Numbly, Menelaus handed back the goggles. He had seen enough.
Keirthlin said, “Why did you call them here? What did you intend? What do these events mean?”
Menelaus said, “I am the smartest man on the planet, and I have no damnified and pustulating idea what is going on. The Currents, whoever they are, if they had the technology to create such a thing, would surely have left some sign, some energy signal, that the Locusts would have detected, or my radio. Are they hiding?”
Keirthlin said, “While I am not a Simplifier, I do admire the directness of their approach. In this case, the simple approach is best. If you are curious about the motives of the current generation, why not ask?”
Menelaus goggled at her. “You are the Currents?”
Keir made a curt, negative gesture with his hand. “We are not. She is.” And he nodded toward Alalloel. “Everyone else here is from our past. Only her energy signals contain fine emission nuances we cannot penetrate. Observe the small motions of her eyes and hands. She is a posthuman.”
10. Girl from the Eighteenth Configuration
Menelaus still felt an astonishment, great as anger, burning in his belly. He spun and glared across the space separating them at Alalloel.
He looked at the ornamental clasps adorning her shoulders, wrists, and waist. They looked like seashells. The tiny patterns of striations showed they had been grown using the same method as the shell-like buildings outside.
“You! You are a Current, aren’t you? World hasn’t changed that much in four hundred years, has it? You are a Melusine! You are in contact with them! You know what’s going on! Where is the world? Where did the human race go? What is that—that thing outside?”
The gold, silver, and blue antennae on her head stirred, and the second pair of ears below her human ears opened like little pink parasols, and tilted toward Menelaus as if tracking the source of the noise. But she said nothing, and there was a mocking look in her blind-seeming eyes.
He probed the clasps on her uniform with a signal from his implants; this time he used the Gray logic gems to heterodyne his signal onto the carrier wave he had detected earlier. From the energy echo, he realized she had the range and the power to reach not only the Bell, but whoever was in charge of this period of history, including whatever libraries and infosphere contained the answers to his questions. Questions she was not answering.
Menelaus adjusted the nodes the Grays had given him, and sent a signal strong enough that Alalloel winced. Aloud, he said the same words: “Who are you?”
She raised an eyebrow. She opened her tongueless mouth. From her throat issued a voice.
“Alalloel u lal rir Lree, u lal rir Enlil-Urthlolendthril.”
“Nope. If the Linderlings can pick up this language at their speed, you can at yours.”
The throat-voice changed, and now spoke with the same modulation, accent, and rhythm as Keir, but at a slightly higher pitch. The perfection of the impersonation was eerie. “Alalloel of the Lree of the Eighteenth World Mind Configuration.”
“You hid that you can grasp our talk? Why?”
“It would lack symmetry were you, given your actions, to criticize the pretense of ignorance to lure others to speak unguardedly.”
“You started to speak to me in the mess tent.”
“I started to offer you my name; you offered me in return a lie. Absent reciprocity, conversation halts.”
Menelaus said angrily to Alalloel, “Lady, you better tell me where is the human race.”
“Measured in terms of the majority of intellectual activity, the human race is no longer significant. The Eighteenth Configuration is no longer significant. The Earth itself is self-aware.”
He didn’t know if that referred to Pellucid filling the core, or the self-aware Del Azarchel snow-coating the outside of the planet. He said, “Go on.”
“The mentality involved has not yet achieved coherence. Rather, the conflicting polities have thought-structures issuing from two epicenters, creating mutual interference. Nobilissimus Del Azarchel and the historical and mental events he sets in motion occupy one epicenter; you and yours occupy the other. But who are you? The archives refuse to confirm that you are the Judge of Ages, Menelaus Montrose, despite your claim. There is an information lapse or blind spot when the inquiry is made. Something nulls the reply. Who are you?”
Menelaus realized she must be at least partly contaminated by Exarchel, or her archives were. He said, “What happened to the people? Where is everyone?”
