Mickey said, “The little blonde, Fatin, is the key to winning the loyalty of the rest. She is actually the eldest virgin here, and this gives her power over us. But I have convinced her that I know secrets of many ages that passed while she slept, and so you will have to make it look like I do. What happened?”
“One of the Chimerae, a Kine named Larz, claims he can open the fourth door and identify the Judge of Ages. He’s lying, but it is going to draw all the Blues away from the other spots they’re protecting, such as the gate, the airfield, the hospital.”
“What if he opens the door for them? Or they break it down without him?”
“Ah—well, there are enough biological traces of me down there, not to mention internment records, or patterns in the arrangement of controls and architecture indicative of particular behaviors of mine—hellfire and pox, I left a coffeepot sitting on a plate down there, and I know I am the only man left alive who drinks that Arbuckle’s brown gargle—that anyone of my level of intelligence could figure out pretty damn quickly where I am hiding. Little Illiance is maybe two steps away from figuring it out anyway. We can meet in a large group on the shielded hilltop near the pass leading to the dig: this is a good chance to gather together in a large group without the dogs noticing and breaking it up. Go!”
Mickey departed, moving surprisingly quickly and silently for a man so large. Menelaus decided his fine new duds added a lightness to his step.
Montrose saw the flap of the mess tent move. Ctesibius the Savant had emerged, his face as cool and dignified as the face of the statue of the pharaoh Ozymandias. Ctesibius began to walk with slow and stately step, his hands clasped behind him, his head hooded in black cloth, toward the prison yard where the other tents were, all alone.
5. The Servant of the Machine
By the time Menelaus caught up with him, Ctesibius was at the flap of his sleeping tent. Menelaus reached out with his implants to deactivate the espionage recorders woven into the tent fabric and found to his shock that they were already deactivated.
Ctesibius was a dark-eyed, dark-haired man of olive complexion. He had fine, neatly arranged features slanting down to a narrow chin. He had the thin-fingered but muscular hands of a pianist. There were three diamond-shaped tattoos on his forehead in a down-pointing triangle, and additional lines of ink running from the outer corners of his eyes to hairline above his temples, and from the corners of his mouth to his jaw, giving him an oddly masklike but solemn appearance.
The man showed no surprise at Menelaus’ approach, but merely threw wide the tent flap and gestured politely for the other to follow him inside. Ctesibius sat on the metallic cot and drew around his shoulders the blue blanket provided, but he wore it as if had been ermine.
Menelaus addressed him in three different tongues. The man did not speak Merikan or Sylph, but understood the Merikan/Spanish/Nipponese pidgin dialect known as Pre-Anglatino. The conversation was halting, but not impossible. The difference was no greater than the gap in language between an Englishmen of A.D. 1500 and a Saxon of A.D. 1000.
Menelaus said, “I understand Savant, but cannot speak it. If you can jinx their smartmetal, you should have been helping us plan our escape, pal.”
The man uttered the rapid noises of Savant modulator-demodulator code. A second channel of information carried nonverbal cues, tones of voice, body language. Hence, in this second channel of information, even though not in real life, the man’s tone of voice was ponderous, his expressive grave. “Your words are improper, an affront. Am I not an elevated being of the third recital?”
“Are you not a prisoner in a death camp? Just today one of the Blue Men said he was going to kill us all, since we cannot serve in their society, even as slaves.”
With a nonexistent gesture in this information channel, Ctesibius pointed significantly at the three diamonds inked on his brow. “Do I fear death? What you see before you is a mere vessel of flesh. My soul and information have passed into the infosphere not once, but three times, and achieved a level of perfection undreamed by mere hylic and physical men!”
Menelaus narrowed his eyes. “You’re a Ghostfather. A Servant of the Machine.”
The man looked disdainful. “That is not the polite term. I have downloaded my brain information into the Xypotech system three times. I am a Savant of the Machine, not ‘servant.’ The partnership is mutual and cooperative. My name is Ctesibius, my title is Glorified, and you may address me as Donator. I am an Endocist.”
