The Architect of Aeons (4 page)

“Are you as curious as I,
amigo
?”

“That I am, partner.”

“Then our alliance and nonaggression pact continues?”

“We need proper seconds and judges and a right good footing with no shipside Coriolis effect to throw off my aim. You don't even need to ask. I ain't going to shoot you in the back, and I know you ain't going to shoot me in the back. The survivor will have to live with himself until the end of time. Cause both of us stopped aging a while back, and neither of us ain't planning to cash out our chips early on … Jesus H. Christ in a thorny hat!”

“Please don't blaspheme,” said Del Azarchel, which surprised Montrose, even though it should not have. Hard to remember that Blackie took his religion seriously, or seemed to.

“That weren't no blasphemery! That was a pestilential
prayer
of poxed
thanksgiving
! I been hanging out with you too long, Blackie, that I almost forgot that I don't believe nothing you say!
You
think the Hyades world-armada, that cloud of black slime the size of a gas giant, after coming all this way from Epsilon Tauri was sure to crush any resistance.
You
said mankind, not humans and not posthumans, not Swans and not Potentates, none of us could possibly hurt them nor drive them off! But I ain't never said that!”

Del Azarchel said, “I don't see your point.”

“Which shows that, no matter how smart you are, you cannot escape your axioms and assumptions. What is the simplest explanation for what we are seeing? Earth is here. The Varmint ain't.”

“I still don't…”

“We won. We drove them off.”

“Impossible.”

“Let's get a radio message to someone, and get permission to land, read a newspaper, find out the story. We can always ripple our sail like a honking big heliograph and send them flashes in Morse code.”

“Or burn a city from orbit if they ignore or threaten us,” added Del Azarchel with a dark smile.

“You are one sick, sick puppy.”

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, or a world-ruler dispossessed, or so they say.”

“Start sending signals. How long can it take?”

7. Reply

A.D. 11055

“Cowhand, we're getting a reply from the surface. It is in the Swan language, which, like the Monument code itself, contains its own self-reflexive predictions for its own semantic changes and semiotic drift.”

“So y'all were able to find a common language?”

“In theory we could have rendered one using infinite-variable calculus techniques to solve toward absolute syntax strange attractors. But it was just easier to use Latin.”

“
Omnes viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam,
I reckon. Who was it? What d'they say about the Varmint, or the location of the Earth? What happened?”

“It calls itself the Judge of Years and the Voice of the Swan, and seems not to be in the mood to answer questions. I cannot tell if this comes from some corner of planetwide No
ö
sphere, or is some smaller, independent group, or even a lone crackpot with a radio. The signals are coming from the eastern shore of Africa. It says the Swan for whom it speaks grants us permission to make splashdown. It gives a longitude and latitude and a window of time. Do we trust this unknown voice?”

“Better than sitting up here in ice'tween our buttock cheeks. The Swans should not be able to see us or stop us, so we got the perfect smuggling vessel. Let's risk it. Do I need to recite that poem from Kipling?
If you can keep your hat when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you
…”

“You are a man after my own bold heart, but spare me your clubfooted Anglo jingles, I who rejoice in the fiery wine of Manuel Jos
é
Quintana, or who have flown to the pure classical summit of the Paradise by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos!”

“Anglo poems is better. I see you one Shakespeare and raise you a Chaucer.”

“I match them and find them wanting against the satire of Cervantes and earthiness of the Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita. In any case, I am willing to risk my heap of winnings on one turn of pitch-and-toss—”

“There is a
‘but'
a-coming, ain't there?”

“—but this Judge of Years has warned us that neither will we be given nor sold any heavy water to spare for the fusion drive of the landing craft, to power a launch again. To land now is to be stranded.”

“Fine,” said Montrose, sending an X-ray version of his face cartoon, so Blackie could see him grit his teeth. “We nip out to the asteroid belt, find a likely chunk of ice, boil it down, render up enough heavy water to do a safe belly flop into their oceans … how long can that take?”

“I do wish you'd stop saying that.”

