The Hermetic Millennia (24 page)

“Well, if you ask me,” said Menelaus, rolling his eyes to the ceiling thoughtfully, “if they were not near landmarks, no clients could find them, but if they were too near places where people were, they’d be looted. So just by a natural selection, they would tend to end up in such locations. And the watchmen take on the protective coloration of successful Tombs, and so adopt their emblems. How’s that for a theory?”

“Ingenious,” murmured Illiance.

“It enjoys a certain superficial feasibility,” Ull said coldly, “but there are legends of Tomb systems buried even deeper, beneath the crust and well into the mantle, beyond where geophones or other seismic instruments reach. Maintaining such a system would require interconnection by depthtrain, which implies central organization. Only the examination of a working Tomb with a working depthtrain station would confirm the theory.

“By great good fortune,” continued Ull, “It so happens that a Tomb almost intact, suffering only minor surface damage, has been opened to our inspection, and the major automatic weapon systems hindered to such a degree that it allows the recovery of some coffins and the relicts therein to be examined. It would be erratic, the product of an overcomplicated sense of deference, not to exploit the opportunity.”

“That’s a debatable point,” drawled Menelaus. “You don’t want people pawing through your stuff while you are asleep, do you? And you don’t know what you are meddling with, or who or what you might stir up.”

Ull waved the objection aside with a small motion of his hand. “Our order is unattached to such formalities and scruples. The opportunity exists, and we exist, and our desires match with the facts of reality without undue transformation or distortion.

“The course suggesting itself is a natural one, and elegant,” Ull continued dourly, not smiling. “We take coffins from each layer, finding those on the upper layers whose knowledge of the immediate past allows us to find and communicate with those in the middle layers; and, when found, their knowledge is used to find and communicate with those in the deep. Soon, the knowledge of who and what made the Tombs, and for what purpose, will not be a matter of legend, rumor, and speculation. It will be the living and firsthand memory of someone in the Tomb itself. The Thaws will give their testimony and the Tomb will, by its own nature, reveal the secrets of the Tomb.”

Menelaus said, “Let me ask you straight up, gentlemen. What secret are you seeking? What is your point? You are committing what anyone would regard as a trespass and a crime of monstrous proportions. What do you need so badly that it is worth it?”

Illiance spoke up. Instead of answering, he asked, “Lance-Corporal Beta Anubis, are you familiar with the mathematical theory of divarication? Perhaps the question startles you—You have an expression on your face that is odd. You are staring.”

Menelaus said, “No, this is my normal expression. Merely the cast of my face. But divarication theory is a particular study of mine.”

Illiance tilted his head. “A historian has interest in mathematical theory? Unexpected.”

Menelaus uttered a noncommittal grunt. “What about it?”

Illiance said, “Divarication theory was originally devised in relation to information transmission systems, such as iterations of legacy computer data. To make a copy of a human mind into a machine emulation is fraught with risk of madness, merely because maintaining sanity is a difficult balance of a large number of information streams. A healthy informational system has self-correction features, methods of checking falsehoods, data mutations, and encouraging true ergo accurate iteration.”

Menelaus said, “The theory is more general than that. It puts numbers to the tendency of information to degrade. Any kind of information. It actually was first developed by some forgotten genius and really swell guy at the dawn of the Second Space Age in relation to the problem of how to stop cancer and cell degradation during super-long-term hibernation. The ability of the cell to reproduce itself within a host under ultraslow life processes was analyzed as an information transmission problem. So the divarication mathematics are general enough that they can also apply to social information passed from generation to generation.”

Illiance asked, “How does this happen to fall into the realm of interest of an historian?”

Menelaus said, “Simple enough. What gets passed between generations can be analyzed as transmission of information. Simple dramatic narratives are easier to recall than messy historical facts. Flattering narratives are even easier, so founders tend to turn into demigods. Simpler rules are also easier than complex ones, so stagnant societies tend to turn into parodies of themselves. When the transmission of social norms and mores is hindered or halted, the society starts to die. My particular field of interest is studying the symptoms of cultural decline in dying societies.”

