The Judge of Ages

  Montrose, at that point, said simply that this was man’s business, and no matter what the customs or rules of their ages might be, his death, or his victory, must be done by the rules he knew. He did not speak to either one about what had happened when his own mother, watching in secret, had seen his father shot dead in a duel.

  Montrose shook his head, trying to clear it of such thought. Why did he ponder of his mother now, who had been gone some eight thousand years? Then he recalled that she regarded the profession of gunfighting shameful, and would not take the money Montrose had brought in. To his brothers it went, but not a dime to her.

  She had told him: “You think you can kill and make that be an end of it? There is no end! The men you kill will come out of the ground and come back for you, or sure as like. There is always one more.”

  There was always one more. One more what? He had never had the nerve to ask.

  Montrose was uneasy because his experience as a duelist told him that any man who dwelt on the shame brought to his mother when he walked onto the field of honor was not the one who walked away again, but was the one carried away in a box. He hid his uneasiness behind his best poker face, but he knew Del Azarchel sensed it, for the man’s twinkling eyes narrowed, and a look of confidence was in them.

  Mickey introduced himself as Mictlanagualzin of the Dark Science Coven, which made Del Azarchel smile in contempt and Montrose smile in appreciation for the gesture, which was a noble one.

  The Warlock said, “Such is my true name, and I depart of half my power by speaking it: and yet that power I place into this deadly ground, and across this deadly hour, that there be no trace, no shadow, of the least dishonor. I bind your souls to it.”

  4. The Hooded Men

  The five who stood behind Del Azarchel now came forth into the light shed from the gleaming many-eyed cloak of Alalloel. Menelaus tried to betray no expression on his face, but as he had so often found before, his more powerful intellect lent more power to his passions, intuitions, and reactions. Now his passion was fear, his intuition was supernatural dread, and his reaction was a trembling in his innards.

  His brain had not allowed him to recognize them from afar, despite that their identity was obvious even in silhouette. What was it Soorm had said about more intelligent people being more able to fool themselves, whereas animals saw things clear and far off?

  The gigantic one was Sarmento i Illa d’Or, who pointed his finger at Montrose, and closed one eye and twitched his thumb. He pointed at the spot where the scar was, marking the wound Sarmento left that should have killed Montrose.

  And next to him …

  The stoop-shouldered boyish one was De Ulloa, as handsome as he ever had been, smiling sheepishly, wearing a cross of Nero around his neck: an upside-down cross with the arms broken to slant as the letter Y reversed, all within a circle.

  The slim and rigid-spined one was Narcís D’Aragó, wearing a rapier, and standing as stiffly as the Chimerae whom he had made in his own image.

  The one with the tendrils was Jaume Coronimas.

  The final one, his face young and unlined, and his tendrils waving in rhythm with Coronimas as they passed radioneural messages back and forth, was Mentor Ull, dressed in a miniature version of the black shipsuit and hood. And his skin was an onyx dark as his silk.

  Sarmento was delighted, and he laughed. “No, in one way these are not quite who you think, Fifty-One! What, are we afraid the old madness is coming back? No, this is not Melchor de Ulloa. This is Exulloa, or, rather, the remote body, operated by quantum entanglement, from where he rests in the Noösphere. He does not remember being shot by you, because there was no time for an additional communion. The others, you have guessed, are Exarago, Excoronimas, and I don’t believe you have met Exynglingas, our newest crewmate! He does recall his death, because his savant circuits were activated by the biometric failure that accompanies death trauma. Once, we only had enough computer resources to bring us out one at a time. Now, you have given us so much more calculation space—the entire core of the planet!—we need not fear such penury again!”

  Mickey said sternly, “It is only the inner core. Do not be ridiculous.”

  The young, jet-dark version of Mentor Ull, or, rather, Exynglingas, still had the same half-lidded, wholly reptilian eyes of his previous incarnation. “It happens that all your absurdities of bloodshed and striving have yielded nothing. The Hermeticists have finally achieved the ultimate secret: life beyond bodily death.”

