The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  Now, I seen you have some Greencloaks working in your infirmary and slopping slops in the cook-tent, and dithering anyone who’ll toke up with a puffball or two: right spicy harlots ready-eddy to spready? So I hear these AWOLs took over the whole damn planet, the whole snotball we call Third from Sol, and I tell you I am not surprised. Nope, not by a hair, because I saw it all and I were there! I was there when the Judge of Ages condemned the Chimeras and all their way of life to the recycling abattoir. He killed the greatest civilization history has ever known, to make way for a bunch of dunderbrains and sloshers to take over. Don’t ask me why, but you should ask if he’s planning to do the same right now to you!

  You asked about the spike in the slumbering pop? It was all we talked about, all the bulletins carried. Why are so many Kine deserting, why are Chimerae wounding themselves to get a medical slip, and take the sleep? Everyone knew why. Because we could.

  Y’see having Hibernation tech around, it changes people. Hell, I could see the white horse drawn in chalk on the hill outside my first-ever overseas station. And there was a statue of a man on a white horse right near the Sisters of Bon Secours hospital. People see these things, and they read kiddie yarns about adventures in space, and they get to thinking, why live through another war, another plague, another famine, and another round of population cuts or slave demotions? Why not just snooze through it?

  Bye-bye world and worldly sorrow, hello world and new tomorrow. Y’see?

  Hell, that’s why I entered the Tombs. One short nap fixes everything.

  6. The Stealthboat

  Like I said, Menelaus Montrose is armed to the nines and he comes to where the Lotus King is holding court, hiding out in a warehouse in an abandoned area near the waterfront. Montrose spread out these plans, describing a certain type of submersible boat he wants built, based on a principle of propulsion from the days before the fire. It calls for third-generation precision machine tools of a type that have to be built first from second-generation tools that have to be built from tools we can buy on the sly or pilfer. Money is no object: he threw down a bag of gold, doubloons from the Witch-days, lozenges and emeralds from the Giants, and microbrains like beads, each one worth a fortune, he scattered on the floor like musket balls from a kid’s game. Some of the components for the vessel he has on him, stealth counteremission technology, such as no one knows how to make, and some of the substances, he has the formula but not the raw materials, and he has to teach our blackout techs how to make it.

  The Lotus King knew everyone in town, and he knew their kids’ birthdays and name days, and he knew which locks were left open, and which could be broke open without alerting the Chimerae. The boat was done in three months, we used it in a shake-down cruise, and to shoot up a pest or two, maybe trim back a long nose, before we knew it was ready, and the Lotus King sent for the Judge of Ages. That’s when he said all he wanted was a trip across the Atlantic, but he also wanted some musclers and some rustlers, fist and fingers. A break-in, y’understand?

  7. The Gang

  My gang was good for both and all, and that and more.

  It was me, and my partner Brick of Back-alley, a razorgirl named Sugar-n-Slice, a brute born Obu Nobunagato, but we called him Oh-No, because he was modified for wrestling and he was as thick as he was tall and twice as dumb. Last was a snake-charmer named Hesperonado, who doubled as our brain-man, so he was natural to pilot the stealthboat.

  This boat was a dream of a dream! Streamlined like a teardrop torpedo, the upper half one solid shell of some transparent material Montrose made, the thing rode on a hydrofoil shaped like a ring and had one long leg trailing aft to a pontoon. The engine had no moving parts: it ionized the water around it and magnetically accelerated a submerged stream of sea behind it. Now, I know you have heard of caterpillar drives before, and you say they are too noisy, but I am telling you this guy solved the problem of acceleration without turbulence. You sat in the vessel, and the water was like an endless gray white blanket being yanked backwards, and there was almost no sensation of motion. So smooth and fast, it was scary.

  The vessel had an onboard brain that was nervous as a rabbit, and when she sensed anything out of the ordinary pattern, she cut power and submerged. And we knew when the Cities in Space were up, because that’s not the kind of thing you can hide, and we followed under the clouds as much as we could.

