The Judge of Ages
Yuen, prone on the floor, was dead, and did not answer.
3. Dead Eyes
Soorm looked over his shoulder at Menelaus. “There started a huge burst of signal traffic when he died. Like an alarm, or a download process. Loud enough to reach the moon. It is still going on.”
Menelaus said, “Quick! Pick up his head, point it at me, and pull that eyepatch off his eye. Yikes! I meant lift the head up, not yank it off the neck! Well, no matter. It should still work. Five minutes of oxygen left in the brain. Do you see signals between Yuen’s head and Rada Lwa’s body?”
Soorm was standing with the severed, dripping head of Yuen in one claw, holding it by the hair like a lantern. The upper section of Yuen’s still-warm spine was in Soorm’s teeth. Yuen’s expression was still one of anger. Both eyes were now uncovered. One was human and one was the all-black eye of a Melusine, able to see higher and lower bands on the spectrum than what humans called visible light.
The dead eyes fell upon Menelaus. The wand Menelaus was clutching started to flicker and light up. “Scabs and boils! This is taking too long…,” Menelaus muttered in English.
Soorm said in Iatric, “What the brother-love is going on, Judge of Ages?”
Menelaus, on the floor and clutching the shining wand with both hands, said, “It is kind of delicate. I’ll explain if it works. Right now, see if you can rouse Oenoe and Mickey, and have them tend Larz. Don’t let that brave man die.”
Soorm said, “Rada Lwa is not moving. We don’t need him any more, do we?”
Looming over the pale figure on the throne, Soorm drove the longer of his two tongues into the eyesocket of the albino and into the brain beyond.
The tongue stiffened and surged as venom was ejaculated into the skull, and black froth came suddenly out of the mouth of Rada Lwa, both nostrils, and both ears, while his arms and legs twitched and stiffened and never moved again.
“Pox you!” shouted Montrose. “Don’t just go killing people like that! I wanted to give him a chance to speak his piece in his own defense! I might have wanted to question him!”
“Or keep him frozen another four thousand years and give him yet another chance to kill you? Isn’t this the very man who dropped an orbital laser platform on your head? I’ve heard the story.”
“You crazy hell-damned monster!”
“A monster who is still alive after surviving the most dangerous and deadly period of history the mind of man or posthuman could conceive. Hell-bound I surely am—which is why I mean to stay alive on Earth as long as possible, and that means not leaving enemies alive at my back.”
“Gah! At least don’t lick up the brains.”
“Complex neural tissue. Why let it go to waste?”
Soorm went over and gently helped Oenoe to rise and stand, supporting her weight with an arm around her naked shoulder, and stroking her hair, and patting her hand, asking her quietly if she were hurt; and he then gave Mickey a friendly kick in the rump to encourage him back on his feet.
The Nymph took up the medical case Mickey had brought down, and she nimbly set to work on Larz. “I have some knowledge of neural medicine,” she said in Natural.
Soorm hunkered down next to her, speaking the same language, which he knew from his youth. “I have considerably more—centuries more.”
Menelaus said in Virginian, “Mickey, volunteer some of your fatty tissue. Maybe Oenoe can give you a painkiller while Soorm takes a slice out of your belly.”
Mickey said, “Puh-leese. Am I not an adept of the Twelfth Echelon? I can work my dark arts without behaviors so grotesque and uncomely! I carry a large mass of undigested totipotent fat cells in my stomach, and can bring it up by vomiting.”
4. Question Game
Working together, they managed to pack the totipotent cell material into the immense wound running through Larz, and began programming it to pinch shut open veins, bind wounds, and lower the fever.
Many moments passed. Eventually Oenoe looked up. “This is beyond my skill. I cannot stop the internal bleeding just with this. There are others in the chamber who might be able to help. Can we call my maids? Can we get him to a coffin?”
Everyone jumped when voices spoke from the dead body of Rada Lwa, whose arms and legs had curled up like a cripple’s, but it was merely the talking boxes, repeating her comment in Iatric and Virginian and Chimerical.
