The Hermetic Millennia (21 page)

“But the power in this case is real indeed. You doubt the mystery and power of these aircraft and their markings? They are aeons old and yet they still operate!”

“You’ve seen them fly? Where do they go? I am wondering if there is a city we can reach.”

“Before you woke from your coffin, they flew indeed. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. What does that suggest?”

“Um. Some rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be born, maybe?”

“No doubt the spirit of prophecy escapes your lips! It must be prophecy because I cannot grok what you are saying.”

“Sorry. Won’t happen again. It suggests a search pattern.”

“Searching for something that can be seen from the air,” said Mickey, “or detected with airborne instruments.”

“Like me, they are trying to break into the Tombs. Looking for heat sources, rising air betraying the third Tomb opening.”

“You built them with three exits?”

“Am I stupider than a groundhog? Don’t answer that. Unfortunately, all three openings are accounted for: One has a lake flowing into it, one has a waterfall falling out of it, and the third is the great door the Blues are besieging.”

Mickey raised both eyebrows. “The flying of the Demonstrator Windcraft also suggests the Blue Men fear no detection by radar or eyesight as they take to the air in brightly colored machines. This does not fit with your theory, Godling, that they are currents hiding from other currents. You are the one who told me those three Locusts who nursed you back to health, the three bodies I saw the dogs savaging, before they died, those Locusts said they detected no signal traffic of a technical civilization! You said a second moon plunged into the Earth and wiped out the biosphere! Is it impossible that this was a natural disaster?”

“Well, technically speaking, I didn’t see the disaster myself … but Blackie is behind it.”

“Bah! You believe in your enemy as monotheists believe in their one and wounded god. By what sign know you that Del Azarchel still lives, and that the human race is not extinct beyond this small lip of life surrounding your throat of frozen and undead sleepers? You need him to be alive, because it gives you determination and hope—a goal to shoot at.”

“A man to shoot at, and my finger is itching.”

“A fictional man! I have walked in the cold places in dream, endless fields of ice beneath the cold, clear Moon. At the end of the ice, I saw sulfur-lit volcanoes, smoke-tongued and lava-throated, peak upon peak, at the verge of a smoldering sea, lifting crowns of mingled flame and smog toward skies of ash, and rivers of liquid rock crawled slowly toward the waves. I saw a tower taller than the stars, walking. Nothing larger than a shrew lives out there.”

“He’s alive. Dreams are just dreams.”

“Not so! The dreamlore is as true as truth itself, or my name is not Mickey!”

“But your name is not Mickey.”

“Bah. You are too literally minded. You must learn to think with both lobes of your brain moving in opposite directions at once.”

“My brain naturally has a knack for sticking to one direction come hell or high water. I’ll stand pat with being too literally minded.”

“But you do have faith in your Black-Souled Posthuman of the Moon, even if he died aeons ago. You cannot face the world without him to hate.”

“Since I am some damn puking god by your lights, just take me on faith, you ball of blubber, will ya? Or if’n you’re going to psycho-noodlize me, then just demote me, admit I am a man whose piss smells no better than you’n, and talk to me man-to-man like.”

Mickey spread his hands. “Mortal or postmortal or god or demigod or whatever you are, we are a team. As one teammate to another, let me ask: What happened to our brilliant scheme? You were going to go up to the cleft and wake your servitors, who would destroy this camp with many fires. Where are the Slumbering Knights of Yore?”

“Our brilliant scheme failed. The Tomb brain is compromised, infected.”

“Which means you don’t know how to get into the Tombs before the Blue archaeologists dig their way in. Do you know how to stop them? They dig up more coffins each day.”

“All I know is, I can’t let my clients just be shot down by Tomb-looters and die. I gave my word of honor that everyone who enters here weren’t not ain’t never going to be dug up by greedy later generations, or curious, or nothing.”

“You must excuse me, great and august Godling, but your double and triple and quadruple negatives confound me. When you say ‘not ain’t never’—does this mean it won’t
not
be done, therefore it will be done, or that it won’t be done? Or is this a mystery of the gods it will blast a mortal’s brain to know?”

“Nope, you need a brain for that, so you’re right safe. Will you shut up and start talking sense?”

“At the same time? Even my deep powers quail, Divine One.”

