by perpetrator
Like a clamshell, the smartmetal hull, with all its deadly weapons, released him. He stood beneath a roof of transparent energy in a walled garden. Stars were above, grass below. Water from marble basins leaped and danced, woven into fantastic sculptures by kinetic rays. Scent breathed from the multicolored blooms and blossoms, leaves and lianas gathered from the fields of eight planets, fifty wordlets, ninescore moons.
Through the clear roof, he could see familiar towers and cupolas. He was in the eight-sided High Central Palace of Ultrapolis, in the wing set aside for Lord Jupiter. Lord Jupiter was the most powerful of the Sons of Tellus. Was he behind this?
Aeneas saw a light glinting through the leaves. A few steps down the marble path brought it into view.
A young redhead in a silky green robe of woven energy-strands was seated in a curule chair. His other senses told him the strands were woven tractor-presser fields of immense potential. She could knock down a skyscraper with her dress, or deflect a mortar shell.
The garment hung from one shoulder, leaving her arms bare, and fell to her emerald-studded sandals in elegant folds. She had freckles on her cheeks and shoulders which she was not vain enough to have removed. Her red hair was intertwined with pearls, one or two of which glowed the dangerous black of an unstable node. Her coronet was a glowing crescent, horns pointed upward. Her eyes were as green as her dress, and regarded him with a mocking twinkle.
He stood in shock. She was the last person he expected.
“Hello, Peanut,” he said, smiling. “What is with the get up?”
She said, “It’s Lady Luna these days, little cousin.”
“What? I cannot call you Penthesilia any more?”
“After you blew up the Old Wing of the palace in an apparent act of fiery self destruction three days ago, along with the disappearance—no pun intended—of Lord Pluto, the conclave decided not to wait, but to elevate me to the official rank of Lady of Creation. The first of our generation!”
Aeneas said sourly, “So you are the thirteenth member of the Twelve. Now you can trample commoners like the rest. Congratulations are in order.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I knew your brain’s mainspring was wound wrong, Aeneas. With your mother, Lady Venus, who can blame you? Who knows what she did to your mind? But I did not think all your mental gears and flywheels would spin away out of control. Trample? We abolished war and crime, aging and starvation.”
“And abolished hope. So the Moon is now officially your fiefdom?”
“Well, I did terraform it, fill the seas with water and the skies with air, and fill the silver hills with gardens and arbors, white deer and pale hounds. You know how many years I’ve been running it. This is long overdue.”
“It’s not a planet.”
“It’s larger than Lord Pluto’s real estate, and better located! Within Sol’s water ring, but lighter weight than Earth, so the energy cost to orbit is lower. I left the natural gravity at the launch sites.”
“Being the daughter of Lord Jupiter has its privileges, I suppose.”
Annoyance flickered through her green eyes. “I have sixty-six brothers and sisters, all older than I, who were not so honored. Those who prove themselves diligent and useful to the Imperial Family can expect reward from the Family!”
“Expect ever, achieve never!” said Aeneas with scorn. “Not for any work is your reward, but for your pliancy.”
Lady Luna said, “Do I wear a leash...? You once thought highly of me.”
“Some powerful patron wants one family faction to outweigh the others, and helped you. Who? My guess is Lord Neptune: he thinks you will side against your own father.”
“Not him. You helped me.”
“What?”
“Having your assassin set off a bomb in the Old Palace startled The Twelve. The elders are finally are scared of us children. They fear long frustration will make us end our endless intrigue-games, and start a very uncivil civil war. Or one of us will?”
Aeneas said, “Then you should be more grateful. To what do I owe your sudden, unprovoked, unannounced, lethal attack with an interplanetary beam weapon?”
She shook her head. “Not I. Some cousin or uncle established a zone of death-energy in my Sea of Tranquility fortress. All within died suddenly, hundreds of my handmaidens. My instruments detected the emotional echo of their death-screams on the subconscious frequencies of the mental spectrum, and so I knew an enemy was framing me. So I sent a dream to one of Grandfather’s superdreadnaughts he built to awe the world. The ship sacrificed itself to save you.”
“Why should I believe you, Peanut?”
“Why should I lie, Annoyance?”
“Because everyone in this family lies, Lady Luna.”
