The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  We had to set our picket line far from the doors. A mile was safe, two miles was safer, safest of all was to make sure the sicklings were too sick to reach the doors at all: it was the custom to introduce venom into hunting cats to drive them rabid and drive the cats by instinct-lock into the terrain circling a Tomb, or impregnate the smallest nits and mites and midges with fevers of several deadly strains, and send them as clouds to hang before Tomb doors, for the energy-cannon of the most ancient world could not open fire on a crowd of flies or a clowder of cats.

  4. Interment

  My own interment into the Tombs? It was unremarkable.

  From time to time the sicklings, acting in a fashion unlike ours, or using a mental discipline unlike our Wintermindedness, would do the one thing we never do, which is, they would take antihistamines and allergy suppressants, so that they could tolerate one another without their bodies reacting, and many donors or dwellers from different Clade could mingle.

  They would form—there is not really a word for it in our language. The Nymph word for it is orgy, but this implies a union and a cooperation for sexual purposes. You know how pack animals act as one, or a hive of bees, or army ants? It was like that. A man-pack, a man-hive, a man-army.

  Of course, such a unity of purpose, even across difference of Clade, each taken from a different point on the biological spectrum—such a thing is unheard of by those who follow the Old True Way, the astru-do, the way of the omnicompetent and utterly isolated man. But, hoo! The sicklings were robbing the Clade of the organs they carried, so why would any other taboo hold them in check?

  In any case, an orgy of these sicklings were driving toward a Tomb hold I was gene-locked by instinct to ward, and I pursued them, and a maniple of my Clade-dwellers with me, and a three-clawed sloth-mastodon.

  But the sick were wily enough to lead the chase through the swamp, where my sloth-mastodon was bogged, and the branches of the world-forest there too fine to bear his weight.

  To this day, I wonder what happened to Behemodont. That was his name. I grew him from an egg in my own sacs, and I trained him, and he loved me, and I so wanted to eat the steaks and roasts from his ribs and flank when he died. Every time I mounted up the howdah to ride him to battle, where he fought so bravely for me, I salivated, contemplating the rich marbling of his well-designed meat. And now, he is gone forever, eaten not by me, but by time. Ah, how I miss my steed! And the world ecology is changed, and his whole race extinct, and will never come again.

  I left him and my Clade-dwellers behind, and pressed on alone. This same pack of sicklings, as it turned out, also were wily enough to know I would take to the swamp waters and approach them from below, for they had seeded the waters with spore.

  My gills grew inflamed. When I surfaced, spitting swamp water, a man made of steel with a plume above his metal head, shining, terrible, great, came upon me. He rode a steed like horse crossed with a deer; a shining white drestrier that ran on split hooves and lashed a tail like a lion’s tail.

  He had lived four thousand years ago, and served an order founded seven thousand years ago. On his surcoat of black he wore a white cross like unto four chevrons all facing inward, and the hems were decorated with images of crouching lions and unicorns: by this I knew him to be a beforegoer, a man of the Bygone, and a protector of the Hospital.

  He called out “Gesprecan! Hwām gesecen Þū?”

  I knew not what the words meant, but I had learned from the sicklings that to survive this challenge I was supposed to cry out, “Yldothane!” Which is the sickling name for the Judge of Ages—but I had no patience for his superstitions or his folly, so instead of speech, I answered by expelling a stench from my buttocks glands and by throwing the barb of my tail toward his heart.

  Instantly, he should have died. Instead, my poisons availed nothing but to burn his surcoat.

  He struck me with a pointed wand he held in his hand. The word for it in the Nymphs language is lance, but the Nymphs also use this word to refer to the barbed male member of cats bred for bestiality intercourse, so I cannot say what term is best. It was like an oryx horn made of wood and tipped with an iron tooth, so I could use a swarm of diggerwasps from my armpit hive to attack and warp the wood. The weapon bent and shattered, and the wasps blinded his steed.

  But then he dismounted, tossed the shards of lance aside, and smote me with a knife as long as his arm. It was not a living thing, because when I sprayed it, this knife did not flinch.