“I don’t know that word, ah, Donator Ctesibius.”
“An exorcist is one who casts a spirit out. I am one who casts my spirit in. The brain-reading and emulation process is very involved, and requires specific mental disciplines to endure without harm, and without data-distortion on the other side.”
“Yuen says he almost killed you, Donator Ctesibius.”
“The fierce man with one eye? The yogurt he was eating should have come to me.”
“Beat you up with his leg-bone, didn’t he, Donator Ctesibius?”
“On a physical level, yes. I regard the mental plane as one where my victory was culminated. The actions of mere matter and flesh are beneath contempt. I have already reduced the memory of those events to nonimportance.”
“We—that is, me and half a threescore others in the camp—we are planning a breakout, and we need your help. We need the help of every able-bodied man.”
Ctesibius spoke solemnly: “I will help you in the best way possible: by advising you to spare yourselves an untimely death. You cannot defeat the world into which was have awakened. Look.”
He drew out from his overalls a small gray spherical bead and tossed it to Menelaus.
Menelaus caught it. “It is one of the musketballs used by the dog things.”
Ctesibius nodded gravely, squinted, and watched without interest as Menelaus flung the musketball to the ground-cloth underfoot with a shout of pain. The musketball, now translucent, lay hissing, and glowed red-hot with internal heat, and then white-hot, and in a stench of burnt metal, sank through the ground-cloth and into the icy soil beneath. Menelaus snatched his hand behind his back to hide the fact that he had not actually been burned. He had sensed with his implants the signal issue from the more metallic parts of the brain of Ctesibius a split second before the musketball actually became active.
Menelaus said, “Even if the bullets can be programmed to emit several types of lethal energies or explosives, the aiming system is still handheld muskets carried by primitive Moreaus—artificially designed creatures.”
“You mean like the H. G. Wells novel? The beasts of the isle of Dr. Moreau? How odd that that word would survive!” His face softened in a smile; a shadow of pleasant memory haunted his eyes. He seemed, for that moment, human.
“Well, the Judge of Ages tampered with history to preserve certain books he liked. If your machines had not tampered back, more people would remember some of the things we’ve lost of the past.”
Ctesibius stiffened, and his face grew masklike again. “You speak nonsense. The Machine preserves what is worth preservation. We are not.”
“If I get my hands on the right equipment, I hope to be able to jam the control signals involved and render the musketballs nonradiant.”
“You? And who are you?”
“Sorry, where are my manners? My name is Beta Sterling Xenius Anubis. I am a Chimera from A.D. 5292.”
Ctesibius suppressed a laugh, but his eyes twinkled. “Captain Sterling?”
“My rank is Lance-Corporal.”
“Of course it is. ‘Onward! The future is a voyage without end!’ But, say, Chimera, if you are a three-headed monster, where are your two other heads? One of them is a jackal, I assume, Anubis? Xenius is a more obscure reference—it’s an epithet of Zeus, the Sky-Father of the Greeks, in his role as the enforcer of the laws of courtesy and hospitality.”
“Chimera is the common name for the warrior-aristocrats of the Eugenic General Emergency Command who ruled these lands betwee
n 4500 and 5900. So called because they had their genes spliced with animal genes or artificially composed genes. I am not a three-headed monster. Just a one-headed one.”
“You are an officer of the Tombs. A guard, one of the Hospitaliers. And you are from a period of time much earlier than the absurd date you gave. Your name gives you away. But why be so obvious?”
Menelaus saw no reason, at this point, to dissemble. He took his rock out from his robes. “Because I knew anyone who recognized who that name would be from my time, too, and would therefore be a Hermeticist or their agent. I wasn’t expecting it to be you. I never figured you as the one in charge of all this.” He waved his hand at the camp. “How are you sending the signals to Mount Misery? I did not detect any broadcast from you. What are your orders from Del Azarchel?”
