“One of these days,” said Menelaus, “I am going to wake up in bed next to a pretty blond space princess. Unless she changes her hair again. What the hell, Sir Knight? When I zonked out, I had coffins rolling in here to pick up the wounded, I got the doors open, and everyone who was fighting was safely zonked out but you.”
The voice from the external speakers was Sir Guiden’s. “Also the man in red who played you—”
“Scipio Montrose. He is a great-great-whatthehellever-grandnephew or something.”
“—He was at the doors when the cave-in happened. The geophone in his sarcophagus shows that the corridor outside the big doors you jammed shut is now filled up entirely with rubble.”
“Give me some good news.”
“I performed a shutdown of the reactor core, so we are not going to die of radiation poisoning, but the quicker we get everyone into coffins for cellular cleanup and regeneration, the fewer cases of hair loss and bone marrow disease we might encounter. The bad news is that if I thaw the Blues, they can use their radio triggers to paralyze everyone.”
Another temblor rippled through the area. The stalactite-shaped chandelier which had been hanging like a loose tooth now fell in a cataclysm of crashing, breaking, shattering, and the groaning scream of tortured metal. Menelaus could not see if any petrified bodies had just been crushed. Dust filtered down from the cracked ceiling, and he could hear dozens of bullets fallen from a broken wall-gun belt clattering brightly to the floor like so many dropped marbles.
“What’s causing the cave-in?” snarled Menelaus. “This facility is supposed to be able to withstand an energy blast equivalent to one thousand sticks of dynamite without rattling a teacup on a saucer.”
“Offhand, Liege, I would say it was an energy blast equivalent to one thousand and one sticks of dynamite.”
“’Swonderful. Thaw Illiance. Scrape every single last of his gems off his coat and then and only then whack him with your wake-up stick. Get Scipio over here. Hand him one of Rada Lwa’s dog pistols. If Illiance paralyzes us, Scipio shoots him. Shouldn’t come to that, though. I think Illiance has a good heart, if he keeps his weirdness chip turned off. And who else is thawed?”
“Everyone I thought was not dangerous to you, Liege.”
“And who would that be, exactly?”
“Oenoe, Aea, Thysa, Daeira, Ianassa.”
“Your lovely lady wife and her love-starved bouncy-boobed Beautiful Nurse Squad.”
“It was the nursing rather than the bouncing I had in mind, Liege, thinking that we need help with any wounded that had to be thawed, or transitioned from short-term hibernation to a long-term regime.”
“Thaw up Mickey the Witch—”
“He’s dangerous, Liege.”
“—and Soorm the Hormagaunt—”
“He’s also dangerous, Liege.”
“—and Daae the Chimera—”
“He’s dead, Liege.”
“Will you stop saying th—Wait! What? What did he die of?”
“Being a Chimera, sir. He threw himself on the enemy bayonets and blew himself to bits. The aiming cameras recorded it.”
“Damn! And I promised the nice psycho lady Chimeress I’d try to save him.”
“Ivinia? She’s dead, too.”
“Also thaw Keirthlin the Linderling and send her up here.”
“She’s dangerous, Liege.”
“And send one of the bouncy-boob squad with a medical kit over here on the quickstep. I need a gill of morphine or something, and a seamstress to sew my big toe back on. Have one of the dogs sniff around the room to see where it rolled. And hand me your sword.”
“My sword, my Liege?” The voice over the helmet speakers was slow with puzzlement. “You are too weak to wield it, and your hands are unpracticed.” Nonetheless, he unhooked the massive claymore from its war belt, and leaned it against the armrest of the throne.
“It’s not for me.”
Soorm and Mickey were lying, one in a smooth furry heap, the other in a mountainous gelatin blob, to the left and right of the throne. Sir Guiden directed cherry-colored motes from his thaw wand toward them, waiting until their skins started to take on color, and then he moved away in a whirr of leg motors down the dais and across the chamber.
