The Hermetic Millennia (9 page)

“In the final period, the undersea Melusine and spaceborne Melusine entered into what was apparently a war of mutual extermination, which ended with the collision of the asteroid 1036 Ganymed in the Eurafrican continent.”

“Wait,” said Montrose. “Which continent?”

“While you slumbered, this continent was formed by the closing of the Mediterranean, which is now a mountain range.”

“Oh. About fifty million years before schedule, wasn’t it?”

“During the Locust War, certain of the powers used applied volcanism to maneuver plate tectonics to their military advantage. But that continent in turn no longer exists, as it was bisected by an inland sea that reaches from the isthmus of Ethiopia to the Gulf of Guinea. I thought the terminology North Eurafrica and South Eurafrica inelegant, so I called the northern continent Baltica, and the southern, Pannotia. Normally, I would have waited for the decision of an accredited scientific or Linnaean consensus before selecting a naming scheme, but as the human race is extinct, it seemed unproductive to wait.”

“Oh. Well, use those names until we find if Blackie’s got something nicer sounding. Describe the impact.”

“The impact released energy equaling the explosion of one hundred thousand gigatons of TNT, and the seismic reaction was twelve point five on the Richter scale. It formed several impact craters from Ethiopia to Sudan to Cameroon, making a scar some seven hundred and fifty miles wide and two thousand miles long, into which tidal waves poured. The reentry of ejecta produced infrared radiation sufficient to kill all exposed organisms in the eastern hemisphere, and elevated levels of sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere. Continent-wide firestorms igniting all exposed plant life raged throughout the other hemisphere. The dust cloud blocked the sunlight for thirteen months. The year of darkness increased the speed of glaciations, and the polar ice caps, as of my last reliable report, reached to tropical areas, and may have met at the equator.”

“Last reliable report? When was that?”

“Twenty-two hundred hours, thirteen January of
A.D.
9500. The impact of 1036 Ganymed distorted the Earth’s crust and destroyed all my type-one sensor periscopes, and damaged half the near-crust depthtrain tubes. Increasing ice levels combined with atmospheric changes rendered my type-two sensors inoperative. I do not have the resources to repair, nor stores to replace, these systems. I have partial surface access from three hundred and thirteen sites, total access from none, and no remote capacity. Was I right to thaw you?”

“Dammit, you were. I never thought Blackie would actually slam a rock into the Earth and kill the whole human race just to get at me. He’s lost his mind, or he is smarter than both of us—and as far as I care, either option is worse than the other.”

5. The Immortal Game

He heaved a sigh and swallowed his coffee, which had grown cold while he talked. Scowling, he said, “We have one thousand years and change before the Hyades World Armada descends. That is not much time. Warm up the nanobiochemical Lab seventeen and give me the records of the most recent interments.”

“Lab seventeen? Are we planning biological warfare, then, Dr. Montrose?”

“Not quite. Evolutionary warfare. I am going to release Von Neumann machines into what’s left of the biosphere, along with spores, algae, and the basic terraforming package I was saving for that starship voyage I apparently am never going to take. I also need our most recent biological information on whatever might be left of the human race on the surface.”

“Doctor, I believe there is none.”

“And I believe you were fooled, you dumb horse. Do as I say.”

Montrose, now dressed in a black shipsuit taken from his footlocker, climbed up twelve levels of the Tombs, which required more than a few minutes.

The second level was crowded, with two coffins to every cell, and the warehouse chambers filled with dismantled equipment, everything from refrigeration units to nano manipulators to robotic weapons to lighting fixtures, all of which should have been on the first level.

“Which is the most recent coffin?”

Pellucid answered: “We inducted our most recent client on January twenty-third,
A.D.
9296. His name is name unknown, cause unknown, duration unknown. My records are in disorder, and no further details are available. Are you planning to thaw him?”

There were coffins occupying the corridors, linked by lines running through T-splitters to overcrowded cells where more coffins lay piled one atop the other. Montrose followed a glowing line of light on the floor, climbing over the coffins, to find the most recently interred one.

