The Architect of Aeons (31 page)

“We are the Third Human race, and stand to the Swans as they stand to the Firstlings. We are coherent where they are fissiparous. By Firstlings, we are called the Myrmidons.”

“I thought the word referred to ants, or maybe bullies who don't question orders.”

There was no reply to that.

“My name's Menelaus. And don't say
Meany Louse
, cause that joke weren't funny even back when I was human. How you doing? You fellers want anything to drink? I got whiskey. You can try the mechanical bull, excepting you ain't got butts.”

The mask on the blunt prow of the wormlike serpent spoke. “We have no need for alcohol nor athletics. We suffer no fatigue, we require no entertainment nor diversion, and we have no capacity for joy.” The voice was cold, as emotionless as if a winter forest had spoken.

“No family names, neither, I take it?” Montrose said. “No families? No nothing?”

The serpent mask said, “We are the first iteration of incarnate humanity that has done entirely away with the vagaries of sex, being reproduced artificially upon decree. It has freed us of much of the inefficiencies and disturbances of baseline humanity. We are creatures of pure reason, the Men of the Mind.”

“So the suicide rate among you is really high, huhn?”

The wheel masks spoke. Its voices were machinelike, too inhuman even to sound cold. “Each individual is owned by, and thought-monitored by, and obeys, whichever commission designs him; and owns whomever he designs and commissions. Any man who takes up a duty one of us fails, takes on his role and privileges and rank. If our memories are sufficiently worthy to be placed in long-term storage, and passed on to next generations, then the memory-lineage is given a name-designation, and downloaded into receptor engrams in the child organism. Hence suicide is irrelevant.”

“Except a high suicide rate shows you weren't built right. Some things can't be changed in human nature, no matter what Blackie says.”

The wheel masks spoke again. “There are pain-inducing circuits wired into the brain which allow for remote monitoring of neural-electrical activity. The torment causes no physical damage, and any thoughts, hopes, or prayers which might allow the subject sufficient fortitude to resist the pain are isolated as nerve paths and treated with opiates, hindering concentration. The technique tends to deter serial mass-suicides.”

The serpent mask added, “The change to human nature can be made if sufficient pain and sacrifice is inflicted.”

“Nasty. And Blackie actually thought critters of your crippled psychology were what the Hyades wanted as slaves, eh?”

The centaur mask spoke for the first time. Its voice was a baritone, with inflections ringing with pride and command. It sounded human and more than human. “You mock the heroic nature of our race.”

“Damn straight, I do.”

The centaur reared up on its hind legs, assuming the posture of a four-handed giant. The mask in the center of the human-shaped upper torso said coldly, “We suffer that others may live. All humanity would perish if the Myrmidons did not stand ready to preserve them. Our moral code is of iron, and it dictates that extinction must be avoided at all costs.”

Menelaus said wryly, “Lots of men say they have a code which promotes survival. Funny thing is, those are the very codes that don't.”

“Lesser men may say what they wish. We are Myrmidons. We stand ready to pay that cost.”

“So what about your suicide rate? That don't sound like survival at all costs to me.”

The centaur folded itself down on its haunches. “An elite force must purge the weak from its candidates: it is the same for races. Life serves life.”

The wheel said, “We are designed directly based on the Monument mathematics describing the mind-body correlations.”

“Which means what?”

The ostrich-shaped biped said, “It means we are highly adaptable, having only rudimentary personality formations, and therefore the aliens, no matter what their psychology, will surely find us useful. At the apex of all memory chains, the basic curriculum of value judgments and axioms from which the Third Race takes its form, is the Senior and the Learned Del Azarchel.”

The serpent added, “Our mental forms are designed to be compatible with what is known of the Hyades behavior strategies.”

“So his personality is reflected in all of you? You are all Blackie? Your whole damned race is Blackie? And he tortures himself to keep from killing himself? What kind of twisted freak is he? Pox on my poking stick! After all this time, I still ain't got no idea what makes his sick mind tick.”

The biped said, “The comments are irrelevant, and will be discarded.”

