The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  Daae said to Menelaus, “Which of this menagerie are the Locusts?”

  Menelaus said, “Black dwarfish men with big heads and gold tendrils growing from their brow. Those tendrils are radiotelepathic, some sort of remote nerve-link technology from future time now long past. It allowed them to detect that the world outside is empty of all electronic and mechanical activity.” Montrose waved his hand in a broad sweep, as if to indicate everything in the world. “There is no civilization out there. In any case, these Locusts looked to me to protect them, and now they are gone. The Blue Men killed them. I saw the dogs dig their graves.”

  Daae said, “I am out of my reckoning. Which race comes after them? Who inherited the earth?”

  Montrose said, “That is a mystery I am burning to solve. I assume these Blue Men are the current landlords of Mother Earth. The asteroid impact that wiped out the surface life and kicked up the dust that brought this ice age was sometime in the seventy-eighth century AUCR.”

  AUCR stood for Ab Urbe Condita Richmondus. The Chimerical calendar reckoned from the founding of Richmond in 1737. The seventy-eighth century was equivalent to ninety-sixth century by the Gregorian calendar.

  Yuen interrupted, “Wait. Asteroid impact? Sometime in what century? How long have we been in hibernation?”

  Montrose said, “I estimate you were in slumber for five thousand years.”

  There was a rustle in the dark as the two stiffened slightly. “How firm is this intelligence?” said Daae.

  “Perfectly firm,” said Menelaus. “I have studied the stars. From the size of the circle Deneb makes around the north pole, I can calculate the procession of the equinoxes.”

  Yeun said, “But Iota Cephei is the polestar.…” His voice trailed off.

  “Was,” said Montrose. His voice was strangely soft in the triangle of his hood.

  4. Named Weapons and Names

  Yuen said, “You have not asked us of our weapons or names.”

  Menelaus said, “I cannot ask until my superiors speak first. Or are things more at ease in your time?”

  Daae had finished taping Yuen’s leg wounds. At these words, Daae chuckled, and he turned and handed his walking stick to Menelaus. It was surprisingly heavy.

  The older man said, “I dislocated my hip to hinder my stride, so that the Blue Men, in their foolish pity, gave me this wand to lean on. On the second level of the coffins, where no coffins still walk, I found an ancient lathe and some leaden scraps. Cautiously I hollowed out the bore and filled it with lead that cooled and hardened.”

  “A shillelagh?” said Menelaus, handing it back.

  “I don’t know that word. This weapon has tasted no blood and accumulated no shades, and so yet has no name. I carry nothing of note. I am Alpha Captain Varuman Aemileus Daae of Uttarakhand, Osaka, Bombay, Yumbulangang, and other actions in the South China Theater. The Varuman blood derives from the Osterman, from the Homo sapiens, and Canis lupus.”

  Menelaus said sharply, “The Blue Men let you back inside the Tombs? What day was this? How did you convince them?”

  Daae frowned and raised his hand, and did not answer.

  The one-eyed, dark-haired Chimera passed Menelaus his bone truncheon. It was a cubit long, heavy at one end, roughed at the other. It looked surprisingly like what cavemen might have used on the plains of Africa to brain their victims, human or animal.

  Yuen said, “In your hand is the thighbone taken from my left leg, which I amputated by thrusting it between the gears of a digging automaton. In the same unlooted machine shop, I melted lead around the knob of the joint to give it some weight, and wrapped the other end in leather, which I had flayed, and cured, and cut from the skin of my own severed leg, to give the haft a grip. The Blue Men are afraid of spirits, and will not take once-living human matter from my hand. The truncheon is called Grislic, and I maimed a man in the mess tent, and laid him low, a Servant of the Machine from A.D. 2520 named Glorified Ctesibius, an Endorcist of the Three Donations. I hold the interference of the dog things to act as a concession! They hurried Ctesibius to the same restoration coffin that regrew my leg, but I hold he would have died of his wounds. Any contest?”

  “I do not contest it,” said Menelaus. “The weapon is named Grislic.”

  The younger man’s eyes glittered. “As for me, I who carry Grislic, I am Alpha Steadholder Extet Minnethales Yuen of Richmond, Third and Second Manassas, Antietam, and various actions against pirates. The Extet are of the Original Experiment Set, from Homo sapiens and Puma concolor.”

