The Judge of Ages

It took Montrose a long moment to realize that he was still alive, and even longer to realize that Del Azarchel had fired at the ground.

Del Azarchel was not looking at Montrose. Unable to turn his helmeted head, to look left and right, Del Azarchel must move his feet. Del Azarchel was turning slowly in a circle.

Clouds of vapor were rising from underfoot in every direction. The snowy ground was steaming, sublimating. The ice was melting and vanishing. Behind Del Azarchel, Montrose could see the glaciers were also toppling. With a noise like drums and a noise like trumpets, first one, then a dozen, then a myriad distant peaks of glaciers collapsed in avalanche toward the earth, like a stronghold of white towers being flattened by a bomb.

There also came a noise like running or thrumming. It was the sound of rain. No clouds were directly overhead, but in the distance all the vapors and fogs of the sky were changing from white to black with freakish, unnatural speed, and had begun pouring rain against the hills on the horizon; and higher and farther away, the rain was pelting against the sides of the Tower.

Every cloud in sight, including feathery high cirrus in the far distant blue, was precipitating.

Del Azarchel on heavy feet turned back toward Montrose, and pointed underfoot, and then at the hills with his white glove, gesturing toward the unnaturally sublimating snow. “You found a way to kill Exarchel. All the nanotechnology in the world’s water supply is going inert. Your final move was a sacrifice move. You just shot your horse, didn’t you? You allowed Pellucid to be infiltrated, knowing full well that I could not pass up the chance to have a Xypotech of that size housing my soul, and I sent Exarchel into it, and the infiltrator was infiltrated in turn. But why did you wait until I showed the black palm? Ah! You needed the deadman switch turned on, did you not, so that every single copy of Exarchel, wherever it might be stored or howsoever it might be encrypted, would be linked by one link. That was the link you needed. Very clever.”

Montrose raised his unwounded arm and pointed upward. Del Azarchel craned his neck.

There were thousands and tens of thousands of figures in the air, flowing out from the Tower like seedlings blown from a dandelion: Men and women, large and small, winged in silver. With them also were dolphins and several types of whales. One and all, including the sleek sea mammals large and small, were borne aloft on great silvery wings, each feather glittering with eyes.

Montrose spoke in a strained voice, wincing and panting. “They waited, hoping I would shoot you, which would take care of Jupiter for them.”

He did not need to say anything aloud: Montrose could guess the rapid pattern of clues snapping into shape in his mind, such as the amateur awkwardness of the last war, the apparent lack of effect from the spread of the Anarchist Vector.

Del Azarchel forced a lilt of humor into his trembling words. “Clever! So your liberty-loving Anchorites had a method of hiding their thoughts even from intimate psychoscopic examination, did they? When they drilled down to the buried seas, it was not to propagate a war. That war was one they knew they must lose—it was just to spread the mental virus. Like your Giants, they sacrificed themselves to let their philosophy prevail.”

“Not a philosophy. A negative-information semiotic technique to reformat the mind-body relation. It comes from the Monument.”

Montrose, kneeling in the black cloud, spoke in a rasping voice. “No pets of mine. Free men. Equals. They figured out you have no intention whatever of fighting the Hyades, that your whole star raid drill, everything from taking a century to build your skyhook to herding the entire world population under the planetary crust for decades, was just a ruse to get at me.”

Sir Guiden stepped into the cloud of chaff still spreading from Montrose’s pistol. With one arm around Montrose, and a whine of strength amplification motors in his elbows, he helped Montrose to his feet and led him out of the glittering dark cloud of smog. He disconnected the pistol from Montrose’s numb gun hand, and clicked the safeties into place, and worked the lever to open the firing chamber.

Sir Guiden did the same for Montrose. The two men stood bareheaded in the wind, with snow melting underfoot and rain and winged men pouring down. Del Azarchel’s dark hair was whipped by rainy wind, his grimace surprisingly white in his dark beard. Montrose’s pale red hair hung lank, nose jutting out of his squarish misfeatured face, his lantern jaw like the toe of a boot, his eyes like two embers, unblinking.

Del Azarchel did not answer, but said, “I grant quarter until we can re-arm and find a better field. Agreed?”

Montrose said, “Agreed. And next time, we need to pick our judge of honor more carefully. I was not expecting her to interfere.”

“I was not expecting you to fall with such comedic composure on your buttocks,” said Del Azarchel.

Of one accord, they turned and looked at Alalloel. The strange, all-dark eyes of her face seemed for the first time to hold expression: an exultation of triumph.

2. Metaposthuman

The gathered voices of an entire world spoke from her mouth and said, “There shall be no next time! Your duel is ended, now and forever. Neither will we allow you to continue it, neither with pistols nor races nor worlds nor with the calculus of history.

“Eight millennia and more have been changed and marred by the insanity of hatred that endures between the both of you. The resources lost by you and by all the races you fathered, the opportunity cost in more perfect worlds which could have been born, but were not—the waste in human lives is beyond even our calculation power! Entire civilizations rose, flourished, sickened, and were discarded by you as merely resources expended in your conflict. The quarrel is done: we decree peace.”

Del Azarchel stepped toward her. “Silence! I command—”

“You command nothing!” The vibrant look in her eyes grew so powerful that Menelaus could not meet her gaze. When Menelaus looked toward Del Azarchel, he was shading his eyes as if against a strong light. Once and twice Del Azarchel nerved himself to look toward her face; but his eyeballs twitched, his gaze stammered, and he had to turn away.

Del Azarchel looked seasick. His eyes were wild. “Who—? What are you? No Melusine speaks this way!”

“We are their ultimate children. The Melusine created us, the final race, for the express purpose of halting your madness.” The myriad voices blended more harmoniously, sounding almost like a song: “All those who came before us are merely variations within the same species, Homo sapiens. Ours is a new genus, primate but not hominid: Pan sapiens. We are the first prototypes of the post-Melusine species, superhuman beyond even your superhumanity. In this new and final race, the awkward and ugly duckling of mankind, and of all the mankinds, has finally reached beauty, power, strength, and supremacy. We call ourselves the Second Humans: we are the Swans. Behold! We are now come!”

She spread her wings and soared upward, exulting, to meet the dancing and descending silvery thundercloud of winged beings in the midst of the air.

Del Azarchel recovered his aplomb in a deep breath. Now he was peering upward, saying, “These Swans of yours may prove difficult to overcome.”