She looked at him with her strange, blind-seeming eyes. “You are not forthcoming? I reciprocate. Do not resist when the Simplifiers emerge to hale you below. They make an identity error.”
“What?”
“I speak now for the Final Stipulation of Noösphere Protocols, which supersedes even the Eighteenth Configuration: the Finality imposes an imperative to permit resolution of the various deceptions and aggressions involved that minimizes collateral damage to persons or historically valuable objects, information, or arrangements.”
“What the poxy hell you talking about, lady?”
“The Finality requires that you go below. All events are arranged; all contingencies foreseen. Do no damage to our Tombs.”
“Your Tombs! Pestilential hellish pox!”
But there was no more time. The dogs raised their muskets as Illiance, glittering in his blue coat, glided smoothly up and out from the gold shining stairs leading below. He pointed and whistled and the dog things eagerly leaped to obey. Paws grabbed Menelaus by the arms and half dragged, half frogwalked him across the wide steel floor to the shadow of the great doors.
Illiance regarded him with mild curiosity, and said in a quiet voice, “Beta Sterling Anubis.”
Menelaus counted the gems on the Blue Man’s long coat. “Hello, Preceptor. Got your rank back, did you? Congrats.”
“Thank you, Corporal. My peers happen to admire the elegance with which an armed insurrection in the camp was averted, thanks to my forethought, and to my correct assessment of your maneuvers. You were preparing an act of insurrection, were you not? You would have killed the Followers we sent to guide you. The crime is an abomination.”
“Yeah. Almost as bad as tomb-looting, theft, trespass, kidnapping, maiming, assault, torture, and murder.”
Illiance said, “Now, please come this way. Your talent for translating dead languages is needed. We have found the Judge of Ages.”
“Oh, this I got to see.”
2
The Tomb of Ages
1. Payment
Mentor Ull was standing near the line of sandbags that separated the connecting corridor from the firing range, where the huge doors leading underground loomed.
Ull said to Menelaus, “Beta Sterling Anubis, please tell Kine Larz of the Gutter that, as we agreed, he may keep the ratiotechnology-based hand weapon of the Extet clan as payment for his services, but please warn him that there is no fiscal or financial structure in the current world able to exchange such a valuable antiquity for other goods and services more to his liking.”
Naar and Ull returned through the door. Menelaus watched with a look of blank anger on his face as the little men glided without harm past the countless spray-nozzles, mines, gun-muzzles, and energy emission antennae lining the massive metal doorposts.
Menelaus said in Chimerical to Larz, “Now that you have betrayed us to the Blue Men, they are trying to see to it that you get killed. The one in the coat without many glitters is named Ull, and he is the Alpha here. He says you may keep the ancestral weapon of the Extet clan for your use, but he warns you that there are no pawn shops or museums to sell it to. I will warn you that if an Alpha sees a Kine holding a weapon from one of the original experiment families, he will not even bother to utter a ritual challenge.”
The rice wine had given Larz artificial courage. His speech was only slightly slurred when he spoke. “A Beta would not issue a bother to a brother a pother either, a real Beta. Who in oblivion are
you?”
But at this point the dog things grew restless, and began gesturing angrily with their muskets.
The gray twins and Alalloel were at the rear of the line of marching dogs. Menelaus and Larz were in the front.
Menelaus watched the great door carefully. Certain of the gunblisters were still active, and the barrels did track Larz and the dogs as they walked under the massive lintel, and other weapons followed, but nothing fired, and nothing pointed at Menelaus. Menelaus put his hand to his mouth and coughed, and started to say something aloud, but the dog next to him (no doubt fearful that a loud noise might provoke one of the many unknown weapons in the door) struck Menelaus sharply on the side of his unhooded head with a musket butt, and half dragged, half carried him across the threshold. Menelaus was eventually able to get his feet under him.
He also now had the powder horn and the wallet of musketballs which had been dangling alluringly from the dog’s sabretache under his cloak. Along with his rock, the splicing knife, and the Gray capsule of logic crystals, it was not much by way of weaponry, but it was something.
