The Anserine said in unison, “She is lost to you forever. Both of you have abused your timelessness and your immunity from years. We, the one mind of the planet Earth, hereby revoke your immunity of years and condemn you to mortal lives. No other punishment is fit.”
Montrose turned away, his stomach hot and knotted.
Del Azarchel tossed back his head, and drew back his lips, an odd expression halfway between a smile and baring one’s teeth to bite. “Anserine! What will you do if I give Emancipation the command to open fire?”
“What is your target?” The voice now came from an overhead dolphin hanging as motionless as a piñata. “How much heat capacity can you bring to bear? What volume of seawater can you evaporate and at what rate? As you who built them know, our central node housings are at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
“I forebear to mention our cities and arcologies occupying the Great Stalactite. What point would be served by opening fire?” continued the voice, now coming from a high-cheeked, sharp-featured woman who had not spoken previously, her eyes like night, her hair standing and swaying of its own accord. “The surface world, which is the only home or habitat hereafter available to you, defines the reach of your contemplated damage.
“Even were the threat sober,” continued the Anserine sardonically, now speaking through the mouth of a thin, silver-haired man, “you would have limited time to carry it out. We are engaged in meteorological engineering. The ice caps are becoming vapor; cloud cover will soon increase dramatically, and the albedo of the planet become too reflective for space-borne mirrors to be effective. Meanwhile, the Exarchel circuits and systems aboard your vessel have returned to base-operation state, and are empty of data. Look. Even now the clouds are gathering, as all the snows of the world melt. So to whom will you give the command?”
Del Azarchel looked at Montrose, a look of surprise, of wild emotion, in his dark features. “Cowhand, I think they are daring me! What do you think?”
Menelaus Montrose was clenching and unclenching his maimed hand, so that the pain was worse and worse. He was idly wondering at what point the pain would make him go into shock, or faint. “I think I will never see Rania again. So you should burn at least some of them. Say! What happens if you melt the ion drive lance off the anchoring asteroid of your topless Tower? Can we get it to collapse? It should wrap around the equator six and half times before it comes to rest. That mass, falling at terminal velocity, would be—well, it would be the same as a ring-shaped cannonade of nine-mile-wide asteroids all hitting every inch of ground in a spiral belt around the world half a dozen times.”
“Ha! Whenever I start hating you too much, Menelaus, you always say just the right thing to remind me why I so liked the way you thought when we were young. You have scope! Come: I will give the order, you will give the firing solution.”
Del Azarchel strode in his clanking duelist’s armor toward where the black-robed and -hooded Iron Ghosts of the Hermetic Order stood with some other people in a circle, facing inward: Ull and Coronimas, D’Aragó and De Ulloa. Ctesibius the Savant stood with them, solemn in his long white wig and his green robes trimmed with gold.
They stood in postures suggesting that they were conversing with someone their backs blocked from view. It was odd to see the Hermeticists from behind, for the dark silk shipsuit, from this angle only, was bright, since the uniform included a cape of white foil hanging from the shoulder.
Montrose walked with Del Azarchel, matching him stride for stride, and their heavy boots clanged together.
As they came near, they saw whom the Hermeticists addressed: Alalloel of Anserine. And behind her, on the other side of the circle, were his gathered Seconds: Illiance, Soorm, Mickey, Scipio, and Sir Guiden.
With them also stood the two Beta Maidens, Vulpina and Suspinia; Aea and Thysa the Nymphs; Keirthlin the Gray; and the blank-eyed but softly smiling Trey Azurine the Sylph. All stood on the back of a cnidarian which had not only landed, but flattened its circular mantle to the ground no thicker than a silvery carpet.
To one side, a little ways away, stood Oenoe the Nymph, writhed in her living mantilla of leaves and flowers. She was speaking with Sarmento i Illa d’Or, the only Hermeticist yet housed in a biological body.
Curious, Montrose turned his head that way, amplified his hearing, and sharpened his eyesight; then he noticed Del Azarchel had his gaze and attention turned the same way. He was not the only one who noticed: Sarmento i Illa d’Or raised his hand in a grave gesture, and beckoned them forward.
