“So you could not get back into your Tombs, Dr. Montrose? Forget to leave a spare latchkey tucked in the eaves?”
“Call me Meany. After tonight, what you did for me, Williamsburg, we’re on a first-name basis.”
“May the stars above and stones below smile upon you, Meany! It is a deep ritual and sacred to my people to exchange True Names! No more address me as Williamsburg, for that is only the name of my place of power. You must call me Melechemoshemyazanagual!”
“Not if my life depended on it.”
“Quite right. Then call me Mickey. It is too cold for long names.”
“Just toot your poxified flutes, Mickey, and sleepwalk these damn dogs out of the coffins and back up to the top of the hill where they belong. Then I’ll tell you everything that’s gone wrong in my life of late.”
Mickey raised the twin pipes to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and blew. There came a muttering and clicking among the broken coffins, and then, one by one, the lids began to open.
2. First-Name Basis
The two walked together back toward the tents. Menelaus said, “Try to keep your bulk in my radar shadow. I think I can hoax any of the energy signals coming from the Blue Men in the watchtowers. But you have to keep the dog things off our trail.”
Mickey said, “Alas, long is my shadow and deep is my lore in the Black Art, but I cannot lift the smell of out footprints off the grass. And even the dogs on patrol, I had to wait until the silence and monotony of the night watch, and the slow fumes from my alchemic fire, to put them close enough to alpha-wave state to trigger their buried neural codes. I cannot just toot the flute and send them skipping and jigging off the cliffside like lemmings. All deep magic is based on the things of the night of the mind.”
“Too bad. We could break out of here tonight if you could just get the dogs to turn and rend their masters.”
“I can make the Moreaus do nothing against their nature.”
“But you got them to snooze?”
“We were lucky to find naturally negligent and naturally slack watchdogs. The key to controlling states of consciousness is in the limbic lobe, which reacts to smells and scents at a preverbal level. Unfortunately, I do not have my potions, elixirs, and concoctions, nor the grimoires with the formulae for brewing them.”
“Maybe I can find someone to help with that,” said Menelaus thoughtfully.
“Find someone who can get me my clothing back. I dare not wear the overalls the Blues provide, lest they be hexed with electronics or molecular engines; but I do not adore wandering in the chill exposing my grand acreage of flesh!”
“Ah, if I can get back in my Tombs, I can get back whatever the Blue Men stole from you, or call down fire from heaven to smite them. In the meanwhile, don’t sweat it! Nudity is some sort of tradition here in the future.”
“I had robes of wisdom, red and black and white, woven for me by the fingers of crones two hundred years old, and eye-dazzling with sacred labyrinths. I had gloves of power, given to me by my grandmother’s mother during my first flag-burning ritual, when I stabbed my first pet cat, and—ah, me, alas!—I also owned a sorting hat a cubit tall with a kerchief illumed with my conniving stars tucked around the brim! It was my crown of knowledge! They all were taken from my coffin, and I would give my left eye for their return, since I put my soul-force into them, and gave them their own names. No, to be sky-clad before unclean eyes is a sign of shame and defeat! I miss my robes.”
Menelaus said, “We are all missing something. One thing I am missing is people who should be here: by the way, if you spot anyone who looks like a base stock unmodified human, or slightly modified, you give me a holler right quick.”
Mickey said, “Slightly modified how?”
“Either a tattooed man with bioneural implants like mine, or an albino, made with skull shunts. I heard he was hurt, but I hope I heard wrong. Everyone from after your era or so has so much accumulated genetic tinkering, you should be able to spot the Oldie Moldies.”
“We call them Antecpyrotic Man, or Old Adams. Why am I looking?”
“Remember the coffin yard?”
“You mean where I just sat for two nights in a row, developing frostbite of the buttocks as an apparently pointless exercise in accomplishing nothing? Indeed.”
“Well, picture it in your memory, count up the coffins and read the dates on the plaques, and compare that to the total mass of the equipment we have seen, or glimpsed, either in the mess tent or the medical tent. Interesting, huhn?”