“That is what I like about you, Blackie. You are stinking blind-drunk on rotgut optimism, and do not see the world around you.”

“A trait we share. But I prefer to think of it as megalomania,” said Del Azarchel coolly. “The cure, of course,” he smiled, “for the neurotic and false belief that one is possessed of godlike power is actually to obtain it; whereupon the belief is no longer false.”

“You are not overcoming these critters, Blackie. They are as much smarter than us as we are than a baseline human. They were clever enough to hide whole flying circuses of their Paramount bodies aboard your Tower without your noticing.”

Del Azarchel was staring upward, shading his eyes. “Since the Tower has more surface area than China, the feat is less astounding than may seem.”

“Not to mention smart enough to hide their damned world right in front of your eyes while letting you think you ruled it. Smart enough to see through your lies, which the Hermeticists never did, and to turn on you.”

“And smart enough to turn on you, as well.”

“What the pox do you mean?!”

“Look up, Cowhand!”

3. Turning

The falling figures were closer now. Montrose peered, using his cortical technique to make the images clear and sharp in his mind.

Flying down were men, women, Giant posthumans, dwarfish Inquilines of blue and gray, dark Locusts by the swarms hanging like a cloud of pitch. Chimerae were falling head downward in angled formations like diving geese, not having opened their wings yet. Witches, perhaps for ceremonial reasons, perhaps merely for joy, held broomsticks and besoms between their legs.

“I see that they raided your Tombs,” drawled Del Azarchel. “No respect for private property, eh? That was not in your plan, was it? Obviously, your plan was to have something happen that neither one of us could plan.” Del Azarchel started laughing. “So this was your final move! To throw yourself out of the game! Congratulations! Small wonder I did not foresee it!”

Montrose knew that Del Azarchel must have run Cliometric scenarios on the impact of Cliometry on a society. It had only one of two halt states: The first halt was one where everyone was under control of a plan, even the planners themselves, and every least act and smallest thought was unfree, controlled by a calculus no one controlled. The Melusine world Del Azarchel had tried to create was a model of that state. The other state was where everyone knew Cliometry, and could freely adjust his future to match and harmonize with all other like-minded future plans—or freely decline, neither interfering nor being interfered with. That was the new world Montrose had brought into being.

Montrose said, “These people are free of your Cliometric interference as well as from mine. Why are you laughing? It worked, didn’t it?”

“If kicking over the chessboard prevents the checkmate, certainly it worked. But it is the ingratitude that amuses me. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth!” he laughed and wiped his eyes. “That asteroid strike! Of course it wiped out all the threads of history I had been developing—but it wiped you out also. It blinded my satellites and blinded your periscopes. That is how desperate they were to get rid of you.”

“Of us.”

“Yes, as you say, but getting rid of me is not as deliciously funny. I regarded them as cattle anyway, and expected them to stampede. You are the one who thought of them as pets, and got bitten.”

“Laugh it up,” snarled Montrose. “Soon enough we’ll find out what they mean to do with us. You see it, don’t you? Explain it to your man.”

Sarmento spoke up, his voice a rumble, “Explain it to yours, Fifty-One. I am in communion with Exillador. I grasp the situation. Your pets whom you insist on treating as equals are the only ones here who are not posthuman.”

Montrose turned to Sir Guiden. Sir Guiden said, “I don’t understand. We won. They lost. The people of this era, these steel-winged angels, they have thrown off the tyranny of the Hermeticists. Have they not?”

“And they are throwing me off as well,” said Montrose grimly. “We are prisoners. They have to decide how we are going to fit into their society. Go over to the others and tell them the bad news.”

4. Swan Song

The figures in the air were touching down.

Two Giants, grotesque beetle-browed heads atop their elephantine bodies gleaming, their beautiful golden eyes glistening, landed as lightly as thistledown nearby. No higher than the Gigantic elbows were a coven of Witches, thin as rails and gray and wrinkled in their black habits and peaked hoods. A squad of Chimerae, eyes fierce and unblinking as the eyes of hunting cats, were no taller than the waists of the Giants; a host of Locusts, dark and solemn-faced with endless repetitions of the same face, tendrils glistering, were no taller than the thick knees of the Giants. Here and there, like some delirious dream of Egyptian pantheons, were freakish Hormagaunts, beast-headed or hawk-billed, furred like lions or shelled like armadillos, a nightmare of pincers and claws and writhing tentacles studded with mouths; here also were rank upon rank of Clade-dwellers, identical twins in groups of twelve and twenty, hair quills bristling. The six-tendrilled dark-eyed Melusine were present as well, standing in groups of three, with dolphins and whales, sleek as torpedoes, soaring and swooping and hovering above them, graceful as notes of music in a symphony.

Which post-Cetaceans went with which of the standing figures was not clear. All wore the shining neural cloaks of the Second Humans. Tallest loomed the two winged Giants, and their white pinions reached twenty-four feet from tip to tip as they furled and folded them. With them were winged Witches and winged Chimerae with ten-foot spans; and winged Locusts with stubby pinions like so many cupids from Saint Valentine’s Day cards. All the eyes on all the feathers were glinting and beating with light. Montrose tried to estimate the volume of information being passed back and forth between the gathered minds here, the core of the Earth, and systems the Tower was spreading elsewhere.

Del Azarchel must have made a similar calculation, because he turned toward a group of creatures Montrose did not recognize: tall men and beautiful women whose hair was a strange shimmering like the wigs of Scholars, and skin as pale as theirs, but their eyes were the black-within-black of the Melusine. Montrose saw these were not wigs, but masses of Locust tendrils, each one as fine as a strand of silk, and as many as hairs in a wig. The hair swayed and moved as if an invisible updraft of wind were blowing about each pale face.

They were not twins; nor were they of the same family or race. Indeed, Montrose could not tell which human stock these beings sprang from, for each face was an individual work of art, and if one had a Roman-looking nose or a Japanese-looking eye, or the jawline of an Australian aborigine, or the lips of a Persian, his other features might resemble some other stock, or none at all. All the faces were beautiful with a cold beauty, and, unalike as they were, all were stern and ascetic with the same spirit.

Montrose saw what Del Azarchel did: these dozen figures were the center of the communication flux binding the areas together.

To them, Del Azarchel said, “Your victory is temporary and meaningless. The Jupiter Brain will grow and overmaster you.”

One of the Swans, tall and thin, beak-nosed and with swaying silvery tendril-hair falling past his shoulders, stepped forward.

