The Judge of Ages

Menelaus Montrose woke to a noise of many thunders, earthquakes, and volcanoes, and voices, and he thought it was a nightmare. He was on the iron throne, and when he tried to stand, the pain in his maimed legs shot through his body like a javelin of fire, and the burns that made a patchwork of pain across his flesh seemed to ignite in reply. He was still dressed in no more than the beaded undergarment of Rada Lwa, torn, ripped, slashed, burnt, stained, bloody, and smelling of the fume of the black gas.

A Maltese Knight in powered armor stood before him, and in his gauntlet a slumber wand glowing with pink motes: the emergency thaw setting.

Menelaus sniffed, and smelled a smell that chilled his heart. It was that particular combination of heat and dust that men who work in the demolition of old buildings, buildings made of stone and concrete, recognize: the smell of solid rock being cracked, crumpled, crumbled. It is the smell, behind the gunpowder, that hangs behind a mine explosion.

“One of these days,” said Menelaus, “I am going to wake up in bed next to a pretty blond space princess. Unless she changes her hair again. What the hell, Sir Knight? When I zonked out, I had coffins rolling in here to pick up the wounded, I got the doors open, and everyone who was fighting was safely zonked out but you.”

The voice from the external speakers was Sir Guiden’s. “Also the man in red who played you—”

“Scipio Montrose. He is a great-great-whatthehellever-grandnephew or something.”

“—He was at the doors when the cave-in happened. The geophone in his sarcophagus shows that the corridor outside the big doors you jammed shut is now filled up entirely with rubble.”

“I performed a shutdown of the reactor core, so we are not going to die of radiation poisoning, but the quicker we get everyone into coffins for cellular cleanup and regeneration, the fewer cases of hair loss and bone marrow disease we might encounter. The bad news is that if I thaw the Blues, they can use their radio triggers to paralyze everyone.”

Another temblor rippled through the area. The stalactite-shaped chandelier which had been hanging like a loose tooth now fell in a cataclysm of crashing, breaking, shattering, and the groaning scream of tortured metal. Menelaus could not see if any petrified bodies had just been crushed. Dust filtered down from the cracked ceiling, and he could hear dozens of bullets fallen from a broken wall-gun belt clattering brightly to the floor like so many dropped marbles.

“What’s causing the cave-in?” snarled Menelaus. “This facility is supposed to be able to withstand an energy blast equivalent to one thousand sticks of dynamite without rattling a teacup on a saucer.”

“Offhand, Liege, I would say it was an energy blast equivalent to one thousand and one sticks of dynamite.”

“’Swonderful. Thaw Illiance. Scrape every single last of his gems off his coat and then and only then whack him with your wake-up stick. Get Scipio over here. Hand him one of Rada Lwa’s dog pistols. If Illiance paralyzes us, Scipio shoots him. Shouldn’t come to that, though. I think Illiance has a good heart, if he keeps his weirdness chip turned off. And who else is thawed?”

“Your lovely lady wife and her love-starved bouncy-boobed Beautiful Nurse Squad.”

“It was the nursing rather than the bouncing I had in mind, Liege, thinking that we need help with any wounded that had to be thawed, or transitioned from short-term hibernation to a long-term regime.”

“Being a Chimera, sir. He threw himself on the enemy bayonets and blew himself to bits. The aiming cameras recorded it.”

“Damn! And I promised the nice psycho lady Chimeress I’d try to save him.”

“And send one of the bouncy-boob squad with a medical kit over here on the quickstep. I need a gill of morphine or something, and a seamstress to sew my big toe back on. Have one of the dogs sniff around the room to see where it rolled. And hand me your sword.”

“My sword, my Liege?” The voice over the helmet speakers was slow with puzzlement. “You are too weak to wield it, and your hands are unpracticed.” Nonetheless, he unhooked the massive claymore from its war belt, and leaned it against the armrest of the throne.

Soorm and Mickey were lying, one in a smooth furry heap, the other in a mountainous gelatin blob, to the left and right of the throne. Sir Guiden directed cherry-colored motes from his thaw wand toward them, waiting until their skins started to take on color, and then he moved away in a whirr of leg motors down the dais and across the chamber.

