The sun rose higher, and the darker hues cast across the overhead clouds turned bright and began to mingle into a dazzling whiteness, like the hueless sky seen above a desert or above an arctic tundra.
The sun cleared the mountains before the man arrived, and suddenly the mirror-bright surface of the Earth was gorgeous, but also blinding, dazzling, disorienting. Montrose put his hand before his face, but there was no way to turn to escape the fiery dazzle.
The man ceased to move his legs and stood upright as he approached. For the last hundred yards or so, he slid, looking almost comically poised and serene, white cloak waving behind, like the mast on a sailboat with sails spread, or like a tall pine tree with the wind blowing snowy streams from its branches. The friction properties of the surface changed in the last ten yards, and the stranger slowed to a halt without a jar.
They stood regarding each other. Menelaus was naked, and he was picking his teeth with a sliver of diamond.
The other man had skin that gleamed like metallic gold, as if a statue had sprung to life. He was beardless, but the jet-blackness of his eyebrows and long dark hair made a startling contrast with his bright skin. The white garment was classically draped, and a hem of purple traced the edges of the skirts and cloak. He wore a coronet of green, but whether it was ivy leaves or emerald stones, or some other substance entirely, Montrose could not detect.
When the man smiled, his teeth were diamond, perhaps the same substance as the ground beneath or the distant mountains. But the strangest feature was his eyes. They were silver-gray, pupil and iris and sclera and all. His face was young, but these eyes were old.
Without a word, the man held out his hand, offering Menelaus a small fruit the size of a plum, so purple it was almost black.
Menelaus shrugged, figuring that if anyone meant him harm, there were easier ways to do him in. The first bite of the fruit let a gush of juice sweeter than wine flood his mouth; in the second bite, the pleasure was doubled; the third was ecstasy. He wolfed it down with unseemly haste, crowing and slurping at the sheer physical gratification of the thing, as if every nutrient need of all his hungry cells was being deluged with satisfaction.
At the same time, his senses sharpened. Every nuance of the air on his bare skin could be felt separately, and he could now distinguish a riot of buried colors in the semitransparent layers of the ground beneath. Also, the white cloak of the other man now could be seen to be a combination of many slight nuances of shade, silver and dove gray, white and ivory and milk and snow. The man’s skin was even more complex; it was now a pattern of veins and dapples of topaz, chartreuse, tawny, sulfur and primrose, ochre and icterine.
Best of all, the light no longer dazzled him. It had not grown less bright. Rather, it was as if his visual nerve was stronger, more flexible.
The stone of the fruit was small, hard, and wrinkled like a peach pit, and clear and bright like a diamond. Montrose offered it back to the man, but, with a smile, as if he bestowed a gift of great value, the man gestured he should keep it.
The man now drew out a drinking horn from his shoulder belt, knelt, and plunged the horn beneath the surface of the diamond ground, which obligingly turned to liquid at his touch. When he raised the horn, it was filled to the brim with a golden fluid thicker than honey. Still kneeling, he proffered it to Montrose. Once again, fearing no evil, Montrose threw back his head and drained the horn.
This time, there was no physical sensation. The fluid seemed to evaporate in his mouth, leaving his tongue feeling cool. He in no way became intoxicated, but his thoughts grew clear and sharp, as if he were waking from a half dream, and at the same time, his emotions surged and seemed to grow unknotted, as if pains and fears long held in check, long buried, were in one moment excised.
Montrose sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “Can’t say as I care for the taste, as it sneaked out of my mouth, but it is sure a great pick-me-up. What is it called?”
The man, without rising, answered in flawless English. He had no trace of an accent Montrose could detect, but his rhythm and inflection were oddly musical, almost a singsong. His voice was a pleasant baritone. “What you quaff is called glory. Now in your blood is a sign, which none dare deny, of the honor in which all living creatures behold you on this, your utmost day, and the dignity you are owed.”