  Well, we all pretty much hated each other to pieces by the time we made it to the cold part of the world. The Judge of Ages didn’t talk much. Didn’t talk at all, in fact, except to give orders, and since the boat mostly piloted herself, he didn’t give many of those. See, his mind was already on the year A.D. 70000—when his bride comes back, and so we were already dead and gone like the Neanderthals as far as he was concerned.

  8. Streetlaw Larz on the Isle of Fear

  Fear Island is best defended place I ever saw.

  There was a ring of buoys around the whole island, and cables running along the ring, and listening towers buried in the sea, and watching towers on the rocks, and helicopters in the air, and boat patrols, and guard dogs, and—hell, there might have been guard fishes for all I knew. Then there were black walls of that reflex armor the Chimerae put on everything, pillboxes and lookout-shoot-out periscopes, and bright red boxes with lead-eyed radiation lamps, for giving anything organic a dose of lethal roentgens if the lamp blinked wide its eye.

  But we bypassed all this. The stealthship came to ground on the ocean floor, in the middle of the ruins of what had once been a train station, back when this part of the world had been drier.

  We suited up, dove out, set some paste, and melted open some old walls, slow-go explosives of the kind with no boom to set off the seismics. Then back in the boat.

  The Judge worked some explosive bolts and dropped the ring and the line-accelerator off the boat, which caused some grumbling in my gang, seeing as how we didn’t see how we was getting back home. Judge didn’t care about our grumbling. I don’t even think he knew our names.

  But now the boat was lean enough to dive into the hole we’d made.

  We left our suits on, because the train tunnel was “hot”—not plutonium-style hot, but concentrated magnetic can kill you just as dead. Just ask any bird that flies into one of those big receiving dishes they use to talk to the Cities in Space. The tunnel was round as a gun barrel and twice as straight, made of those old substances we don’t have anymore—unless you folks reinvented them, which I don’t see any around so far—smartmetals and sail fabric and molecular hunger silk, and big rings of nanocrystal titanium-steel alloy, supercooled and superconductive.

  Well, the damn train tube was still alive, yes, alive, after all these centuries, and by just some happenstance, the stealthboat fields were the right waveform and complement to lock on, just like a depthtrain. We rolled forward and up as smoothly as a glass ball in a groove sliding along a frictionless incline.

  At the end of the tunnel was the ruin of another depthtrain station, which mustsa-been maybe-been long and long ago to carry freight to the island. The platform was bricked up, walled off. Middle of the wall is a big vault door made of modern materials that looked like crap compared to the fine, ancient stuff behind us.

  The plan was that Hesperonado was going to charm his snakes into drilling through at a weak spot, mesh with the door-brain, and interface and override. It called for pretty delicate work, but Hesperonado had light hands and a touch like a surgeon. He was a real artist.

  He had two pretty snakes too, metal lines of tapering segments smarter than a dog and nine yards long at full extension. Antiques. They come from the days of the Sylphs, when everyone lived in the clouds, and the Giants burned the cities. Whenever a Chimera has a serpentine go bad, or the bloodline dries up, or the weapon-brain won’t take orders no more, what do you think happened to them, the old, haunted weapons? By one crooked trick or another, they come into the hands of a snake-charmer like Hesperonado, and he gets them to do what he can get them to do.


  But he got into some bungle, or ran into ice, and he was picking and tricking and he wasn’t getting paid by the hour. So he took off his gloves. We all started shouting, because Brick told him to suit up again, and Slice was telling him just to hurry it along, and a small exposure never killed anyone. Now, I got to tell you straight-up that a voice in our earphones spoke up and told him to put his gloves back on, and we didn’t recognize the voice, because it was the Judge talking, and he had not said anything for two weeks.

  But Hesperonado was looking for a reason to give the Judge an earful of fearful, and he used some words the Chimerae impale you if you look them up in a dictionary, much less use them, and, well, Hesp was snaking the razorgirl during the long watches on the boat, so hers was the last voice he heard. Because he stopped listening after she spoke, see?

