The Judge of Ages
It was everyone. It was the whole race of the Melusine speaking.
Sarmento i Illa d’Or was more alert than Montrose would have thought. Montrose was surprised when Sarmento said, “Senior! This is outside what we expected”—we in this case meaning Sarmento and his Ghost, Exillador—“the Cliometric calculus cannot account for this amount of interest from the Melusine. I suggest—”
Del Azarchel shook his head. “A bigger crowd than expected, eh? The Cowhand did actually have another move underway, and now the strike will come out of the obscuring fog. I care not. I don’t see that it is anything that can physically stop the duel. Speak your line.”
Sir Guiden on behalf of Montrose said that no additional measure could be found to avoid the conflict. Sarmento spoke the same words with a more obvious reluctance, wary that something had gone wrong, and his eyes were darting left and right at high speed in the peculiar way posthumans were wont to use.
Unexpectedly, something stung Montrose in his eyes. He drew the back of his gauntleted wrist across his brow, cocking the wrist so that the leather joint rather than the metal glove plates rubbed him. He stared in disbelief at the discoloration on his wrist. It was dank. He was sweating. Sweating in fear.
But Blackie had already knelt to Sarmento to allow his helmet to be wrestled on, and did not see it. That was a comfort, if only a small one. Mickey saw, and mopped Montrose’s brow dry with his lambrequin. That was a bigger comfort.
Montrose also knelt. Mickey raised the wide, heavy helmet and placed it over Montrose’s head, giving it a firm twist. With a click, the contact points in the inner and outer screw collar met, and, with a whine, the internal lights and readouts came on.
It took a moment of rocking and heaving for Montrose to get himself back afoot. He did not remember having problems like this back when he was a young man of twenty. Now he was biologically forty years—and even that was only equivalent years, because biosuspension did not arrest all life processes exactly, and thaw did not correct all damage exactly back to the point of prehibernation. It was approximate. He might have been, biologically speaking, older than that. He sure felt it.
Alalloel raised the baton to shoulder level, no higher. “Gentlemen, see to your countermeasures!”
Through his lookout visor, nothing was different, but the view in the helmet aiming monocle showed the real electronic story. Del Azarchel was now surrounded by a dozen shadows of himself, blurring and shifting and fading, and his radio silhouette swayed and dimmed with interference. Montrose looked the same to him. He could feel the warmth of the batteries powering his coat camouflage as they came online.
Alalloel now raised the baton fully overhead. It was the penultimate signal. “Gentlemen, see to your weapons! Do not fire before the signal, or all honor is forfeit, whereupon the Seconds may and must intervene!”
Sir Guiden presented the massive pistol and plugged it into the forearm sockets of Menelaus’ armor. Sir Guiden checked the circuits, double-checked, opened and closed the main chamber and the eight lesser chambers, then thumbed the chaff magazine.
Then Sir Guiden walked away, five, ten, fifteen paces. He turned and nodded. Sir Guiden called to Montrose: “Stand firm until the baton is dropped. When the baton is dropped, you are at liberty to fire.”
Montrose raised his left gauntlet, and held up his hand. By tradition, the non-weapon-hand was white, but a black circle was in the palm, so that the opponent could clearly see the sign. He was ready to fire.
Sarmento had taken longer than Sir Guiden, or perhaps had checked his master’s weapon more thoroughly. Or perhaps a growing suspicion that something was wrong was slowing his footsteps. He was not yet out of the line of fire. Blackie had not yet raised his glove.
Montrose waited, feeling the sweat begin to come into his eyes again, and knowing there was no way to wipe his helmeted face. This was not one of those modern helmets, whose internal circuits noticed wearer discomfort, and used small inside manipulators to wipe a hot face. If I blink during the wrong moment, I’m dead.
It seemed so unfair that such small things would make the difference between victory and death. He wrinkled his brow furiously, hoping to delay the gathering drip of ticklish saltwater he could feel accumulating.
Then Sarmento was out of the line of fire, and instructing Del Azarchel not to shoot until the baton dropped.
