The Architect of Aeons (10 page)

“Why was it so perfect? Because we Swans, we exemplars of independence and wild, mad thinking, full of gaiety and boldness, we had already been expelled from the planetary mind core by our own exile. The damaged mind of Tellus was usurped by one mind, endlessly reiterated, found in the archives, and all the lesser minds in the mental ecology, the ghosts of Sylphs and Locusts and Melusine and all the lordly dead of the First Humanity gathered to this new Tellus and exalted him.

“When Earth fell into her new orbit, Asmodel, following, again took up position between us and the sun, but now the great concave became transparent, a focusing lens, and Asmodel heated the atmosphere from solid to gas.

“We discovered only then that some of the substance had crossed the void between Asmodel and Earth in the form of liquid picotechnology we call murk. It fell as meteors through the atmosphere, and then as cloud vapor, then as deluge, drowning certain villages and patches of valley even before we had been able to evacuate underground. Tens and hundreds of thousands of people were perfectly safe, perfectly frozen, as well as plants, spores, seeds, grubs, worms, and all the minutia needed to restart and restore the ecology.

“It was done with effortless, godlike elegance. The calculation times we estimate they took just to block out the chaos math needed to foretell the revitalization of the ecology are staggering: it would be like a juggler assembling a ticking pocket watch in midair, all the parts and gears and springs and levers moving, all the motions coming together at just the right time to be self-sustaining.

“Asmodel breathed the Earth back to life. The Slumberers in the murk woke in fury to greet a population already exhausted with war and eager to surrender.

“Next, Asmodel inscribed the runes onto the moon. We cannot read the message. It is akin to the Monument notation, but a more complicated recursive version, as calculus would be compared to arithmetic. If it is their intelligence test, we have failed it.

“Then the Virtue lowered fourteen skyhooks from orbit to the surface, and both those who wanted to continue the fight and those who were eager to surrender were swept up.

“The black liquid flowed from the base of the great towers who walked, surrounded by storm clouds, across the face of the earth, and burrowing down into the tunnels leading to the buried cities, tearing roofs open to wild blue sky.

“By certain signs painted in the heavens, Asmodel showed to all parts of the globe the numbers of population needed. Those who wished to end the agony of Earth fled toward the moving mouths of the skyhooks—we could not see and stop them! The Second Humans were blinded by the madness of Montrose, and stood helpless as the millions rushed toward slavery and death!

“We do not regard you humans of lesser intellect to be pets. You were our children. With minds like ours, we could remember and cherish every nuance of personality, we understood you so much better than you understand yourselves! But when you unplug from the No
ö
sphere, and seek isolation, you turn into a phantasm and fade like a shadow. We are not sure who of our beloved children tarry on the globe, and who were turned to black ice and taken up the towers into darkness.

“Those who fled away from the skyhooks vowed horrible vows of retaliation, ants from trampled anthills cursing mastodons. Those vows still live. In fury our children who linger here on Earth tear at each other: we are aware of the wars they fight, but the legal nicety of the phantasm protocol renders us unable to interfere. Perhaps that is best, because otherwise we would apply the stern correction as the wrathful gods once did who sank Atlantis or burned Sodom and Gomorrah.

“Decades were spent by Asmodel in consuming the billions of Earth. Children were born and raised in the shadow of topless towers, the rivers running black with murk, and knew no other world. Can you gentlemen contemplate the numbers involved in planetary colonization? We estimate that between a half to two-thirds of the world population was taken.

“One day, the skyhooks rose into space. As they rose, they rebuilt themselves to assume the form of vast lightsailing vessels of design so perfect, solutions of engineering so elegant, that only nature's hand who made the butterfly and the ostrich, the stallion and the hippopotamus could possibly compare, or the design of the seashell, or the perfection of the rose.

“The sun, tormented by the alien technology, now sent out her beams from certain points in the photosphere, permanent sunspots. Coherent light issues from those dark spots on the face of the sun and, undimmed by lightyears, establishes bridges of pure light across the wide interrupt of interstellar void. Away the vessels fled, softly as thistledowns on the breeze, as delicate as the petals of the cherry blossom trees when they fall after so brief a bloom.