  Hesp, he got the door open before he keeled over. So, points for him. The man was a professional. Give him that.

  We get squirmed into some crawlway maybe two thousand years old. So now the next part of the plan goes wrong, because Slice wants to stay with her man, and she says she’ll wait for us to come back, but Brick wants us to put Hesp out of our misery and get a move along.

  Well, the Judge talks again, which made it some sort of world record for the week, and he passes her the first aid box and tells her to stay and mind Hesp, and keep him alive, because we are going to need him to get the door open again to go back out, and he wants me to stay behind too. So the three of them—Brick, Oh-No, and the Judge—take off down the tunnel, with Oh-No in front, and me laughing, because that man’s augmented buttocks filled the whole diameter.

  Now, I have to explain something about myself. Y’understand, I was sort of a Greencloak too, in those days. I had been given a medical discharge from Intel, and I was in a lot of pain. My first gland was just to release endorphins, and later I added a morphine gland, both to kill the pain and because I liked it. But then I was losing sleep, so I add a gland for soporifics, and then another for stimulants, and at that point I did not see why a memory-sharpener or a mild euphoric should be illegal. Sometimes the glands gave me acute insight, or helped me solve the case. The hallucinogenic unwound my mainspring when it was too tighty, righty? And then there were neurochemical compounds I could use to slow the subjective passage of time during long, boring stakeouts, or speed up time to make my reflexes lighting quick—and that has saved my life during more than one bit of the nasty, believe you me. And there were others I needed to correct for overglanding errors, and I had to get a sexual supplement to correct for erection limpness, because I was saddling the razorgirl something fierce before Hesp came along. Each gland was twice as expensive as the next. Now you know why I took the case, and why I was going to be in debt to the Lotus King for the rest of my life.

  So you also should understand that I just had to squeeze a few drops into my bloodstream while I was sitting in that damn tunnel listening to my old sexhole oo and coo and baby-talk that brainless snake-twiddler. Pretty soon I am floating, and figure there’s nothing wrong with saying whatever I wanted to say, so I tell her the pogostick is a corpse by now and ain’t ever coming back to bed, and she yells at me, so I switch off my radio. When she realizes I ain’t listening, she unfolds one of those molecular-thin razors of hers from her fingernail and waves it toward my mask, and I figure it is time to say till next time.

  Sure, if I have been sober, I would have stayed at my post, but I wasn’t, I had oozed some alcohol into my bloodstream, to take the fuzzy edge off the high, so who can blame me? I took off down the tunnel because I wanted to see some deeds.

  I got my deeds sooner than I’d’ve liked, because Hesp, who really should have been dead by then, tears off his mask and started shouting in his native yuck-yack at me, and his voice echoes all up and down the tunnels.

  There is a noise up ahead, sounds of a struggle, a shot, and by the time I get there, Oh-No is wounded and Brick is dead. The Judge is just dandy-fine, of course, since he was in the back.

  Some guard, a Gamma, heard the noise of Hesp shouting, stuck his head into the crawlway, and Oh-No pulled his head off his shoulders, but the guard’s gun, acting on auto, scuttled forward and fired a needle that passed through Oh-No without hitting anything too important but it drilled Brick right through the nose and expanded, out the back of his skull leaving an exit wound the size of a grapefruit. The front of his face was caved in and burnt so even his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

  But there is no sight sweeter than seeing a Chimera, even a Gamma, killed by a Kine. They think they are better than us, but they die just like us.

  So the Judge grabs me like it was my fault somehow and shoved me up past him so that I can pick up the corpse of my partner and crawl along on one hand and two knees, shoving this corpse every inch of the way, and getting his blood and brainstuff all over my suit. Oh-No is shoving the corpse of the dead guard, and he is wobbling a bit himself.

  We get to a hatch and all fall out, and now the Judge tells Oh-No to apply direct pressure to his wound, and asks if he can make it back to where Slice is waiting.