  “First Antietam?” asked Menelaus.

  “There were two?” Yuen looked surprised.

  “What year was your Battle of Antietam?” asked Menelaus.

  “AUCR 3144.” This was equivalent to A.D. 4881 in the Gregorian calendar.

  Daae spoke up. “His is the Pre-Proscopalian period, the days of the Republic, back when the Command officers were elected from among the Proven rather than appointed by Breeding Tribunals. My squire hails from a time of poverty and golden virtue, when each Chimera in his freehold owned nothing but his weapon, his land, his name, and his harem. In those days, the Betas were loyal, and the Gammas were cowed and hardworking!”

  Yuen said sardonically, “The era of virtue did not seem so at the time. We were dying.”

  Daae said to him, “You slumbered too soon, Alpha Yuen. The days after your hibernation were days of bloodred gold. In the North, the Final Sabbat surrendered at Buffington’s Island, and submitted to sterilization. The Witches were crushed, their matriarchs enslaved, their menfolk gelded, their children sent to humiliation camps, and their totems and sacred trees chopped up for wood for our war-locomotives of the Long Iron Road. The survivors fled to their sisters in the Far East, and made Peking their final fortress. But they were not as they were.

  “By the time of the Battle of Uttarakhand, where my regiment-family served, the Witches had lost their secret Fountain of Youth; they were aged, and the Amazon warriors, once so fierce and strong, rode their white mules into battle with hair as white.” To Montrose, he said, “I am from an era foeless and cheated of glory, and it is no shame that his weapon be the first to drink.”

  “But the Battle of Uttarakhand was in A.D. 5402,” said Menelaus. “Alpha Daae, does not that make you the younger? How is Alpha Yuen your squire? Shouldn’t you be his?”

  “The Judge of Ages decreed that those who rise from the coffins keep their rank, despite the passage of years,” answered Daae.

  Menelaus pulled the hood a little closer around his face, perhaps to hide his expression. “Hm. Strange that I never heard of that.…”

  “All the mandates concerning those who slumber and thaw derive from his word. But now tell us of yourself.”

  Menelaus nodded his hooded head and passed to Daae an oblong stone the size of a fist. “This weapon is named Rock. I haven’t killed anyone with it yet, but I am plenty tough enough to, if pressed. Knocked out some teeth. You’ve seen me in action with the dogs. Any contest?”

  “I do not contest it,” said Yuen. “It is a true weapon and valiant.”

  “Nor I,” said Daae with a sober expression. “The weapon is called Rock.”

  “Fine. I am High-Beta Sterling Xenius Anubis of Mount Erebus.”

  “Mount Erebus in Antarctica?” Yuen asked. “We are a warlike race indeed. What were we fighting over? Snow? Penguin eggs?”

  “There was a radar station in Antarctica in my day. It is a method of using invisible waves called radio to detect and range a target—”

  Yuen said impatiently, “Come, now! I know what radar is. And horseless carriages, and talking animals, and evil voices that speak out of the graveyards of dead machines, and flying carpets of silver gossamer that soar to the Moon, where the Master of the World left his handprint. My tutors beat the old legends of the Space Ages into me.”

  “The Social Wars were fought on every continent,” said Menelaus, “including when a submarine manned by Sino-Chimerae was blown off course an
d came aground on the Ross Ice Shelf, in McMurdo Sound. The station crew went out with our seal-hunting rifles and spear guns at low tide and besieged and shot ’em, and the Command considered that a real battle, and issued a medallion and everything. So it counts.”

  Yuen said, “We—were we fighting each other? What year was this?”

  Daae answered him, and gave the dates in Chimera reckoning that corresponded to A.D. 5260 through 5270. “Beta Anubis is from the very onset of a great period of expansion. The whole earth was Chimerical by then, and no Witches left anywhere. But the eastern and western hemispheres, which had been allies for centuries against the Witches and Kine-states, did not agree on genetic policy, and came to blows. The Judge of Ages was angry at Tomb-robbers, and released from his tombs a pair of slumbering scientists so that rocketry and atomic energy were rediscovered. Little is known of the Social Wars, since paper documents burned, and calculation machines were erased by magnetic-pulse side effects of atomic weapons.”

