The Judge of Ages

As there always were in affairs of this type, despite the willingness, even the impatience, to begin, there were delays which accumulated to many hours.

Montrose had to receive medical attention and invigoration from his coffins. He had much, much damage to undo; and Del Azarchel scorned the idea of facing a foe at less than the peak of his prowess, and so insisted he be sent the coffin medical reports to prove Montrose was hale. Since some of the information had value, it had to be redacted, and the Seconds had to negotiate what data were left in and what cut out.

The submicroscopic mites the Blue Men had introduced into Montrose’s nervous system had to be painstakingly removed, lest they hinder his reaction time.

With great reluctance and regret, Montrose also had his implants, which had served him so well, removed. Now that Exarchel was occupying the entire volume of Pellucid, and was having the nanomechanisms augmenting his brain power expanded in number from merely what could coat the Earth to what could fill it, the signal environment was too dangerous for Montrose to have any direct link even to peripheral parts of his nervous system. Montrose also did not want to be distracted by an unexpected hiss of electromagnetic noise, or to have anything radiating from him that a clever bullet might target.

The negotiations over the intelligence quotient of the weapons also took time. Since a logic crystal the size of a diamond that could fit on a lady’s smallest finger contained calculating power equal to what every computer system on the Earth combined could achieve back when these guns were first designed and programmed, there was something absurd about the long discussion over how intelligent, and what kind of intelligence, and what programming, could be allowed in the gun calculation magazine. It was as if they were discussing whether the abacus could use oily stones, lest the fingers flicking the beads get some advantage of speed. But Montrose did not merely admire and appreciate, he loved his weapon, and refused to admit that it could ever be out-of-date. And from the tenacity of the responses carried by the Seconds, Del Azarchel felt the same way.

When Montrose explained to Keirthlin the Linderling that the ranging and detection gear performed its calculations by means of electrons being forced across open or shut transistor gates powered by a current differential in the circuit, she actually laughed, her deep sorrow, if only for that moment, held in abeyance.

However, Vulpina chided her, saying that Chimeresses were trained in every weapon, even the oldest and simplest, because at times this was the only weapon at hand. She also made a point of saying to Montrose that Chimeresses made good wives and bore fierce children.

There was considerable debate over whom to have as judge of honor presiding over the duel. Everyone Del Azarchel and Montrose knew was either one man’s servant and the other man’s enemy or vice versa. Montrose thought it over carefully, and then agreed that Alalloel the Cetacean could serve in this capacity.

Montrose had to check his dueling armor, which, compared to the powered armor of the Hospitaliers, now seemed primitive, small, and weak, but unbearably precious. Both men had to submit (Montrose insisted) to an invasive medical examination by agreed-upon physicians, to ensure that their skin, bones, and organs were within a defined range of human location, and made of natural biological materials.

And, most importantly, after all other matters were decided, Montrose returned to his Tombs and found a workbench, found a light and shook it until it glowed, and he sat and packed the chaff for his dueling pistol, and selected and balanced and loaded and programmed the targeting tactics, one by one, into the eight escort gyro-jet bullets, and then into the deadly, massive, self-propelled main shot.

2. Unnatural Twilight

It was dark where they stood below the foot of the Bell, the air scented with the hint of sunrise, but the cherry-red light of dawn struck the sides of the vast Tower above them. Above that, where the structure intercepted the direct and unrefracted rays of the sun, the towerlight was yellow. An aurora borealis had gathered around the reaches above that, a side effect of radiation disturbances and flux in the magnetosphere surrounding the globe. Even farther skyward, the uppermost lengths, and the long-tailed crescent of the anchor point, were glaring in the sharp light of hard vacuum.

The Tower was far brighter than the full moon. Because of this, odd to the eye, the landscape neither had the clarity of daylight nor the mystic softness of moonlight. It was not even the wild overcast gloom of a heavy storm, since the light was the color of blood and fire, but too bright. It was, rather, like the unnatural noon twilight of a solar eclipse. Everything looked spectral.