“Interesting that you think I am capable of doing such an unlikely mental contortion.”
“There are thirty-five coffins in the yard, and another thirty-four have been cannibalized to be used either as medical beds or gruel-production units or for other purposes about the camp. But there are only sixty-five of us here.”
“Four are missing.”
“I think we can account for all four: Three are the murdered Locusts. My little friends. When I first woke up, they were the only ones altruistic enough to help me. I would have died of my dog bites if they had not. Back when we were all in the mudpit, in the snow, before the Blues set up these nice warm tents.”
Mickey shivered. “I remember. Don’t remind me. They helped several people who otherwise would have died of the cold.”
“They came from an altruistic age. I will repay what was done to them.”
“That leaves one missing,” said Mickey.
“The sixty-ninth coffin. I think that is my friend Sir Guy. How to get him out of the Blue Man’s hospital, I don’t know. Any ideas?”
3. The Death of an Eon
Mickey said, “I do not know. There is much, here, that is unfamiliar. The scents and names of this cold world are strange to me. All is changed.”
“Yeah. Time does that. Some things stay the same.”
“Like you, Judge of Ages.”
“I wish. I am getting older too fast, and I do not know the Hermetic technique for life extension.”
“I have been of useful service to you, Divine One. I would ask a boon of you.”
“Divine I ain’t and useful you are. Ask away.”
“Tell me what happened to my world?”
“Er. It ain’t no fit pretty story to hear, and it happened long ago.”
“Speak, I charge you. Am I not as a child bereft of his mother, who seeks news of how she passed into the Uttermost West?”
“You asked for it. The ritual cannibalism of the Priestkings was practiced under unsanitary conditions, and in A.D. 4730 cannibalism triggered a plague of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.”
“Kuru disease. It was in part to escape that plague I entered your underworld.”
“It got worse. Your physicians were ineffective or counterproductive, since it was illegal for their patients to recover except in accord with a strict quota defined by caste and race and sex and age, and other classifications sacred to your people. A doctor with too many recovering patients in the wrong category would poison them, so that his quota numbers came out right.”
Mickey said, “I had heard rumors of such things, but thought the ghosts who spread those rumors lied.”
“No, it was true enough. People fled the doctors when they were accused of being sick, and soldiers would round up folk, sick and hale alike, and drive them into medical camps. By 4780, somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of the population succumbed. Your slave creatures, the human–animal geneworks you called the Chimerae, however, were being treated by veterinarians, who did not have to abide by the Aesculapius cult rules. And Chimerae also had greater natural resistance to communicated diseases. And, then, of course…”
“And what?”
“Your people treated them like quim, and then of course the Chimerae rose against you in rebellion. One hundred years of bloodshed played out. The Final Sabbat fell at the Battle of Buffington’s Island in A.D. 4888. The Witch covens in China lasted another hundred years or so, and the Chimerae never managed to co
nquer Tibet.”
“Are there any of us yet? Even one small coven, perhaps in some corner of the Earth?”
“’Fraid not.”
“You cannot be sure! We are a bioethical people, and leave a small ecological footprint, hard to detect.”
Menelaus sighed. “Friend, Polaris was the polestar when I was born. Alrai was the polestar when you were born. Deneb is the polestar now. You and the other thirty witches pulled out of my Tombs are the sum total for your race alive and aboveground. Any lore you personally have memorized is it for your culture. Everything else is gone.”
Mickey’s voice trembled with emotion. “You are a posthuman: you control destiny. You are the Judge of Ages. Why did you condemn us?”
“Not me. I tried to haul your chestnuts out of the fire. Recollect the Nameless Empire and that renaissance, when y’all had nuclear power and nuclear families again, all that good stuff? I guess that is ancient history to you. That was my doing. I was trying to wean y’all off Mulchie’s Looney Tune ideas.”
“Mulchie? Who is this?”
“He’s the man who designed your race and preprogrammed your history. Learned Melchor de Ulloa, the Hermeticist. Your people pray to idols of him.”
