“What is the question again, exactly?”
“What is the ques—what? I mean—” Del Azarchel was at a loss for words.
He stared at Montrose, his eyes full of wonder, thunderstruck, dumbfounded.
And then he began to laugh with relief. He roared and wept with laughter, the gales of mirth of a man who had lived with one particular fear for countless thousands of years, only to realize the fear had been a shadow, a boogeyman, a nothing.
Hiccoughing, Blackie said, “Y—You never even toyed with the notion, did you? You are sentimental. You are so stupid. You let me win. Just like that. I win. And you did it to save them! The humans. The hoi polloi. The hylics.”
“Don’t call them that.” Montrose’s voice was sharp.
The laughter turned to scorn. “They are lesser creatures to us.”
“They are not lesser creatures!”
“Then why not tell them the truth? If you thought they were our equals, you would tell them everything we do when we decide how to let them live their lives. But you don’t, do you? You never tell them anything,” said Del Azarchel in a tone of voice so smug that he needed no words to say You, like me, know full well that the Truth is not for such as they.
“God damn you!” shouted Montrose.
And in ten huge, Sumo-wrestler-massive strides, Montrose strode in his armor to where the solemn men stood, his Seconds and Del Azarchel’s. And the white-winged dark-eyed maiden, elfin and eerie, looked on with no expression from the dozens of eyes in her wings.
And Montrose began shouting the truth to them at the top of his lungs.
16
Ready to Fire
1. Not for Such as They
Montrose shouted, “All of your history has been a lie. All your lives. Your civilizations, accomplishments, times of war, times of peace, laws and customs, arts and sciences. A fraud. A farce.”
No one spoke. No one interrupted or turned away.
“Del Azarchel duped his minions into creating one sick, diseased, broken society after another, in order to gull me into revealing a cure, a power, a spell, that only I could wield. It was a secret of seven parts that my wife, the Swan Princess Rania, had discovered on a stone circling a distant star. And each time I used this power to do some good, my shipmates”—he gestured to where the hooded men in black silk were gathered, and he spat the word like it was a curse. The Hermeticists, on their part, wore expressions either of indifference, or triumph, or condescending sneers when Montrose said—“these Hermeticist devils would take whatever good I did and pervert it to evil.
“I gave men civilization, he turned it into a weapon of destruction and oppression; I gave men cooperation, he turned it into the conformity of a military camp; I gave men a pharmaceutical means to extend their span of life, he made it into an addiction, and a means to gull, bewitch, and erase the minds and souls of men…”
And, one after another, he pointed at Melchor de Ulloa, Narcís D’Aragó (or rather, their Ghosts), and then at Sarmento i Illa d’Or.
The voice of Montrose took on a depth and power as his anger grew. “I gave men the discipline to break those addictions; one of their number who stands not here abused that discipline to create an art that destroyed each vestige of brother-love and gentleness and compassion and humanity in mankind, and he marred their forms to make them less than beasts. But he saw and repented his evil, and sought to bring the monsters to the fountains of humanity, and allow them drink; and for his goodness he was slain by him who was his friend and shipmate and brother; I gave the monsters laws of uniformity, to allow them to endure for a time without anarchy; and this same murderer imposed a uniformity of the mind, and destroyed the human soul, that thing which makes each man an individual and precious; and this one, the least and last of all, who has no human soul, created a race of helots and their zombie-masters to destroy the human spirit, that thing which gives a man free will and free conscience.”
And he pointed at the Ghosts of Coronimas, and of Mentor Ull, who stood with golden tendrils; tall man and short Locust, heads held tilted at the same angle, as alike in posture as father and child, albeit nothing else about them was alike: only their souls.
Sarmento i Illa d’Or, who, of all men there, was the least afraid of the Judge of Ages, said, “What does it matter, anything you are saying? We did what we did because it gave us pleasure, and no one could stop us. You do what you do because it gives you pleasure; and any who try to stop you, you shoot and kill. Anything else is merely words.”
