The Judge of Ages
Montrose said, “These people are free of your Cliometric interference as well as from mine. Why are you laughing? It worked, didn’t it?”
“If kicking over the chessboard prevents the checkmate, certainly it worked. But it is the ingratitude that amuses me. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth!” he laughed and wiped his eyes. “That asteroid strike! Of course it wiped out all the threads of history I had been developing—but it wiped you out also. It blinded my satellites and blinded your periscopes. That is how desperate they were to get rid of you.”
“Of us.”
“Yes, as you say, but getting rid of me is not as deliciously funny. I regarded them as cattle anyway, and expected them to stampede. You are the one who thought of them as pets, and got bitten.”
“Laugh it up,” snarled Montrose. “Soon enough we’ll find out what they mean to do with us. You see it, don’t you? Explain it to your man.”
Sarmento spoke up, his voice a rumble, “Explain it to yours, Fifty-One. I am in communion with Exillador. I grasp the situation. Your pets whom you insist on treating as equals are the only ones here who are not posthuman.”
Montrose turned to Sir Guiden. Sir Guiden said, “I don’t understand. We won. They lost. The people of this era, these steel-winged angels, they have thrown off the tyranny of the Hermeticists. Have they not?”
“And they are throwing me off as well,” said Montrose grimly. “We are prisoners. They have to decide how we are going to fit into their society. Go over to the others and tell them the bad news.”
4. Swan Song
The figures in the air were touching down.
Two Giants, grotesque beetle-browed heads atop their elephantine bodies gleaming, their beautiful golden eyes glistening, landed as lightly as thistledown nearby. No higher than the Gigantic elbows were a coven of Witches, thin as rails and gray and wrinkled in their black habits and peaked hoods. A squad of Chimerae, eyes fierce and unblinking as the eyes of hunting cats, were no taller than the waists of the Giants; a host of Locusts, dark and solemn-faced with endless repetitions of the same face, tendrils glistering, were no taller than the thick knees of the Giants. Here and there, like some delirious dream of Egyptian pantheons, were freakish Hormagaunts, beast-headed or hawk-billed, furred like lions or shelled like armadillos, a nightmare of pincers and claws and writhing tentacles studded with mouths; here also were rank upon rank of Clade-dwellers, identical twins in groups of twelve and twenty, hair quills bristling. The six-tendrilled dark-eyed Melusine were present as well, standing in groups of three, with dolphins and whales, sleek as torpedoes, soaring and swooping and hovering above them, graceful as notes of music in a symphony.
Which post-Cetaceans went with which of the standing figures was not clear. All wore the shining neural cloaks of the Second Humans. Tallest loomed the two winged Giants, and their white pinions reached twenty-four feet from tip to tip as they furled and folded them. With them were winged Witches and winged Chimerae with ten-foot spans; and winged Locusts with stubby pinions like so many cupids from Saint Valentine’s Day cards. All the eyes on all the feathers were glinting and beating with light. Montrose tried to estimate the volume of information being passed back and forth between the gathered minds here, the core of the Earth, and systems the Tower was spreading elsewhere.
Del Azarchel must have made a similar calculation, because he turned toward a group of creatures Montrose did not recognize: tall men and beautiful women whose hair was a strange shimmering like the wigs of Scholars, and skin as pale as theirs, but their eyes were the black-within-black of the Melusine. Montrose saw these were not wigs, but masses of Locust tendrils, each one as fine as a strand of silk, and as many as hairs in a wig. The hair swayed and moved as if an invisible updraft of wind were blowing about each pale face.
They were not twins; nor were they of the same family or race. Indeed, Montrose could not tell which human stock these beings sprang from, for each face was an individual work of art, and if one had a Roman-looking nose or a Japanese-looking eye, or the jawline of an Australian aborigine, or the lips of a Persian, his other features might resemble some other stock, or none at all. All the faces were beautiful with a cold beauty, and, unalike as they were, all were stern and ascetic with the same spirit.
Montrose saw what Del Azarchel did: these dozen figures were the center of the communication flux binding the areas together.
