The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  “You must regard them with deep love, to entrust your secrets and your soul to such men. I will adore them likewise for your sake.”

  “It’s partly trust and partly desperation. If I don’t stop the Blue Men from their digging, they will break into a lower level and find my gene-traces, which are all over the place. Also, I think I left my pot of Texas nine-alarm chili on the stove, and I know that’s got traces in it, because I always put back whatever I don’t eat up from my bowl.”

  Her nose wrinkled. “Unsanitary!”

  “You kidding? I come from the Plague Years. I have so much antibiotic crap in my bloodstream that food gets less buggy when I spits on it.”

  “So if the blue eunuchs find your disgusting stew-bowl, what does this mean?”

  “It means I am royally screwed up my Mary-pucker with an industrial-strength heavy-torque screwdriver.”

  “Ah! Congratulations!”

  “No, in my language, that phrase means that I am, uh, disadvantaged ignominiously.”

  “Your translation is awry! That phrase refers to anal copulation, which is a cherished and sacred form of the arts of pleasure.”

  “That’s what I like about you Nymphs. Always looking on the bright side. Well, sister, there ain’t no bright side here. If you fail, I am just royally—” He cleared his throat. “—disadvantaged.”

  “You are posthuman. Surely you are above the blue eunuchs, and all their petty devisings.”

  Menelaus said, “Don’t overestimate me. A genius who is thrown out of his bedroom window and down the street while blissfully a-snooze and wakes up to find his house surrounded and besieged by armed idiots is still locked out of his house. It is not the Blue Men, but whoever or whatever is behind them, that I fear.”

  “You fear the Master of the World.”

  Menelaus looked at her in surprise. “The Nymphs aren’t known for knowing about the past. I suppose your hubby told you all about him?”

  “Even had he not, I would have known. For this is not a thing of the past. It has been, and now is, and shall be. You and the Master quarreled at the dawn of time over the Swan Princess. By lottery, you divided the world between you. The dying machines as Ghosts go to the Moon to be with him; the dying men go to you beneath the ground as ice. Some say there is a power in the sea vassal to neither of you, where the dying whales go.”

  Menelaus smiled. “That’s not as inaccurate as some things I heard.”

  “I do not understand why, if he is on the dark side of the Moon, with his Ghosts and unclear spirits and machines, why has he not unleashed one of those old, dread weapons the Unnaturals use? He could lay waste to any land where he suspected you might pass.”

  “He wants to kill me himself, up close. Blackie and I are in the middle of a duel. Damn tower fell on us halfway through. I feel I was winning. It’s his damn fault I’m here and not in space where I should be.”

  Oenoe was looking at his face carefully. “You are very lonely, because the only other female of your species in existence is in the White Ship, and the bent eternity of Lorenz transformation, light-years and years, stands between you and your beloved.”

  “Thanks. I try to keep busy, and from time to time I wake up and shoot people, and I have my hobbies, but there is no one to talk to on this damned dumb world.” He tried to say it lightly, as a joke, but he raised his hand to his face to wipe his eyes.

  Her expression was one of wonder. “You weep! One would suppose a superior being would have control of all emotions?”

  “Nope. The smarter you are, the worse it hurts when everything does not fit into its proper pattern. If anything, my emotions are worse than they used to be. I remember back when everything was not so painfully, blindingly, piercingly crystal clear. All that happened when I evolved up is that my emotions evolved up too. And this would make even the Mother of Jesus cry, ’cause if I mess up, not only is the whole human future flung overboard, but I lose my wife who is counting on me.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “Were I a cautious maid, I would flee now and throw myself upon the cold mercy of the blue eunuchs. You know we have no chance for success.”

  He snorted. “What made you leave caution behind?”

  “My husband is a prisoner here somewhere in the camp, or elsewhere, just as your wife is a prisoner of eternities and stars. So I am as you are.”

  “What, crazy? Soorm thinks I am.”

  “He is too rational a creature, for he was instructed by a Jesuit, was he not? You are lovesick and helpless in your lovesickness. It is only in such things Nymphs trust, things of the maddened heart beyond all control. We do not believe in reason.”

