The Hermetic Millennia (47 page)

Oenoe said in her language, “Your Honor, what is coming?”

“I don’t know. Something tall. In the meantime, I am worried about you and Soorm. How you two making out?”

“Soorm refuses the copulation arts.”

“Uh, no, I was asking whether you were surviving.”

“Surviving without the copulation arts? The idea is obtuse.”

“Woman, half the songs in Texas are about the bad results of cheating on your mate. The other half are about unemployment. Aren’t you married? You’d best act it!”

“Have I not acted so? Your ways are strange, and it seems insulting to treat Soorm as one might treat one of the nonzoophiliaworthy animals, but such is the code I adopted when I wed, and so do I comport myself. I did not say I offered the love-sports to Soorm; I merely said he does not participate.”

“Yeah, but I got to wonder about any folk in whose language
nonzoophiliaworthy
is a single word.…”

“I wonder of you, Tomb-maker, who inhabit this buried hell where there is no glance of sun nor guffaw of wind. My lord husband is he for whom I yearn, as you for your wife, you who dwell in misery forever. And have you found him? Is he in the Blue Man hospital beyond the most unlovely fence?”

“Haven’t found him and can’t confirm where he is. Did you find any food stores down there in your nonallergenic spectrum?”

“Feasts beyond count, and tools, and weapons, and all your treasures of many libraries.”

“Whoa! Are you on the Tenth Level?”

“Indeed.”

“I mean, right now, right this second?”

“Yes, beloved Judge. Soorm, in whom my heart delights, most carefully noted the position where air pockets had been trapped against irregularities in the roof, and he is mightily strong, strong enough to tow me in an airtight coffin behind him, from pocket to pocket of air.”

“But you found food. Food supplies are in large metal lockers to one side of the main corridor, and the armory is just beyond that. Is there a blank panel of wall between the two that you can see? And a decoration along the wall at eye height, shaped like scallop shells and roses?”

“It is not at my eye height, Your Honor.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Yes, beloved.”

“Go back to calling me that.”

“Yes, Your Honor. For what purpose do I behold this decoration?”

“The first and the third scallops from the southern wall are fakes made of glass. Smash them. Inside are two red D-rings.”

“The glass was smashed long ago. I see two red metal bits shaped like hollow plectra. They are too tall for me to reach.”

“Get Soorm to grab them, one in each hand, and pull.”

“You told us to touch nothing painted red.”

“Pull. The doors will open. Don’t step inside.”

“Zxx!”

Since she was sending only a simulacrum of her voice over the communication link, Oenoe must have dropped her signal board, or strummed a false note.

The played version of her voice he was hearing suddenly sounded dull and monotone. She was too excited to remember to put in nuances of pitch and accent. “I see slumbering warriors, knights of ninety-eight count, and great white beasts beside them, frozen, like deer, but not deer: the long dead horses of man. Treasures of many sorts are stored in their locker below the coffins, and massive metal apes with no faces, statues—they are suits of armor, stand at the head, with flags and pennants displayed. I see on the walls arms and weapons of many shapes, richly adorned, terrible, unnatural, deadly, and the far wall shows racks upon racks of missiles, and carriages and caissons. The treasures overflow the lockers, and coins of many different years and aeons lie underfoot, bright as fallen leaves—”

Menelaus interrupted. “Don’t step into the chamber! Those are my men. With that armor, they can wrestle Giants, and with those missiles, they can shoot down Sylphs. Ha-
ha
! Just one of those guys up and about could whip these dogs and send them whining, and the Blue Men would dance jigs or get their toes shot off. This whole nightmare would be over, and a little brutal justice would get done damn quick!”

“I rejoice in your joy. My nipples harden with exquisite excitement!”

“Yeah, doll, thanks for the little mental image. Can you describe the pattern of lights on the nearest coffin?”

“There are no lights at all, Your Honor.”

“
Pest
-il-ence with a capital
Pest
!”

“They are dead…?”

“Not a bit. The nanotech fluid keeping them alive is designed to power itself from Brownian motions of the surrounding molecules. They need external power to wake up, though, because the sequences needs to be computed, and it is unique not just for every man, but for every bodily state the man passes through when he sleeps.”