Montrose whirled on him, moving swiftly for one in such heavy armor, and his teeth were gritted like a biting animal’s, and his eyes blazed in madness. “This will give you no pleasure, Sarmento! Look about you. All the Hermeticists have done their work. There are none of you left to remake the world in his image. And yet another four hundred years remain to the End of Days. Shall each of you take turns again, and history will spin like some damn wheel, of Giants, Sylphs, Witches, Chimerae, Nymphs, Hormagaunts, Locusts, Melusine? I can start the wheel again, and bring forth Giants from my Tombs!”
Sarmento sneered. “The Nobilissimus, whom I am proud to call my master and the master of our order, he will examine among the races and determine which can best serve the Hyades. The others, as Darwin demands, will be exterminated. I am sure there are enough among your eighty-nine Tomb sites to select the, uh…”
Words failed him. Montrose spoke up, mocking: “The blue ribbon winner? The prize pig? The winner of the Miss Darwin beauty contest? Oh? Well then, who judges the Hermeticists? If you are judged and found wanting, do the people acting in the name of nondeliberate Darwinian forces get to deliberately exterminate you?”
He turned again to the other Iron Ghosts. “Now it is your turn to hear the truth, you bastards! You have all been played for fools; Blackie has his pinkie finger up your nose and leads you as he will: walk, trot, and gallop. Each bit of the Rania Solution that came into your hands was just so you would put it into Del Azarchel’s hands, to then be used to make his greater Machine, his Jupiter Brain. Each of the seven parts of the human psyche was designed by one or another of the templates you made.
“The Sylphs were used as the template for a basic machine level, an unconscious. The peculiar intuitive brain structures of the Witches were templates for the subconscious levels, the seat of dreams and archetypal images, appetites too basic for names. The Chimerae formed the passions; the Nymphs, the instincts; the Clades, the ego; Locusts, the conscience. That is the fate of the civilizations you fathered. That was the only reason you were ever meant to father them. A machine copied part of their base neural psychology. For that purpose only, for a single millennium alone, you each were dressed in your master’s robe, a robe too large for you, and were allowed to play at being Master of the World.
“For the true Master of the World brooks no rival, no, not even in play. You each have served your purpose and served your turn. Now you will be discarded.
“As your races and your dreams were discarded.
“The Great Work of the Hermetic Order—how often you have boasted empty boasts of it!—was to bring forth the race after man.
“Fools! It was done without you.
“Those races, your children, their civilizations, your ideals, your periods of history where for a season he allowed you to design and reign over mankind; in short, everything you have done with your long lives; was merely so he could steal your transitory pretense of the Great Work and copy it into the real Great Work, his Work, meant from the beginning to be the real and permanent, the sole and only.
“The Great Work was launched from here not ten hours past. Jupiter is his name, your new god, whose intellect will surpass a hundredfold all the races you vainly hatch here, yes, and all the inner planets together even if they were covered pole to pole with Aurum Vitae atop glaciers of Living Waters atop which races of Giants manning mile-high Granoliths might multiply, and all their cores Pellucid!
“Look at me! All of you know me.
Except for you, Ull, so shut up. Do I lie?”
But then Ximen del Azarchel, who had sauntered in his clanging armor at a much more deliberate, almost meditative pace, was now among them. The Ghosts of the Hermeticists all now clamored and shouted at Del Azarchel, demanding, threatening, pleading for some word of explanation, yearning for some word of reassurance from him.
Only Sarmento i Illa d’Or did not doubt. “I believe you, my master! I will not listen to this traitor dog! When has he ever been sane?”
Mickey the Witch said softly, “What? Just because he wears a tent instead of clothing, and goes around pretending he is someone else?”
Montrose whispered sideways through his gritted teeth, “You are not helping.” But he started laughing to himself, and he wondered if perhaps he were mad after all, to laugh at a time like this.
Ximen del Azarchel must have thought so too, for he chuckled and raised his hand. Such was his magnetism and authority, that even when stirred to bewildered anger, the Hermeticists fell silent before his glance. “I order you not to believe him. I order you not to think.”
