A voice cried out, “Ahoy!”—a word that was eleven or twelve thousand years old.
2
Aboard the Hysterical Blindness
1. Permission to Board
Sailors from the clipper ship dived into the water and were carried on the backs of dolphins to where the pinnace bobbed in the waves. The men had amphibious features while in the water, goggle-eyed like astonished frogs, blubber-skinned against the cold, webbed of foot and finger.
With astonishing alacrity, they leaped from the water, as high as a dolphin might leap, and grabbed on to the rail that rimmed the upper hull of the landing boat. There were five men with blubbery whalelike skin; they shrank, their blubber as if being absorbed back into their bodies, and their eyes and hands became those of land-dwelling humans. They had the harsh, aquiline features and narrow skulls of Chimera, and some mixture of sea mammal genes were in their genetic cocktail, but they also sported aquamarine hue and the electrotelepathic antennae of Blue Men.
Montrose at first wondered at the speed and completeness of the cellular transfiguration, but then he saw that each man wore on his left wrist a large bracelet of blood-red metal. The Hermetic Order, using similar biomolecular prosthetics, could shed their cellular appearance of youth with comparable speed, but they had been constrained to two morphologies. Some of the nuances of the change bespoke a breakthrough in biotechnology, maybe several.
“Congratulations, Blackie,” he muttered in English. “Looks like everyone on Earth is a Hermeticist nowadays. You must be proud.”
Blackie del Azarchel did not look proud. “I would expect them to take their institutions and heraldry from their conquerors, not from me.”
“No conquerors. Man drove them off.”
Del Azarchel looked skeptical, but did not say more.
The sailors called out in Latin, asking permission to come aboard. Each sailor kept one foot in the waves as he crouched by the rim of the vessel, as if to maintain the pretense that he was still in the water. They called and waited.
Ximen del Azarchel looked at Menelaus Montrose with a look of embarrassed puzzlement. Menelaus said, or, rather whistled, in the ultra-compressed high-speed language Montrose and Del Azarchel had, while bored, designed for shipboard use in case of emergencies. “You are a-calculating which one of us rightly should answer, ain’tcha?”
“I consider myself the captain of the ship…” Del Azarchel answered hesitantly.
“My ship, thank you kindly, pardner.”
“… but I am aware of your contrary, albeit somewhat legalistic claim…”
“The legalism being as that I done own the damnified thing in fee simple, yessir, as seeing you done stole it as a naked act of piracy.…”
“… in my capacity as sovereign Nobilissimus of the World Concordat, in accord with the Statute of Common Space of 2400, all spaceworthy vessels being, by eminent domain, and for the greater good of world peace…”
“… naked act of piracy for the greater good of world peace, like I said. Still mine.”
“The currents are waiting our answer. Shall we talk in unison?”
“What, and make believe you got any sort of right to talk for my ship? What about taking turns. You be captain on odd-numbered millennia, I’ll take even, something like that.”
“A compromise would be tantamount to admitting you have a claim to the ship.”
“Fight a duel? But I suppose we need each other. Toss a coin?”
“The quickdraw game, just using our fingers. The faster one is captain. We could have the onboard brain adjudicate.”
“That’s a kiddie sport!” scoffed Montrose. “Besides, the currents would see us, and we’d look silly. What about paper-scissors-rock?”
“What? Forego my dignity and claim by mere happenstance? Absurd. What about a quick game of blindfold chess? Pawn to King Four.”
“We ain’t got time, the currents is waiting and who says you get white? How about a quick round of wrastling? This deck is pretty slippery. Whoever don’t get tossed in the drink gets to call one and all aboard.”
“The currents will think the gyrations peculiar.”
“Injun thumb wrastling. We can stand and block their view with our backs. Last man with no broke fingers is captain.”
“One does not break fingers during thumb wrestling.”
“One does if’n you play the way I learned it. We both need a pair of pliers.”
Del Azarchel pressed the tips of his fingers against his temples. “This is absurd. We are both Homo Sapiens Postsapiens, with intelligence in the four hundred range, and posthumans in the seven hundred to one thousand estimated intelligence range are waiting for our reply, and we cannot decide which of us should shout back their permission to board, even though we both wish them to come aboard?”