The fighting in the rest of the chamber was still going on. Incredible as it seemed to those on the balcony, the whole duel with Yuen had taken only a minute or two. Beyond the wall of black fog surrounding them, there were still at least twenty Blue Men, scores of dog things, a dozen Witches, and a brace of Chimerae fighting; and, from the clanking noises, at least three automata were still active. Groans and screams and cries indicated how many people also needed immediate medical help, if they were to live.
Menelaus said, “There are no more working coffins in this chamber. And no one in here can see or hear us, thanks to Exarchel.”
The talking boxes repeated that in several languages.
Mickey scowled at the corpse of Rada Lwa. “Gods of the underworld, but that is annoying! Does everyone here speak Latin? I learned it to read the Malleus Maleficarum in the original, and the Archidoxes of Paracelsus.”
Oenoe answered in the same tongue, “And I, to speak with my husband.”
Soorm said, “And I, to follow the strange rites of my master, Father Reyes, and read the book of his tortured god.”
Menelaus said, “And I can memorize new languages by shoving books up my nose directly into my augmented brain.”
Mickey said, “I knew that nose had to have additional prosthetics in it.”
“Mock not the nose! It has served me well this day.”
Soorm said, “What do we do? Your Kine who gave his life for you is dying under our hands. We are in the most advanced medical facility ever devised, and hundreds of coffins, any one of which can bring a man back from six cubits beyond the brink of death, are just beyond the doors that you, in your wisdom, jammed shut, O Judge of Ages.”
Menelaus said, “Yeah, but there is a weak spot in the wall behind the portrait. Yank the machinery for the clock out, and the wall armor is only half an inch thick there, and any of these digging machines, or a single working wall gun, could punch through. Don’t tell my wife my plan was to blow through her face. Or—I guess it don’t matter. She is not due back for another fifty-nine thousand four hundred eighty-five years, four months, three days, and change. That is the thinnest part of the wall. And if she does find out, she’ll understand.”
“How do you know what is there?” asked Mickey. “You have never been in this room before.”
“It’s a posthuman thing. I can see how big the room is with my eyeball, and subtract numbers, and notice tiny air currents, and—it’s magic. It’s poxing magic, and I am a demigod, okay?”
Mickey nodded smugly. “As I suspected. So we cross the battle, where people who cannot see us are shooting muskets, and have Soorm smash through the wall with a battering ram he can project from his groin?”
Soorm said, “There is also a secret exit in the central cistern. I checked. I don’t think we can move the patient through the water very safely, though. For one thing, some madman planted petards of topically active neural poison down there, with directional lasers set to blow the water into steam and vent it into the room. But there is also a secret exit under the throne: I can hear the hollow space under the floor with my echolocation. And there are two hidden doors in the eastern wall, and two in the west, opening into crawl spaces big enough to admit coffins.”
Menelaus said, “That is not the problem. Exarchel is the problem. He has poxed and hexed and jinxed all my systems, and I cannot give orders to Pellucid, because Exarchel and Pellucid are one and the same now, and he cannot see me. So no coffin, at the moment, would accept a new client. When they are off-power, the biosuspension fluid still acts, and the coffin can preserve the hibernaut indefinitely; but you need power t
o put a living man into slumber.”
Soorm said, “Or to thaw a slumbering man to wake? That is why your knights are not here, Judge of Ages. I did all you commanded in your secret armory vault, but something—I know now it was Exarchel—cut the power to their coffins, and also jammed our radio link.”
Menelaus said, “That’s good to hear.”
“Good?” Soorm’s eyes were already goggled like a frog’s, so he could not look more surprised, but there was surprise in his tone.
“Because for a time, I thought you did that. I thought you were still loyal to Reyes, and you had turned on me.”
Soorm said, “I am still loyal to Reyes, or to his memory. But he turned his face away from the Master of the World.”
Menelaus said, “But you said you hated him?”
Soorm said, “I thought you would trust me more if I said that. Besides, Hormagaunts all hate their fathers. We are not really a very nice and cuddly race of beings. I didn’t want you to think me odd.”
Mickey said, “So, did anyone tell the truth to the Blue Men about who and what he was? Did anyone give his right name?”