  If the world were just, I should have been able to flatten him with a stroke of my hand, but justice departed this world long ago. When I grappled him, his metal hull was like the electric eel to shock me, and I heard the motors in his joints whirring and whining, giving him the strength of ten, and I knew I faced a foe from the Age of Machines. His skin was not skin, but armor. It was iron, cold iron, and my claws and great tail availed me nothing.

  He struck me through the primary heart, and I swooned. My secondary heart kept me alive, and my deep-diving oxygen stores kept me breathing. I woke buried in soil. The metal man had put me a foot or so under the ground for some reason, and did not harvest me. With difficulty I dug myself up.

  Wounded, I could not allow my own Clade to come upon me, because my organs were particularly well designed and rare, and if my men found me weakened, their gluttony for what the Iatrocrats would give in return for my body would overcome their fear of me—and a wounded man cannot provoke fear, even if he has a full spectrum of infectives and biotics still at his command.

  And I had perhaps deviated from strict interpretations of the Way, for I needed children, young children, where the donors had no prime specimens, and perhaps I had impressed a Clade-dweller or two into making a donation. They are small of soul, their minds preoccupied by matters of affection and lineage and other trivial things we know to be caused by molecular neurochemistry. A true Phastorling was above mere animal emotions like father-love! But my people had perhaps been afflicted by sentimentality and pettiness.

  I was a sickling now, and therefore weak, and the Way of the Phastorlings has no softness for the weak, because our bodies belong to the Clade.

  Scenting his steed, and knowing myself lost if I did not, I crawled after my murderer, knowing he would be more likely to grant mercy than my friends.

  I remember it began to rain, and this confused the scent, and my bloodloss made me tremble, and so I was very weak. I passed the same outcropping of rock twice and thrice, and knew then I was crawling in circles.

  Then the wind blew, and the rains fluttered like a gray curtain and parted: and I saw my slayer, a great armored knight of the early world, suddenly before me. Because the rain deadened my nose and dinned in my ears, I had no warning. One moment he was simply there. Perhaps he rose from the ground. He did not move, and the rain made the ground boil with mud about the golden spurs of his steel boots.

  By gestures and signs, for we had very few words in common, I made known to him that I wished to be taken into the presence of the Judge of Ages, the Yldothane. He laughed, and it echoed oddly in his helm, and said, Is hit nowh, hys yldu? And then he said, Is sheo becuman, hys wīf?

  I did not know his words, and yet I knew his meaning, and so I said back, “The aeon is not now. His bride is not come.”

  The knight uttered a sardonic laugh and said, “Leort nan-mann wecean Hé Hwa ÁbireÞ, lœst heos wrœðu biÞ äwaeenlan!” I needed no translation. Had I not heard from my youth onward the tale of his anger? Let none waken He Who Waits, lest his wrath be awakened!

  I served the knight in the frozen mortuary for a year and a day, which was the only way to earn the traditional two pence needed to pay the hibernation fee. He did not show to me any Judge, for there was none to show.

  5. Soorm and the Unreal Man

  What is your question? That I do know. There is no Judge of Ages, no one man or one mind controlling all the Tombs here and there and everywhere around the world. That is a myth invented by the Nymphs.

  The Ny
mphs had to expel their excess populations, and did not have the heart—because they were unevolved, and had not yet achieved the sublime perfection of the One True Way of the Phastorlings, the astru-do—to slaughter and consume their excess population as a greater being would have.

  No, hobbled by sentiment and other neuroglandular weaknesses that the Wintermind can overcome, the Nymphs merely preserved their unwanted until such a time as these were no Nymphs, and they woke, and used their arts not for pleasure, as the Nymphs had done, but for pain, for glory, for the dream of escaping all degrading pleasure forever, and living eternally to face the Hyades at the End of Days. By rejecting life and embracing the thing-beyond-life, those exiled Nymphs sculpted and resculpted themselves into the first of my people.

