The Hermetic Millennia (15 page)

3. The Plaque

After more effort than might be expected, the two men were hauled safely back up the cliffside. The tackle gear was made fast to a plate bolted to a stone set to the ground. Yuen, the one-eyed, dark-haired Chimera stared curiously at the ancient letters on the stone as Daae bound the cuts on his legs with medical tape.

Yuen looked at the plaque. “You smile at the writing. What does it say?”

Menelaus read it aloud:

Devil’s Den Long-term biosuspension Facility, Hibernation Syndicate of Fancy Gap, Virginia—M. I. Montrose, Proprietor—This Site Declared a Sanctuary by Order of the Marchioness of Carroll County—These lands under the Protection of the Sovereign Military Order of Knights Hospitalier of Saint John of Jerusalem: Trespassers Killed On Sight. No Soliciting.

“And those?” Below it, in the stone, was a series of linear scratches, a simple code of strokes and angles.

Menelaus said, “Slumber marks. I cannot read them, Proven Alpha.”

Their voices attracted attention. Echoes of metallic noise and reflections of distant and buried light haunted the edge of the pit. The Chimerae wore faces as calm and stoical as if carven from stone, but they moved quickly away from the brink on their silent, catlike feet, alarmed, perhaps terrified. Menelaus knew the era from which they came was famed for its rejection of supernaturalism; therefore, the unknown unnerved them, because they had no category in which to place the uncanny.

Menelaus and the two Chimerae moved into the wood and squatted behind a thicket, keeping a wary eye on the cleft.

Menelaus said, “The dog patrols may come back.”

Yuen said, “Something in the trees interferes with the instruments of the Blue Men. We are safe from eavesdropping here. Do you know what drew the dog things away?”

Menelaus said, “Magic.”

Yuen sighed, and said to the white-haired Daae, “The Beta cannot lawfully answer to us until we establish our chain of command.”

Daae was bent over Yuen’s leg wounds and spoke without looking up. “We should establish how we were betrayed. We were meant to come by surprise. I thought none of these before-men nor after-men speak our tongue. Is there spy in the mess tent?”

“Many spies, I am sure, but none of them speak to me,” answered Menelaus.

“Then how were you forewarned?” asked the older.

“Deduction. I knew I would not look like a proper Chimera to you. The Eugenics Board in my centuries was experimenting with different bloodline factors. Redheadedness is an atavism from Neanderthal genes, a melanin deficiency reintroduced in my forbearers from archive reconstruction.… You did not have this technology? You are from the earlier days, are you not, young sir?”

Yuen’s voice held a shrug. “Oho? Early compared to what? Until I was thawed here, I thought my days were the last days. The wars against the Witches were going badly. You gentlemen are a surprise and joy to me, the fulfillment of many dreams of breeding.”

Daae spoke out of the darkness, “None from before the time of the Chimerae could know it is our custom to slay imposters and wrongbloods, and no kine from our time would dare play the imposter.”

Yuen said doubtfully, “He could be a historian from after.”

“Perhaps,” Daae said, “but we were superceded by creatures I have heard called the Naturalists, also called the Nymphs. You have seen them in the medical tent: a race of gold-skinned and slant-eyed fructivores of superlative and delicate loveliness. And after them come the monster-things called Hormagaunts. After that I know not what.”

“Locusts,” said Montrose. “Then, sea-things called Melusine. Then history stops.”

Daae said, “Each race of man is more artificial, more highly engineered than the ones before. Does this phenotype look deliberate?”

Yuen peered thoughtfully at Menelaus. “Ah, you speak truth! Who would deliberately affix a great hooked claw of flesh to the front a man’s face?”

Menelaus said, “My nurse always told me the Eugenics Board was breeding me in case the lighthouses on the coast failed, with a nose I could blow when the seas were fogbound.”

Yuen chuckled softly in the dark. “Oo? You dare mock the Command?”

Menelaus said, “Before I answer, let me ask this: Did the Eugenics Board breed themselves for intelligence, or did they breed their women to ripe-melons front-up in full kit?”

Yuen gave a louder, shorter laugh. “He’s Chimera, sure enough. No underling would know what ink-stained butterbars and groin-thunks our high brass are.”

Daae said to Menelaus, “Which of this menagerie are the Locusts?”