“Thanks, but seeing as how beholden and honorific I is, what say you share part of your cloak with me, so I ain’t dangling in the wind, making ladies faint and making bulls feel all dinky-donked? I am a kindly man and don’t care to make the critters jealous.”
The man dipped his drinking horn once more into the surface substance, and stood, and gestured for Montrose to kneel. Montrose did and was bemused, but not startled, when the man poured the liquid in the horn over Montrose’s head.
The substance dripped over his neck and shoulders, growing pleasantly warm as it did so, and the fluid rippled and curled and formed itself into hair-thin strands almost too fine to see. Montrose stood, looking down, beheld a white garment being instantly woven into place on his frame, seamless, a twin to the other man’s own, draped neatly from shoulder to waist, to fall to a purple hem just below his knobby knees. He thought he looked ridiculous in it.
But at least the sleeves were folded in such a way to form deep pockets just below his wrists, and he could put the diamond seed in one.
“Such is the wedding garb for me,” said the man in his hypnotic, chanting baritone. “Our records showed you might have wished for something from your period, but I will not deny what you request, and share my own.”
Montrose tried to adjust the garb, to throw over both shoulders, and it perversely kept rearranging itself into handsome folds and classical drapes.
“What’s the big idea of pouring me into another body? Why did you pox with my alarm clock and snuff my lesser selves?”
“For sheer joy’s sake. We decided to surprise you! It was thought not fitting that you should come a pauper to your bride, so we shouldered the expense of recombining your mind while you slept.”
“Some surprise. What the plague is with leaving me to find my way all by my lonesome?” he grunted while trying to rip the fabric, hoping this would kill it and make it lie still. “Right unneighborly.”
“As for leaving you alone, I do not understand your word. To us, solitariness is precious, and, to you, ’twill make your union joyous all the more. You waited but seventy-five degrees of the planetary rotation while I approached, and, of course the additional delay was gained because you walked froward, not toward. To intrude myself in greater haste was feared to be unseemly. I was told that the men of old, being mortal, practiced no patience. I hoped it untrue of you, whose vigil has outlasted all things known to history.”
Menelaus had some of the fabric in his teeth and was still unable to rip the garment, get it to lie still, nor to wrestle it into submission. A long tail of the material was successfully slapping him in the face. “Much as I poxing appreciate the gesture—you know—my duds don’t need to look ’zactly like yours. I ain’t got the knees for wearing no skirt, see.”
The man of gold touched Menelaus lightly on the shoulder, and the garment altered itself, becoming a long tunic, and the cloak was now something more like a poncho, but rich with emerald embroidery. The design showed a triple-headed serpent chasing sparrows, writhing into Celtic knots and arabesques. The hood fell off, remolded itself, grew thicker, and became a broad-brimmed hat more like what Menelaus was used to.
“But now the land must garb him in a floral, festive coat to match your own!” So saying, the gold man began walking and, as he did so, cracks spread from his feet in spiderwebs across the level plain with shocking suddenness.
Montrose followed, his mind full of questions, but that feeling of buoyant joy which woke him was still in the back of his mind, so he held his peace and decided to watch whatever show his host put on.
As the man of gold walked, he broke the ground in each direction. Behind
him, in his footsteps, like a green fire following a trickle of gasoline, grass blades erupted from the cracks in the ground. With soundless explosion, the glassy surface to either side of him sent up shafts of brown, which turned green and opened up their branches, turning into trees. Dewdrops flew from the buds and new leaves, and the trunks elongated, breathing out mists, even as Montrose watched.
The air grew cool with water vapor. At the beginning of their walk, the two men were in an ice-colored landscape of diamond broken by countless small saplings and scattered shrubs. As they walked, through saplings shoulder-high, Montrose could hear at first the trickle, and, later, the lapping rush of a stream off to their left, invisible behind the trees now towering overhead. Their course was parallel to this unseen stream. By the end of the walk, the trees had formed a natural cathedral, green and hushed and solemn, and underfoot was soil and grass as thick and refreshing to the bare feet as splashing in a pool.