To them, Del Azarchel said, “Your victory is temporary and meaningless. The Jupiter Brain will grow and overmaster you.”
One of the Swans, tall and thin, beak-nosed and with swaying silvery tendril-hair falling past his shoulders, stepped forward.
From his body language, poise, and stance, Montrose saw this was another aspect of the Anserine again. The same gathered voice as had come from Alalloel spoke from his empty, tongueless mouth. “Not so. We deliberately misled you as to the internal conditions of the core of Jupiter. Your estimation of growth speed is off by two orders of magnitude. It will not be two hundred years before the mass of Jupiter is converted to logic crystal, nor even two thousand, but over two hundred thousand years. The Hyades World Armada arrives in the solar system in four hundred years. All events will be resolved, for good or ill, long before Jupiter wakes: we will be dead, or be free.”
Montrose stepped toward them and winced. He had forgotten the shattering pain in his gun hand. The pain lent anger to his words. “You speak of freedom and yet you raid my Tombs, abduct my people, insert tendrils in their heads, and drive them into your mass minds, sucking their souls away!”
The Anserine said, “You speak in ignorance. No matter. We will not be mastered by him nor judged by you. Your time as Judge of Ages is done. Your interference in history, benevolent as may have been its intent, is a trespass. Our history is our own. We will write our own destiny with our own Cliometric calculations. As for you, we consider you to have forfeited your right to your Tombs due to the ill use to which you placed them.”
Montrose said, “And as for my clients? Men who trusted me with their lives? What of them?”
“All those hundreds of persons in your eighty-nine Tomb systems you have preserved for medical or scientific reasons, or as sanctuary from current power, or as penalty of exile, or for the sake of curiosity—how were they more than pawns to you? You gathered them merely as a strategy to use against the Master of the World. Fortunately, their numbers are small enough that they can be absorbed without disaccommodation into our protocols. The biosuspension Xypotech procedures maintained by Pellucid were destroyed when we destroyed Exarchel. All the Tombs are automatically opening worldwide.”
Montrose glanced at Del Azarchel. He smiled a crooked and bitter smile and said, “Hundreds. Hundreds of persons in my eighty-nine Tombs. They don’t know what they just did. They don’t see it. You don’t see it either, do you, Blackie?”
Del Azarchel flashed him a dark look and said, “I saw it long ago, and long ago prepared a counterthrust. When Rania fled the solar system, she altered the orbits of the tiny amount of contraterrene she did not herself need as fuel, and radioed the information to you. After our duel was interrupted, and the Beanstalk fell on us, Exarchel had us both in prison hospitals—and one of Rania’s loyal Scholars spirited you away. Exarchel could not see where you went. And so he was slow to understand what was happening. You had the contraterrene needed to keep the depthtrain system operating. Just to prevent tunnel collapses requires an energy pressure higher than nonamplified matter can provide. For years, no, for centuries, I did not understand your obsession with claiming control over these underground places. Do you now say that you had this planned from the start? I suspect you stumbled across the idea by serendipity.”
Montrose said, “The idea was planned out. Who I was going to get to run the thing, that was more jury-rigged. I thought I could trust my Clan not to grow corrupt, and I could not. Then I thought maybe the Church was a better candidate to run things while I slept—while I ain’t much of a churchgoing man myself
, anyone can see that she’s been around longer than any human organization still in business, and might actually hold property over generation after generation waiting for slumberers to wake. And historically, Churchmen run hospitals and graveyards, and I figured this weren’t much different. And then you destroyed the Church with your Witches, and you caused the Collapse, and you, not me, you lost all the records. By that point I had enough men, the Knights Hospitalier, to run the Tombs from the inside, so I only needed minimal contact with the surface world. Every generation, from the Witch-doctors to the Medical Corps to the Maidens of the Hesperides to the Iatrocrats, has cooperated in secret with my people. Why would they not? Doctors don’t want their patients to die.”
The tall Anserine spokesman said, “Explain these remarks. How do they touch our present concerns?”