Montrose said, “When I was young, I used to think that if only mankind were smart enough, enlightened enough, we could solve all our problems. Solve war, solve poverty, solve everything.”
Del Azarchel nodded. “I had a similar dream.”
Montrose said, “Then I grew up.”
Del Azarchel nodded again. “I realized that such a dream would only be achieved under a strong and clear-eyed leadership.”
“With you as leader? Nice work, if you can get it.”
Del Azarchel shrugged. “I am willing both to enslave mankind to the Hyades, and to be a slave, merely for the remote chance of becoming part of whatever greater civilization must be out there in the vasty void, ruling the constellations. You doubt my willingness to serve when needs must be?” He inclined his head. “I grant and acknowledge your rank as acting captain. Welcome aboard the creatures who may indeed prove to be our masters.”
Feeling obscurely as if he had lost the argument, Menelaus Montrose turned and called to the sailors.
2. The First Comprehension
It took some time for swimmers to attach cables to the pinnace. The clipper ship had dropped sea anchors, and whales in harness had hauled the huge vessel alongside. Cranes from amidships lowered slings to carry the men back up to the deck, including Montrose and Del Azarchel. They were hauled up to the deck long before the pinnace was raised by block and tackle and swung over to a point above and a little behind the stern.
The clipper ship was large enough that even their fifty-foot-long, fifteen-foot-beam spaceboat was a small bundle dangled over the side. The clipper ship was immense, boasting twenty-two square sails on six masts, plus multiple jibs, staysails, stunsails, and a spanker. She was larger than the giant barge of Emperor Caligula which brought the obelisk to Saint Peter’s Square in Rome from Egypt. Montrose wondered if he were the only one on Earth who remembered that ship, that emperor, that square, that city, or that nation.
He saw the crescent, dim and ghostly by daylight, of the many-colored moon, hanging halfway between dark and icy oceans and skies fiery with auroras. No sky of the Earth he had known contained upper atmospheric pyrotechnics visible even in sunlight. He suspected the presence of dust and debris from the war, or ionization of an unimaginably large volume of the atmosphere, had altered the visibility conditions. A feeling like a cold wind that wanders through an empty house passed through his soul.
While they were swinging from a harness that fit them like a baby’s diaper, dangling from a yardarm, with sailors guiding them with guy ropes to the snow-slick deck, Montrose leaned and called to Del Azarchel, “I musta read too much futurism when I was a whelp, Blackie. I would have liked to see us picked up by tractor-presser beams, or at least guys wearing jet packs, eh?”
Del Azarchel eye’s were vibrating strangely, darting from object to object on the deck: the captain, the masts, the wheel, the binnacle, and the small dome of bio-organically grown metal, which was a fusion plant. “You were expecting serpentines, you mean. The technology here is paradoxical. I see some evidence of alien thought-patterns, but very unobtrusive. The Hyades overlords ruling the planet must rule with a very light touch, as bespeaks a truly enlighten
ed sovereign.”
Montrose smirked at him. “But it does fit the technology growth patterns if some enemy equipment fell into human hands after the aliens was driven back into the black deep of space, don’t it? There ain’t no alien overlords here. Your mind is making up evidence out of random data patterns, like seeing a face in a Rorschach blot.”
“Oh? Convert the information spaces in the cliometric model of a fusion plant on a sailing ship to the Monument notation, and you will see what I mean: there is a low zeta-count in the juridical parameter. Does that match what you’d find for a general human victory? You are self-deluded, Cowhand.”
“It don’t match your model none, neither. You are the self-deludeder.”
“That is not a word.”
“Since no one’s talked the Queen’s English for some odd eight thousand years and change, I am the only one rightly set to write a dictionary, I figure.”
By that point, they were standing on the deck. Here were two giants of the ancient posthuman design from the Third Millennium, with bald, vast heads and childish features gathered toward the bottom of their skulls, four nostrils sucking in volumes of air, squat of midriff, standing on toeless elephantine legs. One was dressed in the rough garb of a sailor, the other, leaning on a staff, wore the blue coat of a Simplifier.