From his body language, poise, and stance, Montrose saw this was another aspect of the Anserine again. The same gathered voice as had come from Alalloel spoke from his empty, tongueless mouth. “Not so. We deliberately misled you as to the internal conditions of the core of Jupiter. Your estimation of growth speed is off by two orders of magnitude. It will not be two hundred years before the mass of Jupiter is converted to logic crystal, nor even two thousand, but over two hundred thousand years. The Hyades World Armada arrives in the solar system in four hundred years. All events will be resolved, for good or ill, long before Jupiter wakes: we will be dead, or be free.”

Montrose stepped toward them and winced. He had forgotten the shattering pain in his gun hand. The pain lent anger to his words. “You speak of freedom and yet you raid my Tombs, abduct my people, insert tendrils in their heads, and drive them into your mass minds, sucking their souls away!”

The Anserine said, “You speak in ignorance. No matter. We will not be mastered by him nor judged by you. Your time as Judge of Ages is done. Your interference in history, benevolent as may have been its intent, is a trespass. Our history is our own. We will write our own destiny with our own Cliometric calculations. As for you, we consider you to have forfeited your right to your Tombs due to the ill use to which you placed them.”

Montrose said, “And as for my clients? Men who trusted me with their lives? What of them?”

“All those hundreds of persons in your eighty-nine Tomb systems you have preserved for medical or scientific reasons, or as sanctuary from current power, or as penalty of exile, or for the sake of curiosity—how were they more than pawns to you? You gathered them merely as a strategy to use against the Master of the World. Fortunately, their numbers are small enough that they can be absorbed without disaccommodation into our protocols. The biosuspension Xypotech procedures maintained by Pellucid were destroyed when we destroyed Exarchel. All the Tombs are automatically opening worldwide.”

Montrose glanced at Del Azarchel. He smiled a crooked and bitter smile and said, “Hundreds. Hundreds of persons in my eighty-nine Tombs. They don’t know what they just did. They don’t see it. You don’t see it either, do you, Blackie?”

Del Azarchel flashed him a dark look and said, “I saw it long ago, and long ago prepared a counterthrust. When Rania fled the solar system, she altered the orbits of the tiny amount of contraterrene she did not herself need as fuel, and radioed the information to you. After our duel was interrupted, and the Beanstalk fell on us, Exarchel had us both in prison hospitals—and one of Rania’s loyal Scholars spirited you away. Exarchel could not see where you went. And so he was slow to understand what was happening. You had the contraterrene needed to keep the depthtrain system operating. Just to prevent tunnel collapses requires an energy pressure higher than nonamplified matter can provide. For years, no, for centuries, I did not understand your obsession with claiming control over these underground places. Do you now say that you had this planned from the start? I suspect you stumbled across the idea by serendipity.”

Montrose said, “The idea was planned out. Who I was going to get to run the thing, that was more jury-rigged. I thought I could trust my Clan not to grow corrupt, and I could not. Then I thought maybe the Church was a better candidate to run things while I slept—while I ain’t much of a churchgoing man myself, anyone can see that she’s been around longer than any human organization still in business, and might actually hold property over generation after generation waiting for slumberers to wake. And historically, Churchmen run hospitals and graveyards, and I figured this weren’t much different. And then you destroyed the Church with your Witches, and you caused the Collapse, and you, not me, you lost all the records. By that point I had enough men, the Knights Hospitalier, to run the Tombs from the inside, so I only needed minimal contact with the surface world. Every generation, from the Witch-doctors to the Medical Corps to the Maidens of the Hesperides to the Iatrocrats, has cooperated in secret with my people. Why would they not? Doctors don’t want their patients to die.”

The tall Anserine spokesman said, “Explain these remarks. How do they touch our present concerns?”

Del Azarchel turned to the Anserine, saying, “You fool. Everyone is beneath the earth.”

Montrose said, “It’s not everyone. That would be ridiculous. Some died in accidents or battles, and my people could not get to them in time. Others could not be preserved even with the best medical coffin system I could make. But it is a lot of people. A whole lot.”

The spokesman said, “This is unexpected—please confirm you are claiming the Tomb system is more extensive than anticipated?”

Del Azarchel laughed. “Exarchel never kept a record of all the populations over the centuries and millennia who entered hospitals and sick-houses and Nymph deleriumariums and did not emerge, because Montrose’s acts were edited from his mind. Montrose moved all Tombs far below the crust, below the mantle, out of any possible surface-detection range, back when I had my Witches digging up Churchmen to prevent a resuscitation of my poor, senile, machine-hating Mother Church. Montrose kept near the surface only the minimum possible number of Tombs to maintain a steady contact with the current world, to replace thawed followers, or to hear rumors of war or disaster in case he needed to offer sanctuary to anyone.

“He does not have eighty-nine Tombs, nor eighty-nine hundred. He has over one million ten-thousand-man facilities buried at various levels between the mantle and the core. His failsafes all performed a fail-over when Pellucid died just now: without the memory space, his coffins cannot correct for the cellular information of all his clients, millions and millions of them. So up they come. He is bringing up more than your society can possibly absorb. Do you have any food to feed them? They can pay. For all of your metals and minerals of the surface world are exhausted, are they not? You’ve possessed yourself of some of the volume he has vacated? You have no idea how small a volume that is. The swarms of populations will have all the wealth of the buried world at their command, oil and gold, copper and tin, uranium and suchlike.”

Del Azarchel bowed and gestured toward Montrose, smiling, both eyebrows raised. “Behold him. You see, my dear Swans, the Judge of Ages, he is a cowboy, and he knows that the Red Indians, no matter how brave they are, cannot stand up to the pressure of sheer numbers from the White Man.

“This is (and, ever since the time of the Witches, always has been) the final executioner’s ax which the Judge of Ages bore above the throats of every generation. And now, by accident, in your haste to slay Exarchel, you have done in Pellucid, triggered a global system failure, and brought the ax upon yourself.”

Winged beings had not stopped landing from the Tower. More were present, and more, until the hills surrounding were shivering and glinting with what seemed snowbank upon snowbank of white metallic wings. The millions of eyes, like the eyes of peacocks seen in some drugged hallucination, flashed and glinted silently, the glittering of a tropic sun on diamond-brilliant waves.

Montrose said to the Anserine, “Sirs! Now that you are masters of your own world and judges of your own age, what provision will you make for the innocent?”

The tall Anserine said, “You think the matter disastrous for us? It is not even difficult. We have set events in motion.”

