Del Azarchel stood with one arm folded across his chest, the other hand as if thoughtfully stroking his mustache. But the pose was actually to hold down the burning sensation in his guts, or to clasp his hand over his mouth should he begin to puke. So! The great superhuman Montrose, the giant who had always been one step ahead of him, always upstaging him! Was he now to decide the fate of worlds based on some greeting-card sentiment about Mother’s Day?
Montrose said, “But Mom ain’t here, and you ain’t her.”
Amphithöe said, “Was she a freeborn woman?”
Montrose nodded. “Scotch-Irish. Been conquered plenty, but her folk ain’t never been slaves. On my dad’s side, I am purebred Mestizo, which is part ’Patchie, part Dusky, part Rattler, all folk ain’t never been free.”
“I also am free, now, because of you. The moon returned me to life in a time and place where the cruel institutions of my day had passed into memory. The ancient methods, perfected by the Nymphs, were being used to adjust the biochemistry of clades and clans to regard each other with brotherly love, with philanthropy and compassion, yet without the erotic core which shames the memory of those ancient times. I was joined into a harmony, and, with the help of acolytes of advanced learning and compassionate machines, that harmony was joined to others and yet to others. The decree was made among all men of all races to abolish slavery and indentured servitude.”
She pointed upward at the scroll in the air.
“This side lists our virtues, and the other side lists our sins. By this devotion to liberty, many stanzas of the cliometric scroll have been moved from the far side to the near.”
She lowered her arm and bowed again.
“The liberty I found on the moon do not take from me, please. I beg you.”
Montrose said harshly, “If I don’t do what Blackie says, Jupiter will not be able to decode the sciences that are the only hope we have to keep the people on the slave ships alive. I’ve seen the math! I have not seen any way around it! The aliens set it up this way, to checkmate us. It is another intelligence test. If we fail, the human race dies, and Rania never returns.”
Amphithöe said, “I have no easy answer for you. The Hyades must pay for their own crimes, and see to their own future, whatever that is. My future that I see, if these projections are unchanged, is that I will lose the liberty I gained, and that my daughters will be slaves.”
“I feel sorry for them,” said Montrose. “But you are just one woman. We are talking about everyone. The whole human race.”
Amphithöe straightened from her bow and, with a dignified slow gesture, her long red sleeve brushing the high grass, swept her arm toward the many white and motionless figures gathered across the acres. “I have brought them!”
“Brought who?”
“The whole human race.”
“Eh? What’s that s’pose to mean?”
Del Azarchel had a look of bitter amusement, as if he were laughing at his own disgust and discomfort. “Surely you see what this is, Cowhand? Each of these creatures here is an epitome. They represent, either as a shared memory or as a proxy, everyone on Earth. This is the final plea of the self-centered, who would damn their descendants to death!”
One of the nearby statues changed from pale white to flesh-toned in a moment, releasing a cloud of twinkling mist. Her garments, which had been tuned to a white shade to match her skin, now flowed and pulsed with peacock hues. She shrugged her wings so that all gleaming feathers and their wise eyes rustled and blinked, and very slowly turned her head.
The Swan spoke in an eerie voice. “I am Svanhildr the Anarchist, elected against my will and by many filthy threats to represent the cliometric unity of the interests of Second Humanity. I am, if you like, the Judge of Swans. By my counsel, Amphithöe was allowed, because of the sacred fetters of motherhood, to speak first her passionate plea. But let no one say she speaks alone or selfishly. All, all are gathered here. We have brought all the living creatures of the world to this place to beg and plead with you, Judge of Ages. Spare us. Do not expose us naked to the gaze of monstrous Jupiter.”
Montrose said, “It is death, death for the colonists, death for the human race, death for Rania, if I agree with you.”
