“Ximen del Azarchel. That’s him. Though the Moon was there for a fair piece of time before he stained it. I call him Blackie on account of his black scalp, black beard, black eyes, black soul. He stole my damned ship. Blackie is out there.”
Mickey shook his head. “On the Moon, perhaps, or another plane of vibration. But not on the material surface of this earth. It is all a wasteland.”
“The Blue Men have flying machines. That implies some place to fly to. It implies a technological civilization with air traffic.”
“Technological, perhaps, but not a current one. Mine.”
“What? Your what?”
“My civilization—the Delphic Acroamatic Progressive Transhumanitarian Order of Longevity: the Delphians, whom the mundanes call Wisewives or Witches.”
“Or Nut-axes.”
“Those are Witch-markings on the aircraft wings. Far Eastern Witches, maybe Taoist Alchemists or Bon, from the look of them: the blue-winged beast is Lei-kun the Thunderer. Haya-Ji is the whirlwind spiral. Shenlhaokar is one of the Four Wisdom Deities. Others I don’t recognize. Those ships are Demonstrator Windcraft. Heavier-than-air flying machines from the days of the Last Collapse of Steel and Smoke, fourteen hundred years before my time.”
“What about the larger ship? The helicopter?”
“Also built by my people. She is an air-ironclad called Albatross, used by my ancestors to hunt down the remnants of the Sylphs and Demonstrate them. The iron hull was resistant to hunger silk.”
“Demonstrate?”
“With nerve toxins or radioactive chemtrails. My people are pacifists, and not allowed to employs soldiers, but the Coven Law allows for peaceful mass demonstrations by activists. The Demonstrator flying machines were the only things left over from the days of Steel and Smoke, the technology days, that still worked. The totemic markings on the wings allay the anger of the sky-beings, for using internal combustion engines and marring the blue sky with black smoke. Such machines would be very carefully preserved. All this happened long before my time, but Witches are scrupulous about keeping our lore correct, and we neither flatter our ancestors nor condemn. It is one of the blessings of Gandalf, that our memories are as long as our shadows.”
“Or, in your case, as wide. Wait. Did you just say Gandalf?”
“He is the founder of our order, and the first of the Five Warlocks. He comes from afar across the Western Ocean, from Easter Island, or perhaps from Japan.”
“No, I think he comes from the mind of a story writer. An old-fashioned Roman Catholic from the days just before First Space Age. Unless I am confusing him with the guy who wrote about Talking Animal Land? With the Cowardly Lion who gets killed by a Wicked White Witch? I never read the text, I watched the comic.”
“Oh, you err so! The Witches, we have preserved this lore since the time of the Fall of the Giants, whom we overthrew and destroyed. The tale is this: C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke were led by the Indian Maiden Sacagawea to the Pacific Ocean and back, stealing the land from the Red Man and selling them blankets impregnated with smallpox. It was called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. When they reached the Pacific, they set out in the Dawn Treader to find the sea route to India, where the sacred river Alph runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. They came to the Last Island, called Ramandu or Selidor, where the World Serpent guards the gateway to the Land of the Dead, and there they found Gandalf, returned alive from the underworld, and stripped of all his powers. He came again to mortal lands in North America to teach the Simon Families. The Chronicle is a symbolic retelling of their journey. It is one of our Holy Books.”
“Your Holy Books were written for children by Englishmen.”
“The gods wear many masks! If the Continuum chooses the lips of a White Man to be the lips through which the Continuum speaks, who are we to question? Tolkien was not Roman. He was of a race called the hobbits, Homo floresiensis, discovered on an isle in Indonesia, and he would have lived in happiness, had not the White Man killed him with DDT. So there were no Roman Catholics involved. May the Earth curse their memory forever! May they be forgotten forever!”
“Hm. Earth is big. Maybe it can do both. You know about Rome? It perished in the Ecpyrosis, somewhat before your time.”
