1
The Sound of Her Voice
1. A Bad Call
A.D. 68010
As he woke in his selective fashion, layer by layer, the central node version of Menelaus Montrose wondered if he had made a bad call.
Was he losing his nerve? Was he losing his mind?
Just to check, Montrose called a forum of his ulterior and inferior minds, including archived templates, remote units, and singles. The consensus mind briefly formed and ran through some twelve billion quotient-seconds of self-calculations, including that branch of specialized cliometry reserved for coordinate minds predicting their own behaviors over the long term.
Both the superhuman and subhuman versions of himself returned the answer that, yes, he was losing his grip.
“But why?” Montrose called out across the many channels linking his mind spaces together. “I am just the same as I always was!”
2. His House
Where the Mediterranean once had been was now a mountain range. What had once been the land between the Nile and the Congo was now an inland sea called Tethys. The southern continent was called Pannotia, and the northern Baltica. Millennia ago, when this northern coastline of Baltica had been inch by inch submerging into the Atlantic, Montrose had bought this tract of land on speculation, since the long-term tectonic plate movements planned by Tellus foretold that this land would rise once more above the sea in the seventeen thousand years before the return of Rania. And he grew and built a house here, relieved, for once, that he had no need to lock himself into a hidden and heavily armed subterranean tomb.
Years passed, and the land sank, and more passed, and it rose again. Hills to either side of him first breached the waves, forming an island chain, and the uplands rose, forming a peninsula, and now his land was in the midst of an isthmus reaching between the mountains of Cambria the plateau of Normandy. The hills and uplands of what had once been the English Channel pushed their green and pine-clad heads into the icy air, all save, ironically, the acres where he’d placed the main house.
So at the moment, he was somewhere under the waters of a loch, which was under an ice layer, in the middle of a diamond-walled mansion so old that it had been on the surface when last he checked, and so smart that it simply adapted to the changing environment, and replanted the hedge mazes surrounding the main house with sea plants and corals.
The diamond mansion had both roots striking down to subcrustal information cables and branches reaching up through the lake water to thrust naked twigs above the ice layer. These antennae grew or shrank as needed. They could receive and send signals to convenient orbitals or towers sixty thousand miles high, reaching from anchors affixed beneath the mantle to geostationary points in orbit. Through these antennae he could reach other versions of himself, in other stages and conditions of awareness, seated elsewhere.
3. His Hierarchy
At his cry of despair, somewhere in the depths of the logic diamond core of the planet, two of the Archangel-level supermontroses, beings of intelligence in the ten thousand range, exchanged information signals corresponding to wry glances, or prodding the inside of one’s cheek with a tongue.
Meanwhile, a hypersupermonstrose, who existed intermittently at the Potentate level in the eight hundred thousand intelligence range, was like a looming statue in the background of the shared Montrosian thoughtspace. He sent a brief, sardonic message to the forum: “Oh, surely so. Poxing pustules on my peck! We’s just as human as ever. Rania is almost here! Nothing else matters!”
But it was the singles, of intelligence between two or one thousand, some of whom occupied human-formed bodies in near-Earth orbit, or on the upper or lower levels of the vast space elevators rising by the dozen from Terra’s recently formed unbroken equatorial mountain range, or bodies larger than whales swimming in the sea, or in the flooded tunnels running through the mantle of the Earth, who answered back, “You need a priest. You need confessing. Something gnawing at your gut, and you ain’t man enough to face up to it.”
“Why do you say that?” the central Montrose, still half-awake, demanded.
“What do you feel guilty about?” came the message from the consensus forum of Montrose-minds.
That particular central Montrose, who was in the act of waking up, his attention divided between the smarter versions and the simpler, suddenly halted the waking process.
Montrose said to himselves, “Guilty about what?”
No doubt it would have been quicker to wake the Potentate level version of himself, but such extraordinary minds used up extraordinary amounts of energy and infrastructure rather quickly. Unless he wanted to go out into the current world and work for a living—or beg or steal—to get the resources to support him and his infrastructure, it was better if the giant slept.
He was also haunted by the memory of a particular high-energy version of Montrose who once had been admiral of the Black Fleet, back in the old days, during the coming of Cahetel. He had slain himself, or let himself be slain, which was much the same thing. Whatever else had been in his memory and experience, thoughts, visions, dream, ambitions, ideas, everything from that slain version was gone. Montrose often put the lost section of his life from his mind, but it just as often returned, like a tongue that cannot help but seek out the hole left by a missing tooth. It was as if a stroke had left a blank spot in his mind.
“And what if the smarter version of me sees something I cannot poxing stand to see? Is he going to commit suicide also? And take me with him?”
They answered back, “Rania wouldn’t like that.”
Another version looked at the calendar. “Why am I waking up now? What has happened?”
It was the Sixty-Ninth Millennium. A thousand years before her return. The last tiny sliver of time. A negligible amount of time. A hiccough. He could do it standing on his head. One more nap, and she was here.
So why did he keep waking himself up?
The Potentate Montrose, buried in a matrix of black murk somewhere near the core of the self-aware world, renting part of the Tellurian Mind, answered softly, “Psychological weakness.”
“You’re poxing me.”
“No pox. You were beaten by your mommy as a boy, and this made you strangle on apron strings from then to now. You are afraid of women; afraid you cannot be the boss, play the man, take command. You think Rania is too good for you.”