He wiped the screen set in the coffin’s hull free of frost and switched it on. Inside was a streamlined, narrow-headed body, unusually tall but unusually thin. It was oceangoing: it had the thick skin, webbed fingers and toes, gills like Venetian blinds under its armpits, of a standard sea-modified hominid. It was utterly lacking in facial hair, and the sexual organs were folded into a crotch pouch, so Montrose could not tell if it were a merman or mermaid. The skin was a black as shoe polish. Negroes were called “Black” in his day, and so were Dravidians, but they were a dark pink or a dark brown, not so much darker than himself after a hot summer. This creature was black as obsidian, black as onyx. It gave the man an almost statuelike inhuman look. Nothing like it had existed on earth the year when Montrose was born.

The most radical modifications were evidently to the nervous system. On the front of the narrow skull of the sleeping form, above the huge eyes and above the infra-red-sensing eye-pits, tendrils of some sort of radio-linked neural interface curved back from the brow like antennae: one pair was gold, one was silver, one pair was blue. It had two sets of ears, a smaller pair covered by folding tissue set behind and below the human-looking pair. The back of the skull was dotted with three symmetrically spaced pair of input and output ports. Whoever had designed the species evidently expected them to draw in a great deal of sense impressions from their environment.

“So this is what became of the human race, eh? Ugly-looking little bugger.” He shook his head. So much time had passed; so much was yet to pass. He was more than awed; he was appalled.

“Is that a Melusine component?” he asked Pellucid.

“Yes. This is a descendant of an Inquiline-type Locust, one of the Special People designed to scan Melusine thought streams: a Psychoscopist. Each Melusine pentad or septad contained at least one, to act as interface and intercessor to the world Noösphere, which had no direct mental connection otherwise. If he were thawed, he would not, by Melusine standards, be sane.”

“I expect not. It would be like me thawing up a client’s left hemisphere of his brain while leaving the right in slumber. This is only part of a gestalt being.”

“Do you wish me to thaw him? I have no record whether his living will conditions for thaw have been met. The onboard coffin brain, which is intact, may have additional information.”

Montrose straightened up and spoke brusquely. “No need for thaw. I merely need samples of his gene material; I can calculate his biopsychology. Looks like someone needs a neurological predilection for independent action, not to mention total immunity from all forms of mental coercion. Freethinking and all that. A mental anarchy vector. Maybe a touch of that self-reliant pioneer spirit. The whole world looks like frontier now. So right now I don’t care about modifications not reflected in the genetics, since I am working my reply to Blackie’s latest tactic on a broader strategic level. Do you play chess, Pellucid?”

“Of course, Doctor. I have played all chess games in every possibility. There are only ten to the one hundred and twentieth power variations.”

“You are familiar with the Immortal Game?”

“Grandmasters Anderssen and Kieseritsky in London 1851. Kieseritsky neglected his development, and Anderssen sacrificed both rooks, a bishop, then his queen, to checkmate Kieseritsky with his remaining minor pieces.”

“That is basically the game I have to play.”

“I am not very good at grasping analogies outside of my defined sphere of behavior, Dr. Montrose.”

“In my case, my Queen is safe, since she is way off the board and out of anyone’s reach. Blackie’s most powerful piece, his Queen, is his machine intelligence, Exarchel, the damn mirror reflection of his brain. Blackie is a cold bastard, and he cares more about staying alive than staying human, and that goes double for his machine duplicate, but I can sacrifice my best piece and lure Exarchel into the open, and take Exarchel off the board forever.

“These Tomb systems here are my rooks, and as long as I stay buried and hidden like a king in a castle, he cannot get at me. I may have to sacrifice at least one rook to draw Del Azarchel out of hiding—but I can’t break my word to the people who trusted their slumbering bodies to me. I cannot turn them over to grave-robbers. So what can I do? And I cannot stand pat and do nothing, because Blackie has me in a tight corner now, a fork.”

“I understand that metaphor. It refers to a dilemma.”

“A damnation of a dilemma. I am the only one in a position to restore the Earth’s biosphere from my archives, and doing nothing leaves us with an iceball environment where only the machines can live.”