Del Azarchel turned to the Anserine, saying, “You fool. Everyone is beneath the earth.”
Montrose said, “It’s not everyone. That would be ridiculous. Some died in accidents or battles, and my people could not get to them in time. Others could not be preserved even with the best medical coffin system I could make. But it is a lot of people. A whole lot.”
The spokesman said, “This is unexpected—please confirm you are claiming the Tomb system is more extensive than anticipated?”
Del Azarchel laughed. “Exarchel never kept a record of all the populations over the centuries and millennia who entered hospitals and sick-houses and Nymph deleriumariums and did not emerge, because Montrose’s acts were edited from his mind. Montrose moved all Tombs far below the crust, below the mantle, out of any possible surface-detection range, back when I had my Witches digging up Churchmen to prevent a resuscitation of my poor, senile, machine-hating Mother Church. Montrose kept near the surface only the minimum possible number of Tombs to maintain a steady contact with the current world, to replace thawed followers, or to hear rumors of war or disaster in case he needed to offer sanctuary to anyone.
“He does not have eighty-nine Tombs, nor eighty-nine hundred. He has over one million ten-thousand-man facilities buried at various levels between the mantle and the core. His failsafes all performed a fail-over when Pellucid died just now: without the memory space, his coffins cannot correct for the cellular information of all his clients, millions and millions of them. So up they come. He is bringing up more than your society can possibly absorb. Do you have any food to feed them? They can pay. For all of your metals and minerals of the surface world are exhausted, are they not? You’ve possessed yourself of some of the volume he has vacated? You have no idea how small a volume that is. The swarms of populations will have all the wealth of the buried world at their command, oil and gold, copper and tin, uranium and suchlike.”
Del Azarchel bowed and gestured toward Montrose, smiling, both eyebrows raised. “Behold him. You see, my dear Swans, the Judge of Ages, he is a cowboy, and he knows that the Red Indians, no matter how brave they are, cannot stand up to the pressure of sheer numbers from the White Man.
“This is (and, ever since the time of the Witches, always has been) the final executioner’s ax which the Judge of Ages bore above the throats of every generation. And now, by accident, in your haste to slay Exarchel, you have done in Pellucid, triggered a global system failure, and brought the ax upon yourself.”
Winged beings had not stopped landing from the Tower. More were present, and more, until the hills surrounding were shivering and glinting with what seemed snowbank upon snowbank of white metallic wings. The millions of eyes, like the eyes of peacocks seen in some drugged hallucination, flashed and glinted silently, the glittering of a tropic sun on diamond-brilliant waves.
Montrose said to the Anserine, “Sirs! Now that you are masters of your own world and judges of your own age, what provision will you make for the innocent?”
The tall Anserine said, “You think the matter disastrous for us? It is not even difficult. We have set events in motion.”
“What events? What?”
The tall Anserine said, “Do not concern yourself with the lives of others. For now, see to your own life! Our intent is benevolent, but, to one of your level of awareness, inexplicable. You will save yourself much needless mental anxiety if you now, this moment, make peace with Ximen del Azarchel: otherwise the route we have planned for you will be more convolute. Go speak with him!”
Montrose stepped closer to Del Azarchel, lowering his voice and saying, “I am not sure what they are threatening. They say we must make peace. But has anything changed between us?”
“Divorce Rania.”
“You know that’s impossible. And there is still Grimaldi’s murder.”
“And your treason and ingratitude.”
“So, Blackie, What happens if these Swans decide to open fire on my clients with that many-miniature-suns weapon you mentioned, or something even worse?”
Del Azarchel’s smile turned into a sneer. “You should trust your own Cliometric calculus. Kill ten billion helpless people, whose only crime was that the Swans destroyed the Xypotech infrastructure maintaining their biosuspension? Work out the math in your head. If they do that, in two data-generations, the psychological pressure from guilt and cynicism would turn them into—well, into Hermeticists. Or do you think that any logical being can embrace genocide, when needed for his own survival, but reject servitude, which, by any measure, is a far less grievous offense? If they indulge in genocide, I win. See their wings a-shine with signal traffic! They know it, too. Your rugged honor-bound individualists could not commit billionfold mega-mass-murder in cold blood without losing their souls to me. They will not act. But I shall.”
