The Hermetic Millennia (31 page)

“That could place it around Saint Christopher’s Island, one of the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles,” said Montrose. “Mentor Ull, the older one, mentioned Mount Misery. I am assuming Mount Nevis and Montferrat are also active. Mount Nevis is across the narrows atop an island called
Nuestra Siñora de las Nieves,
‘Our Lady of the Snows.’”

Soorm looked at him oddly. “Why do you assume volcanoes over a thousand miles away are active?”

“Because I set in motion certain plate tectonics to activate them, using self-replicating Von Neumann crystals. My intent is to end the ice age and reestablish a surface human civilization powerful enough to resist the Hyades before the End of Days. It is only half a millennium from now, so time is really limited.”

Soorm’s nape hairs bristled, and porcupine quills stood up from his scalp and shoulders. His scorpion tail lashed, and the swim flukes opened and shut nervously. “Who are—what are you?”

Menelaus relaxed and allowed the natural neural rhythm in his optic nerve to reassert itself. His gaze took on a magnetic majesty, an unearthly intelligence, a penetrating menace: Soorm tried to meet that gaze. But then Soorm stepped back and raised his scaly hand before his face.

3. Cards on the Table

Menelaus lowered the vividness of his face and features back to the normal human range, and he said, “You tried to protect me from the Blue Men. You did not know I was standing in the room, but you did try to discourage them from continuing to dig for me. You lied and said you thought I was a myth. I am grateful, but also curious. Why did you do that?”

“You cannot figure it out with your superhuman brain?” Soorm snarled.

“I can’t figure out jack with no information, no.”

“Why not? You are like a man walking among brute wolves to us.”

“A man raised by wolves, you mean. One with no humans to teach me their wonderful inventions, like language and arithmetic and logic and flint-napping: an illiterate Romulus who barks like a wolf, or Tarzan who never found that children’s primer to teach himself French.”

“I don’t know who those people are.”

“Too bad! And here I took the trouble to manipulate history to increase the longevity of certain stories I liked, and I established statistical incentives, introduced self-replicating sociometric viruses, and everything. Damn that Blackie and his meddling! In any case, my point is that a human baby raised by apes is a pretty smart ape but a pretty poor man. I don’t expect you to be in awe of me. But I didn’t expect you to help me, either. Why did you?”

“You tell me first why you are not afraid of me, if you are such a poor superman. Just because you are posthuman does not give you any supernatural powers. You could not live if I tore out your throat. You cannot fling beams of deadly energy from your brain.”

“No, but I can use my brain for thinking. I know that you are not Soorm scion Asvid.”

“Am I not? Then who am I?”

“A showdog for Reyes. For that matter, you are not even really a Hormagaunt.”

“Am I not? Then
what
am I?”

“A Nymph. Logically, if you are the first Hormagaunt, you must be the last Nymph. You alone of Hormagaunts, the eldest and first, do not kill for sadistic pleasure, nor for the gluttony to achieve more life. You don’t need to. Reyes y Pastor had to keep you alive as a propaganda tool, to prove that the longevity of the Hermeticists could and would continue to operate, even after centuries had passed. Starting with you, Reyes shared one of the primary secrets the Hermeticists learned via the Monument—the secret of Eternal Youth. You are far too old and cunning to kill without reason. And, unlike a real Hormagaunt, you have a certain degree of fellow-feeling, brother-love, pity for the weak. You did not use the Wintermind technique to obviate the basic emotional contour of your human nature. You used it to break the addictions the Nymph Queens used to redact your memory, mesmerize, enchant, and enslave you. You were the first to break free of the addictive system. Your name is not Soorm.”

“Is it not? What is my name?”

“Your real name is Asvid.”

Soorm shrugged. “Two right guesses out of three is not bad.”

“Your name really is Soorm?”

“Not quite. Actually, my real name is Marsyas, and my displayed design is Saffron and Oakwhite together, but my intimate is Oleander, Rocket and Mandrake twinned in a knot.”

Menelaus nodded. The Nymph naming scheme recited the heraldic flowers which identified which of several endocrinal protocols and glandular systems one used.

Soorm, or Marsyas, continued, “I am of the Tityroi, a flute-player for the Nymphs. I survived the torture pits and gladiatorial chambers of Reyes and became his champion. And then I outlasted and outlived his other champions.
Asvid
is a title, not a name. It means ‘the Old Man.’”