“What events? What?”

The tall Anserine said, “Do not concern yourself with the lives of others. For now, see to your own life! Our intent is benevolent, but, to one of your level of awareness, inexplicable. You will save yourself much needless mental anxiety if you now, this moment, make peace with Ximen del Azarchel: otherwise the route we have planned for you will be more convolute. Go speak with him!”

Montrose stepped closer to Del Azarchel, lowering his voice and saying, “I am not sure what they are threatening. They say we must make peace. But has anything changed between us?”

“Divorce Rania.”

“You know that’s impossible. And there is still Grimaldi’s murder.”

“And your treason and ingratitude.”

“So, Blackie, What happens if these Swans decide to open fire on my clients with that many-miniature-suns weapon you mentioned, or something even worse?”

Del Azarchel’s smile turned into a sneer. “You should trust your own Cliometric calculus. Kill ten billion helpless people, whose only crime was that the Swans destroyed the Xypotech infrastructure maintaining their biosuspension? Work out the math in your head. If they do that, in two data-generations, the psychological pressure from guilt and cynicism would turn them into—well, into Hermeticists. Or do you think that any logical being can embrace genocide, when needed for his own survival, but reject servitude, which, by any measure, is a far less grievous offense? If they indulge in genocide, I win. See their wings a-shine with signal traffic! They know it, too. Your rugged honor-bound individualists could not commit billionfold mega-mass-murder in cold blood without losing their souls to me. They will not act. But I shall.”

Montrose gripped his arm, then winced, breathless with pain, because he had gripped Del Azarchel with his maimed hand. He hissed, “What counterthrust did you have planned?”

Del Azarchel shrugged his hand aside and pointed at the horizon. “She is rising now. See that light? Looks like daybreak on the western horizon? It is not daybreak.”

“What is it?”

“It is shipbreak.”

The mountains to the west were lit up as if with cherry flame, and the rain clouds above, still weeping the memories and libraries of Exarchel, were stained cerise and purple and magnificent magenta as if a second twilight were rising to encompass the dome of the sky. It was faster than a sunrise when a second sun rose above the peaks, red and flattened in the distortion of the atmosphere. Montrose squinted, seeing the morning star and perhaps a sliver of the moon by day, its ghostly handprint reversed.

Montrose said, “That is the sail of the Emancipation.”

Del Azarchel said, “The ship as well, and her various escort craft to help work the shrouds—but you cannot see her at this distance. I was toying with the notion of simply burning your revenants like ants with a magnifying glass by pulling in the focal length of the lightsail. A simple and effective means to make war on earthlubbers, as we spacefarers like to call you. You should know its effectiveness. You, after all, commanded the Giants to do the same to my people and my civilization. Every emulation recorded in a mainframe you annihilated was a person, a thinking being.”

“A thinking being who thought to conquer and enslave the world!” Montrose snapped.

“A loyal being carrying out the orders of his sovereign, the only sovereign in world history to impose world peace—I had already mastered the world. She is mine, then, and now and forever. I am within my rights to crush rebellion and disorder, and to do whatever is needed to save my civilization that I made from alien invasion. If I call surrender, and order all the world to lay down her arms in the name of peace, I must be obeyed! Anything a man may do by right to save himself alive, how much more right have I, to save worlds and aeons unborn? If I call upon my ship to put down the upstart Swans, who dare prevent me?”

“My ship,” corrected Montrose. “You just took her.”

Del Azarchel said, “Return my fiancée and the life I was fated to enjoy, and I will give you your ship back. Until then, do not voice complaint to me about mere material possessions. With all your buried wealth and factory space and bottomless geothermal wells, you did not have the wealth, across all those years, to build yourself another?”

“Since every time I woke, the world was in another Dark Ages produced by you, you plague-spotted son of a clap-blinded whore—”

“You insult my mother? That saint—?”

“Me? Your whole damned life is one big insult to your mother’s memory, Blackie, as you damn well—”

Montrose turned his head. Dolphins, a dozen or more, were levitating overhead, motionless. They wore wings akin to those of their human counterparts, except a cloud of drizzling mists also issued from the feathers, or from a web of studs dappling their sleek bodies. They stared down with grave black-within-black eyes. From above and behind those eyes rose very long whipcords of golden neurotelepathic tendrils

Twelve of the many-color-cloaked Second Humans also had gathered in a loose semicircle. Now the thin, silver-haired Anserine man raised his hand, and, as one gesture, so did a dozen other of the Swans.

They spoke in the same voice, human and dolphin. “Gentlemen, your levity is appalling. That you would squabble and threaten the Earth with war even at a moment like this is atrocious. Whatever debt of gratitude the human race may have owed either of you, either for a peaceful reign of which you boast, Ximen del Azarchel, or your benevolent offer of sanctuary from the ravages of time you extended, Menelaus Montrose—that debt is cancelled. No more will any hibernation facilities accept anyone bearing your genetic code, either of you.”

Montrose stared up at the narrow faces of the sea-beasts, then looked wildly at the remote, dispassionate faces of the equally inhuman humanoids, saying, “You can’t do that! I have to slumber until Rania comes back.”

Del Azarchel said, “And I as well, since she will leave him and cleave to me, when that great day comes.” Del Azarchel could slow his aging process tremendously, but even he could not endure the immensity of time before Rania’s return.

The Anserine said in unison, “She is lost to you forever. Both of you have abused your timelessness and your immunity from years. We, the one mind of the planet Earth, hereby revoke your immunity of years and condemn you to mortal lives. No other punishment is fit.”

Montrose turned away, his stomach hot and knotted.

Del Azarchel tossed back his head, and drew back his lips, an odd expression halfway between a smile and baring one’s teeth to bite. “Anserine! What will you do if I give Emancipation the command to open fire?”

“What is your target?” The voice now came from an overhead dolphin hanging as motionless as a piñata. “How much heat capacity can you bring to bear? What volume of seawater can you evaporate and at what rate? As you who built them know, our central node housings are at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

“I forebear to mention our cities and arcologies occupying the Great Stalactite. What point would be served by opening fire?” continued the voice, now coming from a high-cheeked, sharp-featured woman who had not spoken previously, her eyes like night, her hair standing and swaying of its own accord. “The surface world, which is the only home or habitat hereafter available to you, defines the reach of your contemplated damage.

