The Judge of Ages
Vulpina stood up, striking the dais sharply with the heel of her unstrung bowstaff. She looked very young and very fierce and warlike, despite her tear-stains, and her hair was loose about her face and wild. “Not the whole list. Just one thing.” She drew herself up. “Judge of Ages, the Chimerae of the Emergency General Command demand to know…”
“Will you knock it off, sister? All your Alphas are dead and your race is extinct. The Command ain’t giving no-one not no-more commands, not now, not forever and amen. We are all just people now, human people, and we all have the exact same rank: which is Screwpustulated, First Class. Just ask your damned question.”
She blinked but gathered her breath and spoke. “Why did you kill the Imperator-General? Larz said you shot the last Emperor in an act of assassination, and the Empire fell.”
“Act of assassination my ass—uh—assination. Shot him fair and square, blast pattern in the chest, eyes open, pistol in his hand, plenty of warning and in a good light. It was a duel. I ain’t no assassin. What was I supposed to do? Sue him in court? D’Aragó had his men break into the Tombs in Switzerland, found Thucydides Montrose, a relative of mine, and shot him in his coffin. Thucydides was a preacher man. Little old guy. Later he got poped or something. His men took a DNA sample back, and it was a close match, and they thought they had done me; so they told Draggy I was dead, so I had to go have some dealings with him to convince him of the error of his ways. That time, it was just personal. He killed kin, so I killed him.”
Illiance said, “And did the same obtain of the Hermeticist De Ulloa? Had you some personal vendetta against him? I recall the testimony of Rada Lwa the Scholar.”
Menelaus said, “Nope. That was just professional, a courtesy call. His Witches decided to dig up all the slumbering Christians, bishops and popes and so on who were in medical hibernation, so I had to go beef him just to keep him out of my back yard.”
Oenoe said in a voice like throbbing woodwinds, “And what of Sarmento i Illa d’Or?”
Menelaus said, “Well, that was a different case entirely. Old Yellow Door was a strange guy. He thought he could talk me over to his side of things, talk me into accepting the Hyades as the master race, talk me into liking Blackie’s way of playing with people’s lives like puppets, forgiving the murder of Star-Captain Grimaldi, and talk me into not being in love with Rania anymore. See, he had all these good, sound, logical, persuasive-sounding arguments, and he wanted to lead me through every step of them, starting with definitions, axioms, and common notions. What a damn bore that man was. Oh, and the poxified, pestilential, disease-riddled, scab-oozing, leper whoreson dolled up a clone of my wife, my own damn wife, and sent her around to try to seduce me. He just took that same section of the Monument that defined Rania, and ran through the same calculation again. The idea being I will give up my fight with Blackie, and let the world be his personal bugger boy, provided I am getting my own urges soothed—but I found out old Yellow had plunged her measure before me, cherry-picking, and that without benefit of clergy, if you take my meaning.”
Oenoe said, “I don’t take your meaning, beloved Judge of Ages.”
“Nah. You wouldn’t. So he ’poons my wife’s twin sister, and then dangles her my way to play come-hither-eyes at me, and at that point I am fed up so I went to call him out.
“One of my rare miscalculations,” Montrose continued, shaking his head. “Don’t seem fair he should be sharp as a razor in math and be some super athlete with muscles like a bull. He says doing weights helps him think, and he thinks pretty hard. Thought of a way to pack his pistol better than mine. He was a pretty damn good shot, and cool as a cucumber staring down a barrel, so what can I say?
“By rights, I should be dead. I can show you the scar.
“My wife’s twin sister had two more sisters—they were trial runs, jobs that did not come out so perfect. Named Aura-Ah and Riana-Ah. They were still Rania clones, and looked a lot like her, and all programmed by the Monument to be able to read pretty damn far into the Monument. And the three ladies had read some mathematical model about the relationship of the mind and body that enabled them to make half a dozen breakthroughs in medical and biotechnological and bioneuropsychiatric sciences, including all the stuff that allowed the Nymphs to domesticate every damn living thing from inchworms to sharks, and train raccoons and fawns to do housework, giraffes to carry parasols, and kangaroos to carry parcels, and they even taught crows to sing.
