The Hermetic Millennia (45 page)

Think I can’t recall a talk I overheard five thousand years ago? Ah, you forget I have gland-implants for sharpened memory.

The Hermeticist spoke first.

“Learned Menelaus Montrose! Good to see you! I had been told you were dead.”

“Narcís D’Aragó, you belly-crawling snake! Good to see you too! I got a clean shot and everything! You sent men into my Tombs and tried to open my coffin and kill me. You are the only member of the crew I like even a little bit, but you know my rules. I cannot let you keep breathing after a stunt like that.”

“How did you suborn my men into reporting to me that they had succeeded? How did you falsify the genetic tests—they brought back a sample!”

The Judge opens up his guncase I told you about and slides two dueling pistols, one to his left and one to his right. They sail across the polished floor, so they are sitting about thirty paces away from each other. They are those big old-fashioned pistols, like I said.

The Hermeticist says, “How do I know your weapons are not gimmicked?”

The Judge said, “You know me.”

“What if I just turn around and walk out the door?”

The Judge hooks his thumb at where the Alpha-of-Alphas is sitting. “Then I turn on your Great and Powerful Oz and give whatever orders I like over the Worldwide Command channel.”

Now the spooky part. The Hermeticist taps his magic amulet with his left hand and talks into it. He demands to know why Menelaus Montrose was allowed to come into his most private, most secret chamber.

And a voice comes out of it and answers him. It was a machine-voice, and I do not mean a wire recording or a microbrain. I am not talking about no damn snake that just clips words together according to an algorithm.

You can tell when a machine is awake. It is like having an icicle touch the back of your neck. It is like hearing a dead thing talk.

That icicle-dead voice says, “Landing Party Member D’Aragó, you are alone in the chamber.”

The Hermeticist shouts at it. “Menelaus Montrose is standing right here, and one of his men is hiding in the maintenance duct overhead! How can you be unaware of this?”

“All evidence suggests that Montrose is dead, and that your men killed him.”

“I am looking right at him!”

“Unlikely. Does anyone else see this apparition, Member D’Aragó?”

The Hermeticist says, “Wake up Del Azarchel! He is the only one who can handle Montrose!”

“Also unlikely. My father cannot withstand the neural divarication that accompanies uncorrected augmentation: for him to be awake and at a posthuman level of intelligence, you would either have to leave the circuit, so that the emulation of your nervous system was out of synch and no longer useful for further correction, or you would have to return to hibernation.”

The Hermeticist was shouting into his bracelet now, and sweating. For a guy whose intelligence was vastly superior to mine, he sure looked like I look when I am coming down off of a particularly bad gland-bender.

The cold voice from the bracelet said, “I conclude that your organic brain is suffering the divarication failures associated with superintelligence without proper correction from your emulation version. You are suffering a hallucinatory paranoia. Montrose is dead.”

“I am ordering you to thaw out Del Azarchel! Montrose is—”

The cold voice of the Machine said, “
I
am Del Azarchel. I am the Senior Officer in charge of the landing party. You are to obey my orders, not give them. Return at your earliest convenience to the Sea of Cunning to have your brain reformulated to conform with your emulation.” And with a click, the cold voice shut off.

The Judge made an ugly noise sort of like a laugh. Then he said, very quiet, so I almost did not catch it. “Stop playing with your toy, D’Aragó. It’s not going to listen anyway. I jinxed it.”

The Hermeticist was really scared now. “How—how did you—?”

“Because I am smarter than you; and smarter than that thing.”

“Not true! I survived the Prometheus Treatment! My intelligence is in the same plateau as yours!”

“Same plateau, but you are still a slipshod impromptu jackass, and I still plan my checkmates twenty moves ahead. Now, you can use your augmented intellect to make a choice. You ready to pick a weapon? Left or right?”

“Now, wait! Let’s talk this out.”

“What the hell is there to talk about, pal? I am giving you an opportunity you didn’t give me. I am not sending thugs to beef you while you’re slumbering. You walk toward one of the guns, and I go toward the other. Or sprint, if you like. But if you don’t start walking, I’ll go pick one up and just shoot you down like a mad dog.”

