The Judge of Ages
She scowled but nodded. “To ask of the unknown is our creed.”
Drosselmeyer stepped away from Menelaus and turned and saluted by holding the Witch-knife at eye level. Menelaus did not know the formal way to return the salute, so he just nodded affably and touched his forefinger to his eyebrow.
“Howdy.”
“Dread Sir, there was a legend saying that we Witches were at war, and always have been, with He Who Waits. Our lore cannot be mistaken. It is, indeed, the first precept of our lore that our lore cannot be mistaken! And so we know the lore is infallible, because the lore says so! How can this be?”
Menelaus shrugged. “The bullshit lies told by the newspapers, run by the Simon Families, in those long ago days got scooped up and repeated into bullshit history books; and then got manured around and turned into bullshit legends. And a war makes a better story than the truth, and so gets passed along, and ended up in your lore. Stories get dumbed-down and drama’d-up by natural selection. I can show you the Divarication function involved, if you’re curious.”
Fatin said, “But I saw your knights herding people underground, into your dungeons and prisons! I saw it!”
“Into my refugee camps, you mean, Miss. Into my dormitories and mess halls. I opened my doors and let thousands and tens of thousands of starving exiles into my Tombs, to wait until the worst of the famines your crapheaded collectivist coven form of government had arranged had passed by, so that they could wake up in a greener world. It was not my damn fault that your rules about how to run the world made famine a permanent part of life.
“Your Honor!” Menelaus continued. “I call the Warlock Drosselmeyer to the stand. Do you swear to tell the truth by whatever make-believe spooks you serve?”
“By Asimov and E. M. Forster and all the sages of yore who swore that the Machine must serve Man and never rule him, so I swear.”
“Uh. Good enough. Then answer me this: Your lore about me, the legend of He Who Waits. You’ve heard it. What weapons did it say my men used?”
“Pale white staves,” answered Drosselmeyer, “from which drops of fire fell.”
Menelaus pointed at the four staves holding up the canopy above the judgment seat. “There they are. Pretty damn effective, huhn? Slumber wands. They shed clusters of molecular engines held in a field of balled lightning. They only work on clients who have not been properly dehibernated and un-nanoinfected. Such as Trojan-Horse-wannabe clients who get inside my facility and pop up on quick-thaw and try to raise a ruckus. Your legends are about a time when my knights had to stop my clients from trying to take over my house by force, after I welcomed them in here as my guests.
“After I saved their sorry heathen asses,” Menelaus continued, half to himself. “Damn Witches have no sense of gratitude.
“I don’t blame your people, Fatin!” he continued in a louder voice. “You cannot be grateful. Gratitude requires private property. If you own all property in common, anything that comes to you is either yours by right, or you stole it. In the first case, the guy who gave it to you is just the quartermaster, and you don’t give thanks if he just does his job; and in the second case, he is your chump. No one says ‘thank you’ and means it in a world like that.
“When De Ulloa made your world that way, he robbed you of gratitude and generosity, robbed you of the ability to earn thanks or give thanks, and you lost part of your humanity.”
Mickey interrupted, “That cannot be. My people would not be so ungrateful! We respect the laws of guest and host, the sharing of wine and fire and salt.”
Menelaus sighed. “Guess that depends on what period of history we’re talking about. After y’all were reduced to absolute poverty by the spendthrift ways of your forefathers, you rediscovered some of the hard virtues of the poor, I reckon.”
Drosselmeyer said, “Dread Sir! May I speak? What happened to them?”
“To who?”
“The Witches from the period of history we are talking about?”
Menelaus said, “The Witches from the days of the Collapse? I kept them on ice until the Collapse was over. Ask those two guys. Your Honor, I call that big guy to the stand. I don’t know your name. Did your generation have the expanding economy and unclaimed land you needed to absorb a big influx of old-timers? Did I keep the Witches locked up forever, as I surely would have done had I really been at war with y’all, or by any chance did I let them out, and in a time when they could have a chance at new life?”
