The Judge of Ages

“I know you are not an idiot, because your augmentation to posthumanity is what started all these events.”

“Aboard the ship, Cowhand. I was the one who gave you sponge baths when the other crewmen wanted to kill you for the moisture in your coffin system and the meat on your bones; and it is not as if you kept your diaper on during your, ah, episodes of scatological excitement. I saw more of that member than I care to recall, and I fail to have nightmares about it only due to my abnormally stable and well-balanced psychology. Say a prayer of thanksgiving to the winged monkey of winkieland who no doubt serves you in place of a guardian angel that you remain amnesiac about the horror and privation we endured.”

2. A Companionable Silence

The two men were silent, standing together, for a long time. Menelaus looked over where his friends, and the judge of honor, and the Iron Ghost versions of the men he’d killed, were all standing ready for this grim business, but none a one of them spoke or made any gesture. Del Azarchel was right. None of them wanted to see this bloodshed.

And he was right that none of them understood.

Eventually Montrose said, “So it’s no deal, no matter what either of us wants? Can’t be done, can it? Even if I said I would serve you like a manservant, you could not have a manservant who was married to Rania, any more than you can drive two carpenter’s nails into the balls of your eyes and not mind it. You can say you’d not mind it, and you maybe can make up what sounds like an argument to prove for sure that some men can drive carpenter’s nails into their eyeballs and not go blind—and that argument might sound right sound at first. But not when you actually pick up the nails in your hand.”

“And you,” answered Del Azarchel, “you cannot divorce her, because she would not permit it, having been raised in the True Christian faith, and being a pure and righteous soul, unsoiled. Nor could you abandon her without divorce, because your wedding vow—to love, to cherish, in woe or weal, and to cleave to her unto death—is like all your vows. Made of words, a vow is lighter than spider silk; but for just this reason, a vow is sterner than the unguarded golden gates of paradise, which no strength can force, and no force encompass. What is not made of matter cannot be broken. No, Cowhand. You cannot flee her no more than a man can run so fast he leaves his heart outdistanced by his speed. Where a man is, his heart is, and if his heart departs from his bosom, he dies.”

“And even if Rania were not the issue,” said Montrose apologetically, “I gotta kill you for killing Captain Ranier Grimaldi, the finest man who ever lived. Sorry. I ain’t hot mad about that one no more, but it’s still got to be done.”

“As I must kill you,” said Del Azarchel amiably, “to repay your treason for when I trusted you, and put the inmost thoughts, indeed, the soul of Exarchel into your hands, and you used the opportunity to inflict your phantasm virus into my perceptual system. You reached in and twisted my very thoughts to your personal advantage. I will never be able to achieve perfect communion with Exarchel due to this. I too no longer am keenly angered about this. But it needs to be repaid.”

“Share a cigarette? It’s my last pack. I was saving them for this day.”

“Don’t mind if I do! If you kill me, Cowhand, you’ll inherit my tobacco fields on Ganymede.”

They lit both cigarettes from the heat of the blade of Del Azarchel’s energy-dirk.

“And if I don’t, I’ll be smoking myself in perdition, Blackie, and won’t need to save the rest.”

The two stood together in silence, puffing. But it was a companionable silence, not an awkward nor a cold one. The delicate yet sooty smell of tobacco surrounded them, a scent not known on Earth in countless years.

3. One Last Question

After a time, Montrose said, “Speaking of which, seeing as how we are all chummy and friendly-like, and about to shoot each other, let’s put our cards on the table. I said there was one thing I could not figure. If I ask you nicely, will you tell me? For old time’s sake? Curiosity is killing me. I have turned it this way and that in my mind, and I just can’t figure it. So I admit you are the better man—you got me. Will you tell me how you did it?”

Del Azarchel said, “My friend, my only friend, after a heartfelt plea like that, including that gill of totally false humility and flattery, I can deny you nothing! I don’t remember any tactic we’ve discussed where I outsmarted you, though. Ask away. I swear by the grave of my sainted mother—may she rest in peace enjoying in heaven the sainthood I purchased from the Church for her—I will tell you what you ask. In return you must answer one of mine. One thing has always puzzled me, year after year, century after century, and I promised myself that if I ever saw you face-to-face again in this life, that I would cajole the answer from you, or else be nagged by wonder forever. Have we a deal? One for one? It is but fair.”

“Deal. You first.”

“Ah no, Cowhand. Allow me the honor of allowing you the honor of going first.”

“Well! When you put it that way—when you put it that way, I cannot make out what you said.”

“I said you first. Don’t argue, or I shoot you.”

“Fair ’nuff. Here is my question: I cannot figure out how the current Melusine society as described to me can exist. Back in the year A.D. 9999, I released a group of spores carrying not one, but a huge set of interrelated nanite packages, viruses to rewrite genetic code. Honestly and not to brag, but I thought this was the cleverest thing I ever done or heard tell of, because I was both trying to lure you into opening the Devil’s Den hibernation facility—ah! You look surprised! Didn’t know I set this up to draw you in here on purpose, did ya?”

Del Azarchel said sheepishly, “Both I and Ull, who was my factotum at the time, did a statistical analysis of the distribution patterns of your spores, and we concluded it had been an accidental release. For one thing, the spore mated with various lichen and fungi and produced a harmless chemical that did nothing but produce a harmless color change and served no other purpose. For another, it was based on a biochemical weapon. With your background, growing up in a high-infection zone from the Abecedarian War—well, I would expect you to use such means only in the most extreme circumstances. Not to change rock moss from red to black.”

