The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  I heard the rumor of Asvid of Nettles, who lived alone nigh that ring of stones, and him I sought, seeking the truth of older things. Rumor named him the Old Man, As-Vid, who was the first of all my race, preserved alive by Hermeneutic forces in order to demonstrate to the world that we could live forever, and unaging, if only we killed and consumed without remorse and without satiation, each day to be stronger and more cunning and more deadly than the last.

  I knew I had come ashore near the lands of a master of the Iatric Art when I foolishly stooped to pet a rabbit, and took up a palm of porcupine barbs, for even the hairs of bunnies were bred for ferocity. The trees of the world-forest that hung atop the White Cliffs of Dover were grown strange, and hated Man. They deterred me from seeking an overland route by the venom of their lianas, the thorny armor of their bark, their orchid-blooms with gripping mouths that seek out the breath of sleepers unwise enough to snore beneath the cursed leaf-shade to strangle them. Scalded by poison sap, I flung me back into the Channel. I circled the island by sea and traveled up the riverways, better able to fend off the cold-water piranhas, giant leeches, and stinging eels.

  Up the river Avon I made my way, living off the venomous flesh-eating swans for whom the stream is famous. In my pouch I kept homunculi adjusted to my immune system and genetic structure, and so what fruit or fish they could eat and survive, I could so. They were big-eyed creatures, miniature versions of me, and they would dance by the campfire and mimic my antics during the northern nights. I am sorry they died so quickly, but it was a dangerous land.

  The river wound beneath the hanging moss of the canopy, and a strange white swamp of chalky waters, leavened with limestone, spread beneath the roots of the eternal, hundred-foot-high trees.

  I found Asvid. His house was thorns woven with poison ivy and oak and sumac, and in the mud he bred his worms and snakes and stinging things, and on the branches he hung skulls of visitors who discontented him. Once and twice I tried to approach his miserable vile hut, and once and twice I returned to the mud of the river, tossing and screaming as I slept in the waves, with boils on my flesh, and my tongue was swollen like a smoldering log with heat.

  But I was not unpracticed in the arts of the Leeches, including arts of mine own devising, and on the third trial I waded his bog with a hide as heavy as a hippopotamus’s, and I laughed amid scorpions and trod them underfoot, and I crushed his snakes and worms between my tusks and ate them raw.

  Asvid rose from the muck at my feet and blew a weft of spores from an arm-sac that set me to puking. I begged him for my life, and that astounded him, for none of my kind esteem life, or ask for it, much less beg. He croaked with a voice that had not spoke in centuries, asking me if I disdained the First Law of the Old True Way, which was to feed off others or be fed to them, that the weak might fall and the survivors grow strong.

  I said I did wish to feed from him, but I swore that I wanted none of his flesh or organs. Instead I wished to consume his knowledge, and I could feed off him in this way with no loss to himself. I wished to know of the old things only he knew.

  He laughed, and said that I had eaten Ormvermin, his favorite pet, and his guardian and watch-worm. Who now would guard his hut while he traveled?

  I took my crotch in my paw and swore by my sexual organs, where the genetic material rests that will one day bring forth the posthuman Enemies of the Star-Monsters, and we Phastorlings swear by nothing else, for that is all we hold sacred. I said I would serve him as well as the beastie I had killed, and better, and if I failed, he need not return my testicular sacs to me.

  His hut was not the hovel of misery it seemed, for each and every thorn was a library needle containing another archive of life-code information, and all the secrets the Iatrocrats over many bloody generations had accumulated and hid away, for, immortal and hating their children, what discoveries did any share?

  My first task was to grow in myself a chemical coder-decoder organ, so that I could read what was written in the messenger acids. I drove the needle into my brain according to the most ancient ritual the first augmented man, called Montrose, by his suffering and madness so long ago inaugurated.

  Asvid infected me with madness, and filial love and piety, and other chemicals even the disciplines of the Wintermind could not efface. And thus I became ensnared, and thus became the apprentice of the Old Man, who was first of our kind.

