Menelaus said, “Look up. I have one hundred guns armed with a mix of armor-piercing and scattershot rounds, with a few tracers to look pretty, aimed at all your heads. The floor is electrified; the fountain is poison. You are totally outgunned, surrounded, and locked in a radioactive room that is rapidly growing unhealthy for human life.”
Ull sneered, “Your control is illusionary, Chimera. We permitted those signals to pass in order to lure the Judge of Ages, through overconfidence, to reveal his location. You do not think we returned the equipment of the Linderlings to them unchanged and dangerous? The multivariable channel neuroemission node object 6AS-46A-W5-BB963”—Menelaus reached under his cloak, and tightened his hand on the gold capsule Keirthlin had given him—“was reprogrammed to impersonate all passthrough data without passing it through. The signals only appeared to pass. Do you think us fools?”
“Yes,” said Menelaus. “Well, not all of y’all. Mostly you.” And he stepped over to the throne, and put his hand on the armrest. As he had hoped, the upper surface was library cloth, and at touch-range, the radioactivity could not stop the transmission from his fingertips to the cloth surface.
Two of the guns overhead clicked with loud snaps, and nothing happened, and nothing fired.
Menelaus groaned. “Okay, I take back that fool comment. That was well played. Is Blackie helping you, Learned Ull? There is no way that trick would have worked if it was just you who reprogrammed the node. What happened to Reyes y Pastor? Why did you take his seat at the Table Round?”
Soorm spoke in Iatric, “That answer I know!”
The words were spoken so loudly, and with such authority, that even Ull looked amazed, and stared at the monstrosity, half bear and half sea lion, that stood in the waters of the fountain, two mismatched eyes goggling, two tongues lolling, the claws on his webbed hands sheathing and unsheathing like those of a twitching lion.
Soorm said, “The Red Hermeticist realized that the era he ruled, all his dreams for how humanity should evolve, we beloved Hormagaunts, and everything else for which he lived, was a falsehood. Over a thousand years of events were organized merely to allow for one raid on Yap Island—the Cetaceans reverse engineered the genework on the Clades to deduce the mathematical Divarication solution Menelaus Montrose used to solve for complex mutually incompatible system interaction. It was from the Clade Codes that the Unity Divarication was devised, to drive the lines of Hormagaunt artificial species into oneness, and produce first the Locusts, and, later, the Locust hive mind.
“My entire world, of which I am the father and the first, was a joke, a feint, a jest, merely meant to permit one afternoon of bloodshed, lasting from noon to the ninth hour, and years of torment to thousands of innocent Clades buried alive at the utmost bottom of the sea, merely so that that fourteen lines of code expressed in ninety-one symbols could be deduced.
“The knowledge drove Reyes, my creator, insane, and he returned to the comfort of the superstitions of his youth, and sought to save the souls of the soulless monsters he created. For this crime, his greater self and oversoul, the Dreagh Expastor, was murdered and consumed by the Dreagh Excoronimas, even as Man Pastor was slain by Man Coronimas. Reyes y Pastor died a martyr on the steps of his church, trying to defend the sacred bread of the altar from defilement.”
Ull was staring dumbfounded at him. “How can you know of these secret things, hidden since the dawn of time? You are a Hormagaunt and a monster. And whom do you address?” For the chameleon eyes of Soorm did not point the same direction when he spoke.
Soorm drew himself up, his scorpion tail lashing angrily. “I am the scion of Reyes y Pastor, and his masterwork! You are not worthy to touch the latchet of his shoes, much less fill those shoes! Judge of Ages, hear my prayer! I hold thee to thy oath! This pathetic blue dwarf occupies the throne of Master of the World of this Age. Judge him, O Judge of Ages! You said he would topple from his throne!”
Menelaus said, “One last thing he’s got to do, first. One little thing.”
Ull said to Menelaus, “Your control of the chamber weapons, Chimera, is nullified. Even with our nerve mites out of contact, yet our Followers outnumber the Thaws by more than twice over, armed against unarmed! We command, and on pain of death, you obey! Tell all in this chamber in their languages to reveal the Judge of Ages, or we begin to slay the innocent!”