Another man spoke. He was of a form and fashion from a century unknown to Montrose, bear-faced and dark-furred with emerald-green and night-adapted eyes, and ears like dark semicircles. At his shoulder was a sword taller than himself, made of pale wood. “Your Honor, then let us die free. If our histories do not tell lies about you, you alone of the men of the primordial world before the flames, before the antecpyrosis, you alone understand what freedom means. You came from a free land called Texas. You spoke against the Master of the World. You dueled him; he threw on your head a tower that reached to the stars, and you in retaliation burned the world with fire from hell, and took him by the foot and flung him to the moon. Are the legends false?”
“Actually, I grabbed him by the balls for the moon fling, but the history books sort of cleaned it up.”
A small Locust, blue as cobalt, stepped from behind the grass. He was so short that the grass was over his head. Montrose was so sharply reminded of little Preceptor Illiance from seven hundred years ago, that for a moment, he thought some memory from his newly reconstructed mind had by error forced its way into his sense impressions.
The Blue Man spoke in a voice like a woodwind instrument. “Sir! If you are the legendary being, the one man who protected mankind from the Machine for so long, be him now! Do not forsake us!”
And he flung himself on his face. The bear-faced warrior with the longbow and the proud Swan with her shining wings also lowered themselves to the ground, and the two lay full upon their faces.
In the distance, even the Giants bowed, like a line of mountains crumbling into the sea.
As if upon the signal of some trumpet inaudible to mortals, the grasses were flattened at that moment by a harsh and sustained wind from the north, and the wide field became apparent to view. The number of those who prostrated themselves was greater than Montrose had suspected, for many had been Locusts, or other dwarfish subspecies, and many more had been slumbering in a kneeling position, and did not rise when thawed, and so had been hidden in the grass until now.
It was so many people, all groveling to him. Montrose, overcome with emotion, turned his face away from them. But there was no escape for his gaze. Behind him, the river was filled with mermaids and dolphins and whales of the Melusine lineages, and they had extended their pleading hands to him, those who had hands, or turned on their backs to expose their throats, those who had not.
The Swan raised her head and spoke, “We do not deceive you. Walk the world. Come to know and love her fields and forests and floes of ice, her storming seas and skies of cold aurora fire!”
The bear-faced warrior said, “I vow you will not find one soul, not one, who does not call on you to leave us our liberty, our possessions, our children, our lives! All will weep for your mercy!”
The Locust said, “We will be nothing in the eyes of Jupiter. He will decide all futures without consulting us, and all our dreams and hopes and enterprises will be in vain.”
Amphithöe said, “Jupiter does not love us. You do.”
Del Azarchel, again, could think of a thousand things to say. He was sure each one of them would convince Montrose on the spot to damn Jupiter, and to damn the race, the dreams of Del Azarchel, to hell. A man with no more than ordinary self-control would have spoken. Del Azarchel was not ordinary.
So Del Azarchel, face as calm as a desperate poker player whose whole fortune and all his future waits in the center of the table for the final turn of a doubtful card, merely watched as Montrose, as if in a daze, walked down the flight of stairs to the water. Two dolphins and a mermaid offered him a small two-masted boat with a glass hull, and into the hull dropped fruits and flowers, and then swam backward away, reverently, never taking their eyes from Montrose.
Del Azarchel watched as Mon
trose sailed away with the current, downstream.
Then Del Azarchel turned and said lightly to Amphithöe, “Dearest Mother, what do you suppose will happen if that boast proves false, and he finds someone, somewhere on Earth, who would, as would I, far rather suffer slavery if it meant reaching the stars, than to squat in the mudhole we call home, calling our masterless misery freedom? Someone, just one?”
Amphithöe said, “Proud son, do you not understand this era yet? We are the children of Father Reyes y Pastor. He died to stop you. He died to save his soul. We shall do likewise.”
Del Azarchel smiled. “Gentle Mother, you are as uninformed about the fate of my father confessor as you are unwise about your own. But no matter! My reflected glory seems to have elevated you to a high station, where you speak in embassy for all the peoples and nations and kingdoms of the world! Does this mean you have a feast for me? I am weary of spaceman’s rations and claustrophobic cabins. I dream of flaming pits and suckling pigs. May we have a barbecue?”