“Not everyone.”
Aeneas said in exasperation, “Did the Twelve share any secrets with you on your coronation day, so-called Lady Luna? No. You were imprinted with dream-reading, one branch of neuropsionics my Mother said she was not using at the moment. They will never give more.”
Lady Luna smiled, and glanced at him sidelong. “I enjoyed those days on Ishtar Plateau, learning your mother’s lore, the little part she was willing to impart. Walking by the scented sea beneath a sky of bright, eternal cloud was pleasant, and talking with a gawky teen who never stopped tinkering with his own genetic code.” Her smile vanished. She continued: “But you impose too heavily on our friendship if you think I would protect a traitor.”
He scowled. “Friendship? Is that all...?”
“You smuggled in a jammer to block all our mindlinks. Who else beside the Son of Venus would have access to such a toy? And the assassin, Thoon, was a democracy cultist — one of yours!”
“No more. He came to kill me.”
Lady Luna favored him with a withering glance. “And who filled his head with hate for us? Democracy! Did your mother teach you brainwashing? Why else would someone yearn for mob rule?”
“Grandfather forced the family to make new races like mad toymakers turning out talking dolls and tin soldiers!”
“You’re one to talk. You burn your toys when they bore you!”
“It was self-defense.”
“Says he who said we all lie.”
“It’s truth.”
“But not the whole truth! Someone breached the neurotech thought-barrier around the Mountain. My instruments detected a massive beam carrying a library’s worth of information — enough to implant a stratonic science — just before your explosion. Who sent it?”
Aeneas said, “How could thought-detectors operate in a thought-proof field?”
“Your machine suppressed conscious thoughtcasts. My machines work at deeper levels. The library beam was tuned to the subconscious, to the levels of dream and madness, the darkness of the undiscovered mind, where I alone am queen. I doubt anyone else detected it.”
“How is it that you set up a detection grid when we were all abed?”
“A strange dream woke me. I sought to find if it were external. Imagine my surprise at the readings. Someone had vast learning poured into his unconscious mind. Was it you? Answer honestly! I can give you one and only one chance.”
Aeneas probed the garden with his multiple senses. He detected no energy echoes, no trace of spy-rays. He needed an ally. But...
She leaned forward, eyes bright and urgent, “Aeneas! I cannot shield you if you lie! Is the secret of superluminal science yours?”
Aeneas felt grim. He wanted Lady Luna with him. But at what risk? The superluminal technology could overpower all the other stratonic technologies combined. It was that fundamental.
Grandfather had never shared the secret. Aeneas realized Lord Tellus, then, had been afraid. Simply afraid.
As was he.
He said, “No.”
Lady Luna leaned back, sighed, eyes half closed. “Well, you all heard me. I tried. Take him! Do as you like with him!”
Nine of the pearls in her coiffure blazed with space-contortion. Nine regal figures snapped int
o existence around him.
The Lords of Creation had him surrounded.
He snapped his hidden armor shut, unfolded hidden wings, and charged his energy-control organs for battle.
9. The Battle in the Garden of Worlds
The Lords of Creation encircled Aeneas. He sensed active neural links to weapons, energy sources, and artificial intellects, on their persons, or in powerhouses, satellites, or arsenals.
In the first second, Aeneas nullified gravity and unfurled his huge bioadmantium wings from their dorsal pocket. Each wing-scale had a separate kinetic cell and a disinertia thruster. He rocketed upward supersonically.
Meanwhile electric and positronic organs in his body discharged. Superconductive rays carried this charge into all his relatives. The positive and negative rays intersected in the mutual annihilation, producing gamma rays, mesons and bosons in bursts.
Thin winds screamed when he smashed through the roof. The Lords of Creation laughed as the electropositronic rays struck them.
He was outside. A fiery, flickering boy-shaped shadow popped into existence before him. He swerved, but the grinning shadow-boy was there too, and then behind him, and then to either side.
The flickering shadow was a space contortion of unknown type, as if the boy were teleporting himself into the same spot hundreds of times a second, ionizing and superheating the air. Between flickers, Aeneas saw the youthful face of Procopius Tell, Lord of Mercury. He had halted his aging too early, and wore a small boy’s face and form.