  But the judge of honor held up her empty hand in a brusque gesture, saying, “The Seconds may not address the primaries, only the Seconds brought by him. Such is the convention.”

  Illiance, or, rather, Squire Lagniappe, stepped forward. His skin color changed suddenly, passing from blue to become the silvery-gray of a Linderling. His eyes lost their color, and became silver throughout, eerie and beautiful.

  Exynglingas, the Ghost of Ull, seemed startled, and shrank back with alarm. Menelaus was puzzled by this—until he recalled that the Linderlings had hunted and herded the Blue Men, and all other Inquiline form of Locust, into extinction.

  The gray-shimmering, silver-eyed Squire said to the Ghost of Ull, “Tell me. Does Coronimas the Hermeticist recall being shot to death on the toilet, nay, shot in the back while he fled, by an assailant he could not see? The terror and shame of that download is now in his permanent mind records, and touches all related thoughts. Is this accomplishment as nothing? It is meaningful to defy even an evil one cannot destroy.”

  But Montrose said to Mickey, “Witness Mictlanagualzin—is the honorable party facing me willing to program, with an irrevocable code, an unstoppable self-destruct sequence into his machine half of his soul, Exarchel, to initiate the moment their biometric link shows the principle, Learned Del Azarchel, has indeed died?”

  Excoronimas flicked his gold tendrils and said to Mickey, “Ask your principle how he could verify? We cannot give you the access to the inner workings of the thoughts of Exarchel.”

  Del Azarchel held up his hand. “There is no need to debate. It is disquietingly easy to establish a suicide reflex tied to a deadman switch for beings of such architecture, prone as they are in any case to Divarication cascade. Indeed, I expected this request, and spent many hours last night preparing exactly such a combination. Before these witnesses, I vow that I will remove the safety from the deadman switch to obliterate every copy of myself, wheresoever situate, the moment we take our positions and claim ready, showing the black palm, but not before. Nor is there need for verification. Learned Montrose will trust me to keep my word. He knows me. I know him. The meeting is without honor if I am not exposed to the risk of death. Shall we begin?”

  The judge of honor raised a baton, which she held in lieu of the more traditional handkerchief. The red dawnlight was sliding rapidly down the towerside, and too swiftly to be seen, a sliver of red was to the east above the hill crests, and on the high hilltop where they stood, their shadows stretched thin and weak toward the darkened west, where brighter stars still twinkled.

  She said, “Before I give the signal, three things must be said. First, you must agree that I am no longer Alalloel of Lree. For the purposes of this encounter and hereafter, to you I am Alalloel of the Anserine, a Paramount of an unlimited mental communion. You must so address me, or as Anserine. Is this acceptable? May we continue?”

  Del Azarchel spoke sharply, “I do not see it makes a difference. Does everyone change his name, save only for me and Montrose? I accept. Continue.”

  Sarmento’s eyes jerked toward the winged woman, and narrowed in thought.

  Montrose suppressed the impulse to introduce himself by a new name, such as Mr. Nostradamus Twiddle Apocalypse, Esquire. A man’s last words should not be a jape. He said only, “I accept. Continue.”

  Alalloel of the Anserine next said, “If a peaceful accommodation can be sought and found, both participators may even now withdraw, and with no loss of honor, and no imputation against their steadfast
ness. Witnesses! Inquire now and finally if accommodation can be made on any other ground.”

  Mickey put his head near Montrose and said softly, “Can it? You told me once, Judge of Ages, that you had some admiration for him, the Master of the World. The two of you have been like sun and moon for all of all the history anyone here knows. It will be odd to walk under the dome of heaven and nevermore to see one of the great luminaries.”

  Montrose said, “To be frank, I’d give almost anything to be able to take him, and walk away from here arm in arm, and find something to do together, go on a space voyage or something. You know he stole my starship, the Emancipation, that I named after my childhood dream? And I’ve never been aboard her. So, yeah, I suppose I’d give almost anything. Almost. But not my word. That I keep, even if I die for it.”

  Mickey turned and raised his voice. “Madame. No accommodation can be made.” And Sarmento i Illa d’Or said the same.

