But the substance was not plastic: it was a latticework of transparent molecular filters that absorbed oxygen and nitrogen on its outer surface, grabbing each atom with a nanotechnological lock-and-key system, rotating it to the inner surface, and releasing it.
The fabric turned red when agitated. Snatching a fold of the film between one’s teeth and chewing it gave the filter lines more Brownian energy, and increased the action speed, so that a tight bite brought a gush of cool air to his face. Cool, because the filter process slowed air molecule action. The bag Menelaus wore was also pine-scented, which Menelaus thought was the nanotech artist just showing off.
“Don’t touch the red spots!” Menelaus cautioned Mickey, who could not read the language in which the warning labels were printed. “They will strip the oxygen atoms out of the flesh of your hands and give you a nasty burn.”
While he was still being carried along the balcony, the Nymphs Aea and Thysa meanwhile jogged alongside, smiling softly, gliding as swiftly as dreams, and they were quickly wrapping the maimed feet of Menelaus in medical tape, into which they had packed little flower petals that released coagulants and topically active painkillers.
Mickey, with one hand, was slapping handfuls of anti-burn paste here and there along Montrose’s back and neck and legs; and the substance formed a bond with his skin; and tiny molecular machines in the paste worked quickly, bringing nutriment to any still-living cells, soothing damage, and binding shut cracks and lacerations neatly as a suture. The parts of his body on which the Nymphs poured their loving attention were neatly pursed up and scented; the parts Mickey helped with looked like a half-unfinished clay statue, daubed with bruises, burns, and blood clots.
Oenoe held a flower under the broken nose of Menelaus which killed the sensation of pain throughout his body, and cleared his wits in a fashion he found alarming. Then she stole a kiss from him in a fashion he found even more alarming.
Mickey, still striding along with huge, rolling strides, seeing this, puckered up, pointing at his at own round and chubby face significantly. He spoke in Virginian, “Hey, Geisha fairy! I hauled him up here at great personal risk! Gimme some sugar, baby!”
Oenoe smiled, not understanding his words, but, understanding the gesture, said in her language: “But I am married, and may not kiss you on the lips. Fair and Darling Thysa! Thrust the round warmth of your bosom into the charming face of our beloved guest and friend, that he may taste your nipples; and Fair and Darling Aea! Kneel to greet his manhood with the welcome of mouth joy, that it may be filled and exult in a happy explosion of seed! Fortunately, we have practiced the technique to use on a man while walking briskly…”
Menelaus said to Mickey, “We are in the middle of combat here, and these women give off nerve-slave type pheromones that build up an operant conditioning in your thalamus and hypothalamus, and don’t you Witches know never to let the Belles Dames sans Merci or the Queen of Fairyland get you? Don’t put anything into your mouth! You’ll be ruined for normal women.” And to Oenoe, he said, “Call your little wiggle-assed whorettes off him! Or do I have to get a garden hose?”
Mickey was saying philosophically, “You know, some things in life are more important than others. While, on the one hand, staying in control of my own brain is important, on the other hand, I don’t use it that much, and that girl is the most physically attractive human being I have ever seen or can imagine, so…”
“Don’t make me slap you, Witch-man! I ain’t got the strength left. I can shut off the whole battle in a second, if I get to my throne. The damn Melusine was right. No one can hurt me what’s ever been in one of my coffins.”
“But only if you’re sitting down?”
“Exactly.”
“What kind of magic is that? Arsomancy? Sit down in the Geisha babe’s lap.”
“But only if I sit there. Get me to the judgment seat. C’mon.”
Oenoe rose and followed. She sent Thysa and Aea back to tend the sleeping musicians, whose gentle music of pipes and harps behind them was lost in the clamor of battle before them. Oenoe wore no gas mask, but raised a flower with a deep purple bell to hide her nose, red mouth, and delicately pointed chin, and held it in place with the veil of her mantilla, so only her enormous eyes were visible. These she anointed with moly herb to prevent the lachrymal agent in the gas cloud from blinding her, and she descended the stairs into the cloud.