The ventilation had cleared more and more of the black smoke away, and now could be seen the bodies of the dead and dying—the latter preserved like flies in amber in pale petrifaction—here lying singly, there lying in a pile, or there lying sundered in pieces. There was wreckage of automata also, and the waters of the fountain had fallen silent.
2. Epicenter
With his good hand, Menelaus tapped on the library surface of the armrest of the throne. He was talking aloud, in English. “I just love having a computer system where, every time you press a poxed command in, nothing the pox happens. Oops! What have we here? Seismometer is working. The epicenter is the depthtrain station. Someone on the surface is blowing a hole through the armor between the third and fourth level. Prying the damn roof off, so the train station will be open to the sky. But who in the world is—?”
A voice, or rather a set of voices, answered him, speaking in English. “It was Aanwen.”
Menelaus looked up. Soorm and Mickey had thawed to the point where they were breathing, and their flesh was pink, but they looked comatose. Neither of them had spoken.
Some clouds and banks of the black smoke still hovered in the chamber, in quarters where the ventilation was broken. One cloud lapped the area between the dais and the statue of Hades, so that the white, marble arms and pale, frightened face of Proserpine, frozen in midfling over the death god’s shoulder, emerged from the top of the cloud like a drowning swimmer.
The black cloud stirred and Alalloel of Lree, the Melusine, stepped out from the fogbank of poison, and mounted the dais. The skin of her face and hands, which were not covered by her skintight wet suit, were glinting and glimmering with a cherry-red cloud of motes, as if she herself were a living thaw wand, or could impersonate the action of such a wand with her skin cells. From the tiny glints of reflection behind her, he could tell that the surface of her exposed back was also lit up as if with the same cold flame of delicate pink.
Alalloel opened her tongueless mouth. The voices of three women blended together emerged. “Aanwen the Widow was the final agent of the Nobilissimus del Azarchel, the one you did not detect.”
Her walk was different than it had been before. Now it was both more confident and more womanish: she swayed her hips and swung her arms, or, when a strand from her hanging bangs fell in her face, she tossed her head with a casual, unselfconscious, girlish gesture to flip it back. Menelaus found her whole demeanor eerie and unnerving.
The cherry aura of motes withdrew into her skin, which returned to normal hue. Alalloel stood before the throne, one leg straight, the other flexed, one hand on her hip, gazing at him with her strange, lightless eyes. At one moment, she reminded him of some blind and inhuman monster; in another moment, she looked like a girl, shorter than average, wearing an oddly bobbed haircut and what could almost be a pair of dark eyeglasses.
Now two of the voices halted, and only one, a contralto with a slight, lilting accent, continued to speak. “Upon discovering your identity, Aanwen commanded Ull to pretend not to know your identity until the point when any further delay would trigger your suspicions. If I may venture a personal opinion, it would have been wiser for him not to continue the deception for so long; but he evidently knew your psychology better than I. Even now, I sense you doubt me. You think Ull was that slow-witted? I wonder what distorts your estimate.”
He said, “Nobilissimus del Azarchel you call him? Even Pellucid mocked the idea, but I knew that there had to be a Current culture on the surface, and that it was being run by Del Azarchel.”
Now she spoke in three voices again. “Not on the surface.”
“In the ocean, then,” he shrugged. “You guys are dolphins and whales and machine emulations nerve-linked wi
th humans and Moreaus into a single gestalt mind—or so I was told. I was also told that certain bodies in the gestalt are mind-controlled down to the finest imaginable level: a helotry of the mind, a slave who cannot even imagine freedom unless he is commanded to imagine it, and told how to.”
Her trio of voices said, “That format has been superseded.”
“Meaning what?”
“Consider the man-hours involved in removing even one mental habit from an entire society, merely to perform the proofreading and line-checking of each hierarchy by its superiors, plus the danger of contamination of the editors by the very thoughts they are redacting, and you will apprehend some of the immediate limitations of the helotry system. For daily operations, our world is governed by a decentralized parliamentary plutoaristocratic advocacy, based on semi-independent families and clans, similar to the Concordat designed by Rania the First. The Nobilissimus is supreme military commander as well as the sacramental king.”
