Mickey said, “No. German god of magic. And skiing. The name means Glory.”
Soorm cocked his head. “What a bunch of interesting rubbish you have collected in your head!”
Mickey: “Thank you. I come from a literate civilization. And I am a Naming Magus. Ull selected his external name because he was a Savant, a Glorified, who had an emulation made of himself.”
Soorm: “I’d like to eat it after you are dead, if you don’t mind. Your brain.”
Mickey: “That is not in keeping with the traditions of the Wise. We are sealed in geomancy-compliant mausoleums with gear specially named and sanctified to be drawn along with us magnetically through the reincarnation wheel, and sealed also are our Moreaus, who are given poisoned peyote to eat for mercy’s sake.”
“Waste of servants! Organ spoilage! Prodigality! You people from the wrong parts of history are freaks.”
Menelaus ploughed on, saying, “—even after De Ulloa solved the Divarication equations for turning animals into Moreaus, they still did not look into emulating augmented animals to do their brainwork. Works like a charm. Animals are just not as prone to entering electronic nirvana, and not imaginative enough to invent electronic paradises to get lost in.”
Mickey said, “And the entire nickel-iron core of the Earth is a computer? That works for you? Sorry. Only the inner core. I would not want to exaggerate your powers, and sound ridiculous.”
“Right. You’d be amazed what you can do with molten building materials on a molecular level. It is a lot like working with squishy gray matter. The trick is to continually regrow the lattices faster than the boiling motions tear them down.”
“And you still say you are not a demigod?”
“Right. Just a man who is good with figures who stuck a damned needle in his brain and went mad and got smart and fell in love and got puckered and peeved when my best pal backstabbed me. Really good with figures. Really smart. Really puckered.”
Oenoe spoke without looking up from the body of Larz, which she still plied with the salves and pumps and flowers and coffin fluid and intravenous bags she had found in the medical kit. “My turn. My question is for Soorm. How is it you can see us? How is it that the nerve-seeking mites slipped by the Blue Men into our food did not work on your nervous system?”
Soorm said, “Lovely lady, they did work! That is, they worked on the spare nervous system I keep in my body as a fake. I have two spares. They are only connected to enough organs—spare organs—so that invasives trying to sly-up my cell life will think they succeeded. My real nervous system is hardened and molecularly double-encrypted. Even I do not know which organ contains my real brain; that way no one can trick the location out of me. In this case, when my false-lobe in my number-two backup brain started editing out sounds and sights from the dais, I knew something weird was happening. Posthuman weird. And I followed the source of the mites being used to jinx the Blue Man nerve blocks.” He squinted his goatlike eye at Menelaus. “I followed it of my own free will, on a whim!”
Oenoe blinked. “Your precautions would normally seem over-elaborate, but no one can doubt they proved effective this day, handsome Soorm.”
“Elaborate? Hardly!” Soorm threw back his head and uttered a vast, jovial laugh. “Brother-loving al-TRU-ism! Do you know how old and wary I am? I am Asvid, the Man himself, the brother-loving Old Man of the Hermetic Gargantua! The first of my kind! Do you think simple tricks with nerve-seekers in the grub can fool me?”
Oenoe bent over Larz, who lay with his head in her lap, and his eyes had just opened. He whispered to her. She said in her sweet voice, “I don’t speak his langauge, but I think he has a question also.”
5. Phantasm
Mickey said, “Let me try. Some of the Chimerae speak Virginian.”
“Only the high-class ones,” said Menelaus. “Educated in dead languages.”
“Well, either he has to come over to you, or you have to get over to him,” said Mickey. “And right now both of you look like battered slabs of raw pork in the butcher shop widow.”
Soorm said to Mickey, “Stop. You are making me hungry.”
Menelaus said, “Don’t move him. Here. Hold this next to his ear.” And he tossed one of the talking boxes looted from Rada Lwa to Oenoe.
Larz whispered, “One eye.”
“Beg pardon?”
Louder, Larz said, “The coffin can regrow nerve tissue, right?”
