The Hermetic Millennia (25 page)

8. Diffusion and Parallelism

Illiance said, “Mentor Ull believes there is a single founder to the Tombs, and his work was copied by many cultures through diffusion. I happen to support the theory that the various elements found at various sites are examples of parallel evolution.

“Since the ultralongterm-hibernation technology exists, and since the alleged founder (whether dead or in slumber) could not know nor prevent any person with the resources and inclination from using that technology to erect competing Tombs systems, if there were not forces herding the Tomb systems into parallel similarities, we would have many diverse Tombs, each with its unique architecture and technology—instead we have what seems a single, monolithic, worldwide system continuous and unchanged throughout history.”

Ull said, “The similarities are too statistically improbable to admit of such facile attempts at explanation. Locust records dating from after the beginning of mental-electronic history (which we take to be more reliable than written history or oral tradition), contains accounts of the horsemen of the pale horses who rise from the Tombs. They are seen to ride when plagues strike, or wars, or whenever there are many of the dying to gather. The two riders approach sickbeds and asylums, hospitals and temples housing the infirm, asking if any within have hope that the future will discover cures for their ills. Those who have no hope, they will not take. Accounts also say these knights act in the name of one same founder. In the lowest of levels, from the earliest of days, from the Second Age of Space, or the First Age, there is a sleeping figure whom it is death to disturb, a lord of the dead who sleeps surrounded by his knights.

“He is known by many names: Charlemagne, Karl or Kralj; Frederick Barbarossa or Finn McCool; Holger Danske, William Tell or Thomas the Rhymer or Rip Van Winkle; Brian Boru, Montrose, and Arthur; but it is always said that he will arise when the people have need of him, and deliver judgment against the age.

“If the age has forgotten the purpose of history, or the rulers have fallen into corruption, or if the people forget that an enemy comes from the stars of the Hyades to enslave the children of men at the End of Days, then the Judge of the Ages will overthrow the age and destroy their works, sparing only such children of theirs as vow to keep and remember the Year Foretold, and prepare against that day.”

“Spooky!” commented Menelaus. “My dam used to tell me that if I didn’t go to sleep on time, but stayed awake talking to my brothers, my voice would call the Red Indians down from the hills, because some still survived from the old days, and still kept their old ways. She told me how they could reach in the window without making any noise with their long, strong, terrible arms, and cut off the top of my head, hair and scalp and all, with their cold, stone tomahawks. When my brothers woke the next morning, I’d be dead, my brains slithered out over the pillow, my eyes as still and white as two peeled eggs, and my mouth hanging open in a scream that would never come. I can assure you, that tale gave me spiders in my belly! In hindsight, I think she just wanted me to hush up at lights-out. But, a tale to give you the willies, nonetheless.”

Mentor Ull, his face nonplussed, turned his head slowly and gazed at Preceptor Illiance. Both men, with furrowed brows, listened. Eventually Ull said ponderously, “I believe your mother’s tale was a fabrication, but I happen not to apprehend any immediate relevance to the discussion.”

Menelaus said, “No? My dam warned me there were those in the hills, old things, that might come down upon me if I called them to me. And you are meddling with something older and deadlier. If he was real, this Judge of Ages, and he has people to guard his burial grounds, what happened to them? Where are they? And what are they waiting for?”

Ull and Illiance rose gracefully to their feet.

Mentor Ull said, “That perhaps will be the first question to ask the relict. Shall we go above?”

Without a further word or gesture, the two Blue Men drifted up the ramp to the next level.

6

The Testament of Soorm the Hormagaunt

1. The Hormagaunt

There were three more dog things in the chamber on the next level above. Two were hunkered to one side, muskets in their paws, watching the prisoner and pricking up their ears with every movement.

Another dog thing, this one with the more intelligent face of a black Sheepdog, crouched on a stool at a table. Like the table in the chamber below, albeit larger, this table was a thin sheet of polished coral suspended from the ceiling. The Sheepdog was bent over what seemed to be a polygraph—the tracks and pulses of light from the glass plate atop the instrument corresponded to typical patterns of heartbeat, electroencephalogram, and galvanic skin response.

