The Hermetic Millennia (16 page)

Daae said, “Forgive us. By my time, the days of the Republic were legend. The same fires that blotted out the world’s memory of the Social Wars erased records of previous eras as well. Only the Judge of Ages, who dwells in the underworld, knows and remembers the truth.”

Menelaus nodded. “For just that reason, I don’t know my derivation, gentlemen, since my lineage records were wiped out. And the atomics made it so the Social Wars weren’t none too sociable. I am sure I have at least some rattlesnake in my cocktail.”

With no word, the three men each saluted the weapons of the other two by a gesture of raising the hand, palm out, before the eyes, as if to shield them from an invisible glory. Then they gravely passed their weapons each back to the proper owner, shillelagh, thighbone, and rock.

5. Aeonicide

“Now that the formalities are over, gentlemen,” Menelaus said, “what do you want? You did not just come all this way to kill an imposter, and you could have done that in plain sight, back at the camp. You didn’t hit as hard or as nasty as you could have done, which means you were trying to guess my mettle. I assume I passed, and that you want to recruit me. What’s the mission?”

“Escape first, and then revenge,” said Daae. “The Blues have woken men of other times: men you must gather to us. The rods can be broken each separately, but not when bundled together.”

Yuen said, “Even the lesser races from earlier periods, and the degenerate freaks of our future, can redeem, in part, their inferiority, by service to a superior cause.”

Menelaus cleared his throat. “Excellent plan. Do let me do the talking, right, Proven Alpha? The lesser races, uh, have brains not excellent enough to stand the shock of being told how pathetic they are. I’ll have to kind of cajole them into helping us. We are clearly low on manpower: how feasible would it be to break into the Tombs and wake others of our kind?”

Yuen said, “To thaw the sick and the weak? Unless the Blue Men restore them, they will have no weapons and hence no names worth speaking.”

Daae said, “More than this: we dare not provoke the Judge of Ages. How shall it fare with us, if we disturb the Tombs for our purposes, if he comes in wrath to avenge himself on the Blue Men?”

Menelaus turned his hooded head toward him. “You have faith in this Judge of Ages?”

Daae said softly, “Erudite sir, you have studied history, have you not?”

The hood nodded. “More than I’d like.”

“You know that there is a recurrent pattern to history. The persistence of the Tombs over so many centuries, unmolested, despite the rumors of buried wealth, bespeaks some power that protects them from grave-robbers. A great power. I say he will arise to punish this trespass. Are not those who unearthed us defilers of his work, and defiers of his word?”

“Chimerae do not believe in spirits,” said Menelaus.

“I say the Judge of Ages is a real man, a survivor from some earlier period of history, the Second Age of Space, and that he rises from his own Tombs to walk the earth when need calls.”

The hood turned toward the younger. “And what do you say, Alpha Yuen?”

“I say nothing to contradict my Captain,” said Yuen.

“Do you believe in the Judge of Ages?”

“Permission to speak freely?” The younger man looked at Daae, who flicked his eyes in a microscopic nod of assent.

Yuen said, “The Judges of Ages is a children’s story, invented by the superstitious fools of the Final Sabbat. The Witches worshipped everything they did not understand, including the technology they destroyed. Of course, the great Tombs and how they worked were beyond their wits, undisciplined as they were, to conceive. No doubt some coffin contained a victim of a bioweapon. The Witches unsealed a Tomb and were struck down by a disease, something their undisciplined minds could not comprehend, and so they invented the figment of an avenger. They had gods and godlets for all things, houses and hearths and fields and trees. To add one more to their crowded
pantheon
”—he practically spat the word—“saved them from the expense of mounting a continual guard on known Tomb sites.”

Menelaus said, “The Natural Order of Man, those fruit-eaters called the Nymphs, they believed the Judge of Ages was real. The Hormagaunts from the period of the Iatrocracy besieged his Tomb site to prevent entry or egress. They said they encountered his soldiers, armored men who balanced on the back of an extinct quadruped called a horse and were carried from place to place. These men were called
cniht,
which means ‘vassal,’ or
cavalier,
which means ‘horse-rider of disdainful mien.’ Are there vassals without a liege? I wondered why the Blue Men have not unearthed any of these knights, or why they have not risen from the earth, if they are real. Do either of you Loyal and Proven Alphas have any information on the subject?”

