“Female pentads seeking mates examined the land-houses and sea-houses to see how well the male pentad could succeed while using nothing but his own raw talent and willpower. Since the so-called isolated individual was actually a group of five, they got a fair amount of hauling and labor done, including ploughing.”
“Ploughing?”
“The whale ploughed.”
“In the sea?”
“No. Don’t be silly. On land.”
“How?”
“What do you mean, how? He grew legs.”
“Oh. Of course.”
“The effort was very difficult and some of them did die. But since there was no other way to attract a high-status female mating group, the incentives that drove the Anchorites into hermitage were very strong.”
Blackie pointed at another group of symbols that spun out of the marriage customs. “Their women pentads had a similar ritual of discipline. They took a vow of silence, and entered into trade or finance, using their bodies as living ships to haul goods all up and down the coast. But the laws and customs expressed in this equation here granted a monopoly to anyone who opened a new market: frontier trade was much, much more lucrative than protecting the established trade. When they were apprentices, these she-pilgrims of peddling took a vow of silence, because, for some odd reason, the Anchorite culture despised the art of persuasion and salesmanship. Each article bought and sold had to speak for itself, without the salesmaiden influencing her customer’s thoughts via radiotelepathy. When she had accumulated her fortune, she offered it as a dowry to her selected mate.
“Back when this crazy little fringe group existed, their political leadership was selected by a like method. In those days, only one who departed civilization and had no contact and no self-interest tied to any clan or faction could be conscripted to service. They only chose leaders from among the pool of candidates who actively attempted to flee into the uncharted coastal seas or inland rivers to avoid public service. If the fleeing candidate were not beloved by enough people to form a hunting party, he did not serve.”
“Not a bad custom,” muttered Montrose. “I can think of a few politicians I would not mind seeing run into the wild and not be called back.”
“Easier to establish a World Concordat whose supreme leader can destroy incompetent public servants with a nod of his crown,” said Del Azarchel stiffly.
Menelaus gave him a dark look. “Sure, and amputating a leg is a fine way to stop bunions on your toes. Can we get back to the equations? That looks like a inverted supply-demand function.”
“It is. Among the Anchorites, the marriages were happy enough, simply because it was so hard to woo. Men esteem lightly what they win easily; and that is true for Melusine. The joke ran that, once the maiden was a bride, and her vow of silence ended, she filled the seas and rivers of the coast with song and talk and chatter, and all the gossip she had gathered; and once the youth was a bridegroom, and his vow of toil and solitude was done, he never stirred a flipper or a finger again to get anything for himself, but spent his time in congregations with his cronies, lazy as lions who make the lionesses do all the hunting.”
“Actually,” said Montrose, “lions have a bad reputation. They are so lazy during the day because they spend all night fighting hyena packs, protecting the women and children.”
“Well, your male Anchorites did much the same. Look at that glyph there. The violence index. The male pentads drove off the Infernals, protecting the cows and the calves. All the zombie-masters living in the seas below the Earth had endless ranks of mind-controlled Helots to send against them.
“And, between their seasons of warring with Helots, the Anchorites, when offended, would settle matters one-on-one, or, rather, to be accurate, five-on-five, selecting a stretch of abandoned river for the field of honor, and encountering each other with jaw-mounted rockets and energy weapons, or just encountering each other jaw to jaw. The human-shaped components would await on shore, or meet with swords or pistols, and when one of them clutched his head, amputated from his mental link, merely of human intelligence again forever and nine-tenths of his memories gone, they would know the Cetacean had died and the pentad was broken.
“If the affront was particularly egregious, the duelists would not meet in the rivers, but select instead a spot beyond the continental shelf. They would sink together at the assigned place; and perhaps the flash of weapons could be glimpsed in the depths by the witnesses as they dashed against each other like dragons, fire in their jaws.”
“That’s why you agreed to have Alalloel be our judge of honor, ain’t it?” asked Montrose suddenly. “She is descended from one of these groups, isn’t she?”
Del Azarchel nodded. “Her family, the Lree, are civilized now, but they have not forgotten their barbaric past: a past you created. They understand us. Meeting in the darkness far below the waves, one would rise to the sunlit waters again, or neither; but even in death, honor lived on.”
“Sounds like my kind of people,” said Montrose sadly. “Sorry I missed them.”
Montrose pondered. These strange people with their strange customs, mermen emerging from the sea to reclaim the land so long ago annihilated by the apocalyptic fall of 1036 Ganymed, were much like the pioneers and frontiersmen that shaped his own land, his own background. They had been retracing those brave steps of that first feeble lungfish, the Neil Armstrong of evolution’s march, who emerged from the sea in remote prehistory and colonized the lifeless land of early Earth.
He would have liked to meet them. His brainchildren. But he had been in hibernation and the centuries fled, and they were no more, and never would come again.
5. Helots
The next group of symbols showed the new world that arose after the Anchorites fell. The Paramounts and the Helots were driven by population pressures to emerge from the crevasses and caves of their sunless oceans, and rapidly overspread the surface waters: blind whales and dolphins as pale as albino Scholars, with generations of stored Ghosts in their infospheres.