Illiance tilted his head as if puzzled and said, “We are indeed fortunate—abnormally so—that someone with your qualifications should happen to have been unearthed from the Tombs. Your studies will find particular application in our project.”

Menelaus said, “Which is what, again, exactly?”

Ull said, “We are seeking the source of a legend.”

Menelaus said, “What legend?”

To answer, Ull handed him a sheet of silk on which characters in the Iatrocrat language were printed. It was not smart material: the letters did not form or change under his fingers.

It was a fragment.

6. He Who Waits

… Giants walked the Earth in those days, and destroyed the Antecpyrotic World in storms of fire. Only one righteous man, with his wife and sons and their wives, was spared, for benevolent posthumans carried him in a flying ship, and a complete DNA library of all fauna and flora, into the cool air above the midst of the sea, where the flames did not reach.

In the farthest times they said his name was Satyavrate, and in the times not so far, they said Deucalion whose wife was Phyrra, but in the true world, is remembered that the survivors of the burned Earth were called Simon and Glinda, who were brother and sister, king and queen, man and wife, warlock and witch. These wed each other in incest, and brought forth the race of the long-lived ones, or Longevitalists.

The astrologers of the Longevitalists contemplated eternity, and read the fate of man in the stars; and they learned our world to be no more than a bauble, like a semiprecious stone meant for the smallest finger of a great lady, but held to be of low account by her, owned by star-monstrosities of unlimited mind from beyond Aldebaran, destined to come after an immensity of time has passed, at the End of Days. Learning these things, the weight of these infinities smothered their souls, and so they became Witches.

The Witches were starved for length of life, and never fully achieved it, for they flinched away from the Dark Knowledge.

Their life-hunger drove the Witches mad, and they destroyed the machinery of the forgotten age that came before them, and when it came time to die, they did not die, but called upon the hills and mountains to fall on them, that they might be buried in the ground by the thousands and tens of thousands, freezing themselves like lungfish in winter. The only machines they did not trouble were the aestivation coffins, and they thought to pass the aeons in timeless slumber until an aeon arrived when death itself should perish.

But a time came when the Witches grew aware that there were other coffins buried deeper than theirs, giants and flying men from an earlier age, pale men and servants of the machines who worshipped Ghosts of Iron, and did not serve the living trees, the sun and water and moon and fire, sacred to the witchkindred.

In their jealousy and rage, the witches doused themselves with consecrated wine, and dressed their men in the skins of bears smeared with opiates, and with fennels stalks and besoms in hand, made as if to tear these older coffins out of the ground.

They came upon the corpse of a pale white horse, a horse of a breed that does not exist in nature, and the corpse came to life at their touch.

Now, they held the lore that such a horse as this was the steed of the messenger who goes to summon Death from his house among the stars of the Hyades beyond Aldebaran. The Crone of Witches slew the horse with her athame, her magic knife, to offer sacrifice to the Biosphere and strengthen it, and to curse the Infosphere, where the ghosts live, and weaken it.

Yet by digging up the Tombs, the Witches unforethoughtfully and unforeseeing woke the most ancient and the first of all the Revenants there buried.

Forth he came from the deepest and darkest pit of the Tombs, and in his hand he held a wand as pale as mist from which drops of fire fell, whose touch was slumbering death. On his head was a crown of roses red as blood, and scallop shells white as bone, which he wore to show that he was judge over land and sea alike. And the thorns of the roses pierce his skull, and he is mad for a season and sane for a season, and only his wife makes him sane. Some say it is the winter season when he is sane, and others say it is high summer, but some say it is no season of Earth when his wits shall return, but only when his wife returns from where she walks among the stars.

This one turned and called into the dark pit behind him.
IS IT YET, THE AEON?

And many voices answered him.
IT IS NOT YET!

He called into the dark pit behind him.
IS SHE COME, MY BRIDE?

And many voices answered him.
SHE IS NOT COME!

And he called into the darkness of the old Earth.
THEN ARISE! ARISE AND SLAY, FOR THEY DARE WAKE ME WHEN MINE AEON IS NOT YET, AND MY BRIDE IS NOT COME.