The scenery exposed to that light was equally uncanny. It was like the surface of the moon for craters and pockmarks. Steam rose from glaciers in the distance, which were sprinkled with spots and streamers of molten and refrozen iron, surrounded wherever it appeared by discharged matter that looked like fine black sand. Stumps of burnt and broken trees lay every way the eye turned, and the piled and thrown trunks were like the remnants of a lumberyard fire, acres of black splinters.

A dry streambed cut across the hill in one area; and frozen fans, red with rust and sediment, boiling and dripping across the slopes, was the dispossessed volume of water that once ran there.

In another place, a lake that had been underground had boiled to the surface, but a vortex was in the midst of it, and a continual roaring; and broken bits of depthtrain cars floated on the lake. The water was draining into the rail tube leading below the mantle of the Earth.

In each direction was wreckage, destruction and death, broken rock, craters, smoke and burnings, and fields of cracked ice dotted with pellets and dust from the earth’s core, or black with tiny bits and flakes of debris that fell from the inner cylinder of the skyhook.

The only things that were whole were the cnidarian machines, hanging with unnatural weightlessness between the broken landscape and the storm-caressed Tower.

One of these, a cnidarian no larger than a Viking longboat, swooped smoothly down through the predawn gloom. Against the vertical red river of towerlight, the silhouettes of five hooded figures could be seen: one boyish and slouching, one looming and huge-limbed as a blacksmith, one thin and erect as an upraised sword, one crowned with two golden tendrils. The final figure was half their height, like a big-headed child.

Serpentines lowered the five to the broken ground behind the armored bulk of Del Azarchel, standing patiently.

None of the men carried lights, and this told Menelaus that they were the nycloptic. Menelaus saw silver capes of solar sail material, startlingly bright in the blood-hued gloom against the dark silk of their uniforms. Heavy amulets of dull metallic red gleamed on their wrists. These men were dressed as members of the Hermetic Order, and had bodies, like theirs, able to adjust to a range of environments, and eyes that changed at night to be nocturnal.

It seemed it was the fancy of Del Azarchel to dress these new servants, whoever they were, in the uniform, style, and equipment of his old shipmates of the Hermetic Expedition, some eight thousand two hundred eighty years ago. As if the Beefeaters guarding Buckingham retained the dress and weapons of the nomadic hunting bands of the middle Neolithic: tunics of mastodon leather, spears tipped with leaf-shaped flint.

Montrose found that odd, even chilling.

On the other hand, the armor Montrose wore, and his massive pistol, came from the same year, so he understood the impulse to freeze some of the waters of the river of time, and keep preserved in ice something of the long-dead past, even the uniforms of dead men. Odd, yes, and chilling, but very human.

3. Witnesses and Seconds

Montrose was in his armor, wondering how he had been able, when he was a young man, to stand wearing it for such interminable lengths of time without suffering the desire to scratch. Of course, he never before fought a duel having come just that hour dripping from a rapid-healing coffin, with the bones in his newly unbroken arm still tickling and aching. Always before it had been some enemy selected by his law firm, and the killing had been, to him, merely a task. More difficult and dangerous than some, but just a task.

It had not been personal. It had not been the culmination of countless millennia of unfolding destiny.

The two men, and their Seconds, now advanced on each other. Their footsteps were the only sounds in the area. There were no sounds of birdcalls or nocturnal animals seeking their dens, because all living things within a mile or so had died when the depthtrain tube had been used as an orbital launcher, or when the earth-current had ignited. However, in the distance, nine or ten miles away, clouds gathered against the far side of the Bell, and, cooled by the touch of the outer hull, had begun to precipitate. The rain could be heard, faint and far, washing against the endless height of metallic hardness, and, lower, against the broken hilltops and ice fields. Higher on the Bell, another set of clouds had gathered, but they had snowed, not rained, and an irregular streak of white, like a snowfield of a far mountain peak, could be clearly seen painted against the towerside, gleaming in the brighter light of the higher air.

Montrose spared no glances for this, nor any of the other sights which might possibly prove his last sight evermore. He walked forward, stomach boiling with emotion, his eye not leaving the dark and mocking eyes of his opponent. Neither man had donned his helm yet. Neither man was carrying the cubit-long six-pound sidearm that served him as his dueling weapon.

