The Hermetic Millennia (12 page)

The bank of the stream was coated with snow. In the bewilderment, Montrose had not noticed how cold it was.

On the bank, the fog was still billowing and spreading from the open coffin. The coffin alarms were ringing—another fact his dazed mind had not been able to take in—and the disabled coffin guns were clicking pathetically.

The stream tumbled down a hillside covered with snow and (Montrose saw to his immense satisfaction) pine trees. The crest of the hill was bare of trees, but angular walking machines and scaffolding surrounded a deep cleft from which the thunder of gunfire and the snap of laser fire echoed. The Tombs were violated, ripped open.

He was in a yard enclosed by wire inside a camp enclosed by wire. The streambed neatly bisected the yard. There were seventy coffins in the yard in various states of damage and disrepair. Those with working alarms were ringing; those whose alarms were mute were raging weakly, flickering the stubs of their disconnected legs and or spinning the useless wheels of their missing treads, flicking their aiming lasers at potential targets, clicking to one another with sound-transmitted ranging information. All the coffins were trying to come to his aid. None could move or fire.

Montrose absorbed this in one split-second flicker of his eyes. Still puking up fluid from his lungs, he rose to his feet. The stream was not even knee deep. All he had done was to wet himself in the winter wind and bruise and cut himself badly enough on the streambed rocks that he could barely force his tortured body into motion.

A sudden gush of wind stirred and parted the fog like a curtain. There was the semicircle of sixty dog things. Most were unclothed, except for weapon belts, but some wore scarlet pantaloons or braided vests or half capes. They carried muskets, cutlasses, and long knives. Montrose was gratified to see that he had killed seven and wounded ten more, who were writhing on the ground yowling, as pairs of comrades, two to each wounded hound, pulled them back out of combat or applied pressure to wounds. Of these sixty, only twenty-three were standing with weapons at the shoulder. The muskets had been pointing at Montrose even before the wind parted the vapor, since the fog had not deceived their sense of smell.

They were waiting for the order to fire.

Their masters were three blue men, or, rather, two azure men and a ruddier-hued man who was almost purple. All were bald and had very small and delicate ears. All wore knee-length coats studded with emeralds, sapphires, blue diamonds, topazes yellow as honey, agates, amethysts, and stones of beryl and glinting jasper red as blood and polished onyx gleaming black as drops of ink.

The purple-shaded Blue Man was the operator of the grasshopper-shaped automaton, and his coat still flickered and flamed with whatever energy he had used to disable Montrose’s pistols and deflect their final burst. He pushed the goggles hiding his eyes back over his wide and bald brow, revealing an expression of utter boredom.

The older of the two lighter-shaded Blue Men regarded Montrose with a heavily lidded and reptilian stare from eyes underlined with bags of weariness and expressionless as stones. His prune mouth was wrinkled as if it had been folded far too often into bitterness and contempt. He too wore a knee-length coat patterned with gems.

The younger Blue Man observed Montrose with a cool and almost amused detachment. In his outstretched hand was an instrument so studded with gems and ornate scrollwork that Montrose did not recognize it at first as a energy weapon, probably a solid-state laser carrying a galvanic charge.

Montrose was bent double with puking into the stream, but he still held his knife up high in defiance. If his hand would stop shaking, he might manage a throw into the older-looking one. His coat had fewer gems, so perhaps he was lower rank or lower status than the other two, but he had a look of arrogance that bespoke command.

Menelaus did not throw the knife. Instead, baffled, he induced in his middle-level brain sections one of those pattern-recognition gestalts normally called intuition. The answer surfaced immediately:
The Hermetic Order has an agent (or agents) observing this scene: but he (or they) fails to recognize you due to subverbal-conceptual interference across more than one mental system
.

At some point, if he lived, and if he had the time to go back through his thought process, he could try to put into words the wordless intuition. As it was, he decided merely to accept it as a given.

Coronimas, Sarmento, and Father Reyes, as far as he knew, were still alive, not to mention Ximen del Azarchel. Why were they absent when the Tombs were being looted?