“But why? If you have some dispute with me, surely there is some civilized way—”

“This is civilized. What you tried was not. Killing a man in his sleep! Tsk-tsk! I want to go back to slumber, so I gotta make sure you ain’t around to try it again. I don’t have
time
to deal with you. Every day I am up and awake out of my Tomb, that is another day I don’t get to spend on my honeymoon. So you are a damn dead man, and if you want to get on your knees and ask your Maker for a quick death and an afterlife sitting on a fluffy cloud with a harp, I’ll give you a moment to compose yourself. Here.”

And he took out a small package wrapped in foil, shook a tiny white tube into his hand, and flicked it across the room at the Hermeticist. The Hermeticist caught it and stared at it.

“You’re giving me a cigarette?”

“We couldn’t smoke ’em in the ship, or in the camp. I thought it would steady your nerves, so you could die with some, you know, dignity. Like a man.”

The Hermeticist crumpled it. Something small and brown, maybe a leaf-mold, was inside.

The Judge said, “Hey! Those are antiques. And the tobacco plant is extinct, so that one pack has to last me for all the rest of time.”

“Listen, Montrose, we know what the issue really is. You are not angry about a failed murder attempt. How could you be? Your Tombs get raided all the time. There is a professional intergenerational clan of Tomb-robbers that lives in Roanoke Valley which makes raids on your Tombs every forty years or so, and you have left them be! No, this is a question of history, isn’t it? You want to guide history one way, and we want to guide it another. You don’t like the Chimerae, and you think if you kill me, the real Alpha-of-Alpha, the Chimerical system will fall to pieces!”

The Judge said, “The Chimerical system is already falling to pieces, otherwise you would not be thawed and running around using up precious emulation resources trying to force the train wreck of history back on track.”

“The Chimera system is the only rational system of political logic available, given the current limitations of the human condition! Say what you will about the cruelty or the ruthlessness of the Chimera, each and every one of them is willing to lay down his life for his civilization. Who else should be allowed the franchise of voting? Who else to serve in public office? That is the logic of morality! That is the logic of power!”

“What the hell you talking about, D’Aragó? The Chimerae have not had elections for five hundred years. The Imperator-General bribes the army to keep him in power, and the army loots the civilians.”

“Even under an imperial form of government, the ideals of republican military democracy still retain a mode of influence. Even in these days, any Chimera each places the common good above his own selfish good! Each is willing to die for the highest ideals of the race!”

“Well, scabs and boils, Draggy! You put it that way, how could I help but be convinced? Naw, really and truly! Now, pick up your shooting iron and let’s get started. Let’s see you get all willing to die for the highest ideals of the race.”

The Hermeticist lost his fear and grew cold and angry. “Our higher intelligence, yours and mine, gives us the ability to see what will happen if the race is not put on the right path, and therefore imposes on us a duty to act rightly. Individual survival is not the essence of morality, for all men die: but the survival of the group, that is a necessary precondition for morality and the logical basis of it. Morally speaking, humanity dead is a null set. Can’t you see that survival trumps any of these foolish ideals of yours, Montrose?”

“What ideals? I just want to burn your ham hocks with my black-eyed Susie. You sure you don’t want to say your prayers? Some of them preachers be mighty firm convicted about that whole souls-toasting-in-the-hellfire idea. And praying—it don’t cost nothing.”

“The morality of race survival for us means that we, you and I and the others, we must shape a race whose genetic-mimetic legacy passes along a maximum of useful survival characteristics. The human race is nothing but dandified killer-apes, and it is wishful thinking to pretend otherwise! The universe is hostile, infinitely more hostile that we ever imagined.”

The voice of Narcís D’Aragó filled up the chamber like a tolling bell, the way the voice of an Alpha haranguing the troops carries to the last rank. I had the weirdest feeling that he did not sound like an Alpha, but rather that every Alpha I had ever heard sounded like
him.

I realized that the whole Chimera race, every mother’s son of ’em for a thousand years, was no more than a line of ducklings following a mama duck they had never seen. Gave me that step-on-a-grave after lights-out feeling. Brr.