He said, “From the time of the Witches onward, the Hermeticists ruled their subject populations in secret. What changed?”
The choir of female voices said, “All previous races were of inferior design, and not intended to survive long enough to witness the End of Days when the Hyades should descend; had they known the Hermetic intention, they might have objected to the prospect of their own scheduled extinction. Those considerations do not apply to the Melusine; therefore there is no need for deception on the part of the Nobilissimus. The remnant of previous race members will be taken up.”
He wondered why she phrased it that way. On the part of the Nobilissimus. Montrose said, “He must still need some damned deception. Your system of mental helotry is designed to be fitted into the Hyades social equations as neatly as a jack fits a socket, or a spurred boot fits a stirrup. Does your general population know that he intends to enslave us all to the Hyades?”
“Evidently he does not, as the current circumstances show.”
That was an odd, even astonishing, reaction. It did not fit into any pattern he could form in his mind of the historical events which created this era.
Montrose wondered if his ears had betrayed him. Had Del Azarchel changed his mind about resisting the invader? Or were his people simply deceived about his intent?
But he was more worried about her other words: “You said the remnants of the previous races will be taken up? What the hell does that mean? What are you doing to my clients?”
“We Melusine form gestalt minds of posthuman levels of intelligence beyond what even the Giants achieved. Brain masses the size of whales swim in the waters: the unit you see before you is merely an extension, a tool used for land-based operations. Each gestalt is controlled by a Paramount in a hierarchy, where the lesser minds are taken up into the greater.”
Again, two of her voices faded. The one voice that spoke next was cool and regal, but huskier, a tenor. She sounded like a Carolina aristocrat. “I hereby exercise my claim of possession, as your office of Judge of Ages and Guardian of the Tombs can be more aptly served by me.”
“Sez you,” he muttered.
“This site is mine. Even now, other Paramount Melusine have been dispatched to the eighty-eight other sites under your control,” one of her voices said.
Menelaus was looking at her with an odd, almost hungry look on his face. Then: “What is your interest in my Tomb sites?”
The cold and regal tenor said, “As I have already said. The raw materials you think of as people, which you have preserved for us, shall be thawed, revived, implanted, and willingly or not, brought into nerve-link with our Noösphere, to compel them into the condition you aptly call mental helotry, able to think only permitted thoughts.
“Minds of our scope can only mesh in groups of five or seven: but these lesser minds of the archaic men, lower on the scale of being, can be taken up in far greater numbers. In the case of this site, the Locusts, Inquline, and Savants found here, with very few modifications, can be adapted to be able to perform Melusinry, and so some of the lesser may be taken up under them.
“Our system is hierarchical and exact. No stray person, and no stray thought, is permitted to exist.
“Fear not! Your clients will not be disadvantaged. Their minds will be adjusted so that they will regard the helotry as a joyful rather than regrettable condition. The Melusine mind-gestalts thus will be elevated and augmented with the psychological richness, talents, outlooks, and diverse experience these lesser ones will contribute into the multiform mental unity: their memories, souls, and lives, which the lessers were unable to use or appreciate, will be his.”
“Sez you, and we’ll just see about that. More important topic: The fight in the chamber, and the duel with Rada Lwa and Yuen. So it was a stall tactic? Stalling for what?”
All three voices spoke: “Even a posthuman like you can have his attention occupied by sufficiently dire emergencies. Aanwen needed time to repair a depthtrain car, load it with equipment meant to discover and gather Von Neumann crystal, to calculate the path toward the Earth’s core, and prepare the various detonators she carried hidden in her body to initiate the magnetic overload and railgun launch. Even with the additional digging automatona brought back aboard the Albatross from the Vulnerary Simplifier Tomb site at Mount Misery, it was difficult to move so much equipment in the time available. She descended with the depthtrain, she being a necessary component to the mission, and will not emerge again. It is customary among the Vulnerary Simplifiers to program a widow to commit self-destruction should her mate die. This is done for the sake of the simplicity and tidiness they crave.”
