The Hermetic Millennia (30 page)

“Um. I assume you thought the Blue Men would not dare enter the West Crevasse to recover my body and determine the cause of death? As a stratagem, I see no obvious flaw.”

“No, I don’t mean the mechanics of the murder. I mean the motive.”

“I was not going to ask, no.”

“No?”

“I am Chimera. We kill each other all the time, and with reckless glee. I regard it as unexceptional behavior, no doubt caused by high spirits.”

“You are no Chimera. I suspect you are an agent of the Blue Men, a mole, a Judas goat.”

“Good! Then you will not take me seriously when I ask you to join an uprising against them. If we can get enough Thaws to join us, we can rush the gate and overbear the dog things before the cylinders kill too many of us.”

“Rush the gate for what purpose?”

“To win our liberty, and live no more as slaves.”

2. Counting Revenants

Soorm rocked back on his heels and turned his mismatched eyes up to the snowy sky. “Personally, I dismiss liberty as an abstract concept of only limited applicability. For who is free of history, or his own biological fate? No, I am much more eager to kill Blue Men, who have inflicted indignity on me, than I am to achieve liberty or sustain my life. Therefore I am eager to join with you, should your plans prove feasible. From the dead-line to the gate is at least forty yards, with no cover and no concealment. How many of us do you think the dog things could kill with distance weapons as we rushed them?”

“The Chimerae have time-tested formulae for deducing such casualty estimates, based on factors such as rates of fire, targets available per strike, targets hit per strike, wound severity, effective range, muzzle velocity, reliability, mobility, radius of action, and vulnerability.”

“How quaint and ghastly of you. We Hormagaunts are a horrid race, I freely confess it, but we killed one at a time, and never marched to war.”

“And we did not raise lobotomized children in crèches, and harvest glands and organs and living tissue from them for longevity treatments,” Menelaus said dryly.

“We indulged in the darkest of sciences, and won the greatest of rewards. And yet you seem nonchalant. You do not recoil?”

“Each period of history has its own peculiarities.”

“As you say. What does your quaint science of death estimation estimate?”

“The cylinders hold a single operator behind thick armor, a gun crew of three in the trench beyond. Each cylinder both can emit a defensive fan of radiant heat covering a forty-five-degree angle, and can shoot mixed slugs and grapeshot from a steam-powered machine gun muzzle. The technology was selected for its simplicity to assemble and maintain rather than its lethality: all you need is water and power and a machine shop. Each steamgun holds four hundred rounds of musketballs and has two minutes of effective fire. The heating elements can fire as long as cables leading to the powerhouse on the other side of the gate remain uncut. I estimate a firing pressure of four thousand pounds per square inch and a muzzle velocity four hundred and eighty cubits per second. Assuming the charge can cross the lethal zone in four and a half seconds—”

“I remind you I can drive my acid-coated tongue spike into your eyeball from up to three yards away.”

“You just want the sum number?”

“That would be nice, yes.”

“Charging the two cylinders across forty yards of open ground should result in forty to sixty effective casualties.”

“And how many men do we have so far in our uprising?”

“Including you?”

“Include me, yes.”

“Four.”

“So you are expecting a casualty rate … ah … somewhat approximately one thousand percent over and above our available troop strength.”

“I cannot fault your calculation.”

“Hm.”

“I hope to recruit more men, and also to find a way to arm ourselves. Can you speak to the men of your era?”

“I cannot merely speak but command,” Soorm said with a flick of his two tongues. “The other Hormagaunts, Crile scion Wept and Gload scion Ghollipog, are from later periods than mine, so I should be able to domineer them through our ancestor laws.”

“How far back do your ancestral laws command? I have seen Nymphs working as nurses in the infirmary tent, and as drudges in the mess tent. They created your race.”

Soorm bristled uneasily. “It is better not to meddle with them.”

Menelaus said, “I would think that to one of your era, interred in 7466, they would be mythical?”

“They are not soldiers.”

“The Chimerae have a saying: Any warm body that pulls a heat-seeker away from a soldier dies with a soldier’s honor. There are five Nymph women, and four males. I don’t know their names as yet.”

