“Well, cheer up, ma’am. The younger one just said you can tell him what’s on your mind, and he’ll listen with an open heart.”
“What is his name?” Oenoe’s face lit up with joy, and her beauty was like a sun coming from behind a cloud. “If he is willing truly to listen, I must know and cherish his name.”
“One of his names is Illiance. His title means ‘teacher’ or ‘bard.’ Hold on a second.” Menelaus turned to Illiance. “Preceptor, you told me Illiance was what you called an external name. Do you have an internal name? A first name? She is about to tell you something private, and she wants to know your name to cherish it.”
Illiance touched his fingertips to his ears ceremoniously. “When I departed from the Locusts, I was adopted into the care of a pretend-mother. She called me Lagniappe, for she likened me to those small gifts a merchant seeking the goodwill of patrons might bestow.”
Menelaus turned again to Oenoe. “His private name means ‘Small Favor.’ The word means something given in hopes of attracting future generosity.”
“His favor of telling me that his name means ‘favor’ has won my favor!” she said with a smile. “Because of his kindness, my heart beats rapidly, my breath is short, and my nipples stand erect!”
“Uh, ma’am, while that sounds like poetry and sweetness in Nymph-talk, if I translated it into his language, it would sound like a description of a medical condition.”
“So. In that case, tell him I will plead with the Judge of Ages, when he arises, to spare his life.”
Menelaus sighed heavily and turned to Illiance. “Preceptor, I hope you followed that, because I don’t want to translate it.”
Illiance asked, “Why do you not want to translate it?”
“It’s a Chimera thing. I am not allowed to speak another man’s threats or defiance unless I am willing to pick up his whip and carry them out. What she said sounded like a threat to me, and if I say it, I am legally responsible for acting on it.”
“Your laws are no longer in force.”
“Call it an imposition of a moral obligation, then.”
“I flowed with the drift of the current of her words,” said Illiance. “She is pleased with my false-mother-name, and therefore, in recompense, she will shield me from the Judge of Ages. Is she using a figure of speech, or does she think the Judge of Ages is a real person? Why does she think she will have any sway over his actions?”
Menelaus translated the question.
Oenoe tilted up her chin with girlish pride and smiled a dazzling smile. “Of course he is real. Who built the Tombs, if not he? He built the Tombs to preserve himself, and merely lets others dwell for a time to slumber beside him while he waits. Of course I can soothe the world-destroying wrath that burns and bites his dark and horrid heart. Am I not one high in the esteem of the servants of Nature, and a queen of my kind? The Judge of Ages loves us!”
7. Woe to the Nymph Who Moistens Not Her Lip
O bountiful and generous Nature, breathe into me, that I might breathe out words to stir the soul, and open blinded eyes.
Hear me, then, Little Favor, and I will tell of my woe. As I said, the stream of hedonism is a white and rapid water to row, and requires both discipline and daring. My failure came when I pursued in love a girl I found fetching, for she was willful and glancing-eyed, and she knew my soul as none other did. But she was humiliated at a thiasus for a misstep in the revelry, and yet she refused to dim the memory, preferring to feel scorn and shame. She watered and manured her wrong feelings, until she resolved to leave our today-ness, and seek the tomorrow-ness of the Tombs.
She sought and fetched forth one of the sleeping knights, and his name was Sir Mathurin d’Aux Lescaut, but he was called Romegas. She importuned him to teach her the management of arms, so that she could become a Valkyrie, and die in vain futility at the End of Days of Peace. He granted it.
Therefore for many days, even though the flowers were bright and the birds sang, Sir Romegas and my lost beloved stood drilling and exercising in the meadow, fencing and tilting and shooting both chemical firearm and energy lance, until the meadow was like a storm, for the firearm shouted like thunder, and the lance flashed like lightning.