Montrose knew not to tense his arm before the raising, not to tense his trigger-finger. It had to be one smooth motion, and smoothness counted for more than speed, because one did not want to jar the chaff package, or confuse the aiming sensors with jerky or blurry motions. He waited, and eternity crawled by.
Del Azarchel raised his hand and opened it. There were the white fingers and thumb; there was the black palm. Montrose suddenly felt buoyant with relief, weightless, almost lightheaded, because the eight-thousand-year-long wait had ended. This was it.
And then—
—the baton dropped—
4. Misfire
—And Montrose blinked when the drop of sweat stung his eye. This made him raise his pistol too quickly: a sudden jerk. This in turn made his weight shift, and only then did the ice puddle on which he stood crack, give way, and drop him.
The bottom of the puddle was not far, a matter of a handsbreadth or less, but it was enough to slide a bootheel along the slick and frictionless mud of the puddle bottom, and pull his leg out from under him.
With a resounding clattering clash, Montrose fell. He landed on his hands and knees, but the heavy gun hit the ground and went off.
For a moment, he was deaf. His gun hand went numb as it was kicked backward as if by seven mules, and the charge of chaff and cloud exploded under his fingers instead of in the air between himself and his target. Splinters of rock ricocheted against his armor, and the fierce pain in his armpit and ribs told him his armor had been pierced. It felt as if the main bullet and two escort bullets, the number three and the number two, had gone off and blown themselves into the icy rock only a foot or less from his hand.
Montrose found himself kneeling, buried up to the neck in a swarming fog of glittering black chaff-particles, but his head was clearly visible to the enemy. A perfect target.
With his other hand, he raised his gun hand up, trying to see if any fingers had been blown off, but he was defeated by the weight of the gun dangling from his wrist and the restricted field of vision (the helmets were not designed to nod forward, nor was there a peep window below the jawline to let a man see his feet). From the sensation, he thought he’d lost a finger, maybe two. With some part of his brain, he knew he should be scrambling to take the gun up in his left hand and squeeze off the remaining escort bullets, hoping for a lucky shot.
With another part of his brain, he noted that being the master of a worldwide system of coffins which had the most advanced medical nanotechnology on the planet tended to make one nonchalant about wounds. His maimed feet from the day before had been healed overnight; because of events like this, he now regarded major wounds as an inconvenience rather than a lifelong tragedy.
Of course, at the moment, the word “lifelong” meant a span measured in fractions of a second. Montrose saw the gunbarrels of Del Azarchel’s weapon, main shot and escort bullets, aim at him, each one seeming larger and deeper than a well.
Del Azarchel had not released his chaff cloud yet. He held his weapon pointing at the helpless Montrose for a moment. His hand did not shake. The aim was straight and true.
Then Del Azarchel pointed at the ground, and fired his main shot. The noise was thunder, ringing so loud it could almost be tasted.
Del Azarchel had deloped.
17
The Swans
1. Interruption
It took Montrose a long moment to realize that he was still alive, and even longer to realize that Del Azarchel had fired at the ground.
Del Azarchel was not looking at Montrose. Unable to turn his helmeted head, to look left and right, Del Azarchel must move his feet. Del
Azarchel was turning slowly in a circle.
Clouds of vapor were rising from underfoot in every direction. The snowy ground was steaming, sublimating. The ice was melting and vanishing. Behind Del Azarchel, Montrose could see the glaciers were also toppling. With a noise like drums and a noise like trumpets, first one, then a dozen, then a myriad distant peaks of glaciers collapsed in avalanche toward the earth, like a stronghold of white towers being flattened by a bomb.
There also came a noise like running or thrumming. It was the sound of rain. No clouds were directly overhead, but in the distance all the vapors and fogs of the sky were changing from white to black with freakish, unnatural speed, and had begun pouring rain against the hills on the horizon; and higher and farther away, the rain was pelting against the sides of the Tower.
Every cloud in sight, including feathery high cirrus in the far distant blue, was precipitating.
