The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  Illiance said, “These conclusions remain tentative. It would be untoward to share this speculation with the—” He glanced at Menelaus. “—ah, with, ah whomever may be taking an interest in the research.”

  Mentor Ull said, “You refer to the Expositors of our Order gathered at Mount Misery? Agreed. We cannot approach greater certainty until we interview a Nymph, and determine the characteristics of the social-psychological control mechanisms involved in the communal relations of the Natural Order of Man.”

  Mentor Ull said to Menelaus in High Iatric, “With our deception-detection equipment in disorder, no further testament is needed at this time. Tell the relict Soorm scion Asvid that the Followers will escort him, and you, back to the confinement area.”

  Menelaus said to Soorm in Leech, “The blue lordling says the dog things will drag us back to the prison yard, thanks to your blowing up their lie detector. We’re dismissed.”

  7

  The Old Man of Albion

  1. A Private Place for Private Deeds

  The next day, it was snowing, and no work could be done at the dig. Instead, the machines of the Blue Men crouched beneath a snapping, wind-tossed tarpaulin, cleaning and oiling their blades and spades with an endlessly repeated gesture like the gleeful hand-wringing of misers, or perhaps like flies washing. The snow was blowing vertically, not quite parallel to the sloping ground, and the horn had not sounded for the mess tent.

  Each individual was in the tent assigned him. Whether that could be said of the lone figure leaving a temporary line of naked footprints in the snow was a matter of semantics. His tent was folded around him like a hooded cloak, and he carried the long train of metallic fabric over his arm, like a senator of old holding the drape of a toga, or a princess in a trailing gown suddenly found without her maidens of honor.

  He came to one of the tents and shouted a halloo. He waited unanswered for a while, and shouted and shouted again.

  “Hail and parley! Weapons down!”

  Eventually the tent flap drew open, revealing the scowling dark-furred beast-face of Soorm the Hormagaunt.

  “I am armed with a rock, and my name is Beta Sterling Anubis. May I enter?” The hooded man spoke in Leech.

  “Think you I so soon forget?” rumbled Soorm.

  “To introduce myself by weapon and name is merely a Chimerical custom.”

  “How odd. You do not smell like a Chimera.”

  “Easily explained. I am a Beta, and imperfect. The other Chimerae in the camp are Alpha, well bred of long bloodlines. May I enter?”

  “No. I will exit. The tent cloth can be stiffened without warning by an electric signal to form a nearly airtight prison, and I have no wish to be trapped in a small space with you. The Blues doubtless have other sleights and oddities they could perform as well, while their substance is around us. Come!”

  The big dark-furred man lumbered out of the tent and, taking the arm of Menelaus, stalked toward the trees not far away, pine and spruce conical hats of snow, from which the wind drew plumes. Without waiting for an invitation, Soorm parted the garments of Anubis and put a furry arm around him, drawing the material of the robes of Menelaus around him for warmth. Menelaus made no protest, but walked huddled up to the other man, his head almost in his armpit.

  Soorm said, “You show no fear to walk so nigh a Hormagaunt? I have both virulent pus and stench-cloud I can emit from several orifices, and beneath my hairs are needles I could stiffen into barbs.”

  “It’s not that I am all that brave, it’s just that I figure we are all going to be killed by the Blue Men soon enough anyhow, so why worry? Besides, there aren’t that many people in the camp you can talk with. Who speaks Leech, but me?”

  “Come, then. Let us walk up farther, and find a private place for private deeds. Your feet do not freeze, or bleed?”

  Menelaus said, “My boots were stolen from my coffin while I slept. Made from the hide of a gator I shot myself, and I was damn proud of those boots! One of the Hospitaliers drew tattoos for me under the skin of my foot, with heating elements inside. Don’t tell my superiors, please. Chimerae have rules about bodily modifications.”

  Soorm with his huge stride set a quick pace, and he dragged or drove an uncomplaining Menelaus to where a cliff clove the mountainside. Far underfoot between two converging rock walls, a rushing stream emerged, bubbling, from a doorway in the mountainside. The leaves of the door hung open at an odd angle, half torn from their hinges.