  The Judge picks up the guard’s radio and opens the back and sticks in a little thinking-stick, does something to its brain, and the radio reports an accidental discharge of a firearm back to central. He picks up the gun and gulls its brain too, because now the gun imprints on me, and thinks I am its master.

  “You there, drunkboat, you know how to fire one of these?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You tell it what to point at and when to fire. I served twelve years in Intelligence Command out of Kang Key, Eighth Division. I got a name, you know!”

  “Yeah, your name is Juan O’Reilly. One O’Really Roostered Soak. Do you have a sobriety gland in that mess you call your endocrine system? Wring yourself out and fast, because I need you to back me. I am aiming to kill an old pal of mine, and I have to talk him into letting me do it, and that means you got to shoot any guards who come through the door to meddle. I’ve wired the identifier to the aimer, so the gun can see and shoot any guard carrying a regulation radio. All you have to do is make sure the barrel has a clean line, and the ammo feed doesn’t overheat. Can you handle that?”

  So, yeah, I went through my sober-up flush until my kidney groaned, and wondered when I could get my next modification. I wanted this bone marrow thing the Lotus King told me about, to increase the production of white blood count, and allow for a quicker sober-up time if I had to flush a drench through my liver quick. He stood there looking down while I cleaned out my head, and I checked the action on the gun, just to make sure.

  On we crawled, and now it was just the two of us, me and his buttocks, in the crawlspace. There were a lot of things I had to say back, and some of them were fearful hard words too, but I didn’t happen to think of them just then. But, now, hah! Now I got a ton, a metric ton, of sharpened wits all ready!

  Now, here is the weird part. The first time he comes up to a camera or a telltale he taps it with his finger and points at me, and says, “Null. Classify same, retroactive through all databases,” and he says it in a dead language called English. After that, he just taps any looker he comes across, and points at me, and says, “Null.”

  We get to the target. He shucks off his environment suit and unlimbered that huge hand cannon of his. We smartglue some line to the tunnel surface, and he sets the epoxy for a quick release. I want to ask him how he plans to climb back up, but he’s taken off his helmet by then, and I am not fool enough to talk aloud while we are in a black zone, so it is just one of the mysteries, I guess. Maybe he had no plan to climb back up.

  Another mystery is how he gets the service hatch open from the inside with no plate and no interface, but I figure he has an implant, or he knows a tap-code to alert the microbrain, or something.

  He rappels down past rafters and slowly turning fan blades into—hell, I don’t know what this room was. Partly a lab and partly a hangar and partly a museum, I guess. There were aircraft on launch cradles t
o one side, and glass boxes containing weapons and trophies on the other side. The line drops down beside him when the epoxy changes state. But I wedge the door open so my gun can get a clear view of the doings down below.

  My head is not in the right position, but I can see through the aiming camera that there is another guy in the room. There is a battery of cameras and microphones facing him, and he is seated behind the most famous desk in the world! You know the one. The desk is a slab of onyx atop the axes and bundled-rods of unity, and in little vacuum globes along the top, facing the camera, are the polished skulls of the Gang of Four. Behind his judgment seat is the Great Seal of the Chimera, a three-headed beastie that conquered the whole damn world, and there is a black flag to the right and a red flag to the left—oh, hell! How far in the future is this? Do your dwarfs actually not know what the Supreme Imperator-General’s Office looks like?

  It was the Alpha-of-Alpha, the commander-in-chief and absolute dictator of the whole planet and the Cities in Space. And he was asleep behind his desk, sitting upright, not snoring. I’ve seen him on coins, and on the reels, and every time a giant screen in a giant town square lights up for a giant announcement. It was him, I tell you.

  Anyway, there was the Imperator, seated on his seat of judgment, and looking sound asleep, or dead. Now, I am thinking about what gland to squeeze at this point, because everyone knows that this seat is sitting in the Imperial Mansion in Richmond, and is not on some freeze-your-ass island off the shore of Denmark.