Preceptor Naar, looking down from his perch on a nearby automaton, said sharply, “What do you mean, ‘we’? You are not a Simplifier. You are a Hermeticist, mazed in complexity and falsehood like a spider in a labyrinth, an architect of the Noösphere we shed. You are an enemy and opponent of every ideal for which we stand!” And for once, his languid, long features were tight and hot with passion.
All the Blue Men, faces expressionless, raised their fingers and pointed at Ull. Despite the radioactivity in the room, some of their coat-circuits must have been working, for flocks of gems fled from their coats, passing through the air like glittering snowflakes of many colors. With a chattering clatter, the gems affixed themselves to Ull’s coat, layer upon layer, until he was one bright multipatterned carpet of gemstones from neck to hemline, and all along his sleeves.
No matter how demoted, he was still a human, and Ull’s commands were still obeyed by the dog things in the chamber, for he cried out, “Followers! Bayonet the She-Nymphs!”
Two groups of seven dog things ran at the Nymphs, who, oddly, neither flinched nor fled. Instead the Nymphs began to dance, the women counterclockwise and the men clockwise, weaving and interweaving with rapid footfalls, and their mantillas floated like scarves, shedding white cherry blossom petals and white dandelion puffs. The dogs rushed into their midst, and the Nymphs screamed.
But they screamed with laughter, because the dog things were running in circles with the dance, weaving in and out, each chasing the tail of the dog thing before, barking happily, tongues lolling, tails wagging. The muskets and cutlasses were flung gaily to the golden floor, and Nymphs led dogs in a game of skipping and jumping over the muskets, from one side to the other.
Then Oenoe, who stood in the middle of circles of mad, dancing figures, raised her lovely arms overhead, and sang a single high note into the air, crystalline, perfect, pure. The music slowed, softened, and segued into a lullaby.
Even without understanding the words, all in the chamber understood the song promised the wonders of safety and satiety; mother’s love and lover’s kisses; roses and wine and feast-days without end; and slumber by the golden margins of mazy streams of cool, clear water beneath the dappled shadows of generous fruit trees, their luscious fruit a-shine with dewdrops; and, then, at sunset, dreams of pleasure merging into the beauty of the starlight.
And when the song was ended, the fourteen dog things were asleep in a puppy pile heaped in the center of the circle, and the male Nymphs, grinning like Satyrs, brandished four muskets, clutching them by the barrels as if they were clubs.
There was a murmur of admiration from the hags among the Witches, who nodded their hooded heads and clapped their hands in applause.
Ull cried wildly to Ydmoy, Yndech, and Yndelf, “Expelled of the order or not, a confluence of interests still commingles our actions! For your own reasons, to preserve your order and race, you must find the Judge of Ages.”
Ydmoy said gravely, “It may be so, but to spend human lives to achieve our goal, while efficient and useful, we reject as Locust thinking.”
Yndech said, “True, but then again, Locust Ull is correct—no objection can be raised to discovering the identity of the Judge of Ages and coercing him to preserve our race. The principle of Darwinian evolution proposes that to do otherwise would be to adopt a moral code that cannot reproduce itself and therefore cannot be carried into the future!” And he pointed his pistol at Menelaus. “Translate the command to the chamber!”
The Giant Bashan tilted his vast bald head down, his magnificent, beautiful eyes narrowed and his tiny grisly mouth bracketed by wrinkles in his orange-peel integument
. Now he strode forward, the floor murmuring thunder beneath his footfalls, and stepped over the fountain in one stride. He was a tower, high and terrible, staring down with eyes like two suns, a gaze no one could meet. There was a rumble in his chest, almost subsonic, like the noise whales might make, a sound more easily felt in the teeth than heard in the ear. At the same time, there was a voice of human pitch that issued from his throat.
But the rumbling in his chest was a second voice box, which the Giants used for their long-range low-frequency speech. The sounds were too low for the ear hairs of the Blue Men to catch, but Menelaus heard this second voice, speaking in Merikan: “Where is the manual firing station?”
