The Hermetic Millennia (3 page)

Meanwhile, at the same time, Menelaus was talking aloud to the Jesuit with his real mouth and listening with his real ears. The first thing he said was, “What anomaly?”

Brother Roger said, “This is Tessa Azurine, and her permanent paramour, Woggy Azurine, and the sexpartner is called Third, since she is between names at the moment. I am their mendicant and confessor.”

The man waved and grinned. “Gulps! Bro Ro is weight-valued, since the Giants be less like to scald flocks what have a spook-speaking man amidst. Not mendicant he!”

The taller of the two women curtsied like a willow bending, and her blue gray robes writhed like mist. “We scorn no refugee; we share lift, fire, and salt. ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Adam hath not where to lay his head.’ You are a Sylph of Time as we are Sylphs of Wind, blown you know not where.”

The girl with the purple hair and the gem on her brow was pouting like a child, and her eyes were not focused on anything in the environment around her. She spoke aloud to no one in particular, “How about Trey? No? Like a card.”

Montrose grunted. “Yeah, um, pleezta-meetcha, gals, guy, nice digs. Sure hope y’all feel better soon.”

The willowy, flower-crowned woman, Tessa, said, “But we are not sick, no?”

“I ain’t touching that line with a boat hook, ma’am. Brother Roger, what anomaly?”

The Jesuit said to her, “Tessa, if you could ask the
Azurine
to ascend to the observatory, it should be passing through the area directly.”

Tessa said, “
Azurine,
my adored, acknowledge the order.”

A melodic voice answered from the wall, sounding like wind chimes. “I delight to obey, my adored. I ascend. For your delight, I play an ascension theme from your preference profile.” A haunting sequence of woodwinds and plaintive chords drifted through the air, soft and without melody, but a trumpet added a note of triumph when the airship broke through the cloud, as if through a gray floor, up into dazzling daylight.

Montrose said to the priest, “You! Now that the pleasantries are done, what poxy anomaly?”

Brother Roger said, “Energy discharges from V886 Centauri. The radiospectrography and gamma ray analysis are constant with an, ah, interplanetary event.”

“No damn point in pausing for drama, Padre, because I grade on info, not on delivery.”

Brother Roger said, “Ah. As you say. We believe the ice giant planet Thrymheim was driven into the star. The terrene matter of the superjovian world interacted with the contraterrene plasma of the star’s atmosphere.”

Thrymheim was the single planet orbiting the Diamond Star. It held a far Neptunian orbit, beyond where the antimatter in the solar wind could reach, and so was not disintegrated.

“Driven in why? As a weapon?”

Brother Roger shook his head. “Criswell mining operates by inducing a ring-current around the star by ionically charged beams oppositely directed from each other. Usually the mining satellite ring is equatorial, so that the ejection mass—”

“By Mother Mary changing baby Jesus’ stinking holy diapers, Padre! I was
on
the expedition, and I
am
a star miner, so I know how the damn process works!”

Brother Roger said, “There are dark lines in the spectrographic analysis consistent with an off-center arrangement of the mining orbitals, Honored.”

“Blight and clap! What are the vectors?”

Brother Roger said, “I have not been able to deduce, from the limited information available fifty light-years away, what the various constituent pressures—”

“You are saying the mining satellites focused the explosion like a jet engine.”

“Explosions. So we speculate, Honored.”

“Which way is it pointing? Wait. Explosions, with an
s,
plural?”

“Indeed, Honored.”

“She broke the damn planet into bits, made it into an asteroid stream, and is feeding in one or two earth-masses at a time. Thrymheim was fifteen hundred and ninety earth-masses, as I recall. The whole solar system, Monument and everything, has been turned into a damned Orion drive, just on a massive scale.”

Sir Guiden turned on his suit speakers, to let the people in the cabin hear the question, “Liege! How do you know it is she?”

“Meaning what?” Montrose said.

Sir Guiden said, “The
Bellerophon
was lighter than the
Hermetic,
and should have overtaken her either when they made starfall at V886 Centauri, a few months more or less. We tend to think of red dwarfs as small and dim, but a sailing ship can reflect and focus a beam of star energy to burn targets across interplanetary distances, and small stars have more than enough power for that.”