The ventilation had cleared more and more of the black smoke away, and now could be seen the bodies of the dead and dying—the latter preserved like flies in amber in pale petrifaction—here lying singly, there lying in a pile, or there lying sundered in pieces. There was wreckage of automata also, and the waters of the fountain had fallen silent.

2. Epicenter

With his good hand, Menelaus tapped on the library surface of the armrest of the throne. He was talking aloud, in English. “I just love having a computer system where, every time you press a poxed command in, nothing the pox happens. Oops! What have we here? Seismometer is working. The epicenter is the depthtrain station. Someone on the surface is blowing a hole through the armor between the third and fourth level. Prying the damn roof off, so the train station will be open to the sky. But who in the world is—?”

A voice, or rather a set of voices, answered him, speaking in English. “It was Aanwen.”

Menelaus looked up. Soorm and Mickey had thawed to the point where they were breathing, and their flesh was pink, but they looked comatose. Neither of them had spoken.

Some clouds and banks of the black smoke still hovered in the chamber, in quarters where the ventilation was broken. One cloud lapped the area between the dais and the statue of Hades, so that the white, marble arms and pale, frightened face of Proserpine, frozen in midfling over the death god’s shoulder, emerged from the top of the cloud like a drowning swimmer.

The black cloud stirred and Alalloel of Lree, the Melusine, stepped out from the fogbank of poison, and mounted the dais. The skin of her face and hands, which were not covered by her skintight wet suit, were glinting and glimmering with a cherry-red cloud of motes, as if she herself were a living thaw wand, or could impersonate the action of such a wand with her skin cells. From the tiny glints of reflection behind her, he could tell that the surface of her exposed back was also lit up as if with the same cold flame of delicate pink.

Alalloel opened her tongueless mouth. The voices of three women blended together emerged. “Aanwen the Widow was the final agent of the Nobilissimus del Azarchel, the one you did not detect.”

Her walk was different than it had been before. Now it was both more confident and more womanish: she swayed her hips and swung her arms, or, when a strand from her hanging bangs fell in her face, she tossed her head with a casual, unselfconscious, girlish gesture to flip it back. Menelaus found her whole demeanor eerie and unnerving.

The cherry aura of motes withdrew into her skin, which returned to normal hue. Alalloel stood before the throne, one leg straight, the other flexed, one hand on her hip, gazing at him with her strange, lightless eyes. At one moment, she reminded him of some blind and inhuman monster; in another moment, she looked like a girl, shorter than average, wearing an oddly bobbed haircut and what could almost be a pair of dark eyeglasses.

Now two of the voices halted, and only one, a contralto with a slight, lilting accent, continued to speak. “Upon discovering your identity, Aanwen commanded Ull to pretend not to know your identity until the point when any further delay would trigger your suspicions. If I may venture a personal opinion, it would have been wiser for him not to continue the deception for so long; but he evidently knew your psychology better than I. Even now, I sense you doubt me. You think Ull was that slow-witted? I wonder what distorts your estimate.”

He said, “Nobilissimus del Azarchel you call him? Even Pellucid mocked the idea, but I knew that there had to be a Current culture on the surface, and that it was being run by Del Azarchel.”

Now she spoke in three voices again. “Not on the surface.”

“In the ocean, then,” he shrugged. “You guys are dolphins and whales and machine emulations nerve-linked with humans and Moreaus into a single gestalt mind—or so I was told. I was also told that certain bodies in the gestalt are mind-controlled down to the finest imaginable level: a helotry of the mind, a slave who cannot even imagine freedom unless he is commanded to imagine it, and told how to.”

Her trio of voices said, “That format has been superseded.”

“Meaning what?”

“Consider the man-hours involved in removing even one mental habit from an entire society, merely to perform the proofreading and line-checking of each hierarchy by its superiors, plus the danger of contamination of the editors by the very thoughts they are redacting, and you will apprehend some of the immediate limitations of the helotry system. For daily operations, our world is governed by a decentralized parliamentary plutoaristocratic advocacy, based on semi-independent families and clans, similar to the Concordat designed by Rania the First. The Nobilissimus is supreme military commander as well as the sacramental king.”

He said, “From the time of the Witches onward, the Hermeticists ruled their subject populations in secret. What changed?”