Their absence bespoke stealth, indirection, secrecy, and therefore fear. Del Azarchel was hiding from someone. From whom? If Montrose’s Cliometrically calculated predictive model of history was right, no civilization on the Earth’s surface powerful enough to threaten Exarchel could have arisen from the barren ice floes that ruled the surface when last he woke. So something was wrong with his model of history, something very basic. That was something imperative to look into, later.

If there was a later.

The Blue Men were the starting point of the thread leading back to Del Azarchel, who must be ultimately behind the attack and the looting. Montrose tried to imagine the magnitude of damage needed to have so thoroughly crippled the defensive systems of the Tombs that they could not stop a squad of musketmen. Or musketdogs. Some part of Pellucid must still be operating, if only a local node, but the main brain must already be compromised, perhaps dead. And where were the Knights Hospitalier?

The time for grief was later, as was the time to sort this out. For the moment, he was captured, but his captors missed the fact that they had found whom they sought.

Of course, it helped that the coffin had been marked with the wrong name and interment date. There were not many periods of history after the era in which Montrose was born, where large numbers of great-boned redheads walked abroad: the one such period, the time of the Chimerae, circa
A.D.
5000, had an unusually broad genetic base.

So Menelaus hesitated, armed with nothing but one dinky knife, stood shivering, eyeing the dozens of musket muzzles covering him and the dozens of dog muzzles snarling.

The younger Blue Man tilted his head to one side as if in thought, and a made a polite fluting sound in some unknown language of singing notes to the older one, who grunted and nodded. Menelaus was gratified that, despite the passage of thousands of years, the meaning of that particular head motion had not changed.

The younger Blue Man, lowering his pistol, opened his coat with both hands, exposing the inner lining, which was a pearly gray. The coat lining shimmered. It was library cloth.

An image of the Monument appeared on the inside of the coat to the left and right of the young Blue Man’s body, and then the image expanded to zoom in on the opening statement. First one group of glyphs lit up, and then a second, and then a third. A bisected circle filled the view, constructed of a sequence of dashes that flickered quickly: large-three-small-one-four-one-five-nine—

“You little plague-sucking rot-brained buggers broke into my coffin and abducted me to ask me the value of
pi
?” Montrose roared in anger, or tried to. The severed breathing tube was still dangling and flapping from his mouth like an absurd proboscis, and now he gagged, drew in a deep breath, and, when the air struck his fluid-adapted lungs, they seized up.

Terrible hacking coughs started to yank themselves out of his body like scarves from the mouth of a sideshow magician, and his muscles tightened in the first seizure of the transition paroxysm, first in his chest, then in his limbs.

He wobbled, knelt, and then fell face-first into the freezing water. A roaring darkness filled his brain, and little black metallic flashes swirled to and fro in his eyes. He thought he could detect a mathematical pattern in the swirls he saw as his vision faded in and out, something he could analyze with the Navier–Stokes vortex equations.

He was dimly aware of doglike paws pulling him from the water. Two dog things held his either arm, and his naked legs were being dragged across the frost-coated pebbles and through the burrs and prickles of the gray dead winter weeds of the stream bank.

He was inordinately proud of the fact that they had to bend his thumb so far back that it broke with a dull snap like a twig before they could pry the knife from his hand.

They dragged him roughly before the younger Blue Man, who knelt and wrote a set of Monument glyphs in the snow. It was the glyph for self-identity, and a symbolic logic expression also used to refer to set representation. In other words, it was the glyph that meant “name.”

Montrose also saw a red dot appear in the glyph, and then another, and he realized blood from his face wounds was dripping onto the snow.

The younger man pointed at his nose and said solemnly,
“Ss’s Illiance-pra-e syn-suan va, hna-t.”
He pointed at the older Blue Man with the back of his hand.
“Ss’s Ull-mnempra-e syn-suan hthna, hno-t.”
He pointed the back of his hand at the Purple Man.
“Ss’s Naar-ma-e syn-suan hthna, hno-t.”
Then he made as if to touch Montrose with the back of his hand, but did not actually brush his skin.
“Ss’s nii, hni? T?”