Menelaus said, “Black dwarfish men with big heads and gold tendrils growing from their brow. Those tendrils are radiotelepathic, some sort of remote nerve-link technology from future time now long past. It allowed them to detect that the world outside is empty of all electronic and mechanical activity.” Montrose waved his hand in a broad sweep, as if to indicate everything in the world. “There is no civilization out there. In any case, these Locusts looked to me to protect them, and now they are gone. The Blue Men killed them. I saw the dogs dig their graves.”

Daae said, “I am out of my reckoning. Which race comes after them? Who inherited the earth?”

Montrose said, “That is a mystery I am burning to solve. I assume these Blue Men are the current landlords of Mother Earth. The asteroid impact that wiped out the surface life and kicked up the dust that brought this ice age was sometime in the seventy-eighth century
AUCR.
”

AUCR
stood for
Ab Urbe Condita Richmondus
. The Chimerical calendar reckoned from the founding of Richmond in 1737. The seventy-eighth century was equivalent to ninety-sixth century by the Gregorian calendar.

Yuen interrupted, “Wait. Asteroid impact? Sometime in
what
century? How long have we been in hibernation?”

Montrose said, “I estimate you were in slumber for five thousand years.”

There was a rustle in the dark as the two stiffened slightly. “How firm is this intelligence?” said Daae.

“Perfectly firm,” said Menelaus. “I have studied the stars. From the size of the circle Deneb makes around the north pole, I can calculate the procession of the equinoxes.”

Yeun said, “But Iota Cephei is the polestar.…” His voice trailed off.

“Was,” said Montrose. His voice was strangely soft in the triangle of his hood.

4. Named Weapons and Names

Yuen said, “You have not asked us of our weapons or names.”

Menelaus said, “I cannot ask until my superiors speak first. Or are things more at ease in your time?”

Daae had finished taping Yuen’s leg wounds. At these words, Daae chuckled, and he turned and handed his walking stick to Menelaus. It was surprisingly heavy.

The older man said, “I dislocated my hip to hinder my stride, so that the Blue Men, in their foolish pity, gave me this wand to lean on. On the second level of the coffins, where no coffins still walk, I found an ancient lathe and some leaden scraps. Cautiously I hollowed out the bore and filled it with lead that cooled and hardened.”

“A shillelagh?” said Menelaus, handing it back.

“I don’t know that word. This weapon has tasted no blood and accumulated no shades, and so yet has no name. I carry nothing of note. I am Alpha Captain Varuman Aemileus Daae of Uttarakhand, Osaka, Bombay, Yumbulangang, and other actions in the South China Theater. The Varuman blood derives from the Osterman, from the
Homo sapiens,
and
Canis lupus.
”

Menelaus said sharply, “The Blue Men let you back inside the Tombs? What day was this? How did you convince them?”

Daae frowned and raised his hand, and did not answer.

The one-eyed, dark-haired Chimera passed Menelaus his bone truncheon. It was a cubit long, heavy at one end, roughed at the other. It looked surprisingly like what cavemen might have used on the plains of Africa to brain their victims, human or animal.

Yuen said, “In your hand is the thighbone taken from my left leg, which I amputated by thrusting it between the gears of a digging automaton. In the same unlooted machine shop, I melted lead around the knob of the joint to give it some weight, and wrapped the other end in leather, which I had flayed, and cured, and cut from the skin of my own severed leg, to give the haft a grip. The Blue Men are afraid of spirits, and will not take once-living human matter from my hand. The truncheon is called Grislic, and I maimed a man in the mess tent, and laid him low, a Servant of the Machine from
A.D.
2520 named Glorified Ctesibius, an Endorcist of the Three Donations. I hold the interference of the dog things to act as a concession! They hurried Ctesibius to the same restoration coffin that regrew my leg, but I hold he
would
have died of his wounds. Any contest?”

“I do not contest it,” said Menelaus. “The weapon is named Grislic.”

The younger man’s eyes glittered. “As for me, I who carry Grislic, I am Alpha Steadholder Extet Minnethales Yuen of Richmond, Third and Second Manassas, Antietam, and various actions against pirates. The Extet are of the Original Experiment Set, from
Homo sapiens
and
Puma concolor
.”

“First Antietam?” asked Menelaus.

“There were two?” Yuen looked surprised.

“What year was your Battle of Antietam?” asked Menelaus.

“
AUCR
3144.” This was equivalent to
A.D.
4881 in the Gregorian calendar.

