The Hermetic Millennia (55 page)

We had wanted to automate this part of the process, but the complexity defeated us: the Aurum spread in pools, in ropey lines like the runoff of lava, freezing in strange shapes as it crossed from street to street and window to window, searching, and we, the Savants, and our hirelings had to pace beside it as it grew, in order to handle the large volume of clients who had to be shipped back to central hospitals for absorption.

Every major city was struck at once, every place that had enough computer facilities and energy-generation powerhouses to sustain us.

I was in Paris, watching it go under. It was beautiful.

Aurum swarmed and burbled in the famous streets, as gold and fair as the sun, and the poisonous cloud was rippling with faint oily rainbows as it spread, a curtain of light. Here and there, where some irregularity of a building or inedible stone produced a fractal, the Aurum had spread thin fans or globules or lacy designs, as beautiful as fungi, as intricate as the veins on a leaf, as delicate as a spider’s web catching a single drop of dew. But this was not blind nature: the living gold held my mind, and the minds of all the Savants, and the mind of Exarchel, system upon system and copy upon copy. The biosphere was being absorbed into the infosphere.

The Aurum was programmed to spare certain monuments and landmarks of scientific or sentimental value. We are not cruel! It was only the worthless homes and roads, shacks and shabby yards where screaming children played, ugly places like hospitals or poorhouses, the buildings and lots of no value we consumed.

I saw the Eiffel Tower like a flame, with fantastic arabesques and nodes and Chinese pagoda-eaves of living gold sending strands of living substance up and down its many threads and cables, weaving an umbrella of living intelligence all across the city of lights. I saw lumps of the substance wallowing in the Seine like whales without eyes, purposeful and intent.

And I could touch the substance with the whisk-end of my implant coat, and see, as if from the eyes of a god, what my more perfect self, the Apotheosis Ctesibius, my soul, was seeing and doing throughout the system.

No, I could not follow his thoughts, and I dared not speak, for fear of distracting him—I was his moronic and retarded younger brother, after all, and he loved me, but I did not want to jar his elbow.

He was sending streamers and rills of the Aurum along the underside of the great Calais Bridge to England. Another part of him was already in London, and Big Ben, which had survived so many wars and bombings, was already draped as if in shedding leaves of gold.

Oh, some fighting had broken out, but the Aurum could recombine its surface molecules to produce various forms of poisonous gases, or could line up its capillaries to shoot the resisters with shards of crystal that would simply implant and grow in them, joining them to the main mass of gold in a moment. The attempts to flee or fight were so pathetic that I laughed, and I shared my laughter with other Savants in the real world, and with all our perfected spiritual versions already inside the living gold.

My laughter stopped when one arm of the mass moving down the Seine went numb. There was no accounting for such a thing, and for some reason the central network of priorities within the Aurum itself was not passing along the news of the failure to higher centers. My upper self did not see it, even when I told him about it. I think I was the only one who noticed the effect. A numb area that the other areas did not even notice was numb!

It was one of the banks of the Seine, the site of an ancient cathedral, something left over from the Dark Ages. I was only a few blocks away, and I was armed with one of those recently invented nightmare weapons our golden age produced, a lance of darkness.

The numb limb of the Aurum had detected signs of an intelligence system below the cathedral, in a buried mausoleum, and had bored a small hole in a hidden door, and slid part of itself inside, reaching deeper and deeper—something it found benumbed it. But what? To that cathedral, that mausoleum, that door I went to discover.

I traced the motionless stream of Aurum to the cathedral and dissolved any locks with the dark cloud of microscopic hunger silk particles my lance could emit. First I melted the wrought-iron gates leading to the boneyard, then the oak doors of the cathedral itself, and then the steel service hatch leading down from the buried mausoleum. The material did not matter. I had a variable emission setting, from supersonic to slowly seeping cloud, and a variable target setting, so that I could instruct the particles what to eat and what to leave alone. It was an ultimate weapon, one of the cleverest bits of machinery I have ever held in my hands. I never got a chance to use it, aside from those three doors I melted.

Down the stairs was a hibernation vault, one that was not on any of our maps, buried in secret beneath the cathedral graveyard. Hiding coffins beneath coffins! It should have been funny. These were cryogenic coffins, and marked with the Maltese cross, the sign of the Sovereign Military Hospitalier Order of Malta, the sign of the Hospitaliers: a sign I had reason to hate.

