And now Daae smiled, which he had never done before, and gripped Menelaus by the shoulder.
“Beta-Corporal!” The voice of Daae rang out, “I fear I can offer you no increase in pay, since the only wages that issue from my hand, in this cold, strange world of this lost and far-hither year, shall be wounds and toil and cries of pain, and then victory for the living, and the honor for the dead of being buried as free men, by the hands of free comrades: but liberty both for living and dead.”
Even Yuen was grinning.
Menelaus was both surprised and moved. “Sir! I expect no better wage.”
Mickey the Witch threw his hat in the air and clapped his big hands, hooting and whistling his congratulations and calling down blessing from his many gods.
Daae said, “We shall establish the ambush in the pass yonder. You will command a unit on the far side of the pass, and I on this side, so we take their column from either direction. Once the Blue Men realize that Larz Quire cannot open the fourth door, and return and climb the switchback, we shall fall upon them—”
Menelaus was shocked. “Sir! With all due respect, my plan to assault the wire and win the hospital, free the prisoners there, and secure the airfield allows us to face less formidable odds!”
Daae said, “It is far more important that we get underground as soon as possible. You see, we found something dreadful. The gray twins discovered it—”
At that moment there was a sharp whistle from the trees not far away. A Beta-ranked maiden of the Chimera race, a girl named Vulpina, stepped from the trees and waved a warning. Before any other word was said, the Chimerae on the hilltop scattered. The Witches were slower, but they began moving rapidly down the slope of the bowl-shaped hill, trying to keep the crest between themselves and Illiance, who was approaching at a rapid trot with a squad of dog things.
Menelaus had to decide between running after Daae, to hear the rest of his comment, or running after Mickey. He chose Mickey.
But the huge man waved him off. “You stay while we flee. The Blues still trust you. But they must not see men of the different eras gathering!”
Menelaus said, “It is only one squad. Let’s stand and fight. You cannot get away. You’re too fat.”
Mickey uttered a belly laugh. “You forget I studied the Lore to the Twelfth Degree. I gained this weight to attract the gluttony of the anthropophages of the stepped pyramids of Appalachia, so that other members of my coven, the thinner ones, would be overlooked. When the dogs and manhunters of my day came to the village on the dark moon nights and feast days, I was the one the packs followed into the swamps and bogs, and I was the one who emerged at dawn, with the severed tails of the hunting hounds tied into my hair as trophies, and the severed hands of the huntsmen. Besides, the Witches were a dying race when I was born, and with the Chimerae driving us out of the lowlands and into the hills, the old strictures against biomodification carried less weight. Or in my case, carried more. Watch this.”
And he sped away like a jackrabbit, leaving impossibly light footprints in the snow, his conical hat, dangling by its chin strap, flopping energetically down his back, his black robes and scarlet chasuble flapping like wings. He used his charming wand as a pole-vaulter’s pole and threw himself across a line of holly brush, and for a moment look like a black, silken, and highly ornamented blimp.
Menelaus was still standing and staring when Illiance stepped silently up next to him. “Lance-Corporal Beta Sterling Anubis, if you should happen to accompany me, there is a relict who bears questioning on a matter of some import. It would be advantageous to come as quickly as possible. Several vectors of events are reaching a convergence.”
The dog things pelted past, noses to the ground, snuffing for scent. Menelaus saw a trio of them congregate near the line of holly, but then circle in confusion and frustration. One of them sat on his haunches, waved his cutlass angrily in the air, put back his muzzle, and howled.
12
The Testament of Ctesibius the Savant
1. The Rook
Menelaus walked alongside Illiance, looking like a tall adult in a robe and hood of metallic cloth next to a bald child in a richly ornamented coat, and he realized what an odd sight they would have seemed to any man from any earlier era.
Menelaus noted that only one of the two hemicylindrical gun emplacements at the wire was being manned by dogs at the moment. An eerie silence hung over the little village of seashells, and no figures could be glimpsed moving among them.