Flowers of every color were springing up, but white was the dominant hue, with white rose, tuberose, peony, baby’s breath overwhelming the other blooms, and dendrobium and hydrangea, amaryllis, and apple-of-my-eye.
He was not surprised by this rapid, elfin growth. Ever since the day he had seen the white-haired and wrinkled Hermeticists throw off their old age like a wet cloak thrown aside, he expected to see such rapid cellular changes eventually on a wider scale.
Nonetheless, watching the green spread across the barren glass with the speed of a prairie fire in a high wind, and trunks shoot up like brown and silent rockets, with fruits and flowers like quiet fireworks bursting, and bestow the tall and solemn beauty of deep forestlands and sunny glades in so short of time, was magic.
He noted the species of trees were not merely from Earth, with no alien life-forms present, but from his quarter of Earth, from North America. And they were not simply the pines and evergreens of his cold youth, but the leafy trees, oak and ash and elm, of his happier teenaged years, when he was a horse soldier, campaigning in the thick woods of Mojave and the overgrown green swamps of Death Valley.
The two men came suddenly to the brink of the cliff Montrose had seen hours before from afar. Stepping out from between stately birch trees was like stepping from a high temple rich with shadows through a doorway guarded by brown pillars. The brightness of the sun in the cloudless white sky was like a blow to the face.
At their foot was a gulf of air overlooking a flat plain of glassy diamond. To their right, cherry trees and apples were spilling small white and pink petals into the depth of air.
To their left, the stream which thick woods had for so long kept hidden now leaped shoutingly into view, and, with a noise like cymbals, flashing in the sun, brilliant, threw itself from the cliff in a long, smooth parabola to dash against the cliff, a thin and threadlike waterfall, robed in its own windblown mists and spray. A second threadlike stream could be seen falling from the brink five hundred yards beyond that, and a third at a thousand yards, and so on, evenly spaced to left and right across the inlets and headlands of the irregular cliff side.
The man flourished aloft the drinking horn he had previously offered Montrose and, with a bow of his head, cast it from the cliff. Slowly, the tiny thing toppled, growing invisible with distance.
Montrose said, “What was that for?”
The other replied, “To honor and receive your bride, I am opening the floodgates of the buried waters of the Earth.”
No sooner than he said it but there was a loud, sharp explosion of noise. Montrose clutched his ears, shocked. The glassy plain so far beneath them was heaving. Vast cubes and boulders and sheets of the diamond substance were rising and falling, and smaller stones were hurling themselves in the air. It was if all the earthquakes of the world, all the landslips and eruptions, had been gathered into one spot and set free. Up from the vents and canyons and fissures, volumes of fluid broke forth, columns of spray rearing hundreds of yards in the air like giant sea serpents on a rampage. Fountains and volcanoes of cold fluid surged to the surface, and maelstroms whirled whole lakes and mighty rivers upward and upward.
Soon, the diamond plain was smothered and vanished, invisible beneath the surging flood. Higher and higher rose the boiling waves. Montrose watched in awe, impressed despite himself.
“That is not water,” Montrose said. “Look at how it moves.”
It was true. The fluid was a rich and dark purple hue, and a fragrant smell, delicious, wild, issued from it.
“It is the wine of the wedding feast,” said the golden man. “With greatest toil and care concocted it was from all the most delicate essences and forms of millennia past beyond telling, designed particularly to be pleasing, as was the fruit from which it came, to your palate and hers. We have destroyed the formula and the engines which can reproduce it. We will toast your happiness yearly, but when the last drop is drained, there will never be another bottle of it. The seed you carry and it alone can grow new trees to bring the fruit, and the wine, forth from extinction.” He smiled without moving his lips, by crinkling his eyes. “Should you wish to grow a tree or a grove for your children as their wedding days approach.”
“Whose wedding are we talking about?”
The man looked very surprised. “Yours!”
“I am already married.”