“But their breakthroughs also included the stuff they did to bring me back from nine-tenths dead and put me back on my feet. So I made some deals with the ladies, and with their daughters, and they helped me revolutionize the hibernation process. I mean, their understanding of biology was, well, you know, unbepustulevable. And the Nymphs ruled the only period of history that did not care about the past and did not care about the future, and so they did not try to dig up my damn Tombs.
“That’s where all the stories about how much the Judge of Ages loves the Nymphs and their Natural Order of Man comes from. For once in all the millennia of time, in my buried house, I had a neighbor living on my roof, what you call your world, what was friendly and neighborly.
“And I could unload a hefty parcel of medical Thaws on them, and get my patients all cured-up, and some of them stayed for a season up topside to play with the native girls, but came down again to sleep and dream to a better future, and some of them got addicted and stayed topside for life.
“So the harlotocracy of Nymphland was sick and wrong, but never did wrong to me, and I let it be.”
3. The Game of Fates of Races and Empires
Expositor Illiance said, “The deaths you encompassed of your peers and fellow posthumans, the Hermeticists, are of biographical interest, indeed. But a deeper question hangs over every soul born since the time of the Giants, who knew the science of predictive history. It is a science you know, and the Hermetic Order, and so all human destiny, was shaped to your designs as a channel guides the canal-stream. We in this chamber represent all the races of Man. We need and yearn to know the answer to the riddle. This opportunity, to learn the mind of a mind beyond man, will never come again. Instruct us.”
Menelaus said, “I don’t understand what your question is.”
“My question concerns human destiny. It is simple to ask.”
“Yes? What about human destiny?”
“—why?—”
A silence hung over the buried chamber. Menelaus looked at the gathered people.
He sighed and spoke. “I did a lot of things in your history; and every event in history, no matter how nice the intention, had bad side effects.
“Sorry, Scipio, but it started when I smashed the Cryonarchy. Blackie had your foot in the bear trap, and the only way out was to gnaw your foot off. He did to me what Rania did to him: set up a situation where the only solution was to step down. He tried to hang on to power, and so his Concordat was shattered forever. I gave power away, and it brought forth a race of Giants. Maybe you think I should not have done it. But it would have been worse had I done nothing. Do you still want to take a poke at me?”
Scipio, one arm around Trey Azurine, waved his hand in the air as if brushing away cigarette smoke. “What year is this again, Old Timer? I cannot stay mad at General Santa Anna about the Alamo and stay mad at you, too. Besides, you are FBC, and it ain’t right to paste no crazy man.”
Menelaus nodded thoughtfully, as if allowing the wisdom of those words. He went on: “Like I said, it would have been worse if I had done nothing; far worse. The world would have been covered in gold logic crystal, and Earth been nothing but a planet of ghosts, had I not released the first part of the Rania Solution to the Selfish Meme Divarication problem to Thucydides. The Self-Corrective Code was universal and philosophical, and it applied to every field of study: it could be used to fix Divarication in man and machine alike.
“Sorry, Ctesibius, if you thought the world of gold would have been Utopia. It would have been, but not for you
. You know now that the Machine only meant to eat the Ghosts you donated to him.
“Sorry, Trey Azurine. I did not give the order to burn the world, but I made the Giants who gave the order, and I built the Xypotech, Pellucid, who could do a passing fair impersonation of me over the wire, and send out the evacuation plans. My authority and prestige was the only thing that made a hesitating world agree to such a mad and desperate plan. Everybody and his wife thought the posthuman was such a smart guy! Everyone trusted me! That was the last period in history anyone ever did. So it is my fault you never set foot in a house, never had neighbors, never walked down a street or slept in the same meadow twice.”