Menelaus had the arsenal index and weapon status information glowing in his mind. He was not certain, because the golden node capsule given him by the Linderlings had touched the data, if the information were accurate. He decided to trust it, because events were happening too fast, and there were no other options. He replied in Merikan, “A firing station at the corner balcony, up yonder, behind the statue of the Grim Reaper. Behind a secret panel, there is a big metal door that needs a key I don’t have.”
The Giant, with his other, high-pitched voice box, talked over the voice of Menelaus (who spoke words the Blue Men could not have understood even had they been loud and clear) and so was at the same time saying in Iatric, “O Fools! Your so-called principle of Darwinism is nothing to do with Darwin, or with any biological theory: It is an excuse for the evil you contemplate, and, like all evils, a lie. The lie says that if you merely do deeds evil enough, ruthlessly enough, you shall survive.
“Your Locust race did horrific deeds in the name of race survival, inflicting a despair upon the Hormagaunts, so that anyone not absorbed into a Locust hive mind was diverted from his true life and true mate, subtly made miserable, and exposed to influences both psychological and chemical to hinder reproduction. The Hormagaunts in those years were led by Cliometric webs of incentives first to lives of pleasure and sterile self-centeredness, then to underpopulation, and then to extinction. You killed a race: genocide. By Darwin’s logic, genocide is not merely acceptable, but laudable.
“And yet here you are, the last remnant of an extinct species, and your grim deeds did not win you the racial immortality you crave. You are as dead as the Giants, but far more ignobly.”
Yndech said, “No one can defy the cold logic of the Darwinian calculation. Those who do not place survival as paramount, by definition do not survive. Self-sacrifice is always a losing survival strategy!”
The Giant opened wide his eyes, and they were like two scalding lamps, and Yndech put up his arms over his face, and quailed.
The massive voice boomed: “The Consensus Advocacy met in final conclave and read the Cliometric calculations of our future. We saw that if we continued to expand our numbers, the technological infrastructure needed to reproduce our race at replacement levels would be great—for even to bear a single child required extensive biogenetic modification and neurosurgery—so great indeed that the conversion of all biological life to nanomechanical life would be inevitable, and the human race be extinct. We chose instead to destroy the technological basis of man, and preserve the whole which was greater than our part. Do you say we did wrong? Hypocrites! The human race—and all races represented here in this chamber, and all of history—owes themselves to our sacrifice. Therefore you shall not, if I can prevent, bring any coercion to bear on the Judge of Ages, for he is the grandfather of the Giants, and all the races after owe their very existence to him.”
The Blue Men had nothing to say back.
Subsonically, meanwhile, in another language, Bashan said to Menelaus, “Doctor Montrose, I can open that firing station for you, but only by exposing myself to gunfire unto death. This saddens me, for my only purpose, once I deduced the existence of the chess game throughout all human history, the chess game in which the fated part of the race of Giants was merely to be a sacrificial pawn, was to discover whether that sacrifice was worthwhile. I instructed my coffin to wake me when your deadly game with Del Azarchel was to be concluded. I wanted to see your last duel. I left my world and outlived all history, and lost everything, merely to slake that curiosity. Now I die that you might live. So I shall never know.”
Menelaus again spoke in Merikan, which the Blue Men could hear but not understand, saying, “I can at least satisfy your curiosity. If De Ulloa, D’Aragó, Pastor, and Coronimas are dead, and Ull is about to die, the only Hermeticist left is Sarmento i Illa d’Or: I can see the end of the chess game. It is a sacrifice move. I lose my rook and checkmate him. But you must get me to the fire control station before the Blues figure out who I am. Which cannot be that far off: practically everyone in the room knows.”
4. None in This Chamber
The Giant said to Yndech and the Blue Men, “Simplifiers! I tell you the simple truth. You will not discover who or where the Judge of Ages is. None in this chamber will or can betray him. Have your translator pass the question along, and see for yourselves.”
Menelaus wondered what Bashan the Giant had in mind; but he trusted him, so when Yndech in Iatric gave the command, Menelaus obeyed, and spoke the question in several tongues to the other Thaws: he demanded of the Thaws to reveal who among them did not conform to the standards of their times.