“It also means First of the Kindred. So I told you why I was not afraid,” said Menelaus, spreading his hands. “I had too much faith in your humanity. Why did you try to help hide the Judge of Ages?”

“Because none other can stop the Red Hermeticist.”

Menelaus cocked his head to one side. “Is he still alive?”

“Expastor lives. His Ghost lives. They are Dreagh, Ghosts who can possess living flesh.”

“Where?”

Soorm raised a webbed claw and pointed upward. “In my era, there was an evening star, an artificial moon. At sea, out from beneath the canopy of the world-forest, on clear nights, I could spy her rising and setting, a small, fine, silver point of light. You know whereof I speak?”

“The Nigh-to-Motionless starship
Emancipation.
Know of her? I built her. Blackie snitched her from me. Payback for snitching his bride from him, I suppose.”

Soorm said, “How do you know I will not betray you?”

Menelaus gestured toward the snowy ridges and trees in which direction the camp lay. “Even a non-supergenius can see that. If you tried to protect the Judge of Ages when you did not know he was in the room with you, why would you turn on him when he was?”

“Perhaps because I overestimated his powers. Summon up your Knights and Giants and thinking machines, exorcists and archbishops, djinn and efreets, aftergangers and cacodemons, mummies, sorcerer-kings and walking dead. Bring out your magic needle and stab yourself in the head to unleash your inner daemons. Create the antimatter and obliterate your foes.”

“Damn but I’m impressive! I’d give my left nut to meet me, if I was actually able to do pox like that.”

“You are a prisoner here, then. How is it that you serve them as a translator, instead of as sliced meat garnished with peppers and cloves on the feast table?”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re making me hungry. It’s been eight thousand four years since I had a square meal. I don’t count a lavish fish dinner I had in
A.D.
3089, because I was on the lam, and had to snatch bites while looking over my shoulder. A restaurant called
Phantom de Casa Curial
served delicious Cajun redfish spiced with bell pepper, onion, celery, and dried cayenne pepper. This was a floating barge-city anchored over the sunken ruins of Newer Orleans.”

“What can you do, Posthuman, aside from talk about extinct forms of foodstuffs?”

“No, no. I was surprised by the extinction of the tobacco leaf. Won’t make that mistake again. Got the recipe, and all those organisms for the ingredients I have preserved somewhere in my Tomb system. Hibernation is not just for people, you know.”

“Point taken. What can you do aside from talk about nonextinct forms of foodstuffs? By the lovingkindness of the long-suffering, is everyone older than a few thousand years insufferably garrulous?”

“What can I do? If you are asking whether I can track down and delete every copy of a posthuman machine intelligence, which is nothing but a gestalt-pattern of information that can be copied, transmitted, stored in a wide variety of media, all I can say is nine thousand years of trying to track down and destroy Exarchel have won me nairn, nary, none, and beans in the kitty.”

“Go back to pretending you are a Chimera. You talk blithering nonsense when you are not someone else. Or is this done to awe the simple with your ineffable incomprehensibility?”

“I cannot promise to kill Reyes y Pastor or allay his ghost, but I can promise, that if he is the Master of the World during this era of history, to knock him off his throne. I can stop him.”

Soorm stood still, looking at Menelaus very carefully. “What is it like?”

“What is what like?”

“Knowing the posthumans. The Hermeticists and starfarers. What are they like, the gods of our world?”

“Sick bastards.”

“Yet you were once one of them, or so Reyes told me at the last.”

“So I am a sick bastard too. People that like to experiment on their own brains are not usually the most balanced of critters, if’n you take my meaning.”

“Why do they rule history? By what right?”

“Pestilence! No right at all.”

“Why
them
? How did they achieve control of fate and world-destiny, so that they decide what empires fall and rise? Why was this power not placed in the hands of someone more—I don’t know the word for it.”

“Altruistic?”

“That is a swearword in my language.”

“Piss-poor language, if you can’t say nothing worth saying in it. The Hermeticists? Blackie and his Black-Robed Creeps? They didn’t start out bad, but outer space—years of close confinement falling through light-years of black nothing, drinking recycled pee water—it drove them stir-crazy. The Captain announced they would never return to Earth, to save Earth from discovery by the Hyades, and they mutinied and killed him for it. You know the End of Days, the year when we get invaded by Principalities, Virtues, and Powers sent out by the Hosts and Dominions of Hyades? They brought that down upon us.”