“The pursuit ship didn’t have no crew aboard, it was just Del Azarchel’s second emulation, an Astro-Exarchel, and a passel of teleoperated tools. You’re thinking Rania might have bought the farm during whatever shoot-out banged when they butted heads?

Sir Guiden said, “Liege, are you trying to be obscure? Farm?”

“Sorry. You think Rania died? No fear of that!”

Sir Guiden said, “How not?”

“I know Blackie. He don’t think this big. Oh, this is her work, all right.” Montrose threw back his head and laughed. “What a gal! Did I tell you she’s mine?”

Brother Roger said diffidently, “Honored—if you intuit the meaning of this anomaly, I would be grateful if—”

“It’s eight thousand five hundred years until the Hyades Armada arrives here. Not much time. What is the biggest block to our being able to fight them when they come? We’re too small, too weak, too stupid. What is the main thing you need to get smarts? I don’t mean one man, I mean on a large-scale, bigger-than-worlds, multiple-centuries sort of deal. Library smarts; datasphere smarts. What’s it take? Energy. It takes fuel to calculate. Fuel to think. Now, the whole damn and plague-ridden universe is made out of energy, but not in a form ready to use. I was going crazy trying to figure out how many expeditions we could make to the Diamond Star for contraterrene, how much fuel is lost in transport, how many ships, considering that a ship can tow only about as much fuel as you might like to use for a round-trip, and not too much over.”

Brother Roger said, “Honored, I don’t follow you.”

“Rania blasted the Diamond Star out of its orbit around the galactic core, and is bringing the Diamond Star here. It is a dwarf star holding a ten-decillion-carat diamond made of antimatter, and if she parks it in an orbit inside our heliopause, where the interstellar medium is thin, we can go mine it in a reasonable time. How about the antimatter source is thirteen light-hours away rather than fifty light-years? How are our chances against the Dominion of the Hyades then?”

“But, Honored—”

“Please stop calling me that. The only titles I ever earned were ‘Doctor’ and ‘Esquire’ and ‘Lance-Corporal,’ and I am only qualified for one and a half of them. So call me Menelaus. If I scare ya, you can call me Doctor Montrose.”

“Doctor—”

“So I scare ya?”

Brother Roger said, “Very much so, Doctor. After you destroyed all the cities of the world, one would be foolish not to—”

“Wait. What the pox?”

Just at that moment, the clouds underfoot parted, and the sun shining on the surface of the water sent a dazzle into the cabin. Montrose turned, squinted, blinked, and something in the back of his mind, between one blink and the next, ran some rapid calculations on the afterimage of what he had just seen.

He stepped over the window. “Anyone here got a spyglass?”

Sir Guiden said, “He means a snooper.”

The willowy woman, Tessa said, “He means hunger silk. It absorbs photons as well as proteins.”

With this, Tessa stepped over to the window and threw a tail of her writhing garment across the glass. The blue gray material stuck as if magnetized, and the surface bubbled slightly. The disk of vacuum trapped beneath formed a lens, and suddenly the fabric seemed to become like a library cloth, because a clear image appeared in it of what Menelaus had seen in the distance.

It was a flotilla of airships, by scores and hundreds, drifting idly across the face of the waters, or brushing the surface. Long banners, like the lines trailing a fishing boat, hung from the airships and swept through the water. Every now and again one of the airships would turn and dive like a pelican, splashdown, and become a submarine, darting like a shark. One such airship he saw dived into a school of fish, and when it rose, the hull was dotted with sleek bodies that seemed to be glued or held against the surface. The fish melted, and their bodily fluids and guts streamed for a moment against the gray fabric of the airship, and then those streaks too were absorbed.

In the distance was shoreline, and trees beyond. There were airships here as well, trailing long fabric trains behind them as they drifted. Where the cloth passed, the trees were stripped of bark and buds. Any birds passing near were slashed out of the air by the serpentines, and the blue gray trails of fabric turned the bodies into stains of blood and absorbed them.

Menelaus, now that they were above the cloud cover, could make an estimate of their speed, and was astonished. “What is your propulsion?”

