The Judge of Ages
Soorm said, “Blow the station? Do you have all your rooms and chambers really wired with explosives and outfitted with guns and lethalities? That’s paranoid.”
Menelaus said, “Is your nervous system really hidden under two levels of fakes with three levels of encryption?”
Soorm said blithely, “It is not a matter for casual discussion. I have foes.”
“As have I, and I am usually asleep when they come a-calling.”
Mickey said, “But why does the Master of the World want a depthtrain? And why send Alalloel to tell you? Was she here just to tell lies?”
Menelaus glanced sharply at him. “Lies, plural? With an s? I only heard one. She was lying about the Tombs. But I don’t know the point of that lie…”
“She was so totally lying about Mentor Ull,” affirmed Mickey.
Menelaus said slowly, “What makes you say so?”
Mickey said, “First, Ull was about as good at lying with a straight face as you. Second, Alalloel is possessed. The woman who was just here was not the one who was sitting in the mess tent yesterday.”
Menelaus said, “Yeah. She aged four hundred years in one day.”
Mickey said, “No, that is not it. That demon is a type we call ‘Legion’—a manifestation with multiple centers. But Legion cannot coordinate well. When a demon like that tells a lie, one and only one voice ever speaks. When multiple voices lie, it sounds rehearsed rather than spontaneous, or the voices drop out of synch. So whatever Alalloel said in choir is true. What she said solo is false. She said the thing about Ull solo: Therefore it is false. QED.”
Menelaus said to Soorm, “You heard her. What do you think?”
Soorm flicked his two tongues in the air thoughtfully. “I don’t believe in spooks. But I have noticed that Reyes, and you, and other posthumans I have met have more ability to fool themselves than stupid and normal people like me. You have more spare brainspace or something to devote to explaining away the obvious. Ull had been posthumanized, and so he did not listen when Aanwen told him who you were. Like animals, we humans tend to have a sharper ability to see what is right in front of us. I was there. I saw the dumb look on his arrogant little face. It was right in front of me.”
Soorm shrugged and spread his webby hands. Then he said, “He was blind as a bat in a box down a dark well at the bottom of a coal mine shaft at midnight, overcast with no moon out. You cannot fake that kind of bone-deep stupid. If you had been wearing a yard-high pointy hat with two blinking eyes and the words I AM THE JUDGE OF AGES printed in seven languages circled by a trained magpie calling out the same words in seven languages … it still would not look as bad as what Mickey presently has perched on his head.”
“Hey!” said Mickey, sounding wounded. “This hat makes me look dignified. It is my Headgear of Power!”
“Clothing is overrated,” sniffed Soorm.
Menelaus said, “Why did Weird Girl say Ull was stalling me? It seems a pointless little thing to lie about.”
Mickey said, “Oho! What do you know about the ancient and honorable art of fabrication? If you want to know about lies, talk to a magician. Listen: that little lie was the most important thing Alalloel said, which is why she said it first.”
“Important that I was being stalled?”
Mickey said, “By the beard of baby Oberon, for a supergenius, you’re dumb! No! That is not what the lie was! How did you feel when you found out, not that you had fooled Ull, but that Ull (of all people) had fooled you? Miserable? Worried, weak, and stupid? Scared? Like your foes might be better than you? Or, in other words, you are put in the exact state of mind any foe would want you to be in.”
Soorm said, “She was also trying to make it sound as if Ull, who was a Hermeticist, and Aanwen, who was a personal vassal of Del Azarchel and him alone, were perfectly coordinated. What if they are not perfectly coordinated? Reyes broke with the Table Round.”
Mickey said solemnly, “It is not an unbroken circle. The ward is weakened.”
4. External View
Keirthlin, black parka flapping, came soaring over the floor toward them. She was skating like a speed skater. Menelaus saw that she had reprogrammed the smartmetal of her soles into frictionless surfaces. Her face was no longer grief-stricken, but instead looked preternaturally calm, hard, and intent, as if she had used some mesmeric technique or compartmentalization of her brain to store her grieving until it could be confronted without distraction. Had her expression been one of wild panic, it would not have more quickly imparted to Menelaus a sense of fear.
