The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  “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.

  2. The Notes

  Menelaus could use his implants to copy the data directly into his cortex. Menelaus paused when he saw the ownership line: Rada Lwa had been a servant in the Cryonarchy before Menelaus had robbed them of their political power. After the fall of the Cryonarchy, he severed his connection to the Montrose Clan and sought out their enemies, the Hermetic Order.

  Nothing else in the library was of any particular interest to Menelaus except the notebooks on mathematics, which were extensive.

  It seemed that De Ulloa had been teaching Rada Lwa Cliometry, and had taken a section from Del Azarchel’s predictions for the forty-fifth century as an example. This was a scrap from Del Azarchel’s own work, a listing of the social influences, their vector amounts, and the decision forks, all laid out neat and nice in a fourteen-dimensional matrix of ninety thousand variables.

  Menelaus realized what he was reading. He was thunderstruck by astonishment and anger so palpable that he could actually feel it race down his spine and weaken his limbs, so that he almost dropped Rada Lwa again.

  Then he shrugged and decided to go ahead and drop Rada Lwa one more time anyway, just because he was in the mood for that. (He did not kick the unconscious man, however, because he was feeling so very merciful: Menelaus congratulated himself on his forbearance.)

  Appended to the predictions for the forty-fifth century was an executive summary: At or about this point in time, the 51 will introduce a biochemical-psychology code system to allow the various nonhuman sapient creatures Prometheanized by the Simon Families to cooperate.

  The Simon Families were the precursors to the Delphic World Order, or, in other words, the Witches. The 51 was himself, his locker and suit number from the NTL star-vessel Hermetic. Prometheus Augmentation was Montrose’s own process he had discovered and inflicted on himself. He had released the secret to Thucydides Montrose, who used it to augment the intellect of the Giants to superhuman levels. De Ulloa and his Witches had taken it in turn and used it to augment animal intelligence to human levels.

  The prediction about Montrose was eerily accurate. Menelaus had indeed introduced in and about the region of Lake Superior before the brief Re-Industrial Age of the Nameless Warlock Empire in the forty-fifth century a genetic-political arrangement, coded as biohardware, that he called the cooperation code. This cooperation code was based on Rania’s work, her solution to the so-called selfish meme problem: the Witches had been suffering a particularly acute version of that problem. Their social system incentivized and overrewarded what Montrose called “meme envy”—the tendency of any information system, either a computer system or a human economy, to copy and borrow from successful systems it encountered to the degree that the original information is lost. Piracy was encouraged and originality discouraged.

  Montrose had used an application of Rania’s Divarication solution to discover a game-theory method to allow the endocrinal and instinctive priorities of the Witches and their Moreaus to harmonize over generations, so that cooperation rather than coercion was a possible basis for human–Moreau relations. A civilization based on free trade and free inquiry followed naturally.

  Menelaus bitterly remembered how, back in the forty-fifth century, he had so confidently assumed Blackie would never have clues enough to reverse engineer the mathematical tools used to reach the cooperation code solution from merely seeing the outcome, but not knowing how the outcome was reached. That assumption was disastrously false. It seemed the Witches were witches in truth: somehow able to intuit conclusions on partial information as if by magic, that normal reasoning could not reach.

  In Rada Lwa’s text, the chain of statistical predictors describing what Montrose would do ended in a strange attractor—with a side note stating that, at this point, history had to be derailed due to direct intervention by a Hermeticist.

  At this node a new race will be introduced by Narcís D’Aragó. The exact details cannot be predicted, but we can predict via multiparallel intuitive deduction that D’Aragó will take the solution, whatever it is, introduced by the Traitor in an earlier era and reselect the social variables for unification.

  —and then, in broad strokes, the notes laid out what Menelaus recognized as the fundamental psychological skeleton of the Chimerical psychology and predictive history. He recognized it from his own attempts, made many centuries after this was written, to graph out the basics of Chimera historical nodes, nests, and attractors.

  That prediction (or perhaps it was a command) was also accurate. D’Aragó had stolen and perverted Montrose’s work. D’Aragó had used it to make the men and animal-people one race, and as tolerant of diversity as any military order. (In Montrose’s day, there had been no beaneaters, Anglos, Odds, or Tejas in the service, only Texans; and no white men, black men, or red men in the cavalry, only horsemen.)

  But D’Aragó had reversed the markers to install a Caste system, where each Caste was genetically programmed to be intolerant of other Castes.

  Montrose smiled a sour smile. “Oh, Draggy, you always admired the Hindus, didn’t you? Never got over that envy you felt growing up in a world where the world’s foremost superpower, the Indosphere, had a caste system. Your Hispanosphere was trying so desperately to play catch-up and me-too. They had a caste system, and you thought you should have one too. It was so very efficient and scientific and fashionable and up to date … in the twenty-second century … eight thousand three hundre
d years ago.…”

  Just the mention of the amount of time passed gave him a sensation of painful nostalgia. It had been only twenty years or so biological time for him. He wondered at all the things that were gone and would never come again: the palaces and pinnacles and towers and skyscrapers of civilizations that had faded and dispersed like so many columns of rising smoke, broken up in the wind.

  Montrose picked up the unconscious Rada Lwa one last time, and awkwardly hauled him to his shoulder. As he walked, he talked aloud. “Sorry, Rada Lwa, Grampa was just talking to my old friend D’Aragó who I shot dead and put in the ground. Him and your boss, your real boss, the Machine Exarchel—and hell, let’s give dopey Melchor de Ulloa some credit too, he had a hand in this—y’all has me powerful confounded and bewildered.

  “The Giants made the Simon Families—that is clear enough. Blackie snookered them into creating their own destroyers. That I did not figure. The Giants lashed out and burned all the places where you could hide a Xypotech—all but up on the Moon.

  “Did the Simons create the Sylphs? Or was that a natural development?

  “Don’t matter. In any case, the Giants were tickled, tricked, and led into putting in place restrictions on xypotechnology that created an impossible computational and social problem for the Sylphs in their airskiffs. A problem I solved using Rania’s work. Work Del Azarchel knew I had, but had never seen himself.

  “The damn serpentines are eternal machines. But that was a side effect, a mistake. Del Azarchel should have cleaned up that clue from the stream of history, and buried legends of it. Or, hell, maybe he did, but in my damn Tomb system, the one you tried to destroy, Ratty Low, you low rat, I keep these little fragments of history, including people who don’t want to live through periods the Hermeticists control.

  “Are you paying attention? Or am I just speaking to a sleeping man’s really pale butt? Lemme explain: De Ulloa, your Master, is a guy who (before you killed him for me) spent his whole life on a project, a real long life—but there was no project.