Montrose said, “That ain’t the reason. I don’t buy it.”
“You should buy what I sell. I am a far piece smarter than you, after all,” said the Potentate Montrose.
The two Archangel Montroses, far less in intellect than the Potentate, but immensely smarter than the waking version who tossed and mumbled in his coffin egg and served as the mental phylum’s central node, both said in slightly different wording, “But all our sins and fears and neurotic little twitches we built up over the years, they, too, get all big when we get all big. The black spot on a balloon expands when the balloon swells up, don’t it?”
Central Montrose said, “I should be able to throw the clock out the window, shoot the rooster, turn over, stuff my head under the pillow, and go back to sleep. But I am tossing and turning. I thought things were … I dunno … settled.”
“What’s keeping you up?”
“I am just worried about whether I made a bad call, that’s all. You know.”
They did. He was worried whether the price he paid for that tiny little seventeen-and-a-half-thousand-year nap was too high.
4. While He Slept
He and Blackie had a deal. No more meddling in history, no more duels, no more nothing until she got back. They had not technically shaken hands on it, but Blackie had agreed! It had been so close, so soon, less than eighteen millennia! A pittance!
Dark ages followed bright in rapid succession. Twice more the aliens visited mankind with their horrid, irresistible power, scattering men to the stars. Dying and failing and sometimes prevailing, the pantropicly altered men of many new subspecies on the terraformed worlds now used the techniques pioneered by Montrose to create Pellucid, to stir their nickel-iron cores to life as Potentates; and those, in turn, took their fire giants, ice giants, and gas giant worlds within reach and, using the techniques pioneered by Del Azarchel, woke Powers to awareness; and those Powers, urged on in messages never heard by mortals by the dark agencies of Hyades, built Dyson clouds and Dyson spheres and macroscale structures in rings and hemispheres about their stars, gods beyond gods, self-aware arrays large as solar systems, called Principalities.
The chords and notes of the symphony of history changed, but the two great themes never ceased to clash: the urge for liberty, with each man free to calculate his own destiny and selecting his own place within the scheme of prediction, forever fought the need for unity, conformity, and, above all, predictability, without which long-term trade with Hyades was impossible.
The enmities between the Powers, who warped and bent the currents of predictive history to their dark will, were carried on in those children that so far surpassed them, as the gods in legend overtowered the titans: the Principalities of Tau Ceti, Proxima, Altair, and 61 Cyngi. A greater plateau of intellect, immeasurable, indescribable, unimaginable to biological life, was achieved, but not peace.
But Montrose, seeing that these convulsions and conflicts would not diminish the ability of civilization to decelerate and receive his approaching wife in her strange, huge, lonely vessel, kept his ageless vigil and slept through it all.
Throughout, Blackie seemed not to be doing anything sinister. What was he waiting for? What was he up to?
The nagging fear would not leave Montrose that his bargain with Blackie had been a mistake, and it all was going to explode in his face.
5. Duel to the Self-Destruction
But one of the remote Montroses, a man no smarter than Montrose had been back when he was only Mr. Hyde, a mere posthuman with an intelligence of four hundred, broke into the conversation path with a priority signal. “Worrying about Blackie is a fine hobby to keep a body busy while we wait. Beats whittling. But that is not the reason you keep waking yourself up.”
“So what’s the reason?” snapped Central Montrose.
Posthuman Montrose said, “We are still crippled by the limits of our own mental architecture. It don’t scale up. The superbrains, the bigger they get, the easier they get to go crazy, easier to divaricate, easier to split into a zillion stray thought-chains, each squabbling like snakes in a mason jar. That is why Jupiter killed his bad ol’ self, and don’t fool yourself none thinking otherwise. Lookit here, smarty-pants Montroses.”
An image came over the channel. Posthuman Montrose was dressed in a dark cloak and a wide-brimmed sombrero, standing near a grove of peach trees adorned with roses rather than peach blossoms. He was peering to where two men in armor stood in the near distance.
These were two more Montroses, both semiposthuman, each equal in body and mind, wearing the armor of duelists, each carrying the cubit-long iron tube of a Krupp dueling pistol.
They stood in a field of some species of bright red clover and pink grass Montrose did not recognize, some weed imported from another world, which should not have been able to grow on Earth. Behind them was a row of tall banners and standards of orange and gold whose meaning Montrose did not recognize, but a helpful familiarization file explained that these were privacy flags, attempting to emit encryption to ban the attention of media, gossips, and historians.
“I am here to kill myself?” Montrose muttered. “This is not a good sign.”
The judge was dressed in the distinctive garb of a Penitent, barefoot in a white robe and conical purple hood of unlikely height, with a rope for a belt.
The men of the planet Penance were similar in build and look to Rosicrucians, since they were all descended from the sons of Cazi who had aided Montrose in stealing his starship, the Emancipation, back from Blackie, star-faring toward what was an uninhabited planet when they set out, but arrived to find a starving colony of Swans and Men from Albino and Dust, dropped there by the inhuman indifference of the Fourth Sweep. The ancestors of the Penitents half saved and half conquered these survivors and built a mighty civilization where men were free and secure.
The world had worked and woken to self-awareness in record time and launched a gigantic treasure ship back to Sol to prove the point of what a free world could build, arriving in the Fifty-Sixth Millennium.