A stiletto-blade of flickering hot shadow, half-displaced from normal timespace, slid into Aeneas’ skin but somehow bypassed the invulnerable scales beneath. It missed his kidney and instead struck a storage organ.
This was one of Aeneas’ internal biochemical factories, filled with unstable materials. The blade materialized a small mass of superhighspeed nanomachine assemblers into the tissue. These, in a split-second, absorbed cell materials, turning everything into more of themselves. The organ should have been converted instantly and eaten his stomach, lungs and heart, adding mass as it grew. Aeneas should have died before the pain signal of the knife piercing flesh reached his brain.
But this organ was isolated from his main circulatory and nervous systems, and it was set, if it grew unstable, to eject, self-sterilize and explode. The blast sent Aeneas spinning. Lord Mercury, inertialess, wafted aside, grinning, unharmed.
In the third second, his uncle Eleftherios Tell, Lord of Neptune, pointed his trident. The gravity increased fiftyfold, but, impossibly, only touched Aeneas. His body was its own pile-driver, and hammered him flat. The grass and soil splashed upward from a sudden crater. He lay dazed.
Lord Neptune was of his mother’s race, a blue-skinned, dark-haired amphibian. Lord Neptune’s thin azure face twisted with a sour half-smile.
Meanwhile, Bromius Tell, Lord of Jupiter, had gathered up into his hand all the energy rays and radiations Aeneas had flung, and, laughing merrily, struck Aeneas with all of them as if with a many-bladed whip of white fire. He was a big, broad-shouldered, bearded man, richly dressed in gold and purple, with hair and beard as black as coal, and eyes as gray as a stormy sky.
The crater blazed with lightning. Aeneas’ skin burned, his internal organs fried, his muscles spasmed, his mouth screamed and puked blood. Lord Jupiter smiled grandly, and drank wine from the golden cup in his other hand.
The gravity relented. A round-faced uncle garbed in the simple robe of a Franciscan Friar, barefoot, rope-belted, his brown hair cut in a tonsure, now took Aeneas by the arm, and picked up his nine-foot tall, five hundred pound body easily. This was Anargyros Tell.
Uncle Anargyros ruled no planet. He was Steward of Earth, not sovereign, for the family was stalemated over who should replace the missing Lord Tellus. He maintained the weather, agriculture and aquaculture, to feed the multitudes. He joked that he ruled wilderness, not men. Hence, he was called Brother Beast.
The secret of neurosomatics was his. He controlled his internal energy cycles in ways biotechnicians could not grasp, and yoga masters not imitate.
The friar grappled him. Aeneas sensed no biomechanics inside Brother Beast, and so, for a wild moment, thought he could fling him aside. But then Brother Beast merely grew stronger than a giant, and then stronger than a titan, until the living metal under Aeneas’ skin groaned and cracked. Aeneas freed an arm, swung. The blow would have felled a tree.
Brother Beast somersaulted up Aeneas’ fist and elbow, did a onehanded handstand atop Aeneas’ head, and broke his nose with a barefoot kick. Aeneas yowled. Brother Beast grabbed his tongue with his toes, yanking it. Then he was riding on his back, and had Aeneas in a full nelson, ready to break his bioadmantium neck. Aeneas was too tall for Brother Beast’s bare feet to touch the soil.
Aeneas unfolded tentacles from his ribcage, ripping human skin aside. It was a ghastly sight. Reaching behind, Aeneas wrapped the mighty limbs of Brother Beast. The tentacles injected deadly venom, sprayed mustard gas, spewed jellied flame, and shot electric jolts. Brother Beast yelled. Aeneas strained, and ...
A melancholy blonde stepped forward. This was his aunt, Zoë Romanov, Lady of Ceres.
Her signet ring twinkled. Aeneas sensed invisible life-energy pouring from remote transmitters into the body of Brother Beast. Wounds regenerated. Aeneas could not see how Lady Ceres was forming the circuit, or where the extra mass came from to replace burnt flesh.
Brother Beast yanked the metal tentacles out of Aeneas’ spine and threw them across the garden. He said calmly, “Be still, nephew! We only wish to talk!”
Aeneas said, “Who accuses me? Of what? I demand a public trial!”