Menelaus said, “I am trying to get a coffin in here as soon as I can. You’ll be fine.”
Larz said, “Not me. Yuen.”
Menelaus said, “Ah, no. He is suffering from disconnected head syndrome, so he will not be fine.”
“Yuen. So why didn’t Yuen get his eye grown back? Why didn’t the Blue Men repair him?”
“Everyone assumed it was an old war wound he was proud of, and wanted to keep. It is not like the Blue Men know how Chimerae think.”
“But Kine know,” smiled Larz weakly. “Regrowing optic affects the brain. He had something in his brain, an implant, he did not want the Blue Men to find and remove. He has been sending signals somewhere. He worked for your enemies.”
“That’s right. Is that why you took my side against him just now? I know you couldn’t follow what was said.”
Larz nodded weakly.
“But how did you know?”
Larz coughed and smiled, and whispered, “Don’t you read the cheaplies? Del Azarchel the Black Hermeticist wants to kill you with his own hands. Exarchel has no hands. So he just wants you dead. But the Machine cannot see you, can it? That is what it said in the Larz of the Gutter stories. You can point your finger and say, “Null,” and all record of you gets erased, all the cameras go blank, and the mikes go deaf. Only living people can see you. You exist entirely in the biosphere, and not at all in the infosphere. So the Machine needs to get someone else to do it. A seeing-eye dog. Always wanted to ask you. How’d you do it? The null trick. Invisible only to machines, not to people.”
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell me. I am not busy right now…,” smiled Larz.
Menelaus said, “Back when I was a crazy man with two personalities, my true self, who was truly crazy—call him Mister Hyde—wakes up in a computer gray room, and realizes his scat-for-brains sleepwalker self—call him Dopey Blinkers McBlindeye, the Champion Gull of the Land of Gullible—realizes he’s got his head stuck in a bear trap with a hair trigger.
“Del Azarchel has a crazy machine version of himself named Exarchel, which, if it cannot be made to work, Del Azarchel loses his world empire and everything he loves. Mr. Hyde realizes, point one, that if he cannot or does not fix the Machine, he is worthless to Blackie, who then either puts him on ice, hibernation-style, or puts him on ice, mortuary-style, got me? Mr. Hyde also realizes, point two, that if he does fix the Machine, he is again worthless to Blackie, because no one needs a doctor when no one is sick, besides which the Machine, once it is up and running, will be better at running maintenance on itself than an army of human mechanics. So what is the solution?”
Larz squinted. “Let me guess. Fix it a little bit, so it needs a little more work?”
“Good answer. But point three, Mr. Hyde realizes that this is exactly what Princess Rania did to get Blackie to cure Hyde and wake him up in the gray room; and there is just no damn way the same trick will work twice on the same guy, especially if the Machine brain is ramped up to posthuman levels, and would be smart enough to see the trick anyway. Hyde wanted to hide Rania’s trick; but Exarchel would have exposed it.
“Also, the clock is ticking, because Hyde is just too big for the brain of Dopey at this point in time.
“But, point four, here is Princess Rania, whom both he and Blackie are deeply in love with, not to mention in lust, with a little bit of hero-worship thrown in for good measure—heroine-worship?—whatever it is called. She is the key to the solution.”
Larz looked amazed. “The Swan Princess is real?”
“Wait.
You are sitting here in a room with the god-plagued pus-stinking Judge of Ages, and you don’t think my wife is a real person? If you buy the one, don’t you have to buy the other?”
Larz spoke in a voice pale with exhaustion, but his tone was gentle. “Rania is the wise and beautiful virgin who went to the stars to vindicate the human race and save us. You are a mad god who kills people who dig up graves. It is easy to believe in things too scary to be true. Believing in what is too good to be true takes work. Continue with your tale.”