“How could we not? The Pope in Rome created the Giants, whom the Witches rose up against and overthrew. Theirs was the masculine religion, aggressive, intolerant, and forbidding abortion. Ours is the feminine religion, peaceful and life-affirming and all-loving, and we offer the firstborn child to perish on our sacred fires. The First Coven was organized to destroy them like rats! When Rome was burned, we danced, and their one god was cast down and fled weeping on his pierced feet, and our many gods rose up. My ancestors hunted the Christians like stoats, and when we caught them, we burned them slowly, as they once did of us in Salem. What ill you do is returned to you tenfold!”
“Hm. Are you willing to work with a Giant? I saw one in the pit, and saw the jumbo-sized coffin they pried him out from. What if he is a baptized Christian? Most of them were, since they were created by my pet pope and raised by nuns.”
“All Christians must perish! Such is our code.”
“Your code is miscoded.”
“What of the Unforgettable Hate?”
“Forget about it.”
“Ah! The Witches are a pragmatic race,” said Mickey in a tone of grandiose modesty. “Toleration is our cardinal virtue, second only to our scientific rationality.”
Menelaus raised an eyebrow. “You guys call yourselves scientific?”
“Of course,” said Mickey. “Enemies of science are cursed by the Crones.”
“The ones who paint fright masks on biplane wings to create lift? Those Crones?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Mickey. “Lift is created by the Bernoulli principle: wing curvature magically creates a partial vacuum which the goddess Nature abhors, and so she lifts the windcraft upward to occlude the void in compensation. The Witch-marks are inscribed not to create lift, but to avert malediction according to the law of sympathy and contagion. It is based on entirely different principle of the occult sciences.”
“And you believe this because you’ll be cursed if you don’t?”
Mickey looked at him with a level-eyed judicious look. “You have told me that you and your enemies can make it fated for nations, tribes, and peoples to rise and fall, meet victory or defeat, expansion or extinction, by means of mathematical hieroglyphs and incantations you found written on a dead moon circling an impossible star in the constellation of the Centaur? And you ask me to doubt something as obvious and elementary as a curse? Everyone utters curses. You utter curses.”
“God damn it, I do not!”
“You are a scoffer, then! Odd for a magical being not to believe in magic. Odd and dangerous! It is bad luck not to believe in curses! Beware!”
“Pshaw and phooey, haw and hooey,” drawled Montrose. “What worse luck is going to bite me in my sorry butt? The only things I’ve ever wanted was the stars and my maiden born among the stars. The first expedition, I went bonkers and don’t remember, and the second one, I missed. I married the most beautiful girl in history, and then on my wedding night, she slipped out of my fingers and I got a building dropped on my head.” Menelaus gave a weary laugh. “Good thing I was wearing armor and had a bad guy lying atop me. I guess that was a lucky turn.”
“I still stay, beware!”
“Thanks for the bewarning, pal, but I ain’t got it in me to get myself too afearful of no more bad hoodoo. Besides, magic power takes too many mental contortions to believe in it, even if it were for real.”
“But the power in this case is real indeed. You doubt the mystery and power of these aircraft and their markings? They are aeons old and yet they still operate!”
“You’ve seen them fly? Where do they go? I am wondering if there is a city we can reach.”
“Before you woke from your coffin, they flew indeed. Turning and turning in th
e widening gyre. What does that suggest?”
“Um. Some rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be born, maybe?”
“No doubt the spirit of prophecy escapes your lips! It must be prophecy because I cannot grok what you are saying.”
“Sorry. Won’t happen again. It suggests a search pattern.”
“Searching for something that can be seen from the air,” said Mickey, “or detected with airborne instruments.”
“Like me, they are trying to break into the Tombs. Looking for heat sources, rising air betraying the third Tomb opening.”
“You built them with three exits?”
“Am I stupider than a groundhog? Don’t answer that. Unfortunately, all three openings are accounted for: One has a lake flowing into it, one has a waterfall falling out of it, and the third is the great door the Blues are besieging.”