The choir of female voices said, “All previous races were of inferior design, and not intended to survive long enough to witness the End of Days when the Hyades should descend; had they known the Hermetic intention, they might have objected to the prospect of their own scheduled extinction. Those considerations do not apply to the Melusine; therefore there is no need for deception on the part of the Nobilissimus. The remnant of previous race members will be taken up.”

He wondered why she phrased it that way. On the part of the Nobilissimus. Montrose said, “He must still need some damned deception. Your system of mental helotry is designed to be fitted into the Hyades social equations as neatly as a jack fits a socket, or a spurred boot fits a stirrup. Does your general population know that he intends to enslave us all to the Hyades?”

“Evidently he does not, as the current circumstances show.”

That was an odd, even astonishing, reaction. It did not fit into any pattern he could form in his mind of the historical events which created this era.

Montrose wondered if his ears had betrayed him. Had Del Azarchel changed his mind about resisting the invader? Or were his people simply deceived about his intent?

But he was more worried about her other words: “You said the remnants of the previous races will be taken up? What the hell does that mean? What are you doing to my clients?”

“We Melusine form gestalt minds of posthuman levels of intelligence beyond what even the Giants achieved. Brain masses the size of whales swim in the waters: the unit you see before you is merely an extension, a tool used for land-based operations. Each gestalt is controlled by a Paramount in a hierarchy, where the lesser minds are taken up into the greater.”

Again, two of her voices faded. The one voice that spoke next was cool and regal, but huskier, a tenor. She sounded like a Carolina aristocrat. “I hereby exercise my claim of possession, as your office of Judge of Ages and Guardian of the Tombs can be more aptly served by me.”

“Sez you,” he muttered.

“This site is mine. Even now, other Paramount Melusine have been dispatched to the eighty-eight other sites under your control,” one of her voices said.

Menelaus was looking at her with an odd, almost hungry look on his face. Then: “What is your interest in my Tomb sites?”

The cold and regal tenor said, “As I have already said. The raw materials you think of as people, which you have preserved for us, shall be thawed, revived, implanted, and willingly or not, brought into nerve-link with our Noösphere, to compel them into the condition you aptly call mental helotry, able to think only permitted thoughts.

“Minds of our scope can only mesh in groups of five or seven: but these lesser minds of the archaic men, lower on the scale of being, can be taken up in far greater numbers. In the case of this site, the Locusts, Inquline, and Savants found here, with very few modifications, can be adapted to be able to perform Melusinry, and so some of the lesser may be taken up under them.

“Our system is hierarchical and exact. No stray person, and no stray thought, is permitted to exist.

“Fear not! Your clients will not be disadvantaged. Their minds will be adjusted so that they will regard the helotry as a joyful rather than regrettable condition. The Melusine mind-gestalts thus will be elevated and augmented with the psychological richness, talents, outlooks, and diverse experience these lesser ones will contribute into the multiform mental unity: their memories, souls, and lives, which the lessers were unable to use or appreciate, will be his.”

“Sez you, and we’ll just see about that. More important topic: The fight in the chamber, and the duel with Rada Lwa and Yuen. So it was a stall tactic? Stalling for what?”

All three voices spoke: “Even a posthuman like you can have his attention occupied by sufficiently dire emergencies. Aanwen needed time to repair a depthtrain car, load it with equipment meant to discover and gather Von Neumann crystal, to calculate the path toward the Earth’s core, and prepare the various detonators she carried hidden in her body to initiate the magnetic overload and railgun launch. Even with the additional digging automatona brought back aboard the Albatross from the Vulnerary Simplifier Tomb site at Mount Misery, it was difficult to move so much equipment in the time available. She descended with the depthtrain, she being a necessary component to the mission, and will not emerge again. It is customary among the Vulnerary Simplifiers to program a widow to commit self-destruction should her mate die. This is done for the sake of the simplicity and tidiness they crave.”

“Hell, and I thought Scipio was kidding when he called people who wouldn’t touch a Bible barbarians. Maybe he weren’t too far wrong. So you are telling me that Del Azarchel sent that lady what lost her husband off to do herself in, because she carries some kind of trigger inside her he needed to hide? And it just slipped his mind to tell her that suicide is a sin? He calls himself a Christian and a gentlemen. He ain’t even a man.”

