The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  There were tens of thousands of Hormagaunts gathered there, the Asvidlings (as I said) and also his other champions and their scions, janissaries, and fighting-slaves: abominations and hairy men from the pine trees, many-colored serpent men from the palm trees. But here were also machines who spoke, and dreadful Ghosts, and Albinos more cunning than human, and Witches who could command the beasts, and Medusae in their amphibious airskiffs, Chimerae in their ferocity. Strange men from the far past.

  The interview was in Father Pastor’s outlandish and soaring house he had grown out of shining pearl and mother of pearl, spire upon spire reaching skyward like his starship; but, within, a strange image of a tortured and unmodified man affixed by spikes to a tree occupied the far wall, and a circle of barbs was on his head: I assume this was a memorial of some particularly sadistic execution Reyes had ordered, and he wished the memento to appall and cow his servants.

  This was not our first meeting, and in my brain, I knew that Reyes y Pastor was an Old Stock, unmodified Homo sapiens, and yet somehow in my hearts I was still surprised to see and smell him in his flesh, with facial hair and fingernails and toes upon his feet and a thousand other useless atavisms. It was like seeing a moving illustration from an antique living scroll step off the paper.

  And yet, no matter what alterations are made to our neural chemistry, his awkward and ancient body looked right to me, and my magnificent body looked wrong. But we all know that seeing beauty is a mere chemical flocculation in the brain, the release of neural colloids from suspension. Why could no change in neurochemistry change the image of man?

  He wore the scarlet robes and bore the shepherd’s crook of that most ancient coven called god-eaters, who worship a spirit called Anointed. But beneath this red mantle, what he wore was black as night and fine as silk, and it had fittings for helm and gauntlets, and I saw it was the garb of a star voyager, and so I fell at his feet.

  As I crouched, Reyes reached down a hand to me. On his right wrist he wore an amulet of metal the hue of blood that sucks at the witch-marks in his wrist, affixed to nerve and vein, and with this he speaks in unseen waves to what dwells on the dark side of the Moon.

  The Master bade me rise, saying, “I am but a servant of servants here. What you see before you, this flesh, is the least part of me. Far greater is my own Ghost, thought of my thought and soul of my soul, which occupies a flying star that hangs above the heavens here. When she is above the horizon, I am more than human; but when not, I am merely a tired old man of an extinct race.”

  I towered over him, an ape towering above a puny child. From the way he moved, the things toward which he turned his head, I saw once again how he was nearsighted, and his ears were duller and nose dimmer than mine. And yet he frightened me.

  “Do not speak!” he commanded gently. “I can anticipate your questions, beloved servant, and foresee your thoughts, and it will save time if I merely answer.”

  He stooped and pried a pebble from the floor, and held it up before my eyes. “Coral is one of the great building materials of the Hormagaunts. To escape the eternal twilight, thorns, and deadly fruit of the world-forest, there were certain Clades who had created or expanded atolls and islands here in the Philippines and Micronesia using coral. The eternal trees cannot take root here, and therefore I cannot gather intelligence as to the goings-on.

  “Would that I had watched this empty quarter of the world more closely! I saw the number of islands multiplying, and thought no ill of it. But these Insular Clades of the Pacific had long ago departed the One True Way, for they departed from the Wintermind and sought out the old psychological matrices of unmodified man. They married and raised their young without consuming them or selling them.

  “These Insulars have resurrected the long-dead filial relationships: they have uncles and aunts, cousins and clans, and they erected totems to their clanholds, flags and heraldries, special images and names as if their holds were living things—and emotional set from before the times of the Nymphs, a Chimera configuration called patriotism which long I sought to destroy utterly.

  “From clan totems to sacred idols is a small step. Worship, a emotional set of the Witches, was reborn, for the Insulars began to slaughter sacrifices and to burn incense and do the other things that those who hold this world is not the sole and final world are wont to do: and so the endless Darwinian wars of this world lost their fascination to them.