One night I crept into her sleeping cloak, and wakened her with kisses, pleading that she foreswear her folly and return to the roundelays and reels and frivolous games with which all true Nymphs are wont to fritter our lives away. But she was displeased with me, because the knight had told her of some secret lore from the before time, and bound her with laws, and washed away her past with water from a sacred, secret stream. Now she served a man who had been tortured to death, and perhaps she wanted to torture herself, because she had vowed no more to disport herself in the love-play.
While I knelt weeping at her feet, she concocted a dram of the Nepenthe for me, so that I might quench my sorrow in the seethe of forgetfulness. But I dashed the clamshell of wine from her hand, and spoke and sang an angry word instead. I said I did not wish to forget my love for her.
She offered to kiss me a final time, a kiss of peace, but with this one caveat: Using the neurochemistry she knew, she could transfer my love for her to another, so that it would not be forgotten, but instead displaced. I would be infatuated with some other, but in a way I would still be true to her. She warned me once this was done to bind my eyes with a silk band and depart her camp, and not to peek until I heard once more the singing of the Nymphs at play around me, and whomever I first saw, I would love.
To please her, I agreed. As we kissed, she passed her influence to me through topically active transmitters in lip membrane, and chemical cues in the saliva. I was blind with weeping as I fled her, so I thought there was no need to obey her injunction to blindfold my eyes. I pushed the blindfold aside and covered my eyes with my hand, because I had to wipe my tears.
I struck a man made of metal, who caught me, laughing, by the arms, and he asked me gentle questions in a tongue I did not understand. He was broad as a bear and taller than any man of the Nymph race, and his voice was the voice of a man who is unafraid to kill and unafraid to die and unafraid to give commands. I opened my eyes and was lost.
His name was Sir Guiden von Hompesch zu Bolheim of the Order of the Knights of Saint John, of the Holy City of Jerusalem and of the Islands of Rhodes and Malta, and of Colorado, and he was the Grand Master of the Order that Romegas served; and he is a man from the dawn of the world, and there is none like him in the world, or in any age.
I am here for him, and I left all the world I knew to follow him past tomorrow and tomorrow through endless years.
My coffin would not have opened unless he was awake and alive upon the Earth, and he is not the only servant of the Judge of Ages, and not even the most deadly, but he is the oldest and most loyal.
Beware the Wrath of the Slumbering Knighthood of the Ages when it wakes!
I thank the Nature that gave me words to say these things.
8. Teardrop
Menelaus looked with surprise at the tear sliding down among the sweat droplets on the cheek of Preceptor Illiance, and he wondered what it meant.
9
The Dying Place
1. Opening the Tent
The next day dawned clear. Snow lay thick and even over the whole camp, and the trees wore dunce caps of white. The tall man cloaked and hooded in tent fabric crept to the tent of Soorm the Hormagaunt. He yanked on it, but the fabric was stiff as metal. The tall man looked left and right carefully. He saw nothing moving in the still, white world.
He pressed the hem of his cloak against the seams of the tent. There was a noise like paper ripping.
He stood, backed away, stooped, made a snowball, and threw it against the side of the Hormagaunt’s tent. A second splattered by the first. A moment later, a huge furry dark figure of Soorm emerged, snarling and blinking and lashing his scorpion-tipped otter tail. In the cold, the scales of his mismatched hands and elongated feet gleamed red.
“Who dares disturb my s
leep?”
“You sound like the Judge of Ages. Call me Anubis.”
“Anubis it is.” Soorm blinked his goat eye and flattened his cuttlefish eye. “Too early it also is. The dogs haven’t blown reveille yet. How do you accomplish this trick of unlocking their metal cloth?” Soorm’s neck bristles stood and swayed. “Come to think of it—where do you sleep without freezing?”
“I get close enough to the Tomb entrance that the automatics spray me with napalm every few minutes until I am toasted on all sides, and then I sleep inside the shell of one of the Blue Men machines. But at least I am not locked in a tent. Shall we walk? Get dressed.”
“What is this thing, dressed, of which you speak, past-creature?”