“—Like I said, I thought it was clever work. The color change altered the eating habits of the arctic tern, and there was another genetic redaction code which would also show as harmless on normal analysis techniques, that changed an inherited characteristic in the tern bloodstream and altered their magnetic sense to alter their migration patterns. As you know, the arctic tern enjoys the longest regular migration known, over forty-four thousand miles each year. I used them as a vector to spread yet another spore, and since the distribution would be over such a long area, including crucial sea migration routes of the newly unextinctified whales, that it would be nearly impossible to detect changes to the plankton population triggered by changes to the chemical concentrations in the tern droppings. Because migrant birds poop in the sea, right? So—”

Del Azarchel seemed uncharacteristically perturbed the longer Montrose went on. He interrupted with unusual brusqueness, “Usually I can tell when you are joking, Cowhand, but you look entirely sincere, as if you are actually talking about something you really did that you thought was clever. You are not a convincing liar, so I know this is not an act. But what are you driving at?”

“Okay, sorry, Blackie, I forget English is not your native language. To sum up, I came up with an indirect way to create a genetic change in the whales that the Melusine were using. This change would not directly change personal behavior, but would change institutional behavior, like the genes that control herd instinct and pack pecking order—the gene has to be in more than one member of the herd or pack for it to be active, because otherwise the behavior has no context, so a normal statistical comparison of one mutant would not pick out the mutation. It was tied into the sex drive, so it was powerful and fundamental. Now, here is the cunning part.

“I tied a meme change into the gene change, so that once the institution got started, it would create a self-replicating and self-reinforcing set of ideas that acted as their own incentive to spread and multiply.

“Frankly I was thinking of it as a religious instinct: I knew a church would be created, and churches teach that you gotta teach church teachings to the young, and to save the heathens—so even someone who did not have the “church” gene, once he was infected with “church” ideas, would spread the ideas, and if even a suspicious guy like you looked back along the vector trying to figure out what gene it had come from, well, there is no way to narrow it down.

“I hid the church gene among many similar formations in the genetic intron, where it was lost in the crowd of lookalikes. It was spread from lichen, to terns, to whales, and the whales in the Melusine Pentad—their basic social unit—always had a radiotelepath, one of the ‘special people’ with and watching the group. And so the meme spread telepathically and swiftly. The meme was a mental Anarchist Vector, creating an extremely powerful incentive toward personal liberty, tied into the libido.”

Del Azarchel said, “You are describing the rise and fall of a group called the Anchorites, which evolved out of the Oceangoing Melusine. They existed on the earth, or, rather, in the sea, during the first century of this current millennium. They were an odd and nonconformist species, unable to react compatibly with the Final Stipulation of the Noösphere Protocols. Are you actually claiming credit for having brought them into being?”

Montrose said honestly, “I am not sure if that is them. You tell me. You defeated the vector change I introduced into history, if everything I have heard about these Melusine is true. This world you rule? Can you give me the equations? I want to see which counter-vector of the Mind Helot matrix deflected my Anarchist Vector, and how.”

Del Azarchel was only too happy to talk shop.

Both men hunched down awkwardly in their bulky duelist armor, and, holding bayonet or dirk in hand, scratched into the dirty ice puddles around them one line of hieroglyphs after another, depicting in equations more precise than any word the nuances of the incentives molding the patterns of history, equations even the other Hermeticists could not read.

Soon the two enemies were chatting and exclaiming. Smiling together, heads bent down, they looked like magicians bent over the rune circles used to conjure familiar spirits, the patterns of glyphs that conjured and controlled the fates themselves.

4. Anchorites

The first group of signs showed the results exactly like what Montrose would have expected had his vector been introduced and flourished without detection: institutional anarchists. Ultra-freedom-lovers.

Among the Melusine (so said the social vector equations), the Anchorite, or Hermit, custom was to have the male sever all social and whale-pod ties with the surrounding society, and live in the wilderness entirely by himself with only food he caught himself, and only living in a sea-tower or land-tower he grew himself.

“When the Anchorite movement started among the Oceangoing Melusine,” Blackie added offhandedly, “they broke away from their normal deep sea haunts, and traveled first to coastal areas, and then upriver, and established their many hermitages among the ruins of the civilizations slain by the Fall of Ganymed. Melusine houses can still be found, empty, ruined, here and there among the wastelands. They last for hundreds of years, despite weather and decay, because they are alive, as houses of the Nymphs before the Blight. Where a river has dried up, or changed beds, you can find them standing ashore.”

Montrose said, “They look like seashells.” One of the Blue Men had mentioned the houses outside the camp wire had not been their making. Montrose felt the fool for not having put the clues together. That camp had been a Melusine mansion with its outbuilding, or, specifically, a hermitage of the Anchorites. Only the fence and the watchtowers had been constructed by the Blues and their dogs.

Blackie pointed at the central hieroglyph, functionally interconnected with all others: the mating and childrearing customs that defined the basic values for any culture. “Anchorite pentads were only allowed to marry another pentad if all the members of the other group were correctly opposite the first group. There were many possible groups, only some of which were legal. Groups were classed as male and female according to social expectations. A pentad might, for example, consist of a postwhale cow, a merman, a male Inquiline, and a male dolphin, and might still be considered female; whereas the same group with different augmentations, a male postdolphin but a whale cow of only human-level intellect, would be legally masculine.