Ah! Montrose grinned at the memory, because the ship, christened the Prestor John, had been outfitted at his suggestion as a huge fraud, crewed only by female astronauts prettier than their Fox Maiden ancestors and pretending to be from the lost and legendary colony at Houristan, the paradise of women. For once, events worked out as Montrose’s secret calculations of cliometry predicted, and as the Guild grew fearful of an imaginary empire beyond their boundaries, and ashamed of the example, so the interstellar slave trade waned and was abolished in many ports of call.
The recollection warmed him like an ember in a pipe. After a trick like that, fooling even the Archangels and Potentates and Powers, what need had Montrose had to stay awake and look after things?
A familiarization file helpfully explained that a domed city called Penitentiary still rested on a mountain in Asia on Earth, holding the environment and oxygen-charged atmosphere of that remote world, and proud and wealthy descendants of the ship’s crew dwelled like their ancestors, and their daughters eagerly sought in marriage or for pageants and displays or events of less worthy sorts. By tradition, they hid their wealth, and walked abroad in humble garments, and were hated and envied nonetheless. Small wonder the duelists selected a man from that race to be their judge of honor.
The two Seconds assisting in the duel shocked him to see.
One was the rotund form of Mickey the Witch, whom all reports and all common sense said should have been dead countless centuries and millennia ago. His face was round and full of mirth, and his eyes were small and twinkled with cunning.
He was dressed in robes resplendent and lavish to the point of absurdity. Silks as black as raven’s wing and scarlet like the cardinal’s were trimmed with ermine whiter than the snowy owl. There were nine yards of cloth just in the sweeping sleeves whose hems trailed on the grass. His shoes had pointed toes so extravagantly long and tall Montrose wondered that they had impaled no passersby. And all this was adorned in gems and gewgaws and inscribed with trigrams and psalms and mystic circles and astrological signs from a dozen bogus systems of occultism. The tree of the cabala along the spine of his flowing alb was enhanced with sigils from the Monument. Most absurd of all was his hat, which was a cone a cubit high, with jeweled chinstrap and ceremonial earflap, tassels, scarves, homunculus mouth, blinking eyes, and brim of glittering moonstones.
The other Second was a girl, which was a shocking breach of tradition. Her body was perhaps eighteen, but from her stance and glance and tilt of her head, her mind was years younger. Her eyes were wide and wrapped in dreams, her lips pouty and pretty and ready for kisses, but her hair was an astonishing wilderness of purple that glowed with phosphorescence. She was naked except for a semitransparent, semiluminous garment flung casually over one shoulder that flowed and floated around her shapely limbs. It was a blue-gray material that seethed like a live thing, glinting with sparks of motion, like a nest of invisibly tiny numberless flying insects whose legs were so entangled to each other that the whole formed long, elegant sheets and pleats and folds.
He did not recognize her, but from the electromagnetic echoes around her head, his instruments detected that she had the directional sense of a migratory bird. She was a Sylph, a member of a race of airborne nomads so long dead that even Montrose’s advanced brain ached with fatigue when counting the ages gone.
“Who the plagued roup is that?” Central Montrose shouted.
Posthuman Montrose, standing at the edge of the red field in a black hat and poncho, said, “You are an idiot.”
An Archangel Montrose said, “That is Trey.”
“Who?”
“Trey Soaring Azurine, the Sylph. You met her the day you discovered Rania had ripped the diamond star out of orbit, and was lost to you for thirty-three thousand nine hundred years times two plus change; and that same day, Blackie put his handprint on the moon. She went into slumber, one of your first customers ever, just to follow you through time and see what happened, how it all turns out.”
“And why is Mickey here?” asked Central Montrose.
“For the wedding,” said Potentate Montrose, looming like a sphinx above the thoughtscape, this mind too deep and rapid to apprehend. “For love.”
“What wedding?” asked Central Montrose.
“You are an idiot, like our idiot brother said.” The Archangel Montrose sighed.
“Thanks, I think,” said the Posthuman Montrose. “Makes me want to shoot myself, sometimes.”
Central Montrose looked through Posthuman Montrose’s eyes by feeding a stepped-down neural flow from the posthuman into the optic centers of his brain. Now a large torpedo-shaped dirigible hanging just above the grove could be seen. It was a Sylph aeroscaphe, complete with serpentines dangling from its gondola to give it the aspect of a jellyfish. Montrose would have been just as surprised to see a gasoline-powered Ford Thunderbird from Detroit from the First Space Age or galleon from the Golden Age of Spain.
He looked at the girl’s wild eyes and her strangely absentminded smile. “I dunno. That girl looks a little … unstable. Didn’t she get shot in the gut or something? Wasn’t she going to marry Scipio?”
The Posthuman standing on the field said, “It gets better.” He stepped out from the rose-covered trees and directed his eyes to another point of the field. To one side, beyond the banners but near the rose trees, sat Del Azarchel in a Morris chair, eating popcorn from a paper bag, perhaps the only paper bag on Earth in this era. His smile was like the sun. He had waxed his moustache and combed his beard, and looked more like a goat than ever, or perhaps like some pagan god of old who danced in the wood and worked malice on unwary Greeks.
“Bugger me with a submarine! What the pestiferous epidemical plagues of hell is that whoreson coxcomb doing here?”
“Gloating,” said the Posthuman. “Want me to go over and talk to him?”
“He is poxy up to something! He has got some scheme! What is he up to?”