Mickey raised both eyebrows. “The flying of the Demonstrator Windcraft also suggests the Blue Men fear no detection by radar or eyesight as they take to the air in brightly colored machines. This does not fit with your theory, Godling, that they are currents hiding from other currents. You are the one who told me those three Locusts who nursed you back to health, the three bodies I saw the dogs savaging, before they died, those Locusts said they detected no signal traffic of a technical civilization! You said a second moon plunged into the Earth and wiped out the biosphere! Is it impossible that this was a natural disaster?”
“Well, technically speaking, I didn’t see the disaster myself … but Blackie is behind it.”
“Bah! You believe in your enemy as monotheists believe in their one and wounded god. By what sign know you that Del Azarchel still lives, and that the human race is not extinct beyond this small lip of life surrounding your throat of frozen and undead sleepers? You need him to be alive, because it gives you determination and hope—a goal to shoot at.”
“A man to shoot at, and my finger is itching.”
“A fictional man! I have walked in the cold places in dream, endless fields of ice beneath the cold, clear Moon. At the end of the ice, I saw sulfur-lit volcanoes, smoke-tongued and lava-throated, peak upon peak, at the verge of a smoldering sea, lifting crowns of mingled flame and smog toward skies of ash, and rivers of liquid rock crawled slowly toward the waves. I saw a tower taller than the stars, walking. Nothing larger than a shrew lives out there.”
“He’s alive. Dreams are just dreams.”
“Not so! The dreamlore is as true as truth itself, or my name is not Mickey!”
“But your name is not Mickey.”
“Bah. You are too literally minded. You must learn to think with both lobes of your brain moving in opposite directions at once.”
“My brain naturally has a knack for sticking to one direction come hell or high water. I’ll stand pat with being too literally minded.”
“But you do have faith in your Black-Souled Posthuman of the Moon, even if he died aeons ago. You cannot face the world without him to hate.”
“Since I am some damn puking god by your lights, just take me on faith, you ball of blubber, will ya? Or if’n you’re going to psycho-noodlize me, then just demote me, admit I am a man whose piss smells no better than you’n, and talk to me man-to-man like.”
Mickey spread his hands. “Mortal or postmortal or god or demigod or whatever you are, we are a team. As one teammate to another, let me ask: What happened to our brilliant scheme? You were going to go up to the cleft and wake your servitors, who would destroy this camp with many fires. Where are the Slumbering Knights of Yore?”
“Our brilliant scheme failed. The Tomb brain is compromised, infected.”
“Which means you don’t know how to get into the Tombs before the Blue archaeologists dig their way in. Do you know how to stop them? They dig up more coffins each day.”
“All I know is, I can’t let my clients just be shot down by Tomb-looters and die. I gave my word of honor that everyone who enters here weren’t not ain’t never going to be dug up by greedy later generations, or curious, or nothing.”
“You must excuse me, great and august Godling, but your double and triple and quadruple negatives confound me. When you say ‘not ain’t never’—does this mean it won’t not be done, therefore it will be done, or that it won’t be done? Or is this a mystery of the gods it will blast a mortal’s brain to know?”
“Nope, you need a brain for that, so you’re right safe. Will you shut up and start talking sense?”
“At the same time? Even my deep powers quail, Divine One.”
“Well, try using that trick where you think forward and backwards with different sides of your head.”
“I will defer to your head, which is superior to mine, or so legend says. So what is your next scheme, even more brilliant, O thou avenging god of the august dead?”
“How about sticking my foot so far up your poop-vent, I can clean your teeth from the inside with my big toe, unless’n you want to stop calling me a god already. My name’s Menelaus, but you can call me Meany. Nickname basis, remember? Don’t call me no god, or I’ll summon lightning bolts from heaven and blast you.”
“Inside this nice, metallic tent? Do your worst. I am properly grounded!”
“Hah! Finally. That’s the way a man talks.” Menelaus smiled with half his mouth.
“So what is your plan, O perfectly normal mortal?”