  8. Soorm and Asvid

  How many years passed by, I will not say, lest you think I boast, but Asvid was both the most accomplished and least demonstrative of all the Phastorlings, and he slew without mercy, and those he spared served him, for he knew the art of instilling pack-loyalty instincts and altruism-codes into those he defeated, and the Wintermind could not quell the instinct.

  That, little lordlings, was the great secret of his longevity: He, the most ancient example of our race routinely and blithely betrayed the bedrock principles of the Old True Way.

  When I recited the First Law, Eat or be eaten, fight or die, he smiled and said there was Law higher than the number one law, a Law of Zero: Let others fight or die for you, and eat the survivors while they are wounded and weary.

  He called this his Law of Laws: The rule was that Laws were meant for others to obey, and you to exploit. He said that is why laws were made at all. His law was as old as the handprint on the Moon.

  Asvid was not my patron only, but my father, the only father I would ever know. My brain chemistry had been altered to allow me to have the emotion proper between father and sons. I do not have a word for it in my language, and the Nymph word implies incestuous intergenerational sodomy, which is not the proper idea.

  Knowing this nameless emotion, my disgust and hatred of the world in which I lived grew great, and then greater. Why were the Hormagaunts born not of woman, but in growth-pods? Why did I have no brothers, no cousins, no mate? Why so much death and pain and disease? Why had Earth once boasted starships, but now we did not even have Clipper Ships, but swam the seas in coracles and canoes and longboats pulled by sea serpents? Why was our world so wrong?

  9. Hemoclysm

  Then the time of bloodshed came, the Hemoclysm, when the configurations, nations, and factions attempted utterly to exterminate all rival DNA molecular compositions. First one worldwide war and then many burned the eternal forest, and in the times between the wars came the gene-cleansings and genocides and mass starvations.

  Because of the wars, Asvid and I were growing allergic to each other. Our immune defenses, as they grew more complex, were harder to harmonize chemically. When we could no longer stand each other, he declared me his apprentice no longer, but a journeyman.

  Not long after I departed from him, and founded for myself a stronghold at the mouth of the Avon, a summons arrived that midnight by long-range night-swallow. I ate the bird to ingest the chemical codes, which only mechanisms from my DNA could unlock and read.

  It was a summons, not from Asvid, but from his master. After so many years of surviving the deadly world-wood and the deadlier children of his kindred, Asvid was being called by the one man with the right to call him: his patron and maker and master, Pastor, from whom all Phastorlings take their name.

  And, in calling Asvid, he called all the Asvidlings, who were a very great number, more than I had imagined.

  Pastor had called a Phastormoot, a gathering of those loyal to him, and we were summoned to Millennium Island on the opposite side of the globe.

  I met with Asvid on the day the great migration was set to depart. Such a gathering of such hosts had never been seen, for he was eldest, and there were many indeed beholden to him. Rank after rank of the Asvidlings, names out of legend, rumors from history, Hormagaunts as vicious and deadly and cunning as anything our race had ever produced paraded before us and descended into the moaning vessels of the sea, a forest of horns and crests, a cacophony of screams and trumpets, a thunder of claws and hooves, until only we two, Asvid and I, remained.

  I remember it well. We stood upon a
t the river mouth on a bluff overlooking the sea, and the land behind us, as far as eyes could reach, was dark with ash, and there were many trunks, hundreds of feet high, cracked and burnt and dead, huge like half-fallen towers, with no canopy overhead to hide the agoraphobic sky. Upon the battle plain, I saw blackened skulls piled in pyramids or rolling in the ash, and corpses of dogs and crows foolish enough to eat the slain, and so be poisoned by what slew them. Across this roofless world of smoldering death the river currents ran black with cinders and bark. The world-forest was dying.

  Even I, who lived and rejoiced in death and murder, was appalled, for the chemical codes inspiring filial piety in me had weakened my nature. I asked of my master why all these dread events were necessary? What was wrong with the world?

  He told me all history is nothing but a play of marionettes, and all events were played out by the puppeteer who pulled the secret strings, the Red Hermeticist Father Reyes y Pastor.