One of the smaller Montroses standing on the table said, “Mortiferous pestilence, but I ain't heard Blackie called
Senior
in a long time! Not the Master of the World no more, eh?”

And the voice of Iron Ghost Montrose said from the crystal wall, “He's back to Landing Party boss.”

Montrose pondered that for a moment with several of his minds.

7. Voyages to Stepmother Earths

A.D. 14303 TO 14551

Long ago, Blackie had launched the
Emancipation
to Epsilon Eridani, ten lightyears from Sol, bringing a delighted Montrose. It was not exactly his first interstellar voyage, but it was the first one he made while sane. Now that Jupiter had decreed an end to Blackie's exile, he had no trouble finding volunteers to create a new Hermetic Order, from which he bred and selected a picked complement of Swans officers and Firstling crew, mostly Sylphs.

Fairer than all songs, brighter than a sword unsheathed, the great ship opened her wings of fire, and rode a river of light across the endless night.

The world there, a tide-locked world called Nocturne, had been too poor to build a deceleration laser, so the
Emancipation
had shed one sail ahead, and caught in her deceleration chutes the reflected beam from that sail as it retreated into endless space.

The humans—if they could he called that—had enthusiastically embraced the sciences of pantropy which Jupiter had narrowcast to them before their first landfall. The deracination ship was still present in orbit, as an O'Neill colony from which populations had been, from time to time in centuries long past, floated randomly to the surface in great bubbles of alien material. Through pantropy those humans and their livestock were radically altered to allow them to survive, and a different species dominated each zone of ever-colder and ever-darker climates from the plutonian West Pole to the almost-terrestrial clime of the Terminator, the line of eternal dusk that surrounded the pole-to-pole equator of the planet.

The world was ruled by a cabal of cliometrists called Actuaries, who manipulated economies and events to force families and clans to tinker with their gene plasms and produce the various freakish sub-races to fill the allotted slots in their biologically determined caste system.

The dayside of Nocturne was uninhabitable, but Montrose and Del Azarchel had shown the Actuaries how to grow self-replicating acres of solar energy cells across the dead sea bottoms there.

In gratitude for the industrial revolution this innovation had fathered, the Actuaries had cannibalized the hulk of the deracination ship to build a launching laser in order to allow the
Emancipation
to sail back to Sol.

The round trip had taken less than a century.

Later, Del Azarchel was commanded by the growing Jupiter Brain to mount an expedition to Delta Pavonis, the other surviving colony, nearly bankrupting the Earth to do so.

This colony was twice as far away, a world called Splendor. Like a white gem set in an opalescent ring, Splendor shared its orbit with a bright, multicolored ring system stretching entirely around Delta Pavonis, a sun ringed like Saturn. This asteroid belt was thought to be the remnant of a disintegrated gas giant of which Splendor was supposed to be a surviving moon. At every latitude, the immense and brightly colored bands of the belt were visible, a rainbow running from horizon to horizon through the sun.

Falling stars were a daily or hourly occurrence. The icy landscape was broken with crater lakes, remnants of asteroid falls of dinosaur-extinction size, apparently falling with appalling frequency. It was a location only minds utterly indifferent to the chances of survival would select to plant a colony.

Their cold, low-gravity, diamond-bright world had a year some four hundred days long, but, unlike Nocturne, rotated with a ten-hour day, so the deracination ship could assume a geosynchronous orbit and lower its vast length like a space elevator, allowing a low energy method of ascent to orbit, and easy access to the seventeen large moons and countless smaller satellites crowding the world.

A single equatorial ocean cinctured the globe. Glacier covered the entire northern continent and the southern, sculpted into ghostly, fantastic shapes by high winds and low gravity. All was ice-locked save the belt of rugged seashore fjords and cliffs and narrow valleys where human fields and farms and walled towns grew. The golden domes and steaming spires of the seven competing ecological stations, placed among the precipices and crags of these fierce shores were now the seats of the world's arrogant ruling clans, the Houses of Splendor.