Trey stood with her head on the shoulder of Scipio, and she looked up, and smiled brightly. She spoke in a wondering tone of voice, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. “I don’t think about things like that. We are Drifters. We drift with the wind. Sometimes we fish. Or we interface with the fun-line. You can use up whole days playing yourself in little cartoons. Or we can drop into the sea and kill the whales. They serve the Machine. I hate whales. That Machine is satanic. It does not have a soul. Burning the cities was like amputation.” And she must have remembered Brother Roger the Jesuit astronomer, for she said: “If your eye offends you, pluck it out. It is better that a man enter paradise one-eyed than that he descend into hell with two eyes.”
At these words, Sir Guiden crossed himself; but Scipio scowled at him and shouted an amen; and Mickey the Witch scowled at them both.
Menelaus inclined his head to Trey, and raised his voice once more to fill the chamber.
“That universal Self-Corrective Code solution I mentioned allowed Blackie to make the Dreagh, the special posthuman Ghosts that have been running all the eras and aeons of history ever since, Exulloa and Exarago, Exillador and Expastor. And Ull’s emulation that replaced Expastor. So it is my fault that the last eight thousand years did not grow naturally, but were engineered into their shapes by the Hermetic Order.
“The second solution I released to save the Sylphs, because otherwise either the Giants would have killed them, or they would have fallen into total preindustrial barbarism. It allowed the serpentine Mälzels to copy each other’s solutions and perpetuate any useful change of code—forever. It was a bit of straight computer engineering, but I devised by accident an eternal form of self-repairing tool.
“Melchor de Ulloa used this technique and applied it to living things, such as for re-copying iterations of Witch genetic information back onto unraveled telomeres, and returning cells to totipotency, and performed parallel experiments in uplift to create more Moreaus than just whales. Horses and elephants and dogs and swine: soon everything was talking. And taking orders. And on the backs of the slave armies of animal people, the labyrinthine edifice of the Witches reared its envious head.
“I interfered again. At the time of the Nameless Empire, I meddled with the Moreaus, and introduced by viral vector a gene-rewriting intron. It was an unselfish gene, a cooperation code. I had to make it so that the intelligent lion could lie down with the intelligent lamb in a democratic republic, because nothing else could ever stir the endless tyranny of the Wise over their fellow creatures and their fellow men.
“It worked for a while, but you know the next twist in that story: Narcís D’Aragó took that exact same bit of biotech engineering I had devised to make for himself new creatures, cooperating on a molecular level, half lion and half goat and all snake, and they ate up the lambs.
“A fourth solution was biochemical rather than biotechnical. It was used to formulate the original portable neurochemical biofeedback backpack systems called Greencloaks, which was my attempt to copy in a crude way the things done by the red amulets of the Hermeticists. It was not passed from father to son, because the Chimera eugenicists controlled who passed what from father to son. I had to do an end-run around their whole game. My game was a needle you stuck in your head. My signature move.
“Thanks to Sarmento, the boys in green, guys like Larz, who is right now drinking the medical fluid out of the coffin he is in trying to get his bender on, the next generation really liked sticking needles of all kinds up their heads; or whatever else they could take with alcohol, or patch or inhale or stuff up a nostril, or as a suppository. That was one civilization whose fall was not my fault: Sarmento was the exception again. He hated D’Aragó and wanted his little tin empire of little tin soldiers smashed as soon as possible and replaced it with Whoreworld, the Garden of Addict. Sarmento’s notion of paradise.
“The Wintermind techniques I taught to the Nymphs when their weather control system began to fail. This fifth solution was biosoftware—the training must be ingrained via training and biofeedback to establish the nerve paths, because obviously anything that comes out of a needle or in a pill, the Nymphs could control and block and make to do backflips. I broke their hold over their people so that those people would wake up out of their drunk drug-dreams, see the world was getting colder, and come up with a way to save themselves.
“Once again, I had to do it, because otherwise the society would crash and never recover. There were no metals left in digging range anymore, so if civilization did a Humpty Dumpy, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—Does anyone here know who old Humpty is? That would make Alice sad. Yeah, Trey, Alice in Wonderland! I am glad that book survived as long as your era.
