The Hermetic Millennia (38 page)

Soorm shook his shaggy head. “It still takes some getting used to. Meeting you, it is easy to believe you are a death-god from the underworld, bent on vengeance. But to think you are married to a woman born beneath a distant sun! A princess who brought the only era of world peace the world has ever known!”

Montrose nodded glumly. “I take it back. She is too good to be true. I don’t know why she married me, but I’ve done sworn I ain’t gunna disappoint her. Die, maybe. Disappoint her, never.”

They reached their destination and stood on the height of the cliff, overlooking the cold stream that rushed out from a narrow doorway leading into the mountain.

As it had been yesterday, in the distance, two upright coffins stood like sentries to either side of the flooded door from which roaring waters poured. In the stream almost directly beneath Soorm and Montrose the several broken machines of the Blue Men lay. The white and rippling water played around their dented hulks and crooked legs, and rust and trails of icicles accumulated.

What had not been here yesterday was a set of parallel deep scars or gouges in the cliff face under their feet, in a line leading down to where the broken machines were heaped. Each scar was about nine inches long, and an inch or two deep into the rock.

“Can you climb down this cliff? Your feet are adapted for swimming, not climbing,” said Menelaus.

Soorm said, “I could not pass this point before. Where the machines fell is as far as I could go. In addition to those two by the door, there are some active coffins lying on the floor of the streambed. I saw their lights shining, and they put little red dots on me.”

“Aiming laser dots?”

“It was not a technology I knew. I retreated.”

“Smart man. Did you come from above, from where we are now?”

Soorm shook his head, an oddly human gesture for his dark and furry otter-shaped skull. “From downstream.”

“There are clusters of sensors buried in the cliff wall downstream, and they paint incoming objects as targets for the coffins and door circuits. Scaling down the cliffside avoids the clusters, so we should only have to deal with short-range reactions. Can you make it down these handholds?”

Soorm went to all fours, dipped just his head over the edge of the cliff, and sniffed cautiously. “I can scale the wall. You cut this ladder. It has your scent. When?”

“Last night, when everyone was asleep.”

“How? The stone is melted. This was done by an energy weapon.”

Menelaus pointed at the door. “You cannot see it from here, but there is a hundred-kilowatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser in the lintel.”

“How did you get it to cut the handholds?”

“My skill as a toreador. I dangled my cloak over my elbow to get it to shoot. It is programmed to find the center of body mass, and I had to throw off its estimate so the beam would land between my arm and my torso and hit the rock. It was not fun.”

Soorm’s face did not allow him to show much expression, but disbelief seemed to crackle through his fur. “Impossible.”

“The lethal kilolaser is cut off from its mainframe, so it is actually easy to fool, if you know the limitations. Which I do, since I built the dumb thing. And I could do the math in my head to calculate the beam path.”

Soorm grunted. “For such a poor superman, you seem to be able to do unusual feats. What else did you build?”

“Most of this is my work, though it mutates when I slumber. The lethals won’t see you. You need to worry about the nonlethals. There are three. First, hidden behind the panels to either side of the door are millimeter-wave radiation emitters. Make you feel like your skin is on fire. But stay submerged. Water droplets will disperse the beam. Second, there are acoustic weapons mounted farther down, beyond the mouth of the door, but their projection horns are underwater, so they probably won’t go off. If they do, the whole camp will hear us and scamper back up here.”

“And third?”

“A shock barrier. Shoots sixty electrified lancets at the same time. I stood in the water last night freezing my ass off for about an hour, until it ran out of ammo. I was holding my cloak on a stick in front of me and the lancets could not penetrate. Dumb machine. It fired until it ran out of ammo. It takes it three whole goddam days to grow another batch, and that is if and only if the feed lines connecting it to the liquid biometal are not cut, which I am not sure of. Why did I even bother putting in such a stupid system? I reckon I got a little overly enthused at the drawing board. Once you get in the door, the whole corridor is flooded.”

“And then the coffins will swarm over me and kill me.”

“In theory, all my clients have a right to go back in, so the automatics should let any of you pass,” said Menelaus.

