The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  “The whole civilization of the Witches from start to stop—it was a smoke screen, a cover, a hoax.

  “A hoax aimed at me. They put everything in that society, from their economics to their marriage customs to their tree-hugging, everything I would despise and want to … fix.

  “Sure, I knew the Chimerae were reverse in their genetic-sociopsychology from the Witches, but I always thought the Witches used their own biotech to plant those elements in the Chimerae—they were gene-tinkerers, after all, and pretty good ones whenever their strict communist coven system broke down, and they’d have the resources to devote to research.

  “But no. D’Aragó did it. That was the plan from the first. The damn society of the damn Witches was falling to pieces, and if civilization falls and don’t get back up again in time, then there is no one to fight the Hyades at the End of Days. So I had to do something!

  “And Blackie knew I had to do something.

  “Over a thousand years of war, genocides, mass manipulation of the gene plasm, ruined lives, world conquests, not to mention slavery and even cannibalism—it was all a plot, a plan, a fake. A thousand years of civilization forced into a particular channel just so that I would thaw out for a few months here and there and solve the mistakes in their genetic, psychological, and social order using one of the seven derived keys of Rania’s elegant solution to the divarication problem.

  “But who manipulated the Witch civilization into such an plumb rank outhouse of a world piss-poorer than Job’s turkey? Wasn’t De Ulloa … That boy was dim, but damn sincere. He had sincerity on him like stink on a skunk.”

  “Sweet Jesus up a tree! Did Blackie let an entire civilization across the entire world run itself into the ground and did he let De Ulloa get himself shot, burned, and nuked to bits just to winkle a bit of math code out of me?

  “Or was De Ulloa in on it? Did he betray the whole civilization that was his brain child, all the Witches who thought he was their Washington and their Moses? Was that the real reason he shot himself?”

  He again examined the scrap of Cliometric notes he had found. The Cliometric equations in the notebook cut off at the point in history that marked the revolt and the rise of the Chimerae (here called simply “projected biohomogenized race”).

  De Ulloa had shown Rada Lwa the plan for the downfall of the Witches. De Ulloa revealed the mathematics of the apocalypse, and the final end days of his Witches, his beloved racial experiment in a world civilization based on communal harmony and kinship with lesser creatures. De Ulloa either did not know, or had not been shown, or simply did not share with his vassal Rada Lwa, the plan for history after his period.

  The time stamp on the files in the notebook was A.D. 2580.

  Presumably, that was about the time Del Azarchel went into long-term hibernation, and turned over control of history to Melchor de Ulloa. Montrose had sent out scholars and geneticists from his Tombs in A.D. 3950 to introduce the cooperation code and set in motion the chain of events leading to the founding of the Nameless Empire, one of his two attempts to save the Witch civilization from its own folly. The revolts of the Chimerae began in A.D. 4460, and the defeat of the Final Sabbat at Baffington’s Island was in A.D. 4888. But that attempt, that folly, those revolts, and that defeat had all been planned out two thousand two hundred years before: it would be as if Augustus Caesar had foreseen and planned the launch of the of the NTL Hermetic.

  “So Blackie fooled me twice. I used the self-correction code to perfect the serpentines—Damn, and Sir Guy even warned me this would happen!—Blackie reverse engineered it, and that is how he finally made emulations of his surviving men. I helped him create the posthuman versions of the Hermeticists I have been fighting all these millennia.

  “De Ulloa used my Prometheus intelligence augmentations on animals, and increased their intellect to human levels, but created a world of hell, because intelligent bunnies and intelligent wolves cannot sit down in a Town Hall and vote what to have for lunch. The Witch setup could never have worked, because the problems with a multispecies culture were built in at a structural level. Herbivores just don’t think like carnivores. They place a different value on risk and loyalty and different ideas of courage and different toleration for cruelty and on and on.

  “But with the Nameless Empire period, I actually cobbled together something to allow the Witch system to work. Problem-solver Crazy Montrose, that’s me! I introduced a new type of coven called a ‘familia’ with one patriarch leader, and a harem of one and only one wife, and with children under the coven leader’s strict control. And property was ‘sacred’ to the lares, the household gods, of each familia. Pretty clever, eh, Ratty Low? They were Witches in name only, but they actually had families and private property and rule of law.

