Posthuman Montrose, standing at the edge of the red field in a black hat and poncho, said, “You are an idiot.”
An Archangel Montrose said, “That is Trey.”
“Who?”
“Trey Soaring Azurine, the Sylph. You met her the day you discovered Rania had ripped the diamond star out of orbit, and was lost to you for thirty-three thousand nine hundred years times two plus change; and that same day, Blackie put his handprint on the moon. She went into slumber, one of your first customers ever, just to follow you through time and see what happened, how it all turns out.”
“And why is Mickey here?” asked Central Montrose.
“For the wedding,” said Potentate Montrose, looming like a sphinx above the thoughtscape, this mind too deep and rapid to apprehend. “For love.”
“What wedding?” asked Central Montrose.
“You are an idiot, like our idiot brother said.” The Archangel Montrose sighed.
“Thanks, I think,” said the Posthuman Montrose. “Makes me want to shoot myself, sometimes.”
Central Montrose looked through Posthuman Montrose’s eyes by feeding a stepped-down neural flow from the posthuman into the optic centers of his brain. Now a large torpedo-shaped dirigible hanging just above the grove could be seen. It was a Sylph aeroscaphe, complete with serpentines dangling from its gondola to give it the aspect of a jellyfish. Montrose would have been just as surprised to see a gasoline-powered Ford Thunderbird from Detroit from the First Space Age or galleon from the Golden Age of Spain.
He looked at the girl’s wild eyes and her strangely absentminded smile. “I dunno. That girl looks a little … unstable. Didn’t she get shot in the gut or something? Wasn’t she going to marry Scipio?”
The Posthuman standing on the field said, “It gets better.” He stepped out from the rose-covered trees and directed his eyes to another point of the field. To one side, beyond the banners but near the rose trees, sat Del Azarchel in a Morris chair, eating popcorn from a paper bag, perhaps the only paper bag on Earth in this era. His smile was like the sun. He had waxed his moustache and combed his beard, and looked more like a goat than ever, or perhaps like some pagan god of old who danced in the wood and worked malice on unwary Greeks.
“Bugger me with a submarine! What the pestiferous epidemical plagues of hell is that whoreson coxcomb doing here?”
“Gloating,” said the Posthuman. “Want me to go over and talk to him?”
“He is poxy up to something! He has got some scheme! What is he up to?”
The Archangel spoke again. “Off and on—and more off than on, due to energy budget constraints—we been watching him over the centuries, or having our Patricians do it, or Neptune.”
“So what is he plaguing up to?”
“Your lesser version just told you, you stump-stupid, pox-brained buffalo. Gloating. That is what he is up to. He is watching us tear ourselves apart the closer she gets to coming home. Show him the last bit, little brother.”
The Posthuman turned his head.
Opposite him, on the other side of the field, stood Rania dressed in a simple robe of white, her bright hair and brighter smile and eyes like an angel. The sight of her face was like twin daggers of light in through his eyes into the deepest part of his brain. The pain and longing and love choked his next thought.
But Posthuman Montrose said, “That’s not her.”
Central Montrose said, “What the pestilent pox is going on?”
“Turns out that there was some leftover false Ranias,” Archangel Montrose explained, “made by our old pal Sarmento ‘Makes Me Ill’ a d’Or, or maybe from those experiments our friend Mother Selene halted, way back when.”
The Posthuman said, “The lady is a Monument reader. She got found in one of our old, old tombs and woken up by some man or some god with nothing better to do. Half a century ago our time, the first message from the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum was picked up by ultrasensitive receivers—”
“—that is the human name for the attotechnology supership the aliens at M3 gave the real Rania. What the aliens call the ship, we don’t know. The message is called the Canes Venatici Neutrino Anomaly—” supplied the Archangel Montrose, interrupting on a parallel channel.
“—and Number Six over yonder wanted to go through the Monument notations Rania sent line by line, and got this girl to translate for him, and spent too much time alone with her, and sniffed what she smelled like, and saw that place behind her ear when she turned her head, and sure looked like Rania’s neck, white as a swan’s neck and all, and so he done fell empty head over kicking heels in damnable love with her. Her name is Shiranui Kage-no-Ranuya-ko, the fiery shadow of little Rania.”