“Pox! What the hell is it about the future? Why is everyone a nudist?”
“Nudist? I have fur. Like a cat, I am always dressed, and in impeccable attire emperors can but envy. All I need is a brush and a currycomb.”
2. Handholds
The two men crunched through the fresh snow up the slope. The Hormagaunt spread his toes, and his webbed feet acted like snowshoes, leaving only a light footprint on the surface of the snow. Menelaus had glowing lines of ink lighting his bare feet, and his each footprint gave off a hiss of steam as he trod. The sound of the rushing stream in the still, early-morning air was audible as they approached the steeply sided river channel.
Soorm said, “You don’t really sleep slathered in napalm, do you?”
“Of course not. I bunk with Mickey the Witch. The Blues don’t realize yet that I can jinx their smartmetal. I was joshing you.”
“So I suspected, but who knows what a posthuman driven insane by grief and ill-advised augmentation experiments might do?”
“Whoa. You think I am insane?”
“You have been granted superhuman life, and so you spend it in a Tomb, pining for a woman who will never return, and blasting and butchering those who disturb your rest? It seems insane.”
Montrose shrugged. “I got nothing better to do. Besides, I perform a public service. My Tomb system saves lives and preserves a past the Hermeticists would rather force mankind to forget.”
“You perform a service for mankind, but who does not fear and loathe you? Why such altruism? You are not repaid, nor thanked.”
Montrose shrugged. “You win. I must be insane. So are you, for helping me.”
“You know why I help you. I hate the Hermeticists.”
“You hate them for ruining your world, and creating the Locusts to replace you?”
“No. For creating my world. What race of man was ever more monstrous than the Hormagaunts?”
“I try not to hate ’em. The Hermeticists, I mean.”
“Why not? They took everything from you. Pastor used to boast that they used you as their beast of burden for mental tasks. It is your duty to hate them.”
“She still thinks of them as her fathers. She doesn’t hate them.”
“She, who?”
“She, the one this is all about.”
“You mean—? Then the Swan Maiden is not a myth!”
“She ain’t no maiden no more,” harrumphed Montrose. “I got interrupted on my wedding night, but not that interrupted.”
“Is it true she plucked the Diamond Star out of the heavens? That she flies to a star beyond the galaxy to plead with the star-monstrosities for the emancipation of mankind? Are all the children’s stories true?”
Montrose looked at Soorm oddly. “You worked for Reyes y Pastor, that snake-oil-selling preacherman. You know all this stuff is real. Besides, M3 is a globular cluster, not a star.”
Soorm shook his shaggy head. “It still takes some getting used to. Meeting you, it is easy to believe you are a death-god from the underworld, bent on vengeance. But to think you are married to a woman born beneath a distant sun! A princess who brought the only era of world peace the world has ever known!”
Montrose nodded glumly. “I take it back. She is too good to be true. I don’t know why she married me, but I’ve done sworn I ain’t gunna disappoint her. Die, maybe. Disappoint her, never.”
They reached their destination and stood on the height of the cliff, overlooking the cold stream that rushed out from a narrow doorway leading into the mountain.
As it had been yesterday, in the distance, two upright coffins stood like sentries to either side of the flooded door from which roaring waters poured. In the stream almost directly beneath Soorm and Montrose the several broken machines of the Blue Men lay. The white and rippling water played around their dented hulks and crooked legs, and rust and trails of icicles accumulated.
What had not been here yesterday was a set of parallel deep scars or gouges in the cliff face under their feet, in a line leading down to where the broken machines were heaped. Each scar was about nine inches long, and an inch or two deep into the rock.
“Can you climb down this cliff? Your feet are adapted for swimming, not climbing,” said Menelaus.
Soorm said, “I could not pass this point before. Where the machines fell is as far as I could go. In addition to those two by the door, there are some active coffins lying on the floor of the streambed. I saw their lights shining, and they put little red dots on me.”
“Aiming laser dots?”
“It was not a technology I knew. I retreated.”
