The Judge of Ages
Del Azarchel was laughing. Over his implants, Montrose heard a message:
“Ah, Cowhand, always full of surprises! I think you may actually have damaged the internal works of the Tower up to three thousand feet! Since the Tower is over one hundred sixty-five thousand miles high, three thousand feet is less than a pinprick would be if you stepped on it with your big toe. If you had a big toe. Your knights are brave men. I will dedicate this lake to their memory.”
He paused, smiling a seraphic smile.
“The lake, I mean, which will be caused by the nine-mile-wide imprint when I land the foot of the Tower here, and drive the crust of the Earth downward several hundred feet below sea level.
“And, by Saint Iago! It might take the internal autorepair mechanisms of the Tower nearly, ah, twenty minutes to lower into place spare arcologies and factories from midlevel storage to the damaged section. It may take as long as half an hour. None of my people were in that tiny fragment you singed: the living quarters are above the atmosphere line.
“I am immune from any earthly force.
“But your facilities are not immune from the forces of heaven, are they? Let us see what happens when the Tower base is maneuvered over the Tombs to drop the rubble from the damage directly onto the heads of your knights and the people still sleeping in your pit, shall we?
“Come, shoot your puny little sparks again, old friend. Let us see if you can hit the maneuvering anchor asteroid. Can you make even the zenith point of a suborbital arc? Can you send lightning out of the atmosphere with your system? No? Let us see what your vaunted Tombs can do against a real … oh…”
The message over the implants trailed off, and Del Azarchel, now leaning with one boot on the edge of the cnidarian canopy, staring down, looked stricken. His face was blank and drawn, and his eyes were filled with strange sorrow. Montrose was more than puzzled, he was shocked to see such a look on the face of Del Azarchel.
Slowly and painfully (for every movement of any muscle was painful) he turned his head to see what Del Azarchel stared at.
The golden box of the burial chamber beneath them was clear and plain to the eye. The cnidarian on which they stood had been pushed by the gale winds to the north, so they now saw the chamber from a different angle. There were the great main doors.
Above the doors was the portrait of a fair princess in white, with the half circle of a galaxy framing her like a multistellar sunrise.
Del Azarchel, eyes on the portrait of Rania, said brusquely, “Give my compliments to the Grandmaster Sir Guiden and tell him that if he orders his men to stop firing, I will call my instruments back into the Tower, and trouble him no further. You I will also release back into his hands. There is no need to involve these others. I will let your humans live: such pets do not concern me. This is between the two of us.”
Montrose said, “It won’t take me long to dig up my armor and my Krupp gun.”
“Ah. You keep yours loaded and ready? So do I. I will meet you in an hour.”
And Del Azarchel ordered his cnidarian to carry Montrose gently back down to the Tomb.
13
The Judge of Ages and the Master of the World
1. Delays
It took longer than an hour.
As there always were in affairs of this type, despite the willingness, even the impatience, to begin, there were delays which accumulated to many hours.
The Seconds had to be appointed and sent to address each other.
Montrose had to receive medical attention and invigoration from his coffins. He had much, much damage to undo; and Del Azarchel scorned the idea of facing a foe at less than the peak of his prowess, and so insisted he be sent the coffin medical reports to prove Montrose was hale. Since some of the information had value, it had to be redacted, and the Seconds had to negotiate what data were left in and what cut out.
The submicroscopic mites the Blue Men had introduced into Montrose’s nervous system had to be painstakingly removed, lest they hinder his reaction time.
With great reluctance and regret, Montrose also had his implants, which had served him so well, removed. Now that Exarchel was occupying the entire volume of Pellucid, and was having the nanomechanisms augmenting his brain power expanded in number from merely what could coat the Earth to what could fill it, the signal environment was too dangerous for Montrose to have any direct link even to peripheral parts of his nervous system. Montrose also did not want to be distracted by an unexpected hiss of electromagnetic noise, or to have anything radiating from him that a clever bullet might target.