There was some muttering. Narcís D’Aragó said, “If the Judge of Ages is mad, surely so is the Master of the World. You order us to do what?”
Del Azarchel said in a calm, conversational tone of voice, as if it were a matter of no import, “I will erase your short-term memories because it suits me to do so. I have done such things many times in the past. I have even told you this many times in the past, because it does not matter what you think or what you do in a span of a moment of your lives, for it is a moment I can wash clean with a sweep of my hand. All your thoughts are written in dust. Do you still imagine I am your leader, or merely the first among equals? I am your master and you are my hounds. You are my possessions.”
But he turned to Sarmento i Illa d’Or, saying, “Not you, for obvious reasons. I don’t have anything in your head.”
And, hearing the noise of disgust and horror from Montrose, Del Azarchel turned his head a little more, saying, “You look askance, Cowhand? You, of all people? This is an art I learned from you! I have phantasms of my own to serve me.”
Montrose stepped forward, but not toward Del Azarchel: to Alalloel. He said, “He must die and I must kill him. Let us proceed.”
2. Man of Honor
At that moment, Narcís D’Aragó approached Montrose and bowed his head. “Learned Montrose, I know I have no right to ask. And yet, I remind you that my previous version—a man like me in all ways, in personality and spirit and sense of honor, did not run from you when the time came for him to face you, pistol in hand. While it is true that he lives on in me, it is also true he died the death. It was a death he willingly faced. Will you allow me to speak to you, as one man of honor to another?”
Montrose could not suppress a spasm of hatred for the man. He said archly, “What kind of honor are we talking about? What kind of man? I would ask Captain Grimaldi about the perfect performance of your honorable duties aboard ship, but he is quite dead, seeing as how you rose up with the other mutineers and murdered him. So he is not around to ask.”
D’Aragó did not look up. His voice, normally as thin and cold as an icicle, was thick with shame. “These are … old questions, no longer visited.”
“Old as you and me, brother. You was there. You did the deed. You never paid for it, never got hanged, never got caught, and when you came back to Earth y’all were the princes of the world. Prince? A god! Hell, you even got your very own period of one thousand years as your own private lab and breeding grounds, stockyard, and gladiatorial circus, and you played with mankind like a girl playing with goddam paper dolls, instead of, oh, something like, dying in chains breaking rocks in the hot sun.”
D’Aragó said in his cold voice, “I was loyal to the Captain until he … you know that he ordered us not to ignite the launching laser so that we could never return to Earth. He ordered us to die.”
“The Hyades would never have discovered Earth had you done that.”
“Truly? No further expedition ever would have sought out a nugget of contraterrene the size of a star? The most precious, most dangerous substance in nature?” He looked up, his cold eyes twinkling. “Come now: surely it was better to be warned, and have these millennia to prepare a defense, than let Captain Grimaldi in his madness have his way, and for us to die with the human race uninformed, unwarned, unprepared? Did I not have duties of honor to my home?”
“So what if Earth was warned? You think fighting the Hyades is completely futile.”
“But you do not.”
Montrose was not sure what to say to that. The argument sounded fishy, but he wanted to get back to the business of shooting Del Azarchel, so he said, “Fine. You are a pox-ridden man of honor. Whoop-dee-do and yee-haw and bully for you. Speak your piece, you syphilitic whoreson.”
Much to the embarrassment of Montrose, Narcís D’Aragó fell to his knees, and clasped his hands in prayer. “Save us.”
“Pustules on the burning balls of Satan in Hell! What the hell you asking me?”
“Save us from Del Azarchel. There must be some Divarication failure. He is suffering a mental disease, and he has absolute power over us, even to our inmost thoughts.”
“He ain’t crazy, he’s just evil. There’s a difference.” Menelaus looked up and sighed. Del Azarchel was standing with the other Hermeticists. Sarmento i Illa d’Or was standing behind his master, broad as a bull and breathing through his nostrils like one. The others, crouching and cringing in various postures of panic, were talking in a shrill confusion of voices. Del Azarchel was answering them back in the cool, distant, polite tones of a professor in a classroom explaining a scientific problem with no particular application to any human life, of merely intellectual interest only. He was describing the means he would use to toy with their minds and memories and souls, since they were, after all, actually minds housed in computer mainframes he controlled. And he was smiling and laughing and his eye glinted with mirth and sadism.