  “But that was the surface. Below the surface, I had to reengineer the Moreaus, so they would breed themselves toward more cooperative forms. And I had to use another part of Rania’s divarication solution to do it. The cooperation code. And D’Aragó used that in a twisted backward way to create his Chimerae. And then … I thawed—”

  Another thought struck Menelaus, a thought he should have seen years, or centuries before, if not millennia.

  “And then … I thawed out again, because of D’Aragó. He broke into the Tombs to try to kill me as I slept, and I had to stop him. And so I had to teach him a hard lesson. And, of course, while I was awake, I saw the problem with the Chimera civilization, and the screwed-on-backwards-headedness their organizational principles, and I saw the rot and corruption caused by divarication both genetic and sociological and…”

  When reduced to a mathematical code, the social, political, and biological errors of the Chimera system formed a classical problem in divarication: a positive feedback violence loop or negative-sum game.

  It could be, of course, analyzed in terms of another divarication problem, to which Montrose could apply yet another one of Rania’s seven keys of her general solution.

  The solution was to introduce into every information unit a “dyad” or permanent pair of mutually reinforcing units so that one unit cannot reproduce of itself. The second unit of the pair interrupts negative-sum cycles. In biology, this was done by evolving from asexual to sexual reproduction; but in sociology, by introducing a second carrier outside the normal education channels, without which the social information cannot be carried to the next generation, such as an oral tradition, church, or mass-media entertainment complex: in this case, he used the Lotus Cults he had already found among the lower ranks of Chimera society.

  And that was when Montrose had introduced the original Greencloak portable neurochemical biofeedback backpack systems, which is the first (and in some ways, least significant) part of the Hermetic Secret of Youth, a system for preventing, or even artificially reweaving and restoring, lost telomere length. The restorative also contained an enzyme code to produce a mild euphoric, something to prevent the buildup of adrenaline-habituated rage patterns in the endocrine system. It was a euphoric that also lengthened life span, and because it was chemical rather than genetic, none of the normal Chimera techniques of breeding away undesirable characteristics would work to prevent its spread.

  The attempt was meant to expand Kine and Chimera life spans to Witch longevity levels or beyond, so as to break the Chimera out of the perverted version of the cooperation code Narcís D’Aragó had genetically hardwired into their nervous systems. The idea was that a long-lived race would react to long-term incentives and disincentives, and begin to learn the futility of war, and become more peaceful—

  “Sweet Jesus up a tree! Did Blackie send D’Aragó into the Tombs to kill me just to trick me into waking up during that period of time? Blackie let one of his own men get shot to death by me, just in the hope that when I walked away from the killing ground, I might look around at the suffering and see what was wrong with the Chimera civilization and see what needed to be done to fix it?”

  For the second time in his life, Menelaus felt th
at frozen, helpless, wrathful sensation which must have been (he was sure) Blackie Del Azarchel’s constant companion: the realization that there was someone smarter than he was, more ruthless, more willing to do whatever it took, whether to sacrifice or betray friends or loyal followers or whole worlds of innocent men—the realization that the foe was colder than ice on Pluto, harder and stronger than carbon-quenched steel, deadlier than a rattlesnake and twice as poisonous.

  The first time had been when Blackie won their first duel.

  Menelaus used to have a recurring nightmare that he was called out to a duel, standing and waiting for dawn in some deserted graveyard or empty park, to find himself not only without his gun, but without his clothing as well, and he had to explain to the seconds and the judges and doctor watching the duel why he left his pants and his gun at home. The feeling that crawled like a nest of bugs through his stomach at that moment was one he recognized from that nightmare.

  It was cold as he stepped outside. Menelaus looked up and realized that there was no one around him. The village of seashell buildings silent and motionless was all about him.