“The Nobilissimus del Azarchel informs us that your marriage was annulled by the Sacerdotal Order of your day and age, eons ago, on the grounds of a lack of consummation. The marriage mass will need to be performed again.”
“Well, he is a lying polecat and a louse that eats lice, so I will just hurt him in ways of which a man ought not speak in polite company, but it involves cutting off some parts of him and stuffing them down or up other parts of him. I am so sorry I missed the years when he could not get his head to form anything but a jackass head. That would have been the cream of the jest!”
“His defeat is absolute,” intoned the other. “We allow him liberty to walk our world as he will and do as he pleases, since any material good he takes can be replicated, and no harm to our physical forms can cause us discomfort.”
“He wanders around robbing and killing? That seems almost a particular kind of purgatory for a man like him.”
“Not so often anymore does he steal or kill. The novelty wore away after very few centuries.”
“I think it would be kindlier of y’all to fix him up with a donkey head as a punishment more fitting and less, well, philosophical than just leaving him alone, stealing and not being a king no more.”
“He is not idle. Mostly he reads books, which can be manufactured as needed from the ontic crystal, since we will not let him drink our glory. He is allowed certain laboratory equipment to reproduce certain experiments from four or five scientific revolutions ago.”
Montrose said, “Stranger, I did not rightly get your name.”
“We do not intrude our names unless asked,” replied the other gravely. “You honor me. For to know a man’s name, if the name be true, is to touch his soul and carry his burdens. I am the Judge of Ages.”
Montrose laughed. “You can have that cursed name and welcome to it! It weren’t never mine.”
“That is but the first of my names. Saeculum Coensor I am called, for I am given the task to organize these last few ages of human history, to reward those millennia who welcome the Vindication of Man and prepared wisely, and chastise those foolish millennia which do not. My next name is Rassaphore of the Epithalamion, for I bear the robe of the bridegroom, as well as the garments of the Earth and the girdle of the sea. Next, I am called Quintumvir, for I am Epitome of the Fifth Men. Finally, I am Praecantator Ultimus, because I am the last of cliometricians or aruspices to face the Asymptote.”
Montrose looked at him sharply. “Asymptote! That is a word I ain’t heard in a long while. What do you mean?”
“You are familiar with singularities in mathematics and physics, a point at which no extrapolation is possible, because all values fall to the infinitesimal or approach i
nfinity asymptotically?”
“Sure.”
“The return of your bride is one such an asymptote of singularity for us, because no prediction of the future, no, not even that accomplished by Toliman, Consecrate, and Zauberring acting in concert, can predict the vectors introduced by the Authority of M3.”
“But I heard from a guy in a dumb hat that Hyades had records about what happened before when planets was manumitted out of indentured servitude. Ours is not the first time.”
“The general terms are known: we must make arrangements to continue the strange and inexplicably pointless contest of transforming worlds and solar systems from inert matter to cognitive matter, either in return for resources proffered by Praesepe or as piecework. The Vindication of Man will prove that our race has the capacity to keep our oaths taken across sixty thousand years of time, but this does not mean the other Dominions under Praesepe’s control are wise to trust that we shall. Our Principalities may indeed prove too short-lived and shortsighted for them.”
“What about the specifics?”
“You mean the freedom or servitude of mortal races sure to be extinct long before even the shortest of these long-term obligations can be carried out? The only thing that is certain is that not even the Dominion of Hyades, if all his living suns and planets combined in one eon of meditation, with thoughts narrowcast from one side of the cluster to the other, could extrapolate what the Domination of Praesepe, his master, will do, no more than the Domination of Praesepe can guess at the mind of the Authority of M3. The intelligence of one hundred billion is as unimaginable to us as the intelligence of a quadrillion or quintillion, and yet they are five and eight orders of magnitude greater. The difference is more than that between a man and a coelacanth and includes difference not just of magnitude, but of kind. Therefore, this is the final hour any mind in the Empyrean of Man has predicted by cliometry. What shall be our institutions, mores, and law hereafter, we cannot say.”