There also were sailors and hands very similar to ancient Locusts, the collective-mind race of the Ninth Millennium, black-skinned, quick and elegant of motion, moving with the precision of machines, golden tendrils coming from their bald skulls.
The marines had the racial features of Chimerae, a warrior race of the Sixth Millennium, hatchet-faced and burning-eyed.
Here also was a white-haired and black-robed priestess of the Witch race, her nine-foot-tall stature betraying the use of (by this date) ludicrously ancient life-elongating biotechniques, and her odd body language and haunted eyes betraying the foundational changes in her nervous system for which the Witches were famous, including a more direct access and control to the dreaming and intuitional centers than baseline humans.
The captain and the first mate were Melusine of the Eleventh Millennium, with eyes entirely jet black, all pupil without sclera, secondary eyepits in the brow for receiving infrared, and delicate secondary ears beneath their human-shaped main ears. They had gold tendrils rising from the forehead for brain-to-brain signal communication like the Locusts, and two additional tendrils sets, long silvery whips or short blue feathers, for other bands of signals.
An absurdly attractive brunette greeted them, bowing and offering bowls of tea. Del Azarchel looked at the steaming bowl skeptically, perhaps wary of adverse chemicals or nanotechnological agents, while Montrose gulped his down with gusto, grateful for the warmth, and burped and said, “Thank you, ma’am. Right kind of y’all.”
The woman had a sweet face, high-cheeked with a pointed chin, and dark and slanted eyes, larger than were ever found in unmodified humans, underlined by an epicanthic eyefold, golden-white skin, and hair as black as India ink falling to her narrow waist. Her lips were also larger, redder, and fuller than typical. Her body shape was an idealized form from Hindu mythology, buxom to the point of exaggeration, slender-waisted, full-hipped, with long dancer’s legs. She wore a kimono of green silk patterned with images of cranes ascending and starships descending, with dragons curling around DNA spirals. Over all this she wore a luxurious mantissa falling from a hair comb made of living grapevine twined with ivy. This was both the traditional dress of the Nymphs who ruled the Seventh Millennium, and one of their favorite bodily forms.
Her voice was like a wind chime, singing. The words were English. “The men, officers, captain, owners, and ghosts of Her Majesty’s Ship Hysterical Blindness tender greetings and adoration to you, Master of the World That Was.” And she inclined her graceful head toward Del Azarchel. Then, “We welcome you, as well, and extend you welcome and peace and free leave to come and go, as well, Judge of Ages Past. Our Prognasticators calculate your wish will be to speak with our Swan, and to have your landing vessel drawn readied for rapid launch from the sea-mountain of our Swan, to which we bend our destination.”
Del Azarchel looked at Montrose sidelong and smirked. Montrose realized that, by calling out the permission to board, and by drinking first, it now seemed to the currents as if Montrose was subservient, like a herald or a food-taster, and Del Azarchel his superior. But all he said in whisper to Montrose was, “We have found another English speaker, so your authority to mangle the language is curtailed.”
Del Azarchel, answering the emissary, said, “Your Prognasticators have calculated correctly somewhat. Our prime purpose is information. Who masters this world? Man or Hyades?”
Around her throat she wore a slim metallic band or choker made of a hard substance as pink as coral. She touched it with her slender hand, as if in unconscious gesture. “Ultimately, none is master of his own fate. Resignation is best.”
Montrose did not like the look of the pink metallic ring around her neck. It reminded him unpleasantly of a dog’s collar. He stepped forward. “Miss? Do you need help? If you know who I am, you know I have a knack for setting things right. And breaking skulls.”
She smiled, and glanced at the other sailors and officers standing about them. The captain, a Melusine dressed in a heavy coat of dark blue seal fur over a skintight sheath of black metallic mesh, twitched his tendrils at her, but did not speak aloud.
She turned back to Montrose. “Do not call me Miss, for no maiden am I. The name given me is Amphithöe. Our society is not yet recovered from the depopulations, nor have we successfully followed our cliometric plans to undo the rigid hierarchy of the Buried Years.”