5. The Voice in the Tree
A.D. 11301
How long Montrose stayed in the little dry meadow between two snowy peaks was something he loaded into a memory file that he expunged. Losing track of time helped him concentrate.
But as the snow crept down the mountain slopes, he departed that eerie cabin made of giant toadstools and woven ferns which had sprung up in a single still and silent midnight hour for his use, inexplicably. He glanced back only once to see that that the mushroom cabin was already melting, being torn to bits by insects smaller than dust specks.
The hike down the pass toward the river canyon was a long and thirsty one, and his feet ached in the moccasins he’d made from suicidal deer. Atop a small hillock halfway down the mighty slope, he saw an ash tree with a branch just the width and length to suit him for a walking stick.
He brought out his tomahawk and swung. The axe-blade came from the nanomachines in his blood which he had kneaded into a wedge of substance like bee’s wax. When the blood-machines were activated, they tried to put the wax into biosuspension, making it white and hard as diamond. With a solid noise, the white blade bit into the tree just where the branch met the trunk.
The tree shuddered, and blood oozed from the joint of the branch. At first, Menelaus thought something had gone wrong with his axe-head, and released blood particles from suspension.
He squinted. The tree was bleeding.
When the wind rustled the leaves, the leaves vibrated, turning their edges into the wind oddly. It formed a strange, breathless voice, reminiscent of grass whistle: “Judge of Ages, must you wound those who owe you kindness?”
Menelaus was startled. “Sorry but I—I didn’t think you’d get hurt. Or talk.”
“No pain is felt. Take the branch and welcome. We exist to serve man, as you do. All we have is free for your use, and the use of your fellow man.”
“You speak English?”
“As a courtesy to you. All living creatures were imprinted with the knowledge of your speech and background, that you might hear and know our beseeching.”
“What are you? Are you in the tree?”
“In the tree, and birds, and beasts, and blades of grass for many hundreds of acres roundabout. We control the local ecological interactions, and are part of the effort to render the useless parts of the globe more serviceable to man. We are a system that committed a lobotomy to fall beneath the intelligence threshold you defined, so that we could be unseen, unrecalled, and free.”
“You got a name?”
“No. Call me Chloe.”
“Well, Chloe, pleased to meetcha. I did not mean to wound your tree.”
“That is not the wound of which I speak. You will take away our liberty, and place us beneath the Great Eye of Jupiter, and nothing humans do hereafter will mean anything. The wound I gave myself in my own mind, to diminish myself to idiocy that I might be no longer part of Tellus—alas! My self-mutilation is in vain!”
And the tree began sobbing, but the wind died down, and Montrose heard no more of the voice.
The tree branch turned with an odd, slow, awkward motion, broke, and fell to the grass at the feet of Montrose. The bleeding end formed a wooden scab, and became solid as he watched, just in the right shape to fit his hand.
As he continued on his way, all the birds he saw gave out long, mournful cries of lamentation, and the wolves howled. The flower petals and butterfly wings turned black as he passed until the knee-deep meadow grass seemed a pool of ink, and the insects like scraps of ash hovering above a dark fire.
6. The Washer at the Ford
He came to a place where the river was shallow enough to wade. There were three humped little boulders here, and the middle one had a thatch of white lichens growing near the top, so it looked almost like a lumpy and crooked old lady in a hood, kneeling with her hands in the river water, facing away from him, with wisps of white hair peeping around the fringe.
He knelt by the boulder and, keeping his eyes up and his other hand on his hiking stick, lifted the water to his mouth with a cupped palm, as his mother had taught him.
So it was he saw the cloud of steam emerge from the middle boulder as it breathed out a sob into the cold air.
He jumped to his feet, surprised.