Menelaus knew his previous, nonaugmented brain would not have been quick enough on the uptake to deduce some of the grammatical rules of a semi-declined language based on so small a sample.
Ss’s
either indicated the beginning of a sentence, or the younger Blue Man Illiance had a lisp.
Va, hthna, nii
were “me, he, you.”
Hna, hno, hni
were verbs in the passive voice, the act of naming: “I am called, he is called, you are called.” The
t
sound indicated the end of a sentence, which meant this was an old and corrupted form of computer-derived language, since no human listener needs to hear punctuation marks in spoken speech.

Illiance, Ull, and Naar were names or honorifics.

Damn me, but I am smart.

“Me, Tarzan,” replied Montrose. “You, Jerkdong? I can’t talk with this damned buggery tube yerked up my eating-hole, you smurf.” But since his mouth was blocked, it came out more like:
A cawh’n taw wif dif bwah-erwee doob eerd ut mwa eewen-oal, oo fnurf
. Which, upon reflection, actually did not make much less sense than what he’d tried to say.

The tone must have been clear even if the words were not, because one of the dog things drew what looked like a single-shot wheel lock pistol from his sash and clouted Montrose sharply across the cheek with it. More than ever, Montrose wished for the mind powers the old comics always awarded to creatures with superior intelligence. As it was, he was able to deduce the exact vector magnitude of the incoming iron pistol barrel and make an accurate mental model of which parts of his cheek and face and nose cartilage would be torn and broken before the blow actually fell. He was not able to anticipate how much it would hurt, however. Pain is always a surprise.

When the blow landed, Menelaus had sufficient control of his nervous system to induce a fainting cycle without anything more than a silent act of will. He slid down into the roaring darkness with a sense of relief, hoping the breathing tube still lodged in his face would hide any smile of victory.

If all went as planned, they would place him back in a working coffin for the internal systems to heal his damage. And turn on the communication implants wired into his nervous system.

The chance that they would kill him while he was unconscious was small; or, at least, small enough that it was worth the risk. And if they did kill him? He had already said his good-byes to Rania, and there was no one else he cared about, nor any group of people, nor any civilization, for thousands of years.

That was his last conscious thought for a while.

2

The Pit of Revenants

1. Three Locusts

His next conscious thought was how cold it was, and he wished his brother Leonidas, whose bunk was near the window, would stand up and lever the darn thing shut. Still, it was nice to know he was home, with his brothers around him. By why were they all in his bunk with him? Why did Agamemnon have his elbow sticking in his eye?

Menelaus pried an eyelid open. He was in a steep-sloped pit, in the mud, in the freezing rain, with other bodies cold as corpses huddled up to either side of him, groaning, and Leonidas had been dead for eight thousand years.

All was not going as planned. They had not placed him back inside a working coffin.

When he tried to stand, a naked, bald-headed, and big-headed boy put a hand, and then a shoulder, under his arm. He leaned, but the boy could not lift Montrose.

Montrose focused his eyes, wishing the light were better. He did a mental trick to repeat the visual images in overlapping layers in his cortex, pick out details, and deduce a brighter and clearer picture.

The one trying to help him up was not a boy: his frame and facial characteristics were the same as those of the Blue Men who had captured him and, like them, stood four feet tall—except that he was not blue. Instead the man was black as onyx. The fellow was an adult, for he had pubic hair and armpit hair, but no trace of beard stubble nor scalp hair.

A more obvious distinction was that this man had two yellow tendrils coming from the crown of his skull just above his eyes. These eyes were large and lustrous, and his mouth a tiny rosebud. From what he could see, Montrose guessed the eyes had been modified to pick up ultraviolet. High on the skull, near the base of the two antennae, were two pit organs like those of snakes, able to pick up infrared rays. The Blue Men had displayed no such modifications.

At that same moment, two other little onyx men, as alike to the first as twin brothers, came to the other side of Montrose and with soft hands helped him to his feet, and steadied him.

Montrose, for a moment, was delighted to see people who looked so exactly like what his childhood cartoons imaged far future men should look like. “Take me to your leader!” he said in English. Then he scowled. “Or if I am any judge of genetic handiwork, your leader was Coronimas, that idiot. But why this design? Maybe he watched the same toons I did as a kid. That’s a creepy thought.”