“Even were the threat sober,” continued the Anserine sardonically, now speaking through the mouth of a thin, silver-haired man, “you would have limited time to carry it out. We are engaged in meteorological engineering. The ice caps are becoming vapor; cloud cover will soon increase dramatically, and the albedo of the planet become too reflective for space-borne mirrors to be effective. Meanwhile, the Exarchel circuits and systems aboard your vessel have returned to base-operation state, and are empty of data. Look. Even now the clouds are gathering, as all the snows of the world melt. So to whom will you give the command?”

Del Azarchel looked at Montrose, a look of surprise, of wild emotion, in his dark features. “Cowhand, I think they are daring me! What do you think?”

Menelaus Montrose was clenching and unclenching his maimed hand, so that the pain was worse and worse. He was idly wondering at what point the pain would make him go into shock, or faint. “I think I will never see Rania again. So you should burn at least some of them. Say! What happens if you melt the ion drive lance off the anchoring asteroid of your topless Tower? Can we get it to collapse? It should wrap around the equator six and half times before it comes to rest. That mass, falling at terminal velocity, would be—well, it would be the same as a ring-shaped cannonade of nine-mile-wide asteroids all hitting every inch of ground in a spiral belt around the world half a dozen times.”

“Ha! Whenever I start hating you too much, Menelaus, you always say just the right thing to remind me why I so liked the way you thought when we were young. You have scope! Come: I will give the order, you will give the firing solution.”

Del Azarchel strode in his clanking duelist’s armor toward where the black-robed and -hooded Iron Ghosts of the Hermetic Order stood with some other people in a circle, facing inward: Ull and Coronimas, D’Aragó and De Ulloa. Ctesibius the Savant stood with them, solemn in his long white wig and his green robes trimmed with gold.

They stood in postures suggesting that they were conversing with someone their backs blocked from view. It was odd to see the Hermeticists from behind, for the dark silk shipsuit, from this angle only, was bright, since the uniform included a cape of white foil hanging from the shoulder.

Montrose walked with Del Azarchel, matching him stride for stride, and their heavy boots clanged together.

As they came near, they saw whom the Hermeticists addressed: Alalloel of Anserine. And behind her, on the other side of the circle, were his gathered Seconds: Illiance, Soorm, Mickey, Scipio, and Sir Guiden.

With them also stood the two Beta Maidens, Vulpina and Suspinia; Aea and Thysa the Nymphs; Keirthlin the Gray; and the blank-eyed but softly smiling Trey Azurine the Sylph. All stood on the back of a cnidarian which had not only landed, but flattened its circular mantle to the ground no thicker than a silvery carpet.

To one side, a little ways away, stood Oenoe the Nymph, writhed in her living mantilla of leaves and flowers. She was speaking with Sarmento i Illa d’Or, the only Hermeticist yet housed in a biological body.

Curious, Montrose turned his head that way, amplified his hearing, and sharpened his eyesight; then he noticed Del Azarchel had his gaze and attention turned the same way. He was not the only one who noticed: Sarmento i Illa d’Or raised his hand in a grave gesture, and beckoned them forward.

Oenoe dropped her eyes and curtseyed, bending her back leg and bowing at the waist, somehow making this awkward pose graceful and alluring. She stepped back, and then turned to walk with light footstep and overly swaying hip in the direction of where Sir Guiden, her husband, stood with the others, listening to Alalloel.

Sarmento spoke in the abbreviated fashion of posthumans familiar with each other’s mental contours. If written out in words, the look on the face of Sarmento, the brief syllables he spoke, would have read, “Crewman Fifty-One. Ready for a rematch? I would not have shot at the ground.”

And he gave Del Azarchel a look of scorn. Del Azarchel was taken by surprise, too puzzled to be angry at this unexpected hostility.

Montrose quirked an eyebrow, asking without words, “Nice to see you too, Learned i Illa d’Or, you pug-ugly soaplock. So what was that conversation about?” All three men turned and stared for a moment at the legs, hips, and general contours of the retreating girl in green.

Sarmento answered, partly in words, partly by implication, “She was asking me to bless her marriage. Do not look surprised, learned gentlemen: I am still, after all, the father of her race, and the creator of her world. You might think ill of my age, but she does not. Was there ever a time of greater happiness and peace?”

Del Azarchel said and implied, “A moment ago, I was your master, and the center of your loyalty, Learned i Illa d’Or. What changed?”

Sarmento answered in the same abbreviated way, “I was always loyal to our idea, not to your person, Senior. We stood for the principle that the higher form of life must rule the lower. Did we not? Was that not the motto we used to excuse everything, justify everything, allow ourselves everything? As it happens, the Swans are higher than you. Will you bow the knee to them? Or do you seriously think any of us will carry out your order to have the Emancipation open fire?”

Del Azarchel said and implied, “No matter where they are on the Darwinian scale of being, they are still in rebellion against me. Am I not, by their own rules, their lawful sovereign?”

“Have you lost your mind, Senior? The surface of this world is merely the hull of an Earth-sized fortress. What good would burning it do? Our most powerful weapons could not crack open the crust, much less reach down through the mantle to the outer core. We do not have the focusing power even to boil the seas away; and all the ice cap is rapidly becoming a cloud layer—like that the world enjoyed the last time the Cetaceans were in charge.”

Del Azarchel turned away in disgust, and stomped in his heavy armor toward Alalloel.

Sarmento said softly to Montrose, “I wanted to kill the princess and make Del Azarchel Captain. He wouldn’t do it. We would not have suffered all this trouble, millennia of toil, if only he’d done that. It would have been easy to let the princess die in some fashion, gently, without pain, which the Little Big Brother would not have considered murder. It was a stupid machine, after all, easy to fool, and we should not have been so afraid of it.”

Little Big Brother had been the internal security system aboard the antimatter-star-mining vessel. It enforced the rules and regulations to prevent exactly what had happened, the mutiny of the crew. The human crew had outsmarted the simplistic Mälzel brain of the ship by offering Rania, who shared genetic and legal traits with Captain Grimaldi, as the new Captain; and the ship’s brain had no choice but to accept the deception.

Montrose gave him a level, cool look. “Blackie shot at the ground because he realized that the Melusine wanted me dead. The moment the snow started sublimating, he figured it out. He is a bad man, don’t get me wrong, and needs killing if ever a man did; but he’s got some sort of principles. One of them is not doing dirty work for any critter not polite enough to ask it of him. Do you have any principles?”

“Of course. I serve the pleasure principle. Everyone does. I merely admit it.”