“Okay,” Menelaus said to D’Aragó with a sigh. “Let’s compromise. He’s evil and crazy.”
D’Aragó said, “It was a technology evolved while we were in hibernation aboard the Emancipation.”
“The Mind Helot tech. I know. So you want me to save your sorry evil asses from your evil boss, on account of now you are on the receiving end of his evil. All but Sarmento, who looks like he is just having a fine old time. Even if I agreed—”
But Narcís D’Aragó now had a smile on his thin face. It was a crooked smile, because he clearly had little practice making his face fold into that shape, but it was a human smile. “You will agree. For better or worse, you cannot help but solve problems, Crewman Fifty-One. Your soul is large.”
“Your mouth is large. By rights, I should stand aside and watch you squirm just for the sheer cussed-mindedness of it. But since I came up here with my gun and my Seconds to blast Blackie to Hell so that his daddy, the Devil, can rump-plunge him until his eyes pop, I don’t even know why you are flapping your damn gums at me.”
“I came, Learned Montrose, because I know that you destroy those who challenge you. Am not I, myself, one whom you destroyed? You alone can overcome the Senior Del Azarchel. Whether you believe me or scorn me, I came because to stand by, saying nothing, knowing you would duel with Del Azarchel, and by killing him, grant us life—to get this gift of life from you, and freedom, and to have restored to us the possession of our souls—to have all this from your hand, Learned Montrose, and not to have asked it of you, well, that were low indeed. I ask you for my life because it is more honorable to ask, even though I know you have your own reasons to wish him dead. Now I too have reasons. Kill him also for me.”
“But you killed Grimaldi.”
“So I did, and do not regret the deed, dark as it was. I killed my superior officer because he went mad and meant to kill us all. Now Del Azarchel is mad and means us all to die, or worse. The same logic applies.” And, with no further wo
rd, he stiffly turned and marched back to where the Hermeticists were gathered, where he stood, thin as a birch tree in winter, and as silent.
3. Accommodation
Del Azarchel now had but one Second, Sarmento i Illa d’Or, who carried his master’s pistol and helmet. Montrose waved Scipio, Illiance, and Soorm off the field; the three men retreated, Soorm scowling and snapping his teeth with disappointment, Scipio looking relieved, Illiance impassive. Sir Guiden remained to one side of Montrose, and cradled the oversized dueling pistol in both hands; Mickey held the great cauldron-shaped helmet and stood at his other side.
The two duelists took up their positions thirty paces from each other, and the Seconds, Sarmento and Sir Guiden, approached the judge of honor to confer.
The tongueless mouth of Alalloel of Anserine opened, and now, not merely a trio of voices issued forth, but a choir as might fill a cathedral, or a stadium. It was several thousand voices speaking at once, blended into harmony.
Montrose squinted, and saw a similar twinge of thought cross the face of Del Azarchel. The word choice indicated a different psychological architecture than had obtained when last Alalloel spoke, or, rather, when last this body was used to transmit to them the thoughts from the ever larger mind groups who seemed to be joining the communal link. If he understood their nomenclature, Montrose guessed that Anserine was a much larger group of minds than Lree, so much so that the original Alalloel personality was lost in the crowd, insignificant compared to what was now at the microphone.
The multitude of voices said: “We ask again whether peaceful accommodation can be found? If so, without dishonor, both participators may withdraw, and no slight against them will be permitted.”
Sir Guiden and Sarmento replied that no accommodation was possible.
“Have all measures to avoid this conflict been exhausted?” The number of voices had increased again. This time it was in the millions. Menelaus ran a rough calculation in his head about the coordination tolerance needed to avoid overlapping and blurring of that many waveforms: it implied a degree of mental unity far greater than what had obtained even a moment before.