8. Splashdown

A.D. 11057

The new orbit of Earth made the winters much more severe than in prior eons. The
Emancipation
formed her mirrored sail as a magnifying glass to clear the icebergs from a generous volume of the Sea of Arabia. Here, not long after, the ship's fifty-foot pinnace splashed down.

Bobbing to the surface, Montrose and Del Azarchel commanded the hatch of the flattened, trilobite-shaped craft to undog itself and admit the atmosphere of Earth, which neither had breathed for centuries. The air whistled in the dorsal hatch and internal xenon gas, which had been used as a preservative to fill the interior, streamed out of ventral gills just above the waterline, an unseen smoke.

Both bodies had been prepped for a quick thaw, so it was only a matter of minutes, rather than hours, before their coffin lids slid aside and they saw each other once more in the flesh.

Del Azarchel was naked, soaked with medical fluid, and holding a longsword whose hilts were crusted with dazzling work of diamond, topaz, and jacinth. The scabbard was white leather flayed from the flesh of the Coptic Patriarch who had reigned on Earth before the rise of Del Azarchel to power. Montrose had his white glass caterpillar-drive pistols in his hands.

“You look shaggy,” observed Del Azarchel.

“I cannot believe you programmed your coffin to trim and maintain your little goat beard thingie all these centuries.”

“Hair cells are cells; why should I grow uncouth, merely because I slumber? You must tidy yourself, though. The portable head unfolds from the deck, and I think there is a dop kit with a straight razor. You can program your coffin fluid into lather, if you like.…”

“I know what it can do! I designed the damnified Jell-O one molecule at a time. The message told us to land here. If they are surface dwellers, they will send a boat, or if they are sea dwellers, they'll surface. Is there anything outside?”

Del Azarchel surprised him by not going over to the sensor panel (which was bolted down for gee-maneuver conditions) but by simply swarming up the newly formed ladder to the hatch, and sticking his head into the sunlight.

He yelled and jumped down.

Montrose readied his pistols. “You hurt? What happened?”

“Wind chill, Cowhand. It is cold as Erebus out there. There is a clipper ship made of fiberglass on the horizon, approaching from the south. I saw men and elevated animals aboard, and from the play of the waves I deduce they are accompanied by an escort of dolphins, which I assume are post-delphic Cetaceans. It is a six-masted ship with energy lanterns ranked on three firing tiers port and starboard, with swivel-mounted bow-chasers. So your little magnetic pistols may not be enough to sink her.”

“Yeah, well, I will leave you to sink the ship with your pigsticker. Think you can awl a hole in the hull with that piece of ironmongery?”

“Ah! Speaking of which—the Iron Crown of Lombardy! Shame I had to store it in a mere boat locker.” Del Azarchel moved over to a rack bolted to the overhead, and worked the catch, drawing out a transparent, macromolecular-locked diamond case.

“Blackie, you are a damn crazy man,” opined Montrose.

“Compared to whom?”

“You are stark naked wearing a crown on your head.”

“I would say this shows a nicety of priority on my part. I had the ship fabricate any number of proper garments, which we, as historical figures of some import, should not hesitate to don.”

“Hope you included parkas.”

“I will break out your gear, Cowhand, while you are shaving. Are you really going to use that barbaric knife rather than a depilatory cream?”

“Bowie knife, not barbaric knife.”

“We are on a rocking deck! You'll cut your jugular.”

“And deprive you of the pleasure of shooting me? Not likely.”

“Spoken like a true friend. I have laid out your…”

“Are you yanking my Johnson with this? What is this, a costume party?”

“I had thought, considering…”

“An English judicial robe and a long white wig. That is what you thought I wanted to wear?”

“As the Judge of Ages, that is the garb legend describes.”

“Legend can stick a snorkel up my bunghole and suck a heaping snort of dung fume. Besides, we been out of touch with local legends for quite a spell. Who knows what they think about us nowadays? Maybe they've forgotten us. That'd be a relief, wouldn't it?”

“Not at all. It would mean a lot of work to reacquaint them with whom they are dealing.”

“I am not going to let you burn any more cities from orbit, you sick snot.”