“Female pentads seeking mates examined the land-houses and sea-houses to see how well the male pentad could succeed while using nothing but his own raw talent and willpower. Since the so-called isolated individual was actually a group of five, they got a fair amount of hauling and labor done, including ploughing.”

“Ploughing?”

“The whale ploughed.”

“In the sea?”

“No. Don’t be silly. On land.”

“How?”

“What do you mean, how? He grew legs.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“The effort was very difficult and some of them did die. But since there was no other way to attract a high-status female mating group, the incentives that drove the Anchorites into hermitage were very strong.”

Blackie pointed at another group of symbols that spun out of the marriage customs. “Their women pentads had a similar ritual of discipline. They took a vow of silence, and entered into trade or finance, using their bodies as living ships to haul goods all up and down the coast. But the laws and customs expressed in this equation here granted a monopoly to anyone who opened a new market: frontier trade was much, much more lucrative than protecting the established trade. When they were apprentices, these she-pilgrims of peddling took a vow of silence, because, for some odd reason, the Anchorite culture despised the art of persuasion and salesmanship. Each article bought and sold had to speak for itself, without the salesmaiden influencing her customer’s thoughts via radiotelepathy. When she had accumulated her fortune, she offered it as a dowry to her selected mate.

“Back when this crazy little fringe group existed, their political leadership was selected by a like method. In those days, only one who departed civilization and had no contact and no self-interest tied to any clan or faction could be conscripted to service. They only chose leaders from among the pool of candidates who actively attempted to flee into the uncharted coastal seas or inland rivers to avoid public service. If the fleeing candidate were not beloved by enough people to form a hunting party, he did not serve.”

“Not a bad custom,” muttered Montrose. “I can think of a few politicians I would not mind seeing run into the wild and not be called back.”

“Easier to establish a World Concordat whose supreme leader can destroy incompetent public servants with a nod of his crown,” said Del Azarchel stiffly.

Menelaus gave him a dark look. “Sure, and amputating a leg is a fine way to stop bunions on your toes. Can we get back to the equations? That looks like a inverted supply-demand function.”

“It is. Among the Anchorites, the marriages were happy enough, simply because it was so hard to woo. Men esteem lightly what they win easily; and that is true for Melusine. The joke ran that, once the maiden was a bride, and her vow of silence ended, she filled the seas and rivers of the coast with song and talk and chatter, and all the gossip she had gathered; and once the youth was a bridegroom, and his vow of toil and solitude was done, he never stirred a flipper or a finger again to get anything for himself, but spent his time in congregations with his cronies, lazy as lions who make the lionesses do all the hunting.”

“Actually,” said Montrose, “lions have a bad reputation. They are so lazy during the day because they spend all night fighting hyena packs, protecting the women and children.”

“Well, your male Anchorites did much the same. Look at that glyph there. The violence index. The male pentads drove off the Infernals, protecting the cows and the calves. All the zombie-masters living in the seas below the Earth had endless ranks of mind-controlled Helots to send against them.

“And, between their seasons of warring with Helots, the Anchorites, when offended, would settle matters one-on-one, or, rather, to be accurate, five-on-five, selecting a stretch of abandoned river for the field of honor, and encountering each other with jaw-mounted rockets and energy weapons, or just encountering each other jaw to jaw. The human-shaped components would await on shore, or meet with swords or pistols, and when one of them clutched his head, amputated from his mental link, merely of human intelligence again forever and nine-tenths of his memories gone, they would know the Cetacean had died and the pentad was broken.

“If the affront was particularly egregious, the duelists would not meet in the rivers, but select instead a spot beyond the continental shelf. They would sink together at the assigned place; and perhaps the flash of weapons could be glimpsed in the depths by the witnesses as they dashed against each other like dragons, fire in their jaws.”

“That’s why you agreed to have Alalloel be our judge of honor, ain’t it?” asked Montrose suddenly. “She is descended from one of these groups, isn’t she?”

Del Azarchel nodded. “Her family, the Lree, are civilized now, but they have not forgotten their barbaric past: a past you created. They understand us. Meeting in the darkness far below the waves, one would rise to the sunlit waters again, or neither; but even in death, honor lived on.”

“Sounds like my kind of people,” said Montrose sadly. “Sorry I missed them.”

Montrose pondered. These strange people with their strange customs, mermen emerging from the sea to reclaim the land so long ago annihilated by the apocalyptic fall of 1036 Ganymed, were much like the pioneers and frontiersmen that shaped his own land, his own background. They had been retracing those brave steps of that first feeble lungfish, the Neil Armstrong of evolution’s march, who emerged from the sea in remote prehistory and colonized the lifeless land of early Earth.

He would have liked to meet them. His brainchildren. But he had been in hibernation and the centuries fled, and they were no more, and never would come again.

5. Helots

The next group of symbols showed the new world that arose after the Anchorites fell. The Paramounts and the Helots were driven by population pressures to emerge from the crevasses and caves of their sunless oceans, and rapidly overspread the surface waters: blind whales and dolphins as pale as albino Scholars, with generations of stored Ghosts in their infospheres.