  Alalloel said, “Have all measures to avoid this conflict, with or without an accommodation, been examined and exhausted?”

  Mickey called all, “Yes.”

  But Sarmento i Illa d’Or said, “Just a moment!”

  For Sarmento was having some fierce, whispered debate with Del Azarchel. Montrose, thinking it was one of the privileges of being posthuman, adjusted the interpretation mechanism of his temporal lobes so that the words came crisp and clear despite the distance. But it was gibberish. Del Azarchel and Sarmento i Illa d’Or were inventing new languages with radically differing grammar and signification rules, one per each sentence, based on some arbitrary algorithm known to both of them. It seemed they also enjoyed the perquisites of being posthuman.

  Finally, Del Azarchel said, “I want to talk to Montrose privately.”

  Anserine said, “That is not allowed. You must abide by the rules and follow them.”

  “No, I think not,” drawled Del Azarchel. “Menelaus Montrose never obeyed a rule in his life, save when it suited him. Nor have I. Lesser men follow and obey us. We do not follow. He and I, we are the makers of rules.”

  And so Del Azarchel started walking forward, his gait in his armor stiff and rolling, a fashion of walk that was something comical while being menacing. Montrose thought he looked like a Sumo wrestler.

  5. Always One More

  Mickey whispered to Montrose, “Del Azarchel is in breach. You now have a faultless right to withdraw, and no man can say infraction.”

  Montrose did not answer that, but heaved up his heavy boots and stomped forward himself. He did not want to withdraw, and live. He counted the number of years he had awaited this day, and compared it to the number of steps he now made across the icy and broken rock, gray with ashes and pockmarked with miniature craters. It was roughly eight hundred years per step. Unhelmeted, unarmed, they closed the distance.

  Then they were together, close enough to look eye to eye. Close enough that when Del Azarchel laughed, Montrose felt the touch of warmth on his face.

  Suddenly an old memory bubbled up in his mind.

  He was four years old, maybe three. He had been lying in bed, hungry. He often went to bed hungry, as the older boys who could do chores needed their strength to do them. It was a cold night, as most nights of the endless winter were, and he had doubled up with two of his brothers in the same narrow bed for warmth, with three blankets piled over all of them. One of them, maybe it was Agamemnon, was telling the other, Hector, that the Sheriff had been asking mother where she had been yesterday, and whether anyone had seen her there, and so on. It had meant nothing to him then.

  Now, looking back with adult memory, posthuman memory, he identified that as the day and date Hatchet Jim Rackham had died. Gunned down by an unknown assailant. It had been a light caliber bullet, so the rumor ran that it might have been a woman, using a small pistol. But he had also been stabbed savagely, repeatedly, methodically, and the trail of bloodstains showed that he had been alive and crawling the first few times the blade entered his back. Whoever had done it had not had a strong arm.

  It clicked into his mind what his mother had meant. There is always one more.

  Whenever you kill a man, and you think that is the end of it, someone will come to avenge him. No matter how dead he is, a force as invisible as a specter would rise up, and find someone, a brother or a friend, or even a stranger who now feared your murderer’s reputation or envied and sought to better it, and the dead man’s vengeance would walk, even if the man himself never moved physically from the grave. And if you kill that avenger, that brother or son, he might have another brother or son.

  Or he might have a fierce young wife with ten small children to feed. Hatchet Jim had been the man who shot his father. That clicked into place, too.

  Looking back with his posthuman memory, he counted the number of knives in the knife rack when he saw them at age four, age three, age five. The largest blade had been missing since April of that year. The one mother had used to murder a man after her first shot had failed to do the deed.

  Something very cold and still touched his heart at the moment. To take a man’s life was a fearful thing. And even if he killed Blackie, that would not be the end of it. It would never end.

  He straightened his shoulders, and, with an apology in his cold heart for his mother, he vowed to himself: Very well. It never ends. Even if it lasts to the last hour of the universe.

  He was ready.