He was so startled that he began to get up, and this sent such pain through his body that he collapsed back in the throne, and that motion produced more pain. “I am going to need a well-equipped coffin with nine yards of synthetic flesh-replacement.”
Keirthlin skated to the dais, leaped up, landed neatly, but then stumbled, and was on her knees before the throne. Without even bothering to speak, she snatched the goggles off her silvery eyes and thrust them at the face of Menelaus.
He caught them in his good hand before she could poke him in the eye with an earpiece.
“I thought you might like to see this,” she said, panting, her voice bizarrely calm.
Menelaus donned the glasses.
It was an external view of the camp.
It had been only a short time since he had descended underground, but to see the snowy trees and hillocks of the camp in sunlight again, beneath a sky he had almost forgotten, was like looking into a world from childhood.
The cleft was enlarged. Trees on the hilltop had been flattened and scattered. Raw earth and broken rock, stumbled with boulders and dripping like river deltas of brown and dun and back, now spilled from the hill. Three vast shards of metal, carbon-nanotube-reinforced titanium steel several yards thick, had been bent to the vertical, and loomed like the sails of a ship of stone above the enlarged hole. This was where the magnetic ray from Tycho crater had passed.
The third level was gone, save for a fringe of wreckage ringing a pit. At the bottom of this pit, remarkably free of damage and debris, was the depthtrain station; but the launching and receiving coils, the drop-shaft, and the turntable were all vanished. The head of the evacuated tube was exposed to the snowy air. The outer door was gone. Only the inner door stood between the atmosphere and the airlessness of the depthtrain tube.
He saw nothing to provoke panic. Grief and horror and anger, yes, at the casual destruction of any clients in any coffins that might have been on the third level—but not panic.
Then he realized the visor had infrared, ultraviolet, and other settings. Clicking from one band to another, he now saw that the head of the depthtrain tube was glowing white-hot. The excess of magnetic energy running to the surface from the core of the planet was roughly the same as that found at the North and South Poles—or, rather, to be more accurate, the application of some titanic electromagnetic force had made this spot on Earth into the magnetic North Pole, placing the magnetic South Pole no doubt somewhere off the coast of Australia.
The display of such unimaginable immensity of power was indeed worthy of some consternation. Menelaus, in a tense tone, started to say, “Keirthlin, what is causing…”
Then came the explosion.
Menelaus was flung from his throne and fell heavily to the floor, perhaps hitting every single second-degree burn that had blackened his upper back and lower legs. Fortunately, the pain as the ends of his broken arm bones ground together was so great that the tormenting sensation of his dead skin being peeled off receded to the background.
The goggles did not fall off his face, yet he saw nothing. Keirthlin’s calm voice cut through Soorm’s bellowing and Mickey’s swearing, and told Menelaus to stand by. His implants detected the nodes she wore on her belt seeking other contacts through the Nymph arboreal neural net. Then the picture returned.
The image was from considerably farther away. The view now showed the hill, and what seemed a stream or tube of pure white light, slightl
y red at the edges, reaching down from heaven to touch the shattered crest of the hill. All the black shadows from the trees, clefts, rocks, and surrounding clouds were leaping and staggering in straight lines of deepest black directly away from the tower of white fire.
The Blue Men had been wise to abandon the camp: the seashell-shaped buildings had been tossed by the shock wave like so many teacups shattered against the hearthstone, cracked and blackened, and the smartwire fence flung across the trees like a snarled fishing line. At that same moment, everything flammable flicked with a yellow-white aura and caught fire; everything not flammable began to melt.
The image vanished, and switched to yet another viewpoint, this one from two or three miles away.
A cloud of smoke, black and oily midmost, but red and yellow with blinding fire at the edge, gushed out from the hill and was yanked upward like a drawn blanket. When seen through the ash cloud, the stream of white light now resolved itself into a lava-stream made of molten iron, catching the light with a glitter of diamond refractions.