“Yours is a sick and savage race, painting with gold what is basically the unromantic business of man-butchery. Speaking of which, how many Chimerae can you enlist?”

“There are two Chimerae in the camp.”

“Two Chimerae? You miscount. What of yourself?”

“Three.”

“And all the other ones?”

“Joet is a Gamma. The others include an Alpha Lady, two Beta Maidens of the Auxiliary class, and four Kine. Kine and women are noncombatants.”

“Wait. You wish to shield your woman and servants from combat, while you are sending in decorated Nymphs and their dancing boys?”

“Your count is also short. You listed Crile and Gload, but what about the five other Hormagaunts from your period?”

“I don’t know whom you mean.”

“Toil, Drudge, Drench, Prissy Pskov, and Zouave Zhigansk?”

“Ho! They are not Hormagaunts! They are Short-liveds. As their names suggest, two are Burghers. The Pskov Clade and Zhigansk Clade come from different walled cities, have different biochemical recognitions, and are therefore mutually allergic. It would be difficult to compel them into melee. Except against each other.”

“Overcome the difficulty.”

“And the other three are organ donors, who form our slave and livestock class, and therefore cannot be allowed to handle weapons.”

“In my sole capacity as Chief Intelligence Officer of the Academic Division of the Intelligence Command, of the Eugenic General Emergency Command of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the surrounding States, Settlements, and Territories, and acting under the battlefield regulations of the Code of Military Justice as Commander-in-Chief ad hoc and pro tempore, I hereby manumit any and all servile or underling classes, categories, slaves, or indentured servants whose members are willing to fight for our liberty. In the absence of any objection or veto from the Governor, and taking the Advice and Consent of the Senate and the House of Burgesses as granted, the motion passes by acclamation. There! Your slaves are now free men. Let us see if they will fight to stay free.”

“Milk and mush! You have no authority to mulct the Hormagaunts of our donation stock!”

“You may apply to the House of Burgesses for recompense at their next regular session. They have not been convoked for five thousand sixty-seven years, so you may have to find our Imperator-General to call them into session.”

“Bah! This is drollery and japery, not worth the spit required to spit on it. Fine! I will throw the three organ donors into the fray, if you will commit your Alpha and Beta ladies and your Gamma lad and the whole rest of the stupid alphabet of your Chimera-folk.”

“That would bring the tally up to twenty-seven.”

“Who is left?”

“Three very early and three very late.” Menelaus ticked them off on his fingers. “The early-comers include one Servant of the Machine named Glorified Ctesibius from
A.D.
2525, from before the Ecpyrosis; a Giant from
A.D.
3033; an albino Scholar named Rada Lwa—I don’t know his date, but he is very likely the earliest person here. The later-comers include the male and female gray-skinned blue-haired twins from some race I don’t recognize from
A.D.
8866 and the strange-eyed creature from some race I
really
don’t recognize from
A.D.
10100, the last year of the one hundred first century—unless that coffin was marked in binary, and she is from
A.D.
20, the first century.”

“Everyone here is strange-eyed compared to me. Which one do you mean?”

“I mean the dark and silent lady who sits in the mess tent and never moves, and all the dogs are afraid of her. Her eyes are modified so that there is no white in them: every part of her eye is black. I think it is multifrequency absorption material. And what looks like a second pair of eyes, maybe infrared or microwave, above that. She has scars on her back. I don’t have her name. And there are two people the Blues are holding I haven’t seen yet. I am hoping one of them is our knight.”

“I can name the gray twins.”

“Really? Just how did you learn their names?”

“I just walked up in the exercise yard and pointed to myself and said
Soorm
; and they pointed to themselves and said
Linder Keir
and
Linder Keirthlin
. Linder Keir is the brother’s name. So either Linder Keirthlin is the sister’s name, or those are the words for
I don’t know what you said
and
Why did your point at yourself?
in their language. Just how do you learn their dates?”

“I sat out in the cold talking to a man not named Mickey the Witch of Williamsburg, and I memorized the dates on every coffin I could see.”