  The idea that the Tombs have a buried and first ruler, a wise lord who sleeps? Nonsense. The Nymphs needed a father-figure as reassurance to the cast-offs that someone or something would protect them as they slept. They were afraid of tomorrow, because Nymphs have no concept of tomorrow, and so they had to be told there was a little godling, a posthuman, a guardian of their graveyards.

  He would both protect the little darlings as they slept, like a guard dog, and, (so fortunate!) would assure them that any age into which they woke would be a good era. He was the Judge and Arbiter of Ages, and he condemned and destroyed whole civilizations with a wave of his hand. Hah! As if any creature could possess such authority and prowess. Convenient, was it not, that he fulfilled both roles?

  No, little wee lordlings, there is no Judge of Ages. He is a myth invented by Nymphs, an opiate falsehood meant to deceive the Many.

  6. Proof

  Illiance, with a sidelong glance at Ull, said softly, “Ask Soorm scion Asvid where from his certainty happens to derive its solid nature. He speaks with force upon a topic muchly debated. Does he enjoy some proof to confirm his words, that there is no one founder to the Tombs?”

  When the question was translated, Soorm goggled his mismatched eyes and showed his horrid teeth in grin or grimace. His seal-face was too inflexible for subtle expressions.

  “Proof? Nonsense! How can there be proof that nothing is nothing? A shadow has no weight; a reflection in a looking glass makes no noise. Do you expect me to call the Judge of Ages here out of the abyss of time, and have him testify as to his own nonexistence? Such a testimony would be unreal, coming from a unreal man, would it not?”

  Menelaus said to the Blue Men, “I would also like to add that I agree with Soorm. I have reentered and exited the Tombs many times, first in one land, and then in another, and saw no evidence of any central leadership, or even that one Tomb communicated with another. I can testify that the Judge of Ages is myth. But now I have a question for you, Preceptor Illiance.”

  Ull narrowed his heavily lidded eyes in annoyance, but Illiance nodded serenely.

  “Illiance, you said that if I recognized the brotherhood that all academics across the ages share, this imposes a moral burden on me to help your research. Right?”

  Illiance nodded. “I did not use the word burden, but you are essentially correct.”

  “Is this obligation one-way, or two-way?”

  Illiance said, “A degree of reciprocity is to be expected. Have you some research of your own to which we, without undue extension of resources, may make a contribution?”

  “Thanks for volunteering and yes, indeedy-do, I do. I told you I study the decline and fall of civilizations. I was ordered to do so, and I don’t see any reason to stop and—to be frank—don’t have anything else worth doing. To be really frank, I’ll tell you that history is a stenchified huge disappointment to me, gentlemen! I was expecting to wake up in a future with ten-mile-high skyscrapers, flying horseless carriages made of antigravity metal powered by atmospheric electricity, atomic-powered lightbulbs, rocket-jetpacks able to surpass the speed of sound, and starships able to surpass the speed of light. Instead I wake up in a dingy camp occupied by Moreau dogs that any apprentice biotechnician could have whipped up in his wine cellar, and they are toting muzzle-loaders and cutlasses. So where the hell is the future? What happened to it? What did you people do?”

  Illiance said, “Your model assumes that technological progress is ever-increasing and unidirectional. The premise is false. Technological progress is the apex of a complex and specialized social organism reacting to specific environmental pressures, and then only for societies embracing particular metaphysical and ontological beliefs, social priorities, economic structures, academic liberties, and unity of worldview. The disarrangement of any element in the organism hinders, slows, or reverses that progress and, in turn, creates additional disarrangement. Naturally, such cascade failures can be avoided if the degree of interdependence of worldwide systems is minimized: self-sufficiency is more adroit. Progress is not an unmitigated good.”

  Menelaus said slowly, “Is your philosophy of living simply something that sprang out of a period of widespread social collapse? What happened to the world outside? Are you survivors of the asteroid strike?”

  Ull interrupted, “The question is an aberration distorting the conversational flow of our verbal information exchanges, and must be relegated to a lower priority. Lance-Corporal Beta Anubis, the technological progress of the prior aeons was hindered by a retarding element. The Tomb system prevents the errors and unsanities of previous aeons from expiring when due, by preserving representatives of each generation to the next; and, by a natural selection, only psychologically malcontented or physically ill seek out long-term hibernation.”