“The world that emerged from the darkness of the interior was the world of your nightmare and my utopia,” said Del Azarchel.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that the tau function for human liberty is exactly at zero. Theirs is a hierarchy as strict as a pyramid, with rank and dignity clearly defined and nor subject to change. A natural aristocracy, if you will, ruling a naturally servile class.”

“And at the apex—you?”

“Exarchel and I have calculation powers at our disposal that make us like titans among the toy soldiers. The entire surface of the globe is my mind. This Tour de Oro, one of the greatest works of man—they could not have made it without me, and nothing on the surface of the world can withstand its power. I have not even hinted at its weapons. I can make a dozen miniature suns, as bright and hot as Sol but only a few yards in diameter, to fly around my Tower like so many trained pigeonhawks of fire. And yet—such is the beauty of this world—I have no need among my people ever to use such weapons.

“My weapon is much more simple and terrible: each Melusine is born and bred with mind-reading and mind-controlling circuits organically grown into the various skulls and mainframes of their composite bodies. Paramounts rule Helots like a zombie master with his zombie. And each man has absolute and utter control of those below him, to the utmost nuance of thought, and he in turn is absolutely and utterly helpless to those above.

“You are thinking the Helots would be sullen and lazy slaves, inert and waiting for orders, or shambling masses unable to compete with the liberated energy of that disorder you so love to call liberty? This is because you do not comprehend how fine and exact the mind control is. This is not mesmerism. It is not even computer programming. The Helot’s mind, in effect, is a part or subcompartment of the Paramount’s mind, and can be ordered to use all its spirit and genius and devotion and willpower to program itself, coming up with imaginative solutions on how to make its own slavery all that more rigorous, and bind the chains tighter. Even God Almighty cannot achieve such perfect devotion from his choirs of angels, because it is with free will the angelic hosts must serve.

“If a Paramount wishes his Helot to be as devoted as an ancient samurai, to be willing to throw himself on the blade of suicide rather than face dishonor, then with no more effort than you use to raise your left hand, it is done; if he wishes his Helots to be as devout as monks in the First Dark Age, who drained swamps and cleared timber and reduced the tangled barbaric wild to cultivation and civilization, not for wages, but for the Glory of God, he need but raise his right hand, and it is done. Or if, on his whim, he thinks the free market would be more inventive, he raises his foot, and there is a market season, and the thousands and tens of thousands compete and strive and exploit themselves for that grubby materialism you Yanks so romanticize—and then he lowers his foot, and they give all their money back into the central treasury, not recalling or not caring what they did once the season ends. The souls of those below him are merely his members and organs of thought.

“And he is an organ of the one above him, whose every thought he scrutinizes as closely as the conscience scrutinizes a man who feels a pang of guilt even before he brings to mind what he did wrong.

“So where is there room for corruption or vice? There is no darkness in this world at all. Everything that in prior ages hid, or was forgotten, in this world is transfixed with pitiless, penetrating light.

“You see why I make free to offer them to you? The Melusine are fluid, and will fill the shape of any container into which they are poured. You can make them anything you like, even make them once again the Anchorites and lovers of liberty.”

The face of Montrose was greenish with the sickness that he felt, the loathing sense of moral foulness. He could not hide his features: Del Azarchel, like a plant seeking sunlight, bloomed in the disgust and hatred shed from the face of Montrose, and his dark, bearded face was flushed with sadistic joy, seeing how his words were barbs.

Del Azarchel leaned close, whispering as a lover to his bride.

“Come, Montrose, compliment me. I have molded mankind at last to a state of perfection. Mine is one of the most elegantly Darwinian and ruthless social-political systems imaginable! Within the Mind Helotry system, in order to prevent themselves from being brain-enslaved and brain-raped, they must enslave and rape any potential source of threat, and, unlike wars of flesh and blood, the victim always loves and cooperates with the victor, and there is no loss of lives or resources.

“But the struggle for competition and command is even more fierce than Nature red in tooth and claw! The mental war system is far more desperate than any physical war. The pressure to prevail or suffer a fate endlessly worse than death or hell, the loss of free will—no race of people has even been under such pressure! They make themselves into geniuses, or die! This is a golden age! Each group of surface-world Helots, the Oceanic Melusine, when their free will is drained…”

Montrose had an insight. He interrupted. “You sick bastard. You don’t like this world, this setup. You deliberately made it as appalling as possible. Because you want me to take it over. This is your blackmail. You said you’d give me this world if I bowed to you. Because if you give it to me, I can abolish your system and free all the generations to come.”

Del Azarchel merely spread his hands. “You have always before come to the rescue of the wounded worlds I have made. Why should this be different? I hereby condemn this world forever and for eternity to this hell of lifelessness until you take Earth from my hand.”

“Your helot system cannot last forever!”

“It certainly, certainly can. Mind Helotry is a halt state. Once the world is enslaved to the point where even daydreams of rebellion or impulses of discontent cannot be lodged in a brain cell without the permission of the Paramount class, how can any rise up? And if they did rise up, what would they do to those under them: program them with the false belief they have free will? Ironic, to say the least, and hardly worth fighting for.”

“What about my Anarchist Vector? If you look at the social incentives surrounding—” But as he pointed toward Del Azarchel’s equation, the one that described the current world, and he reached his finger to point at the vector sum describing the Anchorite mental technology … it was not there.

