The creature folded his wings and closed his eyes, and breathed a sigh so broken that it brought a tear to the eye of Montrose, and a sneer to the lip of Del Azarchel. Silence for many minutes reigned.
8. Pride and Atonement
Then the Swan, myriad eyes still shut, said in a still, deep intonation: “If there is an atonement you wish to make for your crimes of unparalleled magnitude, genocide many times over, you who led the Hyades here or you who crippled our ability to drive them off, you must volunteer it. I am too proud to ask.”
Del Azarchel said, “We must apply to the Hyades for aid, beg them to return. Was any communication method discovered during the war years? If there was some signal…”
The Swan interrupted. “Are you blind as well as stupid? Hyades painted their message on the face of the moon, and none of us can read it. Interpret the Cenotaph.”
Del Azarchel looked startled, then angry. “That is not within my power!”
“Then slay yourself, for you are useless.” The Swan still had his head bowed, but he turned his face to one side as if wishing to spit out some bitter thing on his tongue.
Montrose, who greatly enjoyed hearing Del Azarchel belittled, now grinned his toothy grin and spoke up. “Hey, Mr. Swan? Sir? Maybe I can volunteer something? I would not mind helping out if there is anything I can do!”
The Swan said simply, “Release us from your curse. Break the phantasm barrier. Allow us to see our children.”
Montrose looked as a man who is dashed with cold water. Whatever sympathy he had for the Swan vanished. He snapped, “Pox on you! I cannot do that. It would make them less than slaves!”
The Swan’s eyes snapped open, blazing with high emotion, both the three in his face, and the scores adorning his wings. Montrose staggered back, squinting through his fingers at the superior being as if against a great light.
Quailing, he turned aside his gaze and saw Del Azarchel also flinching and squinting. This shocked him. Montrose would have sworn Del Azarchel man enough to spit in the eye of the Devil himself.
Their eyes met. Blackie gave Montrose a rueful shake of the head, a wry smile that was halfway a sneer, yet a smile of sour mutual understanding. Montrose saw they were both thinking the same thing: each was obscurely glad that the other man was not better able to stand in that terrible gaze of the winged being than he.
The creature’s voice filled the chamber like a pipe organ, and a dreadful music marched through the words.
“Unless the shadows of the future shown to us by the cliometric science of the Monument are changed, the human race will die in the Seventeenth Millennium. This is fifty-four thousand years before the earliest possible return date for the Princess Rania. You, little man, you will have failed in all you seek and dream, and everything for which you hope will be as dust and ashes in your mouth.”
The Swan allowed a bitter expression to darken his solemn, ascetic features. “Perhaps then you will know the grief you have bestowed on us, your children, the race you created and set free. We are free indeed; free to die.
“I tolerate no more. Depart from me, you wretches.”
And he closed his wings about his bowed head, and would say no more.
3
The Barefoot Moon
1. Maternity
Amphithöe led the two men to where a tent had been set up for them on deck. She bowed a deep bow, her pretty cheeks pink with shame. “Because we are unseen to the higher forms of intelligence connected to the Noösphere, our quarters, and, indeed, our lives, occupy the overlooked spaces of the civilization: the spandrels, so to speak.”
Montrose poked his head in the tent, and saw both things he knew, sleeping rolls and lanterns, and things he did not. He tapped a bowl on the deck doubtfully with his toe, and it started up speaking in a highly formal version of the Melusine airborne language from the Tenth Millennium. It was a spoken form of Glyphic, based on Monument symbol logics.
“Greetings, noble sir! I am a chamber pot! For all your needs, from excretion to the expulsion of vomit during seasickness, it will be my pleasure to sterilize and cleanse various biological expulsive material you might be pleased to extrude. If you would care for a demonstration, merely direct any organ of elimination toward the clearly marked orifice…” Montrose kicked it again to hush it. The sleeping roll seemed comfy enough, but he dared not touch it to test its cushion. He was afraid it would begin singing lullabies.