The Archangel spoke again. “Off and on—and more off than on, due to energy budget constraints—we been watching him over the centuries, or having our Patricians do it, or Neptune.”
“So what is he plaguing up to?”
“Your lesser version just told you, you stump-stupid, pox-brained buffalo. Gloating. That is what he is up to. He is watching us tear ourselves apart the closer she gets to coming home. Show him the last bit, little brother.”
The Posthuman turned his head.
Opposite him, on the other side of the field, stood Rania dressed in a simple robe of white, her bright hair and brighter smile and eyes like an angel. The sight of her face was like twin daggers of light in through his eyes into the deepest part of his brain. The pain and longing and love choked his next thought.
But Posthuman Montrose said, “That’s not her.”
Central Montrose said, “What the pestilent pox is going on?”
“Turns out that there was some leftover false Ranias,” Archangel Montrose explained, “made by our old pal Sarmento ‘Makes Me Ill’ a d’Or, or maybe from those experiments our friend Mother Selene halted, way back when.”
The Posthuman said, “The lady is a Monument reader. She got found in one of our old, old tombs and woken up by some man or some god with nothing better to do. Half a century ago our time, the first message from the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum was picked up by ultrasensitive receivers—”
“—that is the human name for the attotechnology supership the aliens at M3 gave the real Rania. What the aliens call the ship, we don’t know. The message is called the Canes Venatici Neutrino Anomaly—” supplied the Archangel Montrose, interrupting on a parallel channel.
“—and Number Six over yonder wanted to go through the Monument notations Rania sent line by line, and got this girl to translate for him, and spent too much time alone with her, and sniffed what she smelled like, and saw that place behind her ear when she turned her head, and sure looked like Rania’s neck, white as a swan’s neck and all, and so he done fell empty head over kicking heels in damnable love with her. Her name is Shiranui Kage-no-Ranuya-ko, the fiery shadow of little Rania.”
It was the name of a Fox Maiden, a race long ago extinct on Earth, which meant she had come from a deeply buried tomb, or from the Empyrean.
“What’s the fight over?”
“Number Five, that’s our cousin there, says the only way to keep every version of Montrose willing and able to recombine into one person with one mind and one soul is if and only if we all have one purpose. Love for Rania. So Six says no, this is an exception, and Five says bullpox, and Six says up your nose, and Five throws down the glove and says get your Seconds and your shooting iron. Got it?”
Angrily, Central Montrose sent, “There was a message from Rania, and you did not wake me?”
The Posthuman sent back, “You should word your orders more careful-like. The message, it didn’t have nothing personal in it, just cliometry equations to pull mankind back from the brink of extinction, so we did not wake you up.”
Central Montrose said, “She would have put in a secret message just for me, hidden in the enjambments and negative thought-character spaces!”
The Posthuman said, “We looked. Weren’t nothing. So we let you snooze. You wanted to slumber so damn much and just get the waiting over, right? And everything was all set, right?”
The Archangel added sardonically, “Besides, waking all us up at once, much less fitting every memory and personality growth back together into one system in one body costs money, and unless someone wants to pay me to do a historical essay starring my pox-awfully wondrous wonderful self, what skills we got this market here and now cares diddly-do about, eh?”
The sheer sass of the reply was a bad sign. Usually he was more respectful of himself. He looked at the numbers in his mind’s eye, ran through the cliometric calculus, and got a nonsense answer. Some factor was missing from the equation.
“I don’t know. Blackie never seems to run low on funds.”
“Well, you’re supposed to know,” said one of him. (He was not sure which one. All of him sounded alike to him. He wondered if his other hims had the same problem.) “You! You are the central leadership node of our scattered personality here. You’re the boss.”
“Well, pox on you and the rutting donkey that you rode in on! You are the current version, who is supposed to keep an eye on events—and an eye on Blackie—and wake me when something needs fixing so I can sleep in peace!”
The Archangel chimed in, “Little brother, I ain’t even sure how the market works these days, and I have an intelligence range north of ten thousand.”
“I ain’t as smart as either of you, but I read the day feeds,” said the Posthuman. “It is a system that tracks a quantified form of liquid glory the Patricians drink and bathe in.”
“What the hellific pox? Do you mean glory like bright light, or glory like the applause of the world at your reputation?” asked Central Montrose.
“Both and neither,” answered the Archangel and Posthuman together. Those two had knit themselves back into a single system at this point. The debt register showed considerable expense just for those two to merge. “Don’t worry. The Fox Maidens and the Myrmidons, back when they still existed, could not make heads nor buffalos about it neither.”
The Potentate from the world’s core said, “This problem is insoluble. If we sleep, we miss life and snore through dangers. If we wake, we change too much, and Rania won’t know us. You have slept too long, and the signs of disunion and disharmony you see among the lesser versions of us is a by-product of Divarication.”
But one of the duelists, Number Five, sent angrily, “It’s not Divarication. It’s madness. Your conscience is lashing you like Mom used to. That clench in your stomach is you trying not to puke up what you swallow of your bad deeds. And now Rania is getting close, and it is getting too late!”
Central Montrose sent, “What bad deeds?”
“Giving up on the human race. You don’t care what happens once Rania comes back!”
Central Montrose had no reply to that, but he could feel segments of his mind rapidly trying to rewrite the thought, distort it, hide it from himself, and that made him sickly suspicious that Number Five Montrose was right. So he said nothing.