It was the name of a Fox Maiden, a race long ago extinct on Earth, which meant she had come from a deeply buried tomb, or from the Empyrean.
“What’s the fight over?”
“Number Five, that’s our cousin there, says the only way to keep every version of Montrose willing and able to recombine into one person with one mind and one soul is if and only if we all have one purpose. Love for Rania. So Six says no, this is an exception, and Five says bullpox, and Six says up your nose, and Five throws down the glove and says get your Seconds and your shooting iron. Got it?”
Angrily, Central Montrose sent, “There was a message from Rania, and you did not wake me?”
The Posthuman sent back, “You should word your orders more careful-like. The message, it didn’t have nothing personal in it, just cliometry equations to pull mankind back from the brink of extinction, so we did not wake you up.”
Central Montrose said, “She would have put in a secret message just for me, hidden in the enjambments and negative thought-character spaces!”
The Posthuman said, “We looked. Weren’t nothing. So we let you snooze. You wanted to slumber so damn much and just get the waiting over, right? And everything was all set, right?”
The Archangel added sardonically, “Besides, waking all us up at once, much less fitting every memory and personality growth back together into one system in one body costs money, and unless someone wants to pay me to do a historical essay starring my pox-awfully wondrous wonderful self, what skills we got this market here and now cares diddly-do about, eh?”
The sheer sass of the reply was a bad sign. Usually he was more respectful of himself. He looked at the numbers in his mind’s eye, ran through the cliometric calculus, and got a nonsense answer. Some factor was missing from the equation.
“I don’t know. Blackie never seems to run low on funds.”
“Well, you’re supposed to know,” said one of him. (He was not sure which one. All of him sounded alike to him. He wondered if his other hims had the same problem.) “You! You are the central leadership node of our scattered personality here. You’re the boss.”
“Well, pox on you and the rutting donkey that you rode in on! You are the current version, who is supposed to keep an eye on events—and an eye on Blackie—and wake me when something needs fixing so I can sleep in peace!”
The Archangel chimed in, “Little brother, I ain’t even sure how the market works these days, and I have an intelligence range north of ten thousand.”
“I ain’t as smart as either of you, but I read the day feeds,” said the Posthuman. “It is a system that tracks a quantified form of liquid glory the Patricians drink and bathe in.”
“What the hellific pox? Do you mean glory like bright light, or glory like the applause of the world at your reputation?” asked Central Montrose.
“Both and neither,” answered the Archangel and Posthuman together. Those two had knit themselves back into a single system at this point. The debt register showed considerable expense just for those two to merge. “Don’t worry. The Fox Maidens and the Myrmidons, back when they still existed, could not make heads nor buffalos about it neither.”
The Potentate from the world’s core said, “This problem is insoluble. If we sleep, we miss life and snore through dangers. If we wa
ke, we change too much, and Rania won’t know us. You have slept too long, and the signs of disunion and disharmony you see among the lesser versions of us is a by-product of Divarication.”
But one of the duelists, Number Five, sent angrily, “It’s not Divarication. It’s madness. Your conscience is lashing you like Mom used to. That clench in your stomach is you trying not to puke up what you swallow of your bad deeds. And now Rania is getting close, and it is getting too late!”
Central Montrose sent, “What bad deeds?”
“Giving up on the human race. You don’t care what happens once Rania comes back!”
Central Montrose had no reply to that, but he could feel segments of his mind rapidly trying to rewrite the thought, distort it, hide it from himself, and that made him sickly suspicious that Number Five Montrose was right. So he said nothing.
Number Five said, “You won every fight, even against artificial minds orders of magnitude smarter than you, because of one thing. They thought in the short term, the length of their lives, the life of their clan or their civilization, but no longer. You thought in evolutionary life spans, in the scale of geologic ages.”
“Because the only damn thing I gave a damn about was geologic ages away from me,” muttered Montrose. Several Montroses on the line muttered agreement.