The man dressed in a robe adorned with images of cogwheels and smokestacks spoke up. “My name is Heron. I am of the Automaton Workers Coven Local 101. Yeah, Judge, times were fat and wages were high when I was younger. Then you let out the Old Witches. At first, we needed every new pair of hands to work. Later, it was more Old Witches than we wanted. We had a perfectly stable government under the Nameless Witch-King. A man government. We had wives who could not divorce us and take our children and our money. Our money was gold, back then. And our women were not allowed to kill our children anymore, in the womb or out of it. We owned things. Lands had boundary stones. Good old Janus, one of the old, strong gods, the god who curses those who move a boundary stone, he was among us then. So was Vesta, the goddess of the family. But then! Then when we had a flood of Witches from the Old Times, one named Butler began to agitate for all the Old Ways to return: nonaggression, harmony with nature, gathering and sharing, communes instead of corporations.”
Another man, this one dressed in an alchemist’s robes gilded with a pattern of birds and snakes wrapping in spiral DNA patterns, spoke up. “I am Parnassus of the Golden Golem Coven of Lake Superior. I was alive then, too. Your generosity with our age ended our age, Judge of Ages! The Butlerian Witches gained control, held a purge as dread as any of which ancient reports in whisper speak. Industries were placed under communal control, or outlawed altogether. The Old Witches wanted to stop the use of human-animal gene-hybrids. The General Genetic Science Covens were using the hybrids to find a new form of human life hardened against radiation and bioweapon contagion: the hybrids were our only hope to reclaim the war-poisoned coastal areas; no one else could work the land. The Old Witches, the damned Butlerians, were rounding them up, shipping them off to a concentration camp in the middle of the radioactive hellscape surrounding the Richmond Plague Zone, where the only buildings standing were haunted by Ghosts, emulations long since gone mad. So you did not do us any favors, Judge of Ages.”
“I am not in the business of doing favors. I just store cold meat,” Menelaus Montrose said. “Let me call my next witness. Beta Suspinia! What was your name? Originally? Before the Great Mutiny?”
For the two young warrior maidens, their hair still braided close to their heads as if for battle, but bows unstrung and slung over their slim shoulders, had come marching up in step, hips swinging in unison, and now halted and stood at parade rest to one side, heads tilted toward each other, whispering. Menelaus wondered sadly if the two young ladies realized yet that they could unbraid and comb out their hair, now that the battle was over, without waiting for official orders to do it. All the Alphas were dead. There would be no officer to give the order to relax, not ever again.
The two long-legged teenaged Chimerae began staring, Vulpina giggling and Suspinia frowning, at the sight of the half circle of the Witches with their muskets pointing at each other, as if the girls did not believe the weapons were meant to be used by ancestors of the Kine, any more than one expects a child disguised as a wolfman at a Halloween masquerade actually to bite anyone.
When addressed, Suspinia straightened, blushing to find all eyes turned toward her. “Sir? They did not give us names. I was Beta Class Handmaiden Seven Dormitory Two of the Suspiring Nature Coven of Nome. Nome was an old Hot Site. The Suspiring Nature Coven was doing ecoreclamation work.”
Menelaus translated the words and turned to Fatin. “There she is: a first-generation Chimera. The Witches are the ones that ranked them from Alpha to Epsilon, based on breeding data. Do I need to say
anything more? Can I rest my case? Sometimes I cannot tell what normal humans are quick enough to grasp.”
Mickey the Witch said, “I will explain it to our maiden. Wise and eldest Fatin, the Judge of Ages is telling you that he tried to save the witches of your generation. By his arts, he created the conditions that brought forth an industrial revolution, to have a civilization into which he could release them safely; but once he released them into this later industrialized period of history, they destroyed that civilization, too, for they were manipulated and set to do this by the Iron Hermeticist, Narcís D’Aragó.”
Menelaus said, “Exactly right. Draggy wanted to scrape clean the scroll of history again, to make room for his idealized version of warrior-aristocrats, an idea he picked up from Plato, or maybe a comic book, about how to organize society like an ant farm of workers ruled by a wolf pack of soldiers ruled by a philosopher-king of him.”
