The Hermetic Millennia (60 page)

Illiance said,
“Again, I would be grateful for your wisdom.”

She said,
“The mission is endangered. Summon Followers. He will kill us, they will kill him, and the remainder of our order will continue, without undue perturbation to the flow of events.”

Illiance shook his head.
“While insightful, the proposal lacks several attractive prospects.”

Aanwen said,
“What matter our two lives? The Bell is coming. Summon the Followers, Docent Illiance! Or I will.”

Illiance said,
“With respect, you shall not. You have not seen clearly. You reason like a Locust, weighing one life against another. This is inelegant. Sometimes the simplest solution truly is best.”

And, without a further word or sign, Illiance turned and glided smoothly and without hurry out of the chamber, and the cobra pattern of gemstones glinted on the shoulders and back of his long blue coat as he moved away.

4. Simple Solution

Both Aanwen and Menelaus stared in astonishment after the retreating back of Illiance for a moment. Then the smooth slope of the curving corridor hid him from view.

Menelaus looked down at her just as she looked up at him, as if they both were surprised to catch themselves staring. He met her eyes, and smiled and shrugged.

He turned, stepped closer to the coffin, and reached out with both hands, touching several control points. The alert lights on the coffin housing winked to a new configuration.

Aanwen said in Iatric, “You are familiar with how to operate the coffin machinery?”

“Yes, ma’am. More ’n I’d like to be. I’ve seen so many coffins in my life, it makes me sick.”

“I hope you will recover your health in due time. This coffin before us itself is slightly damaged, but I notice you reshunted the compositional of a soporific compound you have introduced into the albino into a holding tube and flushed the main cache: this is not the normal procedure, but it bypassed a broken feeder tube, whose existence you must have deduced from an anomaly in the back-pressure. You also adjusted the dose correctly for his body mass and type and hypoallergenic spectrum. I wonder at this display of casual expertise on your part, you being a soldier.”

Menelaus said, “More of a schoolteacher than a soldier, really. I have slumbered and thawed many times, and as part of my payment to the Tomb officers, I served as an apprentice to them, scrubbing floors, doing routine maintenance, and so on. Some simple coffin repair … basic medical nanotechnology … troubleshooting … You know … a fellow picks these things up.…” Menelaus made a vague gesture in the air. “I am going to tranquilize him, throw him over my shoulder, and walk back to the camp, on account of there is no place else in this world I can go. You got the answers you wanted, I got my albino, we both walk out happy. How does that set with you? Any reason why your dogs will prevent me from going through the gate if I am going in?”

“Who are you, really?”

“Rumpelstiltskin. I know Nymph sciences that can make it so you can fall in love again, and mate and marry, and bring forth a firstborn child. Think about that child. If you set your dogs on me, well, I lose my life and you never get to give that child his. If I passed away, I’d rather have my wife wed again, find some sort of happiness. Wouldn’t your husband have said the same? So think about him too.”

“You are married? This is not a Chimerical custom.”

“Ma’am, if you studied the period of our atom wars, you know all our old customs fell into anarchy, and isolated towns like mine returned to some of the older and saner laws, like monogamy.”

“What is it about our pistols that you find remarkable?”

He put out his hand. “I’ll show you.”

With no expression on her face whatever, nor any hesitation, Aanwen surrendered to him the energy weapon.

He stepped over to where her instruments lay scattered, stooped, and picked up a splicing knife. With the point of the knife, he pried under the carapace of jewels that coated the weapon, found a catch, wiggled the blade, and the casing opened, exposing the unadorned barrel. The barrel was a short cylinder made of a set of telescoping rings.

Menelaus tapped the rings with the knife point and elicited a chiming sound. “This is one of our named weapons.”

“Do not say
our
named weapons, for you cannot be a Chimera. Your psycholinguistic structure does not allow for it.”

“Whatever. This is a serpentine. Or a segment of one. You are using the tiny set of onboard brains to control the waveguide. The energy actually comes from the gems, which are logic crystals, and you just added a grip and a trigger. The grip holds an amplifier that heterodynes various deadly energies onto the coherent aiming ray the gems generate. Simple, elegant, but how in the hell did this technology persist all the time from the Sylph period?”