Number Five said, “You won every fight, even against artificial minds orders of magnitude smarter than you, because of one thing. They thought in the short term, the length of their lives, the life of their clan or their civilization, but no longer. You thought in evolutionary life spans, in the scale of geologic ages.”
“Because the only damn thing I gave a damn about was geologic ages away from me,” muttered Montrose. Several Montroses on the line muttered agreement.
“But now you’ve brought your eyes away from the horizon to the foreground. You are looking at tomorrow, when Rania comes, but not what happens the day after tomorrow.”
“Why the poxing pox should I give a tinker’s damn about that? Let the day after tomorrow pox itself for all I care.”
“But she will care, won’t she?”
Central Montrose sent, “If you are less smart than me by a zillion points of intelligence, and the Archangels and Potentates are smarter again by another zillion, how come you see this plain and none of us smarter than you sees it?”
“’Cause smarts ain’t everything. Brains is most things, but not everything. I got a simple brain, a posthuman brain, and my little balloon of a mind is so small that the volume is clear compared to the surface and the light shines all the way through. You guys have more brainpower to monkey yourselves up with lies and brain-lard. Well, snap out of it.”
“Snap out of what? I am about to shoot myself out there. Put away your piece, you maniac!”
“I got to kill all parts of me that don’t love Rania,” said Number Five grimly. And suddenly the channel went dead.
6. The Second Second
So there it was: a hard, cold certainty in himself that Number Six deserved to die for rutting with a Fox dressed up to look like Rania. He could think of nothing more viscerally disgusting, more worthy of death by gunfire. He did not want to recombine back into himself any memory-chains containing the memories of whatever thoughts or temptations or justifications he had used on himself to excuse adultery. It was an absolute in his soul: there was no debate, no second thoughts.
So, without thought, he combined himself with Number Five. It used up nearly all the credit in his account. By the time he raised his pistol and armed his countermeasures, there were two of him in the nervous system, pulling the trigger together. By the time he lowered the massive weapon and stepped heavily forward from the octopus-armed black smogbank of chaff and looked down at his dead opponent, he was one.
Melechemoshemyazanagual Onmyoji de Concepcion of Williamsburg hailed from the Fifth Millennium, an Era of the Witches during the ten-thousand-year period known as the Hermetic Millennia, in the long-forgotten years before the First Sweep, when mankind was merely the experimental plaything of Blackie del Azarchel and his fellow mutineers who survived the Hermetic expedition. His true name was Mictlanagualzin, but Montrose called him Mickey.
Now Mickey waddled over to help Montrose out of his armor, while the Penitent judge gave an abrupt gesture to a grave-digging automaton carrying a coffin and a shovel. The machine groaned and stepped forward and shoved the blade of its shovel into the soil.
“Mickey, what the pox are you doing here, acting as my Second?” When the helmet hiding the face of Montrose came off, Mickey stepped back, raising his hand before his eyes. He could not meet Montrose’s gaze.
“Ah!” said Mickey. “You have torn your soul in scraps, and now a larger fragment descends like a bat from the infosphere to possess you! Did I not warn you in ages past to have no traffic with the Machine? Now you are one.” He shook his head sadly, and his jowls wobbled. “Alas! I hope you got a good price. I envy you. No more soul-selling for me.”
“You didn’t phlegming answer my question.”
“It is not necessary to answer the gods, even ones, like you, who are insane and think they are not gods. Your mind is suffering from an interleaf conjunction. The memory should come back momentarily. Your avatar here knew me. I will be shamed if you have forgotten.”
At that moment, the second figure who had served as Second during the duel, Trey Soaring, came skipping over, her eyes dreaming and focused on nothing in particular. She was a purple-haired Sylph woman from the Third Millennium, the same millennium when Montrose himself was born, only a few centuries after he was. Around her floated her garment of hunger silk; it was a molecular disassembly array shaped like a deep sari and cloak, or perhaps like a swarm of purple wasps woven into a solid sheet. She stared at the bridge of his nose but did not flinch back like Mickey did at the sight of the posthuman intelligence burning in the gaze of Montrose.
“Hi!” she said vaguely. “You’ve changed again. You have to stop doing that. It’s weird.” And she took a strand of hair around her forefinger and stuck it between her lips, as if suckling on it. Trey craned her head back to watch a flock of scaly and feathered urvogel fly over, half-bird, half-saurian creatures originally from Venus: including the anchiornis, the xiaotingia, and the regal aurornis.
With her head turned up and away from Montrose, she spoke, “He’s your Best Man. It sours him when you forget.”
Mickey did not look sour, but he did raise one eyebrow, and the decorative right eye on his absurd pointed hat above his right eye raised an eyebrow as well, but much higher. “I found my demonstrations of power were augmented by erecting shrines to you, and my shadow grew strong at my feet because your name touched my name. For three seasons, I dwelled hidden among the earliest generation of the Swans, and my name was great among the resurrected Witches.”
Trey said, “I’ll translate from Icky-Mickey jabber to groundling: he got famed up because of you, Judge Montrose. It weirdered him.” She giggled and stared at her left hand, spreading her fingers. “Isn’t that a word? Made him weirder.”