  “You are a strange creature.”

  She inclined her head. “I could say the same of you.”

  Soorm, by that time, had returned, and now was waving a webbed hand.

  Oenoe stood on tiptoe and made as if to kiss Menelaus, but he backed up and held up his left hand. There was a gold ring on his third finger.

  He pointed at it with a finger. “I’m married. Married. That word means something to you. I thought Sir Guy had you baptized and such, Mrs. Von Hompesch?”

  She pouted. “I meant only to share the kiss of peace.”

  “I’ll give you the handshake of wary and temporary cease-fire.”

  Oenoe stepped too close to him. Her hand was small and delicate and warm, and so gentle in its touch when they shook hands, that it was as intimate as a kiss, and his fingers tingled.

  She turned, and climbed slowly and carefully down the cliffside, her green robes billowing around her, shedding white petals.

  7. Extremely Low Frequency

  It was twenty minutes later when Menelaus sensed, through his implants, an electronic whisper and a flicker of bioelectromagnetic energy leap from tree to tree.

  He put his hand on the nearest trunk, wishing he had a clearer connection. The tent material he wore had broadcast-receiver beads woven through the fabric, nothing on the correct frequency, but he was able to program in a mutual interference between the bead distances to set up a resonance effect that acted, crudely, like a step-down antenna for his implants. The geometry of it required him to stick stiffened triangles of his cloak left and right, above and below, and the jury-rig was so delicate that shifting his weight, or having the leaves toss in the breeze, created static interference. He had to stand on one leg with one arm overhead.

  “Nobody had better put this into the legends they make up about me.” He grimaced.

  But then eventually he got a signal channel. It was Oenoe.—MY LOINS ACHE FOR YOU COMMA BELOVED AND ADORED COMMA AND I CARESS WITH LOVING FINGERS THE KEYPOINTS OF THE INPUT BOARD STOP—she typed out.

  He found he could flick his implants off and on by grinding his teeth. The simplified brain woven into the strands of the tent material was able to turn the binary code into a Nymph symbol format. The trees could understand that format, and transmit through their roots to her mantilla. Oenoe’s mantilla was connected to the board she had discovered in the radio shack.

  —STOP WITH THE DIRTY TALK STOP BE BRIEF STOP AND STOP MAKING ME SAY STOP STOP—he sent back.

  To his surprise (and relief) the next message was just a description of the chamber she and Soorm had found, and the condition of the equipment. Soorm was able to sense some of the biotechnological circuits buried in the walls through his Sach’s organ, which was the weaker of his three electrocyte organs, ten volts, and able to throw the main switch in the chamber using his Main and Hunter’s organs, six hundred volts. At that point, the circuits on their own made contact with their emergency failover power cells, and the radio had power.

  Menelaus walked Oenoe through the maintenance procedure step by step. Both she and Soorm came from ages with very advanced biotechnology, but very poor in metals, and they were not used to dealing with the nuts-and-bolts technology of dead metal and live copper wires Menelaus preferred. He did not even use fiber optics, since the material for him was harder to work and replac
e. Copper he could work with in a smithy. (And of course, whether the crust of the Earth was depleted of lodes of metals made no difference to him, since the depthtrains reached to the outer core.)

  Then, very carefully, he had her power up the antenna, and listen first on the terahertz imaging frequency; then on the bands set aside, in his day, for amateur radio, wireless microwave signals, television, FM, shortwave, and AM and geophysical monitors.

  No one was broadcasting. Dead air.

  Impossible. Even had mankind retreated into a totally nonmetallic biotechnological phase, as they had with the Nymphs, there would still be organized signal traffic from the trees. Even the Sylphs, who had the most restrictive regime of technophobic radio silence in history, still produced detectable engine pulses from the automated factories on land, and energy residue from the high-energy vehicles in the air. There would be something out there!

  Menelaus wanted to pound his head against the tree in frustration but he dared not move, lest he lose the contact with Oenoe in the radio shack.