  Menelaus turned to Yuen and said, “All matter is made of fine bits called atoms, which consist of positive and negative energies bound together in a balance. When the atom is split, the energy is released—”

  Yuen said, “I know what atomic energy is! Magic fire from the sun that burns whole cities at one stroke. The fire leaves behind a specter that dwells in old craters, invisible and silent: mild effects include chromosome damage, hair loss; medium effects include vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue; great effects include marrow and intestine destruction, and death. What sort of opinion do you aftercomers have of the people of my days? We were not savages! We could not remake the machines and weapons of the Space Ages, but we remembered them.”

  Daae said, “Forgive us. By my time, the days of the Republic were legend. The same fires that blotted out the world’s memory of the Social Wars erased records of previous eras as well. Only the Judge of Ages, who dwells in the underworld, knows and remembers the truth.”

  Menelaus nodded. “For just that reason, I don’t know my derivation, gentlemen, since my lineage records were wiped out. And the atomics made it so the Social Wars weren’t none too sociable. I am sure I have at least some rattlesnake in my cocktail.”

  With no word, the three men each saluted the weapons of the other two by a gesture of raising the hand, palm out, before the eyes, as if to shield them from an invisible glory. Then they gravely passed their weapons each back to the proper owner, shillelagh, thighbone, and rock.

  5. Aeonicide

  “Now that the formalities are over, gentlemen,” Menelaus said, “what do you want? You did not just come all this way to kill an imposter, and you could have done that in plain sight, back at the camp. You didn’t hit as hard or as nasty as you could have done, which means you were trying to guess my mettle. I assume I passed, and that you want to recruit me. What’s the mission?”

  “Escape first, and then revenge,” said Daae. “The Blues have woken men of other times: men you must gather to us. The rods can be broken each separately, but not when bundled together.”

  Yuen said, “Even the lesser races from earlier periods, and the degenerate freaks of our future, can redeem, in part, their inferiority, by service to a superior cause.”

  Menelaus cleared his throat. “Excellent plan. Do let me do the talking, right, Proven Alpha? The lesser races, uh, have brains not excellent enough to stand the shock of being told how pathetic they are. I’ll have to kind of cajole them into helping us. We are clearly low on manpower: how feasible would it be to break into the Tombs and wake others of our kind?”

  Yuen said, “To thaw the sick and the weak? Unless the Blue Men restore them, they will have no weapons and hence no names worth speaking.”

  Daae said, “More than this: we dare not provoke the Judge of Ages. How shall it fare with us, if we disturb the Tombs for our purposes, if he comes in wrath to avenge himself on the Blue Men?”

  Menelaus turned his hooded head toward him. “You have faith in this Judge of Ages?”

  Daae said softly, “Erudite sir, you have studied history, have you not?”

  The hood nodded. “More than I’d like.”

  “You know that there is a recurrent pattern to history. The persistence of the Tombs over so many centuries, unmolested, despite the rumors of buried wealth, bespeaks some power that protects them from grave-robbers. A great power. I say he will arise to punish this trespass. Are not those who unearthed us defilers of his work, and defiers of his word?”

  “Chimerae do not believe in spirits,” said Menelaus.

  “I say the Judge of Ages is a real man, a survivor from some earlier period of history, the Second Age of Space, and that he rises from his own Tombs to walk the earth when need calls.”

  The hood turned toward the younger. “And what do you say, Alpha Yuen?”

  “I say nothing to contradict my Captain,” said Yuen.

  “Do you believe in the Judge of Ages?”

  “Permission to speak freely?” The younger man looked at Daae, who flicked his eyes in a microscopic nod of assent.

  Yuen said, “The Judges of Ages is a children’s story, invented by the superstitious fools of the Final Sabbat. The Witches worshipped everything they did not understand, including the technology they destroyed. Of course, the great Tombs and how they worked were beyond their wits, undisciplined as they were, to conceive. No doubt some coffin contained a victim of a bioweapon. The Witches unsealed a Tomb and were struck down by a disease, something their undisciplined minds could not comprehend, and so they invented the figment of an avenger. They had gods and godlets for all things, houses and hearths and fields and trees. To add one more to their crowded pantheon”—he practically spat the word—“saved them from the expense of mounting a continual guard on known Tomb sites.”