“The world that emerged from the darkness of the interior was the world of your nightmare and my utopia,” said Del Azarchel.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that the tau function for human liberty is exactly at zero. Theirs is a hierarchy as strict as a pyramid, with rank and dignity clearly defined and nor subject to change. A natural aristocracy, if you will, ruling a naturally servile class.”
“And at the apex—you?”
“Exarchel and I have calculation powers at our disposal that make us like titans among the toy soldiers. The entire surface of the globe is my mind. This Tour de Oro, one of the greatest works of man—they could not have made it without me, and nothing on the surface of the world can withstand its power. I have not even hinted at its weapons. I can make a dozen miniature suns, as bright and hot as Sol but only a few yards in diameter, to fly around my Tower like so many trained pigeonhawks of fire. And yet—such is the beauty of this world—I have no need among my people ever to use such weapons.
“My weapon is much more simple and terrible: each Melusine is born and bred with mind-reading and mind-controlling circuits organically grown into the various skulls and mainframes of their composite bodies. Paramounts rule Helots like a zombie master with his zombie. And each man has absolute and utter control of those below him, to the utmost nuance of thought, and he in turn is absolutely and utterly helpless to those above.
“You are thinking the Helots would be sullen and lazy slaves, inert and waiting for orders, or shambling masses unable to compete with the liberated energy of that disorder you so love to call liberty? This is because you do not comprehend how fine and exact the mind control is. This is not mesmerism. It is not even computer programming. The Helot’s mind, in effect, is a part or subcompartment of the Paramount’s mind, and can be ordered to use all its spirit and genius and devotion and willpower to program itself, coming up with imaginative solutions on how to make its own slavery all that more rigorous,
and bind the chains tighter. Even God Almighty cannot achieve such perfect devotion from his choirs of angels, because it is with free will the angelic hosts must serve.
“If a Paramount wishes his Helot to be as devoted as an ancient samurai, to be willing to throw himself on the blade of suicide rather than face dishonor, then with no more effort than you use to raise your left hand, it is done; if he wishes his Helots to be as devout as monks in the First Dark Age, who drained swamps and cleared timber and reduced the tangled barbaric wild to cultivation and civilization, not for wages, but for the Glory of God, he need but raise his right hand, and it is done. Or if, on his whim, he thinks the free market would be more inventive, he raises his foot, and there is a market season, and the thousands and tens of thousands compete and strive and exploit themselves for that grubby materialism you Yanks so romanticize—and then he lowers his foot, and they give all their money back into the central treasury, not recalling or not caring what they did once the season ends. The souls of those below him are merely his members and organs of thought.
“And he is an organ of the one above him, whose every thought he scrutinizes as closely as the conscience scrutinizes a man who feels a pang of guilt even before he brings to mind what he did wrong.
“So where is there room for corruption or vice? There is no darkness in this world at all. Everything that in prior ages hid, or was forgotten, in this world is transfixed with pitiless, penetrating light.
“You see why I make free to offer them to you? The Melusine are fluid, and will fill the shape of any container into which they are poured. You can make them anything you like, even make them once again the Anchorites and lovers of liberty.”
The face of Montrose was greenish with the sickness that he felt, the loathing sense of moral foulness. He could not hide his features: Del Azarchel, like a plant seeking sunlight, bloomed in the disgust and hatred shed from the face of Montrose, and his dark, bearded face was flushed with sadistic joy, seeing how his words were barbs.
Del Azarchel leaned close, whispering as a lover to his bride.
“Come, Montrose, compliment me. I have molded mankind at last to a state of perfection. Mine is one of the most elegantly Darwinian and ruthless social-political systems imaginable! Within the Mind Helotry system, in order to prevent themselves from being brain-enslaved and brain-raped, they must enslave and rape any potential source of threat, and, unlike wars of flesh and blood, the victim always loves and cooperates with the victor, and there is no loss of lives or resources.
“But the struggle for competition and command is even more fierce than Nature red in tooth and claw! The mental war system is far more desperate than any physical war. The pressure to prevail or suffer a fate endlessly worse than death or hell, the loss of free will—no race of people has even been under such pressure! They make themselves into geniuses, or die! This is a golden age! Each group of surface-world Helots, the Oceanic Melusine, when their free will is drained…”
Montrose had an insight. He interrupted. “You sick bastard. You don’t like this world, this setup. You deliberately made it as appalling as possible. Because you want me to take it over. This is your blackmail. You said you’d give me this world if I bowed to you. Because if you give it to me, I can abolish your system and free all the generations to come.”
Del Azarchel merely spread his hands. “You have always before come to the rescue of the wounded worlds I have made. Why should this be different? I hereby condemn this world forever and for eternity to this hell of lifelessness until you take Earth from my hand.”
“Your helot system cannot last forever!”
“It certainly, certainly can. Mind Helotry is a halt state. Once the world is enslaved to the point where even daydreams of rebellion or impulses of discontent cannot be lodged in a brain cell without the permission of the Paramount class, how can any rise up? And if they did rise up, what would they do to those under them: program them with the false belief they have free will? Ironic, to say the least, and hardly worth fighting for.”