“In theory, the Judge of Ages is not a complete nincompoop who locked himself out of his own stronghold. I still don’t understand how you can be this godlike being, capable of unimaginable depth and breadth of thought, and yet you are here clinging to a snowy cliff like a rat, trying to nibble your way into a grain box.”

“I’ll point out I am smart enough to talk you into a plan where I get to stay here where it is safe, while the nonlethals scald your private parts with searing pain.”

“The brilliance of your posthuman thinking grows ever less clear as time passes.”

Menelaus pointed. “I also did some tests last night and took some measurements. The doors broke open sixty years ago from the water pressure behind. Half my Tomb site there is a damn lake,” Menelaus said, shaking his head, “and there is an incoming underground artesian flood on the north side that keeps pouring in the same rate this pours out. The radio shack is on the fourth level right at the annex. You’ll be traveling against the current. The bad part is this: You see how the water swirls as it rushes out the door? Remember the specific recurring pattern of vortices and their periods. And then look at this.”

He tapped the back surface of the groundcloth he wore as part of his robe. A blueprint diagram formed as if below the surface, adjusted to the peculiarities of Soorm’s mismatched eyes to create a three-dimensional illusion in his brain.

Soorm put his webbed fingers before his muzzle. “Stop doing things like that!”

“Things like what?”

“Weird posthuman things!”

“Sorry, but take a garner at the map. The smartmetal fabric has a way to create visible light from the thumbnail overlap of each microscopic cell, and all I did was formulate a program to use laser interference to create holographic images in eyes like yours, since you can see polarization. I thought a three-D model would be useful. Anyway, compare the map to the door down there. You can tell from the vortex formation periods of the current that three of the internal doors along this corridor as locked down and shut. That was the bad part I mentioned.”

“What? How can I tell?”

“Because the water leaving the mouth of the door would have a different resonance pattern if those doors were open. You never played a flute or blew across the top of a pop bottle?”

“Yes, I played the double-flute quite expertly, and no, I cannot deduce the shape and depth of flooded corridors by glancing at the swirlies the water makes when it gushes out.”

“So take it on faith that my map here is accurate and to scale. There is where you go inside; here is the radio shack. How long would it take you to swim that distance? And can you take someone with you?”

“That distance is nothing to me.” He peered at the map. “I can cross it in an eighth of a watch.”

“I don’t know your measurements of time. How many minutes would that be? A minute is one sixtieth of a sidereal day.”

“Twenty or so.”

“Twenty? No boasting, friend. We are not talking about a straight-line sprint. The corridors will be dark, and you’ll have to grope your way.”

“Not to me. I have an alternative form for deeper oceans. I can shed light and use dolphin echolocation. Pastor modified me to be able to talk to those empty Ghost memories who sing about their desire to die, and cannot die. Does your posthuman body grow posthuman lungs? You cannot survive where I pass.”

“I don’t mean to. Oenoe is the one you are taking along.”

Soorm gave a shiver of skepticism. “A dancing girl! The darkness, the cold of the water will panic her. I don’t think she is fit for this task.”

“Nymphs have the lung capacity for this.”

“Those are mammary glands, not lungs.”

“Very funny. Both the oxygen-carrying capacity in their blood, and the convolutions of their lung tissues in many bloodlines of Nymphs were modified, so that they could perform water ballets when seducing sailors. Oenoe is coming now. She is the one who will open the internal doors.”

3. Liberty and History

Soorm said, “I will abandon her to drown when she panics, and Darwin will be served.”

“She has nerves of steel.”

“How was that modification accomplished? The world supply of metallic ore was exhausted before her day.”

“I mean, Oenoe is a veteran military officer who has seen and survived action. You seem surprised.”

Soorm said, “I come from the last days, when the Nymphs were dying. The thousand years of endless summer had passed, for the albedo-altering organisms in the Arctic, Antarctic, and Tropics were corrupted and becoming extinct, and they had lost control of the Gulf Stream. The Winter Queens betrayed all the principles of their earlier generations, embraced the need for violence, and used alchemy to stir up battle frenzy in their berserkers during the Depravation Wars. But then in the summertime, it was the old time again, and all was sponged away from thought and remembrance. I thought this was a recent and desperate innovation. All my life I thought so. The endless summer of the summer years—surely they were times of peace? She cannot be a veteran!”