Montrose looked up toward the second sun still hanging in the heavens, the visible reflection in the wide mirror surfaces of the unseen starship sails of a ship too small to see. “Would it please you to have us out of your hair? You, the Melusine, everyone?”

Sarmento’s eyes goggled, “Us?”

One advantage of dealing with a fellow posthuman was that there was no need to stand around and explain things. Montrose stomped in his armor over to where Del Azarchel stood facing Alalloel.

Del Azarchel turned his head when Montrose came up. “You will be fascinated by this, Cowhand. Your ungrateful creatures who have condemned us to live and die as mortals are attempting to negotiate how the upcoming ten billion from the past eras will fit into their social structure. They are finding the prospect somewhat overwhelming.”

Montrose said, “I am glad they ain’t so cold-assed as to merely beef them or set them down in the middle of icy nowhere to die. But the social structure should be obvious, if they are so much smarter than us. If I can see it, they can: The Witches are to look after the Moreaus and the environment, but any who grasp for long life will become part of the Swan Hierarchy, and get their souls absorbed. The Chimerae are to become the military caste, since their eugenic dreams have achieved more than success—the perfect race has, after all, been brought forth, but if the Chimerae start wars or kick up a row too great, the Swans can interfere. The Nymphs act as peacemakers and secret police, but they damn well better avoid the pleasures of electronic nirvana, or else they will get absorbed also. The Inquilines get to act as intermediaries between the First Humans and the Second. It is what they are suited for.”

Soorm spoke up in a gruff voice, “And what of us? What role can the Hormagaunts play in their many-racial world of races who all hate each other? We are a folk, a race, whose only virtue and talent is for cannibalism and genetic vampirism, a race too dangerous to live.”

Montrose said, “There is no place on Earth for you. Be pioneers, space explorers, since your people alone can adapt themselves to space conditions and not regret the loss of Earthly flesh. Your people can oversee the terraforming of Mars and Venus, and change each year as the environment changes and becomes more Earthlike.”

Montrose turned to the Anserine. “These options must have been clear to you from the beginning.”

Alalloel of the Anserine said, “You are assuming the Swan Paramounts will permit independent minds to exist.”

Del Azarchel said, “That is not the problem. The Swans do not have the mathematics worked out to express a solvable equation for how the seven races are meant to be interrelated.”

Montrose looked at him sidelong. “Give it to them.”

Del Azarchel raised an eyebrow. “Rather than burn my planet they are stealing from me? In heaven’s name, why?”

Montrose snorted. “And here I thought you said the Earth was irrelevant.”

Del Azarchel scowled. “Irrelevant if I give the Earth away. All-important if Earth is stolen.”

Montrose said to Alalloel, “The Jupiter Brain will wake up eventually, and vastly, vastly outmatch your intelligence. You indicated the event was beyond your timebinding threshold. You don’t give a damn about nothing that happens so far in the future.”

Alalloel said, “Indeed we do not. Why should we? If the Hyades conquer, what will the rest matter?”

Montrose said, “So. I assume that applies to me as well. You just want me gone, not dead. Am I right? Del Azarchel will agree to give you his equations—”

Del Azarchel said archly, “Oh? Will I?”

“—and you will have the tools needed to rule a world of impossibly incompatible subspecies of mankind, if in return you agree to declare any human being—or his property—who does not have any circuit installed in his nervous system connecting him to your Noösphere a free and independent entity.”

Alalloel said sharply, “You seek to possess the Emancipation, and to flee to space to escape our jurisdiction. To this, we will not consent.”

Montrose said, “You already have the laws and customs to deal with free and independent entities: just consider any Thaws, or all, to be legally the same as Inquilines and Anchorites. Anyone not mentally connected to your Noösphere will neither overwhelm your infrastructure nor have need to follow your chain of command. Exarchel occupied and killed Pellucid, and took over all his higher functions, and you in turn occupied and killed Exarchel, but I think you will find that certain base commands and attitudes are hardwired into the system that now forms the basis of your worldwide mind. Pellucid is congenitally unable to interfere with human beings, and not allowed to kill them if they are off Tomb ground, except in retaliation or self-preservation. Like it or not, that rule is part of your psychology now. It is programmed at a basic level where you are not likely to be able to get at it. Unless you want to back out of occupying Pellucid right now, and return to your previous levels of intellect, and just be a normal, slow, stupid old posthuman like Blackie and me? If you disagree, think of the time you will spend trying to figure out how to reprogram your own brain—assuming it can be done at all. If you agree, think of how much trouble you save yourself.”

Alalloel thoughtfully spread her wings. Her many eyes adorning the metallic feathers glinted and gleamed as countless invisible communication rays fed into the local area, communing.

Eventually she snapped her wings shut. Alalloel said, “We agree to the proposition, but to nothing further. Provisions will be made to treat all sub-posthuman life and disconnected life, both mechanical and biological, as Anchorites not obligated to our Noösphere protocol.”

Montrose glanced at Del Azarchel. “You asked me to set up a firing solution? This is it.”

Del Azarchel sighed. “I would rather burn the planet, but obviously, that would be a brutal gesture accomplishing nothing.” He fished an old-fashioned data coin out from his poke, and tossed it with a negligent flick of his thumb toward Alalloel. “My proprietary research on the psychological modes and methodologies of the Jupiter Mind. The same mathematical models can be applied to living beings as to emulations. These races were actually designed to have complementary strengths and weaknesses, checks and balances, to fit into my proposed overall system. Here: it is yours.”

Del Azarchel turned to Montrose. “Why did you not ask for a spare hibernation unit and a Xypotech to run it? We could have gotten that and more.”

Montrose said, “Nope. For one thing, this Noösphere is now a Potentate, a planetary mind. The only reason why it does not want to brute-force recalculate your works is because it’s inefficient to reinvent the wheel. They are actually doing us a favor, on account of they are tender hearted and don’t want to kill all the billions of Thaws about to be dumped on them.”

Del Azarchel scowled at Alalloel. “Then why did they bargain with us at all?”

“My guess is that the Swan Hierarchy is not going to maintain itself as a hierarchy very long. You saw the social vectors of their fundamental construction. They are archindividualists: I suspect they are only maintaining their group mind for so long as the current crisis lasts.”

Del Azarchel said, “What crisis?”

“Us.”

Alalloel said, “You speak with greater insight than one of your level of intellect should be able to reach. We find this disquieting, and yet it confirms our previous conclusion.”

Montrose said, “What conclusion?”