“We lost more people than the Black Plague lost out of Europe. Earth is empty, and there are too few of us to maintain what we now have of civilization. We will fall back to the condition men lived in back when men were mortal, or fall back on atomic energy or powers even more primitive, or use calculation machines that are not self-correcting nor self-aware. The nightfall of barbarism is at hand.

“For the sake of honor, for the sake of sanity, I renounce it all.

“We have watched over the world and were found wanting; we fought and failed. We are not high enough to serve the Hyades even as beasts of burden. Half our globe was despoiled. No social order can survive in the face of such loss. I foresee lesser men shall strain with magnificent futility against the nightfall of all the lamps of civilized life, as one by one the candles die. But that struggle will never be mine. Except for lamentations, the race of the Swans is done.”

The creature folded his wings and closed his eyes, and breathed a sigh so broken that it brought a tear to the eye of Montrose, and a sneer to the lip of Del Azarchel. Silence for many minutes reigned.

8. Pride and Atonement

Then the Swan, myriad eyes still shut, said in a still, deep intonation: “If there is an atonement you wish to make for your crimes of unparalleled magnitude, genocide many times over, you who led the Hyades here or you who crippled our ability to drive them off, you must volunteer it. I am too proud to ask.”

Del Azarchel said, “We must apply to the Hyades for aid, beg them to return. Was any communication method discovered during the war years? If there was some signal…”

The Swan interrupted. “Are you blind as well as stupid? Hyades painted their message on the face of the moon, and none of us can read it. Interpret the Cenotaph.”

Del Azarchel looked startled, then angry. “That is not within my power!”

“Then slay yourself, for you are useless.” The Swan still had his head bowed, but he turned his face to one side as if wishing to spit out some bitter thing on his tongue.

Montrose, who greatly enjoyed hearing Del Azarchel belittled, now grinned his toothy grin and spoke up. “Hey, Mr. Swan? Sir? Maybe I can volunteer something? I would not mind helping out if there is anything I can do!”

The Swan said simply, “Release us from your curse. Break the phantasm barrier. Allow us to see our children.”

Montrose looked as a man who is dashed with cold water. Whatever sympathy he had for the Swan vanished. He snapped, “Pox on you! I cannot do that. It would make them less than slaves!”

The Swan's eyes snapped open, blazing with high emotion, both the three in his face, and the scores adorning his wings. Montrose staggered back, squinting through his fingers at the superior being as if against a great light.

Quailing, he turned aside his gaze and saw Del Azarchel also flinching and squinting. This shocked him. Montrose would have sworn Del Azarchel man enough to spit in the eye of the Devil himself.

Their eyes met. Blackie gave Montrose a rueful shake of the head, a wry smile that was halfway a sneer, yet a smile of sour mutual understanding. Montrose saw they were both thinking the same thing: each was obscurely glad that the other man was not better able to stand in that terrible gaze of the winged being than he.

The creature's voice filled the chamber like a pipe organ, and a dreadful music marched through the words.

“Unless the shadows of the future shown to us by the cliometric science of the Monument are changed, the human race will die in the Seventeenth Millennium. This is fifty-four thousand years before the earliest possible return date for the Princess Rania. You, little man, you will have failed in all you seek and dream, and everything for which you hope will be as dust and ashes in your mouth.”

The Swan allowed a bitter expression to darken his solemn, ascetic features. “Perhaps then you will know the grief you have bestowed on us, your children, the race you created and set free. We are free indeed; free to die.

“I tolerate no more. Depart from me, you wretches.”

And he closed his wings about his bowed head, and would say no more.

 

3

The Barefoot Moon

1. Maternity

Amphith
ö
e led the two men to where a tent had been set up for them on deck. She bowed a deep bow, her pretty cheeks pink with shame. “Because we are unseen to the higher forms of intelligence connected to the No
ö
sphere, our quarters, and, indeed, our lives, occupy the overlooked spaces of the civilization: the spandrels, so to speak.”