Menelaus sighed and rubbed his eyes, wondering what would happen if he shouted for Sir Guy to come back over. He wondered what it would feel like to die like the dogs Alalloel (as best he could tell) was able to kill just by looking at them. He wondered what it would look like if Sir Guy died in that same way, falling over without a mark on him. He decided not to call out for anyone.

Menelaus looked up. There was, of course, no expression in the eyes of the Melusine. He realized at long last what they reminded him of: they looked a bit like the eyes of some sea mammal.

Menelaus said, “The earthquakes—what are they? A beam being directed at this spot from Tycho crater? That same one that cracked the surface armor?”

She nodded. “Correct. It can only be used effectively at a given target location after local moonrise. The original plan had been to wait, but the speed with which you quelled the tumult in the chamber, and dispatched Yuen and Rada Lwa and Linder Keir the Gray—but perhaps this last was merely a casualty of the general violence?—it was thought that to act immediately was better.”

Menelaus said, “The dog things can sense something about your agents. Was Soorm one of yours?”

She said, “No harm is done, now that the events are played out, to tell you that we misunderstood his loyalties. He is apparently still carrying out some orders given him by Reyes y Pastor, or rather, given him by Expastor the Ghost.”

“Played out? You think I am finished?” Menelaus suddenly squinted toward the far end of the chamber. Putting his thumb and forefinger of his good hand between his lips, he gave a sharp, high, clear whistle.

No one answered.

He said, scowling, “You turned Exarchel’s motes back on, so that no one can see or hear us. God, how I hate nanotech.”

Her triple voice said, “Finished or not, you are confined until matters resolve themselves. I will permit you to consult with your friends, who perhaps can see to the wounds of that odd, one, solitary body you call your own. I have other arrangements to make throughout these Tombs pending the arrival here of the Paramount assigned to these revenants; or, more precisely, the completion. Consultations must be made before the Bell arrives. The Hyades practice deracination and removal of every surface structure encountered of the target species; this Tomb is now exposed, and, without intervention, will be converted.”

“Wait—you sound as if the Bell is not under your control. Is it actually a machine from the Hyades, which somehow got here faster than possible? But it can’t be! Hold it! Wait!”

She turned, walked over to the central fountain, hips swaying from side to side, paused at the brink, and dove in. She did not emerge.

Menelaus blinked. Maybe her outfit actually was a wet suit.

3. Pretenses

Soorm, who was still lying on the floor pretending to be frozen, opened his goatlike eye. His other eye, of course, was already and ever opened, since it had no lid. He said in Latin, “That was weird. But I told you there was a secret exit in that cistern.”

Mickey, who was also lying on the floor pretending to be frozen, spoke without raising his head or opening either eye. “Your breathing changed when you went from alpha wave state to beta wave state. If I noticed it, the posthumans noticed it.”

Soorm rolled to his feet, lithe as a bear. Mickey climbed heavily to his feet, round as a water balloon.

Soorm said, “So what is actually going on, again, exactly? Is this something the nonposthumans can be told?”

Menelaus said, “I think even a nonposthuman can understand the complex and abstract concept that Blackie has been puck-dithering with me.”

Soorm said, “If I knew what that was, I would say it sounds painful. Does it involve your anus in any capacity?”

“It involves my brain being too slow and too stupid. Ever since the moment Aanwen told me she knew who I was and walked out of here and over to my depthtrain station, I’ve just been gulled. He was not after me. Blackie was not trying to dig up this Tomb to find me. He was trying to dig up and capture a working depthtrain station. And he had to do it in such a way that I did not blow the station before it fell into his hands, so he had to have his people act like they were looking for me. Maybe he knew where I was all along; maybe he did not give a good goddamn.”

Soorm said, “Blow the station? Do you have all your rooms and chambers really wired with explosives and outfitted with guns and lethalities? That’s paranoid.”

Menelaus said, “Is your nervous system really hidden under two levels of fakes with three levels of encryption?”

Soorm said blithely, “It is not a matter for casual discussion. I have foes.”

“As have I, and I am usually asleep when they come a-calling.”

Mickey said, “But why does the Master of the World want a depthtrain? And why send Alalloel to tell you? Was she here just to tell lies?”