“You and Del Azarchel are too dangerous. There is something embedded in the Monument: a potential, an emergent property, which you unwittingly copied into yourself with your Prometheus Formula, and which you again copied into Exarchel, whose thought patterns have many times been recopied into the version of Del Azarchel you see before you. The matter goes beyond mere differences in intelligence. There is something, some spirit in you, some essential property that cannot be defined nor contained. You will live out your natural lives in this century, having no additional recourse to biosuspensive hibernation nor to computer emulation nor to any other method of perpetuating your patterns of consciousness.”

Montrose said softly, “Blackie. As far as I know, you ain’t never out-and-out broken your word. In all your years as world tyrant and baby-smooching politician, I never heard tell of you giving your sworn word and breaking it—and so I reckon you are superhuman after all. Is that still so? You still a man of your word?”

Alalloel looked on with amazement on her finely boned, delicate features. “What is this? Do you still, at this late hour, intend some deception, some maneuver? The entire volume of Pellucid, overlaid with the lobotomized layer upon layer of Exarchel—the world consciousness—is ours. We are not merely the Swan Paramounts: we are Earth. There is no resource in your reach that we cannot foresee.”

Montrose held out his hand. “What do you say, Blackie? Truce? Up until we see Rania again. If we don’t, neither of us will see her, not never. Pax?”

Del Azarchel put out his hand. “Truce. You have my word.” He tried to keep a smile off his features, but he could not. He grinned, and his teeth were very white against his dark beard.

Alalloel said, “We will be able to foresee and forestall anything which you—”

Montrose reached out and touched one of the eyes on the feathers of her neural cloak. He said, in English, “Null. Classify same, retroactive through all databases.” He pointed at Del Azarchel, “Null and classify as null.”

5. Hysterical Blindness

Del Azarchel burst out with the laughter he had been holding in. “No, my dear Swans, you will indeed be able to foresee anything he is about to do unless you have a code built into your base psychology creating a blind spot you cannot see through. Oh, my. That is amusing to see it finally happen to someone else. Refreshing.”

Montrose turned to the others gathered there. “Anyone else? I don’t have time to speak to every member of each race that comes up, so you people gathered here have to decide for them. ’Taint very democratic-like, but we’re pressed for time.”

Soorm said, “If you can turn us invisible to the Noösphere, what was the point of negotiating our places in the civilization that is to come?”

Montrose said, “My magic only affects their perceptions, not their memories or legal agreements. They won’t be able to see you, up until the moment any one of y’all is dumb enough to stick a telephone or a library chip in your head or something like that. I cannot make the Locusts into phantasms. But that does not mean they cannot make a deal with you, make swaps and trades, all that good stuff. The shoemaker does not need to see the elves to make a deal, just leave out the shoe leather and a bowl of milk. Who wants in to the world of phantasms? It will be a life of hardship.”

Trey Azurine would not answer, but merely shrugged.

Scipio said, “There are no Giants here, but I will speak on their behalf, as the only surviving Cryonarch. Hide them in the phantasm system.”

Ctesibius said, “It would ill behoove the glory of the Savant race if we hid from the world that is the expression of what we sought. For myself and for the Scholars, I say we shall be visible. We decline the offer.”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or said, “The Hermetic Order will also decline the offer. These Swans are insane if they think to oppose the Hyades, but we have learned over the centuries never to dispute creatures higher on the Darwinian scale. We will remain visible. They have offered us a place in their service.”

Mickey said, “How are these Swan creatures different from the Machine? Make the whole race of the Wise into your phantasms, I beseech you.”

Vulpina said, “The Chimerae are a free people. We can survive without the eyes of these godlike, therefore hateful, creatures on us. Camouflage us.”

Sir Guiden said, “Any men from the world before the Giants could not understand the thoughts or the meaning of these Swans, and it would crush their spirits. The elder race of which I believe I am the only representative here, base-stock Homo sapiens, on their behalf, I ask for the sanctuary of invisibility to their eyes.”

Oenoe said, “Our race was made to carry no metals and emit no waves, so that the men of the factory-dark cities and the bloodstained iron fastnesses of war would never see us. We will live in the woods unseen: this is our way. The Einheriar and Valkyrie, our military orders, you must excuse, however, from your work. The Swan must see and speak with them, if they are to be used against the Hyades in the futile gesture of impossible war for love of which they entered your Tombs, O Judge of Ages Past.”

Soorm said, “Is this a trick question? I don’t want those creepy things watching me.”

Ull said, “I speak for the Locusts. We are part of the Noösphere of this age.”

Keirthlin said, her strange, silvery eyes gleaming, “And I speak for Inquilines. When and if we are convinced the Potentate of Earth is benevolent, it will be simple enough to restore our tendrils and seek union. Make us phantasms.”

And everyone was surprised when Alalloel said, “And us as well.”

6. All Bets Are Off

Only three voices came from her mouth.

Montrose stared at her. “How come you can still see and hear me?”

She said, “I—this one whose body this is—I am of the Lree. I am a Melusine. The Melusine did not slay Exarchel or invade the brain space of Pellucid. We are not Swans. Our psychology and philosophy is nothing like that of these semianarchic Pan sapiens creatures you accidentally created. We have no interest in being forced to be part of their system, until and unless we are assured that the principle of strict reciprocity is followed, both on a personal and on a macroscopic scale.”

Montrose touched the feather of her cloak again and he issued the commands.

The winged men, women, dwarfs and giants, dolphins and other shapes either hovering in the air or standing throng on throng along the steaming, vapor-breathing hillsides staggered and spread their wings in alarm, countless eyes glinting frantically.

Montrose said, “You will still be able to speak with them, make deals, even go them to settle disputes, by talking through Ctesibius or any other Savant who wakes. He touches the Noösphere only with a one-way link. Locusts might also be able to act as intermediaries, depending on their degree of neural immersion.”

Mickey stepped forward. “Where are you going?”

Montrose said, “Where you cannot follow. This has only been one-sixth of the time between Rania’s departure in A.D. 2401 and her earliest possible date of return in A.D. 70000 when Kochab and Pherkad are the pole stars. And even that shall be only the first beginning of my life.”

“Or mine,” smiled Del Azarchel darkly. He said to Mickey in Latin, “Come with us. Montrose will not mind, and perhaps I can persuade you to take up my service again, be a Savant, and create an emulation of yourself, a greater soul. You will be deathless.”