  14

  Chessmaster of History, Fencer of Fate

  1. Privately

  Montrose said, “Blackie. Is there anything to say? I am a professional duelist. Back when I was young, I made my whiskey money drilling holes in men’s hearts. So you are not likely to unnerve me. It is not just that we hate each other. Everything in us is opposed.”

  Del Azarchel said, “Not everything.”

  “You’re right. We both love the same girl. Not exactly a basis for an amiable coexistence.”

  Del Azarchel’s face tightened. “I made her for myself. All my ideals of perfection are embodied in her. She’s mine.”

  “That’s incest. Your own daughter. You make me puke.”

  “Incest at least is between members of the same species. She can no more mate with you than with a monkey. That is bestiality. It is not enough to vomit; I must scrub my inward parts with lye to clear my palate.”

  “Wait. All this time, you were thinking I have not consummated my marriage? You came to call me out to duel on my wedding night, but not early enough. It is not like we waited for sundown to start in on our nuptial pleasures. She was more eager than I was. In fact, in the car ascending the tower, she—”

  Del Azarchel threw back his head and laughed. Menelaus was surprised and disappointed. He had been toying with the idea of a little fisticuffs to get the blood pumping on a cold and sluggish morning like this before they picked up pistols. He had been half believing that was Del Azarchel’s purpose in drawing him aside. He did not really think Montrose could be talked out of anything, did he?

  But Del Azarchel was filled with good humor as if the black cloud of deadly anger building in him had never been. “Ah! Such words. No one talks to me as an equal. Do you know that? It’s lonely.”

  “I was kind of hoping I was talking to you unequal-like, sort of as a man speaks to a rat.”

  “Your words are like the toreador’s barbs under the skin of a bull. No one else pierces the skin. They don’t have the skill. Just you. And, well. Her.”

  Montrose felt some of the hate in him ebb, like an engine that cannot maintain a full head of steam. “Okay, Blackie. Speak your piece.”

  “I will give you the Earth.”

  “Come again?”

  “Serve me. If you agree to kneel and serve me, and become my vassal, I will in reward make you the Master of this World, third from the sun. All her peoples and lands, resources and living things, beauties and manufactures, and all her Cliometric destinies forever and aye.”

  “This is the world you are going to give to the Hyades when t
hey come. The End of Days is only four hundred years off.”

  “This world is nothing.”

  “Not to you, you mean,” said Montrose. His eyes held a look of deep sorrow even while his lip curled in a sneer of contempt.

  “So. You have figured it out!”

  “I reckon I have.”

  “Very good. None of my men have, and they have more clues than you. They are augmented by computer emulations who match them thought for thought, and so they are equally as intelligent as either of us—and yet they lack something we have, you and I. That inner fire. The fire of the gods. I expected no less. You know.”

  “I do know,” admitted Montrose, “and I would have known sooner, but I just couldn’t—despite all your crimes—I just didn’t want to believe you’d ever be that low.”

  “It was necessary.”

  “Your own men! Hell, I knew these guys too, back from the training camp. Once they might have been my friends. And now you are making me feel sorry for them? Wow. I’ve shot most of them. All but one, actually, and I actually feel sorry for them, because they trust you. They admire you. Like loyal little dogs. They love you.”

  Del Azarchel turned his eyes toward where the Seconds were gathered, looking on, no doubt wondering what the Judge of Ages and the Master of the World might be discussing. He said thoughtfully, “I can guess the day, maybe even the hour, when you deduced it. It was last night. You were gathered with your comrades, most of whom entered your Tombs to hunt you, but now they were won over. Loyal comrades. You have just survived deadly combat, and so there is that warmth that no man can feel who has not, alongside his brothers, looked in the face of death. And perhaps one of them says, O Judge of Ages, you who shape and shake men’s destinies, why is our world as it is? Could you not have shaped a better? And then you told them about our fencing match in the fog of history.”

  “Fencing match? I think of it as a chess game. Move, countermove. A matter of logic.”

  “That is why you lost, Cowhand. It is a matter of feints and fakes. And a chessboard has an edge, whereas fencers move to whatever part of the yard gives them advantage. Including off the planet altogether.”