  Menelaus looked dumbfounded. “Hold on! Are—are you claiming the presence of this so-called Judge of Ages, the builder of the Tomb system, that he is the thing dragging civilization back from progress?”

  Ull looked at him coldly. “The hypothesis fits the available facts.”

  Menelaus said, “You want my help? Then let me ask a few questions of my own, and maybe we can expand the pool of available facts.”

  Illiance made a small, delicate gesture with his fingers, which could have meant anything. Menelaus decided to interpret it as a gesture of consent, or else not to care what it meant. He turned to Soorm (who had been watching both sides of the conversation with his independently moving eyes) and spoke in Leech: “Tell what you know of Reyes y Pastor.”

  7. Soorm in Artabria

  The only way to speak of Pastor is to tell you of my whole life, and this for reasons that will become clear.

  I was born in slavery and pain, as all my kind are born, amid the stench in the surgical pits of the Iatrocrats, who in those times were called the Leeches. I was the scion of Moord scion Elwe, the most accomplished genius of his age, and I was the summit of his art, for my excellent master had outdone himself. At tourney or melee or assassination or for kidnapping virgins to serve in the mothering racks, I was the most famed and most feared in all the Artabrian land. The Leeches I served gained many dormitories of donors by my victories, and extended their lives by many hundreds of years, grinding their elixirs from the glands of many captured children: and so the Leeches of Moord and his Clades and auxiliaries waxed fat and affluent, great and gay.

  The power of the Artabrians, of which Moord was not the least, extended from Aragon and Castile down the Duero toward the coast, and the great walled Clade city of Olissipona became ours. When that happened, ours became a naval power, facing corsairs from the north of the world, where the world-forest forms a roof of pine and conifer half a thousand feet above the benighted lands. We fought wallowing kragens from Hibernia and nicors from Thule.

  I was modified to become a dweller in the sea, and I traveled afar on the business of the Leeches who created me, slaying whom it was given me to slay, capsizing the coracles of mariners, but I was for a short space free from endless, smothering canopy of leaves, and I floated at night beneath the stars, and wondered at them.

  Alas for the Leeches that I was given gills! For in the salt sea I breathed the wind of liberty, and it was wine to me. I grew curious ab
out hither shores, and distant lands where other parts of the world-forest grew. And I saw the migrations of the great seabirds in an empty, leafless sky.

  Often I would wound the vessels of mariners, leaving them adrift or aground, toying with their crew most slowly, murdering them one by one across a space of days or weeks while they thirsted and starved. I did this because I was curious, and they would tell me tales of things afar or long ago, that I might spare them for last, or eat their legs before I ate their head. And so I learned that there was a larger world and a deeper time.

  Here I heard of the father of our race, the Red Hermeticist, Reyes y Pastor, for whom we are named, and whose code we follow.

  I heard tales of great and ancient things, of ships who sailed the stars, men of old who did grand deeds, legends of one man who stole power from heaven and put all of Earth beneath his heel, or legends of another man who dared to love a swan-princess who fled beyond the river of stars called Milky Way. The tales told of a time, days of Eden, before men feasted upon one another’s glands and organs, or knew the art of Hormagauntery.

  And these tales tormented me, and I knew I must find the truth of them.

  A night came when I saw the world-forest for miles along the coasts of Olissipona aflame, and I knew war had come: for the Surgeon-General of Iberia had for months been gathering Hermeneutic Gargantuans and Clade-levies and war-beasts and disease-bearing flies from Telamon to Tarraco, lured by the rumor of our slave-wealth.

  I left Moord and my other masters to their fate, and left my patrimony behind. I was no more Soorm scion Moord. Woe befall him! His name shall live forever, but not through me. I shed his name like a snake sheds a skin. It grew too small.

  North I swam by daylight and starlight, and came at last to the isles of the Cassiterides, so called for their tin mines, the last place metal could be dug from the earth, and long since exhausted. Here ancient men older than Giants reared a circle of stones to measure the stars, which, even in those days, they feared.