Mickey said solemnly to Montrose, “Your life and mine were cast together in fate, Great One, intertwined like the DNA helix of the caduceus of the psychopomp. Then I dreamed a dream with the left lobe of my brain while my right lobe half was exalted by pharmaceutical—”
Trey jabbed her elbow sharply into Mickey’s side. “Vent it!” she snapped.
Montrose stared in surprise. Trey was small and waiflike, like all her race, with hollow bones, so it was like seeing an eel taunt a whale.
Mickey frowned judiciously, nodded his head to Montrose. “I am become as you, and sought remotest futurity to seek my one true love.” And he smiled down at Trey with such a smile that his shining eyes were almost lost in the folds and wrinkles of his cheeks.
Trey said, “And I came because I said I would. I want to see the wedding! Find out how the story ends.”
Montrose now noticed on the left hand of Trey was a gold band. Evidently the custom of exchanging rings had still been remembered in whatever year the two had wed.
“B-but—Mickey! I thought you are gunna marry a bosomy Nymph or something?”
She saw his gaze and held up her hand proudly, wiggling her fingers to make the ring catch the light and glitter. “He gave up witchcraft for me. We got chased into your tombs again, but the Witches were afraid of you and would not follow. One of the old bishops you saved married us. Named Father Talbot. Married us to each other, I mean! I had to give up threesomes. I am not sure they were a good for me.”
Montrose stared at the unlikely pair. The recollections of Montrose Number Five were settling into place in his associative memory.
7. A Glimpse of Memory
A.D. 67098
It had been not long ago. He (Montrose Number Five) and Mickey had spent an evening in a public house at the nearby Forever Village.
The village surrounded the foot of a beanstalk issuing from the tallest summit, a speaking peak called Baxianshan, high in the Mediterranean Mountains.
The oldest era of history maintained by the Eternity Circuits of the local Stability was from the time before the Great Silence, when the Teleological Conspectus had successfully crushed the soul of man. An immortal of the planet Odette called the Conservator of the Futurity had taken control of the bankrupt and mortgaged Tellus and had undertaken to organize all Earthly life for the benefit of far future generations, whose numbers and dispositions were planned in advance. The plan condemned certain bloodlines, cults, cultures, and peoples to slow extinction. In those long-lost centuries of yore, the Atavist were a dwindling people.
Those condemned by the Conservator included the sea-Atavists, the Nicors and Camenae, Rusalka and Merrow, and other remote descendants of the Melusine. Their place in the sea and aboard the Great Ships was taken by a Squaloid race of Moreaus. They were unwilling to live in houses on shore and were nostalgic for the undersea palaces in which their grandfathers dwelled before the Squids forced them into upright shore-shapes. In memory, they erected great structures in the hollow trunks of trees, coated all within with coral growths. For their own bodies, they assumed the shape of small, swift, delicate beings. This was in a vain attempt to produce breeds in their children low-mass enough to compete for berths on starships with the more microgravity-agile, but more massive, Squids.
It was a point in history when metal was obdurate and denied to men, so everything was grown rather than made. Thus the décor was elfin, fanciful, and alive. The chairs were obnoxiously large leaves, and the lamps were lightning bugs. There was a fire pit in the center so that the smoke wandered up the axis of the hollow tree trunk, with scattered tables and booths circling it. Coy and coquettish girls on stilts or dangling from wire harnesses served the human-sized customers on the floor or smaller-than-human patrons occupying shelves and nooks up the inner walls.
Odd as it was, the other quarters of the village, from centuries nearer to the current day, were more odd. They were dormitories and breeding stalls formed in blocky proportions that bespoke no concern for human notions of beauty, and with strangely uniform streets and tools, and neither cathouses with their red lamps nor chapels with their silver bells anywhere in evidence.
The two old friends had been drinking boilermakers, and Mickey was cheating by using a technique to absorb the excess alcohol out of his cells, and so he was steadily and slowly drinking Montrose under the table.
Montrose Five, if he had been doing his duty, allegedly was awake and active due to the activity of Montrose Six, who, if he had been doing his duty, allegedly to spy out what schemes, if any, Blackie was weaving while the calendar counted down to the day of her return.
As best as Six could find out, Blackie was running a gymnasium and fencing academy, to teach young and idle bravos the formalities and finer points of swordsmanship. It was apparently an art that never entirely vanished from human history. He also received a small stipend from a museum to give lectures about his past, and from a clioseum to give lectures about his future.
“So that is why Six took up with this false Rania,” said Montrose Five. “Boredom. He got tired of watching a retired tyrant.”
Instead of returning to slumber, as his contract with himself stipulated, Montrose Five hired a gunsmith, hunted up an armorer, and began making arrangements. His activity, in turn, came to the attention of whatever angel or ghost was guarding Trey’s tomb, and thawed her, which triggered Mickey’s thaw as well.
The strange, modern world to which Mickey woke had forgotten the art of building cities, and the various races of Plebeians, those who chose not to fret about tomorrow, nor map out their futures, lived in small villages of grape-bunches of hemispheres. These huts were made of what looked like baked glass or transparent satin or bubbles of invisible pressure solid enough to keep out rain and cold.
Looming above their groves and plantations, the massive mansions of Patricians reflected an austere design of rectilinear geometry, with many a pillared portico, ambulatory, or chalcidicum of unsmiling caryatids circumvallating solemn cloisters, crowned with entablatures ordered by the golden mean, or belvedere, tower, and clerestory windows reflecting the Fibonacci sequence.