He followed Illiance into the large blue nautilus shell, and up the smaller curving ramp into a space that was even narrower than the chambers he had seen before, very near the topmost part of the spiral tower. They were alone, unaccompanied by any dog things.
Menelaus spoke: “Who are we interviewing now? And why is it so important that you and I are doing it alone, while the others are off preparing for the fabulous Larz and his fabulous assault on the Tomb doors?”
“Two relicts remain, both from the very earliest stratum of history, perhaps from the days before the Ecpyrosis. Their answers will either increase or diminish the confidence extended to the testament of Kine Larz of the Gutter. I have my reservations about placing too much trust in Kine Larz.”
“No kidding,” said Menelaus sardonically.
Illiance said, “But it cannot have escaped your attention that all the revenants here gathered in this site have some connection with the figure of the Judge of Ages, and that none of the relicts thawed so far are Tomb Guardians. Why the Tomb Guardians, whoever they are, decided to group all slumberers with this connection in one spot is unknown. Yet this lends indirect support to what Larz says.”
“How so?”
“If those who slumber here were gathered because each has a connection with the Judge of Ages, the pattern is not contradicted that one of them, Kine Larz, would be able to describe his look and costume.”
“Yup. You just look for a guy in a long red robe and a longer white wig, and I am sure that will be Hizzoner his own self. Why did Ull tell you y’all were looking for him? What is his bogus cover story, again, exactly?”
“Your question cannot at this time preoccupy us.” Illiance said apologetically, “For us, but two questions more urgently claim our attention. First, we do not understand the meaning of the Judgments of the Judge of Ages. Why does he destroy some periods of history while leaving others intact? Second, we do not understand the meaning of this so-called chess game of evolution that seems to be going on between the Judge of Ages and the Hermeticists. It is a violent game, in which anything from the murder of specific individuals up to the destruction of whole civilizations—or even races—are merely moves in it. The Tombs are part of it.”
“You think this Tomb is a chessman in that game, like a castle? What about the theory that this Judge of Ages built the Tombs merely to have a place to lay his head? He sleeps in the cold ground while he waits for the human race to get advanced enough to build another starship, so he can go seek his wife. That is what the legend says.”
Illiance nodded thoughtfully. “The legends could have been started or encouraged by a deliberate manipulation of the statistical tendencies of history. And, also, it is possible that the Tombs were built for more purposes than one. A posthuman mind might foresee more goals than humans know. The idea that the entire worldwide system of Tombs was designed and built and maintained over millennia and aeons merely as part of a very long-term strategy enacted by the Judge of Ages against the Master of the World is strangely compelling.”
“Sure, the strategy of a man who wants to be left alone.”
“It is odd indeed that this site alone had armor breached so severely yet so neatly.”
“Are you implying that you found this site like this? Here I thought you folks ripped the roof off.”
Illiance spread his hands. “Do you see in our camp here the heavy machinery of the type needed to cut a hilltop peak in half or pull up a layer of carbon nanotube-fiber reinforced titanium alloy r
oof armor three yards thick? This was a man-made attack: our investigation of the trace energies left behind indicate a lased magnetic monopole beam reached down from Mare Cognitum’s Riphaeus Mountains on the Moon and introduced a potent upward vector to rip the armor upward. The assault at that range, two hundred thirty-eight thousand miles, would be beyond any conceivable retaliation of the Tomb defenses. The beam crossed one and one half light-seconds of distance, and would have been diffracted sharply when it entered the atmosphere: the calculation processing power needed for so delicate an operation over such a distance indicates superhuman intelligence. But you look skeptical.”
“No, that is just the natural cast of my features. It seems a really … odd … way to break in. So who cracked open the Tombs?”
“The superhuman intelligence to which I refer,” said Illiance, “is that of the Hermeticists. Kine Larz claims to have seen one: this suggests they are not mythical beings or, to be precise, that such myths as we know may have accumulated over millennia around a kernel of literal fact.”