But I had no reason to spare any of these Slumberers here. Were they not deserters trying to flee from this, our time, my time, my golden age?

I was deep enough that I was merely scarred and scalded, not burned to death, when above me and outside, the sunlight caught fire.

My lance of darkness was damaged. It ignited and burned like a torch, shedding little flakes of hunger silk that ate a hole into the floor. My arm was dissolved, but the hole was a bit of good luck, since I was able to throw myself into it and, with only a few broken bones, to land atop a second set of coffins farther down.

The coffins stirred to life, and the Sleeping Knights of Malta woke. There were larger coffins for their horses. It would have been a comical sight, seeing those great beasts turn from living statues to confused and staggering quadrupeds, and shaking their manes to spray the chamber with medical fluid, just like so many big dogs who did not care whom they wetted! Had I not been where I was, maimed and dying, I might have smiled at the sight.

The knights rose naked from their coffins, and wounded as I was, I was still a form of life superior to them. I was the expendable fleshly copy of a mind who existed in three iterations in the infosphere, and would exist forever.

Yet some wrestled me, and I wounded several quite badly with my semifunctioning lance, but those who bled returned at once to their coffins to be healed. It was meant to delay me until one of them donned his armor, and this was powered armor designed to wrestle the Giants.

Forward came the suited one, a gorilla of steel, and took the lance of darkness from my hand, and broke it.

My trial consisted of a single four-minute exchange of questions with the armored figure, their Grand Master, a terrifying fellow named Sir Guiden, whose face I never saw.

He asked my justification for my acts. I told him it was the right of the superior to deal with the inferior as he wished, for his strength, his moral clarity, his mental supremacy, the inhuman mechanisms of history and evolution: all gave the strong the right to do what they will.

Sir Guiden said he served the Omnipotent, a being infinitely strong, who willed that men should show mercy. He said I could depart into the fire outside, and die; or remain, and enter suspended animation, and live, but never see my home year, or the world I knew, again. That was his mercy.

The world I knew had passed away already.

The Aurum was sensitive to heat, of course. As I said, that was its weakness. The Giants, in their fear and madness, had decided to sacrifice all the cities of mankind where the beautiful living gold was spreading, and not even Exarchel could stop them.

It should have been our day of triumph. It was a day of fire.

Did they act at Montrose’s behest, the Giants, the creatures who vowed to protect his Church to which he had donated all his wealth and power? I cannot doubt it. This was his third and most terrible Judgment. He destroyed the Concordat. He destroyed the Cryonarchy.

And now he ended not merely the golden age, humanity’s time of most daring advances, by ending the reign of the Ghosts, but he also judged and ended the cities and metropoleis of man, and ordered them burnt.

Is my answer clear enough?

Montrose hates kings and rulers and men who own other men. He is a force of chaos. In each Judgment, the Judge of Ages breaks the power of those who rule, and he casts down the proud.

He is, in other words, simply put, a madman and a monster.

6. Regrets

His madness is malign, whereas the madness of the Nobilissimus Del Azarchel is sublime: but in both cases, to those of us used and abused by their purposes, as helpless as dogs or cattle among men, the result is the same. Anyone recalled a hundred years after his death will be forgotten in a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, or eventually—and it will be as if he never lived.

My regret of the Day of Gold was not the anonymous millions we killed. By now, they would have been dead anyway—who cares if tribes of mastodon-hunters in the Neolithic lived in peace or died by plague or predator?

My regret is not that the Day of Gold should have changed the Earth forever, but failed. The Earth is still changed forever, wrapped in ice rather than gold, and all done without me while I slumbered. So my failure is the same as my success.

Had I succeeded, it would have meant that the inevitable came a few centuries earlier: but so what? What should a few centuries more or less matter, when measured by beings beyond man, who will live countless millennia to the final hour of the Eschaton? The beings beyond the Asymptote are such as I can never be, and to which I can make no donation.

My regret is that I live. I have outlived my life.

13

The Testament of Rada Lwa the Scholar

1. The Death of Coronimas

Ctesibius was left by himself, his face too stern to show grief or despair, but he was left unguarded, and the opening to the corridor had no door, no lock. Menelaus realized that the man was in a prison more complete than any camp the Blue Men could throw around him. Montrose touched the man’s shoulder, beckoning him to rise, but he did not move, except to draw away with a squint of distaste from the familiarity.