Meanwhile Del Azarchel, having no concern for creature comfort, was standing on deck next to the tent and asking Amphithöe, “Who assigned you to us? Are you an ambassador?”
She said, “I am your mother. You are children in this world, which is strange and dangerous to you, and therefore I have been chemically imprinted toward you, to care for your well-being. This tent and these things are my possessions.”
Montrose pulled his head back out. “You ain’t my mother, miss. You’re a damn sight too pretty.”
Del Azarchel scowled at Montrose. “You insult our mother quite cavalierly, sir. Mind your tongue.” To her, with a gallant bow, he said, “As your sons, we will do what is needed to protect your person, your interests, and the honor of the family name. But excuse our confusion! In our time, those who awoke from other eras, either thaws or star-farers returning, created friction because they were alien to the current time. We did not solve the friction between currents and revenants in such a fashion. You are selected at random? Without consulting us?”
Montrose said, “It’s like dropping someone down a chimney and just hoping the house where he lands in the ashes to take a shine to him.”
Amphithöe smiled mysteriously. “And how is a mother giving birth so different? Children appear as oddly as if found at the hearth, and—how did you phrase it?—they shine in our eyes.”
“Close enough.” Montrose shrugged.
“The custom dates back to the time of the Nymphs, I take it,” said Del Azarchel. Montrose scowled, because whatever clue Del Azarchel had seen to allow him to deduce that was opaque to him.
Amphithöe bowed yet again. “Both of you, Master that Was and Judge no Longer—”
“Call me Meany, Mom. Call him Blackie.”
“—Meany, both of you suffered from revenant friction back in your earliest years, the Master that Was from direct attack by space pirates when he approached Earth from the long-lost and legendary Diamond Star, and you, from, ah—”
“Direct attack by Blackie,” supplied Montrose.
Amphithöe said, “—from the difficult situation in which Black-ye was perhaps required, either forgivably or not, to place you.”
Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps the style The Elevated Nobilissimus del Azarchel would be more apt—”
Montrose pursed his lips and raised both eyebrows. “Watch your tongue, sir! Would you stand on ceremony with Ma?”
She finished, “—it is to avoid additional situations like yours, where those who wake find no place in a world grown strange to them, that our custom of proxy adoption was founded.”
Del Azarchel said, “Unless I mistake the spirit of my compatriot, madam, we are not to remain long in this world. We must soon return to our tasks in the outer Solar System.” He looked at Montrose quizzically.
Montrose said, “What the hell you talking about, Blackie? No more tasks for us to do.”
“How so?” Del Azarchel arched his fine black eyebrows.
“The aliens ain’t never coming back, the human race was not advanced enough to live as slaves, and the prediction of history says we are going to be wiped out long before Rania returns.”
Del Azarchel laughed like a golden bell. “Lies! If any of that were true then neither you nor I would triumph. Our endless duel ends in a draw. Ha! Let us not contemplate self-evident absurdities, my friend!” He shook his head wearily, but flashed a bright smile. “What weakness has entered your wavering soul?”
“Glad you are in a chipper mood, you maggot-ridden skunk,” said Montrose, standing now straight and sh
oulders wide, a smolder of spirit in his eye. “So, do you have some plan?”
“Not as such. But I think speaking to Tellus is now inevitable. I am convinced his mind and mine will find a strange sympathy.”
“We would have to augment our brains up to the Archangelic level. I ain’t about to do that. So what do you think Tellus will say?”
“Who knows? He may say that once mankind is dead, it falls to us to create new races, and people the Solar System in preparation for Rania’s return. Will not the Star Colonies flourish? We can re-people Old Mother Earth from any of these fourteen Stepmother Earths to which the deracination ships now sail. And when Jupiter arises…”
“Pshaw and pee-shaw. You mean find a way to wake up the Jupiter Brain before the predicted twenty bazillion years from now? You and your goddamn Great Work. Ain’t gunna happen. The Swans said so.”
“The Swans also made this world you see. Do you trust them?”