“Doctor, why do you think, first, that there is any surviving civilization out there, and, second, that such a civilization will not have the technological capacity to repopulate the Earth with plants and animals as needed?”

“If the asteroid drop was an accident, I might ponder either of those possibilities in my mind. But this stinks of Blackie. He just loves dropping things from heaven onto people’s heads. Always has. Makes him feel all Old Testament and such. Besides, the asteroid just happened to drop at a period when it wipes out all your surface cameras and induces a catastrophic cooling cycle? Too convenient for coincidence.”

The emotion of doubt entered the emotionless voice. “Perhaps so, Dr. Montrose. Your neural structure allows you to pick patterns out from a background of camouflage. Then again, the human mind invents patterns where nothing but chaos exists: it is called the apophenia, and underlies the Rorschach blot effect.”

“In that case, there is no harm in setting a little bit of evolution in motion.”

Now Montrose bent over the coffin controls, introduced a serpentine through a socket lock, and removed cells from the lower and upper spine of the creature, the bone marrow, several organs. Soon he had the material he needed in a small package of red capsules.

He held one of the capsules up to the dim light, frowning. The capsule readout showed the client had suffered some aging and degradation. He hoped the coffins were still tight. The Tombs were not meant to operate cut off from the outside world. The Hospitaliers were supposed to thaw periodically and replace worn gear from supplies purchased or coerced from whatever civilization was occupying the surface world.

There was no help for it. He tucked the capsules into their refrigerated holder and began clambering through the coffin-choked corridor toward Lab 17. Meanwhile, he ordered Pellucid to gather the substances he needed there.

“I need to set the world on fire. My next move against Blackie is to take the Earth’s ecology, what’s left of it, in an unexpected direction. Your basic unit is that of a Von Neumann machine, a self-replicating logic crystal, originally meant to monitor and control volcanism. I can use your units to trigger a number of volcanoes in that mountain range where the Mediterranean used to be, vent gases and smokes from below the Earth’s crust, and start pushing the ice floes back.”

The voice of Pellucid came from one of the still-working wall phones dotting the dim, cold corridor. “Doctor, I cannot help but conclude that the asteroid drop was an accident, or an act of war, on the grounds that it grants you a tremendous advantage in your struggle against Del Azarchel. If he is still exiled on the Moon, he cannot enjoy the biological supplies or geothermal energy sources available to you: whatever race you next intend to create will have a tremendous numerical advantage. Moreover, with the electronic infrastructure of industrial civilization apparently at an end, biological rather than mechanical life must come to dominate. Men reproduce more rapidly in primitive conditions than machines.”

“If I could act without interference, you might be right, Pel,” said Montrose. “But any surviving civilization out there, knowing my Tombs and archives exist, is going to come looking for me to dig me out, and all Blackie has to do is watch them and see who shows up to blast them—because whoever or whatever defends the Tombs from looting is one of my men or one of my mechanisms. And I cannot let innocent people be dug up; but I cannot let this snowball world be the only world the Hyades find at the End of Days.

“So I have to lure him down from the Moon—or wherever the hell he is these days—by developing the next ecology and next human race, swans out of ugly duckings, along a vector he cannot dare leave unstopped, a race with a built-in predilection for independence. Something even less of a pack animal than man. But this is a sacrifice game, and I might lose everything, and still not get the checkmate I foresee.”

“I don’t understand your comment, Dr. Montrose. May I make a four-dimensional emulation of your brain and spinal column down to the subcellular level? The emulation will mimic your thoughts with sufficient precision to allow me to anticipate and follow your conversational quirks and—”

“No, and don’t ask me again, dammit. I am not going to turn into Me-Too Blackie.”

“Then may I emulate Exarchel, Ximen del Azarchel’s machine intelligence? I am not able to anticipate the creative aspect of any machine that mimics human thought.”

“No. That would only play into his hands. I can still outsmart this guy.”

“What is your plan, Dr. Montrose? Under your structure of assumptions, releasing an evolutionary vector into the environment from this location will attract attention here. You do not actually have sufficient troops in biosuspension to fend off a concerted attack. I don’t foresee a solution.”