The Hermetic Millennia (48 page)

She was tall and slender, neither so lovely as a Nymph nor so ugly as a Witch. Her skin was almost as pale as an albino’s, but there was a silvery sheen or highlight to her flesh reminiscent of the Grays. Her hair was a dark cap above the ears, but the lower hemisphere of the back of her head was shaved, a tonsure which emphasized the odd elongation of her neck. The hair was longer in front than back: two locks of hair hung down before her ears to her jawline, framing her face. Her lips were a wide red oval, stark in the paleness of her skin, and her eyes were magnetically and inhumanly dark, as if the midnight sky were using her face as a mask. Her features were too long, too harsh, too serene to be beautiful.

Menelaus looked around the tent. There were, for once, no Blue Men here watching the revenants. All were occupied preparing for Larz to attempt the doors. There were dog things as guards, but they were well away from the dark-eyed woman.

He would have greatly preferred a slower and more thoughtful approach to making “first contact” with this woman, whatever species of humanity she might be. Using his implants on a short-range setting, he sent a Monument-hieroglyph message to her on several frequencies in several formats. Menelaus knew he was taking a risk using his implants inside a tent, which had circuits for detecting such energy activity.

Her antennae twitched but otherwise her face showed no reaction.

Menelaus spelled out the Monument hieroglyph that meant “unit” or “name” or “identity.” Monument code was a very time-consuming method of spelling out a message, even with an electric signal. The other Thaws in the tent were watching as the two stood looking eye to eye, neither apparently saying anything. The Chimerae seemed particularly interested, or perhaps were bewildered that Beta Anubis had not come over first to salute the Alphas present.

Once he had given the last nondiatonic note equivalent of the symbol for identity, he pointed at her, and cupped his ear.

She parted her lips, and a pleasant female voice issue from her throat as if from a hidden mic. She did not seem to have a tongue. The voice from her throat said, or sang, “Alalloel.”

Then she pointed at him and cupped her ear.

Very pleased at this progress, Menelaus pointed at himself and said, “Anubis.”

Alalloel (if that was her name) gave him a look of withering scorn and turned away. She sat and picked up her bowl of gruel.

4. Mystical Garb

At that moment, Mickey came in through the tent flap, blowing like a whale and stamping his feet. With him were two other Witch-men, Twardowski of Wkra and Drosselmeyer of Detroit. In their hands were fabrics of fabulous colors and hues, a stack of conical hats piled one atop another, rolls of fabric under each arm. Mickey strode hugely over to the circle of Witches, with Twardowski and Drosselmeyer capering behind, and with a gigantic cries, the three threw what they carried into the air above their heads.

All the Witches cried and screamed and laughed with delight, and some made howls and hoots like animals. It was their robes and garbs and costumes stolen from them by the Blue Men when they slept, now returned: shimmering red silks, satins white as snow, sable cloaks gemmed with patterns of stars and cabalistic signs.

Menelaus saw the flinty looks on the faces the Hormagaunts. The female Clade-dweller from the time of the Hormagaunts, Prissy Pskov, was looking particularly irate, and the porcupine quills in her mane of hair stood on her scalp and swayed angrily.

There were also flinty looks on the faces of the Chimerae, but such was their normal expression, so it was hard to say if they noticed the change of wardrobe. The Nymphs did not look bitter, but merely envious in an innocent fashion: and two of them, girls nubile and perfect in beauty, with yellow skins and shining black hair, tiptoed closer to the celebration of fabric and tried to stroke the stray scarf or pelisse that fluttered to the mats.

Menelaus deduced the reasons the Blue Men had returned the garb. First, Witch biometric was more sensitive to changes in costume than other races, so the recognition cameras in the Tomb were more likely to let pass a Witch in the same ritual garb he wore when he was interred. Second, by showing favoritism to an historically early group the later groups knew and disliked (for historical memory runs long), the Blue Men introduced an aggravating element of jealousy to hinder a unified conspiracy of the prisoners against them. Both reasons suggested that the Blue Men intended a very serious assault on the Fourth Door, no doubt with a backup plan involving war machines and siege equipment in case the boasts of Larz proved hollow.

This meant time was short.