Del Azarchel raised his arm and gestured grandly toward the ship and its sails, the wide ocean beyond. There were icebergs floating in an equatorial sea, broken from pack ice which could be glimpsed as a white line on the horizon of the south. The sky was afire with curtains of purple and green auroras. There was a too-black cloud of an odd liquid consistency, as unnatural as an inkblot on a portrait, unearthly, the product of the Domination technology from Hyades, far off in the atmosphere to the stern of the white-sailed ship with her masts of fiberglass and diamond. “Is this what you envisioned when you set all the First and Second Human Races free from my sovereignty and power? To free them from the Hyades? Are you happy with the result?”
Montrose, as if struck by the thought, turned and looked at Amphithöe. “There is one thing I sure ain’t happy with. Hey, Mom! That Witch with the dumb nose rings called you a slave. Issat true?”
2. Involuntary Consent
Amphithöe, smiled serenely. “Do you mean the Intercessor? I am a handmaiden: I thaw and slumber, and do whatever is commanded me.”
“For pay?”
She blinked, looking scandalized. “For love.”
Montrose said, “Of your own will?”
Amphithöe had an oddly distant, cool look to her features. “Of course. The chemical balances in my nervous system are adjusted and redacted to produce the willingness.”
Montrose sighed. “Then you don’t want us to set you free?”
Del Azarchel interrupted sternly, “Do not listen to any answer she might give. I have already said I would uphold the family honor.”
Montrose said, “If it is some sort of chemical hypnosis, fine, let’s break her out of here. But if she wants to be a servant, how is that different from you wanting to serve the Hyades Domination? B’sides, we don’t know her.”
“She is our mother.”
“That’s just make-believe! They chemicaled her into having feelings toward us, so’d she give us her tent to sleep in. So if the mother feeling is legit, then her loyalty to her bosses is legit. Ain’t it?”
Del Azarchel sneered. “Come now. I thought you and I were the last creatures left alive on Earth who understand the meaning of honor. Am I alone? Come back to your senses.”
“You’re the guy who says the Earth should be enslaved to the stars! You like the peculiar institution!”
“I am Spanish. We perfected the institution. The New World would not have been colonized had it not been for the slave trade. But you are from backward Texas. You are the one who believes that all men are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights—inalienable means they cannot be bartered, lost, bestowed, bequeathed, appropriated, or sold. She cannot volunteer to be an involuntary being.”
Montrose felt his cheek burning; he was actually blushing. “I don’t need a lecture on what it means to be a Texan from you, Spanish Simon.”
“Evidently you do. Then you will help me free her?”
“Of course. It’s the first thing I said to her when I spoke. But you ain’t answered yet. I know why I’m doing it. Why are you? You like slavery!”
“Not for my mother.”
“But she is not really our mom!”
“Honor says otherwise. Will history remember this event? No one will cherish our names as worshipful if we pass by this opportunity.”
Amphithöe listened to this exchange with the bewilderment on her pretty features becoming fear. She flinched with surprise when Del Azarchel whirled on her. “Mother! Your master, if he be on this vessel, or whoso holds your indenture, who is it?”
“The ship owns my name, and the Nausilogue, Isonadey, is the ship’s voice,” she said. “When Isonadey speaks, I answer.”
“A man?”
“How could he not be? He is also captain of the crew.”
“Then take us on the instant to him!” said Del Azarchel.
Amphithöe took a folding fan from her sleeve, snapped it open, and hid her expression behind it. Her eyes would not meet theirs. “Surely this will produce the disquiet I was thawed to reduce.”
“Don’t worry,” said Montrose soothingly. “We just want to talk to him.”
“No, we don’t,” said Del Azarchel sharply. “Mother! As your son, I implore you! We seek your liberty, the only gift we can bestow the short time in this era we tarry!”
Montrose rolled his eyes and sighed. “I guess your mom in real life treated you better than mine did.”
Del Azarchel gave him a dark look. “She was thrown from her house and comfort, wealth, and position, for me. A saint who wed a devil! You see why I disapprove of miscegenation.”