She continued, “That same cliometric plan contains a glaring uncertainty, a blindness. No one can predict whether the ancient war between the two of you will introduce unexpected variations into the smooth patterns of history. I am given to understand that the Swans imposed exile upon you, banishing you from Earth?”
“Not exactly what happened,” said Montrose, raising his eyes skyward and pursing his lips.
She continued, “Be that as it may, the Voice of the Swan was impelled to summon you, so that you might inspect conditions within this historical period, and see for yourselves that no reasonable grounds for dispute between the two of you remain; or, at least, no grounds for a public dispute which might disturb our commonwealth.”
Del Azarchel said with harsh humor, “And by what means was this miracle manifested?”
She bowed. “I mean no disrespect. I was given to understand that the Judge of Ages wished to repel the Hyades invasion, and the Master of the World to welcome them. The agency of the Hyades, a Virtue we call Asmodel, troubled us for a season, and now does not. Your reasons for conflict are moot. What answer shall I bring to those who send me?”
Montrose simply laughed.
Del Azarchel said, “No answer. You cannot know Hyades will not come again. Nor, it seems, do your predictions take into account that the Great Work of Jupiter is still ongoing. When he arises, he shall rule earth and sky, Man and Swan and all, forever.”
“In two hundred thousand years, perhaps. If our calendar has kept the reckoning correct, then the Celestial Princess of legend returns in seventy thousand years, less than half that extent, carrying the verdict of minds from beyond the Milky Way, to say whether mankind is condemned or vindicated.”
Del Azarchel frowned, but could not contradict her. “I hope to lessen the period significantly.”
“No one is concerned with such remote futurity,” Amphithöe continued artlessly. “The mission of the Celestial Princess is pointless, because whatever awaits her here will be nothing like the mankind she sought to free. One wonders what purpose so romantically mad a venture serves! No doubt it is because she had not the tranquility to resign herself with grace to fate.”
Montrose barked, “Some of us standing right damn here are pestilent damn poxy concerned! And I will be the damned whatever awaiting her here,
my own damned self, with a grin on my gob and a pawful of poesies, and may Satan sodomize me in blue-hot hell if I ain’t! I am just set sick she set out to win the freedom for a race that includes such souls as yours. Do you like being a lickspittle? It weren’t tranquility she had none of; it was puling yellow cowardice!”
Montrose was flabbergasted into silence when Del Azarchel interrupted in a mild voice, “Dear child, please realize that you are talking to Rania’s husband. He will die if he loses faith in her return. Your words wound him.” But then the smile of Del Azarchel grew and shined with malice. “Oh, well done! More of the same, please!”
She looked so meek and miserable that Montrose was reminded of the look on the face of his Aunt Bertholda’s cat he used to dunk in the rain barrel every June to celebrate the Spring’s first snowmelt.
Montrose lowered his voice and spoke in a gentler tone. “Sorry, there, I didn’t mean to shoot my mouth in your ear. Say! Who are you, anyway? I mean, you keep saying ‘we’ and ‘us.’ Who sent you?”
She said, “Forgive me, I thought that was clear. My masters are the Remnant Order of the Post-Final Stipulation. We hail from the Madagascar peninsula. The Wise Manitra is our Judge of our Age for the span of years allotted us, and first among the Cliometric College. The Noble Angatra is Master of our part of the World and Lawgiver, and commands the Hermetic Scholars and the Warrior-priests. Our Celestial Princess for whom they compete is the Fair Ranavalona, whose gentle commands the common people, groves, glades, aquaculture, and the trees with love obey. Our commonwealth is therefore organized as you designed, as a balanced triumvirate.”
Montrose raised an eyebrow. “As we designed—?”
Amphithöe bowed again, cheeks turning pink as if in shame. “I am of the serving class and design, and so am only permitted the First Comprehension. Many things are excised from the Second Comprehension for our ease of understanding, and to prevent vexatious debate. The received history says you three, the Princess, the Master, and the Judge, established our constitution and baseline law-equations. At least, so I was taught.”