6. The Missing Vector

He looked back and forth between the two ice puddles they were using as blackboards. Something was wrong, very wrong. Menelaus blinked in confusion, rewriting and rewriting Cliometric equations in his head, trying to see the missing links, flipping and rotating immense arrays of numbers and symbols in his imagination, trying to find a match, a bridging equation.

There was no match. There was no equation to get from the first array, describing the Anchorite world, to the second, describing the Helot world. That future simply and absolutely could not come out of that past.

Menelaus looked again.

Ctesibius had mentioned Melusine occupying the depthtrain network and a vast underground archeology: those were the ancestors of the Infernals. Their growth patterns, and the society that grew like a strange fractal crystal, matched the equations Del Azarchel described.

As for the Melusine in the oceans, they could not possibly have failed to have been exposed to the genetic-mimetic influence of his Anarchist Vector spread by the migrating terns. One generation, or two, and the genetic change would remain dormant, and then the group instinct would have started to influence events, first of those with the gene, and then those without it. That is what produced the pioneer spirit which led to the Anchorites, and their attempt to recolonize the surface land area.

And the vector could be spread by any means over any boundary, physical or psychological: if the Infernal Melusine beneath the crust of the planet had any physical contact or electronic signal traffic whatsoever with the Anchorites, then the radiotelepaths among the Melusine would have spread the vector in less than a generation.

He looked at Del Azarchel’s hieroglyphs. The crucial equation that described the dark mind technology which should have been present in the Anchorites was not in the formula.

When Menelaus factored the missing element back into the equations written before him, the result was stunning and simple: the Mind Helot system could not have arisen among the Oceangoing Melusine, nor could they have been conquered by the mental warfare system Del Azarchel had just mentioned.

The world of the Helots could not exist.

Del Azarchel was smirking. Montrose looked up from the impossible paradox of symbols he was seeing. “Okay, Blackie. I give. How did you do it? How did you get from the Anchorite world to the Helot world? What did you do with the Anarchist Vector I introduced?”

7. Change of Mind

Del Azarchel said, “I am not sure what aspect of what you introduced you mean. Are you still taking credit for the rise of the Anchorite cult among the Oceangoing Melusine? Which you did by what means again, exactly? Turning red rock moss black and leaving trails of migratory bird-droppings in the wave? Are you sure you want to claim credit for them? They were never more than one-tenth of one percent of the population, never had any particular influence, never shaped events—the Infernals tolerated them because they were far away, formed no threat, did nothing, and meant nothing.

“But the belligerence you built into their social scheme—if you are still taking credit for having done this—merely led them, one step at a time, to their inevitable destruction. Did you design the cult to self-destruct? I have done such things in the past, but I did not expect it from you.”

Menelaus was staring in wonder at what Del Azarchel had written in the surface of the ice puddle. Had he made a mistake in his math? Or had Del Azarchel? Where was the Anarchist Vector in this sum result? It should have had the same effect on the path of events as a supermassive black hole in space would have on the orbits of a solar system it passed through.

Del Azarchel was still talking: “Your Anchorites launched physical attacks against the undersea brain colonies in the buried oceans. Considering how far down your pet anarchists had to drill even to reach the uppermost of the buried lakes or sunless oceans of the inner world, I would say your attempt to concoct a race to supersede mine ended about as badly as your first attempt with the Giants. What am I saying? Far worse. The last Anchorite, Eumolpidai, died in captivity in A.D. 10099. The whole career of the race, from start to finale, was less than a hundred years.

“What were you imagining? What were you thinking? As a Cliometric vector, creating a cult of belligerent aggressive anarchists, who could neither coordinate their assaults nor work for their common defense, against the most well-organized set of nested mental empires Earth has ever known—madness!

“Have you gone mad, my friend? Again? This was the most awkward bit of math I’d ever seen you do!” Blackie shook his head, remembering, wondering. “Why, the last time I saw you so, so, amateurish, was back when you and I were just starting to learn Cliometrics, and we did not have any easy way set up, either of us, for factoring six billion variables.”

Montrose said, “Childish, my Uncle Jack’s jackass’s ass-jack! You are just trying to get my goat! That was the most subtle thing I’ve ever done, undetectable, unstoppable. It … Why! You must have suffered not one stroke of genius, but a dozen in a row, even to begin to come up with a counter-strategy!”

“What in the world are you talking about, Cowhand? The war? Is this vector you introduced the thing that made the Anchorites start a war with the Infernals?”

Montrose was bent over the Cliometric formulae which formed their chessboard, looking for what had become of the missing chessman who had defined his promised checkmate of Blackie. There was no trace. The math was correct up to a certain point, and then …

He drew his head up. War? What war? The history scheme he had set in motion would not have ended in any organized large-scale violence. It could not have.

“Childish!” Blackie was scoffing. “It was like something a human with a computing machine would do, not artists like us. You merely changed all the attractor field values to the positive, one after another after another, and anyone, anyone could have seen that this was a Cliometric manipulation, an unnatural imposition of a new social dynamic by force. To retaliate, I merely added a subduction vector, and it smoothed out the spline variables—in this case, by reducing the source to zero. You know the result.”

“No, I was in hibernation at the time. What was the specific manifestation of this subduction vector?”

“I changed my mind.”

“Sorry, come again?”

