, or what the losing move was. The Melusine should be, according to what I did, the most freedom-loving creatures it is possible to be under heaven. Second, what the hell is up with that Bell?

“Above us is a spacehook, the biggest thing I have ever seen in the sky. On the one hand, it is physically impossible that the Hyades World Armada or anything from it could be here four hundred years ahead of time. On the other hand, it does not seem to be moving or acting like it would act if the Currents controlled it, Melusine or Blackie or whoever is running the store these days. Why would any of them go loot Raleigh? Why would they initiate a maneuvering burn when they saw the magnetic north pole shift to Fancy Gap, Virginia, just as if they wanted to investigate some unknown native phenomenon? Why would they react to ELF radio signals containing Monument hieroglyphs and not to any other signals on any other band?

“And I don’t know the answers to those questions.”

A silence as profound as the grave passed over the chamber. So it was shocking that the sound of a cold chuckle hung in the air. It was doubly shocking when everyone turned and saw that it was Ctesibius the Savant, his despair and aloofness for a moment gone from his face, replaced with a cold and satanic mirth.

Ctesibius said, “I know the answers, aftercomers. I know all.”

4. Star Raid

Menelaus turned to Ctesibius the Savant. “What did you say? What did you find out? Hell—how did you find out?”

“The snow told me. Haven’t you figured out where the people of this time are? Don’t you know what the Bell is?” smirked Ctesibius.

“Told you how?” demanded Montrose. “The nerve links in your head are one-way only. Transmit and not receive.”

Ctesibius shook his bewigged head with bitter mirth. Menelaus decided he liked laughing Ctesibius less than melancholy Ctesibius. Much less.

Now the Savant held up his glove, and showed its back to Menelaus, and pointed with his other hand. On the glove back was a telephone of the kind that had an onboard Mälzel to perform extremely complicated high-data-volume transmissions, so it had more memory than a midrange library cloth, and broadcasting shortwave, enjoyed a practically unlimited, worldwide range. It was beautifully made, coated with gold leaf and rimmed with diamonds, no bigger than a coin.

“Just because I have neurocybernetics in my head,” smiled Ctesibius, “does not mean I need not listen with my ear like any hylic.”

Menelaus rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, pinching his nose for good measure. Hylic. There was a word he had not heard in a while. It was what the Hermeticists and Scholars called anything they regarded as lower on the scale of evolution. It was another little reminder, small as a pinprick, why he hated the Hermeticists and the worlds they made.

But aloud Menelaus said, “Okay. I give. Uncle. I have not figured out where the people of this time are. I was thinking maybe the ocean, on account of the Melusine, but I vectored a social change into the sea life, and it seems like it had no effect. Are they on the moon? I don’t know what the Bell is. I know what it is not. It is not what it seems to be, because what it seems to be makes no sense. It looks like a human-made weapon of the Hyades.”

Ctesibius said, “That is exactly what it is.”

“I got two questions. One is: huhn? The second one is: if I am the coxcombliest smartest smartster on this planet, how come most of what I say most the time is ‘huhn’? Answer the first question first, please.”

Ctesibius said, “The Bell is an accurate mock-up of a typical Hyades attack instrument created from Monument blueprints. The space raid drill began in A.D. 10484, some three decades ago. In the same way civilians would clear the streets of their cities and retreat into underground bomb shelters and bunkers during the Hitlerian War to practice the discipline needed to survive a raid from the air, so, here, too, the surface of the globe, including the oceans, has been cleared of all human and domesticated life, to practice what is needed to survive a raid from the stars.

“Interstellar warfare is feudal,” said Ctesibius in the tone of one who confides a commonplace bromide.

“Futile?” Menelaus wondered if he had heard that correctly.

“Feudal. There is no substance more lightweight and more deadly than contraterrene. Payload mass considerations are paramount in interstellar travel. No other weapon is worth bringing across lightyears. No possible surface defense, nothing made of matter, can withstand it.

“It is the nature of total conversion reaction to react as violently against diffuse material, like atmosphere, as against dense material, like armor, and the concussion always drives the antimatter away from the point of contact. Therefore the best defense is layer after layer of light masses, such as atmosphere and hydrosphere, over layers of heavier mass, as a crust and core.