“Soorm scion Asvid, you know the next part of the story. Wintermind can be used not just to break unnatural additions, love philters, and memory snares the Nymphs impose; the technique can break the addictions Mother Nature kindly puts in us so that mothers love their babies and fathers love their mates, the sex drive and the family drive and the thing that makes man a political animal. Reyes y Pastor trained a generation of gladiators to kill and eat each other, and to use the Wintermind to abolish their addiction to human affections.
“And so I had to do something again. Prissy Pskov—your people, the Clades, exist because of me. The sixth solution was bioeconomic. The Hormagaunts could have controlled anything I introduced that was genetic or based on pheromones, but what I introduced was a fractional genetic banking system, a set of techniques that made it easier to reproduce by parthenogenesis than to try to find a wife you were not allergic to, and everyone was born in clusters with spare organs in all their twins, who suddenly had no strong reason to prey on each other. The Clade unity was a terrible solution, a hack, a kludge, but there was no other way to preserve civilization from the deluge of blood Reyes had unleashed, except in an Ark made of twins and triplets.
“But when the floodwaters of blood receded, there was nothing but that terrible, overwhelming need for unity. That is why Locusts are born oriented toward hive mind thinking and total altruism. They were just a logical extension of the notion of the Clades that, since toleration of differences proved impossible, total conformity is the price of peace.
“Expositor Illiance, you know what happened after that. Yes, I did break the Noösphere of the Locusts. I did it deliberately, and with malice aforethought. It was the most evil thing a man like me can imagine: mankind as an ant farm. A monster army with a million bodies with a million giraffe necks leading to one giant head like a bobbing balloon above them.
“The seventh and last solution was the most subtle of all my moves in this great game. It was not philosophical, nor computational, nor genetic, nor biochemical, nor neurolinguistic, nor bioeconomic. It was legal and informational—a set of universal protocols establishing a format for information exchanges across nonuniform data-regimes. It created very quickly a very powerful incentive for diversity within the mental environment: a good reason for the nest to tolerate useful inquiline species. An Inquiline Protocol.
“And Coronimas perverted my work, and used it to concoct this horrible cellular-level mind-control system, which the Melusine eventually perfected to make their remote control of other people’s minds and souls perfect and inescapable.
“I had a counter to that. I tried to
introduce a new vector into the course of evolution five hundred and six years ago, which should have made this helotry of total mind control a dead end, and forced the whole species into a radical new direction. My mistake was a simple one: I released the viral carrying agent onto the oceans of the Earth, because that is where I thought the men would be living, and that they would carry it into the land areas, or any other place other members of their race would go.
“So it was my damn cleverest move yet—but nothing happened. I should have won by now. Instead the Melusine, as best I can tell, were totally unaffected, and they remain totally loyal to Ximen del Azarchel, who is in charge of the planet, or what is left of it.
“Alalloel of Lree—man, that is a hard name to say—she tells me each Tomb has a Melusine officer assigned to it, called a Paramount, who was going to thaw us all and absorb us into their gestalt, like Locusts.
“So we are buried alive here, waiting for the Melusine to come eat our brains. They will keep our memories and minds and personalities intact, and put us into a slavery so profound that it cannot even be imagined. A helotry of the mind, where the helot rejoices in his invisible chains, or thinks or believes whatever else the Paramount programs him to do, including loving his slavery.
“There you have it. There were a lot more maneuvers within each move, but that was the general outline of the chess game of history.
“You asked me why, Expositor Illiance. There were two sides in the game. My side was the side of human life, civilization, and liberty. Whenever that was threatened, I acted. His side was the side of machine existence, slavery, and for some reason I did not learn until today, barbarism.
“That is the why and the wherefore of it. Why did I interfere with your lives, and the lives of your ancestors and descendents over and over again? Why did I preserve the sick and the lost and those who fled into the exile of time here in my buried house where no time passes? That answer is really simple.