The stairs were gold, and creaked ever so slightly underfoot, as each stair was a pressure plate. Menelaus looked left and right, noting that the heavy voltage conduits meant to electrify the stairs (gold was, after all, a splendid conductor) had been jacked into their safety positions.
The dogs led them down one magnificent flight after another. Down and down they went, through solid bedrock and past layers of armor like the geologic strata of a metal world, from the third to the fourth level.
The stairs were more slippery than they seemed, or Menelaus had been hit in the head more often or harder than he thought, for he fell once or twice. Larz (who was staggering a bit himself) stepped next to him, and put a hand under his arm to help him walk.
As they walked, Larz took the trouble to hide the serpentine. He unbuttoned his shoulders, wrapped the stolen smart whip four or five times around his naked waist, and pulled the top of his coveralls over it.
Menelaus said, “That won’t help. Alpha Yuen already saw you touching it.”
2. The Man Named Loser
“Tell me who you are, or I will tell everyone who you are not,” said Larz in Chimerical. “You are not a Beta. Not no-how.”
“And you are not Larz of the Gutter.”
The man’s eyes grew round. “They still read cheaplies in the far future? They still read Gibson? You’re kidding me!”
“You should have picked a name no one would recognize, like Tarzan or Sherlock.”
“So says a man named Anubis—you trying to get caught? No Chimera was ever called such. He is the ancient Egyptian death-god with the head of a jackal.”
“I was hoping anyone who recognized the name would betray himself. Where did you hear it? It is not like the Chimerae let their slaves study mythology.”
“Mythology? What’s that? No, I know Anubis ’cause Larz of the Gutter faced the Phantom Pharaoh of the Haunted Pyramid of Mars in Strange Tales of the Street numbers 100 to 104, a four-part episode called Beneath the Moons of Fear and Terror. I consider it a five-parter, on account of 104 was a double-sized issue.”
“Y’know, I read slop like that when I was younger, too. So what is your real name?”
“Loser! My Da wanted me to get into a lot of fights. But I actually, really am a merc law. I did crack-knuckle work, and some shoot-and-scoot.”
“Wait, do you mean your name is Loser, or were you calling me a…”
“I mean I am as slick as the real Gutter Larz, and that is my name from now on. I got the damn door to crack, Jack! That’s prudential departmental credential, a smart fix with no tricks!”
“Oh, seeping scabs of syphilis! Please, by all that is clean and sterile, don’t start your stupid sales pitch again. Your coffin said Larz.”
“And yours said Beta Stalling something-or-other Devious Anne-Ibis. So what? I figured whatever name I picked when I slumbered, that would be my name in the new world when I thawed. So stop stalling, Stalling, or I’m calling and you’ll be crawling.”
Menelaus said, “Anything to squelch your damned yammering! I’ll talk! Do you believe in the Hermetic Order?”
“Spooks and kooks who live in the great black yonder in a starship older than history? Dark Magicians who serve the Machine? Simon the Black and his secret of eternal life? C’mon, mate, don’t pork a porker. No such beastie.”
“Simon the Black is myth. Ximen del Azarchel is real.”
“Simon the Magician. Simon of the Moon. I know the name.”
“How do you know it?”
Larz said, “The same way I know about the Pharaohs of Egypt. Larz of the Gutter had to fight mummies and mesmerists and swamp zombies, not just gangsters and assassins. It’s just made-up stuff, R and R reads, not real.”
“Real enough to kill us all in the next hour.”
“No! It is a fairy tale for kids in boot camp. The world was burnt an aeon ago, and only Simon the Magician escaped; an aeon before that, the world was drowned to death, and only Noah the Navigator escaped.”
“Old Noah with his houseboat full of zoo animals?” said Montrose, astonished. “I used to have a toy when I was a whelp—how in the world is that story still around, by your day?”