“Then how do we wake them?”

“We have to find a way to get some of those coffins, maybe only one, up to the Fourth Level. The power cell you are using to run the radio shack is compatible with the coffin fittings. Once it is powered up, you can initiate a thaw sequence. Even so, it will take hours, maybe days to charge up from a full cold-stop.”

“Soorm is here with me. He says the motive powers of several of the sarcophagi are intact.”

“He can tell that at a glance, can he?”

“The Red Hermeticists taught him that aspect of your technology, Your Honor, since he was meant often to slumber and thaw.”

Menelaus was silent. Soorm’s expertise was suspiciously convenient. Menelaus fretted that perhaps Father Pasty had outwitted him this round. But, if so, there was no helping it now. Soorm was locked in there, with the pantry and arsenal well stocked and the pretty girl well stacked, while Menelaus was locked out here, in the cold, on a stinking latrine, with a nasty dog thing giving him dirty looks.

“I can tell you how to enter the chamber safely, and then give you the sequences to bring the knights to life. Don’t touch the coins scattered on the floor: they are there to trap the greedy. Once we have even one knight awake and in full kit, the Blue Men don’t have the firepower to stop ’em.”

With a squawk of data, he sent down to a man he suddenly wondered how far to trust and to the wife of his best friend the secret words to enter the chamber and thaw the sleeping knights.

A moment later, there was a whine of noise in his implants, and the link was cut. The line went dead.

Someone had discovered and jammed the wavelength. Was it a coincidence that this happened just as he had sent out his all-important code words? Or was it good luck it had not happened earlier?

Meanwhile the dog thing was becoming restive, and the stink was getting to Menelaus as well. Menelaus opened his hand and let the six tiny stones fall into the latrine.

2. Self-Directed

A single pair of dog things acted as escorts to guard Invigilator Illiance as he walked Menelaus back to the mess tent at noon.

Menelaus spoke without preliminary: “Do you know who you are working for?”

Illiance did not seem surprised by the question. “It is obvious that we are self-directed.”

“And who self-directed you to break open the Tombs? Does Ull really think that filch-artist Larz is going to get him into the Tomb system? Your aircraft were dug up from another Tomb system—unless I miss my guess, from the burial mounds outside of Wright-Patterson in Ohio. Whoever you were looking for was not there, was he?”

Illiance made a delicate gesture with his fingers. “Let us not allow the conversation to veer into areas of no particular consequence to our continued mutual harmony. Instead, as a mathematician, I am confident that you will be interested in the following puzzle: Not long ago, some forty-two rod-logic crystals, obtainers, reflectors, and memory glints were removed from my coat by you, a gesture which, if you understood it, indicated that you believe I am able to operate all aspects of my nervous system without artificial aid—”

“I understood the gesture. Ull was being a jackass.”

“—but an anomaly arises when the crystals are regathered afterwards, for only thirty-five can be found. Seven are missing.”

“Interesting. Do you have some method of scanning for them? Perhaps a homing signal or something?”

“A question that must vex whomever took them. I seem to recall you have a pattern of such investigatory expropriation.”

“Well, I seem to recall that Kine Larz asked to have some of those logic crystals, since he thought they were gemstones. He also claimed to be a snake-charmer, implying he might be skilled and therefore interested in computerpathics. You could ask him about the missing stones—if he lives through his attempt to force the Tomb door, I mean. What makes you think he can open it? And who told you to let him try?”

Illiance nodded serenely. “You seem to be exerting yourself to ask an additional question, rather than taking the trouble to answer my question.”

“Well, let’s not let the conversation veer into areas of no particular consequences for our contaminated mucilage harmonicas, right?”

Menelaus ducked into the mess tent once Illiance (lightly gliding) and the dog things (loping) departed.

3. Mess Tent

Inside, the long low tent was carpeted with woven mats of straw set atop a heated groundcloth. To one side stood a row of cannibalized coffins, lids open, connected to an ungainly power sump and feeder elements. Various forms of soup, stew, and gruel filled what used to be the nutrient control and restoration pockets. Instead of regrowing the missing flesh and bone marrow of the patient, the assemblers were taking material from the feeder tubes and turning it into other forms of protein and vitamins. Four Nymph women, looking achingly lovely despite their drab prison overalls, tended the cooking coffins and ladled out the gruel.