  Could Pellucid be correct? Was the human race simply … gone? Menelaus did not for a moment believe it.

  Like stepping barefoot on a thorn, a doubt stuck him, and made him unsteady.

  Why was Menelaus so sure? Could Mickey the Witch be correct? Was the conviction that Ximen del Azarchel still lived, and was still arranging every setback and sinister development in human history, no more than a lucky rabbit’s foot?

  He said to himself that Ximen del Azarchel was too intelligent and too careful to let himself get killed by a big rock falling from space. He tried to stand on that conviction, to put his weight on the perfect certainty that Blackie is too damn smart—but the thorn was only driven deeper.

  He answered himself with a sly, sarcastic thought: Oh, really? Just like the Judge of Ages is too damn smart to be locked outside his own Tomb system, eh? Behold! The great and powerful Posthuman of Oz, standing on one leg in the cold, with his arms outstretched, unable to reach his endless arsenal of tools and weapons and Xypotech serfs and biotech labs and bottomless treasures. What, you dropped your keys down a storm drain or something? And didn’t you misplace your wife somewheres, one of these many, many years past?

  If that is how smart you are, what makes Blackie too smart to be wiped out by a dinosaur-killer asteroid? A mountain in space as wide as the island of Zanzibar fell down and pasted everything in the damn hemisphere, and lit up the other half like a Yule log covered in whiskey. What was he supposed to be able to do, push it aside with his brain waves? Be somewhere else when it hit? He was not in your Tomb system; you have too much set up to keep him out. If he was on Earth, and the disaster happened faster than he could prep a ship and find the right launch window, then he was burnt like a straw man stuffed with firecrackers tossed on the Independence Day bonfire.

  Just because you are smarter than a man, does not mean you are not stupid, pal.

  He hated losing arguments to himself, but all he could think of to say to himself was that people who talked to themselves too much were in danger of losing their minds.

  “Well, I’ve lost my mind before, and it don’t look as it’s done me much harm,” he said. Then he wondered whom he was talking to.

  There had to be a human civilization still alive, somewhere. Del Azarchel would not, could not have allowed man to fall below a pre-Marconi level of technology. There were only five hundred years left before the End of Days. That meant that somewhere, large-scale information technologies still operated, global scale or larger. The information libraries had to be considerably larger than they had been in Menelaus’ day, or else, even doubling yearly in size, they could not possibly match the Hyades when they came.

  He had to make one more try to find the current civilization, the Advocacy or World Empire or whatever it was that was running this aeon.

  Montrose sighed. The dogs were not punctilious about blowing reveille at the exact same minute each day. He would have preferred to do the radio check in the middle of the night, but dawn was the best time for certain ionosphere conditions, and the heavyside layer was halfway between its closer nighttime position and its farther position once sunlight expanded the atmosphere with incoming heat. He was not sure whether he had time to have Soorm and Oenoe perform one more check, not and swim out again, and make it back to the tents. But even he could not predict when the dogs would blow the horn. It was just a guess.

  He guessed to have Soorm and Oenoe try one more thing. He ground out the message on his teeth, letter by letter.

  To check in the extremely low frequencies in the 3- to 30-megahertz band, the main antenna was not used, but instead this “antenna” was actually leads drilled into the ground, which used the entire Earth as the antenna. In an atmosphere, waves on that low of a band were refracted so sharply that they followed the curve of the Earth and could, despite its electrical conductivity, penetrate seawater.

  It was not totally passive, but the chance that someone could detect his carrier wave, he assumed, was nil.

  WE DELIGHT TO RECEIVE A BROADCAST STOP—she typed.

  YES AS SOON AS SOMEONE IS ON AIR STOP WHICH BAND QUESTION—he replied.

  THAT SOON IS NOW SOON STOP ELF STOP—she sent.

  IF YOU ARE PULLING MY LEG STOP PLEASE STOP STOP—he replied, wondering if he needed the second stop in that sentence.