Oenoe dropped her eyes and curtseyed, bending her back leg and bowing at the waist, somehow making this awkward pose graceful and alluring. She stepped back, and then turned to walk with light footstep and overly swaying hip in the direction of where Sir Guiden, her husband, stood with the others, listening to Alalloel.
Sarmento spoke in the abbreviated fashion of posthumans familiar with each other’s mental contours. If written out in words, the look on the face of Sarmento, the brief syllables he spoke, would have read, “Crewman Fifty-One. Ready for a rematch? I would not have shot at the ground.”
And he gave Del Azarchel a look of scorn. Del Azarchel was taken by surprise, too puzzled to be angry at this unexpected hostility.
Montrose quirked an eyebrow, asking without words, “Nice to see you too, Learned i Illa d’Or, you pug-ugly soaplock. So what was that conversation about?” All three men turned and stared for a moment at the legs, hips, and general contours of the retreating girl in green.
Sarmento answered, partly in words, partly by implication, “She was asking me to bless her marriage. Do not look surprised, learned gentlemen: I am still, after all, the father of her race, and the creator of her world. You might think ill of my age, but she does not. Was there ever a time of greater happiness and peace?”
Del Azarchel said and implied, “A moment ago, I was your master, and the center of your loyalty, Learned i Illa d’Or. What changed?”
Sarmento answered in the same abbreviated way, “I was always loyal to our idea, not to your person, Senior. We stood for the principle that the higher form of life must rule the lower. Did we not? Was that not the motto we used to excuse everything, justify everything, allow ourselves everything? As it happens, the Swans are higher than you. Will you bow the knee to them? Or do you seriously think any of us will carry out your order to have the Emancipation open fire?”
Del Azarchel said and implied, “No matter where they are on the Darwinian scale of being, they are still in rebellion against me. Am I not, by their own rules, their lawful sovereign?”
“Have you lost your mind, Senior? The surface of this world is merely the hull of an Earth-sized fortress. What good would burning it do? Our most powerful weapons could not crack open the crust, much less reach down through the mantle to the outer core. We do not have the focusing power even to boil the seas away; and all the ice cap is rapidly becoming a cloud layer—like that the world enjoyed the last time the Cetaceans were in charge.”
Del Azarchel turned away in disgust, and stomped in his heavy armor toward Alalloel.
Sarmento said softly to Montrose, “I wanted to kill the princess and make Del Azarchel Captain. He wouldn’t do it. We would not have suffered all this trouble, millennia of toil, if only he’d done that. It would have been easy to let the princess die in some fashion, gently, without pain, which the Little Big Brother would not have considered murder. It was a stupid machine, after all, easy to fool, and we should not have been so afraid of it.”
Little Big Brother had been the internal security system aboard the antimatter-star-mining vessel. It enforced the rules and regulations to prevent exactly what had happened, the mutiny of the crew. The human crew had outsmarted the simplistic Mälzel brain of the ship by offering Rania, who shared genetic and legal traits with Captain Grimaldi, as the new Captain; and the ship’s brain had no choice but to accept the deception.
Montrose gave him a level, cool look. “Blackie shot at the ground because he
realized that the Melusine wanted me dead. The moment the snow started sublimating, he figured it out. He is a bad man, don’t get me wrong, and needs killing if ever a man did; but he’s got some sort of principles. One of them is not doing dirty work for any critter not polite enough to ask it of him. Do you have any principles?”
“Of course. I serve the pleasure principle. Everyone does. I merely admit it.”
Montrose looked up toward the second sun still hanging in the heavens, the visible reflection in the wide mirror surfaces of the unseen starship sails of a ship too small to see. “Would it please you to have us out of your hair? You, the Melusine, everyone?”
Sarmento’s eyes goggled, “Us?”
One advantage of dealing with a fellow posthuman was that there was no need to stand around and explain things. Montrose stomped in his armor over to where Del Azarchel stood facing Alalloel.