Del Azarchel on heavy feet turned back toward Montrose, and pointed underfoot, and then at the hills with his white glove, gesturing toward the unnaturally sublimating snow. “You found a way to kill Exarchel. All the nanotechnology in the world’s water supply is going inert. Your final move was a sacrifice move. You just shot your horse, didn’t you? You allowed Pellucid to be infiltrated, knowing full well that I could not pass up the chance to have a Xypotech of that size housing my soul, and I sent Exarchel into it, and the infiltrator was infiltrated in turn. But why did you wait until I showed the black palm? Ah! You needed the deadman switch turned on, did you not, so that every single copy of Exarchel, wherever it might be stored or howsoever it might be encrypted, would be linked by one link. That was the link you needed. Very clever.”
Montrose raised his unwounded arm and pointed upward. Del Azarchel craned his neck.
There were thousands and tens of thousands of figures in the air, flowing out from the Tower like seedlings blown from a dandelion: Men and women, large and small, winged in silver. With them also were dolphins and several types of whales. One and all, including the sleek sea mammals large and small, were borne aloft on great silvery wings, each feather glittering with eyes.
Montrose spoke in a strained voice, wincing and panting. “They waited, hoping I would shoot you, which would take care of Jupiter for them.”
Del Azarchel’s voice was hoarse with horror. “Them?”
He did not need to say anything aloud: Montrose could guess the rapid pattern of clues snapping into shape in his mind, such as the amateur awkwardness of the last war, the apparent lack of effect from the spread of the Anarchist Vector.
Del Azarchel forced a lilt of humor into his trembling words. “Clever! So your liberty-loving Anchorites had a method of hiding their thoughts even from intimate psychoscopic examination, did they? When they drilled down to the buried seas, it was not to propagate a war. That war was one they knew they must lose—it was just to spread the mental virus. Like your Giants, they sacrificed themselves to let their philosophy prevail.”
“Not a philosophy. A negative-information semiotic technique to reformat the mind-body relation. It comes from the Monument.”
“You think you’ve won this round, you and your pets—”
Montrose, kneeling in the black cloud, spoke in a rasping voice. “No pets of mine. Free men. Equals. They figured out you have no intention whatever of fighting the Hyades, that your whole star raid drill, everything from taking a century to build your skyhook to herding the entire world population under the planetary crust for decades, was just a ruse to get at me.”
Sir Guiden stepped into the cloud of chaff still spreading from Montrose’s pistol. With one arm around Montrose, and a whine of strength amplification motors in his elbows, he helped Montrose to his feet and led him out of the glittering dark cloud of smog. He disconnected the pistol from Montrose’s numb gun hand, and clicked the safeties into place, and worked the lever to open the firing chamber.
Sarmento helped Del Azarchel out of his helmet.
Sir Guiden did the same for Montrose. The two men stood bareheaded in the wind, with snow melting underfoot and rain and winged men pouring down. Del Azarchel’s dark hair was whipped by rainy wind, his grimace surprisingly white in his dark beard. Montrose’s pale red hair hung lank, nose jutting out of his squarish misfeatured face, his lantern jaw like the toe of a boot, his eyes like two embers, unblinking.
Montrose and Del Azarchel stood a moment, merely staring at each other.
Montrose said, “Why didn’t you shoot?”
Del Azarchel did not answer, but said, “I grant quarter until we can re-arm and find a better field. Agreed?”
Montrose said, “Agreed. And next time, we need to pick our judge of honor more carefully. I was not expecting her to interfere.”
“I was not expecting you to fall with such comedic composure on your buttocks,” said Del Azarchel.
“And I was not expecting your brain to melt,” said Montrose.
Of one accord, they turned and looked at Alalloel. The strange, all-dark eyes of her face seemed for the first time to hold expression: an exultation of triumph.
2. Metaposthuman
The gathered voices of an entire world spoke from her mouth and said, “There shall be no next time! Your duel is ended, now and forever. Neither will we allow you to continue it, neither with pistols nor races nor worlds nor with the calculus of history.