“We call him Melchor the Great. He survived the great flood called the Noachian Deluge in the shape of a salmon, and the great burning called the Montrosine Ecpyrosis in the shape of an eagle. The lore says his wives were seventeen in number, and in age: Cessair, Loth, Luam, Mall, Mar, Froechar, Femar, Faible, Foroll, Cipir, Torrian, Tamall, Tam, Abba, Alla, Baichne, Sille. Is the lore correct?”
“I didn’t keep no roster of his doxies, but he was quite the ladies’ man. He jacked like a pogo stick, back in the day. Too bad he didn’t die of the clap.”
“Legend says you killed him atop Mount Ypsilon, in a mighty duel, in the years when the sun hid his face. You called down fire from heaven.”
“I shot fire from my shooting iron and missed by a country mile. But I surely did severe hurt to some of the trees and stones aways behind him, and I reckon they’d be almightily afeared of me.”
“You missed? Can superhumans do that?”
“We surely can, and lucky for me, because he missed his shot at me when he sought to drop a mass of de-orbiting space wreckage on my head, and he was in the drop zone, near enough that he got poisoned by radioactivity, got scared, stuck his pistol up his nose and pulled the trigger and died in a right cowardly and sloppy way, most adroitly messing up that handsome face of his. Your legends leave that part out? Ah, don’t feel bad. Stories tend to get simplified in the retelling. Due to divarication. There is a white-faced jerk locked up in one of these coffins here who knows the whole story, a Scholar named Rada Lwa. So, yes, I can damn well miss. And I can get tripped up. I got tripped up something royally when the history of your people went off the rails.”
“Which of your brother Hermeticists did this thing?”
“No brother of mine. Draggy.”
“Who?”
“The Learned Narcís Santdionís de Rei D’Aragó. You have idols of him too.”
“Why did he condemn us?”
“He wanted a more worldly and warlike type of folk than Witches.”
“Is that the reason? We were a race of Collies, and he craved to breed Huntaways or Lurchers or MacNabs, and so everything our ancestors did, our songs of power, our starlore and deep knowledge, our heraldries and homeopathic phosphors, even our games and festivals—the song the children sing in springtime about the unselfish bee and the diligent ant—was it all dashed away like a chamber pot into the gutter?”
“Sang. Pretty much, that was his reason, yeah.”
“When men die, their shades linger. Do worlds have shades? Do not all my people, all my way of life, cry for vengeance? Is there no echo of that outcry lingering, even if the voice that sends the echo out itself is still? Does a civilization leave a spirit of itself behind?”
“Well, if it can haunt the living, your civilization can rest easy. Because I shot D’Aragó dead as mutton in A.D. 5884. That time I didn’t miss.”
“In the year 4728 by the old reckoning, at Mount Airy, in the shadow of the shrine to Grace Sherwood, you rose from the dead and erected a hall and zendo of the Old Knowing. I and many others learned at your feet, and first swore fealty to you. Yet you went back to your Tomb after only a season. Had you stayed on the surface longer, could you have saved us?”
Menelaus drew his hood more closely about his face and said nothing.
By then, they were coming within earshot of the watchdogs, and so proceeded more cautiously, by sprint, by crawl, by belly-crawl.
4. Witch Lore
They reached Mickey’s tent without being seen or scented. Menelaus touched the metal fabric. The smartmetal could change its conductivity and flexibility. At the moment, it was rigid as steel. Menelaus closed his eyes, sent out a sequence of high-amplitude ultra-shortwave signals from his implants, then grinned. With a soft snap of noise, the metal grew pliant as leather. Menelaus opened the tent flap and shooed Mickey inside.
Inside the tent was a flap of fabric to serve as a cot, a cylindrical unit that served both as latrine and water recycler, and a blanket that could be commanded—one of the few commands the Thaws could give that the circuit would obey—to serve as a stool, a light, or a heat source.
Mickey threw the blanket on the ground and spoke the word. The fabric crinkled and flexed and stood up into a soft cylinder that glowed. Menelaus sat. His shadow spread across the sloping roof of the tent.