Montrose poked his head in the tent, and saw both things he knew, sleeping rolls and lanterns, and things he did not. He tapped a bowl on the deck doubtfully with his toe, and it started up speaking in a highly formal version of the Melusine airborne language from the Tenth Millennium. It was a spoken form of Glyphic, based on Monument symbol logics.

“Greetings, noble sir! I am a chamber pot! For all your needs, from excretion to the expulsion of vomit during seasickness, it will be my pleasure to sterilize and cleanse various biological expulsive material you might be pleased to extrude. If you would care for a demonstration, merely direct any organ of elimination toward the clearly marked orifice…” Montrose kicked it again to hush it. The sleeping roll seemed comfy enough, but he dared not touch it to test its cushion. He was afraid it would begin singing lullabies.

Meanwhile Del Azarchel, having no concern for creature comfort, was standing on deck next to the tent and asking Amphith
ö
e, “Who assigned you to us? Are you an ambassador?”

She said, “I am your mother. You are children in this world, which is strange and dangerous to you, and therefore I have been chemically imprinted toward you, to care for your well-being. This tent and these things are my possessions.”

Montrose pulled his head back out. “You ain't my mother, miss. You're a damn sight too pretty.”

Del Azarchel scowled at Montrose. “You insult our mother quite cavalierly, sir. Mind your tongue.” To her, with a gallant bow, he said, “As your sons, we will do what is needed to protect your person, your interests, and the honor of the family name. But excuse our confusion! In our time, those who awoke from other eras, either thaws or star-farers returning, created friction because they were alien to the current time. We did not solve the friction between currents and revenants in such a fashion. You are selected at random? Without consulting us?”

Montrose said, “It's like dropping someone down a chimney and just hoping the house where he lands in the ashes to take a shine to him.”

Amphith
ö
e smiled mysteriously. “And how is a mother giving birth so different? Children appear as oddly as if found at the hearth, and—how did you phrase it?—they shine in our eyes.”

“Close enough.” Montrose shrugged.

“The custom dates back to the time of the Nymphs, I take it,” said Del Azarchel. Montrose scowled, because whatever clue Del Azarchel had seen to allow him to deduce that was opaque to him.

Amphith
ö
e bowed yet again. “Both of you, Master that Was and Judge no Longer—”

“Call me Meany, Mom. Call him Blackie.”

“—Meany, both of you suffered from revenant friction back in your earliest years, the Master that Was from direct attack by space pirates when he approached Earth from the long-lost and legendary Diamond Star, and you, from, ah—”

“Direct attack by Blackie,” supplied Montrose.

Amphith
ö
e said, “—from the difficult situation in which
Black-ye
was perhaps required, either forgivably or not, to place you.”

Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps the style
The Elevated Nobilissimus del Azarchel
would be more apt—”

Montrose pursed his lips and raised both eyebrows. “Watch your tongue, sir! Would you stand on ceremony with Ma?”

She finished, “—it is to avoid additional situations like yours, where those who wake find no place in a world grown strange to them, that our custom of proxy adoption was founded.”

Del Azarchel said, “Unless I mistake the spirit of my compatriot, madam, we are not to remain long in this world. We must soon return to our tasks in the outer Solar System.” He looked at Montrose quizzically.

Montrose said, “What the hell you talking about, Blackie? No more tasks for us to do.”

“How so?” Del Azarchel arched his fine black eyebrows.

“The aliens ain't never coming back, the human race was not advanced enough to live as slaves, and the prediction of history says we are going to be wiped out long before Rania returns.”

Del Azarchel laughed like a golden bell. “Lies! If any of that were true then neither you nor I would triumph. Our endless duel ends in a draw. Ha! Let us not contemplate self-evident absurdities, my friend!” He shook his head wearily, but flashed a bright smile. “What weakness has entered your wavering soul?”

“Glad you are in a chipper mood, you maggot-ridden skunk,” said Montrose, standing now straight and shoulders wide, a smolder of spirit in his eye. “So, do you have some plan?”