Menelaus glanced sharply at him. “Lies, plural? With an s? I only heard one. She was lying about the Tombs. But I don’t know the point of that lie…”

“She was so totally lying about Mentor Ull,” affirmed Mickey.

Menelaus said slowly, “What makes you say so?”

Mickey said, “First, Ull was about as good at lying with a straight face as you. Second, Alalloel is possessed. The woman who was just here was not the one who was sitting in the mess tent yesterday.”

Menelaus said, “Yeah. She aged four hundred years in one day.”

Mickey said, “No, that is not it. That demon is a type we call ‘Legion’—a manifestation with multiple centers. But Legion cannot coordinate well. When a demon like that tells a lie, one and only one voice ever speaks. When multiple voices lie, it sounds rehearsed rather than spontaneous, or the voices drop out of synch. So whatever Alalloel said in choir is true. What she said solo is false. She said the thing about Ull solo: Therefore it is false. QED.”

Menelaus said to Soorm, “You heard her. What do you think?”

Soorm flicked his two tongues in the air thoughtfully. “I don’t believe in spooks. But I have noticed that Reyes, and you, and other posthumans I have met have more ability to fool themselves than stupid and normal people like me. You have more spare brainspace or something to devote to explaining away the obvious. Ull had been posthumanized, and so he did not listen when Aanwen told him who you were. Like animals, we humans tend to have a sharper ability to see what is right in front of us. I was there. I saw the dumb look on his arrogant little face. It was right in front of me.”

Soorm shrugged and spread his webby hands. Then he said, “He was blind as a bat in a box down a dark well at the bottom of a coal mine shaft at midnight, overcast with no moon out. You cannot fake that kind of bone-deep stupid. If you had been wearing a yard-high pointy hat with two blinking eyes and the words I AM THE JUDGE OF AGES printed in seven languages circled by a trained magpie calling out the same words in seven languages … it still would not look as bad as what Mickey presently has perched on his head.”

“Hey!” said Mickey, sounding wounded. “This hat makes me look dignified. It is my Headgear of Power!”

“Clothing is overrated,” sniffed Soorm.

Menelaus said, “Why did Weird Girl say Ull was stalling me? It seems a pointless little thing to lie about.”

Mickey said, “Oho! What do you know about the ancient and honorable art of fabrication? If you want to know about lies, talk to a magician. Listen: that little lie was the most important thing Alalloel said, which is why she said it first.”

“Important that I was being stalled?”

Mickey said, “By the beard of baby Oberon, for a supergenius, you’re dumb! No! That is not what the lie was! How did you feel when you found out, not that you had fooled Ull, but that Ull (of all people) had fooled you? Miserable? Worried, weak, and stupid? Scared? Like your foes might be better than you? Or, in other words, you are put in the exact state of mind any foe would want you to be in.”

Soorm said, “She was also trying to make it sound as if Ull, who was a Hermeticist, and Aanwen, who was a personal vassal of Del Azarchel and him alone, were perfectly coordinated. What if they are not perfectly coordinated? Reyes broke with the Table Round.”

Mickey said solemnly, “It is not an unbroken circle. The ward is weakened.”

4. External View

Keirthlin, black parka flapping, came soaring over the floor toward them. She was skating like a speed skater. Menelaus saw that she had reprogrammed the smartmetal of her soles into frictionless surfaces. Her face was no longer grief-stricken, but instead looked preternaturally calm, hard, and intent, as if she had used some mesmeric technique or compartmentalization of her brain to store her grieving until it could be confronted without distraction. Had her expression been one of wild panic, it would not have more quickly imparted to Menelaus a sense of fear.

He was so startled that he began to get up, and this sent such pain through his body that he collapsed back in the throne, and that motion produced more pain. “I am going to need a well-equipped coffin with nine yards of synthetic flesh-replacement.”

Keirthlin skated to the dais, leaped up, landed neatly, but then stumbled, and was on her knees before the throne. Without even bothering to speak, she snatched the goggles off her silvery eyes and thrust them at the face of Menelaus.

He caught them in his good hand before she could poke him in the eye with an earpiece.

“I thought you might like to see this,” she said, panting, her voice bizarrely calm.

Menelaus donned the glasses.

It was an external view of the camp.