“What kind of critters make their stools so that lights shine up their bilge holes?” demanded Menelaus.
Mickey sat heavily on the cot, which creaked beneath his weight, and he said, “I think they mean us to sit on the floor, as they do. Surely the tents record all conversations.”
“Yup. What would you like me to have the record say? I can do visuals and audio. I could record that orgy with the Nymph ladies you was talking about earlier, except then the Blues would wonder how you managed to fit seventy virgins in a tent this size.”
“Your power is such?”
“My know-how is such.”
“Knowledge is power,” said Mickey, removing his vast straw hat. With no sense of modesty, he dropped his grass skirt, unrolled, and began to draw on the prison overalls, grunting and snuffling. “Can you teach me the spell?”
“How good are you at differential calculus using analytical logic notation?”
“Ah … I know enough geometry to cast a horoscope, and can calculate the motion of the same and the motion of the other of the wandering star Venus on her epicycles using hexadecimals. I know how to consult an arithmetic table.”
“Hm. Do you know what a zero is? Or algebra?”
“These are forgotten concepts, invented by the Christians, whom we curse.”
“I think the Mohammedans invented the zero. Or was it the Hindus?”
“Bah! All forms of monotheism the Witch race despises with the Unforgettable Hate.”
“The Hindu was pagans with more gods than you could hit with grapeshot. Back in my day, they owned half the planet and told the other half what tunes to dance to. Scoff all you like, but their mathematicians were top notch and first water.”
“There is more to a people than how cunning they are with numbers.”
“I reckon that’s possible, but I cannot imagine what. Not anything important.” Menelaus drew back his hood and scratched his head. “Anyhow, take you a few years to learn the basics, but I plan to be planted back in the ground and snoring before that. I’ll program one of my critters to teach you, if’n you’d like. Call it a wage.”
“Critters? I fear to ask. Something fried in grease, no doubt. But I will spare them the exertion.” Mickey waved his huge hand in the air with a surprisingly delicate gesture, as if to shoo away a fly. “I need no wage. Am I a hireling? I am a Warlock of the Illuminatus Exemptus of the Twelfth Temple Echelon. My misogi or purification attainments includes dr
eam-walking, mnemonics, and autohysteria, and control of the six phases of the six endocrinal glands. I know the secrets of the Red and of the Black, the nature of the Five Elements, the names of the fixed stars and wandering stars, retrogrades, squares, triunes, and conjunctions, and I speak the hidden language of beasts. My yearning is not for things of this false universe.”
“You got some other universe to swap for it?”
“I have nothing; thus I need nothing. My enemies are dead; the Thirteenth Echelon honors I yearned so eagerly to attain are less than dust; my coven and my circle are as extinct as the second dinosaurs, the whales, and the great apes. Wage? What would I ask? My weight in gold? I could not lift it! And if I could, where would I haul it? Outside the fence is ice and moss and tundra grass. The world is empty. No! Say no more of wage and price and prize: I am a Magus, a master of the most hidden powers, and I live for the Threefold Way: to look at darkness, hear the silence, and name the nameless. Even a godling cannot give me this.”
“Damn straight, because I ain’t got the teensiest notion what you just said. And I told you I ain’t no god. I don’t even say ‘thou’ or ‘verily’ or not no scrap like that. My mother’d done take a bar of lye soap to your mouth, she heard you talk all blasphemous! And tan your hide with a strap—except seeing as you’re tan enough as it is, she might not.”
Mickey had a big laugh, deep and bass and full of joy. “Strange and wondrous! To think the little gods fear their mother goddesses! Truly the Feminine Principle is paramount in all things!”
“Damn straight, the female principle is paramount. That’s why Life is a Bitch. But you are wrong about the world outside. There is someone out there. And behind that someone is Blackie.”
Mickey said, “Black? That is your name for the godling who put the Moon in the sky and placed his hand upon it? He is the Father of the All Ghosts. We curse the Machine of his devising, which since has devised all the woes of man. We call him Xocotl and Azarch.”