“What about my Anarchist Vector? If you look at the social incentives surrounding—” But as he pointed toward Del Azarchel’s equation, the one that described the current world, and he reached his finger to point at the vector sum describing the Anchorite mental technology … it was not there.
6. The Missing Vector
He looked back and forth between the two ice puddles they were using as blackboards. Something was wrong, very wrong. Menelaus blinked in confusion, rewriting and rewriting Cliometric equations in his head, trying to see the missing links, flipping and rotating immense arrays of numbers and symbols in his imagination, trying to find a match, a bridging equation.
There was no match. There was no equation to get from the first array, describing the Anchorite world, to the second, describing the Helot world. That future simply and absolutely could not come out of that past.
Menelaus looked again.
Ctesibius had mentioned Melusine occupying the depthtrain network and a vast underground archeology: those were the ancestors of the Infernals. Their growth patterns, and the society that grew like a strange fractal crystal, matched the equations Del Azarchel described.
As for the Melusine in the oceans, they could not possibly have failed to have been exposed to the genetic-mimetic influence of his Anarchist Vector spread by the migrating terns. One generation, or two, and the genetic change would remain dormant, and then the group instinct would have started to influence events, first of those with the gene, and then those without it. That is what produced the pioneer spirit which led to the Anchorites, and their attempt to recolonize the surface land area.
And the vector could be spread by any means over any boundary, physical or psychological: if the Infernal Melusine beneath the crust of the planet had any physical contact or electronic signal traffic whatsoever with the Anchorites, then the radiotelepaths among the Melusine would have spread the vector in less than a generation.
He looked at Del Azarchel’s hieroglyphs. The crucial equation that described the dark mind technology which should have been present in the Anchorites was not in the formula.
When Menelaus factored the missing element back into the equations written before him, the result was stunning and simple: the Mind Helot system could not have arisen among the Oceangoing Melusine, nor could they have been conquered by the mental warfare system Del Azarchel had just mentioned.
The world of the Helots could not exist.
Del Azarchel was smirking. Montrose looked up from the impossible paradox of symbols he was seeing. “Okay, Blackie. I give. How did you do it? How did you get from the Anchorite world to the Helot world? What did you do with the Anarchist Vector I introduced?”
7. Change of Mind
Del Azarchel said, “I am not sure what aspect of what you introduced you mean. Are you still taking credit for the rise of the Anchorite cult among the Oceangoing Melusine? Which you did by what means again, exactly? Turning red rock moss black and leaving trails of migratory bird-droppings in the wave? Are you sure you want to claim credit for them? They were never more than one-tenth of one percent of the population, never had any particular influence, never shaped events—the Infernals tolerated them because they were far away, formed no threat, did nothing, and meant nothing.
“But the belligerence you built into their social scheme—if you are still taking credit for having done this—merely led them, one step at a time, to their inevitable destruction. Did you design the cult to self-destruct? I have done such things in the past, but I did not expect it from you.”
Menelaus was staring in wonder at what Del Azarchel had written in the surface of the ice puddle. Had he made a mistake in his math? Or had Del Azarchel? Where was the Anarchist Vector in this sum result? It should have had the same effect on the path of events as a supermassive black hole in space would have on the orbits of a solar system it passed through.
Del Azarchel was still talking: “Your Anchorites launche
d physical attacks against the undersea brain colonies in the buried oceans. Considering how far down your pet anarchists had to drill even to reach the uppermost of the buried lakes or sunless oceans of the inner world, I would say your attempt to concoct a race to supersede mine ended about as badly as your first attempt with the Giants. What am I saying? Far worse. The last Anchorite, Eumolpidai, died in captivity in A.D. 10099. The whole career of the race, from start to finale, was less than a hundred years.
“What were you imagining? What were you thinking? As a Cliometric vector, creating a cult of belligerent aggressive anarchists, who could neither coordinate their assaults nor work for their common defense, against the most well-organized set of nested mental empires Earth has ever known—madness!
“Have you gone mad, my friend? Again? This was the most awkward bit of math I’d ever seen you do!” Blackie shook his head, remembering, wondering. “Why, the last time I saw you so, so, amateurish, was back when you and I were just starting to learn Cliometrics, and we did not have any easy way set up, either of us, for factoring six billion variables.”
Montrose said, “Childish, my Uncle Jack’s jackass’s ass-jack! You are just trying to get my goat! That was the most subtle thing I’ve ever done, undetectable, unstoppable. It … Why! You must have suffered not one stroke of genius, but a dozen in a row, even to begin to come up with a counter-strategy!”
“What in the world are you talking about, Cowhand? The war? Is this vector you introduced the thing that made the Anchorites start a war with the Infernals?”
Montrose was bent over the Cliometric formulae which formed their chessboard, looking for what had become of the missing chessman who had defined his promised checkmate of Blackie. There was no trace. The math was correct up to a certain point, and then …