The local life, a spongy seaweed and a plethora of colorful jellies, lichens, molds, and balloonlike invertebrates, was obliterated, and the chemical composition of the equatorial ocean-belt and atmosphere slowly changed to suit human needs, as bacteria, then spores, then arctic sea life, piscine then mammalian, was introduced, one layer at a time, carefully, slowly.

The Splendids waited with astonishing patience for uncounted years in airtight sanctuaries worshipping their frozen and slumbering forefathers, waiting for their environmental engineering to tame their world of icy seas and jagged rocks and constant meteor impacts. Their grandfathers emerged in pressure suits, their fathers in breathing masks, and they emerged in parkas, and danced and skated on the ice beneath the earthly pine trees in an unearthly world they had made their own.

The Splendids made it a point of pride never to biomanipulate their folk to match the environment, but always to coax and torment the world into matching the folk. The Chimera and Melusine among them were forced to breed with the Witches and Sylphs to produce a strange but sturdy hybrid called a Splendid: long-lived and light-boned with neural antennae for sending and receiving signals. The Giants and Locusts, outnumbered and unaggressive, were killed in hideous wars and massacres.

The proud, austere, and uncooperative Swans retreated to the regions of icy inland waste, far from the single sea, lost in glacier-torn and treeless tundra larger than the entire combined land mass of Earth, lost beyond the reach of any possible pogrom. There they altered their children to adapt to the environment as it then was, and erected de-terraforming stations antithetical to the attempts of the Splendids: these icy Swans survived in volcanic craters or deep valleys or caverns where the smog of the original atmosphere still tenaciously clung, in palaces grown from surviving native fungi or glued together from the opalescent bodies of the floating invertebrates. According to the rumor Del Azarchel heard from the domestic ghosts of the Seven Houses, the Swans were merely waiting for men to die, that they might emerge and claim the world.

Nor did the ghosts disagree. The cliometric calculus of their many environmental xypotechs showed that the world of Splendids would suffer environmental decay and dropping population rates across the millennia, unless a mass of people as large as the original forced migration was gathered here by the Twenty-fifth Millennium. If not, the world would fall below the minimal population numbers needed to maintain the atmospheric towers and oceanic infusion wells, causing environmental degradation and a return to the original atmospheric balance of gases, and causing death of the entire (and entirely artificial) Earth-like biosphere.

And the cold-eyed Swans of Delta Pavonis in their white-winged robes would emerge from their icy coffins in the wastelands, never smiling once, and live their lives of isolation, under once-more native skies filled with smokes and dripping airborne jellyfish equally poisonous to man, meeting only to mate, and building no tools, neither interstellar ships nor interstellar radios.

For many years Del Azarchel dwelt on the cold world of Splendor, for the planet lacked the energy richness needed to return him home. Then a worldwide war broke out, a grim absurdity on a world so desperately void and empty. Del Azarchel, aiding and betraying the ferocious warlords one after another, used his ship's sails as orbital mirrors to melt and crack the glaciers where various armies hid, or sink the icebergs used as barges by their navies, or used his ship's position to deflect meteors toward defenseless towns, until he was in able to decree himself supreme leader, nobilissimus and lord. When he commanded the cowering civilization to gather the resources needed to exile him back to Sol, gladly they obeyed.

The
Emancipation
towed the launching laser beyond their cometary halo, far beyond the orbit of Tailfeather, the outermost planet of Delta Pavonis. The lonely laser lighthouse was manned by Swans and thinking machines with no loyalty to the Splendids, and by some miracle the laser beam did not fail during an entire decade of terawatt output.

Del Azarchel mounted no further expeditions to Delta Pavonis. The chances that the Swans, or, if not they, whosever unwise hands it might be that the transplutonian lighthouse of Delta Pavonis fell into next, would not turn the apocalyptically powerful laser against the planet Splendid, were very slim. Del Azarchel did not expect the colony to survive, and Montrose (for Del Azarchel after his return shared all his finding with him) expected no better.

There were no other destinations from which any radio messages returned, and so no other expeditions from Sol were launched.