“The ice caps which reach almost to the tropic zone, all this snow: it is all me. Exarchel and I are one system. I melted, flooded the coastal areas where the Anchorites kept their hermitages, overthrew their burgeoning civilization in one swift week of rising flood waters. Ah! The Earth enjoyed exactly one year and a half of summer! Such dancing, such gaiety! The land-dwelling infrastructure was wiped out, and the Anchorite dolphins, whales, and mermaids, shorn of half of their group, were swept back to the deep sea and reabsorbed. Then I froze the world again. I chose Midsummer’s Day in the northern hemisphere to start the first snowstorms over the Atlantic. It is amazing what you can do with a starship, an entire world covered with nanotechnological fluid you can directly control with your mind, and a coherent theory of weather prediction and control developed by the Japanese back in 2211—the year you were born, was it not?”

“No. Year before.”

Del Azarchel said, “Friend, there is no need to be coy with me. The game is over. What was the point of that move? Why have your creatures drill down through the icepacks into the buried oceans? It was stupid. Why provoke a war you could not win? What were you trying to accomplish by introducing this Anchorite cult factor into history, and then having it self-destruct?”

8. The Dark Mind Discipline

It should have worked!

The whole idea for his Mind Anarchy Vector had come straight off one of the cartouches of the Monument in the Omega Segment of the southern hemisphere, hidden among acres and acres of glyphs and signs and patterns which, Montrose knew for certain, neither Del Azarchel nor any other human person had ever translated. Unlike all the surrounding and unreadable mysteries, this one was written in the simple and clear glyphs of the Kappa Segment. Montrose theorized that the Monument Builders, and perhaps all starfaring civilizations, used the technique to prevent any one information system or library or set of philosophical virus-ideas from utterly dominating any other.

The system was so elegant, but so radically different in its axioms and conclusions than anything human beings had ever thought about the nature of thought, that Menelaus regarded it as the best thing he had ever done, the most clever work, to come up with a science to allow the philosophy of negative cognition to be used by the human nervous system. It was better than his most brilliant work in long-term hibernation Divarication; it was certainly better than his work in intelligence augmentation, which had been an insane—literally—failure.

Montrose felt like some crusty old miner who, chipping his way through the snow of the Japanese Winter, finds an unbombed and unplagued mansion from the days of the First Space Age all intact; and breaking in through a window, discovers the owner had kept under glass some lost book or lost painting whose existence was only suspected from references to surviving books; and returning carefully to civilization, he becomes the toast of the town and the hero of the hour, his treasure brought with respect to the municipal or civic Hall of Lost Days, where anything recovered from before the Little Dark Ages was studied with reverence and kept with love. Such was the pride and pleasure Montrose felt at having discovered a nugget of revolutionary scientific information among the endless undeciphered acres of alien hieroglyphs.

Del Azarchel was the only mind on Earth, except, perhaps, for the Giants yet unthawed in his deepest Tombs, who could actually appreciate the rarity of the find and the cleverness of its application. Others might be able to like it, or use it, but only someone steeped in Monument lore and learning, and able to do a calculation of six billion variables in his head, could see the recursive symmetry of the positive and negative patterns involved, or delight in the graceful elegance of the final proof, as short and yet as profound as a haiku.

Menelaus had actually expected not merely compliments, but praise, from Del Azarchel for the find. With a sensation of shame he realized that this man, his deadly enemy, was the one man on Earth whose good opinion he wanted to win. It was that important to him.

9. One Last Answer

Menelaus was frustrated. “Look, Blackie, we’re old friends. Stop dithering around with me. Our game is over. I just don’t understand your checkmate move, or how you escaped mine. I thought I had won. Hell! I thought I had crushed you. So I am asking you, please, curiosity is strangling me. Maybe you can tell me, now that it is over, why it did not work?”

“Why what did not work?” Del Azarchel gave him a withering look, also mingled with frustration. “I do not even know what your question is! Are you asking me why you cannot sink a battleship with a paper airplane? Why did the Anchorites start wars they could not win? Why did they drill down into the lakes buried under glaciers, the seas buried under the crust? What was your plan?”

Menelaus did not know what wars Del Azarchel was talking about. There was no need for war in any of the variations of the vector he introduced. He said, “My plan was to stop the spread of the system by making Helotry possible on a metalogical and semiotic basis … The philosophical problem of the mind and body relation has more than one set of…”

But Blackie was hardly listening. “Ha! Philosophy! Were your Anchorites merely going to talk in Socratic syllogisms to the flood waters, and explain the benefits of mental liberty and freethinking? Where they going to stop the wars they provoked by—? What? Sweet reason? Your anarchists were fighting helots of the mind, zombies, slaves whose every smallest thought was so tightly controlled, one might as well have reasoned with a rockslide, or halted a sniper’s stealthrocket in midflight with an enthymeme! One might as well try to stop the Fall of Ganymed with a word, when it nearly destroyed all life on Earth!”

Montrose tried to hide his reaction, which was one of jarring disorientation, like stepping for a stair that was not there.

Del Azarchel was convinced that Montrose had merely introduced a philosophical idea, no different from any other idea, which spread through a culture as one person after another was convinced and converted, or was raised from a child to believe it.

The Anarchist Vector was not a new thought, nor a new neural architecture to hold thought. It was a new technology of thought: the mind-body relation revisited and revised.

Menelaus had intended for the Mental Anarchists to develop a means of storing thoughts in the negative information spaces between manifest thought forms, a mental activity that could not, even in theory, be decrypted, and would probably not even be detected unless the psychoscopic investigator knew exactly what to look for.

