The boyish laugh came again. “I confess to executing someone you were trying to use to betray me! My own son! You killed him, not I! I only carried out the sentence!” The boyish voice dropped to a lower note. “His mother was Chione, daughter of Daedalion. A famed beauty! Mine! And I kept her suspended animation whenever I was too busy for her. It kept her out of trouble. Or should have. She was assassinated by Lady Venus after Chione attempted the assassination of Hermaphrodita, your monstrous sibling. At Chione’s funeral, her father attempted suicide, and so I used pantropy to turn him into a hawk.”
Aeneas, in bewilderment, said, “Why are you telling me this?”
“To show you how out of your depth you are. Do you honestly think, foolish young whelp, that with a past like this, all our lives a Gordian knot of bloody hatred, slights, retaliations, unforgivable deeds, that this family can somehow be ruled by you? Your laws, your milksop notions of democracy? Do you think the silly sheep should vote for the shepherd of the flock?
“Do you want to know which of my brothers killed your father?
“Yes, I confess to the death of Anubis, and, one by one, all the others of the younger generation on whom you tried to bestow Father’s secret of the warp science. You used the war as an excuse to break the elder generation’s monopoly of power! But I scotched it!
“Yes, I was in communication with the space vampires, and told them whom to kill, and I was responsible for mechanical failures which killed Lord Hydra at HH 80-81!
“Yes, I asked the Revenants at 9 Sagittarii to hunt down Ganymede, who once looked at me askance! And the Ice Vampires of KW Sagittarii were told by me, me, to concentrate their fire on Prospero and Triton!
“Lord Dionysus I liked. That death is on you, you and your reckless risks.
“Well, my Lord Sovereign Emperor? Well, you bag of mismatched organs and medical wastes, you lump, who cannot even keep a human shape? Well, you little twig trying so hard to fill father’s big boots? I’ve confessed! Come down and execute me! Where are you? Come down!”
Aeneas was shocked. These murders he had not even suspected were murder, since they took place in war, during battles. He had been played a fool by his cunning uncle! Wrath burned his intestines, as if he had swallowed raw venom.
Aeneas heard the snap of air as Mercury moved faster than the speed of sound. He did not sense what weapon was used, but suddenly all the pillars holding their tortured corpses toppled and fell. Aeneas spread his owl-feathered wings and glided in a great, slow circle. He could hear the hummingbird heartbeat of the high-speed metabolism of Lord Mercury as the boyish little man moved rapidly from one fallen pillar to another, trying to see where Aeneas had fallen.
The many mouth eggs had fallen haphazardly here and there. Some were still connected by nerve links. Aeneas again had them speak all at once, so that his voice came from every direction of the compass. “Do you confess to the murder of Geras Lord Saturn?”
Lord Mercury moved quickly. Again, Aeneas could not sense what weapon was being used, but four of the mouth eggs that spoke exploded.
“Of course I confess to that! I would claim credit for that even if I had not done it! He was an undead, under my control, when he attacked you: I needed you to destroy him, since he was the only one with the timewarp technology, the only one who could rob the tricks I play with velocity and inertia of their value. He was the only one who could stop me!”
Aeneas felt the hand of Mercury touch one of the nerve filaments leading back to him. Aeneas placed a ten thousand volt static charge in the filament before he plucked the near end out of his spine and flung it silently aside. He heard the explosive thunderclap as the charge went off, but, again, the hummingbird noise of Mercury seemed to be everywhere at once, in no location, and Aeneas smelled only an insignificant amount of burnt flesh.
The cloud of locations condensed again, and Mercury stood halfway up the slope of the mound-shaped dais on which the throne here stood. “Tricky! Cunning! The little runt still thinks he can outwit me!”
Aeneas landed on the back of the empty throne, and folded his wings. He was not sure what sense impressions Lord Mercury, or his signet ring, could master in this black environment, so Aeneas halted his own breathing and stilled the beats of primary and backup hearts, using silent peristalsis of his veins to cause blood-flow, and releasing oxygen from hidden storage cells.
