The Architect of Aeons (26 page)

Montrose stepped forward, his face red with a blush. Whether it was a blush of anger or a blush of shame was not clear, not even to him. He took Amphith
ö
e roughly by the shoulder and drew her to her feet. “Stand up. I don't know you, and you are not my mother. She's a far piece fiercer than you, for one thing, and uglier, too. Get up! I have not agreed to Blackie's plan. I am not going to break the phantasm barrier, and let these machines that think they are gods take over your history, your lives, your thoughts. The Jupiter Mind can mind his own damned business. I have not agreed!”

“But you will,” said Del Azarchel, soft as a snake whispering. “Because you must.”

Amphith
ö
e was standing on her tiptoes in her little jeweled slippers, because Montrose, forgetting how tall he was, was pulling her arm too roughly and too high. She raised her nose and wore a calm expression. “I am your mother in my heart. But if your true mother were here, what would she do?”

“She'd lick me with a strap, I guess, and tell me not to do it, never to agree with Blackie.” Montrose had a hollow, haunted look to his eyes now. He let go the little Nymph woman's arm and stepped back.

Del Azarchel gritted his teeth and said nothing. Del Azarchel was canny enough to know when not to speak. Reason can reach a man willing to be reasonable, and rhetoric can stir a man willing to open his ear. But when a man was wrestling with those ghosts called memory, no voice can reach him.

He had been certain, despite the words of Montrose, that Montrose would yield to the pressure of the inevitable. But now Del Azarchel's sense of certainty stumbled. Del Azarchel had not expected anyone on Earth to be clever enough to preserve Amphith
ö
e in suspension and thaw her for a stunt like this. Clever, but it had backfired. Del Azarchel adored the memory of his own mother as a saint. Montrose did not.

In an agony of disgust, his stomach boiling as if he'd swallowed acid, Del Azarchel watched and waited for his centuries and millennia of planning, plotting, warring, and scheming, his assassinations and deceptions, all to come to nothing. To nothing! And all because the little human boy buried in the memory of posthuman Montrose still feared and respected a woman long dead, and who, in the grand scheme of things, was less than a monkey.

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.”

Amphith
ö
e 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.”

Amphith
ö
e 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.”

Amphith
ö
e 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, Amphith
ö
e 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.”

Amphith
ö
e 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 Montrose sailed away with the current, downstream.

Then Del Azarchel turned and said lightly to Amphith
ö
e, “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?”

Amphith
ö
e 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.”