However, if it were a polygraph, it did not require any tubes or wires to take a reading from the subject.

The subject was seated in a chair, rudely but solidly built of branches lashed together, with a seat and back of woven willow.

He was a massive man, over six feet tall, but with such prodigious breadth of chest and shoulders as to appear like one of the Giants of old. His skin was dark, like seal pelt, because he was covered from heel to crown in fine, thick, dark hair. He had no nose, merely two tiny slits above a very wide mouth.

Only his palms and the area around his mouth and eyes showed his skin beneath, which was orange yellow, and the rings of orange around his mouth gave him a clown-makeup look, and his ringed eyes make him look like a raccoon.

The man had no visible ears, merely a dimple at either side of his skull, and his neck was so thick that it sloped into the massive planes of his shoulders evenly, given him a bullet-headed, almost torpedo-like aspect. The white frills down his chest and under his armpits seemed to be gill tissue. His waist was blubbery and legs like columns. His feet were almost comically large, swim-fin shaped and covered with a coarser and darker hair, scabrous, almost like the quills of porcupine, emerging from red orange scaly integument. His heels boasted an impressive set of spurs.

The seat of the chair divided, to allow a bulky tail to hang down. It looked something like an otter’s tail, but with flukes of cartilage and membrane folded like Chinese fans against its length. At the tip was a barb like a scorpion’s tail, complete with a venom sac, swollen and purplish.

The man raised his hand in greeting. Menelaus saw the fingers were webbed, and that the velvet tips hid retractable claws like those of a cat.

His eyes were not only different colors, they were different species: his left eye was pale, with a square pupil like that of a goat. The right eye was dark, with a bright gold pupil shaped like the letter
W.

Menelaus wondered if, like the eye of a cuttlefish, this right eye had more than one set of receptor cells, called fovea, along the back of the eyeball. Cuttlefish distort their whole eye to change focus rather than using a lens, like humans, and they can see polarization of light.

The seated man turned one of his lunatic-looking eyes toward Menelaus, but he had the other eye tilted, like the eye of a chameleon, independently of the first, and it was looking at the Blue Men.

His voice was a rumble: “Han forwityng yon fremde not ken my tongue. Be ye tongue-witty?”

Menelaus raised his palm by way of greeting and answered him. “My lowely tonge is naught unweedle ne unkonnynge. I speke Leche. Assent ye to be apposed by twa wee pers lordynges?”

“Am naught looth ne drede,” said the big man with a chuckle of expansive good humor. “Find me servysable, who has none been hende weel-dressed muchel mee!”

And he pulled back his lips, revealing an impressive set of tusks. In addition to the molars and incisors of an omnivore, his mouth had a pair of serpent fangs and what looked like an extra row of shark teeth. When he laughed, his nostrils (which had been pinched shut) opened and gasped air. Menelaus listened, and tried to guess at the capacity of the lungs.

Whatever the psychological reason was that required a captor to stand over his captive was obviously not present in the Blue Men. Both Illiance and Ull, without any word, sat themselves at the feet of the huge dark man, spines straight, feet in lotus position, wrists resting on soles.

Menelaus looked down at Illiance and spoke in Iatric. “Small wonder you could not follow his speech. This is not High Iatric, but an earlier variant of the tongue. Old Iatric, or Leechcraft, is closer to Winter-Queen period Natural, the language of the Nymphs.”

Illiance said, “I am not familiar with this dialect.”

“I would call it separate language. Leechcraft was spoken between
A.D.
6800 and 7300, along the northern coasts of Eurasia, from the British Isles through Scandinavia and Siberia, which were all warm and green at that time. The Yakutsk Analeptic Empire adopted, changed, and spread the language north across an open and ice-free polar sea to Canada, which at that time was temperate, and south past Lake Baikal to Mongolia, which at that time was jungle. The language you and I are speaking comes from a later period, when the Therapeutae ruled the northern hemisphere and used the impassible equatorial desert zones as test landscapes: their political order was called Iatrocracy, rule by those who created and were protected against bioweapons. The social order was called Triage.”

Illiance said, “This word-use is unexpected. Do we have mutually coherent symbol-correspondence?”