The negotiations over the intelligence quotient of the weapons also took time. Since a logic crystal the size of a diamond that could fit on a lady’s smallest finger contained calculating power equal to what every computer system on the Earth combined could achieve back when these guns were first designed and programmed, there was something absurd about the long discussion over how intelligent, and what kind of intelligence, and what programming, could be allowed in the gun calculation magazine. It was as if they were discussing whether the abacus could use oily stones, lest the fingers flicking the beads get some advantage of speed. But Montrose did not merely admire and appreciate, he loved his weapon, and refused to admit that it could ever be out-of-date. And from the tenacity of the responses carried by the Seconds, Del Azarchel felt the same way.
When Montrose explained to Keirthlin the Linderling that the ranging and detection gear performed its calculations by means of electrons being forced across open or shut transistor gates powered by a current differential in the circuit, she actually laughed, her deep sorrow, if only for that moment, held in abeyance.
However, Vulpina chided her, saying that Chimeresses were trained in every weapon, even the oldest and simplest, because at times this was the only weapon at hand. She also made a point of saying to Montrose that Chimeresses made good wives and bore fierce children.
There was considerable debate over whom to have as judge of honor presiding over the duel. Everyone Del Azarchel and Montrose knew was either one man’s servant and the other man’s enemy or vice versa. Montrose thought it over carefully, and then agreed that Alalloel the Cetacean could serve in this capacity.
Montrose had to check his dueling armor, which, compared to the powered armor of the Hospitaliers, now seemed primitive, small, and weak, but unbearably precious. Both men had to submit (Montrose insisted) to an invasive medical examination by agreed-upon physicians, to ensure that their skin, bones, and organs were within a defined range of human location, and made of natural biological materials.
And, most importantly, after all other matters were decided, Montrose returned to his Tombs and found a workbench, found a light and shook it until it glowed, and he sat and packed the chaff for his dueling pistol, and selected and balanced and loaded and programmed the targeting tactics, one by one, into the eight escort gyro-jet bullets, and then into the deadly, massive, self-propelled main shot.
As it happened, it was the brink of dawn before they met and faced each other.
2. Unnatural Twilight
It was dark where they stood below the foot of the Bell, the air scented with the hint of sunrise, but the cherry-red light of dawn struck the sides of the vast Tower above them. Above that, where the structure intercepted the direct and unrefracted rays of the sun, the towerlight was yellow. An aurora borealis had gathered around the reaches above that, a side effect of radiation disturbances and flux in the magnetosphere surrounding the globe. Even farther skyward, the uppermost lengths, and the long-tailed crescent of the anchor point, were glaring in the sharp light of hard vacuum.
The Tower was far brighter than the full moon. Because of this, odd to the eye, the landscape neither had the clarity of daylight nor the mystic softness of moonlight. It was not even the wild overcast gloom of a heavy storm, since the light was the color of blood and fire, but too bright. It was, rather, like the unnatural noon twilight of a solar eclipse. Everything looked spectral.
 
; The scenery exposed to that light was equally uncanny. It was like the surface of the moon for craters and pockmarks. Steam rose from glaciers in the distance, which were sprinkled with spots and streamers of molten and refrozen iron, surrounded wherever it appeared by discharged matter that looked like fine black sand. Stumps of burnt and broken trees lay every way the eye turned, and the piled and thrown trunks were like the remnants of a lumberyard fire, acres of black splinters.
A dry streambed cut across the hill in one area; and frozen fans, red with rust and sediment, boiling and dripping across the slopes, was the dispossessed volume of water that once ran there.
In another place, a lake that had been underground had boiled to the surface, but a vortex was in the midst of it, and a continual roaring; and broken bits of depthtrain cars floated on the lake. The water was draining into the rail tube leading below the mantle of the Earth.
In each direction was wreckage, destruction and death, broken rock, craters, smoke and burnings, and fields of cracked ice dotted with pellets and dust from the earth’s core, or black with tiny bits and flakes of debris that fell from the inner cylinder of the skyhook.