  3. Deserted

  The smartwire fence was to his right, but there were no watchmen in the towers, no guards at the gate, which was hanging open. Through the wire, the prison yard was not only deserted, it was empty. The tents had been broken down, folded up, and hauled off. The power plant at one corner of the wire enclosure was still there, and the coffin yard, now unguarded. Trees and rises in the ground hid the rest of the camp from view.

  He turned his head. The airfield was also empty. The large helicopter-bladed ironclad Mickey had called the Albatross was not there. The eleven rear-screwed biplanes and triplanes with their painted wings were gone. The snow was rutted and rerutted with tracks showing that the takeoffs had been recent enough that the wind had not yet covered up the traces: minutes rather than hours ago.

  His weapons banging and robes clattering, and Rada Lwa jouncing on his shoulder, Menelaus jogged to the large pink seashell he supposed to be the hospital, where Sir Guy and the Giant, the two most dangerous prisoners, had been kept.

  He stepped in the pink oval opening hung with tent-cloth material that served as a door. Inside, he saw a floor with lines of chewed tread marks scarring it, and empty bags with dangling needles of medical material hanging from the rafters. Crates made of wood and packing material made of transparent fabric lay strewn everywhere. Midmost, something that looked like an operating table and diagnostic machinery were pulled away from the wall and unbuckled from their power supplies. The power batteries themselves were not in evidence. Along the walls were strips of input-output ports, epoxied to the seashell too well to be quickly torn down, and feeds for the absent coffins that had been parked here. The far wall was simply blown open, with fragments of abalone dangling down, twisting in the wind. Snow had blown in and was puddled here and there on the broken floor.

  He put his hand on the wooden crate, wondering where the wood came from in the barren world of ice.

  Everything bespoke haste, as if the machinery had been in the process of being hauled out and crated up, but then abandoned by the workmen midway.

  He looked at the tread marks. One had been an oversized coffin from the thirty-first century—the coffin of a Giant. The second had a tread pattern design from the twenty-sixth century, belted treads with parallel marks of millipede legs—it was the special coffin of one of his knights.

  He counted the feeder ports and lines along the walls. There had been thirty-two additional coffins here.

  Menelaus stepped through the hole in the wall and back into the snow. He reached up with his free hand (the one not holding Rada Lwa) and snapped off a bit of the abalone-like building material. He looked carefully at the striation marks in order to deduce the growth patterns. Then he looked at the cables and strips still hanging from the walls. It was two different levels of technology, from two different ages of history. And the snow under his feet, if Ctesibius had spoken true, was a third level.

  “Rada Lwa, I am really sick of talking to your pale albino butt, but there is no one else around to talk to. I think I just realized my whole mental picture of what has been going on since the moment I thawed was wrong. All the Blues are revenants. They must have just been put in the ground very recently. I wonder if this ice age is very recent too. Less than four hundred years old? Something here is not adding up.”

  He circled the pink seashell building. In the distance, he saw movement at the gate.

  Menelaus did not resist when the pack of snarling dog things trotted at a quickstep out from the gate and, brandishing their pikes, took him into custody again. There were about forty of them, including some of the better-bred dogs, and two of Preceptor Naar’s armed automata were also there, clanking after on metal feet and carrying heavier weapons.

  After removing from him the subsonic hose, the two railguns, and the laser pack, they escorted him back through the wire. He congratulated himself that he still had the splicing knife up his sleeve. It was not much, but how much would he need? The Blues had probably gathered everyone before the still-locked door, and were watching Larz putter and listening to Larz make excuses.

  Menelaus smiled, counting down the time until his knights, thawed by Soorm and Oenoe awoke. The dogs brought him to the woods.

  The sky had cleared, and overhead showed a brilliant arctic blue, but the southern horizon was darkened with approaching storm clouds.

  Menelaus stood on the highest platform, under the watchful eyes and noses of armed dogs. Yuen, Daae, and the Witches were nowhere to be seen. The south part of the canyon was a set of platforms made of stiffened tent material lashed to poles driven into the rock, and a set of ladders fell from platform to platform into the dig proper.