It had been only a short time since he had descended underground, but to see the snowy trees and hillocks of the camp in sunlight again, beneath a sky he had almost forgotten, was like looking into a world from childhood.

The cleft was enlarged. Trees on the hilltop had been flattened and scattered. Raw earth and broken rock, stumbled with boulders and dripping like river deltas of brown and dun and back, now spilled from the hill. Three vast shards of metal, carbon-nanotube-reinforced titanium steel several yards thick, had been bent to the vertical, and loomed like the sails of a ship of stone above the enlarged hole. This was where the magnetic ray from Tycho crater had passed.

The third level was gone, save for a fringe of wreckage ringing a pit. At the bottom of this pit, remarkably free of damage and debris, was the depthtrain station; but the launching and receiving coils, the drop-shaft, and the turntable were all vanished. The head of the evacuated tube was exposed to the snowy air. The outer door was gone. Only the inner door stood between the atmosphere and the airlessness of the depthtrain tube.

He saw nothing to provoke panic. Grief and horror and anger, yes, at the casual destruction of any clients in any coffins that might have been on the third level—but not panic.

Then he realized the visor had infrared, ultraviolet, and other settings. Clicking from one band to another, he now saw that the head of the depthtrain tube was glowing white-hot. The excess of magnetic energy running to the surface from the core of the planet was roughly the same as that found at the North and South Poles—or, rather, to be more accurate, the application of some titanic electromagnetic force had made this spot on Earth into the magnetic North Pole, placing the magnetic South Pole no doubt somewhere off the coast of Australia.

The display of such unimaginable immensity of power was indeed worthy of some consternation. Menelaus, in a tense tone, started to say, “Keirthlin, what is causing…”

Then came the explosion.

Menelaus was flung from his throne and fell heavily to the floor, perhaps hitting every single second-degree burn that had blackened his upper back and lower legs. Fortunately, the pain as the ends of his broken arm bones ground together was so great that the tormenting sensation of his dead skin being peeled off receded to the background.

The goggles did not fall off his face, yet he saw nothing. Keirthlin’s calm voice cut through Soorm’s bellowing and Mickey’s swearing, and told Menelaus to stand by. His implants detected the nodes she wore on her belt seeking other contacts through the Nymph arboreal neural net. Then the picture returned.

The image was from considerably farther away. The view now showed the hill, and what seemed a stream or tube of pure white light, slightly red at the edges, reaching down from heaven to touch the shattered crest of the hill. All the black shadows from the trees, clefts, rocks, and surrounding clouds were leaping and staggering in straight lines of deepest black directly away from the tower of white fire.

The Blue Men had been wise to abandon the camp: the seashell-shaped buildings had been tossed by the shock wave like so many teacups shattered against the hearthstone, cracked and blackened, and the smartwire fence flung across the trees like a snarled fishing line. At that same moment, everything flammable flicked with a yellow-white aura and caught fire; everything not flammable began to melt.

The image vanished, and switched to yet another viewpoint, this one from two or three miles away.

A cloud of smoke, black and oily midmost, but red and yellow with blinding fire at the edge, gushed out from the hill and was yanked upward like a drawn blanket. When seen through the ash cloud, the stream of white light now resolved itself into a lava-stream made of molten iron, catching the light with a glitter of diamond refractions.

Menelaus realized the white stream was not reaching down from heaven, but rushing up into it. And it was not a tower, but a river of material moving so rapidly as to make a blur of all features.

It was Von Neumann crystal. It was a segment of supercompressed iron from the inner core of the planet, having been accelerated by linear magnetic drive throughout the entire radius of the globe-crossing depthtrain system and shot through the crust of the Earth at some seventeen times the speed of sound. It was a semisolid bar of iron, fathom upon fathom of it, being tossed into the sky in a casual display of power that only great natural disasters or great instruments of war ever demonstrated.

The material would be heated like a space capsule making reentry by the friction of the speed of the liftoff; but compared to the molten core of the Earth, the heating caused by breaking through the tiny blanket of atmosphere was as nothing.