“But now you’ve brought your eyes away from the horizon to the foreground. You are looking at tomorrow, when Rania comes, but not what happens the day after tomorrow.”
“Why the poxing pox should I give a tinker’s damn about that? Let the day after tomorrow pox itself for all I care.”
“But she will care, won’t she?”
Central Montrose sent, “If you are less smart than me by a zillion points of intelligence, and the Archangels and Potentates are smarter again by another zillion, how come you see this plain and none of us smarter than you sees it?”
“’Cause smarts ain’t everything. Brains is most things, but not everything. I got a simple brain, a posthuman brain, and my little balloon of a mind is so small that the volume is clear compared to the surface and the light shines all the way through. You guys have more brainpower to monkey yourselves up with lies and brain-lard. Well, snap out of it.”
“Snap out of what? I am about to shoot myself out there. Put away your piece, you maniac!”
“I got to kill all parts of me that don’t love Rania,” said Number Five grimly. And suddenly the channel went dead.
6. The Second Second
So there it was: a hard, cold certainty in himself that Number Six deserved to die for rutting with a Fox dressed up to look like Rania. He could think of nothing more viscerally disgusting, more worthy of death by gunfire. He did not want to recombine back into himself any memory-chains containing the memories of whatever thoughts or temptations or justifications he had used on himself to excuse adultery. It was an absolute in his soul: there was no debate, no second thoughts.
So, without thought, he combined himself with Number Five. It used up nearly all the credit in his account. By the time he raised his pistol and armed his countermeasures, there were two of him in the nervous system, pulling the trigger together. By the time he lowered the massive weapon and stepped heavily forward from the octopus-armed black smogbank of chaff and looked down at his dead opponent, he was one.
Melechemoshemyazanagual Onmyoji de Concepcion of Williamsburg hailed from the Fifth Millennium, an Era of the Witches during the ten-thousand-year period known as the Hermetic Millennia, in the long-forgotten years before the First Sweep, when mankind was merely the experimental plaything of Blackie del Azarchel and his fellow mutineers who survived the Hermetic expedition. His true name was Mictlanagualzin, but Montrose called him Mickey.
Now Mickey waddled over to help Montrose out of his armor, while the Penitent judge gave an abrupt gesture to a grave-digging automaton carrying a coffin and a shovel. The machine groaned and stepped forward and shoved the blade of its shovel into the soil.
“Mickey, what the pox are you doing here, acting as my Second?” When the helmet hiding the face of Montrose came off, Mickey stepped back, raising his hand before his eyes. He could not meet Montrose’s gaze.
“Ah!” said Mickey. “You have torn your soul in scraps, and now a larger fragment descends like a bat from the infosphere to possess you! Did I not warn you in ages past to have no traffic with the Machine? Now you are one.” He shook his head sadly, and his jowls wobbled. “Alas! I hope you got a good price. I envy you. No more soul-selling for me.”
“You didn’t phlegming answer my question.”
“It is not necessary to answer the gods, even ones, like you, who are insane and think they are not gods. Your mind is suffering from an interleaf conjunction. The memory should come back momentarily. Your avatar here knew me. I will be shamed if you have forgotten.”
At that moment, the second figure who had served as Second during the duel, Trey Soaring, came skipping over, her eyes dreaming and focused on nothing in particular. She was a purple-haired Sylph woman from the Third Millennium, the same millennium when Montrose himself was born, only a few centuries after he was. Around her floated her garment of hunger silk; it was a molecular disassembly array shaped like a deep sari and cloak, or perhaps like a swarm of purple wasps woven into a solid sheet. She stared at the bridge of his nose but did not flinch back like Mickey did at the sight of the posthuman intelligence burning in the gaze of Montrose.
“Hi!” she said vaguely. “You’ve changed again. You have to stop doing that. It’s weird.” And she took a strand of hair around her forefinger and stuck it between her lips, as if suckling on it. Trey craned her head back to watch a flock of scaly and feathered urvogel fly over, half-bird, half-saurian creatures originally from Venus: including the anchiornis, the xiaotingia, and the regal aurornis.
With her head turned up and away from Montrose, she spoke, “He’s your Best Man. It sours him when you forget.”