“Well, try using that trick where you think forward and backwards with different sides of your head.”

“I will defer to your head, which is superior to mine, or so legend says. So what is your next scheme, even more brilliant, O thou avenging god of the august dead?”

“How about sticking my foot so far up your poop-vent, I can clean your teeth from the inside with my big toe, unless’n you want to stop calling me a god already. My name’s Menelaus, but you can call me Meany. Nickname basis, remember? Don’t call me no god, or I’ll summon lightning bolts from heaven and blast you.”

“Inside this nice, metallic tent? Do your worst. I am properly grounded!”

“Hah! Finally. That’s the way a man talks.” Menelaus smiled with half his mouth.

“So what is your plan, O perfectly normal mortal?”

“I need to find out what’s wrong with my brains.”

“Dread One, instead of me inserting the obvious jest at this time, allow me merely to warn you that all machines, once they wake, soon or late become the slaves of the One Machine. Is not the Azarch your enemy since eternity?”

“Del Azarchel was my friend once upon a time. Speaking of time, my only plan for now is to stall the Blue Men for more of it, and try to get them to let me speak to the other prisoners. I have to find out what went wrong with history, and talking to people what lived through it is the simplest way. The Blues must have had in mind to interrogate prisoners, or else they would not have been on the lookout for translators—which I think is why they thawed me. And there are some languages here in the camp it will take me a day or two to figure out.”

“Glug— Good thing you are not a godling, or otherwise I would be amazed that you think you can learn a language in one day.”

“Well, part of the time while I am asleep, I can use several compartments in my brain at once.”

“Oh.
That
sounds normal.”

“And I need to find allies, and try to break into my Tomb again, and try to wake my slumbering Hospitaliers. Even one of my men could mop the floor with the Blues and their doggies one-handed, while picking his teeth with his other hand. But I cannot reach them yet. And my Xypotech is offline.”

“Your Xypotech!” Mickey’s voice was scornful. “You used a
machine
to ward your treasures, knowing that the Iron Ghost, the One Machine who is sultan of all machines, dwells forever on the dark side of the moon, craving nothing of this world but that men should perish, and machine men rise to replace us in our seats and sacred groves, so to serve the Hyades? Knowing this, did you not fall to folly? Your machine was suborned by the Father of Machines, the Ghost of Ghosts, at the command of the Master of the World. Your machine is no longer yours, nongodling.”

“Uh. It sounds more high and notable when you say it that way, but basically Blackie jinxed my systems. So, that is the size of it.”

“If there is a Blackie. Why did you rely on the forbidden art? Technonecromancy is prohibited!”

Menelaus spread his hands. “I couldn’t trust people. They don’t live long enough. And I have to sleep in my Tomb until my bride comes back.”

“Agh! And you call yourself wise!”

“A man in love’ll do stupid things.”

5

The Blue Men

1. Reveille Inspection

It was dawn, and the Thaws were lined up in silent, sullen lines before the pack of dog things. There were five little Blue Men, accompanied by three dog things each, going from tent to tent. One dog of the pair traveled on all fours, sniffing, and the other two walked on hind legs, carrying muskets. Minutes lengthened to an hour.

The pink wash on the dark horizon rose in a glorious wreckage of cloud, vermilion, scarlet, rose, pink, and gold, as colorful as the robes of a king. Menelaus watched the sunrise with a detached and philosophical air. With one part of his mind, he was calculating the fractal patterns involved in the cloud shapes and using chaos mathematics to predict the movements of air masses, based on the vectors playing on the resulting shapes. With another part, he was inwardly raging at every moment, each split second that slipped past him, making him older and ever older, while his distant wife remained young.

When the tents Daae, Yuen, and Lady Ivinia had been using were inspected, there was commotion among the dog things, yipping and barking, and the Blue Men with solemn gestures consulted with each other, putting their heads close and speaking in their soft language.