Daae shook his head. “Perhaps the soldiers of the Judge of Ages are buried too deeply. Or they fought and were slain before we thawed. But there is no sign of battle here.”

Yuen’s one eye narrowed. “It is noteworthy, Beta Anubis, that you speak several of the aftercomer languages. I take it your slumber was interrupted, that you rose from the buried Tombs and walked the Earth in later years, and learned their ways?” There was no mistaking the suspicion in Yuen’s tone.

“I learned
of
their ways, Alpha Yuen,” said Menelaus. The Chimerae were always careful to avoid contamination with foreign cultures and ideas. “Mine was a scholastic interment, not medical, and so I could thaw without undue harm.”

Daae said, “Scholastic? You were ordered into the Tombs?”

“Yes, sir. I am a schoolteacher. A mathematician. My unit is the Hundred and Second Civic Control Division, attached to the Third Pennsylvania Legion, College for Dependents. Academic Joint Command told me to study the causes and results of civilizational decline.”

The eyes of the two other men grew intent.

Daae asked, “What caused our glory to pass away?” His voice was hushed, the tone of voice one used over an open grave, at a funeral.

“Remember I come from a day when atomic world civil war burned everything that could burn. We were reduced to savagery,” Menelaus said solemnly. “All Chimerae are genetically programmed with instincts designed to protect the race. It was the one thing that makes us better than the Witches. How could we have done this to ourselves? So I was ordered to reconstruct, if I could, the predictive mathematical analysis of history called Cliometry, which legend says the Giants knew. I thawed in
A.D.
5884, I learned that Richmond, that great city, in a single hour was fallen, and no candle burned there, and there was no sound of engine, no noise of mill or drill. I thawed again in
A.D.
5900 and
A.D.
5950, and there was no sign anywhere of the Command, and no one to report to. I continued forward into the future, century upon century, because there was no officer, no Alpha, to rescind my orders, or tell me to stop. Therefore I will continue my assigned task until the End of Days, or the arrival of the Hyades, or until an Alpha properly dismisses or relieves me.”

Yuen said, “Are we truly as far in the future as you say? Is it truly all gone? There is no trace of us? Did nothing we erect survive?”

Menelaus said, “I saw ten coffins from the Chimera period in the yard, broken open. So there are eleven of us, counting me.”

Daae said solemnly, “All is lost. The Chimerical way of life passed away, and the black Oculus-pierced domes of our anti-chapels, where once our bravest men gathered to pour out curses into an empty and uncaring sky against an unreal God before our duels and battles, stood isolated and silent upon the hills of Appalachia, and along the shores of the poisonous, sterile waters of the Chesapeake. The woodlands grew and the cities crumbled, and the race that comes after us dances amid our ruins.”

Menelaus said, “And you, Alpha Daae? Why did you inter yourself?”

Daae said uncomfortably, “I was of the party that opposed the dissolution of the Senate. Agathamemnon ‘Fairlock’ Raeus assumed certain emergency powers, combining the military leadership with the civilian government. I wished to preserve my bloodline to the day when Raeus would be forced out of office, and the Senatorial form of government restored. I suppose there was some error in my coffin brain, or—”

Menelaus said, “No error. The coffin never thawed you, because the conditions were never met. The World Empire lasted four hundred more years, and we never returned to our old form of government. Even by your day, the rot was too far advanced to halt.”

Yuen spoke with explosive passion, “But how did it happen? How was it permitted to happen? Whose army is so great to encompass us? Who overthrew us?”

Menelaus shook his head. “No one. The Chimerae were invincible in battle.”

Yuen said, “Then how?”

Menelaus said, “By slow and easy stages of corruption. The specific causes were many and complex. The foremost was a biotechnical improvement during a time of moral decline. Like the Babylonians, we were undone by simple drunkenness. It was called ‘Greencloak’ technology: Implanted artificial glands to intoxicate and alter states of consciousness spread by illegal medics first among the Kine, then among the lower ranks. And then it no longer was illegal, and then it was no longer stigmatized, and finally it was not permitted to be criticized.”