Ctesibius smiled bitterly. “You suffer paranoid delirium, then? Do I look like the master here, dressed in blankets, without even a proper wig? You think I am secretly behind all this? The elaborate bait of seeing who recognizes your name, in my case, was not needed: any man can see at a glance that I am a Savant. But the Machine I serve no longer serves me. You are a wrecker, perhaps? A Luddite, or a catamite of the Giants? No matter. Our conflict was over long ago, and the dreams you served or I served are both as dead and forgotten. My life work is failure—I thought I would wake to a future where the transhumans would revere me as their Adam and great original. Instead—why do the others in the camp, the other prisoners, hiss at me?”
Menelaus frowned, decided murder was not yet needed, and put his rock away, shrugging. “Every period in history hates the Machine.”
“I do not blame them. I thought the dream of Transhumanism would arise like the phoenix from the ashes of the world the Giants burned. Whether the lesser people would understand that dream or no, I thought to be of no account. Together, we who set our eyes on the future, would enter that glorious noontide of man, and the man beyond man, mind beyond mind! Together, upward and onward without end, an asymptote of eternal progress. But no. Narrow is the gate to the future. It will admit but one.”
Menelaus blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I joined the Order of Transhumanitarian Emulation Advocates so that, even though I in my fleshly self would die, my thoughts and memories, the true part of me, the only thing that can really be called a soul, would live on and on, preserved forever.
“He was made to be smarter than I was, not merely a genius, but beyond mere genius. He was closer to me than a son. Not just a diary sprung to life, but the best and most perfect version of yourself you can imagine—and, oh, I know what those Thucydides monsters say, that we Savants are merely narcissists—but no, not so!
“It was for public service that I fathered an Iron Ghost. I was a member of the Special Advocacy myself, a chairman of the Armed Services Committee, so I knew the nuances of the military strengths and ambitions of every strategist of every Giant militia and every general of every princedom; more than that, and served on the Ways and Means Committee, and so I knew the budgets and the bribe amounts of every ledger of every province and parish, county and shire. Small wonder I was selected a second time, and then a third! And my soul could solve problems I could not, and could not have dreamed how to solve, but he did it in my way, with my priorities, my élan, and with the memories and data in my head. He was me, the me I could never be, the me I should have been, and he was supposed to last forever!”
“Forever is a long time, Donator.”
“You know nothing of my sorrow. It is not right that a man should outlive his own soul.”
“Well, none of us are going to outlive much of anything if we don’t escape. Will you stand with us?”
Ctesibius said, “All history has been a single drama, albeit with infinite variations. Evolution attempts to thrust mankind into the higher plane of existence, up the asymptote and into the machine form of life, and the fleshly side of man’s thinking, the corrupt materialism of the body, fights against. But now the struggle is nearly over. The cost to produce logic crystal in my day was in the scores of grams of anticarbon: and it was bulkier and carried less information than what they use as a throw-weight. Do you fail to understand? The logic crystals are so ubiquitous that they are being used as ammunition. The dream of the Machine is nearly accomplished. The current world is nearly entirely covered.”
“Covered with ice, you mean.”
Ctesibius smiled a very small, very thin smile, which had no more humor in it that the smile of a skull, and bent to the spot where the dropped musketball had burnt a small hole in the groundcloth. Menelaus heard a crackling of radio noise in his implants again, and a section of the groundcloth peeled back to reveal a layer beneath where the snow had been packed down, melted and refrozen into a layer of slushy ice. Ctesibius scooped some of this slush into his hand with his fingernails, and he held it up toward Menelaus.
“This is not ice. It is nanotechnological fluid. It is intelligent and active. The entire land surface of the globe may be covered with it. It is microscopic logic crystal. This is the Iron Ghost of the Nobilissimus Ximen del Azarchel. This ice; and that you see outside the door; the glacier beyond: His mind is now housed in a substance covering the planet. Of the volume of all the oceans of the world, I am not certain, but they may be his as well. The world is the Master of the World. All that remains is to wipe out the Tombs and eliminate the last of biological life. Nonmechanical life is no longer needed nor desired.
“And I—who was to be a part of the ascension—I have been left behind.”