  “Being a rational and philosophically inclined people, the Insulars reversed the order of nature, where lower things by evolution leads to higher, and conceived that their many little gods and idols were avatars and descendants of a single and perfect one God—embracing an order not of nature. And this was the emotional set of the Giants, and of earlier orders, including my own. All the progress of history was undone. For they had learned kinship, kindness, patriotism, paternity, worship, and prayer.

  “Peace answered their prayers, and so they wax great and powerful, and revolutions in political economics, philosophy, and military sciences followed. Even the nature of man and his purpose in the world was questioned.

  “The repercussions over the last century spread across the globe, and reached even your home in Albion. All these recent wars and genocides are a seismic adjustment to the social forces set in motion by the nonconformist and divergent Clades of these Pacific Insulars.

  “Long years of statistical analysis crept by. Finally, I located the epicenter of the disturbance to the calculus of history: I know which island the Judge of Ages used to spread the new vector into the patterns of events. But I do not understand the math he used.

  “So I could not move against the divergents erenow. There is a machine at the core of the world that watches and studies all that I do on the surface as closely as I watch and study the doings of my Hormagaunts. But the machine cannot intuit patterns in events, and sees no patterns other than what it is programmed to look for.

  “By encouraging wars and assisting the horrors of war to mount ever higher, I have created sufficient confusion in the pattern of history—a white noise—that the world-core machine will not detect. It will not see, amid all the other statistical anomalies and onetime events that wars create, the anomaly of this, my raid, and the mysterious disappearances I now orchestrate.

  “On an island in my day called Yap, where once the natives carved immense wheels of calcite stone twelve feet in diameter to serve as their money, there is now a great and luxurious people living, groups of Clades not allergic to one another. The Yapese are fraternal and not identical twins, men of psychological unity which my control of history should long ago have led to self-destruction. From here has come the poets and philosophers and nonconformist Iatrocrats which disturb my schemes; from here issues the anomaly that outsmarts and overwhelms my countermaneuvers.

  “Indeed, I can be thwarted. Do not be surprised. I am the Master of this aeon, but there is one who meddles with my designs and defies my mastery.

  “There is a Hermeticist who betrayed my brethren, the other Hermeticists, and he opposes us all. Deep in his Tombs he slumbers, and we cannot destroy him with a strike from space. Such is he the simple people call the Judge of Ages.”

  (I knew then for the first time that he could not foresee my thoughts, for if he could have done, he would have killed me, before the spark of hope, fanned by winds of hate, erupted into wildfire in both my hearts.)

  “My age will not be judged by him,” Reyes continued, “will not be put to trial, not condemned! I will discover the mathematical system he used to break the way of life and the Wintermind disciplines I established. Somehow into the genes and memes, the biological and sociological information that controls civilization, the Judge of Ages introduced the Clade Codes, which allow for Avuncular Altruism, so that even remote relations sharing some genetic material will combine their survival strategies and adopt programs of mutually beneficial selflessness. The Clades were created long ago, and under such conditions as my vision of history was not interrupted; the
refore, I did not detect it. Buried within their genetic codes and mimetic patterns of behavior were recessive elements time eventually brought together, a ripple of many waves converging positively to re-enforce each other at Yap. Hah! And to think that I thought the development of a burg-dwelling class of cloned duplicates was a natural trend.

  “But here, in these islands, unwatched, the Darwinian process was halted, or reversed: I have even seen uncles caring for crippled and retarded Clade-cousins, and Hormagaunts dying naturally of old age, refusing to replace worn organs from the younger generations of their inferiors for reasons of mere sentiment.

  “Intolerable! Who will meet the Hyades at the End of Days when the star-monsters descend? Uncles burdened with love for cripples and idiots? Mothers with babe soaking at the breast? The widowed, the crippled, the poor and the weak? They will reproduce like conies, and outnumber and overwhelm the Enlightened, unless the social vectors involved are neutralized.

