The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  The new material he had introduced into the coffin interior had not been completely mixed with the medical fluid, so only about half the volume had formed the unstable mixture he wanted. So it was that half, rather than all, of the coffin fluid, upon exposure to oxygen, that erupted into a froth of bubble and a wash of vapor. Montrose, at the bottom of the coffin, was still in the layer below the mix, and the cold fluid protected him from the heat released.

  The figures hunched over the lid were not so lucky, and screamed and barked and yowled when the lid blew open. Through the cacophony, Montrose was able to hear which figures had been struck by the coffin lid, which were merely confused and howling, blinded by the vast wash of expanding vapor, and which were burnt. The guards must have had a pack of guard dogs with them, because there was a confusion of barking, yipping, growling, and whining.

  He came up out of the fluid more slowly than he would have liked, because his body was still reacting sluggishly to his commands. Still holding his breath, Montrose sat up, sloshing fluid each direction and trying not to scream as some of the cloud burned him. With his eyes still shut, he thumbed the pistols to continuous fire and sent bursts of slugs into the sources of screams. At the same time he kicked his legs awkwardly and slumped and lumbered and fell over the edge of the coffin to the surface, still firing as he fell. Underfoot seemed to be a platform of wood, perhaps a dock.

  As he rolled, his body collided with one person, a man wearing a shaggy fur coat, and he lashed out with a kick, hoping to break the other man’s knee. But the other man must have been facing away rather than toward him, because he did not strike a kneecap, but the hollow of the joint, so that instead of breaking, the leg folded and the other man fell toward him.

  Another motion of the thumb flicked the magnetics inside his gun to another configuration, so that the projectile mass was grated into shotgun pellets. Guessing based on the motions he had felt inside the coffin, he swung both barrels toward the crane or mechanical limb that had picked up the coffin and fired. He evidently guessed correctly, because he was rewarded by the sound of screaming metallic ricochets. Then the falling man in the fur coat landed on him.

  Montrose opened his eyes, but he saw nothing but the dense fog pouring from the coffin lid, and every droplet of the fog was dazzling with sunlight. With regret, he realized that he should have mixed a nerve gas or at least a puking agent among the fumes. Well, he had been pressed for time. He brought his pistol down sharply on where he thought the back of the skull of the man falling on him would be, but Montrose must have miscalculated, because the skull was pointed toward him, not away, and his gun arm was seized in the man’s teeth.

  They were too sharp and too many to be the teeth in a man’s mouth. This must be one of the guard dogs he heard barking. He heaved with his arm, thankful of the lingering numbness, and still struggling to keep his mouth shut and his breath held. He twisted his trapped hand, firing at another source of nearby noise (he saw a silhouette in the mist stumble and fall) and brought his free hand up to shoot through the skull of the dog trapping his arm and toward a second looming figure in the smoky brightness. The skull must have been both large and oddly shaped for a dog, because the skull fragments exploded in blast pattern other than what he calculated, and pain lodged in Montrose’s face. His flesh was torn, and his nose felt like it was broken.

  The pistols in his hands whined suddenly. Montrose used a mental trick to speed up his nerve actions, so that the scene seemed to slow down. He went through a number of theories in his mind as to what could be causing that whining noise. It was an induction field, he decided. Some onlooker had deduced that his pistols used magnetic caterpillar fields for acceleration, and set up a counterfield to interfere. The metal dowels were being heated by the resulting conflict. The pistols were not designed for this: the metal was expanding and about to crack the barrels open.

  He pondered. In combat, if the troops are not well trained, nine to fifteen seconds will pass before the troopers will react to incoming fire and return fire. Trained troops will drop or seek cover and return fire immediately, if and only if they are armed with automatic weapons. Automatic weapons allow the troops to spray toward unseen targets, hoping to hit, or at least to suppress the enemy. But troops armed with single-shot weapons were more hesitant, rarely willing to fire without a clear shot, lest the return fire kill them. So far, the combat had lasted perhaps five seconds, maybe half, maybe less, of normal human reaction time. From the position of the barks and howls, it seemed the guards near the coffin were reacting with normal human-reaction confusion. Which meant the field was being sent by someone occupying a higher intellectual topography than the guards.