Menelaus said, “She is, and a cunning one. She told me her secret flower combination. Hyssop wards off evil spirits, Juniper means protection, and Lily keeps unwanted visitors away. That is the heraldic sign for their Protective Service. Secret police, Nocturnal Council, whatever you want to call it. The Protectors are the people who stuff troublemakers into hibernation, and kill any rebels they cannot subdue with drugs. People who take care of unwanted visitors. Her people maintained the social order.”

“That means she is an police maiden, not a warrior. Their world was drugged into perfect pacifism!”

Menelaus said, “There were no standing armies nor major land battles during the Nymph period in history, but they sure as hell had a militia, and riot police, and flying squads who kept the peace. There were pitched battles, blockades, sieges, sniper duels with wee little wasp creatures—I mean, come on, they were still human beings! There were even naval actions against privateers with marine cavalry riding the backs of sea-dragons, who turned out not to be just ornamental.”

“How could they keep it secret?”

“The soldiers would quaff the cup of victory after the successful fight. Hell! And anyone who escaped chemical control still obeyed unwritten social control. He’d be ashamed to speak his piece: why spoil the party? The technique you call Wintermind, which allows you to resist memory alterations, and stay lucid when drugged or addicted, that did not exist yet.”

Soorm’s goat eye blazed and his cuttlefish eye wobbled so violently in its socket that it looked ready to pop out. In the strangled voice he cried, “How do you expect me not to hate these creatures? With their balloon breasts and honeyed lips, they have no more heart than Venus flytrap plants!”

Menelaus looked surprised, perhaps a little amused, perhaps a little sad. “We’re talking about something that happened in your childhood—how old are you? Biologically speaking? You cannot be worried about something so long ago?”

“How long ago did you last see your wife, the Swan Princess, O Judge of Ages? Were there still Pyramids in Egypt in those days, or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Or had they not yet been built?”

Menelaus opened his mouth to object, but could think of nothing. (He noticed that Soorm, raised by Father Reyes, knew the names of biblical places. Eerie to think that those ancient spots were remembered long after New York the Beautiful and Newer Orleans had been swallowed by time and forgotten.) So he said: “Uh, good point. But calm down anyway.”

Soorm snarled, “Calm? Why? Does everyone get to run my life but me? I was eager, willing to eat meat, willing to kill men, willing to practice abstinence, willing to do any and every perverse thing I was raised and commanded not to do— Arg! I even became a
teetotaler,
something so horrible, Nymphs don’t even make jokes about it!—I did all these ghastly things merely for the chance to study the Mind of Winter hypnogogy. I became the slave of Pastor merely to escape their slaveries.”

Montrose said thoughtfully, “From where did Reyes y Pastor learn it, to teach it to you?”

Soorm said, “From Nymphs of the Winter days, when their weather control failed.”

Montrose cursed.

Soorm goggled one eye at him. “What is it?”

“Outsmarted again. Those Hermeticists you hate for creating your world? Turns out, I help them to create it. They winkled the secret out of my people, who I tried to free from Nymph control, back when the Nymph system refused to self-correct to account for changed climatic conditions.”

Soorm stared. “The Nymphs all believe you protect and adore them. You helped destroy their world?”

“I helped draw them back from racial suicide, yes. Pastor told you about the Cliometric calculus?”

“He did indeed. How he would cluck and rub his hands and grin when he would tell me how his little webs of math control all destiny and history. He was so proud of us, you see, his monsters. My race was created to serve him, and was destined for eternal sorrow, eternal struggle, eternal bloodshed, and eventual extinction that we might give rise to a greater race!” Soorm clenched his lizard-scaled webbed hands into two great fists and raised them toward the gray clouds above, a gesture of silent rage. “Will there never be an era when men can be free? When I can be free?”

Menelaus shrugged the shrug of a philosopher. “Everyone I know is controlled by someone. Witches obey their Crones, Chimera obey their Imperator-General, Hormagaunts obey their patrons, the Hermeticists obey Blackie.”