Menelaus realized the white stream was not reaching down from heaven, but rushing up into it. And it was not a tower, but a river of material moving so rapidly as to make a blur of all features.
It was Von Neumann crystal. It was a segment of supercompressed iron from the inner core of the planet, having been accelerated by linear magnetic drive throughout the entire radius of the globe-crossing depthtrain system and shot through the crust of the Earth at some seventeen times the speed of sound. It was a semisolid bar of iron, fathom upon fathom of it, being tossed into the sky in a casual display of power that only great natural disasters or great instruments of war ever demonstrated.
The material would be heated like a space capsule making reentry by the friction of the speed of the liftoff; but compared to the molten core of the Earth, the heating caused by breaking through the tiny blanket of atmosphere was as nothing.
Then the white tower was gone. For a moment, so fast was the rate of ascent, the tail of the upflying mass could be glimpsed, a tapering comet-length glowing like a bar in a steel mill. Then the hail started: streaks of light the color of snowflakes appearing and disappearing high above. The launch of the mass had been nearly perfect. Nearly. The loss of even one percent of the mass in the atmosphere, as crystals were peeled away or snapped off, meant that everything Menelaus could see from his vantage point, horizon to horizon, was now being pelted as if with hailstones of fire.
It looked like the first few raindrops touching the slabs of the concrete cloverleaf of his old hometown when the glacier in the distance began to display pockmarks and acne. The steam from the melting ice rose up into the sky.
Then the iron falling was like a shower, and the whole landscape was chewed as if by machine-gun bullets into a moonscape, but a moonscape coating the bottom of a furnace. Then the image vanished for the last time.
He closed his eyes, blinking, trying to resolve the last image that had brushed so briefly against his cornea. It was the faintest possible line of blue reaching from the horizon to the zenith, and at this latitude, the atmospheric distortion made the immensity of the skyhook seem to slant across the sky, curving like a longbow, with its foot somewhere over the horizon to the south.
The line of white-hot iron that had leaped skyward had looked, compared to trees or towers or even the skyscrapers New York the Beautiful was alleged once to have held, like a construction Cyclopes would have been too diminutive to build; but only Titans and elder Uranian beings as could gouge out the seven seas with a mattock, or rear the dome of the sky and lantern it with countless stars.
But when seen against the background of the skyhook, it was like seeing a suspension bridge against the background of mountains blue with distance beyond the water. No matter how big, tall, or heavy a suspension bridge, it is a toy compared to the majestic immensity of mountains. The line of sky-flung iron had been longer than a suspension bridge, but not by much, and may have weighed as much as many aircraft carriers set end-to-end.
But the skyhook was astronomical in scope, and made even a mountain range set on its end look puny. In this case, the mountain range Menelaus saw, white with glaciers, and now covered as if with a spilled pepperbox by subatmospheric meteorite impacts, was over seven hundred miles from northernmost to southernmost ridge. The skyhook was well over two hundred twenty thousand miles from base to geosynchronous balance point. The iron column had been a hair less wide in diameter than the hypocycloid tunnel of the depthtrain system: nine and a half feet. In contrast the skyhook was some two and a half miles in diameter and over fifty thousand feet high.
If someone had lit a yardstick on fire and, with the help of a large crossbow, flung it straight up the side of the Empire State Building and into the clouds beyond, some mote smaller than an ant, looking upward in awe, may have been impressed with the hugeness of the yardstick—until its little mind adjusted to the scale.
5. Pain
He felt the hands of Mickey and Soorm on him, helping him back to the throne, and he felt nine distinct types of pain: aches, agonies, scalds, bone fracture, laceration, throbs, gashes, pangs, and smarts.