“Hell, and I thought Scipio was kidding when he called people who wouldn’t touch a Bible barbarians. Maybe he weren’t too far wrong. So you are telling me that Del Azarchel sent that lady what lost her husband off to do herself in, because she carries some kind of trigger inside her he needed to hide? And it just slipped his mind to tell her that suicide is a sin? He calls himself a Christian and a gentlemen. He ain’t even a man.”
Menelaus sighed and rubbed his eyes, wondering what would happen if he shouted for Sir Guy to come back over. He wondered what it would feel like to die like the dogs Alalloel (as best he could tell) was able to kill just by looking at them. He wondered what it would look like if Sir Guy died in that same way, falling over without a mark on him. He decided not to call out for anyone.
Menelaus looked up. There was, of course, no expression in the eyes of the Melusine. He realized at long last what they reminded him of: they looked a bit like the eyes of some sea mammal.
Menelaus said, “The earthquakes—what are they? A beam being directed at this spot from Tycho crater? That same one that cracked the surface armor?”
She nodded. “Correct. It can only be used effectively at a given target location after local moonrise. The original plan had been to wait, but the speed with which you quelled the tumult in the chamber, and dispatched Yuen and Rada Lwa and Linder Keir the Gray—but perhaps this last was merely a casualty of the general violence?—it was thought that to act immediately was better.”
Menelaus said, “The dog things can sense something about your agents. Was Soorm one of yours?”
She said, “No harm is done, now that the events are played out, to tell you that we misunderstood his loyalties. He is apparently still carrying out some orders given him by Reyes y Pastor, or rather, given him by Expastor the Ghost.”
“Played out? You think I am finished?” Menelaus suddenly squinted toward the far end of the chamber. Putting his thumb and forefinger of his good hand between his lips, he gave a sharp, high, clear whistle.
No one answered.
He said, scowling, “You turned Exarchel’s motes back on, so that no one can see or hear us. God, how I hate nanotech.”
Her triple voice said, “Finished or not, you are confined until matters resolve themselves. I will permit you to consult with your friends, who perhaps can see to the wounds of that odd, one, solitary body you call your own. I have oth
er arrangements to make throughout these Tombs pending the arrival here of the Paramount assigned to these revenants; or, more precisely, the completion. Consultations must be made before the Bell arrives. The Hyades practice deracination and removal of every surface structure encountered of the target species; this Tomb is now exposed, and, without intervention, will be converted.”
“Wait—you sound as if the Bell is not under your control. Is it actually a machine from the Hyades, which somehow got here faster than possible? But it can’t be! Hold it! Wait!”
She turned, walked over to the central fountain, hips swaying from side to side, paused at the brink, and dove in. She did not emerge.
Menelaus blinked. Maybe her outfit actually was a wet suit.
3. Pretenses
Soorm, who was still lying on the floor pretending to be frozen, opened his goatlike eye. His other eye, of course, was already and ever opened, since it had no lid. He said in Latin, “That was weird. But I told you there was a secret exit in that cistern.”
Mickey, who was also lying on the floor pretending to be frozen, spoke without raising his head or opening either eye. “Your breathing changed when you went from alpha wave state to beta wave state. If I noticed it, the posthumans noticed it.”
Soorm rolled to his feet, lithe as a bear. Mickey climbed heavily to his feet, round as a water balloon.
Soorm said, “So what is actually going on, again, exactly? Is this something the nonposthumans can be told?”
Menelaus said, “I think even a nonposthuman can understand the complex and abstract concept that Blackie has been puck-dithering with me.”
Soorm said, “If I knew what that was, I would say it sounds painful. Does it involve your anus in any capacity?”
“It involves my brain being too slow and too stupid. Ever since the moment Aanwen told me she knew who I was and walked out of here and over to my depthtrain station, I’ve just been gulled. He was not after me. Blackie was not trying to dig up this Tomb to find me. He was trying to dig up and capture a working depthtrain station. And he had to do it in such a way that I did not blow the station before it fell into his hands, so he had to have his people act like they were looking for me. Maybe he knew where I was all along; maybe he did not give a good goddamn.”