Oenoe said, “To the grave-robbers? Was I supposed to tell them that I sought out the Grandmaster of the Order of Malta to destroy him, and pretended to fall in love with him so as to weaken him and corrode him—but he would not lie with me as man with woman until he had bound me by oath to forsake all others, and to live no longer for myself, but for the image of his god inside him; was I to tell them this? There was a night we slept in the meadow on scented grass beneath the moon, and the fireflies hung in the sky below the stars, which were as elder fireflies, and Guiden put his naked sword between us as we slept, and he would not turn to me and take me in his arms, though I knew by many signs how he ached for me, and his love for me was like fire in his bones and wine in his head. A Nymph cannot be deceived about such matters! No, he would not so much as brush me with the back of his hand, for the law of his order proved stronger than the arts of mine. Should I have told the Blue Men how entire was my humiliation and defeat? How I was shamed beyond shame? How I was broken like a mare to the saddle, bridle, whip, and spur?”
Mickey said, “Stop talking like that. You’re turning me on.”
“I speak of the lash of my own rich and female passions, the hunting hounds I had so often used on others—in rebellion they turned and rent me. I came to ache for my knight, for he was the only man who has ever taken the deep and hidden grail of my heart in his hand, filled as if with fiery wine, but would not so much as taste of the brim of it. Should I have spoken of the mysteries of womanhood to those—those—eunuchs?! I am the lady wife of the finest knight who has ever drawn sword against the Machine and all its handiworks!”
Nodding toward Larz, Menelaus said, “How we doing?”
Oenoe said, “Poorly. He cannot live, unless you work one of your posthuman works.”
“I am trying my damnest. Soorm. Help me up into the throne. Don’t toss the corpse like that! Easter Jesus popping up a gopher hole, but you are barbaric! Ain’t you been to Sunday school? A dead man is not just a bag of lunchmeat!”
“Why the throne?” asked Soorm, carefully maneuvering Menelaus, with his two maimed feet and broken arm, into the iron judgment seat.
Menelaus put his good hand on the cowls of the friars forming the armrests. There was library material coating the wood in a thin veneer, so he felt an answering tingle in his implants. “Something the Melusine said. I am hoping I might do better with some other interface. My implants are not meshing properly with the systems in the room.”
Mickey said, “Smash your face into the coffin again. That was great.”
Soorm said, “Would you like the head of Yuen? I can put it in your lap.”
“No, pox, no. Gross.”
“Then I can eat it? I have genetic retroengineering receptors in my mouth and first intestine, which helps me analyze and copy interesting biotech from those I defeat.”
“Gross. No, pox, no. Control your appetite.”
Soorm looked puzzled, and hefted the head in one webbed hand, tossing it up and catching it idly, making the teeth clack. The dead eyes stood out, the long and beautiful hair floated, and fluids fled from the grisly red wetness of the neck stump. “Then why did I pick it up? Oh, and I like his taste in eyes.”
“You were supposed to prop up the head and point it toward me because I was hoping if I put information of my identity and location from an uninfected source, like Yuen, into the Exarchel’s system, I could get past the blind spot block, and let Pellucid know I am here, without letting Exarchel see me and countermand any orders I give. This whole rigmarole was just to get myself into a position where Yuen was both dead and looking at me. He had to be dead so that the whole brain mass would download into Exarchel—he is a Savant, like the other slaves of the Machine, but the skullworks are more sophisticated and miniature with him, and Exarchel likes to equip his slaves with an electronic rapture at death, to help him form a complete autopsy and after-action report—and Yuen had to look at me because that eyeball was not infected by Exarchel, and he could see me.”
Soorm said, “Wait. Which rigmarole? The Blue Men found and captured me by accident. And just now, of my own free will, I crossed to this side of the chamber, passed though the fog, and came across your duel … you did not arrange that. You did not know I would take your side of the quarrel.”
“I did. The only thing I did not arrange is Larz. That came as a complete surprise, a thunderbolt out of the clear blue sky. My plan was you walk up to Yuen and wave your tail under his nose and nanotech him to death with your farts. I did not imagine you were going to try to best him at hand to hand. He is a Chimera!”