  Looking down, he saw that the great door leading into the undiscovered parts of the Tombs was open. The weapons were holstered, locked down, and silent. The great valves of the fourth door were thrown wide, and a wedge of golden light formed a triangle along the floor and up the armored blocks of the wall. The light and power seemed to be back on.

  Larz had done it. The Tombs were open. Even if it took men of mortal levels of intelligence an hour or so to find the clues in the Tomb, it would take Del Azarchel or Exarchel only an instant, the moment the agent of Del Azarchel reported his findings to his remote posthuman master.

  At that moment, he desperately wished he had never stabbed himself in the head with that needle, never elevated his brain beyond the human level. Because an ordinary man, brain clouded with ordinary clouds, could cling to hope in such times, make up some lovely fairy tale about how some unknown thing would pop up to make things right; or rage, or pride, or some other hard and hot emotion could blank out, for a few hours, the painful crystal clarity of what his intellect spread before him.

  For painfully, simply, clearly, he saw that he had failed. Blackie Del Azarchel had won. The career and the life of Menelaus Montrose, Judge of Ages, were finished.

  And from the open doors of the Tombs, where the light poured out, rich and golden, into the cold air, he could see the shadows of the dog things dancing and flickering. They were performing an antic jig, leaping and twisting and wagging their tails, biting the air for joy, and flourishing their cutlasses; and dimly he heard the wild music of fiddle and flute echoing against the canyon walls against which their angular shadows leaped.

  PERSONS OF THE DRAMA

  Characters named but not appearing are in italics. Dates given are of last interment date, unless otherwise noted.

  Menelaus—Menelaus Illation Montrose, the Judge of Ages

  Pellucid—His Xypotech

  Rania—Her Serene Highness Rania Anne Galatea Trismegistina del Estrella-Diamante Grimaldi, Sovereign Princess of Monaco, Duchess of Valentinois and of Mazarin, Marchioness of Baux, Countess of Carladès and of Polignac; Stadtholder for Dutch North European Coalitie and Owner-in-Chief of the World Snow Syndicate; Captain of the NTL Hermetic, the Vindicatrix
and Promised Savioress of mankind; also styled Mrs. Rania Montrose

  Captain Grimaldi—His Serene Highness Ranier Grimaldi of Monaco, her father, and Captain of the NTL Hermetic before her

  Hermeticists

  Melchor de Ulloa

  Narcís Santdionís de Rei D’Aragó—The Iron Hermeticist

  Sarmento i Illa d’Or

  Father Reyes y Pastor—The Red Hermeticist

  Jaume Coronimas—The Locust Hermeticist

  Ximen del Azarchel—Senior of the Landing Party, Nobilissimus of the World Concordat, Master of the World

  Exarchel—His emulation

  Astro-Exarchel—His emulation aboard the NTL Bellerophon

  Cryonarch

  Thucydides—Father Thucydides Acumen Montrose, Society of Jesus; later, His Holiness Sixtus VI

  Scholar

  Rada Lwa—Intermediately Evolved Learned Scholar Rada Lwa Chwal Sequitur Argent-Montrose

  Savant

  Ctesibius—Glorified Ctesibius Zant, Endorcist of Three Donatives, Servant of the Machine (A.D. 2525)

  Hospitaliers

  Sir Guy—Sir Guiden von Hompesch zu Bolheim, later Grandmaster of the Order

  Sir Alof Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Manwell Magri, and Themistocles Zammit—Scientist-Knights

  Giant

  Name not given (A.D. 3090)

  Sylphs

  Woggy Soaring Azurine

  Tessa Soaring Azurine

  Third or Trey Soaring Azurine (tentative)

  Brother Roger de Juliac, Society of Jesus

  Witches

  Mickey—Melechemoshemyazanagual Onmyoji de Concepcion, Padre Bruja-Stregone of Donna Verdant Coven; from the Holy Fortress at Williamsburg (A.D. 4733)

  Chimerae

  Daae—Alpha Captain Varuman Aemileus Daae of Uttarakhand, Osaka, Bombay, Yumbulangang, and other actions in the South China Theater; the Varuman blood derives from the Osterman, from the Homo sapiens, and Canis lupus (A.D. 5402)