Soorm answered without needing to wait for a translation. “I represent the Configuration of Iatrocratic Clades. Speaking on behalf of my people and my age of history, let me report that we all live in isolated Clades and scattered hermitages, and most of us are allergic to each other. We have no rules of conformity. This means, first, that we cannot see nonconformity even if we wanted to, and second, we would rather die than conform to your command, so we will never want to. Go eat your own mothers, culls!” And Crile and Gload roared and shrieked like lions and vultures.
Oenoe cried in a voice like ringing music, “The Natural Order of Man loves the Judge of Ages and is beloved by him. We would not betray him even for kisses.”
Illiance now spoke up, “Anubis? Did you translate that correctly? Kisses?”
Menelaus said, “Well, she actually referred to a more intimate congress, but the meaning is the same.”
Alpha Daae spoke sternly, “The Eugenic General Emergency Command of the Commonwealth of Virginia, her federal allies, protectorates, and conquered territories, rejects the authority of mixed-bloods, ferals, strays, and under-creatures to direct our actions. We are not under the command of the Judge of Ages, but our honor will not permit us to yield to you. In the name of the Republic, the Senate, and the Bloodlines, I hereby impose martial law; I countermand the order of the Blue Men; and I compel all in this chamber to answer no question of theirs. Whoever speaks first, dies, and your name will live on in my weapon.”
Fuamnach of Whalesong Coven screeched in a scraping voice and said, “Is not the Judge of Ages a demigod, a prince of the twilight land between life and death? The Delphic Acroamatic Progressive Order reverently seeks to escape his curse, and asks him, if he is within the sound of our voices, to heed how we pray and conjure and convoke that he might spare us, and excuse us our previous trespasses. You are all doomed.” And as her voice shrieked out, all the tall Witches and their menfolk raised their hands on high. And they all moaned, “Do-oo-om.”
Linder Keir said, “The identity of the Judge of Ages is known to me, but certain fine distinctions of the neuropsychological, interpersonal, legal, and ethical codes which govern every nuance of Linderling behavior prevent my telling you. The actions of the Blue Men are highly suspect and unethical.”
Rada Lwa said, “I heard his voice earlier, but I do not see him in the chamber. He is still outside, and you’ve missed him!”
Ctesibius looked at Menelaus, uttered a hard, sharp laugh of despair, and said no word, but sat shaking his head as if in weary amusement.
5. Finality Speaks
Hearing these translated responses, one after another, the little Blue Men began bobbing their head
s in an odd gesture, tilting first one ear toward one shoulder, then the other, and frowning at the chamber floor. Illiance said, “Clearly our means were inappropriate to our goal. We attempted an indirect, unsimplistic approach, and now suffer the penalty. I suggest surrender, immediate and without qualification, to the Judge of Ages, and he may decide the fate of our race without coercion from us.”
And Bashan smiled thinly.
Ull was saying querulously, “Improbable! Unacceptable! Suicidal! Our goals must be achieved, if not by correct means, then…”
Illiance made a harsh, cutting gesture with the side of his hand. “Locust! Be silent! You have no part of the counsels of the Order of Simplified Vulnerary Aetiology! We seek to cure pain, not to inflict! You are the child of a world that has been superseded by our world! Evolution condemns you!”
But a new voice, eerie, multiple, also speaking Intertextual, interrupted: “Founder Ull is also the father of the next world, the one that superseded the Locusts and all their Inquiline subspecies, Blue and Gray, Simple and Linderling. You who condemn in the name of evolution are hence condemned in the name of evolution.”
Not just the Blue Men, but all in the chamber turned at the sound of this.
Alalloel opened her mouth, and a voice which had not spoken before, which sounded like half a dozen voices, male and female, high and low, speaking in unison, then said in Intertextual, “I have been unable to act hitherto, as I am in the process of receiving four hundred years of download memory templates and data, format, philosophical, and mathematical improvements; additional mental applications and channels; and a socio-legal body of precedents applying to various mental environments. These downloads came from my parallel and descendent personalities of the Lree mind-group, which had to be located and restored from archive for this purpose. It is considerable information, but the protocols of the Melusine require that I, being the ranking agent in place, be first consulted before a verdict is rendered. The Final Stipulation of the Noösphere Protocols has waited patiently for my education and decision.