Menelaus stared down at the little Blue Man. He reached out his hand as if he were about to take the other by the shoulder, but he did not actually touch the other man. “Illiance! If what you just said is the case, then the Hermeticists are the ones who broke open the Tomb armor, yet did not appear here to exploit the opening. Doesn’t that make what you and your blue buddies are doing here a little suspicious? Do you know who you are working for? Who arranged you to come here? Don’t give me guesswork. Do you know?”
Illiance showed no change to his tranquil expression, but his footsteps slowed, and he stopped walking.
Menelaus said, “Illiance, if what you just said is so, not only are you in grave danger, but you have also placed your dog things and everyone you dug up in danger. There are two posthuman enemies running around the blind corridors of history like titans, not caring what cities and empires and aeons they step on, one of them buried under the Earth’s mantle, and the other one hidden on the dark side of the moon, and they mean to destroy each other. If this Tomb site is part of that war, you are meddling in that war. You are stepping between two duelists about to shoot. Which side are you going to be on?”
“Such a decision would not be convoluted: Simple Men act primarily, as do all living organisms, toward our own self-preservation and toward the promulgation of the ideals and thought-structures of our mental environment. But this must be determined when convenient.”
Illiance gestured to an oval opening in the seashell substance ahead. “The first of the two relicts occupies the uppermost chamber, which we shall see first, and then we will return here.”
Menelaus glanced inside the oval opening as they passed. He saw a bald blue figure seated facing away from the opening on a spread of gem-dotted blue fabric, which seemed to be one of the coats unfolded to use as a rug. The figure was bent over several medical appliances and a reading machine, which were connected by a nest of cables to a coffin, angrily lit with little red lights. The sight was disquieting, horrible, though he could not consciously say why. There was no other prisoner in evidence.
Their footsteps carried them past and up the slope.
2. Ghost Death
“The first of the two relicts is from A.D. 2525. He has a very complete, if very crude system of interface and interactive neural systems, much like a Locust, but no receptors. We can download what he thinks, but cannot upload to him queries to impel him to think on the topics of our interest.”
The corridor narrowed and the ramp of the floor grew more steep, and led through a sharp twist up to a small and final chamber very near the tip of the spiral tower.
Light here came from an oval opening high on the wall. Gray clouds and drifting snow were visible. It was cold. There was bioluminous fungi streaking the walls, but it was thin and patchy near the window, as if the fungi fared poorly in the cold. Heat came from an unadorned ivory bowl of black liquid resting on the floor. The inky liquid was motionless, not bubbling, but it nonetheless radiated a scalding warmth that robbed the air of moisture and scent.
Seated on a mat on the floor was Ctesibius the Savant, and the aura of his dignity seemed to fill the air even as the odorless heat of the black bowl. The bowl of hot black liquid was to one side of him, and a bowl of artificial peaches (Menelaus recognized them as grown from the half-dismantled coffins in the mess tent) was perched on a handful of snow in a matching bowl to the other side of him.
His clothing had been returned to him. The grotesque piercings of his skull were covered by a film of antiseptic cloth, covered in turn with a long white wig of curls that looked ridiculously like ones those courtiers in English courts in olden times were wont to wear, and, later, only justices in courts of law. He wore silk vestments of a striking green, the color the symbolized eternal life, trimmed with gold, to symbolize machine life. On his upper right breast and lower left skirt was the same emblem tattooed on his brow, the sign of three diamonds, to indicate his three donations, his three souls, which he had deposited by apotheosis into the infosphere.
Menelaus looked left and right. He said in Iatric, “No dogs? No bars on the window?”
Illiance said, “The relict seems to have little motive to attempt flight. We have attempted to speak through the talking boxes, to establish the offer of allowing him to download a version of his mind and memories into our local infosphere—we have more than enough capacity. It was our belief that this was the purpose of this profession and order of being, called the Savants. We thought by this to bind his self-interest to our own: but he remains aloof. I have told you the one question we seek—if he knows the Judge of Ages, and the meaning of his Judgments against the various ages he destroyed.”