The only things that were whole were the cnidarian machines, hanging with unnatural weightlessness between the broken landscape and the storm-caressed Tower.
One of these, a cnidarian no larger than a Viking longboat, swooped smoothly down through the predawn gloom. Against the vertical red river of towerlight, the silhouettes of five hooded figures could be seen: one boyish and slouching, one looming and huge-limbed as a blacksmith, one thin and erect as an upraised sword, one crowned with two golden tendrils. The final figure was half their height, like a big-headed child.
Serpentines lowered the five to the broken ground behind the armored bulk of Del Azarchel, standing patiently.
None of the men carried lights, and this told Menelaus that they were the nycloptic. Menelaus saw silver capes of solar sail material, startlingly bright in the blood-hued gloom against the dark silk of their uniforms. Heavy amulets of dull metallic red gleamed on their wrists. These men were dressed as members of the Hermetic Order, and had bodies, like theirs, able to adjust to a range of environments, and eyes that changed at night to be nocturnal.
It seemed it was the fancy of Del Azarchel to dress these new servants, whoever they were, in the uniform, style, and equipment of his old shipmates of the Hermetic Expedition, some eight thousand two hundred eighty years ago. As if the Beefeaters guarding Buckingham retained the dress and weapons of the nomadic hunting bands of the middle Neolithic: tunics of mastodon leather, spears tipped with leaf-shaped flint.
Montrose found that odd, even chilling.
On the other hand, the armor Montrose wore, and his massive pistol, came from the same year, so he understood the impulse to freeze some of the waters of the river of time, and keep preserved in ice something of the long-dead past, even the uniforms of dead men. Odd, yes, and chilling, but very human.
3. Witnesses and Seconds
Montrose was in his armor, wondering how he had been able, when he was a young man, to stand wearing it for such interminable lengths of time without suffering the desire to scratch. Of course, he never before fought a duel having come just that hour dripping from a rapid-healing coffin, with the bones in his newly unbroken arm still tickling and aching. Always before it had been some enemy selected by his law firm, and the killing had been, to him, merely a task. More difficult and dangerous than some, but just a task.
It had not been personal. It had not been the culmination of countless millennia of unfolding destiny.
The two men, and their Seconds, now advanced on each other. Their footsteps were the only sounds in the area. There were no sounds of birdcalls or nocturnal animals seeking their dens, because all living things within a mile or so had died when the depthtrain tube had been used as an orbital launcher, or when the earth-current had ignited. However, in the distance, nine or ten miles away, clouds gathered against the far side of the Bell, and, cooled by the touch of the outer hull, had begun to precipitate. The rain could be heard, faint and far, washing against the endless height of metallic hardness, and, lower, against the broken hilltops and ice fields. Higher on the Bell, another set of clouds had gathered, but they had snowed, not rained, and an irregular streak of white, like a snowfield of a far mountain peak, could be clearly seen painted against the towerside, gleaming in the brighter light of the higher air.
Montrose spared no glances for this, nor any of the other sights which might possibly prove his last sight evermore. He walked forward, stomach boiling with emotion, his eye not leaving the dark and mocking eyes of his opponent. Neither man had donned his helm yet. Neither man was carrying the cubit-long six-pound sidearm that served him as his dueling weapon.
Midmost stood Alalloel of Lree, to act as judge of honor. Next to her rested two coffins, to act as doctors. Their lids were open, medical fluid warm and hyperoxygenated. Receiving kits attached to the coffin hulls were opened like Swiss Army knives, arms unlimbered and needles shining.
Alalloel was garbed in a skintight jumpsuit of sea green, dark green, and aquamarine, trimmed with black flecks and foam-white surging through rippling patterns set to slow pulsations, ornamented with studs of nacre; but over this was thrown a wide two-leaved cloak of silver hanging from shoulder boards so large as to make her seem childish and frail.
Montrose looked more carefully. It was not a cloak. These were artificial wings of amazingly intricate construction. These must be a version, designed for the human body, of the wings Soorm said he had seen the whales who met her in secret wear.