“Well, Sovereign? Well? Speak up! I’ve confessed. Utter your sentence of condemnation! Walk over here and slap my face! Show yourself! You can do that, can you not?”
And when Aeneas did not respond, Lord Mercury, in a snap of supersonic noise, was suddenly quite near the throne. Aeneas quailed, not knowing how the little man had found him, and not knowing how to overcome him in a fight.
But no: Mercury was now near the control box. “I am sending a signal to my friend Rhazakhang to change the pitch of the Master Armature, once he has overcome the militia with his infinite numbers. Soon we should have light and gravity back! You will be able to throw more lightning in a sad and weak copy of Jupiter’s power, eh? Or perhaps you can try to run away! I will let you have a head start! But, no matter what the head start, people say no one can outrun me! Speak up!”
Aeneas said nothing. He thought furiously.
Mercury said, “The undead grow stronger as they fight, and add the fallen to their numbers. Living organisms grow weaker. That is always the shortcomings of living things! They are weak and illogical. The dead exist in a purely intellectual existence.”
Aeneas continued not to breathe nor to let his hearts beat. Was there any way out of this trap? He could think of nothing.
Mercury said, “Do you need more confessions? Let me list my wondrous works! I knew that father was still alive. Thoon was working with me and for me, and it was easy enough to draw you into what seemed a pro-democracy conspiracy. My plan then was to have Thoon kill you via vampirism, and this would force father to reveal himself, and release the warptech to one of us, so that mankind could fight the vampires. I selected you because I knew you were the favorite child of Lady Venus, and I wanted Venus to suffer.”
Mercury now leaped onto the top of the coffin where Lady Luna was trapped. He did an energetic jig on the lid, banging his heels. Muffled shrill and nasal shrieks answered.
“Item: Lady Luna I framed. I killed her handmaidens and used her interplanetary beam weapon to shoot at you. Still not clear on how you dodged that one.
“Item: I arranged the ambush at Ara A, and of course I saw the arrival of the Black Fleet there in the tachyscopic probes you had me man, forty Dyson Spheres, but failed to tell you.
“Item: I had Lord Saturn freeze time not just to kill you, but so that I could go examine the armatures and find all these vampire servants you said you had who knew the warptech secrets. Remember that? But that was your first attempt to trick me, wasn’t it?
“In reply, I called on the vampires of WR102 to erect a time warp to trap us, since I knew that the only person who could peel back the time warp and unwarp it was Lord Saturn, who was dead, or else was Lord Tellus, who first gave Saturn his powers. And so I watched. Planet George emerged first, and freed the others.
“That meant one thing: under his mask that he always wore, Lord Uranus was Tellus!
“And now I have him drugged and chained in one box, and your girlfriend who is my bride to be in another! And there is no one to stop me!”
Mercury uttered a wild, mad laugh. “These last few months have been so exhilarating! The fear of being caught! Everything at stake! Killing where and whom I wished, knowing every man’s hand was against me! You have no idea….” His laughter trailed off to a hiccough, and he drew a ragged breath, and spoke in a calmer voice. “You really have no idea. It was like being invisible. It was like being invulnerable. My only weapon was that I was so much smarter than you. My only shield was that you were so much dumber than me. It was fun. It was fun, really it was.”
A soft, reddish light stole into the area.
r /> Mercury uttered a crow of triumph. “And now look! Rhazakhang is victor! The sunlight is returning! As soon as I see you, and before you can blink, you die!”
Aeneas now saw that he stood beneath a wide dome, which was pierced with a round skylight above, and many windows in concentric rows around it. From the images in the glass, he knew he was in Lord Mercury’s personal compound.
A limb of the mighty Luminous Blue Variable 1806-20 occupied most of the heavens beyond, partly occluded by a coppery crescent, obviously Jackal, in whose penumbral shadow the small planet stood, shielded by many and powerful fields from the full light and heat of that monstrous hypergiant star.
The lighting in the dome, and other electronic gear arranged about its farther walls, now also lit up or stirred to life. Mercury was just as Aeneas had seen him last: a man inhabiting the body of an underage boy, in short silk pantaloons and a lacy wide collar, but with wise and ancient eyes, black with cruel thoughts, in the midst of an unlined, cherubic face.