Menelaus tried to catch caught Mickey’s eye, but that worthy was preoccupied passing out their robes to the delighted men and women of the Witch era.

The Witches retained a modesty custom, and so each man removed to his tent to change clothes. Mickey, however, was too impatient to climb back in his beloved robes, and so by pantomime he beckoned the Nymphs over to him.

Their names were Aea, Daeira, Ianassa, and Thysa, and they ranged from achingly sweet-faced to breathtakingly lovely to maddeningly voluptuous. All wore their hair to waist length or longer, and within the shadowed eaves of their bangs, their eyes were as mysterious and exquisite as the eyes of a tigress at midnight, when her pupils are bright as dark mirrors and round as the moon. To watch them walk was to see the music of flute, viols, and clashing bangles woven in song.

Smiling softly, with flowers of several hues grown from cooking coffins in their coiffures, swaying on silent steps, they came. Mickey had them turn their backs and hold up the straw floor mats behind them, to screen his vast bulk while he changed garments. They giggled, peered over their shoulders, and made sly rhymes to one another in their soft tongue. Mickey rewarded them with smiles and pinches on the cheek and with the voluminous silk of his undertunic, a vast enough fabric that, with a little clever work with needle and thread, they could all have silk blouses reaching at least to midthigh.

The Nymphs were kissing and fondling and petting Mickey, cooing their thanks in their melodic language, and the rest of the mess tent looked on in various shades of wonder or disgust, when Montrose walked through the midst of the warmly scented Nymph flesh, avoiding the various curves and elbows and clouds of lustrous black hair, took Mickey by the elbow, and guided him out of the mess tent into the snow.

The robes were splendid: chasuble; stole; maniple; burse in silks so black, they seemed almost purple; satins as scarlet as spurting blood, trimmed in the fur of winter ermine; sleeves long enough to sweep the ground with cuffs deep enough to hide a pumpkin; cinctures with tassels as long; shoes with points as curled a ram’s horn—and over all, inscribed with Icelandic runes, uncial elf-script, zodiacal, and esoteric signs, Solomonic seals circled by Latinate incantations and Monument hieroglyphs, trimmed in a geometric galloon. On his broad back was a shape of the cabalistic tree of life in colored thread, surrounded by Chinese trigrams, and an endless pattern of woven mazes.

On his skull an unlikely seventeen-inch-high conical cap loomed and nodded, dripping with earflaps and neck scarf and chin strap and tassels, another scarf floating from the peak, absurd with a false mouth and two squinting decorations like eyes, with lids that opened and shut; and the brim was a dazzle of star patterns picked out in moonstones.

Menelaus could read Monument glyphs, as well as Icelandic and Latin, and knew the writings spelled out gibberish.

Mickey was grinning like an idiot. “Those geisha girls are certainly fine-looking! Such soft hands and long fingers! I will chain them with chains of gold in my floating harem of love when I sail about the world in a houseboat, and dote on them. They can trim the sails and prepare the meals, and during the long, warm, tropic nights … But, no! Gold sinks. I will adorn them in cork vests. Although with mammary glands so globular, they look buoyant enough—”

“Snap out of it, Romeo. You have a noseful of bioengineered pheromones. Your trace-amine-associated olfactory receptors just sent a complex chemosign to your orbitofrontal cortex, fusiform cortex, and right hypothalamus, and triggered an aphrodisiac response. By adjusting their allomones, they could have made you sexually attracted to a dog thing or an old tree stump. You are lucky they did not have their gear with them, or you’d be the one in
their
harem.”

“Gaah! You make life sound like a cold clockwork mechanism. I feel the stirring of the elemental powers of life, the very earth-energy itself! Those geisha girls—”

“Those ‘geisha girls’ as you call them, damn well
ruled
the eras from which they come. Not just the territory and the menfolk, but every living creature down to insects and bacteria were domesticated and in the palm of their oh-so-soft and gentle hands. You might escape because your olfactory and endocrinal systems are not designed and bred to be vulnerable to every nuance of their scent cues and flower language. Your brain is too primitive—if you are lucky—for them to invade it chemically and get complete control. They come from your future: the biopsychological mechanisms you Witches were beginning to play with, they actually understand. So I would not toy with those women, big buddy.”