  The idea that the ELF band would be active was hard to believe. Naturally occurring waves on those extremely low frequencies were present on Earth, resonating between the ionosphere and surface. Montrose had been hoping to pick up a carrier wave from another Tomb station. The idea that a civilization still recovering from a recent asteroid strike would use this, rather than the more useful AM, shortwave, FM, or microwave bands was hard to believe.

  LAST MESSAGE UNCLEAR STOP AM GRAFTING MESSAGE STOP—she typed.

  He was not sure what she meant by grafting until the tree under his hand began to throb with additional energies. It was Monument emulation code. Since all human information systems, whether grown from trees or woven into cloth or cyborged into human nerve endings were based on Monument code basics, it was actually easier to send a cross-platform data packet from radio shack board to Nymph mantilla, tree-and-root network to Blue Man tent material to pre-Sylph-era implants using the raw Monument code than it would have been using either English keystroke hexadecimals, Nymphsong enzyme notes, or Intertextual machine dots, or Merikan internal biofed-signs. Due to the particular and unique structure of his brain, the implants could send a signal directly into his auditory nerve in the squawk-language of the Savants, which a trained subsection of his visual cortex could turn into the image of a ninety-mile-wide two-dimensional surface covered with Monument glyphs.

  This was what the ELF antennae had just picked up, and Oenoe, unable to translate it, sent it along to him through the tree network.

  His message back to Oenoe—SOMEONE HEARD OUR CARRIER WAVE STOP STOP BROADCASTING STOP

  Her reply—WHAT MESSAGE QUESTION

  His—NO WORDS JUST TIME DATE AND COORDINATES STOP THEY ARE COMING HERE STOP

  Hers—WHEN QUESTION

  His—THIRTY HOURS STOP

  Hers—WHO QUESTION

  But for that, he had no answer to give her.

  In his mind’s eye, he could see the acre-sized hieroglyph made of recursively interlocking Mandlebrot hieroglyphs: and he realized with a shock that this was not a segment of the Monument, neither of the deciphered part nor the undeciphered. This meant it was a new composition.

  Back during the Second Space Age, when the Monument had first been discovered and photographed by the unmanned interstellar vessel NTL Croesus, a mathematician named Chandrapur had published a monograph on the degree of information embedded in the Monument writing system. Each glyph was composed of smaller subglyphs and also formed part of a larger superglyph, so that the disquiparant relationships between the microscopic and macroscopic also contained additional information. Dr. Chandrapur estimated the machine calcu
lation time needed to formulate a single square inch of glyph material, and the numbers were astronomical. To fill one acre, much less a small moon, was a feat computers as large as planets working for tens of thousands of years could not accomplish.

  Menelaus looked carefully in his mind’s eye at the immense logoglyph. Assuming it was not a new composition, but merely the normal method of taking parts from here and there and stringing them together without concern for any higher-order resonance or double meanings, there should be a detectable pattern relating some sections here to what Montrose had memorized of the Monument surface. Many minutes passed while he went through pattern after pattern. There was no resemblance.

  The Monument code, by any account, was the most awkward and longwinded system of communication imaginable. The way they wrote the number equaling 4,294,967,296 was not to write 232 but instead was to make four billion little strokes around the edge of a logarithmic spiral: and then to repeat the number in multiple different locations embedded within the first in certain mathematically significant patterns, so as to hint that it was deliberate communication and not an unintentional pattern caused by coincidence. It took more than one acre to say something as simple as a time and place of a rendezvous.

  But who had sent it? He concentrated, the image becoming clearer and clearer to him until the trees around him almost seemed not to be there. His head began to throb in time with this heartbeat.

  There was a danger inherent in becoming too fascinated with a problem. His posthuman brain structure was flexible enough that it could turn more and more of its capacity to bear on one issue, and hence lose track of more and more things. It did not seem fair that smarter people, in some ways, were more easily to befuddle than simpler people. But there was, of course, a reason why Einstein was absentminded.

  There were four separate human mathematical systems, like pidgin languages, made partly of human math and partly of Monument formalities, that various ages in history had devised. Menelaus could think of no reason for using a new composition method to write a new message from scratch, unless …