Mickey did not look sour, but he did raise one eyebrow, and the decorative right eye on his absurd pointed hat above his right eye raised an eyebrow as well, but much higher. “I found my demonstrations of power were augmented by erecting shrines to you, and my shadow grew strong at my feet because your name touched my name. For three seasons, I dwelled hidden among the earliest generation of the Swans, and my name was great among the resurrected Witches.”
Trey said, “I’ll translate from Icky-Mickey jabber to groundling: he got famed up because of you, Judge Montrose. It weirdered him.” She giggled and stared at her left hand, spreading her fingers. “Isn’t that a word? Made him weirder.”
Mickey said solemnly to Montrose, “Your life and mine were cast together in fate, Great One, intertwined like the DNA helix of the caduceus of the psychopomp. Then I dreamed a dream with the left lobe of my brain while my right lobe half was exalted by pharmaceutical—”
Trey jabbed her elbow sharply into Mickey’s side. “Vent it!” she snapped.
Montrose stared in surprise. Trey was small and waiflike, like all her race, with hollow bones, so it was like seeing an eel taunt a whale.
Mickey frowned judiciously, nodded his head to Montrose. “I am become as you, and sought remotest futurity to seek my one true love.” And he smiled down at Trey with such a smile that his shining eyes were almost lost in the folds and wrinkles of his cheeks.
Trey said, “And I came because I said I would. I want to see the wedding! Find out how the story ends.”
Montrose now noticed on the left hand of Trey was a gold band. Evidently the custom of exchanging rings had still been remembered in whatever year the two had wed.
“B-but—Mickey! I thought you are gunna marry a bosomy Nymph or something?”
She saw his gaze and held up her hand proudly, wiggling her fingers to make the ring catch the light and glitter. “He gave up witchcraft for me. We got chased into your tombs again, but the Witches were afraid of you and would not follow. One of the old bishops you saved married us. Named Father Talbot.
Married us to each other, I mean! I had to give up threesomes. I am not sure they were a good for me.”
Montrose stared at the unlikely pair. The recollections of Montrose Number Five were settling into place in his associative memory.
7. A Glimpse of Memory
A.D. 67098
It had been not long ago. He (Montrose Number Five) and Mickey had spent an evening in a public house at the nearby Forever Village.
The village surrounded the foot of a beanstalk issuing from the tallest summit, a speaking peak called Baxianshan, high in the Mediterranean Mountains.
The oldest era of history maintained by the Eternity Circuits of the local Stability was from the time before the Great Silence, when the Teleological Conspectus had successfully crushed the soul of man. An immortal of the planet Odette called the Conservator of the Futurity had taken control of the bankrupt and mortgaged Tellus and had undertaken to organize all Earthly life for the benefit of far future generations, whose numbers and dispositions were planned in advance. The plan condemned certain bloodlines, cults, cultures, and peoples to slow extinction. In those long-lost centuries of yore, the Atavist were a dwindling people.
Those condemned by the Conservator included the sea-Atavists, the Nicors and Camenae, Rusalka and Merrow, and other remote descendants of the Melusine. Their place in the sea and aboard the Great Ships was taken by a Squaloid race of Moreaus. They were unwilling to live in houses on shore and were nostalgic for the undersea palaces in which their grandfathers dwelled before the Squids forced them into upright shore-shapes. In memory, they erected great structures in the hollow trunks of trees, coated all within with coral growths. For their own bodies, they assumed the shape of small, swift, delicate beings. This was in a vain attempt to produce breeds in their children low-mass enough to compete for berths on starships with the more microgravity-agile, but more massive, Squids.
It was a point in history when metal was obdurate and denied to men, so everything was grown rather than made. Thus the décor was elfin, fanciful, and alive. The chairs were obnoxiously large leaves, and the lamps were lightning bugs. There was a fire pit in the center so that the smoke wandered up the axis of the hollow tree trunk, with scattered tables and booths circling it. Coy and coquettish girls on stilts or dangling from wire harnesses served the human-sized customers on the floor or smaller-than-human patrons occupying shelves and nooks up the inner walls.