  There was no time for more than a guess. He looked toward where the crane that had picked up the coffin was supposed to be. Sure enough, looming up through the fog, he could dimly make out what looked like the exoskeleton of a ten-foot-high praying mantis made of steel. But why had there been no outcry from the operator when he’d shot there earlier? Either the machine was an automaton, or remotely controlled, or the operator had some means of deflecting the shot.

  There was no time for more guesswork. Montrose returned to normal neural timeflow in order to operate his muscles without tearing or cramping them. He held down the thumb trigger so that both pistols ejected the entire mass of their ammo at once. Two dowels like little red-hot javelins flew into the fog toward the spider-legged machine.

  Suddenly the operator was visible. He was no bigger than a child, was bald of head, and he wore a long coat studded with glittering gems. The gems lit up as if with fire, and rainbows and halos of energy surrounded the figure. In the confused light, Montrose could see the little bald man had skin as blue as a peacock’s neck.

  The dowels never struck their target. Whether they were deflected magnetically, or disintegrated by some unimaginable energy, Montrose could not tell. But the dazzle shining from the many-colored coat of the strange little man was bright enough that the silhouettes of the guards stood out clearly.

  Even through the fog, he now could see that they were not men, but Moreaus, modified dog things walking on hind legs, and with swords or firearms in their paws. The dog things were grouped in a semicircle and lunging toward him, ears perked up, noses high, and not confused by the blinding vapor cloud.

  In that momentary, eerie flash of radiation from the gems on the coat of the little blue man, Montrose saw a rippling glitter to one side. Water! Perhaps he could reach it. The dog thing bodies were not designed for swimming, and if he somehow escaped them downstream, the water might kill his scent. If he were lucky, the river would be deep enough and the current strong enough to carry him out of range before anyone could react.

  With a powerful leap he flung himself through the fog toward the gleam of water.

  He was not so lucky as he might have hoped. The blind leap brought the edge of the dock sharply against his shins, so that he tumbled, both legs numb in a shock of pain.

  That tumble saved him from landing headfirst, which might have killed him. As it was, the shallow, icy stream struck him in the belly, and so when he struck the streambed, no bones broke. So that was a modicum of luck.

  But the current was not strong, and the water was not deep.

  4. First Impressions

  Striking the shallow bottom dazed him, and so the hyperoxygenated fluid gushed from the tube in his throat. His lungs then rebelled and tried to draw in the icy, freezing waters of the stream. He flung himself to his knees, puking pale hyperoxygenated fluid down across his naked, bruised, and torn chest and belly.

  The bank of the stream was coated with snow. In the bewilderment, Montrose had not noticed how cold it was.

  On the bank, the fog was still billowing and spreading from the open coffin. The coffin alarms were ringing—another fact his dazed mind had not been able to take in—and the disabled coffin guns were clicking pathetically.

  The stream tumbled down a hillside covered with snow and (Montrose saw to his
immense satisfaction) pine trees. The crest of the hill was bare of trees, but angular walking machines and scaffolding surrounded a deep cleft from which the thunder of gunfire and the snap of laser fire echoed. The Tombs were violated, ripped open.

  He was in a yard enclosed by wire inside a camp enclosed by wire. The streambed neatly bisected the yard. There were seventy coffins in the yard in various states of damage and disrepair. Those with working alarms were ringing; those whose alarms were mute were raging weakly, flickering the stubs of their disconnected legs and or spinning the useless wheels of their missing treads, flicking their aiming lasers at potential targets, clicking to one another with sound-transmitted ranging information. All the coffins were trying to come to his aid. None could move or fire.

  Montrose absorbed this in one split-second flicker of his eyes. Still puking up fluid from his lungs, he rose to his feet. The stream was not even knee deep. All he had done was to wet himself in the winter wind and bruise and cut himself badly enough on the streambed rocks that he could barely force his tortured body into motion.