And Blackie did not know what to look for.

He had not stopped Montrose. He had not even been aware. Blackie had no idea.

He had not the slightest idea what had happened to mankind, here in this final act of history before the End of Days, over the last five hundred years.

Del Azarchel was staring at him intently. “You are hiding something.”

10. Moonfall

Montrose said, quite candidly, “I would only be hiding something if our great game were still going on. But according to you, it is over, ain’t it?”

“According to you, you still have one move left. I am wary enough of you to believe it. What is it?”

Montrose spread his hands. “Wait and see.”

“You are bluffing. This is a feint of yours!”

“No, Blackie, only you feint, because you are fencing with me. You rely on your opponent’s dimwittedness. But I am playing chess with you. I don’t feint. That is why you will lose!”

“You seem confident, Cowhand, but it is false confidence, I assure you. Right now, all the tau values for the world culture are flatline zero: this society is a perfectly balanced self-regulating hierarchy that will never change, except to improve, and will never fall. When no party can introduce any further change into the matrix, the game is ended.” Del Azarchel straightened up from their ice pond full of equations. “Ended, with myself the victor! I would not have won so handily had not your last two moves been senseless and erratic to the point of madness. I have been trying to find out what you meant by them. Even now, at the end, when one of us will surely die, and both of us might, will you not say?—or perhaps you have, at last, as I always expected, returned to your old insanity, Crewman Fifty-One.”

“Or perhaps I have outsmarted you and you are going to lose your life, and all your Hermetic work is going to come undone, Crewman Two, because I am just that much smarter than you.”

“Bah!”

“You know, I ain’t sure I know anyone ’cept you who says ‘bah.’”

“And I surely know of none save you who says ‘ain’t.’”

“Be that as it may, Blackie, I said I would answer one question if you answered one of mine. Whether you know it or not, you did in fact answer. So. Ask your—wait a minute—” he interrupted himself. “Two moves? The Anarchist Vector was one move. What was the other?”

Del Azarchel looked up from where he had been frowning at the equations. “The Fall of 1036 Ganymed. I’d certainly like to hear the reasons, the strategy, that propelled you to perform such a deadly and violent act. I have been puzzling over it for years. What motivated you to do such a terrible deed? I did not think you capable of such magnificence.”

Montrose was dumbfounded. “What motivated … me?”

“In magnitude, it was almost an act worthy of, well, myself.”

Montrose said weakly, “Funny. I was thinking it was an act worthy of you, too, I guess.”

“I was a little surprised to see you use the same method twice,” Del Azarchel confided in him. “You are so proud of originality, working with computerpathy in this century, genetic in the next, biohardware one aeon, biosoftware the aeon after. Same thing twice? Not your standard method of approach, is it? Of course, when the Giants decivilized the world, they left nature standing, and they arranged for a lot of city dwellers to be snatched out of harm’s way before the fires started in earnest. You could have done something like that this time. But using an inhabited moon to make an asteroid-drop weapon onto an inhabited world! I suppose the sheer inhumanity of it was new. The brutality. And you mock me for using the contraterrene space lance to irradiate a few dozen rebel cities in order to unify my rule and impose world peace.”

Montrose said in a weak voice, “Took you by surprise, didn’t it?”

“I’ll say. To me it looked as if you damaged all your near-surface Tomb facilities to no purpose. I had sort of assumed you found some other way of getting information from the upper world, because not a single periscope of yours would exist anywhere. Now, I am not saying it did not damage me! I lost radio contact with the whole planet for ten years. I was in a Hohmann transfer orbit to Jupiter, and I missed the rendezvous. No one on Earth could send up a craft because no one on Earth existed. You had completely wiped out human civilization. Ah! But I know your cunning! I knew it was a fake, that there were still people somewhere. (And I was right; you hid them in your depthtrain system.)

“I knew it was you, Cowhand, because, well: you are the cause of all my setbacks—and you do nothing without a plan ten steps ahead!

“I could look out at the blue wonderful world, but it was too far to touch. Had I rode the landing craft down, where would I splash down? In some ocean red with volcanoes? And then how get back up again?

“No, I had to return to Jupiter, and wait years and years for the planets to be in proper position to attempt again. So you put me to a lot of trouble. I have been waiting patiently to discover the reason.”

Montrose stood, face blank, blinking. He said, “Is that your one question? I thought that you had something from an earlier period in mind.”

Del Azarchel chuckled. “Embarrassed, are we?”

Montrose did not answer. He and Del Azarchel had talked for so long, the sun had risen. The strange and hollow twilight that seemed so unnatural had passed. The sunlight was bright and clear, but the landscape was still cratered and inkstained with endless debris, and not a single tree was still standing, but all were charred or blasted.

There was a glint in the distance. Montrose increased the number of nerve firings to his eye, and a crisp picture came into his head.

The glint was a metal plaque.