Montrose paused, frowning, then continued, “They might have been passable fair-to-middling as human beings before the mutiny—but after? It had punctured their souls.

“When they came back to Earth, they had secret knowledge beyond human, and everyone they knew was dead and long done for, and they were attacked by greedy Earthmen. The Earth they knew was gone, and the Earth they found was gone bad.

“The techniques I’ve developed over the years to make it easier for Thaws to acclimate to currents and for currents to welcome Thaws—there was nothing like that then. ‘Thaw shock’ it’s called or ‘future grief.’ And these shocked and grieving boys were armed with weapons more dangerous and techniques more sophisticated than anything on Earth, not to mention the Swan Princess.

“They bombed cities, killed millions, and soon they had the world under their boot heel, soon they had power and prestige and toilet bowls of gold to sit on, and that rusted away their punctured souls into jagged bits of crud. They were so jealous of me and my magic brain, that they killed themselves experimenting on themselves, at least sixty of them, one after another after another. What kind of man does that? Rather die than admit someone else has a leg up on smarts? They’re twisted as screws.”

Soorm grunted. “I knew part of this, but I heard a strangely changed version. But what are they themselves like? I mean—what sort of—?”

“What? You asking about their hobbies and love affairs and suchlike? Pox! I got no idea. It’s not like I talked to any of these folk for more than a few moments in the last eight thousand years. I remember them from space camp back when I was twenty-five calendar, twenty-four bio. That was in
A.D.
2234. We did jumping jacks together and studied orbital mechanics and pressure emergency drills and how to pee in a diaper. It was a five-month training regime. I talked to them for a while again in
A.D.
2399, in a powwow we had. We yakked about math. Sort of funny, but I don’t know these guys. Not personally. Now I am eighty-three hundred and five years old calendar and fifty biological. The only one I really got to know is … Ximen del Azarchel.”

Montrose sighed, and shook his head, and said, “Hm. Blackie ain’t totally rotten, but that kinda makes him worse, in a way. But they all think, Blackie too, that we are just their cattle.”

“We?”

“We humans. Us. Normal people. Why are you laughing?”

“For no reason, fellow normal human. Tell me how I can help you.”

“Simple. Spill what you know about Reyes. History is screwed up and haywire, not to mention the climate and evolutionary changes; and I need to find the point of deviation to set it right. I am hoping it was recent, b’cause that means less work for me.”

“Then I will tell you of my last moot first; and this was also when I learned that you were real.”

4. The Atrocity of the Yap Islands

To the Blue Men, I lied. My bioelectric cells could more than compensate for their crude lie-detection electroencephalograph. I had no apprentice named Soorm when the final summons came, but I did call forth the great host of those beholden to me, and we did see the burning of the world-forest beyond its capacity for self-repair. There would be grasslands and wasteland again, heath and bog and chaparral, and to the north, taiga and tundra. I knew enough predictive ecology to see that much.

Another lie: I went, and did not flee. There is no way to resist the instinctive homing-call that my Master infused into the message-chemicals he sent. And the way was long, ah! It was travail indeed.

It was in the archipelago east of the Cipangu Islands I met the Master of World of the Hormagaunts for the final time. I traveled north, and across the polar sea—in those days, there was no ice cap, as now—to the Chukchi Sea, and across the isthmus to the Bering Sea, then down by coasts of Rus and Cathay, past Annam and Loulan, to the Spice Islands.

Four years and longer I sought, drawn by the summons. And I came upon Reyes y Pastor in on Millennium Island, the easternmost of the uninhabited atolls forming the Line Islands. He had recently descended from heaven: the landing craft was floating in the bay, sleek as an arrowhead.

As I swam near his craft, wondering, a machine from the deepest ocean rose and snared me with many metal tentacles, and then, breaking the surface in an explosion of spray, carried me aloft and screaming toward the isle. Through the transparent hull, I saw a woman dressed in red hunger silk, and she had strands of the same material woven through her hair. Her hair was modified to reach yards upon yards, and she could manipulate all the controls of her half-living flying machine at once. She was a Medusa from the age of myth.