And the many fell voices answered:
LET NONE DARE WAKEN HE WHO WAITS, LEST HIS WRATH AWAKE!

And one hundred knights on ninety-nine pale horses rose from the deep, old places of the Earth, and in their hands were pale white staves. They slew the Witches by thousands and by ten thousands, and never a mark was on them, for the staves slew by a touch; and also not a single corpse was ever brought back to their coven houses for lamentation and wake-drinking, because the knights drew the bodies down into the mountain with them when they descended, and the mountain closed after them, and no one can say where the door now lies.

And that one knight who bears the sign of the Cross, he whose steed the Witches slew, he was afoot during this terrible battle, and he could not return to the deep when the trumpet sounded from below the mountain roots, and all the cavalry of the underworld rushed past him faster than his feet could pursue.

He was left outside when the great door closed, and he pounded on the rocks and wept, but the doors would not open.

Some say he still serves the Judge of Ages from that day to this, and walks on moonless nights among living men in secret, wrapped in shadow and leaning on his pale white staff, and listening to idle talk, seeking any man who believes the tomorrows will be brighter than the chores and sorrows of today: and those dreamers of dreams who answer him yea, he comes by night and takes away.

A time came when the Witches repented their folly, and they set up shrines and images of him to serve, and they sacrificed bears and tortoises and swans, who are sacred to him.

At the appointed time, and also thereafter, a great voice issued from the deep of the mountain, and prophesied against the Witches, saying, “You have forgotten eternity; therefore, the judgment of the Judge of Ages against your age is that forgetfulness shall consume your…”

7. Chimera Lore

Ull said, “I see by your eye movement that you can understand the ideographs of the Iatrocracy period. This is a fragment from a tome of instruction used, we theorize, by the Clades of the Black Sea area, called
The Understanding of Dark Sentences,
which alleged to gather the surviving tales from an even earlier period: but no record remains of the origin of the tale.”

Menelaus handed back the silk. “So what did the Judge of Ages say against the Witches?”

Ull said, “Is there no record of this legend among your people, Beta Anubis?”

Menelaus shrugged. “The Tombs were erected by some civilization or civilizations from before the fire, the Ecpyrosis that burned the world. There have been people from every era, either for medical reasons, or merely to escape the age they live in, who try to dig into the Tombs, copy the technology, and they have added to them and modified them, and help defend them. So there is layer after layer of accretion. No Chimerae from the time of the Social Wars knew where the Tombs came from, or cared much about stories about them. Some of the entrances were known locations with still-active weapon systems, and so we generally steered clear.”

Ull said, “But you are an academic, and you entered the Tombs.”

Menelaus said, “The level I entered was staffed by Chimera, part of Medical Command. There were antiques, people from older coffins, that I knew our top brass from time to time thawed out and consulted with at a high level, deciding policy. As best I knew, these were older Chimerae, from the Pre-Proscopalian Era. Republican times. We did not mess with them. Some of them still had living relatives running major cities, for one thing. We dealt with them like you would deal with a foreign power: We had official emissaries, and a strict code saying what was our jurisdiction, and what was Old Chimera jurisdiction, whose soil belonged to who. But the old-timers were not awaked except once every few decades, so Medical Command ran the levels open to us to suit ourselves.”

Ull said suspiciously, “And you heard no rumor from this older generation, who had built these Tombs?”

Menelaus said, “What? You think the Old Chimera thawed out the frozen Witches for a chat? We denied them recovery rights. If any of them woke up in our era, we sent them back down into the Tombs at gunpoint. But asking who built the Tombs? I mean, someone must have invented the firebow, or the wheel, or the stirrup, or domesticated the very first dog, but who knows his name?”

The Blue Men started to speak, but Menelaus raised his voice and spoke over them: “No more! Now it is time for me to ask questions. What the hell is your interest in all this? You gents cannot possibly expect me to believe you are engaged in a massive looting and Tomb-robbing expedition merely to satisfy some intellectual curiosity?”