  These were his words: “All our lives and all the lives of our ancestors have been bound up in a web of mathematical codes and conclusions, a march of numbers like an army of deadly ants, as invisible as bacteria, and history has never escaped from the meshes of the web. Father Reyes, through us, his scholars and scions and servants, establishes the contours, and history follows when we let the webwork out, or pull it back in. No matter where the individual fish may dart, the school is where the net defines. Pastor is one of the Enlightened, an Illuminatus—many times I have killed or caused disasters, founded schools or spread rumors, to thrust the forces of history one way or another, according to his commands.”

  I told him that the Witches thought the motions of stars and planets defined destiny; that Chimerae said blood and genetic mechanisms defined it; that Nymphs taught that destiny was a figment of brain elements which could be altered by a vapor or a wine. Had not he himself taught me of all these dead ages?

  Even behind the scales and bristles and fangs of his battle modifications, I saw then for the first time his human eyes, and human sorrow. “I will impart the greatest of secrets to you. Not stars, not blood, not brains define the destiny of men. My master does. It is given to him, the Red Hermeticist, to determine the fate of lesser men. The enlightened guide the benighted; the sighted lead the blind.” He spoke as one who speaks and believes, but hates, a hard truth.

  He continued, “It is said there were other Hermeticists who defined and ruled the history of other ages. Our age is his. He is the Master of the Fate of the Hormagaunts.”

  I saw then that I was a fish in a bucket, who, leaping out of the wooden wall, found myself still confined in a well, hemmed by a wall of stone. I had escaped the close slavery of Artabria only to find the larger slavery of the Red Hermeticist. “Are these wars his doing? For his pleasure, hell rules earth, and many fine things pass away, never again to be seen? It there none who can oppose and overthrow the ruler of this age and its present darkness?”

  Asvid spoke with wry and weary humor. “The Nymphs, long ago, believed that there was a Judge of Ages, who would arise from sleep in the roots of his mountain, and condemn any age which offended his law. But what that law is, I never paused to inquire, and now the Nymphs are extinct, as dead as their belief.”

  “You do not hold such a person exists?”

  Asvid said, “Rather, I hope for his sake he does not. For were there a Judge to which the suffering multitudes and slaves and slain children could appeal, he would have heard their cry, and condemned this age long since. If he were real, and so indifferent to his duty, surely I would slay him.”

  We departed separately, for in our present forms, we could neither embrace, not so much as a handshake, and dared not exchange the kiss of peace, lest the allergic reactions sicken us. He spread vast wings of membrane and took to the air, and I bowed my head and dived into the black and rushing water, the river tumbling to the sea.

  I knew we would never meet again. The Phastormoot was the summons of the loyal. And Asvid was no longer numbered among them. Nor, truth be told, was I. The Wintermind technique allowed me to resist the homing instinct implanted in me. I fled in the opposite direction, from Thule to Vinland and south again to New England, Columbia, Virginia.

  Therefore I know Reyes y Pastor exists, because he summoned me. I know the Judge of Ages does not exist, because if he did, Reyes y Pastor would have been judged, and slain.

  You have been patient to hear the whole of my life, for the whole of my life was needed to tell what I knew of Pastor. My life was hell. Pastor is the maker and master of hell, the chief tormentor. That is what I know of him.

  I assumed Asvid would be alive when I was thawed. Legend said nothing could kill the Old Man, the First of the Phastorlings: and the longer I lived with him, the more I thought the legend true.

  He is not here, is he?

  10. Wintermind

  After Soorm was done speaking, Illiance said in High Iatric to Menelaus, “You have heard the testament of the relict Hormagaunt. Did his words happen to open to you a more complete understanding of the causes of the decline of Hormagaunt civilization, or yours?”

  Menelaus said, “I’ll say. Do you two gentlemen have any reason to doubt his tale?”

  Illiance said cautiously, “No obvious element contradicts a known fact preserved in our historical records. On that level, it seems not to be a complete fiction.”

