The Judge of Ages

  He drew his head up. War? What war? The history scheme he had set in motion would not have ended in any organized large-scale violence. It could not have.

  “Childish!” Blackie was scoffing. “It was like something a human with a computing machine would do, not artists like us. You merely changed all the attractor field values to the positive, one after another after another, and anyone, anyone could have seen that this was a Cliometric manipulation, an unnatural imposition of a new social dynamic by force. To retaliate, I merely added a subduction vector, and it smoothed out the spline variables—in this case, by reducing the source to zero. You know the result.”

  “No, I was in hibernation at the time. What was the specific manifestation of this subduction vector?”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Sorry, come again?”

  “The ice caps which reach almost to the tropic zone, all this snow: it is all me. Exarchel and I are one system. I melted, flooded the coastal areas where the Anchorites kept their hermitages, overthrew their burgeoning civilization in one swift week of rising flood waters. Ah! The Earth enjoyed exactly one year and a half of summer! Such dancing, such gaiety! The land-dwelling infrastructure was wiped out, and the Anchorite dolphins, whales, and mermaids, shorn of half of their group, were swept back to the deep sea and reabsorbed. Then I froze the world again. I chose Midsummer’s Day in the northern hemisphere to start the first snowstorms over the Atlantic. It is amazing what you can do with a starship, an entire world covered with nanotechnological fluid you can directly control with your mind, and a coherent theory of weather prediction and control developed by the Japanese back in 2211—the year you were born, was it not?”

  “No. Year before.”

  Del Azarchel said, “Friend, there is no need to be coy with me. The game is over. What was the point of that move? Why have your creatures drill down through the icepacks into the buried oceans? It was stupid. Why provoke a war you could not win? What were you trying to accomplish by introducing this Anchorite cult factor into history, and then having it self-destruct?”

  8. The Dark Mind Discipline

  It should have worked!

  The whole idea for his Mind Anarchy Vector had come straight off one of the cartouches of the Monument in the Omega Segment of the southern hemisphere, hidden among acres and acres of glyphs and signs and patterns which, Montrose knew for certain, neither Del Azarchel nor any other human person had ever translated. Unlike all the surrounding and unreadable mysteries, this one was written in the simple and clear glyphs of the Kappa Segment. Montrose theorized that the Monument Builders, and perhaps all starfaring civilizations, used the technique to prevent any one information system or library or set of philosophical virus-ideas from utterly dominating any other.

  The system was so elegant, but so radically different in its axioms and conclusions than anything human beings had ever thought about the nature of thought, that Menelaus regarded it as the best thing he had ever done, the most clever work, to come up with a science to allow the philosophy of negative cognition to be used by the human nervous system. It was better than his most brilliant work in long-term hibernation Divarication; it was certainly better than his work in intelligence augmentation, which had been an insane—literally—failure.

  Montrose felt like some crusty old miner who, chipping his way through the snow of the Japanese Winter, finds an unbombed and unplagued mansion from the days of the First Space Age all intact; and breaking in through a window, discovers the owner had kept under glass some lost book or lost painting whose existence was only suspected from references to surviving books; and returning carefully to civilization, he becomes the toast of the town and the hero of the hour, his treasure brought with respect to the municipal or civic Hall of Lost Days, where anything recovered from before the Little Dark Ages was studied with reverence and kept with love. Such was the pride and pleasure Montrose felt at having discovered a nugget of revolutionary scientific information among the endless undeciphered acres of alien hieroglyphs.

  Del Azarchel was the only mind on Earth, except, perhaps, for the Giants yet unthawed in his deepest Tombs, who could actually appreciate the rarity of the find and the cleverness of its application. Others might be able to like it, or use it, but only someone steeped in Monument lore and learning, and able to do a calculation of six billion variables in his head, could see the recursive symmetry of the positive and negative patterns involved, or delight in the graceful elegance of the final proof, as short and yet as profound as a haiku.