Midmost stood Alalloel of Lree, to act as judge of honor. Next to her rested two coffins, to act as doctors. Their lids were open, medical fluid warm and hyperoxygenated. Receiving kits attached to the coffin hulls were opened like Swiss Army knives, arms unlimbered and needles shining.

Alalloel was garbed in a skintight jumpsuit of sea green, dark green, and aquamarine, trimmed with black flecks and foam-white surging through rippling patterns set to slow pulsations, ornamented with studs of nacre; but over this was thrown a wide two-leaved cloak of silver hanging from shoulder boards so large as to make her seem childish and frail.

Montrose looked more carefully. It was not a cloak. These were artificial wings of amazingly intricate construction. These must be a version, designed for the human body, of the wings Soorm said he had seen the whales who met her in secret wear.

They were made of silvery feathers that seemed both organic and metallic. Near the base of every vane, atop what would be the calamus had it been an organic feather, was an optical sensor made of logic crystal. There were golden Locust-type tendrils along each rachis of each feather, and other smaller receivers and nodes and ports forming the barbs. When Alalloel shrugged, the wings opened in a splendor of shimmering white, as the wings of an albino peacock, bright with countless eyes.

Montrose noted Del Azarchel staring at the wings for a fraction of a second longer than Del Azarchel would have done had he recognized them. Interesting. Montrose felt his heart begin to beat more strongly, and wondered what emotion was causing it.

It had been a while since he had felt this way: the emotion was hope.

It had been agreed to appoint five Seconds for each of them. Montrose nodded at Mickey, who looked somehow splendid and terrible in his Witching robes, and even the ridiculous decorations of his tall hat looked menacing in the eerie red gloom, as if possessed by hidden powers.

With him stood Sir Guiden the Knight Hospitalier, Scipio the Cryonarch, Soorm the Hormagaunt, Expositor Illiance. Mickey introduced himself and his fellow witnesses to the duel, speaking in Latin. It had been negotiated and agreed that all conversations were to be in this dead language, as most here either knew it, or could follow it with aid of a talking box.

Sir Guy was wearing his hauberk woven of fine, nigh-microscopic five-linked rings. His hood and tunic were black, and his dark surcoat blazed with the white cross of Malta. Gauntlets were on his hands and greaves on his shins. He had turned his smart-ink tattoos to their neutral setting, glow off, and his skin seemed flesh-colored, merely with a rough texture of many fine, dark lines under the skin. Montrose could not recall ever having seen the man’s real face before. His undisguised features were so sad, so calm, and bathed in such an aura of peace, that Montrose understood why he hid behind decorations. It was a face that would neither terrify foes nor inspire the battle-fury in followers.

Scipio’s skull was now whole, and no trace of savant circuits remained in him, for the Iatrocrats had miraculous techniques to accomplish the regrowth and restoration of lost neural tissue and bone cells in a single night which had not existed, or even been dreamed, when Scipio last had lived. From his apparently limitless wardrobe he had had buried with himself, he now wore a uniform of the Cryonarchy from his native decade: a conservatively cut suit of gray and soft green, decorated with scallops and roses, over which was flung a black tabard emblazoned in white with the heraldry of the Endymion Hibernation Syndicate: a sleeping youth in the arms of a crescent moon, cradling an hourglass.

Soorm was splendid in his naked fur. Before he climbed to the field of honor, the Nymph Aea and Suspinia the Chimeress had volunteered to brush the otter pelt of Soorm until it glowed like black ink. He had needed no medical care, but he had spent the night in the coffin nonetheless, making little tweaks and minor innovations to his many innate biological weapons.

The serene little Blue Man appeared dressed in a small hauberk of mail, with coif and hood, and a misericorde tucked through his belt, and his surcoat was the white of a neophyte, his cross the red of a crusader. He bore no sword as yet, nor spurs. He was introduced not by the name Expositor Illiance, but instead was called Squire Lagniappe.

Montrose would have liked to have had the brave Alpha Daae here with him, to represent the Chimerae; or have had a Linderling on hand to record every nuance of the events through their nodes. Indeed, Vulpina had demanded, and Keirthlin had expressed a desire, to be allowed to act as witnesses to the gunfight, but Menelaus Montrose told Keirthlin that women who see such things have a darkness that comes over their soul and does not depart, a thing that makes them less able or willing to be softhearted, wifely, or maternal.