  Menelaus said, “The Natural Order of Man, those fruit-eaters called the Nymphs, they believed the Judge of Ages was real. The Hormagaunts from the period of the Iatrocracy besieged his Tomb site to prevent entry or egress. They said they encountered his soldiers, armored men who balanced on the back of an extinct quadruped called a horse and were carried from place to place. These men were called cniht, which means ‘vassal,’ or cavalier, which means ‘horse-rider of disdainful mien.’ Are there vassals without a liege? I wondered why the Blue Men have not unearthed any of these knights, or why they have not risen from the earth, if they are real. Do either of you Loyal and Proven Alphas have any information on the subject?”

  Daae shook his head. “Perhaps the soldiers of the Judge of Ages are buried too deeply. Or they fought and were slain before we thawed. But there is no sign of battle here.”

  Yuen’s one eye narrowed. “It is noteworthy, Beta Anubis, that you speak several of the aftercomer languages. I take it your slumber was interrupted, that you rose from the buried Tombs and walked the Earth in later years, and learned their ways?” There was no mistaking the suspicion in Yuen’s tone.

  “I learned of their ways, Alpha Yuen,” said Menelaus. The Chimerae were always careful to avoid contamination with foreign cultures and ideas. “Mine was a scholastic interment, not medical, and so I could thaw without undue harm.”

  Daae said, “Scholastic? You were ordered into the Tombs?”

  “Yes, sir. I am a schoolteacher. A mathematician. My unit is the Hundred and Second Civic Control Division, attached to the Third Pennsylvania Legion, College for Dependents. Academic Joint Command told me to study the causes and results of civilizational decline.”

  The eyes of the two other men grew intent.

  Daae asked, “What caused our glory to pass away?” His voice was hushed, the tone of voice one used over an open grave, at a funeral.

  “Remember I come from a day when atomic world civil war burned everything that could burn. We were reduced to savagery,” Menelaus said solemnly. “All Chimerae are genetically programmed with instincts designed to protect the race. It was the one thing that makes us better than the Witches. How could we have done this to ourselves? So I
was ordered to reconstruct, if I could, the predictive mathematical analysis of history called Cliometry, which legend says the Giants knew. I thawed in A.D. 5884, I learned that Richmond, that great city, in a single hour was fallen, and no candle burned there, and there was no sound of engine, no noise of mill or drill. I thawed again in A.D. 5900 and A.D. 5950, and there was no sign anywhere of the Command, and no one to report to. I continued forward into the future, century upon century, because there was no officer, no Alpha, to rescind my orders, or tell me to stop. Therefore I will continue my assigned task until the End of Days, or the arrival of the Hyades, or until an Alpha properly dismisses or relieves me.”

  Yuen said, “Are we truly as far in the future as you say? Is it truly all gone? There is no trace of us? Did nothing we erect survive?”

  Menelaus said, “I saw ten coffins from the Chimera period in the yard, broken open. So there are eleven of us, counting me.”

  Daae said solemnly, “All is lost. The Chimerical way of life passed away, and the black Oculus-pierced domes of our anti-chapels, where once our bravest men gathered to pour out curses into an empty and uncaring sky against an unreal God before our duels and battles, stood isolated and silent upon the hills of Appalachia, and along the shores of the poisonous, sterile waters of the Chesapeake. The woodlands grew and the cities crumbled, and the race that comes after us dances amid our ruins.”

  Menelaus said, “And you, Alpha Daae? Why did you inter yourself?”

  Daae said uncomfortably, “I was of the party that opposed the dissolution of the Senate. Agathamemnon ‘Fairlock’ Raeus assumed certain emergency powers, combining the military leadership with the civilian government. I wished to preserve my bloodline to the day when Raeus would be forced out of office, and the Senatorial form of government restored. I suppose there was some error in my coffin brain, or—”

  Menelaus said, “No error. The coffin never thawed you, because the conditions were never met. The World Empire lasted four hundred more years, and we never returned to our old form of government. Even by your day, the rot was too far advanced to halt.”