“This means people can survive even orbital antimatter bombardment if they retreat to far, far below the mantle of their world like the knights in a medieval fortress retreating behind castle walls. All the attacker can do is eliminate the surface biosphere, and besiege the defender, and hope to starve him out. It is to define and practice the institutions necessary for bathysubterranean life that the space raid drill was organized.”

Menelaus blinked. A thirty-year-long drill. All the people of the surface world in a bombproof shelter. And the presumably much larger sea population of whales and mermaids, also in a bombproof aquarium. An aquarium as big as the Great Lakes might hold all the intelligent sea life in the world, with a little crowding …

“Hey! Wait one pus-dripping minute! What would be big enough to hold—?”

Ctesibius talked over him, trampling the end of the question. “Fortunately there was an extensive and unoccupied system of hypocycloid curves of a long-abandoned evacuated-tube railgun-launched intercontinental train network—all the cities of the Melusine were lowered into the extensive volume for the duration of the raid drill—”

“Unoccupied my cankered cloaca-hole!” shouted Menelaus. “You mean the world is empty because everyone moved into my depthtrain system? My rail yards? My storage bays?”

Ctesibius continued, as if he were unwilling to notice or acknowledge that a lesser being like Montrose could be speaking while he spoke: “—had previously deduced the existence of an extensive body of self-replicating Von Neumann lattices, apparently without end—and therefore began growing a stalactite of logic crystal toward the inner core in A.D. 10401, roughly one hundred years ago. The lava displacement caused by the stalactite growth increased volcanic pressure worldwide, making it easier for you, Menelaus Montrose, to attempt worldwide climate adjustment. The Nobilissimus anticipated that you would employ widespread volcanism to terraform the climate via gas venting to alter the composition in the atmosphere. Your behavior made the stalactite growth easier, and sped the growth—”

At this point, Menelaus was distracted by the sight of Soorm climbing out of the central cistern, with the slender body of the Melusine girl, Alalloel of Lree, tucked under one huge arm. Soorm did not wait for a break in the conversation, but merely bellowed across the chamber. “Judge! I found her where the flooded section meets an underground river. Not a stream—a river bigger than the Ebro. And you will not believe—”

Ctesibius, just as rude as Soorm, raised his voice and kept talking: “—Melusine occupying cities and arcologies cubic miles wide inside the cool core of the stalactite. Would you care to hear the figures for the displacement volume? More significant is the memory volume. Being made of logic crystal, the Great Stalactite can hold emulations of the entire Melusine population who have achieved the rank of Glorified—”

Alalloel was not dead (as Menelaus first thought) but she did look annoyed as Soorm yanked her out from under his arm and held her up. “These scars on her back hide spinal ports. She was nerve-linking to her whales. They came back from the dead. Most of their internal organs are brain mass. Brain Whales. And these whales have wings, and the wings are covered with eyes—”

Ctesibius said, “The core-ward growing Great Stalactite is the second largest single coherent man-made object in history. You are right to fear it—”

Soorm said, “The real her is housed in the Melusine body in her mind-body group—”

Ctesibius said, “The first and largest, of course, is the mock-up of the Hyades Instrumentality, which is finally in position. You have run out of time. All things are ended!”

Soorm said, “The Iron Ghosts I met at the bottom of the Mariana Trench have been reincarnated.” He turned to Scipio and spoke in Latin: “This girl is a Cetus, preserved as an Iron Ghost from the old days. Your days.”

Scipio said, “A Cetacean. The ones who broke the Cryonarchic power by blockading the continents. The creatures we never learned how to fight.” And he said in English to Montrose: “They serve only their creator, and have no pity nor understanding of human beings. These are the most loyal and most effective servants Exarchel has ever commanded.”

Menelaus was more curious about Ctesibius, at the moment, than about Alalloel the Cetacean. “Run out of time, why? Why is the Bell coming here?”

Ctesibius smiled a thin, cruel smile. Menelaus thought he definitively liked moping Savants better than happy ones. Ctesibius said archly, “To answer your second question, the reason why you spend your life, for all your intelligence, grunting—huhn?—is merely because you cross wits with a man who is in every way your superior. The Bell is no longer coming. It is here. The Nobilissimus is here.”