“She ain’t no virgin! I consummated her fair and square, and that is none of your damn business, so shut up. Where was I? So solution one is fix the Machine, but make sure the fix is in. Hyde put a Trojan Horse backdoor code in Exarchel’s perception system, built in as part of the thing that makes Exarchel not insane. Since all perceptions must be emoted and categorized before they are conceptualized (or otherwise they are meaningless raw data and not perceptions), therefore this level always has to be a subconscious level to the Machine. You know how the brain works, with the thalamus and the hypothalamus and the cortex? Well, never mind that. Point is, Exarchel can’t undo it of himself without undoing his own underpart of his brain, and I set it up so that the house collapses if you yank the foundations down. The phantasm itself is too small to be seen: even I could not remove it, even if I could find it, and I am the guy who built it. A few lines of code: just a blank-out jinx, a redactor with a fill-in editor like you have in dreams so that things that don’t make sense seem to make sense, and the whole thing works by association. When Exarchel sees me, or whatever too-near reminds him of me, like my shadow on the wall or footprints on the sand, he doesn’t see me. His subconscious just fills in any blanks with what he expects to see.
“Naar’s digging machines are part of his system. Yeah, he infected them, and the Blue Men took them out of my warehouse buried under Mount Misery when they thawed there. Yes, they are mine. I use a lot of digging machines in my line of work. I had to wear that big metal tent everywhere I went, so my own machines would not step on me.
“The solution two on how to stay alive was cruder. Hyde dropped an elephantine huge hint to Blackie that Rania and I had a romance going on, and since it was a topic concerning a girl, his normally high IQ dropped to idiot levels and his hair-trigger sense of paranoid suspicion flipped into the gullible side of the dial, due to testosterone poisoning—happens to all guys—and he had to keep me alive to find out what the heck was going on. The rest is history, or thanks to Divarication, legend.”
Larz said, “Why is the Master of the World immune? Is not his mind the same as his Machine’s?”
“Grandfather clause. If I had vanished from Blackie’s eyesight during those early days, he would have known something was up, so I made it not affect him. Heh. I may have saved his life by doing that, because the Machine dares not simply absorb and eat his flesh and blood version, or I will be a phantasm to him forever.”
Larz said, “Why not just make the Machine forget you altogether?”
“Can’t. My phantasm code only affects Exarchel’s perception and perceptual memory, not his thoughts, personality, or long-term memory, which have traces in the conscious mind. Even could I have, I would not have: the version of Blackie’s mind that never knew me would not have been a recognizable copy of Blackie, and I would not have made it out of the gray room in one piece—he and I have too much tangled up in each other’s lives.”
Larz had his eyes closed.
Menelaus said gently, “I answered your question. Now you got to tell me one.”
Larz pried his eyes open. “Got questions? I got answers. Man with the plan and I understan’. My price is nice, but don’t ask twice.”
“You jumped Yuen. You knew he was better than you, death on stilts with an afterburner. You knew he would kill you. You knew you could have stayed in the horse armor, where neither the black gas nor the mites Exarchel was spreading would get to you.”
“I knew.”
“Why’d you do it?”
Larz grinned weakly. “Because … I am Streetlaw Larz. Private Law! Best Thaw of ’em all! I wanted to die like the private eye. That is what I am. Not Loser Dzen Scopewaith no more, never. I am Larz of the Gutter now, for real. For real and for ever.”
He closed his eyes. Before he sank into unconsciousness, Larz said, “Wake me when she comes, Judge of Ages.”
A moment later, Oenoe said, “He is going into cardiac arrest. Soorm, I am going to massage his heart to get it going again. When I say ‘clear,’ you stimulate the heart electrically. Ready?”
Menelaus said, “Hold up. I got an easier way.”
And he was grinning with immense relief, and he slumped back on the throne, and his laugh was the laugh of victory.
The ventilations whirled the winds into the chamber, and the fogs and clouds parted. Doors hidden in the walls opened to the left and right, and heavily armored coffins, one after another, crawled into the room.
“Cute! I almost feel like my old self again! But that was not what I came here to do.”
All four of the wands holding up the canopy above the throne lit up like sunlight. Even through the cloud bank, the musketfire and shouts of combat from the other quarters of the chamber broke into cries of alarm, as if frightened of some coming explosion.