  “You and yours will forestall this dread future my mathematics foretells for me.

  “The first wave will descend upon Yap Island in the form of high-altitude microspore packages, condense and fall as rain, and spread a synchronized binary paralytic agent throughout the water table. Major organs and thought processes must be kept functioning, and a sufficient number of living subjects must be kept alive to allow us to reverse-engineer the social and genetic vectors the Judge of Ages introduced when he created his Clade Code.

  “The wider the baseline, the greater the chance of detecting the statistical pattern. Naturally, even the simplest simultaneous solution of a thousand-variable sum is beyond human capacity. It is beyond the capacity of my Dreagh, Expastor, who dwells in the wandering star.

  “No, the only machines capable of reverse engineering the math used to create the Clades are those that squat at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the Ghosts of the long-dead Cetaceans.

  “The Cetaceans were a race elevated not merely to human levels of intelligence, but beyond, to the superhuman, and they used the tools we gave them to create emulations of their own minds deep in the lightless abyss beneath the seas, acre upon acre of windowless domes of onyx and plinths of some diamond-hard material whose making we do not understand.

  “I have expended other amphibian servants over the years to approach the Ghosts of the dead race, and finally one survived, and through him, I have made a covenant with them, and secured a safe conduct for you. I have designed for you a tripartite body able to adjust in its metamorphoses to ever deeper ranges of the sea, from bathypelagic, where no light reaches and black fish swim, and the only light is from the creatures themselves, to abyssopelagic, where no light nor heat is found, and even whales dare not dive, to the hadalpelagic at the bottom of chasms, where the pressure is eight tons per square inch, and boneless starfish and tube worms crawl.

  “You will be the first of many conductors. Your task is to draw the Yap islanders down to the bottom of the trench in special vessels I will give you. There the Yapese will be given, still alive, to the intellects of long-dead whales and superwhales and dolphins and superdolphins.

  “The entire subsea structure of the Yap Islands will be destroyed, and the sea will eat the islands and destroy all evidence of our doings here.

  “Now go. Assemble your squads; select them by the usual gladiatorial method.”

  The year in which these events took place was 7385 by the reckoning Reyes y Pastor used to count the years, the Years of his Lord.

  Blind luck was with us. The hundred things that should have marred the operation instead fell out as the Red Hermeticist desired. Burg after burg of the richest polity on the planet was taken, all intact, and fortresses, libraries, fields, growth cells, plantations, cloning stations, watchtowers; and no word, no electric signals, not even a messenger bee escaped to tell the tale.

  Of the ten thousand grisly deeds I did I will not speak, except to say I seem still to hear the screams and pleas, some wild, and some calm with the dignity only those about to die can muster, still ringing in my ears. Victims and their children I dragged all of that first group into the cells, and then the next and next without number, their limbs unable to move, packed into the nutrient fluid which filled their lungs and veins. Then the islands sank and the flood came, and it was a slow disaster, and through the membrane of the cells, the helpless thousands could see the tides rolling higher and higher, inch by inch, over their land. And then the waters rolled over their heads, and the light of day was gone.

  Below, we crammed into sardonic vessels all the paralytics, frozen like flies in amber, and they sank into darker and darker places. Down into eternal gloom, where freakish fish like skeletal nightmares of teeth and huge blind eyes, glowing like specters from their own luminescence, seeing never any light but their own, down the roots of the deepest trenches of the sea, under one thousand atmospheres of pressure they were taken. Of the ghosts in the windowless domes at the bottom of the abyss, sightless domes that rise through the freezing water above fields of black sand and boiling vents of sulfur, I am the only living thing to have seen, and survived to tell. Of their blind songs and the horror of what has never been human—of all this I will not speak. Three thousands of years have passed, and all my crimes are long forgotten, save by me.

  I served him well, Reyes y Pastor, and sabotaged the efforts of others who served him, and I flattered and fawned and lied, so that he was pleased with me, and he thought I loved him when my only feeling for him was absolute terror.