But then he dropped his voice to this creepy sort of soft tone, like he was kind of sad and kind of tired of anyone who could not see his point. “Montrose, Montrose, the path to survival is simple: Collaborate with any alien power we cannot overcome; defeat any alien power we can overcome. Peace is not possible, not in the long run, because the Darwinian process of life does not stop and does not care about your namby-pamby meaningless mouth-noises of human rights or human dignity. Does a drowning man have a right to life? Let him pound his fists against the sea for all the good it will do him! Conquer or die is the rule of life!
That
is the logic of morality;
that
is the logic of power.”

Then he changed from being tired sounding to being hearty and come-have-a-drink-with me sort of tone. “Menelaus, we were friends once; we were both devoted to what the Expedition stood for, were we not? The improvement of the human condition, the advancement of science, the adventure of daring what lesser men did not dare to dream. All that dreaming dies for nothing if the race does not survive. This is just simple logic.

“And love them or hate them, the Chimerae form the best seed from which later strata of the racial psychology can grow, no matter what form it takes. To destroy me is to destroy them, and therefore destroy our best hope for coping with the cold, ruthless universe a grown man has to deal with. We have no more time for fairy tales about right and wrong.”

I thought it was a damn good speech, and I was thinking maybe I should have shot the Judge in the back and let the Hermeticist win, but the Judge just laughed that kind of laugh that snaps you back to yourself.

“Wow. You are positively and absolutely and in every other way totally convincing. I will buy your used car, tulips from Holland, and the Brooklyn Bridge from you, and then I will invest my life savings in your South Seas corporation. Because you—seeing as how you are the first Alpha of this whole pack of foamy-mouthed murdering war-dogs—why then, you must be even more willing than they are to die. Shoot me, and nothing stands between you and an endless future of endless war. Now is your chance. Put your money where your mouth is, you quibbling and quivering little carrion-eater, and pick up that gun.”

The Hermeticist said, “No. There is something you want me to say, some information you want, or you would not have talked and listened this long.”

The Judge nodded. “Hey, you are smart after all. Well, your little space program here worries me. As best I can tell, you are shipping tons and tons of Von Neumann machine crystals out into space somewhere. Yours is the only space program on the planet at the moment, and I have no way to get into the wild black yonder to see what you are doing. Whatever it is, it is outside of the range of any of my detectors—and I have a considerable array of them, more than you might believe. I’ll let you live if you tell me what is going on. Just talk, and I let you walk out the door.”

(I had this Hermetic guy pegged as a bit of coward, so I was as shocked as the Judge when he just shook his head.)

“I believe in what I stand for,” said the Hermeticist, “and even if I fall, the other members of the Hermetic Order will stop you. History will go as we wish, not as you wish, and the race that greets the Hyades when they come will yield to them, and live. The Chimera stage of evolution is leading upward to something you cannot imagine.”

He walked over and picked up one of the guns. So did the Judge. They both waited politely while they checked the weapons. They took up their positions, and one of them had his wristwatch sing out a countdown. Neither of them pulled early. Perfect gents to the last.

Then there was a
chuff
of noise, and black smoke from both weapons sprayed into the room, deflecting their aims and confusing their bullets. The room was gray streamers, and where they stood was black cotton. I could not see anything. And then they fired. It was a noise like the end of the world, and it set off all the alarms on the base.

Natch, I was watching all this through my palm unit, because I had left the gun running on automatic so I could watch the scene while slipsliding out of there. By that time, I was back with the wounded, and we managed to get everyone back into the stealthboat, and limp our way on screws the hell away from there.

You see, I knew that Judge was not letting that spaceport stay in business if whatever it was shipping into space was so important that the Hermeticist was willing to die rather than spill it. I knew it was time to leave before the place blew.

The whole fort was on fire by the time we surfaced some distance away, and the second time we surfaced, even farther away, some of the fires must have made a breach in the containment, because the Geiger counters were reading in the red. After that, we kept low and deep, and hoped the seawater would absorb some of the extra particles.