Then the white tower was gone. For a moment, so fast was the rate of ascent, the tail of the upflying mass could be glimpsed, a tapering comet-length glowing like a bar in a steel mill. Then the hail started: streaks of light the color of snowflakes appearing and disappearing high above. The launch of the mass had been nearly perfect. Nearly. The loss of even one percent of the mass in the atmosphere, as crystals were peeled away or snapped off, meant that everything Menelaus could see from his vantage point, horizon to horizon, was now being pelted as if with hailstones of fire.

It looked like the first few raindrops touching the slabs of the concrete cloverleaf of his old hometown when the glacier in the distance began to display pockmarks and acne. The steam from the melting ice rose up into the sky.

Then the iron falling was like a shower, and the whole landscape was chewed as if by machine-gun bullets into a moonscape, but a moonscape coating the bottom of a furnace. Then the image vanished for the last time.

He closed his eyes, blinking, trying to resolve the last image that had brushed so briefly against his cornea. It was the faintest possible line of blue reaching from the horizon to the zenith, and at this latitude, the atmospheric distortion made the immensity of the skyhook seem to slant across the sky, curving like a longbow, with its foot somewhere over the horizon to the south.

The line of white-hot iron that had leaped skyward had looked, compared to trees or towers or even the skyscrapers New York the Beautiful was alleged once to have held, like a construction Cyclopes would have been too diminutive to build; but only Titans and elder Uranian beings as could gouge out the seven seas with a mattock, or rear the dome of the sky and lantern it with countless stars.

But when seen against the background of the skyhook, it was like seeing a suspension bridge against the background of mountains blue with distance beyond the water. No matter how big, tall, or heavy a suspension bridge, it is a toy compared to the majestic immensity of mountains. The line of sky-flung iron had been longer than a suspension bridge, but not by much, and may have weighed as much as many aircraft carriers set end-to-end.

But the skyhook was astronomical in scope, and made even a mountain range set on its end look puny. In this case, the mountain range Menelaus saw, white with glaciers, and now covered as if with a spilled pepperbox by subatmospheric meteorite impacts, was over seven hundred miles from northernmost to southernmost ridge. The skyhook was well over two hundred twenty thousand miles from base to geosynchronous balance point. The iron column had been a hair less wide in diameter than the hypocycloid tunnel of the depthtrain system: nine and a half feet. In contrast the skyhook was some two and a half miles in diameter and over fifty thousand feet high.

If someone had lit a yardstick on fire and, with the help of a large crossbow, flung it straight up the side of the Empire State Building and into the clouds beyond, some mote smaller than an ant, looking upward in awe, may have been impressed with the hugeness of the yardstick—until its little mind adjusted to the scale.

5. Pain

He felt the hands of Mickey and Soorm on him, helping him back to the throne, and he felt nine distinct types of pain: aches, agonies, scalds, bone fracture, laceration, throbs, gashes, pangs, and smarts.

Treacherous numbness pretending not to be pain, and lightheadedness brought on by blood loss, shock, cold, panic, blows to the face and head, lack of sleep, nanite interference with nerve flow, or brought on by improperly too-rapid petrifaction and thaw, that he did not consider to be “pain”—these were like wading pools left behind by the tide compared to pain’s true ocean. The things like where his nose hurt from being slammed into a coffin, or where his head ached from being pummeled by the musketstock of a dog; while he might have complained were he healthy that these were painful, compared to the overloaded torrent of pain signals jerking and throbbing and cutting like ice and flashing like angry lightning down his nerves, he would have laughed to call a mere broken nose or cut lip pain.

So it was that when Soorm gasped and Mickey flinched in surprise; and he fell awkwardly into the seat; and the sensation in his arm was only that of having red-hot wires yanked inexpertly up and down through the marrows of his bones; and his skull barked against the metal backrest—that was so slight that he merely smiled, wincing only slightly because he discovered his lip was cut.

“Godling, you are in trouble,” said Mickey in Virginian.

Menelaus, who was absorbed in recollecting the visual details of the scene overhead and outside, had only the smallest fragment of his many-layered mind to spare, and so he said, “I think we are in trouble. That mass of Von Neumann crystal was traveling beyond escape velocity, maybe beyond orbital velocity, and it may be the first of several such launches. I’ve toyed with the idea, of course, of using the train acceleration system to launch a vehicle into orbit, but the friction problem has always stopped me. In this case…”

Only then did he realize that Mickey, who had no goggles with an external view, could not possibly be talking about the launch he had just seen, or even known what was going on overhead and outside. The noise of micrometeorites landing with explosive force along the rocks and hills overhead could be heard, buried here under scores of feet of bedrock and layers of armor, as something fainter than the tap-tap of the drops of a summer shower on the roof. Mickey probably did not leap from that sense impression to conclude that Exarchel had just successfully pirated the technology of Pellucid and created a small-scale orbital version of itself using frighteningly advanced Xypotechnology.