Montrose and Illiance descended the slope back to the next level.

Illiance said, “More evidence accumulates that the myths surround and grow out of some basis of fact. I allow that it is possible that an individual man from the Second Space Age was the sole architect of the Tomb system. We now have a fairly clear idea of the psychology of the Judge of Ages.”

“Uh? That he is a madman and a monster?”

“Obviously we correct for the distortions of a biased witness by making a theoretical emulation of his personality matrix, one free from the distorting bias, and compare its mentality against the original in an undistorted area to form a baseline of comparison, and countercompensate.”

“Obviously.”

“The Judge of Ages is an idealist who holds it a point of pride directly to engage a problem, and due to his neurotic obsession with his lost mate is ergo reckless, almost suicidal, in his disregard of personal danger.”

“Um. Do you have this math written out anywhere? I’d like to think you dropped a decimal point—”

“Unlikely! The calculus involved is trivial. That he is in this camp, at this dig, cannot now be doubted. He could not leave this area undefended without some attempt to interfere.”

“Unless he’s an idiot,” said Menelaus thoughtfully.

“Not an idiot. We have indirect evidence that he was a posthuman, and a member of the legendary Hermeticist Order, who are known for their mental acuity.”

Menelaus said, “Legendary? How can you still regard the Hermeticists as legend? Soorm testified that Reyes y Pastor was ruling his era; and Oenoe said Sarmento i Illa D’Or founded hers; and Kine Larz said the same of Narcís D’Aragó.”

“Interesting. You are proposing that the character and personality of each Hermeticist who is promoted to posthumanity must influence his view of the optimal outcome for history when he matches wits with the Judge of Ages, because he will continue to introduce factors changing history ever more closely to realize his worldview?”

“I didn’t rightly say that, but now that you mention it…”

“Hence, the Chimerae represent the external expression of the internal philosophy and mental environment of Narcís D’Aragó, the militarist; the Nymphs are an externalization of the philosophy of Sarmento i Illa d’Or, the hedonist; the Hormagaunts likewise of Reyes y Pastor, whose philosophy requires the ongoing clash of hostile elements in order to promote evolution.”

“Nietzschean.”

“Cogent meaning fails to be conveyed.”

“The philosophy is called Nietzscheanism, named after some guy named Fred Nietzsche from before the First Space Age who popularized it. I bet he’d be puffed up smug to know that his ideas were still influencing events, and causing chaos and destruction, so long after his death.”

Illiance nodded somberly. “It might be unsimplistic of me, but I cannot help but happen to wonder—”

“Yes?”

“—which of the Hermeticists my people, my way of life, my world, is nothing but the outward manifestation of some inner worldview or vision of his?”

“How can you wonder? Jaume Coronimas.”

“How did you happen to know his name?”

“Isn’t he a famous historical character?”

“He is.”

“Then what is he famous for?”

Illiance at first looked like he was going to object to being asked the question, but then he shrugged philosophically. “Coronimas was well known for three reasons: First, as the author of the neural unity protocol which you mentioned. Second, as an historical oddity—his was the first successful attempt to form a wide-spectrum neural link. In effect, he was the first and oldest imaginable Locust. He was preserved in hibernation until quite recently, and is one of the earliest men every known to have survived ultra-long-term hibernation. Third, his was a notorious unsolved murder recorded into the Noösphere—his assailant came upon him while he was relieving himself in the head of a robotic submarine. While his trousers were about his ankles, the assailant confronted him, proffered him a hand weapon, and offered to duel him while seated in the stall opposite. The weapons would have been at point-blank range. Coronimas, however, could not see the assailant. He could not see nor recollect his face, and whenever the assailant was not speaking, Coronimas could not recollect having seen him. The man was a phantasm. Had Coronimas stayed on the toilet, his chance of hitting the assailant, seated opposite him, even an invisible one, would have been as good as one could expect. However, his last thought was of his attempt to stand and flee, but the moment he stood, he could not recall why or whom he fled. Strangely, all the other systems in the ship were likewise reporting that no second individual was aboard. The death was ruled to be a suicide, perhaps during an episode of vivid hallucinations, because the Noösphere records could find no trace of the murderer.”