“Which one is he?”

“The rotund dark man in the straw hat.”

“The vegetarian.”

“Is he? He must eat a lot of lettuce to maintain that shape.”

“Rice and beans. I can smell it on his breath.”

“I think he and I between us can get the Witches to sign on.”

Soorm spread his webbed claws and looked at his palms meditatively. “Suppose you talk to the Savant, the Scholar, and the Giant. Say they join us. That brings the count up to thirty. Suppose also the Witches join. There are thirty-one of them, which would double our numbers. The men are not odd, but the women hardly look human!”

“I will skirt by the irony of that comment coming from you. The Witch-women look normal. Well, all except the one with freaky hair.”

“They would bring the count to sixty-one,” said Soorm, “Enough to rush the gate and have twenty-one survivor.”

“Our position unfortunately becomes untenable if we have to contend with enemy aerial support. We Chimerae have a standard formula for estimating air-support-induced casualties, depending on the ground cover, rate and precision of antiaircraft measures—”

“Spare me. I apprehend we are better off if they cannot shoot us from the air. And so we wait for a stormy day? This is the worst plan in the history of military endeavor.”

Menelaus said, “I hope to change the minds of my superiors to adopt a different plan. This place here you picked to kill me conveniently looks out upon a back entrance to the Tombs that the Blue Men cannot secure. They are not guarding it, and if we can get in—”

“What is inside? Weapons? Buried valuables? Buried allies? I remind you most people do not recover from thaw for hours or days, because most hibernation is for medical reasons.”

“I was thinking of using the communication equipment to send out an all-band distress signal. Then you open the main doors from the inside, using the words I give you, and we all rush in, close the doors behind us, laugh at the Blue Men outside, and wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For whoever or whatever passes for the local law enforcement of the current era. These Blue Men are pirates. Looters. Everything in the camp bespeaks haste and the need for stealth.”

Soorm shook his head ponderously, an oddly human-seeming gesture, given his monstrous frame. “Why would the Blue Men not simply kill us all the moment the distress call rang out? The fabric they gave out to those of you too foolish to grow proper fur is impregnated with binary chemicals in several phases. An electronic signal could flex the smartmolecules to any number of configurations, including lethal gas or flesh-eating fluid.”

“Strip nude. Or use detergent. Or set up a jamming signal. We have to act in coordination with the other prisoners. Will you help me?”

“I will, since it will irk the Blue Men. But your plan assumes there will be someone to answer your distress call.”

Menelaus said, “I don’t think this world is empty.”

“This part of it is. This air does not smell like there is an industrial civilization anywhere nearby. Even in my day, when everything was part of a worldwide forest, we still burned coal and oil, and you could smell it on the wind.”

“Speaking of something you can smell out for me, where is the radio tower in the airfield sending its information? You hinted that you could detect it.”

“Why should I tell you?”

“For one thing, you gave it away to the Blue Men when you blew the circuits out of their lie detector. It kind of peeved me, since you had been careful enough to keep it secret before that.”

“My secret, not yours.”

“Ours, like it or not,” Menelaus said. “We just stood here and counted up every fighting man in the camp. Do you think the Chimera plan of rushing the wire has a chance? If not, we go with my plan. Are you in or out?”

“In what?”

“In my circle of friends. If you are, answer the question.”

Soorm was silent, peering very closely at his face, first with the goat eye, then with the cuttlefish eye. He put his face within kissing distance of Menelaus and sniffed carefully, and then bent to sniff his armpits and crotch and tasted the air with his two tongues.

Menelaus endured this indignity without uttering one of the several snide comments that bubbled up inside him.

Finally Soorm straightened. “There is a distant responder signal the radio tower seeks out and answers. I was able to sense it now and again, and when I have wandered to various parts of the camp to triangulate. The source is seventeen hundred and thirty miles almost directly southeast of here.”

Menelaus knew where that was. One advantage of his extra brain capacity was that he could memorize reams of useless data, including almanacs and atlases, and make three- and four-dimensional models of them in his head.