Del Azarchel turned his head when Montrose came up. “You will be fascinated by this, Cowhand. Your ungrateful creatures who have condemned us to live and die as mortals are attempting to negotiate how the upcoming ten billion from the past eras will fit into their social structure. They are finding the prospect somewhat overwhelming.”
Montrose said, “I am glad they ain’t so cold-assed as to merely beef them or set them down in the middle of icy nowhere to die. But the social structure should be obvious, if they are so much smarter than us. If I can see it, they can: The Witches are to look after the Moreaus and the environment, but any who grasp for long life will become part of the Swan Hierarchy, and get their souls absorbed. The Chimerae are to become the military caste, since their eugenic dreams have achieved more than success—the perfect race has, after all, been brought forth, but if the Chimerae start wars or kick up a row too great, the Swans can interfere. The Nymphs act as peacemakers and secret police, but they damn well better avoid the pleasures of electronic nirvana, or else they will get absorbed also. The Inquilines get to act as intermediaries between the First Humans and the Second. It is what they are suited for.”
Soorm spoke up in a gruff voice, “And what of us? What role can the Hormagaunts play in their many-racial world of races who all hate each other? We are a folk, a race, whose only virtue and talent is for cannibalism and genetic vampirism, a race too dangerous to live.”
Montrose said, “There is no place on Earth for you. Be pioneers, space explorers, since your people alone can adapt themselves to space conditions and not regret the loss of Earthly flesh. Your people can oversee the terraforming of Mars and Venus, and change each year as the environment changes and becomes more Earthlike.”
Montrose turned to the Anserine. “These options must have been clear to you from the beginning.”
Alalloel of the Anserine said, “You are assuming the Swan Paramounts will permit independent minds to exist.”
Del Azarchel said, “That is not the problem. The Swans do not have the mathematics worked out to express a solvable equation for how the seven races are meant to be interrelated.”
Montrose looked at him sidelong. “Give it to them.”
Del Azarchel raised an eyebrow. “Rather than burn my planet they are stealing from me? In heaven’s name, why?”
Montrose snorted. “And here I thought you said the Earth was irrelevant.”
Del Azarchel scowled. “Irrelevant if I give the Earth away. All-important if Earth is stolen.”
Montrose said to Alalloel, “The Jupiter Brain will wake up eventually, and vastly, vastly outmatch your intelligence. You indicated the event was beyond your timebinding threshold. You don’t give a damn about nothing that happens so far in the future.”
Alalloel said, “Indeed we do not. Why should we? If the Hyades conquer, what will the rest matter?”
Montrose said, “So. I assume that applies to me as well. You just want me gone, not dead. Am I right? Del Azarchel will agree to give you his equations—”
Del Azarchel said archly, “Oh? Will I?”
“—and you will have the tools needed to rule a world of impossibly incompatible subspecies of mankind, if in return you agree to declare any human being—or his property—who does not have any circuit installed in his nervous system connecting him to your Noösphere a free and independent entity.”
Alalloel said sharply, “You seek to possess the Emancipation, and to flee to space to escape our jurisdiction. To this, we will not consent.”
Montrose said, “You already have the laws and customs to deal with free and independent entities: just consider any Thaws, or all, to be legally the same as Inquilines and Anchorites. Anyone not mentally connected to your Noösphere will neither overwhelm your infrastructure nor have need to follow your chain of command. Exarchel occupied and killed Pellucid, and took over all his higher functions, and you in turn occupied and killed Exarchel, but I think you will find that certain base commands and attitudes are hardwired into the system that now forms the basis of your worldwide mind. Pellucid is congenitally unable to interfere with human beings, and not allowed to kill them if they are off Tomb ground, except in retaliation or self-preservation. Like it or not, that rule is part of your psychology now. It is programmed at a basic level where you are not likely to be able to get at it. Unless you want to back out of occupying Pellucid right now, and return to your previous levels of intellect, and just be a normal, slow, stupid old posthuman like Blackie and me? If you disagree, think of the time you will spend trying to figure out how to reprogram your own brain—assuming it can be done at all. If you agree, think of how much trouble you save yourself.”