The woodwind voice of the ship answered, “Admired, cherished, and welcome guest, six valveless pulsejet engines aft use a nuclear hydrogen-fusion lance running along the lifting body axis to heat and expel an inert nitrogen compound propellant gathered from the surrounding atmospheric gases. The flexible lifting body material allows smooth and uninterrupted transition between heavier-than-air and lighter-than-air configurations, with partial vacuum created for lift by multiple microscopic rows along the dorsal surface. All gaseous raw materials are filtered out of the available environment by the submicropore chemical-lock system known as hunger silk, and recombined by molecular-capillary pseudochemistry in the fore nacelles. Lifting gases are in the buoyancy tanks. Carbon gas is reconfigured into diamond crystal and used for ballast. To submerge, the craft cross-sectional configuration—”

“Thanks, good answer, shut up,” said Menelaus. To himself, he muttered, “Never woulda guessed. Atomic-powered supersonic submarine-blimps…” He turned to Tessa, “So what happened to the cities?”

She smiled dreamily. “We have drugs to suppress those memories. Happiness drugs. But the ship can answer you in this as well, my adored ship, more loyal than any human lover.”

The Jesuit said, “I can answer, Doctor. The material used for starship sails included smart strands with molecular engines for the repair of micropunctures, altering permeability, absorbing laser energy, and so on. As time passed, the Exarchel discovered additional programming configurations for the molecular machinery, and a larger range of options. Your antimatter monopoly was broken once orbital sails could focus solar energy into any rectenna receiver anywhere on the planet—and, because Earth had been using your power broadcast reception for decades, the rectennae were everywhere. The orbital sails, ah, well…”

“So what happened to the cities?”

Brother Roger said, “Many were burned like ants under a magnifying glass. Antimissile defenses are of no value against such an attack.”

“Who was fighting who?”

Brother Roger said, “The Giants were fighting the Ghosts.”

“Giants?”

Brother Roger said, “Posthumans. Artificial children with your intelligence range. It is a way to achieve posthumanity without making an Iron Ghost of your own brain, as the Scholars do. It was worked out by a scientific convocation held under His Holiness Pope Sixtus the Sixth.”

Sir Guiden said to Brother Roger, “He won’t know that name.” To Menelaus, he said, “Sir, Sixtus the Sixth was Thucydides Montrose. Research in brain-size increase was married to your Prometheus formula to create a posthuman that did not need to be emulated to be augmented. They are genetically altered before conception to grow gigantic bodies to house their correspondingly elephantine brains.”

“What about augmenting ordinary people, Guy?” asked Montrose, distracted. “Can people ramp up to posthuman intellect like I did, without going mad, like I did?”

“Not really.” Sir Guiden sounded grim. “Too many people died trying. Emulation seemed safer, but it requires specialized training and nerve implants to be able to donate a brain copy for scanning. Those with this skill were called Savants. Before the burning of the cities, most of mankind was ruled or led by counsels or collections of these Ghosts, emulations of jurists and statesmen, replaced from their Savant donors every three years.”

“Why so short?”

Sir Guiden looked surprised. “For reasons you know very well, sir. Divarication failure. You never released to the world Princess Rania’s solution to the Selfish Meme divarication, which allows for stable posthumans without split personalities, nor your solution for the Impersonator divarication, which allows for an electronic copy of a posthuman brain to be made!”

“I was just assuming Blackie and his troupe of trained monkeys would have noodled that out by now, and covered the world with Iron Ghosts.”

Sir Guiden said, “The Hermeticists were said to have a more advanced technology than the Savants, and able to download as well as upload, to put the thoughts of their superintelligent computer copies back into their own brains, at least for a time.”

Montrose said, “That’s a crude way of doing it. Why did you say ‘were’?”

Sir Guiden said, “Our intelligence arm has confirmed information that over sixty of the Hermeticists went insane or died attempting Prometheus augmentation.”

“There were only seventy or so of them all told,” said Montrose in awe. “Did they wipe themselves all out?… That’s … I mean, I got crosswise with them toward the end there, and they were mutineers and murderers, but … aw, hell, they were my partners in training, the only guys I trusted to look over my work for mistakes … the only ones who understood it. Damn. Damnation. All of them? What about Blackie?”

“Almost all,” said Sir Guiden.

“Who’s left?”

“The intelligence reports are tentative. It’s not confirmed,” said Sir Guiden.