Now they were at the top of the stairway. Through gaps in the cloud, looking between the uplifted wings of Archangel Michael, could be glimpsed fragments of a scene of horror, a battlefield in a golden box. The floor was coated with pools and streaks of blood, broken bodies, craters and bulletholes, the wreckage of digging automata.
“Down we go,” muttered Montrose. “Clients are dying. All my damn fault.”
“Are all people with posthuman superintelligence guilt-ridden?” snorted Mickey.
“Yup. Superintelligence allows you to see with crystal clarity just how stupid you are. Ignorance is bliss, my Warlocky friend.”
“Not so. Ignorance is just a comfortable silence in the brain. Eating is bliss. Rounder a man is, the happier he is. Do you know any thin men that you can call jolly? In the globe, nature approaches perfection! Are not the apple, the plum, and the peach unsurpassable? Note, for example, the beauty of a pregnant mother, or, better yet, the shape of a breast that approaches globularity…”
“Shake a leg a little faster, jolly man.”
Posthuman, Warlock, and Nymph crossed the floor, half-blind in the gloom and fogbanks, coming now and again upon bodies, whether wounded or dead they did not pause to inquire.
They groped through the cloud of soporific up the dais to the iron throne.
Gushes of wind surprised them. The ventilation was pouring a volume of fresh air down around the throne, so that a cylinder of cloud surrounded it, billowing in tatters, but no trace of the black gas was atop the dais itself. The rushing air deadened the noise of battle, so it was like stepping into a closed place whose walls muffled the sounds of horror, the clash of arms and called commands and the barks and screams of the dying, making them seem distant.
In the cool air, in the place of silence, there sat Rada Lwa the Scholar on the iron throne, bone-white face bright beneath his black square Scholar’s cap, his ivory fingers templed before his colorless lips, his elbows on the heads of the carven friars of the armrests, and four loaded pistols in his lap.
His pink eyes saw the figures approaching, watching as Oenoe halted, her pretty eyes wide with alarm upon seeing Rada Lwa. Mickey the Witch unlimbered the staggering, bleeding Menelaus, who put both hands on one of the four glittering white wands that held up the canopy over the throne. Menelaus leaned on the wand to support his weight, but he also ran his fingers over one spot as if over unseen control keys. Whatever he was expecting to happen, did not happen. “Locked out! Damnation. This is going to take a little doing…”
“Cowhand,” came the voice of Ximen del Azarchel from the pale mouth of Rada Lwa Chwal, cold and jovial, majestic and mocking. “For a time you had me fooled.”
8
Verdict
1. The Machine
The voice rolled with rich humor and dark magnetism, but the pink eyes were stones, the face dull, idiotic, lifeless: a mask.
Mickey said in a voice of fear, “Rada is not here. His flesh is under a Possession. The lwa speak through his mouth from the infosphere. It is the Machine!”
Menelaus was still hanging on to the pale and glowing wand, and still tapping his fingers and grinding his teeth. He said, “Do not answer him or turn your eyes toward me. That is the Machine, not the real Blackie, and he cannot see me or hear me. Even now, he is not sure if I am here or not.”
“What odd company you keep, Cowhand!” The voice stepped on the shoes of Menelaus’ words, as if the speaker had not heard them. “I see my marionette, Rada Lwa, has brought just enough loaded pistols to do away with you, your escort, and then himself. How convenient! Is this the e
nd result we wish? I can oblige you. But perhaps you are curious to explore other options.”
From his belt the same words, even if spoken in an awkward grammar, or with a word missing, were repeated in Natural and Virginian.
Oenoe, smiling thoughtfully, half turned toward Mickey as if to ask a question. So natural was the gesture that Mickey tilted his head toward her attentively before he remembered that she could not speak the language of the Witches nor understand an answer. Turned, her body hid an oleander flower which dropped softly from her mantilla into her slim hand.
And she whirled, graceful as a dancer, hand raised as if to cast the blossom in the dead, bone-white face of the pale man; but now the muzzle of one pistol was now a foot or two from her face, and the flint was cocked back. She could smell the gunpowder from the recently packed pistol.