“Meaning me and Rania? Them’s fightin’ words, Spanish.”
“Then come fight, Texan. Look!”
For Amphithöe had turned and moved in a gliding movement, surprisingly poised and swift considering the constriction of her green kimono and the pitch and roll of the deck, and leaped up the ladder to the poop deck, graceful as a gazelle.
And they both marched after the fleeing Nymph, double time.
3. Voice of the Ship
The two men came to the upper deck, and found Amphithöe pleading with the anthropoform Melusine captain, Isonadey, in a language neither Montrose nor Del Azarchel understood.
Isonadey stood glaring down at her with his all-black eyes glistering, and his sixfold antennae rising and falling in agitation. With him were the first mate, also a Melusine; two harsh-faced Chimerae in bright red coats; and six child-sized ebon-skinned bald dwarves, Locusts, dressed in heavy tunics with white scarves, their antennae twitching in unison, who were gathered near the navigation equipment.
Del Azarchel took a stance before Isonadey, threw his silver cloak back, and put his hand on his longsword. “We demand the manumission of Amphithöe, our mother!”
Menelaus grinned, which showed his overlarge teeth and Adam’s apple. “You just figuring on sockdolaging any rancid whoreson who gets in our way, just like that? Hot damn! But you are one brassy-swinging groin-clanger!” And he stepped up to Del Azarchel’s left shoulder, put his hands on the grips of his white glass pistols, but did not draw. “No parley nor argument nor nothing!”
Del Azarchel gave him a glance of surprise. Menelaus then realized that by we Del Azarchel had not meant the two of them. He had been speaking in his capacity of World Suzerain. It was the royal we. But Del Azarchel then grinned his devilishly handsome grin at Menelaus, and said, “That was the parley, all that need be. The captain must surrender! Here I have the final argument of kings.”
Isonadey flattened three pairs of antennae against his head, so that they rested along the ponytail of his hair, and raised his hand. He spoke in ponderous tones: “Violence is both impermissible and inadvisable. The allocation of resources, whether self-aware or not, is determined by the cliometric calculations. Amphithöe of Lily falls under the Concubine Vector, which is a pleat manifold in the attractor basin describing exocollateral interpersonal relations. Ancient report says you gentlemen are both master cliometricians, who shaped the manifold of destiny? Then contemplate th
e shape as it would be for those whose hibernation fees fall below any predicted future income. Slavery is objectionable; surely to kill those useless to the social order is worse?”
While he spoke, the two Chimerae standing behind Isonadey merely squinted and, aiming lasers built into their tear ducts placed small round dots of light atop various spots on the heads and chests and torsos of Del Azarchel and Montrose. Metallic ornaments the Chimera wore on shoulder belts also clicked open and pointed small barrels and emission apertures at the two men.
Whips made of silvery metal came slithering out of hidden sheaths in the sleeves of the Chimerae, and the whips giggled and whispered in soft voices to each other in the Sylph language.
Del Azarchel exchanged a glance with Montrose. “What do you say, Cowhand?”
“I say one of us can beef highpockets here before the Chimerae lads cut us to bits.” Then Montrose said to Isonadey, “Cap’n! What does your social order these days do for wills and reputations? You got family?”
Isonadey narrowed his black-within-black eyes, and his golden antennae swayed on his head in annoyance before he flattened them again. He opened his tongueless mouth, and three voices issued from his throat. “Of course I have family! Am I not human?”
“They be able to live down the shame of being related to the guy who killed two famous historical antiques? Where’s your sense of hospitality? Didn’t we, between the two of us, I mean, invent your planet or something?”
Every crewman on deck, including the two Giants, now turned eyes toward the scene on the high rear deck, and several had drawn Chimera-style serpentine weapons, or pistols built around serpentine cores. Serpentines were the Sylph technology of self-repairing artificial brains housed in sinuous metallic cords. They were an absurdly old technology, and absurdly perfect, able to repair and restore themselves indefinitely without error.