  Menelaus had actually expected not merely compliments, but praise, from Del Azarchel for the find. With a sensation of shame he realized that this man, his deadly enemy, was the one man on Earth whose good opinion he wanted to win. It was that important to him.

  9. One Last Answer

  Menelaus was frustrated. “Look, Blackie, we’re old friends. Stop dithering around with me. Our game is over. I just don’t understand your checkmate move, or how you escaped mine. I thought I had won. Hell! I thought I had crushed you. So I am asking you, please, curiosity is strangling me. Maybe you can tell me, now that it is over, why it did not work?”

  “Why what did not work?” Del Azarchel gave him a withering look, also mingled with frustration. “I do not even know what your question is! Are you asking me why you cannot sink a battleship with a paper airplane? Why did the Anchorites start wars they could not win? Why did they drill down into the lakes buried under glaciers, the seas buried under the crust? What was your plan?”

  Menelaus did not know what wars Del Azarchel was talking about. There was no need for war in any of the variations of the vector he introduced. He said, “My plan was to stop the spread of the system by making Helotry possible on a metalogical and semiotic basis … The philosophical problem of the mind and body relation has more than one set of…”

  But Blackie was hardly listening. “Ha! Philosophy! Were your Anchorites merely going to talk in Socratic syllogisms to the flood waters, and explain the benefits of mental liberty and freethinking? Where they going to stop the wars they provoked by—? What? Sweet reason? Your anarchists were fighting helots of the mind, zombies, slaves whose every smallest thought was so tightly controlled, one might as well have reasoned with a rockslide, or halted a sniper’s stealthrocket in midflight with an enthymeme! One might as well try to stop the Fall of Ganymed with a word, when it nearly destroyed all life on Earth!”

  Montrose tried to hide his reaction, which was one of jarring disorientation, like stepping for a stair that was not there.

  Del Azarchel was convinced that Montrose had merely introduced a philosophical idea, no different from any other idea, which spread through a culture as one person after another was convinced and converted, or was raised from a child to believe it.

  The Anarchist Vector was not a new thought, nor a new neural architecture to hold thought. It was a new technology of thought: the mind-body relation revisited and revised.

  Menelaus had intended for the Mental Anarchists to develop a means of storing thoughts in the negative information spaces between manifest thought forms, a mental activity that could not, even in theory, be decrypted, and would probably not even be detected unless the psychoscopic investigator knew exactly what to look for.

  And Blackie did not know what to look for.

  He had not stopped Montrose. He had not even been aware. Blackie had no idea.

  He had not the slightest idea what had happened to mankind, here in this final act of history before the End of Days, over the last five hundred years.

  Del Azarchel was staring at him intently. “You are hiding something.”

  10. Moonfall

  Montrose said, quite candidly, “I would only be hiding something if our great game were still going on. But according to you, it is over, ain’t it?”

  “According to you, you still have one move left. I am wary enough of you to believe it. What is it?”

  Montrose spread his hands. “Wait and see.”


  “You are bluffing. This is a feint of yours!”

  “No, Blackie, only you feint, because you are fencing with me. You rely on your opponent’s dimwittedness. But I am playing chess with you. I don’t feint. That is why you will lose!”

  “You seem confident, Cowhand, but it is false confidence, I assure you. Right now, all the tau values for the world culture are flatline zero: this society is a perfectly balanced self-regulating hierarchy that will never change, except to improve, and will never fall. When no party can introduce any further change into the matrix, the game is ended.” Del Azarchel straightened up from their ice pond full of equations. “Ended, with myself the victor! I would not have won so handily had not your last two moves been senseless and erratic to the point of madness. I have been trying to find out what you meant by them. Even now, at the end, when one of us will surely die, and both of us might, will you not say?—or perhaps you have, at last, as I always expected, returned to your old insanity, Crewman Fifty-One.”

  “Or perhaps I have outsmarted you and you are going to lose your life, and all your Hermetic work is going to come undone, Crewman Two, because I am just that much smarter than you.”