He reached up and pulled the goggles off, absentmindedly proffering them toward Keirthlin, who was not looking at him. Her silvery eyes were on the gathered men facing him.

Their hair was smeared with blood and offal, sharpened bones piercing nose or earlobes, and dressed in white leather flayed from human victims. They were standing on the highest tier of the dais, and had both captured muskets and antique pikes and halberds pointed at him.

Of the twelve men, four were civilians: one wore the grape leaf design of a vintner, one was dressed in the spirals and formulae of a genetic alchemist, one wore a surcoat emblazoned with the snakes and birds of an apothecary, and one was in a black robe adorned with the cogwheels and smokestack of a factory hand. The rest wore the frozen and berserk expression of Demonstrators, the warrior-zealots of the Witches.

Behind them, carrying wands instead of muskets, were Fuamnach and Louhi, Twardowski of Wkra, and Drosselmeyer of Detroit. Drosselmeyer had in his hand a jeweled pistol of the Blue Men, and he had managed to ignite the gems of the barrel to a soft, sinister glow.

Mickey stood to the left of the throne, leaning on his charming wand and looking remarkably nonchalant for a man facing a firing squad. Soorm was on all fours next to the left arm of the throne, his tail lashing, eyes retracted, head lowered, teeth bared; but the expression on him looked like something between a grin and a sneer. Keirthlin the Gray in her black parka stood behind the throne, her hand on the tall backrest. Her fur hood was down, her goggles parked on her brow, and her blue hair hung like a banner down her back; but her strange silver eyes were calm as if she used a mental discipline to neutralize all fear.

“Yes, we are in trouble,” said Menelaus with a sigh.

“What do you mean, ‘we,’ White Man?” asked Mickey.

6. Burn

Menelaus closed his eyes again, because he was still trying to elicit one last bit of visual information from the photons that had struck his eyes. The image was clear enough in his imagination: the vast blue swath of immensity, longbow-curved, hanging in the heaven huge as the rings of Saturn as seen from its innermost moon, had been slightly brighter on the eastern limb than the western. It could not be sunlight. It was an energy discharge of thrusters or attitude-correction jets of some sort, imparting an impulse to the immense mass. It was a maneuvering burn.

The implication of that was clear. The Bell, or whatever intelligence was directing it, had noticed that the north and south magnetic poles of the planet were not where they should be and had seen the eruption of the thin sliver of core material shoot up past mantle and crust, atmosphere and stratosphere—and it was correcting its orbital elements to move the mouth of the skyhook toward the open and defenseless, roofless tomb.

“No, my friend,” said Menelaus to Mickey with a sigh. “I mean ‘we.’ Those of us in this chamber, on this continent, or on this planet. I mean the human race, and I don’t just mean unmodified elder men. I mean all the human races, living or ghost. Us. All of us.

“I thought the skyhook was something the Blue Men had created. Then I thought it was Melusine technology. Now, I do not know. Maybe Einstein was wrong. Maybe the Hyades got here faster than the laws of physics allow, or can accelerate mass without energy, or can derive more energy from a gram of mass than total conversion allows. Because that object, which is bigger than anything man-made has any right to be, is sure acting like a Hyades instrumentality.”

He opened his eyes.

There stood Illiance to one side of the line of armed men, in a coat of blank, pure, and gemless blue, and a look of unselfconscious pride almost like a glow.

To the other stood Fatin Simon Fay, pretty as a schoolgirl in her white cotton dress and peach sash, hair snared in a net that hung down her neck, and in her face was such darkness that Menelaus could not put a name to it. It was a passion beyond mere anger or shame or thirst for revenge.

“Why, Miss Fay,” he said in Virginian. “Pardon my manners for not getting up. What can I do for you?”

“You can burn,” she said.