“Triage. I take it you are not familiar with this period? It was not pretty. The near-surface deposits of metal ore were exhausted, and the technology for submantle mining lost, so theirs was a postmetallic civilization. With their biotechnology, there was no practical upper limit on medical techniques, but no upper limit on cost: after everyone over a certain age had mortgaged their arbors and slave-herds and lives and children’s lives to the biotech guilds, the Iatrocrats, who rationed the medical care, got to decide who died and who lived and for how long and in what amount of pain, so the guilds did not give a damn who collected taxes or led armies. They were the real rulers. The geriatric elite forced lesser orders to donate their organs and glands and life spans to them, and could live for centuries, until killed by violence or accident.

“Technically speaking, the word
Hormagaunt
refers only to their heavily modified military-caste biofacts. The ruling caste biofacts were called Iatrocrats. The donor caste were harvested of their organs and children.

“The Theraputae arose in the northern hemisphere in the seventy-third century, growing the first walled cities and conquering the surrounding Nomads. By the end of that century, a biotechnological revolution created the Clades, who formed a third caste of technical and mercantile bourgeoisie or burg-dwellers. They were mass-produced twins or clones. Their complete genetic uniformity allowed them to program their immune systems to produce allergens which would sicken and drive off outsiders and strangers, so each walled city or hive-dwelling could stay isolated. By the seventy-fourth century, the Triage system of genetic feudalism ruled the globe.”

Illiance said, “Remarkable. Few records survived their global wars with the Locusts. We knew there was a biotechnological caste system, but did not know its origin date.”

“Interesting but irrelevant, I guess. This guy here is from the earliest period. Or his language is. Unless his slumber was interrupted, he would not know any more about the Iatrocracy than Ethelred the Unready would know about the world in Queen Victoria’s time.”

Illiance nodded thoughtfully. “If I knew who those personages happened to be, the contrast would no doubt be quite illuminating.”

During this, Ull sat without speaking but regarded the huge and furry man from beneath half-lidded eyes.

“What was it that the Hormagaunt said?” asked Illiance.

“He said he had a premonition that the foreigners, meaning you gentlemen, would not understand his tongue, and he asked me if I were fluent. I answered that my humble tongue was neither feeble nor ignorant. I told him I spoke Old Iatric. I asked him if he agreed to be questioned by the two, small blue superior officers. He said he was neither unwilling nor afraid, and that he was willing to serve, even though he had not been well served much himself.”

Ull said, “We are not
superior officers
.”

“Do you not give the orders here, sir?” Menelaus proffered him a stiff-armed salute.

Ull snapped, “Sit! Do not call me
sir
!”

Menelaus looked around and, seeing no other chair, gathered his metallic robes and sat on the fragile-looking table, which wobbled under his weight. The black Sheepdog watching the oscilloscope bared her teeth at him, flattening her ears, but did not voice any objection.

Ull said more calmly, “The Simplifiers eschew psycholinguistic rigidities. My words happen to be suggestions, which, should you follow, produce a benevolent coincidence.”

“Well,” said Menelaus, “whether it is a coincidence or not, I know his language and can translate for you. I suggest you record everything, so you can send it to your Intelligence Bureau later for confirmation and analysis—”

Illiance said, “No formal military institution sends us.”

“I meant your University Department. Or your Editor-in-Chief. Or your Chief Priest. Or maybe your Pirate Chief.”

Ull made a small but irked motion of his fingers. “We come to question, not to be questioned.”

“Roger that. What questions do you have?”

The man gave his name as Soorm scion Asvid.

2. The Phastorling

The conversation was in Leech:

“I don’t understand why you carry a rock. Your name is not Rock, is it?”

“No, Soorm scion Asvid. My name is Sterling Xenius Anubis, Beta. Call me Anubis, which is my
agnomen
or victory title. I just carry a rock so my superiors won’t cite me for being out of uniform. It’s my weapon.”

“Not impressive! My weapons cannot be taken from me. Let my sterile intrusives and life-codes be brought forth out of my Tomb, and I can equip you with stench glands that will spray a stinging foam, and melt a foeman’s eyeballs and his brain lobes behind them.”