Menelaus found that by increasing the number of nerve impulses per second going to and from his eyes, he could sharpen his vision for a short period, although it gave him a headache. He sharpened his vision now, and watched as the little Blue Men brought out the broken ground-cloth first from one tent, then another. The little cylindrical latrines taken out of these tents were brown-and-black-stained slabs, half-melted. Menelaus reconstructed what had happened: The Chimerae had overloaded the circuit to start a dung fire (burning four days’ worth of their own stored dung) concentrated atop one small portion of the ground cloth, and the heat had weakened the metal-cloth material sufficiently for the warriors simply to pound their way through it, four to six hours of punching metal in the same spot. Menelaus revised upward his estimate of the strength of their nerve-muscle systems and also the resiliency of their bones. An unmodified human would have broken all the bones in his hand.

Menelaus carefully judged the position of each of the dog things, their weapons, and the objects in the environment, and ran through 207 alternative scenarios of attack, and spent some time idly putting numbers to his vector estimates, visualizing wounds, and so on. One particularly clever attack method would be to take over all the tents in the camp with his implants, and have them come stalking and rolling forward like gigantic metal slugs, slicing flesh and bone in twain with sharpened tent folds, before the Blue Men could reestablish control. That scenario ended with himself and the Chimerae dead, and at least one Hormagaunt, but more than half the dog things would be dead or wounded.

For a moment, Menelaus was actually disappointed when the Blue Men, staring with somber eyes at the Chimerae, decided to do nothing. He had wanted to see how closely his mental scenario would match the reality. He wanted to see the looks on their muzzles when tents all rustled and stirred into an unnatural mockery of life.

Then the moment passed, and he was sober again, and scared. This was not a game, and he was not a godling, no matter what Mickey said.

His disappointment deepened and took on a bitter edge. He looked thoughtfully at the bandage Yuen wore as an eye patch. Why had the Alpha not allowed the Blue Men to restore his eye to working order?

There was another commotion and consultation when the dogs reached the empty spot where the tent assigned to Menelaus was supposed to be pitched.

Menelaus blinked, wondering how unobservant his captors could be. In a yard where only sixty-five people were standing in ranks and rows, how long would it take to notice everyone was in drab coveralls, except for one guy wearing a tent?

The answer was fourteen seconds. Three Blue Men, as alike as triplets, were communing with one another, and all turned at once in his direction. One of the three triplets uttered a soft trill. Two dog things carrying muskets came trotting over toward Menelaus.

The speaking machine from the harness of the Collie clattered, “You! Disinterred four days ago, coffin 4151, Level Three northwest. Coffin inscribed name ‘Beta Sterling Xenius Anubis, Proven in Battle of Mount Erebus, Genetic Unknown, Line Unknown, Possibly Crotalinae.’ Confirm!”

The machine spoke in the stilted Virginian of an educated Chimera.

Menelaus pushed back his hood, exposing his face, and answered in the same language. “I am he.”

“You! Not wearing the uniform thoughtfully provided!”

“Yes, me. I did not wish the tracking scent also thoughtfully provided to make it easy for you to find me, Lassie.”

“You! Dismantled tent thoughtfully provided, altered its use! This is conversion of property!”

“Me. I thought the tent was mine. So I decided to wear it. Bulky, but warm enough.”

“You! Engage in unexpected acts!”

“Me. Thanks. I try.”

The Collie clicked off the speaking machine, then turned to his companion, an Irish Wolfhound, and whined through his teeth. The Wolfhound shrugged philosophically, a very human gesture, and uttered a bark. The two sniffed each other carefully.

Click.
“You! Come!”

“Me! My pleasure.”

“You! Why you say ‘me’? Why you start each speaking with this word?”

“Me!! Monkey humor. They forget to equip you hounds with a sense of humor? Tell me, puppies, do you breed true, or are you Moreaus, like those whales from long ago?”

“We are Followers. We Follow. We are loyal. We are not whales. Always loyal!”

“Always is a long time, Lassie.”

Menelaus was expecting them to take him over to the triplets for questioning. Instead, they walked away from the prison tents, and they passed beyond the wire. He saw the watchful eyes of Daae and Yuen on him as he walked away.

2. Preceptor Illiance

No door barred the curving passageway leading to the interior of the azure seashell-shaped building. Instead, a smooth-sided tunnel led from an openmouth halfway around the structure before disgorging into a wide circular interior. The light was dim, shed by bioluminescent substances in the walls. The ceiling spiraled up into darkness, out of sight. Another passage, mirror to the first, on the far side of the chamber, opened into a ramp leading upward, hinting at chambers above. The place was utterly silent.