  To either side of the doorway, a coffin stood upright, and glints of energy played through their metal surfaces. The waters in the stream swirled around the wreckage of several of the digging automata of the Blue Men. These formed a tangle of metal spiders and metal lobsters, and one treaded vehicle like a tortoise on its back. All were motionless in the white water, icicle streaked, pockmarked, broken, and burnt.

  Soorm said. “Look down! I call this spot the Dying Place. The only approach is so narrow that the mechanisms have to come one or two at a time; even a small display of power from the Tomb defenses can hold them off. The Blue Men did not bother to scavenge their fallen.”

  Menelaus said, “I know you can breathe water. Can you pass these defenses?”

  Soorm tightened his arm, pulling the head of Menelaus closer into his musk-scenting armpit, and he caught the smaller man’s neck in the crook of his elbow. “No, I meant to show you a place where I can commit a murder, and no one would find your body.”

  The man stirred uneasily, and this made the Hormagaunt snarl.

  “Boo! You are pretending to be scared. Don’t bother! I can smell you are not afraid.” Soorm peered at the other carefully, first with one eye, then with the other, nostrils twitching. His muzzle whiskers close enough to tickle. “Altruism and Agape! Why are you fearless? What in the world is wrong with you!”

  “It is a Chimera technique for controlling fear,” said Menelaus in little gasps. “All schoolboys learn it in boot camp.”

  “I can also smell lies. That’s my technique! Quite useful.”

  “Interesting … that so … useful … a technique … can fail.” His voice was little more than a squeak.

  Soorm released the neck of Menelaus, but kept his arm around the other man, perhaps for warmth.

  Menelaus massaged his throat. “You have odd swearwords.”

  “Everyone swears by what he fears most.”

  “You said you came to appreciate the benefit of altruism. When Asvid adopted you as a father. You still fear cooperative action?”

  “Bah! We never overcome what is imprinted into us as eggs, or so Hormagaunt Moord taught me.”

  “A dismal philosophy, but I suppose he learned it when he was young. In any case, I wanted to speak with you,” said Menelaus. “I think the Blue Men plan to kill us all, in order to hide the evidence of this dig. If they were legitimate, they would have their own translators and diggers, rather than have us do their work.”

  “You are not going to ask me why I just threatened to spit flesh-eating acid in your face, twist off your head like a chicken, and throw your twitching body into the freezing rapids below?”

  “Um. I assume you thought the Blue Men would not dare enter the West Crevasse to recover my body and determine the cause of death? As a stratagem, I see no obvious flaw.”

  “No, I don’t mean the mechanics of the murder. I mean the motive.”

  “I was not going to ask, no.”

  “No?”

  “I am Chimera. We kill each other all the time, and with reckless glee. I regard it as unexceptional behavior, no doubt caused by high spirits.”

  “You are no Chimera. I suspect you are an agent of the Blue Men, a mole, a Judas goat.”

  “Good! Then you will not take me seriously when I ask you to join an uprising against them. If we can get enough Thaws to join us, we can rush the gate and overbear the dog things before the cylinders kill too many of us.”

  “Rush the gate for what purpose?”

  “To win our liberty, a
nd live no more as slaves.”

  2. Counting Revenants

  Soorm rocked back on his heels and turned his mismatched eyes up to the snowy sky. “Personally, I dismiss liberty as an abstract concept of only limited applicability. For who is free of history, or his own biological fate? No, I am much more eager to kill Blue Men, who have inflicted indignity on me, than I am to achieve liberty or sustain my life. Therefore I am eager to join with you, should your plans prove feasible. From the dead-line to the gate is at least forty yards, with no cover and no concealment. How many of us do you think the dog things could kill with distance weapons as we rushed them?”

  “The Chimerae have time-tested formulae for deducing such casualty estimates, based on factors such as rates of fire, targets available per strike, targets hit per strike, wound severity, effective range, muzzle velocity, reliability, mobility, radius of action, and vulnerability.”