  Ull gestured toward the dog thing hunched over the table of readouts. “We have some cause, in the absence of contrary evidence, to suspect that there is no deliberate deceit being practiced.”

  Menelaus said, “Well, I just found out my entire search for the causes of the decline and fall of world empires is a fraud. There is no natural law or inevitable tendency to be found. If Soorm is right, history is controlled by some sort of mathematical science of statistics, and empires fall because the men who control that science, the Hermetic Order, decree it shall fall. I thought I was a doctor looking for the natural cause of a disease. I’m not. I am a detective looking for the poison used by an assassin.

  “Where are the assassins now?” Menelaus continued. “Or doesn’t this tale ring any bells with you gentlemen? Were you aware that this current era of world history now is under the control of one of the Hermeticists? If so, which one? If not, why were you not informed?”

  Ull said ponderously, “The simple academic reciprocity demanded by our way has been sated. You have asked your questions and had them answered.”

  “Not quite,” said Menelaus. “I am also curious about the reasons for the decline of your civilization, my little blue guys. You cannot tell me you are still a going concern, can you? How many of you are left?”

  Illiance said in a pedantic voice, “You show great charity to be concerned for our tribulations, but it appears best to accept your aid in the modes conformable to the contours of the situation, which is, to have you assist us in translation, rather than to answer a deposition. There is no need, at present, to rule out an expansion of such a broader basis for accepting your aid; but the matter is of lower priority at the moment.”

  Ull said, “Ask him of this Wintermind of which he speaks. We have no referent for it.”

  Menelaus translated the question.

  Soorm had no eyebrows to raise, but something of a supercilious expression came over his stiff seal-like features when he goggled his eyes and gaped his shark-toothed mouth in a grin.

  He spoke no word, but raised his hand and pointed with a webbed finger at the table on which the dog thing’s equipment rested. After a moment, the instrument began to whistle like a steam kettle, while the dog thing leaped to its hind legs and frantically touched control-points and clicked toggles and slapped mirror surfaces. Some crucial part of the mechanism failed: the little lights dotting the coral surfaces flared up and went dark, and all the mirrors faded to a dull gray.

  Menelaus drew his hood up in order to hide his expression of disgust or anger.

  But neither Ull nor Illiance seemed in the least perturbed. Men
tor Ull said to Illiance in the fluting of the intertextual language of the Locusts, “Wintermind is a primitive form of the Mind Discipline.”

  Illiance opened his eyes wider. “Instruct me, Mentor. I can see that it is a manifestation of biosoftware—the training that must be ingrained rather than implanted via needle. I see also that mental structures of the third order would be needed to instruct our detector to self-destruct. But how do you deduce that this is related to our Discipline?”

  Mentor Ull said, “The Mind Discipline contains systemic neural pulses and alterations of brain wave frequency to alter internal mind states. Reference that relict Soorm scion Asvid used what he called Wintermind to break instinctive genetically imposed control-methods or addictions, including the naturally addictive epiphenomena of family love, which can be interpreted to be just such an internal mind state.”

  Illiance nodded gravely. “Insightful! This suggests that your previous plan to use torment to deter uncooperative or inharmonious thought forms found in the organism is nugatory.”

  Mentor Ull favored him with a dark and reptilian look. “Is that your sole concern? The subjective well being of these erratic and misshapen ancestral creatures? We may be able to deduce which aspect of the Divarication formula was used to create this discipline form.”

  Illiance said, “That aspect seems unclear, Mentor.”

  Mentor Ull said, “Not to a mind fixed and attentive, Student, cleared of complexity and distraction! The initial evidence suggests a mental but not neurological use of the Continuity Code, which is the sixth of the seven solutions of the Divarication problem, used specifically to overcome the Addiction divarication, which occurs in any information system where units enter a positive feedback loop—merely stimulating their pleasure reward without performing the act that merits it. The Continuity Code adds the mechanism of time-binding, so that short-term gain no longer overwhelms long-term loss. Is it not significant that the Hormagaunts were effectively immortal?”