  But my deception prevailed, and I alone was spared when many hundreds of his men, serfs, and loyal servants were slaughtered to keep the atrocity of Yap Island secret from all recorded history.

  Do you see now why I will aid the Judge of Ages, and why I did not tell the Blue lordlings of my moot with Pastor? No man, unless he were a Hormagaunt in truth, could hear of such enormities and not vow eternal war against the Master of the World, or whichever of his Hermetic vassals presently wears in his name his iron crown.

  5. Madness

  I know the fate of Master of Fate: in the Year of his Lord 7466, Reyes y Pastor went mad.

  Still in his household, I served, and I saw it all. Reyes began talking about a king in outer space who has a child but no wife, and Father Reyes was urging but not ordering his servitors and slaves to serve this king.

  Reyes then enacted a strange make-believe type of glandular donation, but using bread instead of real glands from real children, wine instead of real blood. But he insisted that these are the proper mechanisms for producing the biochemical change into a new organism, which he called a glorified body.

  Within the next few years, some of the other Hormagaunts were given an office as “Shepherds”—even though there were no sheep—and were called “Father” as Father Reyes was—even though they sired no sons.

  The Fathers not only spread this imaginary biochemical change, but some also wandered the newly treeless lands, telling Iatrocrats that to kill and consume children was forbidden, telling the Clades to welcome the stranger and the sojourner, telling Donors to obey their masters in all things, but to disobey when ordered to cease to serve the imaginary space king, and to rejoice in the death that this disobedience would provoke.

  The Old True Way was openly defied, and this new way, this thing for which we had no name, spread from the Pacific Islands through Indonesia to Indochina through Angkor to Tabrobane. It sounded like the Nymph-talk, but it was a nonsexual form of sex, a nonhomosexual nonincestuous form of brother-love: indeed, in its name, some of the Clades forswore reproduction altogether and became eremites, living in isolation and begging the king in outer space to forgive the crimes of the world.

  Others of the Clade-folk took one and only one mate, freeing their harems and studs, and they claimed their flesh was one, but they did not consume each other or make the flesh to be one. Nor did they mate only in the mating times and seasons, but for lifelong. Bowers of blooming flowers they grew to solemnize and celebrate this wonder, even th
ough it was nothing but reproduction using sexual organs to exchange fluid, rather than the more dignified and hygienic pods and matrices. They used the old instruments of long-vanished Witches to compose songs about this, called Epithalamia, and the songs were very fair to the ear, so that even Hormagaunts would weep to hear. It was insanity, and did not serve the progress of the race toward posthumanity, but it was a beautiful insanity.

  Reyes y Pastor called himself the Master of the World, and Lord of History. Who could have stopped him and his madness? But one did. The real Master of the World sent another down from the darkness of heaven, from the morning star, your ship.

  Sudden war and horror came, so swift and so complete that no mortal could have compassed it, only a posthuman. First, the foe raised a storm. How you posthumans can command the weather, I do not understand, but I saw it.

  During this typhoon, Medusae dropped down suddenly from the night sky in many vessels as silver as fish and swifter than hawks. From these vessels, tendrils like the arms of Scylla reached down and plucked up and tore asunder all the Hormagaunts, Donors, and Clades found in the open.

  All who served the make-believe king of space were slain by the real space lord, the Master of the World. Up from the sea, their approach hidden by the tidal wave, came Hormagaunts from Annam, offended at those who spoke against the One True Way. And there were diverse earthquakes in many places, wherever a rainbow of light reached down from outer space and touched the bottom of the sea.

  Then one descended from the vehicle of the Medusae dressed as an Hermeticist, in the black silks of a starfarer. He had two tendrils made of biometallic gold issuing from his skull above his eyes. I did not know what it was I saw, but the coming years revealed what it was: This was the first of the Locusts. The time of the Red Hermeticist was done; the time of the Locust Hermeticist was come.