His coat was covered all along the inner lining with pearls of many sizes, not just dangerous black ones and safe white ones, but also colors Aeneas never before had seen, whose functions he could not guess: pink pearls and pale amber, yellow ivory and deep blue.
The only weapon in his hand was his telescoping baton, about which two snakes were entwined.
The eyes turned toward him. Aeneas saw no possibility of defeating the swift and crafty Lord Mercury in combat.
Aeneas gathered his courage, and decided to die without loss of dignity. He restored his lungs to function, drew in a breath, and spoke. “Do you also confess to the charge of treason?”
And then the eyes merely slid on past him. Even though Mercury was standing on a coffin next to the throne and Aeneas was perched on the high chairback of the throne, within two yards of him, the little man did not see him. His gaze was blank, and he turned his eyes right and left, up and down, as if still looking for him.
Aeneas felt a moment of elation followed by a moment of despair and anger. Elation, because he wondered if some force were preventing Mercury’s eyes and mind from registering his presence. And then anger, as he realized the little man was merely toying with him.
Lord Mercury spoke. “Confess? I boast. My motives are not hard to glean. Chione was not my first wife, or my second, even though I never collected women like Lord Jupiter, who gathers them like a philatelist collecting stamps. Poor Chione was taunted by Venus, and so she was provoked! I did not want her to kill Hermaphrodita, the little monster!”
Aeneas said, “All this happened before I was born. I don’t know or care about it. How does that mitigate your crimes?”
Again, the hot gaze of the smaller man passed through him. “The only way to escape the madness of love was to return to boyhood. My young body has none of those chemicals and hormones which make men weak and turn women into lunatics.”
He kicked on the top of the coffin again, eliciting another muffled squeal from Lady Luna. “I do not actually even want my pretty niece for wife. I just like the idea of severing your head, and the head of Jupiter, and keeping them both artificially alive and awake, so you can watch the wedding night, which will be involuntary, indecent and infertile, to say the least. I lack the mature masculine equipment, you might notice, and so the more troublesome biological details will be handled by various loathsome servants I have devised for this task!”
Another moan of anger issued from the coffin, which made Mercury laugh.
“I am sure the virgin of the moon is secretly thrilled!” Mercury said. “What girl does not anticipate her wedding night with bated breath? But not I! No! No, I am free of the sex drive. My mind alone is pure and logical, with no love to mar the crystal lens of intellect. So I alone can ask what crime is? What is sin? Merely the expression of dim and limited minds to oppress the bright.
“But what happens if the brights do not play along? What if we move beyond good and evil, eh?
“The vampires agreed to make me the shepherd of their flocks. I could keep as many as I liked alive as long as I liked, for so long as I gave over a tenth of the population every ten years. It is a mutually beneficial outcome. Only a tenth per decade! Plenty of time to restock! Is that too small a price to pay for revenge against Father, against my brothers and sisters, for the fulfillment of all my dreams, and the imperial scepter? Anyone else would have done the same, if only you were smart enough to think of it, brave enough to break the hallucinatory chains called ethics, morals, logic, and into the free and unbounded realm beyond! The realm of infinite possibilities!”
“You would feed living souls to the vampires? Your own people?”
“They are not people. They are pets. Artifacts made by the family. And every system needs taxation. The vampires are merely more direct than most. More honest. And besides, vampires actually are people. And speaking of honest, I honestly must ask: where are you? Why cannot I see you?”
And Aeneas understood, and laughed aloud.
Lord Mercury scowled. “What is so funny?”
Episode 19 First Lord of Creation
Electromagnetic energy was able to flow through space once again, and gravity.
His magnetic navigational senses, much like those of a migratory bird, allowed Aeneas to pinpoint his longitude and latitude. The dome under which he stood loomed over Argeiphontes Park atop Caloris Planitia, which was the private estate of Lord Mercury on planet Second Mercury. The small world was being bathed in the intolerable light of LBV 1806-20. The spacewarp wrapping the luminous blue variable star had faded, just as Lord Mercury had said it would the moment the vampire hordes swarming the ringworlds and joints of the vast star-spanning armature won final victory over the outnumbered human militia.