Aanwen blinked her large and long-lashed eyes in confusion, an expression so similar to what he had often seen on Illiance’s face, like hearing a familiar theme of music transposed to a higher key, that Menelaus laughed to behold a feminine version. She looked like Illiance’s sister.

She said, “They are the only truly self-repairing machines ever devised. An unconfirmed historical report alludes to seven forms of the divarication problem. An ancient and unknown mathematician produced the first two solutions, called the self-correction code and the copycat code, and invested the ratiotechs with a partial self-awareness and checking system so that they could not evolve into Xypotechs. Then the Master of the World—he was one of the original members of the expedition to the Monument—”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of him.”

“—created the Simon Families, who are the predecessors from whom the Witches spring, organizing in their ancestral stock a genetically promulgated instinct to discover and obsess over mathematical patterns of the type used in the self-correction code. The Simon Family women studied the serpentines and retroengineered the more general solution from which the copycat code was derived. Only the serpentines are simple enough computing appliances to be fully self-eternal. More complex systems suffer breakdown. The Simon Families used this more general solution to deduce the secret of female longevity. This is why females of the Witch race outlive the males by five or ten times the lifespan. Why are you laughing?”

“Ma’am, I’ll explain it to you someday. Promise, I will. But I just figured out an old friend of mine snookered me blind.”

“Cogent meaning fails to be conveyed.”

“A man who knows me well played on my feeling sorry for a bunch of dim-witted drifters, and got me to fix a problem for them, which I wanted to do, but he guessed my methods, and so I solved a problem for him that I damn well did not want to. What the hell is he building, and where on Earth is he building it?
Or off Earth?
”

“Why do you laugh? Among us, that laughter-event is caused by an ellipsis of parallel thoughts turning skew.”

“Oh, I am laughing because of the joy I will feel when I blow his head off, and see his blood and brain stuffs mixed with bone fragments splurched like a drop-kicked tomato across the field of blighted, damnified, pestilential, perdition-bound, god-forsaken, god-damned honor.”

Menelaus snapped shut the pistol housing and pushed with both thumbs to engage the catch.

She looked at him oddly, almost coyly. “Perhaps my assessment erred. That is in keeping with the mental speech-thought structure of the Chimerae. Will you allow me depart unharmed?”

“Surely and with much thanks,” said Menelaus. He pointed the pistol at the floor and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; there was no noise. He laughed again and tossed the weapon back to her. She caught it awkwardly in both hands. She pointed it at him, and now a soft hum came from the pistol, and the gemstones adorning it began to glitter.

Aanwen said, “You could have killed me with your left hand just now, when I raised both hands to intercept the thrown object.”

“Yes, ma’am, I surely could have, had I been a mind to. And you should give your weapon a respectable name. You’ll embarrass her if you call her just ‘object.’”

“Yet if you are truly a Chimera, you must attack me if I utter a threat, is it not so?”

“Ma’am, there is two things you ain’t taking into account. First, according to the divarication function, any information about the past gets eroded into simpler, easier to transmit forms as it goes down the generations. The surviving stories about us are simplistic. The real-life Chimera code, as practiced by real, live Chimerae, was actually rather organic, subtle, and legalistic. We don’t have to attack a schoolmarm who has a toy pistol that cannot shoot until I throw a punch. No offense, but you are not a real threat.”

“And the second?”

“Ma’am, begging your pardon, but I surely am not attacking no widow woman. My mother was a widow since the same year I was born.”

“Why did you let Illiance walk away?”

“Uh, shucks. I like him. Sort of. I am not one of you blue freaks, but sometimes even I admire a simple solution to a difficult problem.”

And she also simply turned her back and walked smoothly down the curving slope of the seashell corridor and out of sight.

15

The Calculus of Fate

1. Arsenal

He had been hoping that the coffin’s motive system would be intact, so that he could merely leave the patient inside and order it to follow him: but the damage to the treads and millipede legs would have required a machine shop and replacement stock to fix.