It had been ripped out of the ground, bent, battered, and charred by molten iron. Only a few words were visible. —M. I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—THESE LANDS UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER—HOSPITALIER OF ST. JOHN—NO SOLICITING

Montrose, who had been feeling a considerable sense of fellowship, pity, admiration, and even a twinge of friendship for Del Azarchel suddenly felt a hardness and a burning coldness in his heart, as if somehow flame could be made of ice and ignite a man’s soul. —M. I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—UNDER THE PROTECTION—TRESPASSERS KILLED—

He reminded himself of everyone who had been robbed, coerced, humiliated, or killed by the Blue Men, had so been because of the orders, or the indifference, of this handsome, dark-haired man before him. A man who committed all these crimes and more, because a Swan Princess had once, innocently, trustingly, used her understanding of Cliometry to manipulate historical forces and push him onto a throne. And then she, seeing his growing ambition and corruption, had turned those same forces to give him a stark choice: to abdicate or else, by clinging illegitimately to power, to cause a world war and a total economic collapse. It was a choice no man with a conscience would have even paused to consider: certainly the Anchorites just mentioned would have jumped at the chance to flee the burdens of power, and the dangerous lure of corruption.

And all of history for roughly eight thousand years had been a turmoil of one insanely failure-ridden and unworkable social and legal scheme after another, exaggerated caricatures of misery, not one of them having been naturally evolved to serve the needs of the current and coming generations.

All because Blackie could not say farewell to a girl whom he should not love. A girl who had chosen another. Mrs. Montrose. Had Menelaus actually had a moment of pity for his wife’s father because that father still had a disgusting and unlawful romantic attraction for a married woman? Menelaus wondered if his coffin sessions last night and early this morning had indeed healed all the damage from the various blows to the head or the side-effects bouts of paralysis and petrifaction may have left.

As suddenly as a snuffed candle, all friendliness and fellowship departed from Montrose’s face. The look of wrath was so clear on his features that Del Azarchel thought the other man might on the instant leap at his throat and tear with his teeth like a dog. Many another man would have backed up, seeing the glint of death in the eyes of Montrose. Del Azarchel hefted his dirk and stepped forward, eyes like flint, teeth white in a stiff grin, as if daring him to try his luck.

They found themselves standing with noses almost touching, staring into each other’s eyes with gazes of superhuman vigor that no man, aside from them, could long hold. But both knew each other’s mystic sense of honor too well. Neither would be the first to break the rules of the code of duels.

Through clenched and smiling teeth, Blackie whispered:

“Are you going to tell me why you dropped the asteroid, Cowhand? Even for you, it seemed rather clumsy, and very brutal. I lost all contact with the Earth for years.”

The pattern jumped into place in the mind of Menelaus. He understood the reason for the asteroid drop, the destruction of the surface world, why the Melusine dwelled in buried lakes and subterranean seas—and where the Anchorites had gone.

“Is that going to be your one question, Blackie? I ain’t much in the talking mood no more.”

“Or the grammaring mood, I see. No. I will learn of all these things at my leisure, once you are dead.”

“We both know that if I kill you, Blackie, your Jupiter Machine seedling must self-destruct, and all your plans die with you.”

“No matter. My pain will end.”

Menelaus grunted, unimpressed.

“You will survive,” said Del Azarchel with an inclination of the head. “You will defy the Hyades, and provoke them to destroy our race. Our world, a tiny cinder circling a minor star in one of the smaller arms of the galaxy, will spin and spin, and the universe will never know nor care that two such men as the Judge of Ages and the Master of the World met and were matched in strength.

“But”—and now the grin of Del Azarchel looked almost boyish, so bright was it—“if I prevail, and I do not ask of you this one question tormenting me, there is no other source I can ask, and it will remain a mystery even after I become the Master of the Stars. So here is my question. I need not remind you that you are honor-bound to answer.”

“Shoot. Sorry. Bad choice of words, considering. I mean, uh, ask.”

“It concerns your long-term strategy during our match. Even from the very earliest days. When did you plant the seeds to grow Pellucid, your world core Xypotech? 2401? Long before the Day of Gold in 2525. At any time, during any of these millennia, you could have let society fall, install yourself into an emulation of your own at the Earth’s core, and then have your own self-replicating iron logic crystals pour out of all the volcanoes of the world. I kept expecting it. I dreamed it and feared it and never once came up with a possible counter-strategy that might have worked. You would have won the game at any time. But the volcanoes never opened.”

“What is the question again, exactly?”

“What is the ques—what? I mean—” Del Azarchel was at a loss for words.

He stared at Montrose, his eyes full of wonder, thunderstruck, dumbfounded.

And then he began to laugh with relief. He roared and wept with laughter, the gales of mirth of a man who had lived with one particular fear for countless thousands of years, only to realize the fear had been a shadow, a boogeyman, a nothing.

Hiccoughing, Blackie said, “Y—You never even toyed with the notion, did you? You are sentimental. You are so stupid. You let me win. Just like that. I win. And you did it to save them! The humans. The hoi polloi. The hylics.”

“Don’t call them that.” Montrose’s voice was sharp.

The laughter turned to scorn. “They are lesser creatures to us.”

“They are not lesser creatures!”

“Then why not tell them the truth? If you thought they were our equals, you would tell them everything we do when we decide how to let them live their lives. But you don’t, do you? You never tell them anything,” said Del Azarchel in a tone of voice so smug that he needed no words to say You, like me, know full well that the Truth is not for such as they.

“God damn you!” shouted Montrose.

And in ten huge, Sumo-wrestler-massive strides, Montrose strode in his armor to where the solemn men stood, his Seconds and Del Azarchel’s. And the white-winged dark-eyed maiden, elfin and eerie, looked on with no expression from the dozens of eyes in her wings.

And Montrose began shouting the truth to them at the top of his lungs.