A second sun filled the sky, also intolerably bright. This was a hollow sphere of plasma the enemy was using to enclose and smother the neuropsionic radiation from the final and fading remnant of Sol. The World Armada was within. The disk was a solid mass of sunspots and flares, discolored, and visibly shrinking. The hollow sphere was slowly and grandly collapsing. Aeneas reminded himself that what he was now seeing had happened over an hour ago, while Aeneas had been traveling in the form of Schroedinger waves to this spot.
Within an arm’s length of Aeneas stood Lord Mercury, against whose control of speed and inertia and Schroedinger-wave uncertainty effects Aeneas had no defense. But the eyes of Mercury were blind to him. They darted left and right, up and down, and focused on other objects in the wide chamber, but not on Aeneas.
“Why are you laughing?” asked Lord Mercury, again.
Aeneas said, “Because you have been outwitted. When the planet George emerged from the timewarp, Lord Uranus was with me.”
For all his boasting, the little man actually was quickwitted, quick enough to see the implication of the comment. With a blur of motion, Mercury was now at the second coffin, and had rolled back the lid. Here was Lord Uranus, unmasked. His cheeks and brow covered with tiny bright points of astral neuropsionic sensor-heads he normally kept covered. He was in a straight jacket and fettered with chains. Aeneas could detect with his many senses the suppressed brainwaves, slow heart rate, and other signs of a man in a medically induced coma.
Lord Mercury touched his ring to the face of Lord Uranus, and performed some energy manipulation too swift for Aeneas to see. Immediately slender rays of a strange energy issued from the gemlike points adorning the face of Lord Uranus. Immediately the shadowy silhouette of an invisible figure, a tall man in a gray helmet and black mantle, faded partly into view.
Lord Pluto had been standing in the room the whole time. Now he was half-seen.
Aeneas had seen this effect before, when Lord Uranus had rendered the vampires attacking the circle of thrones at Heaven Lake visible. Mercury had arranged the attack to discover how to overcome Lord Pluto’s technique.
It was over before Aeneas could move. Mercury drew a knife and turned into a flickering hot shadow half-inside and half-outside n
ullspace. Mercury flung himself on the figure of Lord Pluto, and drove the knife though his armor without touching it, and into his heart, and then cut upward through his breastbone to his throat. Fire erupted from the knife blade due to the friction caused by speed.
Lord Pluto’s helm flew off as he toppled backward. His armor, his skin, and his bones began to dissolve as all his atoms, in a bright dusty cloud, began to disintegrate. Aeneas could not tell if this were the same spacewarp-induced neutron storm weapon as had been seen at 9 Sagittarii, or if Mercury had discovered a means to produce the same result via nullspace manipulation.
Time energy like a dark red nimbus issued in a sphere of countless rays from the signet ring of Lord Pluto, and froze the scene in midmotion. Lord Mercury was trapped entirely within the timewarp, utterly motionless. The shoulders and head of Lord Pluto emerged from the boundary of the sphere, but his hair was floating slowly, the tiny bits of his face were dissolving slowly, one mote at a time.
Beneath the face, which was after all a mask, was a second face. One eye was blue, and one was green. His broken and crooked nose was also dissolving. Aeneas saw the circuits of a small weapon hidden inside his septum. White streaks touched the temples above his ears, which were too large for his head. Old-fashioned cybernetic jacks, a technology centuries out of date, peered out from his scalp. His jaw was sharp and his smile was crooked. Even as he was dying, he smiled.
It was Evripades Zenon Telthexorthopolis. Lord Tellus.
He was in a different frame of reference from Aeneas, frozen in mid-explosion, but he sped up his nerve actions and voicebox to allow his words to emerge at a rate that seemed normal to Aeneas.
“Halt!” he cried (for Aeneas was lunging toward the pair).
“But you need medical help!” shouted Aeneas.