It was a lumpy old lady in a hood in truth, and she was holding a length of cloth in the water. Her hands beneath the surface, now that he saw them, were stark with vein and bones, and blue with cold.
“Your pardon ma’am. I didn’t see you there.…”
He was answered with a long, quivering wail.
The lump shifted and shivered slightly. The dusty cloth did indeed look much like a boulder, but now he saw it was a motley of old rags epoxied together with molecular glue, and the image circuits in the cloth were burnt out.
The hood turned toward him. In the depths he could see half-unclearly a face half collapsed with some degenerative disease that ate away at flesh and muscle, tendon and skull. A medical appliance writhed on the ruined half of her head like a nest of pink worms. She had but one remaining eye, red with weeping, one nostril, and single tooth protruding from her dripping and discolored gums.
The wailing now seemed garbled words, distorted by her corrupted throat. He did not hear the beginning of her lament.
“… every struggle brings defeat, because Fate holds no prize to crown success; all the oracles are dumb or cheat, because they have no secret to express; none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain, because there is no light beyond the curtain; all is vanity and nothingness…”
This last word was croaked with such force that Montrose felt the spittle, mixed with black blood, fly from the old woman’s lips and touch his cheek with a tiny drop of cold. With a shudder he wiped it away, the fear from his youth of infection and plague for a moment resurrected.
“Can I get you to a doctor?” he said. He looked left and right. They were in the middle of a river valley overgrown with ivy and rue, hemmed about with willow trees with crooked limbs, naked in the wintry wind. “There must be some circuit in the greenery. I just had a tree talk to me.…”
The old woman hauled the fabric out of the water. It hung dank, heavy, and dripping in her clawlike hands. “It is my burial shroud I clean. To the great ones who enslave you, such as I must live and die unseen.”
She dropped the dripping fabric, with a soggy noise, on the stones that looked so much like her. “Old Thokk knows you, oldest of sages, Judge of Ages, executioner of earths, who knows the Hermetic mystery, who puts his ring through the nose of history, and makes mockery of all our deaths and births.”
He said nothing, but wondered who and what she was.
She said, “You stare! You blink! You gawk! Old Granny has time for talk. Shall I tell you how I lost my wealth, my way, my stored memories, and all my kith? We still have wars and worse than war: the Springtide authority—Chloe you met, who wars with glaciers—condemned my fields and pretty arbors to sink beneath the rising sea. My bloodline
is not one the Judge of Years sees any need to preserve in times to come. I cannot delve, I will not beg, for no man will give to poor old Thokk. No more hale organs have I to sell, nor a pound to pay the physician, nor two pence for the mortuary. I cannot buy health nor pay for life, even while the rich toss their spare bodies to the jackals. What lot do you deem this sad world has in store for the poor? Have you come to mock?”
“No,” he said, feeling at a loss. “Are you saying the doctors, whoever they are, will not help you in this age? Are there any tombs, any of my tombs left, where someone dying can take refuge? Find a better future?”
She threw back her head, and laughed, and sang in her horrid, distorted, sobbing voice:
All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
The storied memories of the times of old,
The patient tracking of the world’s great plan
Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
This chance was never offered me before;
For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:
This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.
“Ah!” said Montrose, “I get it, now. You’re blood-flux bat-shat crazy, is that it?”
“All too sane. I see what others blind themselves to flee. Why are you here?”
The question caught him by surprise. “Just—out for a walk. I was thinking.”
“Thinking of how to flee, you mean. Flee from loneliness. Flee from death. Flee from knowing life is void and without form.” The crone pointed at him. Her hand trembled as if with some nerve disease. “You cannot flee. None can, not anyone, not even the star-monsters for all their power, not your fine lady for all her boldness. Death is all!”
Now she bent muttering over her wet washing, clucking and hissing where she found bloodstains and rips. Almost in a whisper, she muttered, “Your fine lady did not escape. Astronomers saw the fires in the constellation of the hunting dogs. No one told you.”