Treacherous numbness pretending not to be pain, and lightheadedness brought on by blood loss, shock, cold, panic, blows to the face and head, lack of sleep, nanite interference with nerve flow, or brought on by improperly too-rapid petrifaction and thaw, that he did not consider to be “pain”—these were like wading pools left behind by the tide compared to pain’s true ocean. The things like where his nose hurt from being slammed into a coffin, or where his head ached from being pummeled by the musketstock of a dog; while he might have complained were he healthy that these were painful, compared to the overloaded torrent of pain signals jerking and throbbing and cutting like ice and flashing like angry lightning down his nerves, he would have laughed to call a mere broken nose or cut lip pain.
So it was that when Soorm gasped and Mickey flinched in surprise; and he fell awkwardly into the seat; and the sensation in his arm was only that of having red-hot wires yanked inexpertly up and down through the marrows of his bones; and his skull barked against the metal backrest—that was so slight that he merely smiled, wincing only slightly because he discovered his lip was cut.
“Godling, you are in trouble,” said Mickey in Virginian.
Menelaus, who was absorbed in recollecting the visual details of the scene overhead and outside, had only the smallest fragment of his many-layered mind to spare, and so he said, “I think we are in trouble. That mass of Von Neumann crystal was traveling beyond escape velocity, maybe beyond orbital velocity, and it may be the first of several such launches. I’ve toyed with the idea, of course, of using the train acceleration system to launch a vehicle into orbit, but the friction problem has always stopped me. In this case…”
Only then did he realize that Mickey, who had no goggles with an external view, could not possibly be talking about the launch he had just seen, or even known what was going on overhead and outside. The noise of micrometeorites landing with explosive force along the rocks and hills overhead could be heard, buried here under scores of feet of bedrock and layers of armor, as something fainter than the tap-tap of the drops of a summer shower on the roof. Mickey probably did not leap from that sense impression to conclude that Exarchel had just successfully pirated the technology of Pellucid and created a small-scale orbital version of itself using frighteningly advanced Xypotechnology.
He reached up and pulled the goggles off, absentmindedly proffering them toward Keirthlin, who was not looking at him. Her silvery eyes were on the gathered men facing him.
Their hair was smeared with blood and offal, sharpened bones piercing nose or earlobes, and dressed in white leather flayed from human victims. They were standing on the highest tier of the dais, and had both captured muskets and antique pikes and halberds pointed at him.
Of the twelve men, four were civilians: one wore the grape leaf design of a vintner, one was dressed in the spirals and f
ormulae of a genetic alchemist, one wore a surcoat emblazoned with the snakes and birds of an apothecary, and one was in a black robe adorned with the cogwheels and smokestack of a factory hand. The rest wore the frozen and berserk expression of Demonstrators, the warrior-zealots of the Witches.
Behind them, carrying wands instead of muskets, were Fuamnach and Louhi, Twardowski of Wkra, and Drosselmeyer of Detroit. Drosselmeyer had in his hand a jeweled pistol of the Blue Men, and he had managed to ignite the gems of the barrel to a soft, sinister glow.
Mickey stood to the left of the throne, leaning on his charming wand and looking remarkably nonchalant for a man facing a firing squad. Soorm was on all fours next to the left arm of the throne, his tail lashing, eyes retracted, head lowered, teeth bared; but the expression on him looked like something between a grin and a sneer. Keirthlin the Gray in her black parka stood behind the throne, her hand on the tall backrest. Her fur hood was down, her goggles parked on her brow, and her blue hair hung like a banner down her back; but her strange silver eyes were calm as if she used a mental discipline to neutralize all fear.
“Yes, we are in trouble,” said Menelaus with a sigh.
“What do you mean, ‘we,’ White Man?” asked Mickey.
6. Burn
Menelaus closed his eyes again, because he was still trying to elicit one last bit of visual information from the photons that had struck his eyes. The image was clear enough in his imagination: the vast blue swath of immensity, longbow-curved, hanging in the heaven huge as the rings of Saturn as seen from its innermost moon, had been slightly brighter on the eastern limb than the western. It could not be sunlight. It was an energy discharge of thrusters or attitude-correction jets of some sort, imparting an impulse to the immense mass. It was a maneuvering burn.