“Aha! So you might ask! There is something behind those tales. Now, you might think the latest news is the least painted-up and liar-tilted. But no sirree! My take on it is”—and here Larz seemed to puff out his chest a bit, and assumed a philosophical expression—“in general the older tales can be more trusted, on account of the brass has had less time to hack them, right? Older tales had more time to spread around the world and lodge in nooks and cracks where the truth police cannot unnook nor uncrack them, not all of them, right? Of course right. And the truest tales come from the very beginning of the world.”
“Very beginning of the world?”
“You heard the one about the man named Man and the woman named Wife, and they lived in a garden called Peace? It seems a geneticist named Old Snake fed the wife a poison apple, so that her children would look like people on the outside, but be just like snakes on the inside, ’cause that is the only way the sterile Old Snake could reproduce. You know that one, right? Old stories never die, and not even the Chimerae can wipe them out.”
“That is a very old story,” said Menelaus. “My Ma used to tell it to me. Not sure if I believe it.”
“It explains why the world is just a damned snake pit, though, don’t it?”
“I allow that it might do that,” nodded Menelaus.
“You believe Simon the Black is real. Are you going to scoff at Old Snake and his everlasting poison?”
Menelaus sighed. “I can see that kiddie yarns are more educational than I thought. Well, some of those stories are real or near enough. I think Reyes y Pastor has been adding historical vectors to keep Bible stories afloat, the way I tried to do for yarns about Englishmen raised by apes. And the stories about the great ship Hermetic are true, or based on truth. The Hermeticists have been diddling with your history, and all the history periods before and after, and they are hunting for me.”
“What’d you do?”
“I defied them. It’s not just me. They are gunning for everyone who protects the Tombs, because we are the only thing keeping the past alive, and stopping them from running history any damn which way they please. So I had to hide my ID.”
“Why us? Why try to pass your sassafras ass as a big, bad Beta?”
“Simple. No one frats with a Chimera. I picked an era, the Social Wars, when the records were burnt or erased by electromagnetic pulse.”
“How come the brass didn’t glam your scam?”
Presumably Larz meant Daae and Yuen. “I trounced them,” answered Montrose, “and their Alpha pride could not admit a Kine can trounce a Chimera.”
“Ho! They is slow. I could tell you weren’t no Chimera at half a glance even without you dropping your pants.”
“For the love
of God, I will pay you gold from the treasuries of the Judge of Ages if you will stop talking in rhymes. It makes me seasick. Yellow gold that shines like the sun. I swear by the circumcised and risen penis of Christ.”
Larz was so surprised that his voice dropped to a whisper. “You know about the White Christ?”
3. Depthtrain Station
At that point, the passage was blocked by a rock slide. The procession turned aside and entered a wide arch, and here were ramps meant for coffins to slide, not people to walk, and there was no conversation as the dogs and their prisoners clambered and stooped to pass through.
They entered a short, bright corridor leading to a broad platform. It was a depthtrain station.
A vast well, covered with one transparent airlock after another, dropped into infinite distance underfoot. Poised like a ship in dry dock, or a topsy-turvy rocket ship in an upside-down launch silo, was one of the ancient depthtrains: a bullet shape coated with as many magnetic spines as a metal porcupine. The vehicle was huge, a tower leaning nose-downward, and in the racks and rails overhead, other bullet-shaped carriages and train cars rested, titanic, shining, filling a vast space like the ammunition rack of cyclopean beings. In two great half circles surrounding the lip of the vacuum well, metallic parentheses, crouched the silent bulk of a magnetic-atomic linear accelerator. There was no thunderstorm smell of ozone, no throb of dynamos; the only hint of the vast power locked in those accelerators were little alert lights like fireflies burning steadily, as they had for millennia, on the steel faces of the main leads.
The next chamber, equally vast, was a warehouse with rectilinear crates and containers and lifts and power-trucks and trolleys idle to either side, positioned to maneuver the supplies through an upper loading dock to the waiting depthtrain cars. The train yard control booth was overhead, looking down through slanted glass windows, and its ceiling was a transparent globe, finely spiderwebbed with countless brachistochrone curves of the gravity-drops.