Lord Jupiter flourished his golden cup. “Peace! What is all this yammer of accusation and trial? The family will discuss matters, and come to consensus, as we always do.”
Lord Neptune said sardonically, “And we will kill anyone who threatens our power. As we always do.”
Brother Beast stepped back. Aeneas stood bruised, bleeding, miserable. Tears of pain slid down his cheeks.
Frustration choked him. All his uncles had powers that broke the laws of nature. Aeneas understood none of what had defeated him. “Sometimes I resent being born into a family of Mad Scientists.”
Brother Beast smiled affably. “But the family looks out for its own, do we not? Have no fear! You will have a chance to say your say. In the meantime, please surrender your ring. There’s a good lad.”
Aeneas said, “I have done nothing wrong.”
Lord Mercury snapped his fingers. “Gotten away with nothing, you mean.”
Lady Venus said, “Give it to me. I will return it once your name is cleared.” He did. Without the ring, Aeneas had no power to metamorphosize all his cells while maintaining his life processes, not safely. Easier to rebuild a racecar engine during the race.
Lord Jupiter looked up. The air was whistling out, and cold was rushing in. “Brothers and sisters, it is more comfortable in the library. Shall we?”
Arm in arm with Brother Beast, Aeneas limped down the gold-walled, marble-floored corridors of the high palace. The many servants and guards were gone. However, wine, spirits, and tobacco were awaiting them in the library, each according to his own preference at his own chair.
Books bound in red leather filled one two-story wall. Information diamonds filled another, and neuropsionic emeralds filled a third. Windows looked down on the Himalayan peaks. Below, stormclouds roamed like black sheep.
One chair was framed in a cube of thought-insulation bars, and wire-cap festooned with neuropsionic amplifiers hung above. It was an oversized chair, meant to seat a nine-foot tall man.
His mother stepped forward. “Sit here, son.” She said to the other, “All of you might as well relax. This will take some time.”
She had the jet-black curls, olive skin, and the dark-lashed, overlarge eyes of her Hellenic ancestors. She wore a white hood set with energy gems, contortion pearls, and thought-emission ports. All her ornaments, from hair
combs to shining golden slippers, held nerve impellers or mental weapons.
Her name was Nephelethea Cimon, Lady of Venus. She wed Anchises Cimon, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderberg-Plon-Rethwisch, a cadet branch of the Oldenburg family, to whom all the crowned heads of Europe were related. He had died mysteriously, assassinated, and been buried in Sicily.
That his uncles could commit such crimes unpunished, undetected, was the grief that formed his youth, and sculpted the soul of Aeneas.
He sat, wearily. His mother positioned the cap above his head. There were no visible readout screens or controls: Aeneas sensed the signal flow channeled through her signet ring to his mother’s cortex.
Pressure filled his head as external waves were heterodyned onto his nerve signals. His mother hummed to herself absentmindedly as she worked.
Over an hour passed. All were silent. Some smoked. Some sipped wine.
Finally, Lady Venus straightened up. “He is innocent. He was attacked by an assassin, who is the one who set off the jamming field, murdered our bodyguards, and was killed by a black pearl which someone unknown placed in his bedchamber.”
Lord Jupiter said, “Unknown? You mean Father.”
She said, “He has no memory of seeing anyone.”
Lord Jupiter said, “But he suspects!”
She smiled. “I never agreed to read his suspicions.”
Spyridon, Lord of Uranus, spoke. “He confessed the assassin was his.”
He was a dark-skinned, dark-eyed man dressed in a green uniform. He wore a prosthetic skin-mask that exactly copied his own features. The mask never reflected the expressions on the face beneath.
Aeneas wondered how Lord Uranus had spied on the conversation with Lady Luna in the garden, without any trace of eavesdropping energy.
That mask now turned toward Aeneas, “Marvel not that I know your doings from afar. The information layer of the cosmos, below the physical layer, is open to my view. You brought Thoon here.”
Lady Venus answered before Aeneas could speak. “Thoon deceived him! He played along with some of the lad’s wilder political fancies. Aeneas smuggled him into Ultrapolis for some tomfoolery which would have done nothing and harmed no one. Clearly a breach of protocol, yes, but would you like my list of who has also bent rules? You could fill a harem just with the women Lord Jupiter smuggled into our halls!”