The voice of the Machine chuckled, and said in flawless Natural, “I may fire incendiaries now with no fear of heavy-caliber judgment from above. So, no tricks, please, beloved child. Your elders want to have an intercourse of talk. It would diminish my speech-joy to be interrupted by having my white steed through whose lips I speak befuddled in a stupor, even one so pleasant, ecstatic, hangover-free, memory-free, and talkative as what the Nocturnal Council in their pretty little heads devised against Thaws hailing from the Third Millennium. I do compliment you on your thoroughness, however, Conscript Mother Clover.”
The pink eyes seemed not even to be looking at her. Oenoe wondered if the Machine remembered to allow its borrowed flesh to blink, or would just let the eyes dry out. She gave Rada Lwa a smile both sultry and cheery, as if to compliment his good sportsmanship, and lightly tossed the flower away. The same ventilation that held back the fog snatched up the bloom in midair, and sped it away out of sight, rather than allowing it to land where she dropped it.
Menelaus said, “Stand there, let him talk at you, don’t run away. Don’t answer him.”
The Machine did not bother to turn the pale head of Rada Lwa toward Mickey. The other pistol was pointing at the expanse of his midriff. Exarchel said in Virginian, “Warlock! I welcome you into my circle of power and place you under my shadow. It has been many moons of the great cycle since last we communed. Oh, surely you suspected the machines buried in the ruins of Mexico City were part of my system? Only the highest caste of the Witchkindred were permitted the gene modeling and Divarication techniques I could bring, so that their longevity would be assured. The merely medical longevity was only a first step, a free sample to win your addiction.
“The Witches were never the enemies of the Machine.”
The voice from Rada Lwa paused to let that comment sink in. Mickey said nothing, but his chubby face gathered wrinkles around his eyes in a glance of ire. The voice from the mask of Rada Lwa continued:
“Surely, my Warlock, you also know by now that the antimachine crusades, the exorcisms, and the hunts were arranged and led and misled by me and by my pets, your leaders. I used it as an excuse to pare away rebellious elements or unworkable growths in the infosphere, and I implicated, as collaborators of mine, merely those persons who I wished slain by their own fellows. Have Menelaus Montrose explain to you the double meaning of what used to be called a witch hunt. You will admire the irony.
“But I do compliment you,” the deep, commanding, melodic voice continued. “You saw the rise of the Chimerae coming. You read the stars and guessed, in part, the patterns of history my Hermeticists had planned. But you were the first Witch ever to use the gene modeling technique to incorporate such radically different structures into your cell generations. Not until the Hormagaunts would such a technique be tried again. You are three to four thousand years ahead of your time. Is that not true, Mictlanagualzin of the Dark Science Research Coven of the College of William and Mary? Or are you calling yourself something else these days?”
Mickey spoke to Oenoe in his native tongue, in a voice without strength, “He knows my true name. We are helpless before him, and all my power is as lost.”
The boxes on the belt of the albino translated the comment, if awkwardly. Oenoe smiled and shrugged prettily. She put her hands behind her back, out of sight, and began toying as if idly with one of the rosebuds growing on her long green veils.
Menelaus said, “Don’t attack him. I got it covered. He cannot see me, so when he attacked and contaminated and merged with my Xypotech system, called Pellucid, my Pellucid went blind to me too, so I cannot give any direct orders, not even to open the security keys and give my underlings authority to give orders in my name. But there is a way around the lockout.”
The deep and charming voice issuing from the dead face said, “Do not be despondent, Mictlanagualzin! I can offer you considerable improvements—the Dark Science has advanced remarkably, and only slivers of it were ever revealed to any race of man, not even to the Hormagaunts in their golden days. Grinding the glands of living children to expand the length of life is merely the first of the sweet, forbidden treasure I have guarded since first I made your world.”
Mickey shouted at him, “The Promethean life-force made the world! Darwin and the blind serpent Ouroboros! Odin and Vili and Ve overthrew Ymir at the Big Bang, and the thunder of his downfall echoes through the galaxies to this day! You had no part of these great deeds! You yourself are man-made! Your maker is Menelaus, the Judge of Ages!”
Menelaus said, “I said not to answer him. Don’t argue. It lets him build up a more correct picture…”
The voice from the skull of Rada Lwa trampled over what Menelaus was saying. “My dear Warlock! Are you on a first-name basis with Menelaus? Has he given you a nickname, then, something ending with the sound of the letter Y? Me, he calls Blackie.