“Smart man. Did you come from above, from where we are now?”
Soorm shook his head, an oddly human gesture for his dark and furry otter-shaped skull. “From downstream.”
“There are clusters of sensors buried in the cliff wall downstream, and they paint incoming objects as targets for the coffins and door circuits. Scaling down the cliffside avoids the clusters, so we should only have to deal with short-range reactions. Can you make it down these handholds?”
Soorm went to all fours, dipped just his head over the edge of the cliff, and sniffed cautiously. “I can scale the wall. You cut this ladder. It has your scent. When?”
“Last night, when everyone was asleep.”
“How? The stone is melted. This was done by an energy weapon.”
Menelaus pointed at the door. “You cannot see it from here, but there is a hundred-kilowatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser in the lintel.”
“How did you get it to cut the handholds?”
“My skill as a toreador. I dangled my cloak over my elbow to get it to shoot. It is programmed to find the center of body mass, and I had to throw off its estimate so the beam would land between my arm and my torso and hit the rock. It was not fun.”
Soorm’s face did not allow him to show much expression, but disbelief seemed to crackle through his fur. “Impossible.”
“The lethal kilolaser is cut off from its mainframe, so it is actually easy to fool, if you know the limitations. Which I do, since I built the dumb thing. And I could do the math in my head to calculate the beam path.”
Soorm grunted. “For such a poor superman, you seem to be able to do unusual feats. What else did you build?”
“Most of this is my work, though it mutates when I slumber. The lethals won’t see you. You need to worry about the nonlethals. There are three. First, hidden behind the panels to either side of the door are millimeter-wave radiation emitters. Make you feel like your skin is on fire. But stay submerged. Water droplets will disperse the beam. Second, there are acoustic weapons mounted farther down, beyond the mouth of the door, but their projection horns are underwater, so they probably won’t go off. If they do, the whole camp will hear us and scamper back up here.”
“And third?”
“A shock barrier. Shoots sixty electrified lancets at the same time. I stood in the water last night freezing my ass off for about an hour, until it ran out of ammo. I was holding my cloak on a stick in front of me and the lancets could not penetrate. Dumb machine. It fired until it ran out of ammo. It takes it three whole goddam days to grow another batch, and that is if and only if the feed lines connecting it to the liquid biometal are not cut, which I am
not sure of. Why did I even bother putting in such a stupid system? I reckon I got a little overly enthused at the drawing board. Once you get in the door, the whole corridor is flooded.”
“And then the coffins will swarm over me and kill me.”
“In theory, all my clients have a right to go back in, so the automatics should let any of you pass,” said Menelaus.
“In theory, the Judge of Ages is not a complete nincompoop who locked himself out of his own stronghold. I still don’t understand how you can be this godlike being, capable of unimaginable depth and breadth of thought, and yet you are here clinging to a snowy cliff like a rat, trying to nibble your way into a grain box.”
“I’ll point out I am smart enough to talk you into a plan where I get to stay here where it is safe, while the nonlethals scald your private parts with searing pain.”
“The brilliance of your posthuman thinking grows ever less clear as time passes.”
Menelaus pointed. “I also did some tests last night and took some measurements. The doors broke open sixty years ago from the water pressure behind. Half my Tomb site there is a damn lake,” Menelaus said, shaking his head, “and there is an incoming underground artesian flood on the north side that keeps pouring in the same rate this pours out. The radio shack is on the fourth level right at the annex. You’ll be traveling against the current. The bad part is this: You see how the water swirls as it rushes out the door? Remember the specific recurring pattern of vortices and their periods. And then look at this.”
He tapped the back surface of the groundcloth he wore as part of his robe. A blueprint diagram formed as if below the surface, adjusted to the peculiarities of Soorm’s mismatched eyes to create a three-dimensional illusion in his brain.
Soorm put his webbed fingers before his muzzle. “Stop doing things like that!”
“Things like what?”
The Hermetic Millennia Page 29