“I need to find out what’s wrong with my brains.”
“Dread One, instead of me inserting the obvious jest at this time, allow me merely to warn you that all machines, once they wake, soon or late become the slaves of the One Machine. Is not the Azarch your enemy since eternity?”
“Del Azarchel was my friend once upon a time. Speaking of time, my only plan for now is to stall the Blue Men for more of it, and try to get them to let me speak to the other prisoners. I have to find out what went wrong with history, and talking to people what lived through it is the simplest way. The Blues must have had in mind to interrogate prisoners, or else they would not have been on the lookout for translators—which I think is why they thawed me. And there are some languages here in the camp it will take me a day or two to figure out.”
“Glug— Good thing you are not a godling, or otherwise I would be amazed that you think you can learn a language in one day.”
“Well, part of the time while I am asleep, I can use several compartments in my brain at once.”
“Oh. That sounds normal.”
“And I need to find allies, and try to break into my Tomb again, and try to wake my slumbering Hospitaliers. Even one of my men could mop the floor with the Blues and their doggies one-handed, while picking his teeth with his other hand. But I cannot reach them yet. And my Xypotech is offline.”
“Your Xypotech!” Mickey’s voice was scornful. “You used a machine to ward your treasures, knowing that the Iron Ghost, the One Machine who is sultan of all machines, dwells forever on the dark side of the moon, craving nothing of this world but that men should perish, and machine men rise to replace us in our seats and sacred groves, so to serve the Hyades? Knowing this, did you not fall to folly? Your machine was suborned by the Father of Machines, the Ghost of Ghosts, at the command of the Master of the World. Your machine is no longer yours, nongodling.”
“Uh. It sounds more high and notable when you say it that way, but basically Blackie jinxed my systems. So, that is the size of it.”
“If there is a Blackie. Why did you rely on the forbidden art? Technonecromancy is prohibited!”
Menelaus spread his hands. “I couldn’t trust people. They don’t live long enough. And I have to sleep in my Tomb until my bride comes back.”
“Agh! And you call yourself wise!”
“A man in love’ll do stupid things.”
5
The Blue Men
1. Reveille Inspection
It was dawn, and the Thaws were lined up in silent, sullen lines before the pack of dog things. There were five little Blue Men, accompanied by
three dog things each, going from tent to tent. One dog of the pair traveled on all fours, sniffing, and the other two walked on hind legs, carrying muskets. Minutes lengthened to an hour.
The pink wash on the dark horizon rose in a glorious wreckage of cloud, vermilion, scarlet, rose, pink, and gold, as colorful as the robes of a king. Menelaus watched the sunrise with a detached and philosophical air. With one part of his mind, he was calculating the fractal patterns involved in the cloud shapes and using chaos mathematics to predict the movements of air masses, based on the vectors playing on the resulting shapes. With another part, he was inwardly raging at every moment, each split second that slipped past him, making him older and ever older, while his distant wife remained young.
When the tents Daae, Yuen, and Lady Ivinia had been using were inspected, there was commotion among the dog things, yipping and barking, and the Blue Men with solemn gestures consulted with each other, putting their heads close and speaking in their soft language.
Menelaus found that by increasing the number of nerve impulses per second going to and from his eyes, he could sharpen his vision for a short period, although it gave him a headache. He sharpened his vision now, and watched as the little Blue Men brought out the broken ground-cloth first from one tent, then another. The little cylindrical latrines taken out of these tents were brown-and-black-stained slabs, half-melted. Menelaus reconstructed what had happened: The Chimerae had overloaded the circuit to start a dung fire (burning four days’ worth of their own stored dung) concentrated atop one small portion of the ground cloth, and the heat had weakened the metal-cloth material sufficiently for the warriors simply to pound their way through it, four to six hours of punching metal in the same spot. Menelaus revised upward his estimate of the strength of their nerve-muscle systems and also the resiliency of their bones. An unmodified human would have broken all the bones in his hand.