  A sudden gush of wind stirred and parted the fog like a curtain. There was the semicircle of sixty dog things. Most were unclothed, except for weapon belts, but some wore scarlet pantaloons or braided vests or half capes. They carried muskets, cutlasses, and long knives. Montrose was gratified to see that he had killed seven and wounded ten more, who were writhing on the ground yowling, as pairs of comrades, two to each wounded hound, pulled them back out of combat or applied pressure to wounds. Of these sixty, only twenty-three were standing with weapons at the shoulder. The muskets had been pointing at Montrose even before the wind parted the vapor, since the fog had not deceived their sense of smell.

  They were waiting for the order to fire.

  Their masters were three blue men, or, rather, two azure men and a ruddier-hued man who was almost purple. All were bald and had very small and delicate ears. All wore knee-length coats studded with emeralds, sapphires, blue diamonds, topazes yellow as honey, agates, amethysts, and stones of beryl and glinting jasper red as blood and polished onyx gleaming black as drops of ink.

  The purple-shaded Blue Man was the operator of the grasshopper-shaped automaton, and his coat still flickered and flamed with whatever energy he had used to disable Montrose’s pistols and deflect their final burst. He pushed the goggles hiding his eyes back over his wide and bald brow, revealing an expression of utter boredom.

  The older of the two lighter-shaded Blue Men regarded Montrose with a heavily lidded and reptilian stare from eyes underlined with bags of weariness and expressionless as stones. His prune mouth was wrinkled as if it had been folded far too often into bitterness and contempt. He too wore a knee-length coat patterned with gems.

  The younger Blue Man observed Montrose with a cool and almost amused detachment. In his outstretched hand was an instrument so studded with gems and ornate scrollwork that Montrose did not recognize it at first as a energy weapon, probably a solid-state laser carrying a galvanic charge.

  Montrose was bent double with puking into the stream, but he still held his knife up high in defiance. If his hand would stop shaking, he might manage a throw into the older-looking one. His coat had fewer gems, so perhaps he was lower rank or lower status than the other two, but he had a look of arrogance that bespoke command.

  Menelaus did not throw the knife. Instead, baffled, he induced in his middle-level brain sections one of those pattern-recognition gestalts normally called intuition. The answer surfaced immediately: The Hermetic Order has an agent (or agents) observing this scene: but he (or they) fails to recognize you due to subverbal-conceptual interference across more than one mental system.

  At some point, if he lived, and if he had the time to go back through his thought process, he could try to put into words the wordless intuition. As it was, he decided merely to accept it as a given.

  Coronimas, Sarmento, and Father Reyes, as far as he knew, were still alive, not to mention Ximen del Azarchel. Why were they absent when the Tombs were being looted?

  Their absence bespoke stealth, indirection, secrecy, and therefore fear. Del Azarchel was hiding from someone. From whom? If Montrose’s Cliometrically calculated predictive model of history was right, no civilization on the Earth’s surface powerful enough to threaten Exarchel could have arisen from the barren ice floes that ruled the surface when last he woke. So something was wrong with his model of history, something very basic. That was something imperative to look into, later.

  If there was a later.

  The Blue Men were the starting point of the thread leading back to Del Azarchel, who must be ultimately behind the attack and the looting. Montrose tried to imagine the magnitude of damage needed to have so thoroughly crippled the defensive systems of the Tombs that they could not stop a squad of musketmen. Or musketdogs. Some part of Pellucid must still be operating, if only a local node, but the main brain must already be compromised, perhaps dead. And where were the Knights Hospitalier?

  The time for grief was later, as was the time to sort this out. For the moment, he was captured, but his captors missed the fact that they had found whom they sought.

  Of course, it helped that the coffin had been marked with the wrong name and interment date. There were not many periods of history after the era in which Montrose was born, where large numbers of great-boned redheads walked abroad: the one such period, the time of the Chimerae, circa A.D. 5000, had an unusually broad genetic base.

  So Menelaus hesitated, armed with nothing but one dinky knife, stood shivering, eyeing the dozens of musket muzzles covering him and the dozens of dog muzzles snarling.

  The younger Blue Man tilted his head to one side as if in thought, and a made a polite fluting sound in some unknown language of singing notes to the older one, who grunted and nodded. Menelaus was gratified that, despite the passage of thousands of years, the meaning of that particular head motion had not changed.