Alalloel thoughtfully spread her wings. Her many eyes adorning the metallic feathers glinted and gleamed as countless invisible communication rays fed into the local area, communing.
Eventually she snapped her wings shut. Alalloel said, “We agree to the proposition, but to nothing further. Provisions will be made to treat all sub-posthuman life and disconnected life, both mechanical and biological, as Anchorites not obligated to our Noösphere protocol.”
Montrose glanced at Del Azarchel. “You asked me to set up a firing solution? This is it.”
Del Azarchel sighed. “I would rather burn the planet, but obviously, that would be a brutal gesture accomplishing nothing.” He fished an old-fashioned data coin out from his poke, and tossed it with a negligent flick of his thumb toward Alalloel. “My proprietary research on the psychological modes and methodologies of the Jupiter Mind. The same mathematical models can be applied to living beings as to emulations. These races were actually designed to have complementary strengths and weaknesses, checks and balances, to fit into my proposed overall system. Here: it is yours.”
Del Azarchel turned to Montrose. “Why did you not ask for a spare hibernation unit and a Xypotech to run it? We could have gotten that and more.”
Montrose said, “Nope. For one thing, this Noösphere is now a Potentate, a planetary mind. The only reason why it does not want to brute-force recalculate your works is because it’s inefficient to reinvent the wheel. They are actually doing us a favor, on account of they are tender hearted and don’t want to kill all the billions of Thaws about to be dumped on them.”
Del Azarchel scowled at Alalloel. “Then why did they bargain with us at all?”
“My guess is that the Swan Hierarchy is not going to maintain itself as a hierarchy very long. You saw the social vectors of their fundamental construction. They are archindividualists: I suspect they are only maintaining their group mind for so long as the current crisis lasts.”
Del Azarchel said, “What crisis?”
“Us.”
Alalloel said, “You speak with greater insight than one of your level of intellect should be able to reach. We find this disquieting, and yet it confirms our previous conclusion.”
Montrose said, “What conclusion?”
“You and Del Azarchel are too dangerous. There is something embedded in the Monument: a potential, an emergent property, which you unwittingly copied into yourself with your Prometheus F
ormula, and which you again copied into Exarchel, whose thought patterns have many times been recopied into the version of Del Azarchel you see before you. The matter goes beyond mere differences in intelligence. There is something, some spirit in you, some essential property that cannot be defined nor contained. You will live out your natural lives in this century, having no additional recourse to biosuspensive hibernation nor to computer emulation nor to any other method of perpetuating your patterns of consciousness.”
Montrose said softly, “Blackie. As far as I know, you ain’t never out-and-out broken your word. In all your years as world tyrant and baby-smooching politician, I never heard tell of you giving your sworn word and breaking it—and so I reckon you are superhuman after all. Is that still so? You still a man of your word?”
Alalloel looked on with amazement on her finely boned, delicate features. “What is this? Do you still, at this late hour, intend some deception, some maneuver? The entire volume of Pellucid, overlaid with the lobotomized layer upon layer of Exarchel—the world consciousness—is ours. We are not merely the Swan Paramounts: we are Earth. There is no resource in your reach that we cannot foresee.”
Montrose held out his hand. “What do you say, Blackie? Truce? Up until we see Rania again. If we don’t, neither of us will see her, not never. Pax?”
Del Azarchel put out his hand. “Truce. You have my word.” He tried to keep a smile off his features, but he could not. He grinned, and his teeth were very white against his dark beard.
Alalloel said, “We will be able to foresee and forestall anything which you—”
Montrose reached out and touched one of the eyes on the feathers of her neural cloak. He said, in English, “Null. Classify same, retroactive through all databases.” He pointed at Del Azarchel, “Null and classify as null.”
5. Hysterical Blindness
Del Azarchel burst out with the laughter he had been holding in. “No, my dear Swans, you will indeed be able to foresee anything he is about to do unless you have a code built into your base psychology creating a blind spot you cannot see through. Oh, my. That is amusing to see it finally happen to someone else. Refreshing.”