Vulpina had moved to stand next to where Soorm crouched, her hand on his huge furred shoulder, her cheek next to his jowls, so her ear was near the talking box he held. But now she straightened, her vivid young face blushing with anger. Hers was one of those faces that looked prettier when angry. The Chimerae were built for anger. She did not like hearing her way of life called an ant farm, but she was too well drilled in discipline to interrupt.
Menelaus raised his voice, and said scathingly to Fatin: “So you want to blame someone for your collapse? Go ahead. Blame me. I confess. I lost that round of the great chess game of history to outsmart the Hermeticists—the guys you poxing worship and are poxing trying to help. Can we end this farce now, and get back to the business of organizing a way to dig out of here? The Bell is probably overhead right this damn second!”
When the two white-haired crones joined Drosselmeyer and stepped up behind Menelaus, the rest of the menfolk shouldered their arms and followed.
When Fatin saw she was alone, she stood up out of the judgment seat, and walked to the side of the dais, and sat down, her back to the chamber, hugging her knees in her arms, and rocking back and forth.
11
The Hidden History of Seven Mankinds
1. Manumission
Illiance had returned, and with him was Sir Guiden in his powered armor, his great helm doffed, his head visible above the wide neck ring. He was still wearing the metal coif and black cowl of the lesser or inner helmet. His face tattoos were turned up to their brightest setting, making him look like a Japanese demon; his white beard seemed almost dark by contrast, and his eyes unlit pits. Clinging to him like a grapevine to a strong tree was Oenoe, her slender feet twinkling as she walked, her walk a dance, her eyes wreathed in dreams of joy.
Behind them came Scipio in his splendid scarlet robes and absurd white wig, carrying a Blue Man energy pistol gleaming in either hand, and two more tucked in his belt. Trey Azurine was clinging to Scipio’s arm and smiling absent-headedly, healed now of her wounds, with deadly silks floating lightly about her, sparkling.
Next came also marching Buck Gamma Phyle, who carried a machine gun he had dismounted from the wall, with belts of ammo wrapping and re-wrapping his chest in crossed bandoliers. Behind sauntered Gload the Hormagaunt, picking the teeth of his huge midriff-mouth with a crowbar.
Sir Guiden came forward, and he and Drosselmeyer helped Menelaus back into the judgment seat. Sir Guiden sent silently over his implants, “You know that between me, Trey’s hunger silk, Gload’s strength and the Gamma Chimera’s skill, we could have crushed these Witches as easy as a brace of stallions trampling a snake. Not to mention Scipio is carrying as many pistols as Rada Lwa was—your family has an obsessive gun fetish I call hoplophilia, you know—but you told us to wait, so the heathen devil worshippers could point barrels and blades at your ugly face. How so, my Liege? Did you know it would turn out this way?”
Menelaus sent back, “Don’t be ridiculous. You’d have to be super-smarter than a human being, or be like an adult among heavily armed and highly emotional children, to be able to see and plan out something like that ahead of time. Remember to pick up your sword. Fatin dropped it.”
Scipio had a spare red robe from the voluminous wardrobe he had packed, and he threw this over Montrose like a blanket. Two Nymphs, Aea and Thysa, helped Montrose out of the scholarly undersuit, cutting the suit where the fabric was wedded to burn wounds. Keirthlin, having wheeled a coffin up behind the throne with the help of Soorm, now sent the tubes and metal tentacles of the internal coffin appliances moving up and down Montrose’s body, stripping away dead and burned tissue, and replacing it with new growth.
Somehow, even though the nerve sensations from those patches had been shut off—he had reprogrammed the Blue Men nerve mites and given them honest work to do—the process contrived at the same time to be uncomfortable because it was numb, and uncomfortable because it was painful.
Wincing, Menelaus addressed the gathered survivors:
“I have discovered the control channels to the extra platoon of digging machines Aanwen brought before she died. The automata are currently under my control and trying to dig us out. A simple calculation shows we cannot possibly get out of here before the Bell arrives—and who knows what that means?
“Soorm I can send down the cistern to follow Alalloel and try to find if we can float out through the flooded areas in coffins, which are watertight and contain their own life support.