Soorm said, “Chimerae, in my time, were legend. Would you not wrestle a fearsome Neanderthal, and measure your strength against his, if you had the chance? Or hunt a triceratops, or some other great beast from myth, long extinct? Such chances do not come twice, not even in a life so long as mine.”
“Funny. I had you pegged as being more careful and paranoid. Even posthumans make mistakes.”
Mickey said, “So what are you doing? To us non-posthumans, it looks like you are sitting on a chair, leaking blood on the seat leather.”
Menelaus said, “I am doing something with my brains. I am trying to wake up my systems just enough to turn this room and the things in it back on, bring in coffins for the wounded, and so on. I have set a process in motion. Now we sit around, watching Larz die of internal bleeding and shock, and listening to my clients shoot each other, and we wait.”
Mickey said, “Let’s play a game to pass the time.”
Menelaus said, “You better be pustulating yerking my leg, fat man. That guy in Oenoe’s lap is dying, and I cannot save him.”
Mickey said, “The game is a question and answer game. Exarchel made it clear you have hidden much from me, Judge of Ages, despite your hillbilly Yankee charm.”
“Fine. I can run the program systems through my implants with two segments of my compartmentalized mind and spend a segment chewing the fat with you. I’ve lost the love of loyal men before because I did not explain myself enough, including my whole damned Clan. So ask. But I ain’t no Yankee. Be polite!”
Mickey said, “My question is this: Exarchel invaded your Xypotechnology.”
“By invitation. I invited him and he fell for it.”
“And your system, this Pell-mell—”
“Pellucid. Named him after a place from a Tarzan book.”
“—Your system went blind to you?”
“Exarchel made a more complete and thorough attack than I thought he would. I had a firewall—you don’t know what that is—I had a ward, a magic circle, around that part of my Ghost I was going to keep safe, but Exarchel somehow drove a spike all the way to the core of the planet and got a physical contact with my Ghost, which I thought was poxy impossible. So point for him. I lured him in with bait, and he swallowed the hook, line, and sinker, but also the fish
ing pole and half of my arm. But I got the hook in him, so point for me.”
“I don’t understand. How are they both two minds and one mind at the same time?”
“Uh. It’s magic. One Ghost ate the other. I dangled my horse on purpose like bait into the shark waters, and fed the horseflesh to the foe, ’cause it was a Trojan horse, and I did it to get all my systems inside Exarchel. And because my horse was so big and so tasty, Blackie’s Ghost was dumb enough to fall for the trap. Unlike the real Blackie, Blackie’s Ghost always underestimates me, because he cannot see me, and therefore he never sees me do anything.”
Soorm perked up and said, “My turn to ask a question. Did you say horse?”
“Yup. A sorrel named Res Ipsa. Finest bit of horseflesh I ever sat astride.”
Soorm said, “You are talking about the core of the planet!”
“I surely am. The whole damn planet is my bronco. You see why I ain’t worried too pea-green about Del Azarchel’s Ghost occupying a little crust of ice on the outside, and not even all of that neither. Compare the surface area of a globe to its volume.”
Soorm said, “You used a self-replicating iron-based viral pseudolifeform, a type of crystal called a Von Neumann machine, to infect the entire core of the planet and turn it into a Xypotech.”
“I surely did. Ah—not the whole core. That would be ridiculous. Only the inner core. About two percent of the entire mass of the Earth.”
Soorm said, “Reyes and the other Hermeticists were mad with envy, not able to figure out how to scale up a human brain to that volume without suffering Divarication madness. My question is, how you did it?”
“Because it wasn’t a human brain. A Neohippus is smarter than an old-fashioned horse, but ain’t much smarter than a monkey. The laws, and my conscience, didn’t have any qualms about making an emulation of a beast I loved. And when I augmented his Ghost, it became a super horse, a post-equine. But it still loved me with the simple love of an animal’s heart. It does all that it does sort of half-asleep, in the back of its head, and so it is super brilliant, but not original, and because of that, it cannot go mad. The situation is more complex than that, and there is math involved I could explain—or, actually, can’t explain, not unless you got a few years—but the damn Hermeticists were so fixated on copying me and making themselves superhuman, that even after Melchor de Ulloa—is that twerp Ull named after him, by the way?—”