  “How quaint and ghastly of you. We Hormagaunts are a horrid race, I freely confess it, but we killed one at a time, and never marched to war.”

  “And we did not raise lobotomized children in crèches, and harvest glands and organs and living tissue from them for longevity treatments,” Menelaus said dryly.

  “We indulged in the darkest of sciences, and won the greatest of rewards. And yet you seem nonchalant. You do not recoil?”

  “Each period of history has its own peculiarities.”

  “As you say. What does your quaint science of death estimation estimate?”

  “The cylinders hold a single operator behind thick armor, a gun crew of three in the trench beyond. Each cylinder both can emit a defensive fan of radiant heat covering a forty-five-degree angle, and can shoot mixed slugs and grapeshot from a steam-powered machine gun muzzle. The technology was selected for its simplicity to assemble and maintain rather than its lethality: all you need is water and power and a machine shop. Each steamgun holds four hundred rounds of musketballs and has two minutes of effective fire. The heating elements can fire as long as cables leading to the powerhouse on the other side of the gate remain uncut. I estimate a firing pressure of four thousand pounds per square inch and a muzzle velocity four hundred and eighty cubits per second. Assuming the charge can cross the lethal zone in four and a half seconds—”

  “I remind you I can drive my acid-coated tongue spike into your eyeball from up to three yards away.”

  “You just want the sum number?”

  “That would be nice, yes.”

  “Charging the two cylinders across forty yards of open ground should result in forty to sixty effective casualties.”

  “And how many men do we have so far in our uprising?”

  “Including you?”

  “Include me, yes.”

  “Four.”

  “So you are expecting a casualty rate … ah … somewhat approximately one thousand percent over and above our available troop strength.”

  “I cannot fault your calculation.”

  “Hm.”

  “I hope to recruit more men, and also to find a way to arm ourselves. Can you speak to the men of your era?”

  “I cannot merely speak but command,” Soorm said with a flick of his two tongues. “The other Hormagaunts, Crile scion Wept and Gload scion Ghollipog, are from later periods than mine, so I should be able to domineer them through our ancestor laws.”

  “How far back do your ancestral laws command? I have seen Nymphs working as nurses in the infirmary tent, and as drudges in the mess tent. They created your race.”

  Soorm bristled uneasily. “It is better not to meddle with them.”

  Menelaus said, “I would think that to one of your era, interred in 7466, they would be mythical?”

  “They are not soldiers.”

  “The Chimerae have a saying: Any warm body that pulls a heat-seeker away from a soldier dies with a soldier’s honor. There are five Nymph women, and four males. I don’t know their names as yet.”

  “Yours is a sick and savage race, painting with gold what is basically the unromantic business of man-butchery. Speaking of which, how many Chimerae can you enlist?”

  “There are two Chimerae in the camp.”

  “Two Chimerae? You miscount. What of yourself?”

  “Three.”

  “And all the other ones?”

  “Joet is a Gamma. The others include an Alpha Lady, two Beta Maidens of the Auxiliary class, and four Kine. Kine and women are noncombatants.”

  “Wait. You wish to shield your woman and servants from combat, while you are sending in decorated Nymphs and their dancing boys?”

  “Your count is also short. You listed Crile and Gload, but what about the five other Hormagaunts from your period?”

  “I don’t know whom you mean.”

  “Toil, Drudge, Drench, Prissy Pskov, and Zouave Zhigansk?”

  “Ho! They are not Hormagaunts! They are Short-liveds. As their names suggest, two are Burghers. The Pskov Clade and Zhigansk Clade come from different walled cities, have different biochemical recognitions, and are therefore mutually allergic. It would be difficult to compel them into melee. Except against each other.”

  “Overcome the difficulty.”

  “And the other three are organ donors, who form our slave and livestock class, and therefore cannot be allowed to handle weapons.”