Keirthlin replied that it was not necessarily the case that witnessing such cold and deliberate violence influenced the psychology for the worse. Coming to the aid of her argument, Vulpina bragged that she herself had seen such things on the playground nearly every day of her life, and twice on Dueling Day; and it had not affected her fertility, or the ability of the Eugenic Board to send a stud to beat her into submission in preparation for the mating assault.

Montrose, at that point, said simply that this was man’s business, and no matter what the customs or rules of their ages might be, his death, or his victory, must be done by the rules he knew. He did not speak to either one about what had happened when his own mother, watching in secret, had seen his father shot dead in a duel.

Montrose shook his head, trying to clear it of such thought. Why did he ponder of his mother now, who had been gone some eight thousand years? Then he recalled that she regarded the profession of gunfighting shameful, and would not take the money Montrose had brought in. To his brothers it went, but not a dime to her.

She had told him: “You think you can kill and make that be an end of it? There is no end! The men you kill will come out of the ground and come back for you, or sure as like. There is always one more.”

There was always one more. One more what? He had never had the nerve to ask.

Montrose was uneasy because his experience as a duelist told him that any man who dwelt on the shame brought to his mother when he walked onto the field of honor was not the one who walked away again, but was the one carried away in a box. He hid his uneasiness behind his best poker face, but he knew Del Azarchel sensed it, for the man’s twinkling eyes narrowed, and a look of confidence was in them.

Mickey introduced himself as Mictlanagualzin of the Dark Science Coven, which made Del Azarchel smile in contempt and Montrose smile in appreciation for the gesture, which was a noble one.

The Warlock said, “Such is my true name, and I depart of half my power by speaking it: and yet that power I place into this deadly ground, and across this deadly hour, that there be no trace, no shadow, of the least dishonor. I bind your souls to it.”

4. The Hooded Men

The five who stood behind Del Azarchel now came forth into the light shed from the gleaming many-eyed cloak of Alalloel. Menelaus tried to betray no expression on his face, but as he had so often found before, his more powerful intellect lent more power to his passions, intuitions, and reactions. Now his passion was fear, his intuition was supernatural dread, and his reaction was a trembling in his innards.

His brain had not allowed him to recognize them from afar, despite that their identity was obvious even in silhouette. What was it Soorm had said about more intelligent people being more able to fool themselves, whereas animals saw things clear and far off?

The gigantic one was Sarmento i Illa d’Or, who pointed his finger at Montrose, and closed one eye and twitched his thumb. He pointed at the spot where the scar was, marking the wound Sarmento left that should have killed Montrose.

And next to him …

The stoop-shouldered boyish one was De Ulloa, as handsome as he ever had been, smiling sheepishly, wearing a cross of Nero around his neck: an upside-down cross with the arms broken to slant as the letter Y reversed, all within a circle.

The slim and rigid-spined one was Narcís D’Aragó, wearing a rapier, and standing as stiffly as the Chimerae whom he had made in his own image.

The one with the tendrils was Jaume Coronimas.

The final one, his face young and unlined, and his tendrils waving in rhythm with Coronimas as they passed radioneural messages back and forth, was Mentor Ull, dressed in a miniature version of the black shipsuit and hood. And his skin was an onyx dark as his silk.

Sarmento was delighted, and he laughed. “No, in one way these are not quite who you think, Fifty-One! What, are we afraid the old madness is coming back? No, this is not Melchor de Ulloa. This is Exulloa, or, rather, the remote body, operated by quantum entanglement, from where he rests in the Noösphere. He does not remember being shot by you, because there was no time for an additional communion. The others, you have guessed, are Exarago, Excoronimas, and I don’t believe you have met Exynglingas, our newest crewmate! He does recall his death, because his savant circuits were activated by the biometric failure that accompanies death trauma. Once, we only had enough computer resources to bring us out one at a time. Now, you have given us so much more calculation space—the entire core of the planet!—we need not fear such penury again!”