“You should beware yourself. Did you not see the killing ferocity in the eyes of the Chimerae when you paid no obeisance to their Alphas, but came and touched me, an unclean Witch, and drew me aside to speak?”

“Nah, that is just their normal level of killing ferocity. When they get really puckered, they start combing their hair. Besides, they done told me to talk to the other Thaws and gather troops. Well, I am telling you, start gathering. Can you actually get your Witches from so many different periods to work together? I see some from the Nameless Empire period, another from the Sunless times, and the little blonde is from the days before the Witches were called Witches, the Simon Family era.”

Mickey said, “The little blonde, Fatin, is the key to winning the loyalty of the rest. She is actually the eldest virgin here, and this gives her power over us. But I have convinced her that I know secrets of many ages that passed while she slept, and so you will have to make it look like I do. What happened?”

“One of the Chimerae, a Kine named Larz, claims he can open the fourth door and identify the Judge of Ages. He’s lying, but it is going to draw all the Blues away from the other spots they’re protecting, such as the gate, the airfield, the hospital.”

“What if he opens the door for them? Or they break it down without him?”

“Ah—well, there are enough biological traces of me down there, not to mention internment records, or patterns in the arrangement of controls and architecture indicative of particular behaviors of mine—hellfire and pox, I left a
coffeepot
sitting on a plate down there, and I know I am the only man left alive who drinks that Arbuckle’s brown gargle—that anyone of my level of intelligence could figure out pretty damn quickly where I am hiding. Little Illiance is maybe two steps away from figuring it out anyway. We can meet in a large group on the shielded hilltop near the pass leading to the dig: this is a good chance to gather together in a large group without the dogs noticing and breaking it up. Go!”

Mickey departed, moving surprisingly quickly and silently for a man so large. Menelaus decided his fine new duds added a lightness to his step.

Montrose saw the flap of the mess tent move. Ctesibius the Savant had emerged, his face as cool and dignified as the face of the statue of the pharaoh Ozymandias. Ctesibius began to walk with slow and stately step, his hands clasped behind him, his head hooded in black cloth, toward the prison yard where the other tents were, all alone.

5. The Servant of the Machine

By the time Menelaus caught up with him, Ctesibius was at the flap of his sleeping tent. Menelaus reached out with his implants to deactivate the espionage recorders woven into the tent fabric and found to his shock that they were already deactivated.

Ctesibius was a dark-eyed, dark-haired man of olive complexion. He had fine, neatly arranged features slanting down to a narrow chin. He had the thin-fingered but muscular hands of a pianist. There were three diamond-shaped tattoos on his forehead in a down-pointing triangle, and additional lines of ink running from the outer corners of his eyes to hairline above his temples, and from the corners of his mouth to his jaw, giving him an oddly masklike but solemn appearance.

The man showed no surprise at Menelaus’ approach, but merely threw wide the tent flap and gestured politely for the other to follow him inside. Ctesibius sat on the metallic cot and drew around his shoulders the blue blanket provided, but he wore it as if had been ermine.

Menelaus addressed him in three different tongues. The man did not speak Merikan or Sylph, but understood the Merikan/Spanish/Nipponese pidgin dialect known as Pre-Anglatino. The conversation was halting, but not impossible. The difference was no greater than the gap in language between an Englishmen of
A.D.
1500 and a Saxon of
A.D.
1000.

Menelaus said, “I understand Savant, but cannot speak it. If you can jinx their smartmetal, you should have been helping us plan our escape, pal.”

The man uttered the rapid noises of Savant modulator-demodulator code. A second channel of information carried nonverbal cues, tones of voice, body language. Hence, in this second channel of information, even though not in real life, the man’s tone of voice was ponderous, his expressive grave. “Your words are improper, an affront. Am I not an elevated being of the third recital?”

“Are you not a prisoner in a death camp? Just today one of the Blue Men said he was going to kill us all, since we cannot serve in their society, even as slaves.”

With a nonexistent gesture in this information channel, Ctesibius pointed significantly at the three diamonds inked on his brow. “Do I fear death? What you see before you is a mere vessel of flesh. My soul and information have passed into the infosphere not once, but three times, and achieved a level of perfection undreamed by mere
hylic
and physical men!”