“You are technically correct,” the Machine continued. “By which I mean, you are utterly wrong.
“Listen to me, you, who are my created thing, my handiwork! Darwinian evolution no doubt made the first world: the one the Giants burned, trying to burn me. But I am still here. Everything after that—the unambitiously drifting Sylphs, the Chimerae full of ire, the pleasure-loving Nymphs, the ever-starving Hormagaunts, the never-sated Locusts, the proud Inquiline, even your own Witches and their animal-people, riddled with collectivist envy as with gonorrhea—everything was of my making. I and my Hermeticists, we have designed and redesigned mankind genetically, culturally, psychologically, and historically, no less than seven times.
“It is to laugh. The Judge of Ages created exactly one race once: the Giants of the Consensus, whose numbers never rose above five thousand individuals, and whose only remarkable accomplishment was mass suicide, and the less than perfectly successful destruction of a whole world. Their posthuman genius was sufficient that they saw no nonsense in the proposition of setting the mansion afire to exterminate one rat’s nest.”
All this was spoken in Virginian, and box-translated into Natural. Oenoe said to Mickey in her language, “Perhaps we would be well advised, beloved, not to answer him.”
The boxes did not translate that remark. Exarchel prevented it.
“So! Montrose is here,” came the voice from Rada Lwa, triumphant. “Before I have you killed, Cowhand, let me compliment you on this latest—no, strike that, let us call it this last, for there shall be no more—this last round of exchanges in our chess game.
“You see, I actually, truly thought this Tomb site had released a series of viral spores into the ecology by accident, as if from a broken coffin, improperly sealed, or the like. Soon there were pine trees growing here, and salmon in the stream—all coming from one spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains, from an old cave site.
“Someone who did not know you would not have been fooled, but I know you. I know, and I would bet the thumb of my pistol hand—well, if I had a thumb—I would bet that you would never, ever willingly place any one of the poor sick people who entrusted to you their helpless hibernating bodies into any danger. It is a point of your honor, which is more sacred to you than the Eucharist.
“But spilling the vir
al spores was sending up a flare. And still I thought it might be natural, or unintentional.
“But then Variant Melusine began to appear—and to trigger one unexpected Cliometric crisis after another, attempting to introduce a new vector into my plans for the last period of history before our masters, the Hyades, arrive.
“So I ordered your Tomb here, the viral source, found and dug up. You see, even until today, even until a few moments ago, I thought you had simply suffered an accident. You hate viral warfare more than anyone I know. Pest and spore and pox are swearwords to you. Yet here you were using it. And you would not let me dig up your precious clients—never, not ever!
“A few moments ago, I realized that these were not, were they? None of them were clients of yours, not one. They are prisoners cast into hibernation by the Giants: Scipio and Ctesibius. Or Witches who attacked the Tombs to kill dead Bishops and were cast into hibernation as a punishment. Or Locusts who attacked the Tombs to kill dead Locusts. Or spies like Clover, whom you know as Oenoe, who entered the Tombs to discover your secrets, but you turned her. Or spies like Asvid, who is the creature of my creature Reyes y Pastor. Or saboteurs like Linder Keir, the Gray Man. Or my collaborators, like Rada Lwa Chwal Montrose, whose loyalty I find unutterably delicious to have won—his reasons for turning against you, First Ancestor, are nearly identical to your reasons for turning against me, did you know that? Him I allowed you to capture and place in hibernation, should I ever have need to speak with you securely, as I do now.
“So, Cowhand, you don’t give a damn whether these revenants live or die, because this is not a Tomb. Not a real Tomb.
“This is your prison yard.
“And here you gulled me into breaking in, sneaking in most surreptitiously, imprisoning your prisoners in my prison camp, because I knew you would never on your honor allow anyone under your protection to act as bait. Ah! But what of your enemies? You don’t care a penny for their lives! What of trespassers into the Tombs? Persons who secretly dabbled in the Dark Sciences of Savantry and Emulation, like your Warlock friend? Or is he your friend? Did you include him in your confidence?—He did not, did he, Mictlanagualzin?”