Mickey said sternly, “It is only the inner core. Do not be ridiculous.”

The young, jet-dark version of Mentor Ull, or, rather, Exynglingas, still had the same half-lidded, wholly reptilian eyes of his previous incarnation. “It happens that all your absurdities of bloodshed and striving have yielded nothing. The Hermeticists have finally achieved the ultimate secret: life beyond bodily death.”

But the judge of honor held up her empty hand in a brusque gesture, saying, “The Seconds may not address the primaries, only the Seconds brought by him. Such is the convention.”

Illiance, or, rather, Squire Lagniappe, stepped forward. His skin color changed suddenly, passing from blue to become the silvery-gray of a Linderling. His eyes lost their color, and became silver throughout, eerie and beautiful.

Exynglingas, the Ghost of Ull, seemed startled, and shrank back with alarm. Menelaus was puzzled by this—until he recalled that the Linderlings had hunted and herded the Blue Men, and all other Inquiline form of Locust, into extinction.

The gray-shimmering, silver-eyed Squire said to the Ghost of Ull, “Tell me. Does Coronimas the Hermeticist recall being shot to death on the toilet, nay, shot in the back while he fled, by an assailant he could not see? The terror and shame of that download is now in his permanent mind records, and touches all related thoughts. Is this accomplishment as nothing? It is meaningful to defy even an evil one cannot destroy.”

But Montrose said to Mickey, “Witness Mictlanagualzin—is the honorable party facing me willing to program, with an irrevocable code, an unstoppable self-destruct sequence into his machine half of his soul, Exarchel, to initiate the moment their biometric link shows the principle, Learned Del Azarchel, has indeed died?”

Excoronimas flicked his gold tendrils and said to Mickey, “Ask your principle how he could verify? We cannot give you the access to the inner workings of the thoughts of Exarchel.”

Del Azarchel held up his hand. “There is no need to debate. It is disquietingly easy to establish a suicide reflex tied to a deadman switch for beings of such architecture, prone as they are in any case to Divarication cascade. Indeed, I expected this request, and spent many hours last night preparing exactly such a combination. Before these witnesses, I vow that I will remove the safety from the deadman switch to obliterate every copy of myself, wheresoever situate, the moment we take our positions and claim ready, showing the black palm, but not before. Nor is there need for verification. Learned Montrose will trust me to keep my word. He knows me. I know him. The meeting is without honor if I am not exposed to the risk of death. Shall we begin?”

The judge of honor raised a baton, which she held in lieu of the more traditional handkerchief. The red dawnlight was sliding rapidly down the towerside, and too swiftly to be seen, a sliver of red was to the east above the hill crests, and on the high hilltop where they stood, their shadows stretched thin and weak toward the darkened west, where brighter stars still twinkled.

She said, “Before I give the signal, three things must be said. First, you must agree that I am no longer Alalloel of Lree. For the purposes of this encounter and hereafter, to you I am Alalloel of the Anserine, a Paramount of an unlimited mental communion. You must so address me, or as Anserine. Is this acceptable? May we continue?”

Del Azarchel spoke sharply, “I do not see it makes a difference. Does everyone change his name, save only for me and Montrose? I accept. Continue.”

Sarmento’s eyes jerked toward the winged woman, and narrowed in thought.

Montrose suppressed the impulse to introduce himself by a new name, such as Mr. Nostradamus Twiddle Apocalypse, Esquire. A man’s last words should not be a jape. He said only, “I accept. Continue.”

Alalloel of the Anserine next said, “If a peaceful accommodation can be sought and found, both participators may even now withdraw, and with no loss of honor, and no imputation against their steadfastness. Witnesses! Inquire now and finally if accommodation can be made on any other ground.”

Mickey put his head near Montrose and said softly, “Can it? You told me once, Judge of Ages, that you had some admiration for him, the Master of the World. The two of you have been like sun and moon for all of all the history anyone here knows. It will be odd to walk under the dome of heaven and nevermore to see one of the great luminaries.”

Montrose said, “To be frank, I’d give almost anything to be able to take him, and walk away from here arm in arm, and find something to do together, go on a space voyage or something. You know he stole my starship, the Emancipation, that I named after my childhood dream? And I’ve never been aboard her. So, yeah, I suppose I’d give almost anything. Almost. But not my word. That I keep, even if I die for it.”