  “Bah!”

  “You know, I ain’t sure I know anyone ’cept you who says ‘bah.’”

  “And I surely know of none save you who says ‘ain’t.’”

  “Be that as it may, Blackie, I said I would answer one question if you answered one of mine. Whether you know it or not, you did in fact answer. So. Ask your—wait a minute—” he interrupted himself. “Two moves? The Anarchist Vector was one move. What was the other?”

  Del Azarchel looked up from where he had been frowning at the equations. “The Fall of 1036 Ganymed. I’d certainly like to hear the reasons, the strategy, that propelled you to perform such a deadly and violent act. I have been puzzling over it for years. What motivated you to do such a terrible deed? I did not think you capable of such magnificence.”

  Montrose was dumbfounded. “What motivated … me?”

  “In magnitude, it was almost an act worthy of, well, myself.”

  Montrose said weakly, “Funny. I was thinking it was an act worthy of you, too, I guess.”

  “I was a little surprised to see you use the same method twice,” Del Azarchel confided in him. “You are so proud of originality, working with computerpathy in this century, genetic in the next, biohardware one aeon, biosoftware the aeon after. Same thing twice? Not your standard method of approach, is it? Of course, when the Giants decivilized the world, they left nature standing, and they arranged for a lot of city dwellers to be snatched out of harm’s way before the fires started in earnest. You could have done something like that this time. But using an inhabited moon to make an asteroid-drop weapon onto an inhabited world! I suppose the sheer inhumanity of it was new. The brutality. And you mock me for using the contraterrene space lance to irradiate a few dozen rebel cities in order to unify my rule and impose world peace.”

  Montrose said in a weak voice, “Took you by surprise, didn’t it?”

  “I’ll say. To me it looked as if you damaged all your near-surface Tomb facilities to no purpose. I had sort of assumed you found some other way of getting information from the upper world, because not a single periscope of yours would exist anywhere. Now, I am not saying it did not damage me! I lost radio contact with the whole planet for ten years. I was in a Hohmann transfer orbit to Jupiter, and I missed the rendezvous. No one on Earth could send up a craft because no one on Earth existed. You had completely wiped out human civilization. Ah! But I know your cunning! I knew it was a fake, that there were still people somewhere. (And I was right; you hid them in your depthtrain system.)

  “I knew it was you, Cowhand, because, well: you are the cause of all my setbacks—and you do nothing without a plan ten steps ahead!

  “I could look out at the blue wonderful world, but it was too far to touch. Had I rode the landing craft down, where would I splash down? In some ocean red with volcanoes? And then how get back up again?

  “No, I had to return to Jupiter, and wait years and years for the planets to be in proper position to attempt again. So you put me to a lot of trouble. I have been waiting patiently to discover the reason.”

  Montrose stood, face blank, blinking. He said, “Is that your one question? I thought that you had something from an earlier period in mind.”

  Del Azarchel chuckled. “Embarrassed, are we?”

  Montrose did not answer. He and Del Azarchel had talked for so long, the sun had risen. The strange and hollow twilight that seemed so unnatural had passed. The sunlight was bright and clear, but the landscape was still cratered and inkstained with endless debris, and not a single tree was still standing, but all were charred or blasted.

  There was a glint in the distance. Montrose increased the number of nerve firings to his eye, and a crisp picture came into his head.

  The glint was a metal plaque.