The revenants from different eras tended to segregate themselves by language. The Witches were grouped to one side of the tent, a circle of white-haired women with mummy-gray skins inside a large circle of menfolk. To his disappointment, he did not see Mickey.

The Chimerae sat or stood in rows according to their ranks at the other side of the tent, the lesser ranks not eating until their betters had finished. Only the Hormaguants spaced themselves more or less evenly about the tent, but even they kept their Clade-dwellers and Donors near at hand, for conversation’s sake if nothing else. And the gray twins sat together.

Seated near no one were the Savant Ctesibius from
A.D.
2525 and the strange-eyed woman from
A.D.
10100.

Glorified Ctesibius, the Savant, had entered at about the same time Menelaus did, but from the opposite end of the tent. A sudden hush fell across the diners. The Witches hissed with detestation. As Ctesibius with regal footstep walked past them, the Witches stood or scudded aside, clutching their bowls of gruel, careful lest he accidentally touch one, or have his shadow pass across them.

He was dressed in camp overalls, but had pinned or sewn two blankets together, and these swathed his upper limbs and draped gracefully behind him as he strode, like the toga of a Roman senator, or the ermine cloak of a king. Arrogance radiated from him like heat from a stove. Ctesibius had a number of unsightly holes or ports drilled in his skull, including a opening right in the crown of his head, and large enough one could have inserted a finger and not felt the bottom. He had found a black kerchief large enough to wear over his head like a shawl in lieu of the elaborate, long, antiseptic wigs that were part of the costume of the members of his order of his time.

The Chimerae did not feel any more love for servants of the Machine than Witches, but as he passed where they sat, their outward expressions did not change, except that they grew more still and stiff than their wont, and tightened grip on truncheon or staff.

Ctesibius took a bowl of gruel from the Nymphs, who shrank away from him, either giving him the “cut celestial” (which meant to stare upward rather than meet his eye) or the “cut infernal” (which meant to find something fascinating on the ground). He took the ladle from the hand of one beautiful, big-eyed Nymph without seeing her, and served himself. Then he sat on a straw mat on the cold ground as if he owned the entire world beneath his buttocks.

None of the generations after him would sit near him nor speak to him.

The unknown waif from
A.D.
10100 was the opposite: she sat near no one and spoke to none.

The dog things were noticeably afraid of her, bristling when she moved. Her demeanor was like that of a hermit in the wilderness: an aura of otherworldliness hung about her. She seemed not to notice that there were any living things near her.

Glancing at the unnamed woman, Menelaus wondered how advanced her civilization of four hundred years ago had been. It arose six hundred years after the fall of the 1036 Ganymed. Clearly some life had survived in order to give rise to the civilization of the Blue Men, and records as well—records clear enough to allow the Blue Men to speak flawless High Iatric from the Iatocracy period, three thousand years before present. This civilization had practiced a high degree of biological technology: he looked at her eyes and at the joints where her antennae entered her scalp, and determined this was biotechnology far in advance of what the Hormagaunts practiced. From the little nuances of her stance and motions, he decided that she, like an Hermeticist, did not age.

How else was she like a Hermeticist? For example, did she know the Monument math?

As he approached, she turned from her meal, and rose to her feet, and looked up at him with an expressionless, inhuman stare.

The woman of
A.D.
10100 had no sclera nor iris in her eye: every part of her eyes glittered black as a well of ink, so that she seemed blind. She had no eyebrows, and this gave her face a masklike appearance. Small, well-shaped, and symmetrical growths that no doubt were extra sense organs protruded from her skull: there were infrared pits like dimples on her cheekbones below her eyes, and also were two stubs of dark material above her eyes, which expanded as she turned her attention toward Menelaus. He guessed they were ultraviolet sensors. Above this, she had the same golden tendrils that the Grays sported issuing from her brow, except that her tendrils were so long, they fell to her shoulders. Smaller tendrils of silver hung down parallel to the gold ones, and feathery antennae of metallic blue likewise. Beneath each ear, high on her neck, were what looked like secondary ears, like folded flower petals made of flesh.