  “In my sole capacity as Chief Intelligence Officer of the Academic Division of the Intelligence Command, of the Eugenic General Emergency Command of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the surrounding States, Settlements, and Territories, and acting under the battlefield regulations of the Code of Military Justice as Commander-in-Chief ad hoc and pro tempore, I hereby manumit any and all servile or underling classes, categories, slaves, or indentured servants whose members are willing to fight for our liberty. In the absence of any objection or veto from the Governor, and taking the Advice and Consent of the Senate and the House of Burgesses as granted, the motion passes by acclamation. There! Your slaves are now free men. Let us see if they will fight to stay free.”

  “Milk and mush! You have no authority to mulct the Hormagaunts of our donation stock!”

  “You may apply to the House of Burgesses for recompense at their next regular session. They have not been convoked for five thousand sixty-seven years, so you may have to find our Imperator-General to call them into session.”

  “Bah! This is drollery and japery, not worth the spit required to spit on it. Fine! I will throw the three organ donors into the fray, if you will commit your Alpha and Beta ladies and your Gamma lad and the whole rest of the stupid alphabet of your Chimera-folk.”

  “That would bring the tally up to twenty-seven.”

  “Who is left?”

  “Three very early and three very late.” Menelaus ticked them off on his fingers. “The early-comers include one Servant of the Machine named Glorified Ctesibius from A.D. 2525, from before the Ecpyrosis; a Giant from A.D. 3033; an albino Scholar named Rada Lwa—I don’t know his date, but he is very likely the earliest person here. The later-comers include the male and female gray-skinned blue-haired twins from some race I don’t recognize from A.D. 8866 and the strange-eyed creature from some race I really don’t recognize from A.D. 10100, the last year of the one hundred first century—unless that coffin was marked in binary, and she is from A.D. 20, the first century.”

  “Everyone here is strange-eyed compared to me. Which one do you mean?”

  “I mean the dark and silent lady who sits in the mess tent and never moves, and all the dogs are afraid of her. Her eyes are modified so that there is no white in them: every part of her eye is black. I think it is multifrequency absorption material. And what looks like a second pair of eyes, maybe infrared or microwave, above that. She has scars on her back. I don’t have her name. And there are two people the Blues are holding I haven’t seen yet. I am hoping one of them is our knight.”

  “I can name the gray twins.”

  “Really? Just how did you learn their names?”

 
“I just walked up in the exercise yard and pointed to myself and said Soorm; and they pointed to themselves and said Linder Keir and Linder Keirthlin. Linder Keir is the brother’s name. So either Linder Keirthlin is the sister’s name, or those are the words for I don’t know what you said and Why did your point at yourself? in their language. Just how do you learn their dates?”

  “I sat out in the cold talking to a man not named Mickey the Witch of Williamsburg, and I memorized the dates on every coffin I could see.”

  “Which one is he?”

  “The rotund dark man in the straw hat.”

  “The vegetarian.”

  “Is he? He must eat a lot of lettuce to maintain that shape.”

  “Rice and beans. I can smell it on his breath.”

  “I think he and I between us can get the Witches to sign on.”

  Soorm spread his webbed claws and looked at his palms meditatively. “Suppose you talk to the Savant, the Scholar, and the Giant. Say they join us. That brings the count up to thirty. Suppose also the Witches join. There are thirty-one of them, which would double our numbers. The men are not odd, but the women hardly look human!”

  “I will skirt by the irony of that comment coming from you. The Witch-women look normal. Well, all except the one with freaky hair.”

  “They would bring the count to sixty-one,” said Soorm, “Enough to rush the gate and have twenty-one survivor.”

  “Our position unfortunately becomes untenable if we have to contend with enemy aerial support. We Chimerae have a standard formula for estimating air-support-induced casualties, depending on the ground cover, rate and precision of antiaircraft measures—”

  “Spare me. I apprehend we are better off if they cannot shoot us from the air. And so we wait for a stormy day? This is the worst plan in the history of military endeavor.”

  Menelaus said, “I hope to change the minds of my superiors to adopt a different plan. This place here you picked to kill me conveniently looks out upon a back entrance to the Tombs that the Blue Men cannot secure. They are not guarding it, and if we can get in—”