Daae spoke up. “His is the Pre-Proscopalian period, the days of the Republic, back when the Command officers were elected from among the Proven rather than appointed by Breeding Tribunals. My squire hails from a time of poverty and golden virtue, when each Chimera in his freehold owned nothing but his weapon, his land, his name, and his harem. In those days, the Betas were loyal, and the Gammas were cowed and hardworking!”

Yuen said sardonically, “The era of virtue did not seem so at the time. We were dying.”

Daae said to him, “You slumbered too soon, Alpha Yuen. The days after your hibernation were days of bloodred gold. In the North, the Final Sabbat surrendered at Buffington’s Island, and submitted to sterilization. The Witches were crushed, their matriarchs enslaved, their menfolk gelded, their children sent to humiliation camps, and their totems and sacred trees chopped up for wood for our war-locomotives of the Long Iron Road. The survivors fled to their sisters in the Far East, and made Peking their final fortress. But they were not as they were.

“By the time of the Battle of Uttarakhand, where my regiment-family served, the Witches had lost their secret Fountain of Youth; they were aged, and the Amazon warriors, once so fierce and strong, rode their white mules into battle with hair as white.” To Montrose, he said, “I am from an era foeless and cheated of glory, and it is no shame that his weapon be the first to drink.”

“But the Battle of Uttarakhand was in
A.D.
5402,” said Menelaus. “Alpha Daae, does not that make you the younger? How is Alpha Yuen your squire? Shouldn’t you be his?”

“The Judge of Ages decreed that those who rise from the coffins keep their rank, despite the passage of years,” answered Daae.

Menelaus pulled the hood a little closer around his face, perhaps to hide his expression. “Hm. Strange that I never heard of that.…”

“All the mandates concerning those who slumber and thaw derive from his word. But now tell us of yourself.”

Menelaus nodded his hooded head and passed to Daae an oblong stone the size of a fist. “This weapon is named Rock. I haven’t killed anyone with it yet, but I am plenty tough enough to, if pressed. Knocked out some teeth. You’ve seen me in action with the dogs. Any contest?”

“I do not contest it,” said Yuen. “It is a true weapon and valiant.”

“Nor I,” said Daae with a sober expression. “The weapon is called Rock.”

“Fine. I am High-Beta Sterling Xenius Anubis of Mount Erebus.”

“Mount Erebus in Antarctica?” Yuen asked. “We are a warlike race indeed. What were we fighting over? Snow? Penguin eggs?”

“There was a radar station in Antarctica in my day. It is a method of using invisible waves called radio to detect and range a target—”

Yuen said impatiently, “Come, now! I know what radar is. And horseless carriages, and talking animals, and evil voices that speak out of the graveyards of dead machines, and flying carpets of silver gossamer that soar to the Moon, where the Master of the World left his handprint. My tutors beat the old legends of the Space Ages into me.”

“The Social Wars were fought on every continent,” said Menelaus, “including when a submarine manned by Sino-Chimerae was blown off course and came aground on the Ross Ice Shelf, in McMurdo Sound. The station crew went out with our seal-hunting rifles and spear guns at low tide and besieged and shot ’em, and the Command considered that a real battle, and issued a medallion and everything. So it counts.”

Yuen said, “We—were we fighting
each other
? What year was this?”

Daae answered him, and gave the dates in Chimera reckoning that corresponded to
A.D.
5260 through 5270. “Beta Anubis is from the very onset of a great period of expansion. The whole earth was Chimerical by then, and no Witches left anywhere. But the eastern and western hemispheres, which had been allies for centuries against the Witches and Kine-states, did not agree on genetic policy, and came to blows. The Judge of Ages was angry at Tomb-robbers, and released from his tombs a pair of slumbering scientists so that rocketry and atomic energy were rediscovered. Little is known of the Social Wars, since paper documents burned, and calculation machines were erased by magnetic-pulse side effects of atomic weapons.”

Menelaus turned to Yuen and said, “All matter is made of fine bits called atoms, which consist of positive and negative energies bound together in a balance. When the atom is split, the energy is released—”

Yuen said, “I know what atomic energy is! Magic fire from the sun that burns whole cities at one stroke. The fire leaves behind a specter that dwells in old craters, invisible and silent: mild effects include chromosome damage, hair loss; medium effects include vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue; great effects include marrow and intestine destruction, and death. What sort of opinion do you aftercomers have of the people of my days? We were not savages! We could not remake the machines and weapons of the Space Ages, but we remembered them.”