“That was long ago, and a regrettable necessity, and all those people, had they lived, would have been every one extinct with all their racial stock by now in any case. We are the only true
Homo sapiens
left.”

“It weren't so long ago that you ain't still licking your lips over it like the tomcat what found the fishbowl. So what are you wearing?”

“Hm? The uniform of the Hermetic Order, of course. Simple, tasteful, black—does not show dirt. I brought yours as well, just in case you want to assume the rank and station to which you are entitled. I will take it as an honor if you would agree,
amigo
.”

“Nope. I'll wear the damn fool Halloween costume instead. And you keep talking like we is still the cock of the roost. Pardner, the Giants is as smart as us, and the Swans are smarter, and moon has a mind many magnitudes smarter yet, and moon ain't even one sixth of the volume used to be at the core. So maybe you should take off your dinky crown, forget that you used to rule the Earth, and remember you is now a beggar, you and me both, and there are super-beings as far above our mere posthuman selves as we are above a sheepdog of middle-to-average doggy smarts. Now, I grant you, sheepdog smarter than a sheep, but you think that makes the shepherd ready to give Rover a vote on whether he gets fixed?”

Del Azarchel had pulled a dark uniform about him. It was made of ultralightweight black silk, with a ring at the collar to fit an air hood. The hood itself hung down the back, a triangle of silver and red fabric. The fabric was woven through like the fine, many-branching veins in a leaf, with countless tiny tubules for life support, heating and refrigeration circuits, and air capillaries. Black gauntlets and black toe socks completed the outfit, and a silvery half-cape of shadow-cloth, dotted with a gem-design of energy cells.

Del Azarchel held up a massive bracelet or amulet of dark red touch-sensitive metal. It was fanged on the inner surface, and looked like a medieval torture instrument. He put his hand in the clamp, wedged the amulet against a flat surface, and leaned on it with his other hand and arm, shoving the big needles and spikes into his arm. He writhed and grimaced as the needles sought out veins and nerve connections in his wrist, and sent a probe into his bone marrow.

Montrose winced. “There are ways a sight less fearsomely painful to do that these days. Technology works wonders, y'know.” By way of demonstration, he put his left hand into the medical fluid of his now open coffin. When he removed it a moment later, there was a layer of hard flesh, like the shell of a tortoise, encircling his left wrist and grown into it, and the shell was nacreous ruby. It looked feminine compared to Del Azarchel's heavy manacle, but the computing power used to oversee the continual process of reversing aging errors in cell growth by means of spoofed RNA was the same. Del Azarchel had shared the secret of eternal youth with Montrose when Montrose shared the secret of eternal slumber.

Del Azarchel held the arm which bore the ancient amulet high, and gazed at the antique biotechnology appliance with hawklike stare, his handsome eyes narrowing slightly.

“Menelaus,” he said softly, “it is not the opinion of the world that concerns me, nor am I a man to be moved by such light and trifling things, no, not even if the world contains such genius as cannot be estimated. I wear the Iron Crown because it be my right. My conquests I will not forget, even if history forgets, nor all the glory of them. This suit is symbol of my order. The world outside is my child, made by me and marred by you, and so it is a child who escaped control. No matter: my heart is already set on greater things. All this I did, all this, merely so that the Hyades and their superior powers would enfold us within their civilization. It is up to us whether we shall be like the Japanese when they met the European, whom they so soon imitated and surpassed, or like the Negro, who could neither combine to drive them off, nor learn from them—yet even the sons of slaves in whiter lands, once freed, earned and learned and equaled them and then surpassed. Even at the price of slavery, were they not better off? We are immortals, now, Menelaus. Nothing but the long term should concern us.”

“So you ain't thinking of just beguiling away the time until my Rania comes back?”

“Mine, not yours,” said Del Azarchel with a humorless smile, sharply white within his black goatee, and a twinkle in his eye, dark and large beneath dark brows. “And I shall see to it that this world is fit for her to return to, or, if my ambition deceived me not, a horde of all the local stars. An extensive kingdom in space I will offer her as bride price!”