“Eight millennia and more have been changed and marred by the insanity of hatred that endures between the both of you. The resources lost by you and by all the races you fathered, the opportunity cost in more perfect worlds which could have been born, but were not—the waste in human lives is beyond even our calculation power! Entire civilizations rose, flourished, sickened, and were discarded by you as merely resources expended in your conflict. The quarrel is done: we decree peace.”
Del Azarchel stepped toward her. “Silence! I command—”
“You command nothing!” The vibrant look in her eyes grew so powerful that Menelaus could not meet her gaze. When Menelaus looked toward Del Azarchel, he was shading his eyes as if against a strong light. Once and twice Del Azarchel nerved himself to look toward her face; but his eyeballs twitched, his gaze stammered, and he had to turn away.
Del Azarchel looked seasick. His eyes were wild. “Who—? What are you? No Melusine speaks this way!”
“We are their ultimate children. The Melusine created us, the final race, for the express purpose of halting your madness.” The myriad voices blended more harmoniously, sounding almost like a song: “All those who came before us are merely variations within the same species, Homo sapiens. Ours is a new genus, primate but not hominid: Pan sapiens. We are the first prototypes of the post-Melusine species, superhuman beyond even your superhumanity. In this new and final race, the awkward and ugly duckling of mankind, and of all the mankinds, has finally reached beauty, power, strength, and supremacy. We call ourselves the Second Humans: we are the Swans. Behold! We are now come!”
She spread her wings and soared upward, exulting, to meet the dancing and descending silvery thundercloud of winged beings in the midst of the air.
Del Azarchel recovered his aplomb in a deep breath. Now he was peering upward, saying, “These Swans of yours may prove difficult to overcome.”
“That is what I like about you, Blackie. You are stinking blind-drunk on rotgut optimism, and do not see the world around you.”
“A trait we share. But I prefer to think of it as megalomania,” said Del Azarchel coolly. “The cure, of course,” he smiled, “for the neurotic and false belief that one is possessed of godlike power is actually to obtain it; whereupon the belief is no longer false.”
“You are not overcoming these critters, Blackie. They are as much smarter than us as we are than a baseline human. They were clever enough to hide whole flying circuses of their Paramount bodies aboard your Tower without your noticing.”
Del Azarchel was staring upward, shading his eyes. “Since the Tower has more surface area than China, the f
eat is less astounding than may seem.”
“Not to mention smart enough to hide their damned world right in front of your eyes while letting you think you ruled it. Smart enough to see through your lies, which the Hermeticists never did, and to turn on you.”
“And smart enough to turn on you, as well.”
“What the pox do you mean?!”
“Look up, Cowhand!”
3. Turning
The falling figures were closer now. Montrose peered, using his cortical technique to make the images clear and sharp in his mind.
Flying down were men, women, Giant posthumans, dwarfish Inquilines of blue and gray, dark Locusts by the swarms hanging like a cloud of pitch. Chimerae were falling head downward in angled formations like diving geese, not having opened their wings yet. Witches, perhaps for ceremonial reasons, perhaps merely for joy, held broomsticks and besoms between their legs.
“I see that they raided your Tombs,” drawled Del Azarchel. “No respect for private property, eh? That was not in your plan, was it? Obviously, your plan was to have something happen that neither one of us could plan.” Del Azarchel started laughing. “So this was your final move! To throw yourself out of the game! Congratulations! Small wonder I did not foresee it!”
Montrose knew that Del Azarchel must have run Cliometric scenarios on the impact of Cliometry on a society. It had only one of two halt states: The first halt was one where everyone was under control of a plan, even the planners themselves, and every least act and smallest thought was unfree, controlled by a calculus no one controlled. The Melusine world Del Azarchel had tried to create was a model of that state. The other state was where everyone knew Cliometry, and could freely adjust his future to match and harmonize with all other like-minded future plans—or freely decline, neither interfering nor being interfered with. That was the new world Montrose had brought into being.