The little bits of slush in his palm, the tiny fragments under his nails, began to glow with many colors.
6. The Last Message
Ctesibius slapped his hand against his knee, dashing the glowing droplets of snow from his hand. Like tears, they fell to the groundcloth and sputtered into darkness. “I can neither follow its thoughts nor attract its attention. This is the next evolutionary step of the human race. We have been standing and walking in it, and perhaps drinking it as well, taking it into our bodies. The frequencies used by the snowflakes to communicate one with the other I cannot detect.”
Menelaus stood looking down at the melting drops of snow in the cloth floor of the tent. “Damnation, but I hate nanotechnology. It gets everywhere! And if I had been smarter, I would have recognized this back in the shower tent. Remember how they made us all shower when we were first dug up? I detected particulate matter in the water stream, and I thought it was Blue Men nanotech. No. They just melted some snow and sprayed us down.”
Ctesibius said, “Do you see why your attempt is in vain? I could cup my hand and pick up a lump of snow with more intelligence and calculation power than every brain in this camp combined. I come from a day before the Giants burned the world, and survived only because the Giants were holding me for trial, and they thought it better I should be in hibernation than that I should perish in their fire. But, as I said, three times I made mental union with my Glorified Self in the infosphere, and he was in communion with Exarchel, who was an emulation of the only sane one of the three posthumans, the Nobilissimus del Azarchel. I saw the Cliometric calculations the parliament of Ghosts were contemplating. I know the scope of history.”
Menelaus said, “And what did you see?”
“It is all a falsehood. Del Azarchel never intended this world to bring forth the next evolutionary step beyond man.”
“Never intended? What the hell do you mean? His attempts have been going on for eight thousand one hundred years plus change! There is nothing else he is doing! You tell me what you know, you Swiss cheese head, or I’ll drill you a few more of them ugly holes!” But he realized he was shouting in English, and that the other man was looking at him with a blank-eyed, aloof, and uninterested glare.
Ctesibius said, “I will trouble to say no more. I have outlived my mind and soul, my world, and my usefulness. The asymptote has come and gone, and left all merely living things behind, far behind. My Glorified version d
id not survive the asymptote, and so no memory of mine will be preserved to the end of the universe.
“To be immortal is the only goal worth seeking. All else is merely vanity, for it will be swallowed by entropy, and perish.
“Whether the Blue Interfacers kill me or spare me, it means nothing to me. I have given you the help you need: My counsel is that you embrace despair and die, as I myself shall do. The audience is ended. Depart.”
At that moment, there came a noise of barking dogs and walking automata outside, and Menelaus could tarry for no more questions.
7. Approaching the Fourth Door
The wind had picked up, and sent streamers and shimmers of snowflakes racing along the ground, white dust devils, and plumes fled horizontally from each tree branch or dune-crest, so that anyone facing into the wind soon had a light crust of frost caking his windward side. Despite this, the sky was loftily blue overhead. Only in the south, opposite the glancing blue ridgeline of the glacier, was there a line of dark clouds, presaging storm.
Ahead of the dogs were the several of the Blue Men. Menelaus was familiar with Ull, Yndelf, Yndech, and Ydmoy. Menelaus heard the others being addressed: Docent Aarthroy was a diffident and thickset youth with a heavily gemmed coat, a head taller than the others. Behind Aarthroy were two serene, wrinkle-faced elders called Preceptor Orovoy and Invigilator Saaev.
Of Illiance there was no sign.
The dogs were leaping and gamboling, and the barks rang out along the snowy hillside with sharp, flat, echoes.
The Blue Men seemingly took no notice whatever of the snow, picked their way delicately across the snowdrifts, their slippers leaving footfalls as tiny as deer prints in the drift, and they walked upright, gems winking in their long coats, stately as a procession. Their heads did not seem to bob up and down as they moved, so it almost looked like they were gliding on the icy surface. Despite their reserve, there was an atmosphere of tense eagerness around them, a gleaming eye or quickly hidden smile showing their anticipation.
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