Menelaus stepped forward and offered the seated Ctesibius the stiff-armed salute of a Chimera. Ctesibius the Savant nodded regally and said in early-period Anglatino, “The Hospitalier. Space Captain Sterling, named after a jackal who guards Tombs and a god who slays those who violate the guest laws. Are you here to observe my shame? I release you from your oath to guard my coffin and protect my life: if you have a knife or pistol, hand it me, that I might depart this life honorably.”
Menelaus was surprised at this speech. “What have they done?”
“Mind-rape. You do not know the term? To donate one’s memories is to glorify the soul and make it electronically immortal. It is an exact copy of one’s most inner self, every memory clear and dim, every triumph, every sin. These cretinous little blue-skinned Interactors forced a donation from me, and now a copy of my soul is lost somewhere without me in their infosphere. They are examining it while we speak, hoping to elicit from him the information by trick they cannot elicit by force.”
Menelaus said, “If I get them to shut down the emulation copy of you, would that make you happier?”
“To have him murdered? Then I must add another diamond to my heraldry, a black one, to show a failed donation. You think the shame is not greater? Do they now seek to please me?”
“Sure.”
“Do not say ‘sure.’ Address me as Donator Ctesibius.”
“Of course, Donator Ctesibius.”
“This alone would please me: that that time-honored penalty for mind-rape be accomplished upon all who performed, or failed to hinder, the deed: Our custom is to inject the perpetrator with fluids that separately stimulate the pain response from every nerve in the body, while dissolving the cortex one cell at a time. It is timed to lobotomize the perpetrator so he loses one degree of intelligence once a day for a hundred days or so, eventually becomes subhuman, but kept alive, screaming, in a glass cage in the public forum as a sign to passersby. To see this execution performed, and then to take my life in solemn suicide, this would please me.”
Menelaus said, “I don’t think I can arrange that. What about staying alive long enough just to see them shot?”
Ctesibius said, “When would the opportunity arise? But tell me nothing! They have an active copy of my soul in their hands.”
>
“The Judge of Ages is supposed to have xypotechnology of some sort in his lower Tombs: maybe he could find memory space for your copy. He does not much cotton to Xypotech emulations, but since the crime was done on his watch, in his yard, he will have to make an exception.”
Ctesibius said, “You speak as if you are not his servant.”
Menelaus turned to Illiance and said in Iatric, “Do you have a copy of Ctesibius the Savant that you downloaded from his nervous system?”
Illiance looked mournful. “Not as such. The copy was made with certain interleaf errors and memory compression distortions. It is mostly self-aware, but has degenerated into a psychotic strange-loop condition. It seems to be in considerable anguish. Certain of the nuances of the art of Savantry were evidently lost in the process of time: it is not our area of specialization. Preceptor Yndech did the work.”
“Ah. Tell Yndech that the Judge of Ages is going to kill him. You understand you are not supposed to do things like this, right?”
Illiance waved the question aside. “Events will unfold in our favor. Have you yet inquired of him? The emulation copy does not show clear reaction to bring forth the information we seek.”
“Hold it. You’re keeping the emulation online even as we speak? You are flushing it, even though it is wounded and psycho, with additional data streams coming from the Savant’s head?”
Illiance was blithe. “It is of no matter. We have introduced a time-nonbinding interrupt, so the mind does not remember the excruciation at any given moment of the previous moment. No pain is built up to a psychologically damaging level, and we are still able to discern surface thoughts.”
“Listen: I can get Ctesibius to talk, but you have to get the hell out of his mind, and stop looking at his thoughts, or his copy’s thoughts, whatever you are doing. Got it? He has been fooled into thinking I am a Knight from the mythical Hospitalier Order that the mythical Judge of Ages uses to guard his Tombs. So all I have to do is reassure him. Can you put his copy on standby, or put it to sleep, without killing it? It was not possible in his day and age to switch emulations into a standby mode without killing the information and killing them.”
The Hermetic Millennia Page 41