Montrose gripped his arm, then winced, breathless with pain, because he had gripped Del Azarchel with his maimed hand. He hissed, “What counterthrust did you have planned?”
Del Azarchel shrugged his hand aside and pointed at the horizon. “She is rising now. See that light? Looks like daybreak on the western horizon? It is not daybreak.”
“What is it?”
“It is shipbreak.”
The mountains to the west were lit up as if with cherry flame, and the rain clouds above, still weeping the memories and libraries of Exarchel, were stained cerise and purple and magnificent magenta as if a second twilight were rising to encompass the dome of the sky. It was faster than a sunrise when a second sun rose above the peaks, red and flattened in the distortion of the atmosphere. Montrose squinted, seeing the morning star and perhaps a sliver of the moon by day, its ghostly handprint reversed.
Montrose said, “That is the sail of the Emancipation.”
Del Azarchel said, “The ship as well, and her various escort craft to help work the shrouds—but you cannot see her at this distance. I was toying with the notion of simply burning your revenants like ants with a magnifying glass by pulling in the focal length of the lightsail. A simple and effective means to make war on earthlubbers, as we spacefarers like to call you. You should know its effectiveness. You, after all, commanded the Giants to do the same to my people and my civilization. Every emulation recorded in a mainframe you annihilated was a person, a thinking being.”
“A thinking being who thought to conquer and enslave the world!” Montrose snapped.
“A loyal being carrying out the orders of his sovereign, the only sovereign in world history to impose world peace—I had already mastered the world. She is mine, then, and now and forever. I am within my rights to crush rebellion and disorder, and to do whatever is needed to save my civilization that I made from alien invasion. If I call surrender, and order all the world to lay down her arms in the name of peace, I must be obeyed! Anything a man may do by right to save himself alive, how much more right have I, to save worlds and aeons unborn? If I call upon my ship to put down the upstart Swans, who dare prevent me?”
“My ship,” corrected Montrose. “You just took her.”
Del Azarchel said, “Return my fiancée and the life I was fated to enjoy, and I will give you your ship back. Until then, do not voi
ce complaint to me about mere material possessions. With all your buried wealth and factory space and bottomless geothermal wells, you did not have the wealth, across all those years, to build yourself another?”
“Since every time I woke, the world was in another Dark Ages produced by you, you plague-spotted son of a clap-blinded whore—”
“You insult my mother? That saint—?”
“Me? Your whole damned life is one big insult to your mother’s memory, Blackie, as you damn well—”
Montrose turned his head. Dolphins, a dozen or more, were levitating overhead, motionless. They wore wings akin to those of their human counterparts, except a cloud of drizzling mists also issued from the feathers, or from a web of studs dappling their sleek bodies. They stared down with grave black-within-black eyes. From above and behind those eyes rose very long whipcords of golden neurotelepathic tendrils
Twelve of the many-color-cloaked Second Humans also had gathered in a loose semicircle. Now the thin, silver-haired Anserine man raised his hand, and, as one gesture, so did a dozen other of the Swans.
They spoke in the same voice, human and dolphin. “Gentlemen, your levity is appalling. That you would squabble and threaten the Earth with war even at a moment like this is atrocious. Whatever debt of gratitude the human race may have owed either of you, either for a peaceful reign of which you boast, Ximen del Azarchel, or your benevolent offer of sanctuary from the ravages of time you extended, Menelaus Montrose—that debt is cancelled. No more will any hibernation facilities accept anyone bearing your genetic code, either of you.”
Montrose stared up at the narrow faces of the sea-beasts, then looked wildly at the remote, dispassionate faces of the equally inhuman humanoids, saying, “You can’t do that! I have to slumber until Rania comes back.”
Del Azarchel said, “And I as well, since she will leave him and cleave to me, when that great day comes.” Del Azarchel could slow his aging process tremendously, but even he could not endure the immensity of time before Rania’s return.