Sir Guiden stepped near, and spoke. “Before you hear him, discover from the Hermeticists if his offers lead to joy or grief.”

Del Azarchel narrowed his darkly glimmering eyes. “I spoke no false things to them. I told them plainly they were my dogs, and I their master. Had they obeyed me in all things and in all thoughts, they would know no reason to utter complaint. I was honest in my word.”

“Honesty in word is laudable, Master of the World, but it excuses no sins,” said Sir Guiden.

Del Azarchel turned his head and said to Montrose, “Is this your creature? Tell him to curb his tongue and remind him who he addresses. If he is not your creature, then do not interfere should I deign to smite him.”

Montrose said, “Climb off your buggerified high horse, Blackie, before you get a nosebleed. You ain’t smiting nobody, not for a goodly parcel of time as yet. Sir Guy, this here is my friend Blackie, and he is a pullelo, a gutter rat from Toledo in Spain, who is trying hard to live up to some crazy-ass notion of chivalry he learned from a man named Trajano during a hard period of his hard life, so don’t tell his flaws out to him, it ain’t fitting. Blackie lost his empire today, so don’t irk him. Again. What can I do for you, Sir Guy?”

“Liege, I have kept faithfully your service for lo, these thousands and thousands of years. But now all the Tombs are being raised, and all the dead shall waken, and many of these will be weakened and wounded and seek of many cures. The mission of the Knights of the Hospital of Jerusalem is with the sick who seek our sanctuary; and my heart is here.” He held out his left hand, and Oenoe took it, smiling, her beauty made all the more beautiful by her joy. She blushed, and did not look the posthumans in their eyes.

“I release you,” said Montrose, with a note of sorrow in his voice. “We’ve been through a lot. Well, slept through a lot. Almost the same thing.”

Mickey said, “Am I not to come with you?”

Montrose said, “I am not going to tell you yes or no, but I have a woman waiting for me up yonder in the far tomorrows, and I do not give a good goddam how many lives and how many centuries I have to tuck behind me. You can come if you like, but I have found out there just ain’t no guarantee that the future will be any better than the past, no matter what the optimists say, and there just ain’t no guarantee that the future will go on getting worse and worse, no matter what the pessimists say. For that matter, there is no guarantee that things will stay mixed good and bad, sinners and saints together, with no great change to human nature, because there have been times in the past that things turned a corner and nothing was never the same again. I don’t know what the people are called who think things don’t get worse and don’t get better. Mediocretists? But whatever they are called, there is no guarantee of them being right neither, because there just is no guarantees about the future. All bets are off. That goes double for the far future.”

Mickey said, “But I heard the Swans pronounce your sentence. Long-term biosuspension requires the use of a Xypotech to track all the cellular movements in a man’s body. No machine on Earth will serve you, even if you were visible to any of them.”

Del Azarchel said, “All things have come together, my dear friendly Witch, in just such a way that Montrose and I cannot do, either one of us, without the other. He has made a bargain with Sarmento so that the now-empty Xypotech core at the axis of the Emancipation can be filled and reestablished from my Xypotech, a new version of Exarchel, which he and I have the skills to create from the raw materials we have at hand, but neither of us alone. I have hibernation cells aboard the ship, he knows how to program them; I have savant equipment to create a new emulation of myself, he can use his solution to make him sane. And this time, I can make sure he puts no extra codes inside me. And I have a ship.”

“My ship,” grunted Montrose.

“Our ship,” said Del Azarchel graciously. “The only place we can go, now that the world and the world’s mind is hostile to us. We have a long hike ahead of us, not to mention a sea voyage, since the Tower will obey my command no longer to carry us aloft, and the only launching-landing craft in service, not beholden in any way to the Melusine or the Swans, is the one hidden in the bay of Saint Christopher’s Island, just offshore of your Mount Misery Tomb facility. Unless you have a closer one tucked away? We will also need to raid your fabulous storehouses of legendary wealth, if you have some stout walking shoes and coats worth wearing.”

Montrose said, “I will open my storehouses. Your eyes will fall out of your head when you see the treasures I’ve accumulated, because they bring me gifts, each one of the billions who sleep, or their close relations. But walk? Why walk? Mickey here stole a Witch plane not so long ago, and programmed the serpentine guiding it to land the crate not far away. I know the location. The serpentine power will last forever. It is a two-seater, and I am sure I can figure out how to pilot the darn thing after a crash or six. The thing is at least as steady as a World War One biplane.”

“And the average life-span of a Flying Ace from those days was, what, again? Fourteen days?” asked Del Azarchel archly.

“Long enough to get us to Mount Misery.” And the crooked grin on the lantern-jawed gargoyle face of Menelaus Montrose was something fearful to behold.

Mickey the Witch said, “I will stay in this era, and seduce a buxom Nymph or two, and find my love now.”

Oenoe said softly to him, “Aea looks with favor on you, or can be made to do so once she adjusts her brain chemistry correctly. You will soon be hers.”

Montrose said, “I warned you. Those women will take over your brain.”

Mickey said, “I have no further use for it. Have you seen the size of her—”

“Those women are dangerous!” said Montrose.

“Should I live a nice, safe life like yours, then, Menelaus Montrose?” retorted the Witch.

“Well, if you are so reckless,” said Blackie with a smile, “then come with us.”

Mickey pondered, frowning. Then he said, “No. The depth and strangeness of the centuries and millennia you mean to cross appalls me: you will emerge from your sleep in a world as strange as some unnamed orb that circles Archenar or Bellatrix, but with no way home to any world you knew. Montrose will find his Lady Love, if the gods are with him and the world is just, and Del Azarchel will find despair, and a hell of eternal time unending.

“But as for me, what shall a Witch of simple tastes do in such unguessed aeons far remote? How can I worship oak and ash and thorn and all the sacred trees, if they are all extinct?

“No. My people are here. The future is not mine; but the present.

“For, see! Even now the first of the great doors on the far hillside moves earth and melting ice aside, and the golden light spills up. I hear the psalms of the Christians mingled with the chants of the Witches and the paeans of the Chimerae, and so, perhaps, the ancient enmities are for a season put aside.

“The men of every era emerge blinking into the sunlight of the latter-day world. It is already far too far in the future for me.

“Go, then, Judge of Ages and Master of the World, away from the Age and from the World that has exiled you, and seek you your strange dreams of love for a more-than-human girl. The blessings of earth and sky, hill and wood and water, and all that dwell therein, now and for aye be with you!”