But they built no railways, no roadways, no airports, nothing but bridle paths for riding cheetahs and carriage panthers, aeries for the leather-winged quetzalcoatlus. The immortal and inhumanly patient Patricians of the current day had no motorized means of transit, aside from the expensive and metaphysically dubious method of donning a suicide helmet to copy one’s ghost through the senile Potentate at the world-core to be copied a second time into an empty body waiting elsewhere, leaving a trail of brain-clones behind.
So Mickey had taken in hand his charming wand as a walking stick, broadened his hat brim and lowered its crown to assume the aspect of a cockle hat, and pinned a scallop shell to his brim, the traditional attire in his day for wandering mages following a star.
He spent the better part of two years tramping the roads and working alongside talking apes and half humans as a deckhand on cog or knarr to reach the land north beyond the Mediterranean mountains.
Mickey shook his head. “You don’t know yourself. You would never betray Rania, not ever. All our holy writings say so! Why, just in the ancient and uncorrupted text of The Lion, the Witch, and the Warlord is the story of how a man named Orpheus wanted you to release his wife from suspended animation and return to the sunlight of the surface, and he sang of your own lost love, of Rania, so that tears flowed down your icy cheeks in your coffin. You agreed, but only on condition that he walk blindfolded from the buried tomb system so that he could reveal the position of the secret postern door to no man. But when he did not hear the footstep of a woman behind him—”
Montrose slammed the heavy pewter beer stein to the wooden tabletop with a loud noise that interrupted Mickey. “Of course I am tempted,” snarled Montrose, wiping the foam from his mouth with the back of his wrist. “The Fox girl looks just like her, talks like her. Just to hear the sound of her voice, I would die. But I ain’t never been fooled by no clones, and she’s not the first what’s been thrown at me.”
So then the talk turned to women.
Mickey asked him earnestly about conversion, and giving up witchcraft, and spoke of his fear that otherwise Trey the Sylph would not marry him. Montrose took a practical stance: “I am sure the hell-devils and hell-spooks you worship will understand, and if they don’t, to hell with them. Man should have a forgiving God as his boss. Otherwise life is too tough.”
“You don’t believe in God,” observed Mickey.
“Course I do! You can’t say, God Damn You and God Damn the Horse You Rode in On and Who Rode Your Mother and Put Her Away Wet, Sated, Panting, and Preggers, no, not and really mean it, if’n you don’t believe in God. B’sides, what would ladies do on Sundays, if they had no churching to do?”
“You think it’s real?”
Montrose was not sure what that meant, so he said, “Gen’rally, I take things as I find them,” and then he put his head under the table, looking for a spittoon. “What the plague? We in an era when no one chaws tobacco no more? Goddamn the horse their God’s mother rode them on in on. Or whatever I said.”
While Montrose had his head below the table, Mickey poured his shot glass of whiskey into Montrose’s and drank his own beer unadulterated. “I cannot believe you masticate that archaic leaf while drinking. It’s gross.”
The answer floated up from beneath the tabletop. “The chaw kills the bad taste of the brew, and the brew kills the bad taste of the chaw.”
Montrose pulled his head back up into view. Since Montrose had just used one of the boots Mickey had kicked off under the table as an impromptu spittoon, he thought it best to distract his drinking buddy. “So, brag to me, pard! Flap the lips! What’s so good about her, eh? What’s in her?”
Montrose turned off his perfect memory circuits so that whatever words he did not care to recall of the rambling and saccharine adulation of a man in love that was sure to follow would fade thankfully from his mind.
Nonetheless, the later recollection was clear: Mickey might not realize himself, but Montrose could see the reason. Mickey looked on Trey as a creature from the long-ago vanished age of gold, an age of splendor, when the machines were obedient to men, and the children of men drifted where they would. Aside from rare acts of piracy, it had been an age without war, without cannibalism, without slavery, without concubinage, and without the constant fear that one’s own talking dogs or other slave-beasts would lose their power of speech, revert to wolves, and rend their masters, a fear that made those masters arrogant and cruel. All these things formed the inescapable pattern for all the civilizations the Witches during nine centuries had erected. Thus, for him, meeting Trey was like meeting a lady of Camelot before the treason of Guinevere, or a daughter of Atlas in the Western seas of mythical Atlantis ere the flood.
“But what the hell does she see in you? You are the rightly most uncomely man I done ever lay eyes on, and you’ve got the dumbest hat of all history. I know; I been through all history, and that hat is really the dumbest.”
Mickey’s jowls grew creased with stern indignation, the tall hat stiffened so that its point quivered, and the cartoon eyes above the hat brim glared down. “To insult a Warlock’s headgear is to trifle with the wrath of Fortunato and Hades and dark, brooding Alberich! My millinery splendor is tall due to my pride of power, and this pointed cone distills astral and celestial essences directly into my Sahasrara, which the vulgar call the crown chakra, the seventh primary node of spirit! The wefts and shades and poltergeists flinch and bow the knee when the shadow of this towering—”
“You should marry the girl just so you can get a proper Christian hat, and leave the shady polecats of wherever-the-pox well enough alone. I’d say a Stetson. She ain’t marrying you for your hat. I know. She ain’t blind in both eyes.”