Yuen said in a strangled voice, “I don’t understand. Our greatness was unmatched. Whatever we faced, we conquered.”

Menelaus said, “No Chimera understood it. For that reason I was sent back into the Tombs. The trends of our decline were too slow for one man to see in his lifetime, and I was the only one—the schools by that point no longer taught mathematics of the requisite level—to work out the Cliometric calculus. Academic Command believed that someone was deliberately manipulating history to obliterate our civilization. I was to discover who and how.”

Both men stiffened.

Yuen said, “You mean someone obliterated the noble civilization for which all my ancestors slaved and served and suffered and fought and died … deliberately? A
man
did this? There is not even a word for the crime of killing an age of the world.”

Menelaus said, “Aeonicide. And yes, it is a man. I was sent into the Tombs to wake in a future day when I might trace the source of his historical anomalies, find him and confront him and kill him.”

Daae said in a voice of soft surprise, “But I know who this man is.”

Menelaus said, “Who? Is he here?”

Daae said, “He must be, for he—”

As if pulled by one invisible thread, both Daae and Yuen snapped their heads in the same direction. Menelaus did not have senses as sharp as theirs, but his neuromuscular control allowed him to turn his head the same direction at the same moment, as if he had the eyes and nose of a Chimera.

Of course, he saw nothing, and, of course, he could not ask what they were eluding when Daae raised his hand and flicked his fingers in two quick motions. Menelaus was baffled to see that the trooper hand signals from his days in the Thirty-fifth Cavalry Division, in
A.D.
2225 were alike enough to the hand signals of the Chimera Varuman linage from
A.D.
5480, for him to read them. Daae’s gesture ordered Alpha Yuen to take point; rear guard and trace hider was Beta Anubis (as he thought of him).

It was difficult to follow two men who made so little noise as they glided beneath the trees in pitch darkness.

As they came to the edge of the wood, Yuen raised his hand. The other two stopped, tense, wary. Through the pine trees, Menelaus saw a rise of ground silhouetted against the stars, and a group of figures was coming over the rise, in twos and fours. From the occultation of the stars, it seemed a search party. They carried no lanterns, but they were making no attempt at stealth: Menelaus heard howls and barks, as if the creatures were searching rather than hunting, seeking comrades who might answer, not prey who would flee in stealth.

Daae tapped Yuen on the shoulder, pointed at the enemy, shaded his eyes, wobbled his head, cupped his palm as if begging alms. He was asking what the dogs were looking for. Yuen’s answer was a shrug: another gesture that had not changed despite the change of times and races.

Daae licked his finger and held it to the wind, and selected a path that would keep them downwind of the dogs.

6. Ivinia

At moonrise, they were far enough downslope to fear no patrols of dog things. The hand-stained moon was full, and illumed the scene with silver light.

The three men came to a treeless knoll and climbed the side. It was a mound as symmetrical as an upside-down bowl. When Menelaus stepped on the slope, he heard a strange whine from his implants, and then silence.

The other two men were more relaxed in their posture as they walked. Menelaus wondered how the Chimerae had detected that the trees blocked the medium-range instruments of the Blues; second, he wondered how they knew this mound of grassy ground issued the same interference as the trees did; and third, he wondered how the Chimerae knew the Blue Men had such instrumentation. Who had told them?

The deduction was not hard to make. Daae spoke of the end of his world. The race that superceded the Chimerae called themselves the Natural Order of Man, or the Nymphs: it would be unusual, but not impossible, for a member of that race to be scholarly enough to retain an ancient language, and to have spoken with Daae. Looking at the trees around him, Montrose deduced several of the properties they must possess, including blocking some of the Blue Men instruments. He knew he would soon have an opportunity to speak with a Nymph: he gritted his teeth, wishing it could be immediate. He had set events in motion; now they moved without his control.

At the crest of the knoll stood a thin-faced woman of middle years and regal bearing. Her hair was so blond that by moonlight it seemed a metal helmet. She wore her hair in a tightly drawn bun, which meant she expected battle and death. Her eyes were vivid without being beautiful, deeply sunken in her skull and having a disturbing stare to them.