They were made of silvery feathers that seemed both organic and metallic. Near the base of every vane, atop what would be the calamus had it been an organic feather, was an optical sensor made of logic crystal. There were golden Locust-type tendrils along each rachis of each feather, and other smaller receivers and nodes and ports forming the barbs. When Alalloel shrugged, the wings opened in a splendor of shimmering white, as the wings of an albino peacock, bright with countless eyes.
Montrose noted Del Azarchel staring at the wings for a fraction of a second longer than Del Azarchel would have done had he recognized them. Interesting. Montrose felt his heart begin to beat more strongly, and wondered what emotion was causing it.
It had been a while since he had felt this way: the emotion was hope.
It had been agreed to appoint five Seconds for each of them. Montrose nodded at Mickey, who looked somehow splendid and terrible in his Witching robes, and even the ridiculous decorations of his tall hat looked menacing in the eerie red gloom, as if possessed by hidden powers.
With him stood Sir Guiden the Knight Hospitalier, Scipio the Cryonarch, Soorm the Hormagaunt, Expositor Illiance. Mickey introduced himself and his fellow witnesses to the duel, speaking in Latin. It had been negotiated and agreed that all conversations were to be in this dead language, as most here either knew it, or could follow it with aid of a talking box.
Sir Guy was wearing his hauberk woven of fine, nigh-microscopic five-linked rings. His hood and tunic were black, and his dark surcoat blazed with the white cross of Malta. Gauntlets were on his hands and greaves on his shins. He had turned his smart-ink tattoos to their neutral setting, glow off, and his skin seemed flesh-colored, merely with a rough texture of many fine, dark lines under the skin. Montrose could not recall ever having seen the man’s real face before. His undisguised features were so sad, so calm, and bathed in such an aura of peace, that Montrose understood why he hid behind decorations. It was a face that would neither terrify foes nor inspire the battle-fury in followers.
Scipio’s skull was now whole, and no trace of savant circuits remained in him, for the Iatrocrats had miraculous techniques to accomplish the regrowth and restoration of lost neural tissue and bone cells in a single night which had not existed, or even been dreamed, when Scipio last had lived. From his apparently limitless wardrobe he had had buried with himself, he now wore a uniform o
f the Cryonarchy from his native decade: a conservatively cut suit of gray and soft green, decorated with scallops and roses, over which was flung a black tabard emblazoned in white with the heraldry of the Endymion Hibernation Syndicate: a sleeping youth in the arms of a crescent moon, cradling an hourglass.
Soorm was splendid in his naked fur. Before he climbed to the field of honor, the Nymph Aea and Suspinia the Chimeress had volunteered to brush the otter pelt of Soorm until it glowed like black ink. He had needed no medical care, but he had spent the night in the coffin nonetheless, making little tweaks and minor innovations to his many innate biological weapons.
The serene little Blue Man appeared dressed in a small hauberk of mail, with coif and hood, and a misericorde tucked through his belt, and his surcoat was the white of a neophyte, his cross the red of a crusader. He bore no sword as yet, nor spurs. He was introduced not by the name Expositor Illiance, but instead was called Squire Lagniappe.
Montrose would have liked to have had the brave Alpha Daae here with him, to represent the Chimerae; or have had a Linderling on hand to record every nuance of the events through their nodes. Indeed, Vulpina had demanded, and Keirthlin had expressed a desire, to be allowed to act as witnesses to the gunfight, but Menelaus Montrose told Keirthlin that women who see such things have a darkness that comes over their soul and does not depart, a thing that makes them less able or willing to be softhearted, wifely, or maternal.
Keirthlin replied that it was not necessarily the case that witnessing such cold and deliberate violence influenced the psychology for the worse. Coming to the aid of her argument, Vulpina bragged that she herself had seen such things on the playground nearly every day of her life, and twice on Dueling Day; and it had not affected her fertility, or the ability of the Eugenic Board to send a stud to beat her into submission in preparation for the mating assault.