6. Slumber Wand
There was a crackle as if of static electricity, and the glittering white motes began to flee from the four bright wands. Circle after expanding circle of these motes, bright as the rings of Saturn, rippled outward, and about the throne was a bright pattern like so many four-leafed clovers, one within the next.
“Hoo haw! We were guests of the Blue Men for a week, and they managed to nanotech us. Damn, but I hate those little bugs! But I use them in my biosuspension. I actually have to intrude four quarts of the stuff in every body, or more, and it binds cell to cell, like a second copy inside you. Takes a while to remove, and you have to do it by a careful molecular flushing process—and simply breaking someone out of his coffin is not that process, nor is the quick thaw I installed for emergency quick release. Which means every damn person in this room is nanoteched up to the eyeballs with systems meant to shut down cellular activity. If they had done their thaws correctly—” But, by then, he could say no more.
White streams like waterfalls lapped over Mickey and Oenoe, Larz and Soorm, to blanket them in glitter, and they became motionless. And then Menelaus Montrose on the throne was motionless as well, grinning a motionless grin.
None of the figures on the dais were breathing. This was not paralysis, it was petrifaction: their skin was like stone, and no drop of blood moved within them.
The sound of battle from the rest of the chamber was cut off. All human noises ceased with a rush and clatter of dropped weapons and fainting and falling bodies.
There came noises of clanking automata that continued for a time, and then a series of shocking explosions, one after another, each time accompanied by a robust cry, amplified by loudspeakers, “DEUS LO VOLT!”
When the last sound died, and not a single footfall of any automaton sounded anywhere in the wide chamber, out from the fog and smoke came a whirr of leg-motors.
Next a wide, solid figure in black powered armor, on whose chest and back were blazoned the fierce white cross of Malta, stepped into the clean air as suddenly as if stepping out from behind a curtain. He moved very slowly, groping, hesitating.
The mysterious white pool of sparks and motes continued to dance about his armored feet and legs, but they found no purchase. The motes could not enter the armor.
The armored form raised his hand, moved it back and forth, searching, reaching, and soon touched one of the four white staves. He knew as his master had known how to work the control, for the fog of white motes now began rippling in reverse, ring on ring and wave on wave being gathered back into the wand. The wand had grown dim during this exercise, but now, starting at the heel and growing toward the head of the wand, it grew brighte
r, until all its original luster had returned.
The faceplate opened. There was the tattooed visage of Sir Guiden. His cheeks and chin were surrounded by tongue-buttons and chin-switches, and his visor was a line of readouts whose reflections glinted along his painted brow like fireflies. But his eyes were squinting slits of milky colorlessness. He sniffed and sniffed again. Then he pulled the wand from its stand, letting the front quarter of the canopy fall like a flap to strike Menelaus Montrose in the face.
Sir Guiden groped with the wand like a blind man’s cane, and touched the fallen form of Oenoe, who lay on the ground in silhouette, shoulder and waist and hips and long legs, like a line of fertile and rounded hills of greenery.
Sir Guiden worked the staff, and now a set of bright pink sparks, the color of sunsets or cherry petals, dripped down and washed over the slumbering form. In a moment the thaw was complete, and she rose smiling; and the two were together.
9
Depthtrain
1. Quake
Menelaus Montrose woke to a noise of many thunders, earthquakes, and volcanoes, and voices, and he thought it was a nightmare. He was on the iron throne, and when he tried to stand, the pain in his maimed legs shot through his body like a javelin of fire, and the burns that made a patchwork of pain across his flesh seemed to ignite in reply. He was still dressed in no more than the beaded undergarment of Rada Lwa, torn, ripped, slashed, burnt, stained, bloody, and smelling of the fume of the black gas.
A Maltese Knight in powered armor stood before him, and in his gauntlet a slumber wand glowing with pink motes: the emergency thaw setting.
Menelaus sniffed, and smelled a smell that chilled his heart. It was that particular combination of heat and dust that men who work in the demolition of old buildings, buildings made of stone and concrete, recognize: the smell of solid rock being cracked, crumpled, crumbled. It is the smell, behind the gunpowder, that hangs behind a mine explosion.