  It had been ripped out of the ground, bent, battered, and charred by molten iron. Only a few words were visible. —M. I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—THESE LANDS UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER—HOSPITALIER OF ST. JOHN—NO SOLICITING

  Montrose, who had been feeling a considerable sense of fellowship, pity, admiration, and even a twinge of friendship for Del Azarchel suddenly felt a hardness and a burning coldness in his heart, as if somehow flame could be made of ice and ignite a man’s soul. —M. I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—UNDER THE PROTECTION—TRESPASSERS KILLED—

  He reminded himself of everyone who had been robbed, coerced, humiliated, or killed by the Blue Men, had so been because of the orders, or the indifference, of this handsome, dark-haired man before him. A man who committed all these crimes and more, because a Swan Princess had once, innocently, trustingly, used her understanding of Cliometry to manipulate historical forces and push him onto a throne. And then she, seeing his growing ambition and corruption, had turned those same forces to give him a stark choice: to abdicate or else, by clinging illegitimately to power, to cause a world war and a total economic collapse. It was a choice no man with a conscience would have even paused to consider: certainly the Anchorites just mentioned would have jumped at the chance to flee the burdens of power, and the dangerous lure of corruption.

  And all of history for roughly eight thousand years had been a turmoil of one insanely failure-ridden and unworkable social and legal scheme after another, exaggerated caricatures of misery, not one of them having been naturally evolved to serve the needs of the current and coming generations.

  All because Blackie could not say farewell to a girl whom he should not love. A girl who had chosen another. Mrs. Montrose. Had Menelaus actually had a moment of pity for his wife’s father because that father still had a disgusting and unlawful romantic attraction for a married woman? Menelaus wondered if his coffin sessions last night and early this morning had indeed healed all the damage from the various blows to the head or the side-effects bouts of paralysis and petrifaction may have left.

  As suddenly as a snuffed candle, all friendliness and fellowship departed from Montrose’s face. The look of wrath was so clear on his features that Del Azarchel thought the other man might on the instant leap at his throat and tear with his teeth like a dog. Many another man would have backed up, seeing the glint of death in the eyes of Montrose. Del Azarchel hefted his dirk and stepped forward, eyes like flint, teeth white in a stiff grin, as if daring him to try his luck.

  They found themselves standing with noses almost touching, staring into each other’s eyes with gazes of superhuman vigor that no man, aside from them, could long hold. But both knew each other’s mystic sense of honor too well. Neither would be the first to break the rules of the code of duels.

  Through clenched and smiling teeth, Blackie whispered:

  “Are you going to tell me why you dropped the asteroid, Cowhand? Even for you, it seemed rather clumsy, and very brutal. I lost all contact with the Earth for years.”

&
nbsp; The pattern jumped into place in the mind of Menelaus. He understood the reason for the asteroid drop, the destruction of the surface world, why the Melusine dwelled in buried lakes and subterranean seas—and where the Anchorites had gone.

  “Is that going to be your one question, Blackie? I ain’t much in the talking mood no more.”

  “Or the grammaring mood, I see. No. I will learn of all these things at my leisure, once you are dead.”

  “We both know that if I kill you, Blackie, your Jupiter Machine seedling must self-destruct, and all your plans die with you.”

  “No matter. My pain will end.”

  Menelaus grunted, unimpressed.

  “You will survive,” said Del Azarchel with an inclination of the head. “You will defy the Hyades, and provoke them to destroy our race. Our world, a tiny cinder circling a minor star in one of the smaller arms of the galaxy, will spin and spin, and the universe will never know nor care that two such men as the Judge of Ages and the Master of the World met and were matched in strength.

  “But”—and now the grin of Del Azarchel looked almost boyish, so bright was it—“if I prevail, and I do not ask of you this one question tormenting me, there is no other source I can ask, and it will remain a mystery even after I become the Master of the Stars. So here is my question. I need not remind you that you are honor-bound to answer.”

  “Shoot. Sorry. Bad choice of words, considering. I mean, uh, ask.”

  “It concerns your long-term strategy during our match. Even from the very earliest days. When did you plant the seeds to grow Pellucid, your world core Xypotech? 2401? Long before the Day of Gold in 2525. At any time, during any of these millennia, you could have let society fall, install yourself into an emulation of your own at the Earth’s core, and then have your own self-replicating iron logic crystals pour out of all the volcanoes of the world. I kept expecting it. I dreamed it and feared it and never once came up with a possible counter-strategy that might have worked. You would have won the game at any time. But the volcanoes never opened.”