“The other Blue Men and their dogs are all in coffins, being repaired or restrained until I can decide what to do with them. Yes, I stopped the Blues from doing in their dogs. In my house, one of my rules is that it is not lawful for a man to kill his wounded dog, not while I have veterinarian-coffins to spare.
“Also, no human suicides just because you’ve had a hard day. Betas, I am looking right at you. Oh, and yes, you can unbraid your hair now. Battle is over. You were brave. You did well.”
The girls sat on a lower tier of the dais, and started out happily enough combing each other’s hair and chatting, but soon their accustomed Chimerical stoicism and stiff-faced discipline broke; then had their arms around each other, and began to weep, ashamed and disappointed to have survived the battle, cheated of a glorious death.
Menelaus, meanwhile, said, “I regret to report that Happy the Kine had wounds beyond what my coffins can repair. You all seem to think I am superhuman, and I guess I am, a little, but there are things no one can fix. Larz, Franz, and Ardzl! Because you pummeled to death the dog which had bayoneted Happy, I give you my permission as ranking Beta to keep as rightfully named weapons the cutlasses taken from dog things. I reward your service with manumission: you are free men.”
Franz raised one hand meekly. “Sir? And what rank of freedom would that be? How much freedom? I mean, are we Alpha or Beta, Gamma or Delta? I ain’t being no Epsilon. They stink.”
Ardzl asked in a voice less meek, “And when will we be issued breeding mates from the quartermaster? If we are free men, the Command has to carry on our breed, right? I want two of the Geisha girls in green over there.”
Larz, who was sitting in a coffin with only his head showing, said loudly to Montrose, “Whoa and woe! That’s powerful hard, brains of lard—we’z emotionally scarred! You just gunna toss us a loss and cut free on the street to beat feet? Free to starve under bridges? No, no, we won’t go, unless we got a life, and a wife or three. And those honeys cost money! Upkeep, and you got to dress them, and you have to bring in someone to beat them with a lash every now and again, because if a stud draws blood, that’s no good for domestic tranquilizers. Guys who know how to do it without leaving bruises cost coin too, and you gotta have Kine to draw the plough and raise the crop, or else freedom is just starvation, right?”
“Freedman Larz, I am delighted that you are alive again and that you have found a way to rewind up the motors of your mouth, and let me just say I hate your period of history like the red-lungrot plague, and you are not getting a damn dime out of me, because I do not pay men to be free. Earn it or starve. And, Sir Guy, maybe yo
u can take the newly freed citizens off to one side and explain some basics of civilized law and civilized religion to them.
“Toil, Drudge, and Drench, the same applies. Any man who fights in my service, or takes up arms against my enemies, wins his liberty; and my laws last longer than the laws of merely earthly princes, whose laws of slavery die when they do. You are beholden to none.”
The three ex-Donors of the Hormagaunt Era immediately began whispering and laughing and cutting capers, and talking about the high-quality organs they would buy to replace those they had lost, or they would grow a house as big as dreams to dwell in, and fill it up with clones of themselves, as alike as eggs in a nest, or how fabulously rich they would become buying and selling children in the market.
“Ah, Sir Guy, give a little talk to them too, while you are at it.”
2. Life and the World
Menelaus no longer bothered to hide his nature, and he increased the number of nerve firings to his eyes, so that the scene around him grew crisp and bright as crystal. He turned his painfully sharp more-than-human eyes left and right, and no one could meet his gaze.
“Anyone else have a complaint about life and the world? You Chimerae! Yuen thought the fault was mine that his civilization was fell apart. Kine Larz thought I shot the Last Imperator-General to make the World Empire shatter. You Nymphs thought I helped you overthrow the Chimerae by spreading the various addictions and the hedonism of Greencloak technology among the Lotus Eaters, because I love you so much. Prissy and Gload, I don’t know what you lay at my door, but it must be something. Illiance, you think I arranged for the Noösphere of the Locusts to crack into pieces, and you think this is praiseworthy, because I saved you from a life of permanent thought-enforced mental uniformity; and Keirthlin, you think the same thing, but you think this is blameworthy, because I ruined your life of permanent thought-enforced mental uniformity. Do I really need to go through the whole list of what really happened in each case? It would take forever, and we are out of time.”