Menelaus discovered the footlocker had not been looted, and so Rada Lwa’s original clothes, including his Scholar robes, hood, and mortarboard were untouched. He wrapped the drugged body of the albino carefully in the robes. Didn’t want the man to freeze. And he put the flat, square cap on the man’s head to keep his scalp warm.

Also in the footlocker was a one-piece undergarment of thick silver fabric. The undergarment had a web of input-output ports, caches, and amplifier-transmitter beads he did not want anyone with a highly cyborged nervous system to wear, particularly if Ctesibius was correct and every snowflake they were about to walk over was sophont matter. He put that on himself, and was pleased to find it had two large web belts. He had to cut open the inseam of the garment legs, however, because he was taller than Rada Lwa, so the loose legs dangled below.

Since Rada Lwa’s interment was penal rather than voluntary, Menelaus did not fret himself over appropriating the man’s gear for the common good. It was not like Rada Lwa was really a client.

He was able to dismount two of the railguns from the coffin hull. Each railgun had two-foot-long accelerator wands and a bulbous drum of slurry, but without a proper stock. The subsonic weapon was six feet long, but it was pliant like a garden hose, and could be rolled up.

Ambitious, he took the time to unbolt and extract the antipersonnel laser emitter along with cord and power pack only to discover after the bulky unit was lying on the floor before him (box, emission tube, cords, and all) that the power pack was at one-eighth charge. Enough for about fifteen seconds of action continuous, three times that if used in pulse mode; maybe three minutes, or at lower power, just to burn out eyes and soft tissue.

He realized there must have been a stern fight with this particular coffin. He shook the slurry drums on the rail guns and heard that they were half empty. This meant a second or two of “spray and pray”–type fire, or twenty shots of high-caliber fire, or forty of lower caliber, depending on the desired burst pattern. There were no bullets in this design: the ammunition was a viscous fluid or mud with a high metallic content, ejected supersonically by a linear accelerator.

Menelaus suddenly paused and cocked his ear. There came the rumbling murmur of many engines starting at once. It was the sputtering and coughing of internal combustion engines, as sound he recalled from his youth, millennia ago. There was also the deeper note, and a whining roar, both high-pitched and subsonic, the cracking din of many helicopter blades being spun up to speed. Then, a crescendo like many thunders, the jackhammer sound rose into the air, and then slowly began to diminish, moving farther away.

Only then did he realize how long he had been toiling over the coffin, how many minutes he had been unscrewing, unwinding, unbolting. Too long. He should have been interrupted before this.

He decided it was time to go.

He was able to maneuver the heavy laser into the large shoulder pouch that formed the back of the garment, and he tied the looming emission tube with the loop of the sonic hose so it would not bang into his head when he walked. The web belts from the Scholar’s undergarment he crossed over his chest and shoulders like bandoliers, and they were heavy enough that he could sling from them, if awkwardly, two of the railguns he had looted. If he timed his step and swayed his hips just right, the long barrels would not bark his legs. The subsonic weapon he was able to sling across his shoulders.

There was no hope of hiding such large weapons, even under such a bulky robe as his. For good luck, he slipped the splicing knife into the baglike fold of tent material that served him as a sleeve. He thought about scraping some of the lichen from the walls and using the sublimation properties to make an impromptu tear gas: but there was no time.

He wrestled Rada Lwa over his shoulder, only dropping him once. Menelaus muttered, “In the pixies, Captain Sterling was always flinging a wounded crewman or cute space girls in short skirts over his shoulder. Guess it’s harder when they are not a wide-awake actor trying to hold still.”

One hand wrapped around Rada Lwa, his heavy weapons tangled with his legs beneath his sweeping metallic cloak, and feeling like a one-man army, he strode with a confident step down the sloping ramp.

He wondered that there had been no other personal possessions in the footlocker aside from the garments. A Scholar would certainly carry a library cloth, if nothing else. Then he used his implants to examine the transmission beads dotting the stolen garment he was wearing. In a moment he had found Rada Lwa’s library.