  The younger Blue Man, lowering his pistol, opened his coat with both hands, exposing the inner lining, which was a pearly gray. The coat lining shimmered. It was library cloth.

  An image of the Monument appeared on the inside of the coat to the left and right of the young Blue Man’s body, and then the image expanded to zoom in on the opening statement. First one group of glyphs lit up, and then a second, and then a third. A bisected circle filled the view, constructed of a sequence of dashes that flickered quickly: large-three-small-one-four-one-five-nine—

  “You little plague-sucking rot-brained buggers broke into my coffin and abducted me to ask me the value of pi?” Montrose roared in anger, or tried to. The severed breathing tube was still dangling and flapping from his mouth like an absurd proboscis, and now he gagged, drew in a deep breath, and, when the air struck his fluid-adapted lungs, they seized up.

  Terrible hacking coughs started to yank themselves out of his body like scarves from the mouth of a sideshow magician, and his muscles tightened in the first seizure of the transition paroxysm, first in his chest, then in his limbs.

  He wobbled, knelt, and then fell face-first into the freezing water. A roaring darkness filled his brain, and little black metallic flashes swirled to and fro in his eyes. He thought he could detect a mathematical pattern in the swirls he saw as his vision faded in and out, something he could analyze with the Navier–Stokes vortex equations.

  He was dimly aware of doglike paws pulling him from the water. Two dog things held his either arm, and his naked legs were being dragged across the frost-coated pebbles and through the burrs and prickles of the gray dead winter weeds of the stream bank.

  He was inordinately proud of the fact that they had to bend his thumb so far back that it broke with a dull snap like a twig before they could pry the knife from his hand.

  They dragged him roughly before the younger Blue Man, who knelt and wrote a set of Monument glyphs in the snow. It was the glyph for self-identity, and a symbolic logic expression also used to refer to set representation. In other words
, it was the glyph that meant “name.”

  Montrose also saw a red dot appear in the glyph, and then another, and he realized blood from his face wounds was dripping onto the snow.

  The younger man pointed at his nose and said solemnly, “Ss’s Illiance-pra-e syn-suan va, hna-t.” He pointed at the older Blue Man with the back of his hand. “Ss’s Ull-mnempra-e syn-suan hthna, hno-t.” He pointed the back of his hand at the Purple Man. “Ss’s Naar-ma-e syn-suan hthna, hno-t.” Then he made as if to touch Montrose with the back of his hand, but did not actually brush his skin. “Ss’s nii, hni? T?”

  Menelaus knew his previous, nonaugmented brain would not have been quick enough on the uptake to deduce some of the grammatical rules of a semi-declined language based on so small a sample. Ss’s either indicated the beginning of a sentence, or the younger Blue Man Illiance had a lisp. Va, hthna, nii were “me, he, you.” Hna, hno, hni were verbs in the passive voice, the act of naming: “I am called, he is called, you are called.” The t sound indicated the end of a sentence, which meant this was an old and corrupted form of computer-derived language, since no human listener needs to hear punctuation marks in spoken speech.

  Illiance, Ull, and Naar were names or honorifics.

  Damn me, but I am smart.

  “Me, Tarzan,” replied Montrose. “You, Jerkdong? I can’t talk with this damned buggery tube yerked up my eating-hole, you smurf.” But since his mouth was blocked, it came out more like: A cawh’n taw wif dif bwah-erwee doob eerd ut mwa eewen-oal, oo fnurf. Which, upon reflection, actually did not make much less sense than what he’d tried to say.

  The tone must have been clear even if the words were not, because one of the dog things drew what looked like a single-shot wheel lock pistol from his sash and clouted Montrose sharply across the cheek with it. More than ever, Montrose wished for the mind powers the old comics always awarded to creatures with superior intelligence. As it was, he was able to deduce the exact vector magnitude of the incoming iron pistol barrel and make an accurate mental model of which parts of his cheek and face and nose cartilage would be torn and broken before the blow actually fell. He was not able to anticipate how much it would hurt, however. Pain is always a surprise.