Mickey turned and raised his voice. “Madame. No accommodation can be made.” And Sarmento i Illa d’Or said the same.

Alalloel said, “Have all measures to avoid this conflict, with or without an accommodation, been examined and exhausted?”

Mickey called all, “Yes.”

But Sarmento i Illa d’Or said, “Just a moment!”

For Sarmento was having some fierce, whispered debate with Del Azarchel. Montrose, thinking it was one of the privileges of being posthuman, adjusted the interpretation mechanism of his temporal lobes so that the words came crisp and clear despite the distance. But it was gibberish. Del Azarchel and Sarmento i Illa d’Or were inventing new languages with radically differing grammar and signification rules, one per each sentence, based on some arbitrary algorithm known to both of them. It seemed they also enjoyed the perquisites of being posthuman.

Finally, Del Azarchel said, “I want to talk to Montrose privately.”

Anserine said, “That is not allowed. You must abide by the rules and follow them.”

“No, I think not,” drawled Del Azarchel. “Menelaus Montrose never obeyed a rule in his life, save when it suited him. Nor have I. Lesser men follow and obey us. We do not follow. He and I, we are the makers of rules.”

And so Del Azarchel started walking forward, his gait in his armor stiff and rolling, a fashion of walk that was something comical while being menacing. Montrose thought he looked like a Sumo wrestler.

5. Always One More

Mickey whispered to Montrose, “Del Azarchel is in breach. You now have a faultless right to withdraw, and no man can say infraction.”

Montrose did not answer that, but heaved up his heavy boots and stomped forward himself. He did not want to withdraw, and live. He counted the number of years he had awaited this day, and compared it to the number of steps he now made across the icy and broken rock, gray with ashes and pockmarked with miniature craters. It was roughly eight hundred years per step. Unhelmeted, unarmed, they closed the distance.

Then they were together, close enough to look eye to eye. Close enough that when Del Azarchel laughed, Montrose felt the touch of warmth on his face.

Suddenly an old memory bubbled up in his mind.

He was four years old, maybe three. He had been lying in bed, hungry. He often went to bed hungry, as the older boys who could do chores needed their strength to do them. It was a cold night, as most nights of the endless winter were, and he had doubled up with two of his brothers in the same narrow bed for warmth, with three blankets piled over all of them. One of them, maybe it was Agamemnon, was telling the other, Hector, that the Sheriff had been asking mother where she had been yesterday, and whether anyone had seen her there, and so on. It had meant nothing to him then.

Now, looking back with adult memory, posthuman memory, he identified that as the day and date Hatchet Jim Rackham had died. Gunned down by an unknown assailant. It had been a light caliber bullet, so the rumor ran that it might have been a woman, using a small pistol. But he had also been stabbed savagely, repeatedly, methodically, and the trail of bloodstains showed that he had been alive and crawling the first few times the blade entered his back. Whoever had done it had not had a strong arm.

It clicked into his mind what his mother had meant. There is always one more.

Whenever you kill a man, and you think that is the end of it, someone will come to avenge him. No matter how dead he is, a force as invisible as a specter would rise up, and find someone, a brother or a friend, or even a stranger who now feared your murderer’s reputation or envied and sought to better it, and the dead man’s vengeance would walk, even if the man himself never moved physically from the grave. And if you kill that avenger, that brother or son, he might have another brother or son.

Or he might have a fierce young wife with ten small children to feed. Hatchet Jim had been the man who shot his father. That clicked into place, too.

Looking back with his posthuman memory, he counted the number of knives in the knife rack when he saw them at age four, age three, age five. The largest blade had been missing since April of that year. The one mother had used to murder a man after her first shot had failed to do the deed.

Something very cold and still touched his heart at the moment. To take a man’s life was a fearful thing. And even if he killed Blackie, that would not be the end of it. It would never end.

He straightened his shoulders, and, with an apology in his cold heart for his mother, he vowed to himself: Very well. It never ends. Even if it lasts to the last hour of the universe.

He was ready.