Mickey leaned back and smiled a jovial smile. “Perhaps she thinks me solid and massy!” He slapped himself in the belly hard enough that ripples walked up and down the expensively silk-clad rotundity of that expanse. “I understand that in her day and age, all the men were frail and thin, with hollow bones like birds, to save on lift expense, so that only the truly rich could afford to gain mass. Or maybe it is because I make her laugh?” He spread his hands and shrugged. “I know the secrets of Earth and Air, of Red and of Black, the speech of birds and the secret lore of sea crabs, and can read the entrails of an ox to know the future—but who understands women? All I know is that no man is more fortunate than I am. I don’t know what she sees in me.”
Montrose said, “Damned straight. That’s always the way, ain’t it?”
They clanked their beer steins together and called out cheers. “Blessings of the Bacchants!” “Here’s mud in yer eye!”
8. The Right Question
When this memory surfaced, and fell into place with his other memories, Montrose swore a blistering oath, calling down the names of diseases long extinct.
Because Five had been disobeying, he had not communed with the central mind nexus, never had a second pair of eyes look over his experiences, and had never seen the obvious.
“If only I had not been so afraid of me,” Montrose said, “I would have hooked into more brainpower and seen it!”
“Seen what?” said Mickey, startled.
Trey was looking troubled. “So you think I should not have given up threesomes? Icky-Mickey weighs as much as two sex partners combined, and the priest told me—”
Montrose said to him, “Seen this.” And then he said to her, “Trey, snap out of it. Focus your attention. What did the other version of me, Version Number Six, hand to you for safekeeping before he died?”
Mickey said, “What is going on?”
Montrose said, “I’ve been sleeping badly, not been myself. I am fretting and scared that she won’t know me when she returns—for her, it’s been a few years. I am fretting and scared of what happens to the human race once she’s back. If’n we settle down and live out a normal life, while Blackie slumbers and wakes and makes more ghosts of himself each time he wakes—what then? She must be thinking the same thing. Only now, only now, did the thought leak up from my hinder parts of my brain to the front, and I can see it. She must be fretting, too. About the same thing, about what happens when she lands. So she should have sent a message, but not in the open. I did not know what was keeping me awake. Now I know. The silence. Then damned pox-damned triple-damned silence from the stars. Where is her voice in the stars? She should have damned called to me. I kept asking myself, deep down, in thoughts so hidden even I could not see them—why didn’t she send a message? The speed of light is faster than near lightspeed by definition. But that was the wrong question.”
Mickey said, “What was the right question?”
Montrose said, “The right question is not, Why ain’t there no damned message? The right question is, Where is the damn message?”
“Your pardon, but those seem to be the same, or much the same—”
“Not at all the same, Mickey! The right question has faith that she sent one, and asks about how to set about looking for it. Only the smaller and stupider mes was in touch with his instincts well enough to see that. And so—” He turned to Trey again, saying, “What did Number Six hand you?”
9. The Needle
Trey laughed and pulled a round leaf from a belt pouch. Through the leaf were thrust a number of pins with colored heads in order like a color wheel. Trey plucked out from the center of the leaf a pin with a red-and-white head, and held it out toward Montrose with a strange, eerie smile.
It was the first thing made of metal, aside from the weapons and armor of the duelists, Montrose had seen since his waking. The pin was three inches long, glistening in the girl’s fingers, and a point of light gleamed at its tip.
Another version of himself, connected electronically through his nervous system, said helpfully, “It is a memory needle. There is a way of storing information even more densely than the picotechnology of our day. Something to do with the enjambments and overlaps of quantum fields—it is a praxis that Rania sent back when her neutrino message reached the world fifty years ago. Apparently she discovered how to make a gravity laser, just something she invented for herself, cobbled together in her spare time, and this is one of the spin-offs. The newer versions of the needle, you do not need to stick into your flesh to read the info. It will adjust to the antique receiver ports you already have built into your brain. Just pick it up in your hand.”
Montrose stared at the needle, but did not touch it yet. “What the pox is going on? Why did I die? For this damned thing?”
Trey said, “This blessed thing. You all misunderstood yourself so badly, so very badly. No one but Shiranui the Fox-Rania was enough like Rania to figure out where she hid her personal letter to you. Shiranui would not agree to turn over her results unless you agreed to marry her. You did, and you did not lie to her. Number Six could not tell you what he was doing, because that would make his promise to Shiranui false. You knew you would die at your own hand on his wedding day, but before the wedding night, this one hour, so that you would never be unfaithful to Rania.”
“Why?” he asked. But he knew why.
He looked at where the false Rania, Shiranui, was standing by the side of the field. She had not bothered to come forward and mourn at the burial mound.
Shiranui must have had very good hearing indeed, or else have been connected to listening instruments, or else have been a good judge of character, because when the gaze of Montrose fell upon her where she stood across the field, without moving her lips, she sent a message directly into his brain. His normal barriers and defensive brain encryption neither detected nor even slowed the source of the words: My reason is simple. You will live until the end of time, and either as wife or widow, the memory of me will last. I believe in no gods: this is the only immortality to which a Fox Maiden can aspire.
Trey said, “Just as I put you in the armor, you handed me that pin and told me.”
“I would die to hear her voice again,” Montrose muttered, and he took the pin.
It was an audio file, but it silently fed directly into his auditory nerve. He heard her words, and they were private. True love neither years nor lightyears can abate, nor any yawning gulfs, my husband, of these vast desolations of heaven …
Copyright © 2016 by John C. Wright
