The Judge of Ages Read online

  This is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE JUDGE OF AGES

  Copyright © 2014 by John C. Wright

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by John Harris

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Wright, John C. (John Charles), 1961–

  The Judge of ages / John C. Wright.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2929-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4299-4712-1 (e-book)

  1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 2. Interstellar travel—Fiction. 3. Cryopreservation of organs, tissues, etc.—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.R54J83 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2013025457

  e-ISBN 9781429947121

  First Edition: February 2014

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  Part Five: The World Beneath the World

  One: The Instrumentality of the Hyades

  Two: The Tomb of Ages

  Three: The Court of Ages

  Four: Witnesses

  Five: Jurors

  Six: Deliberation

  Seven: Darwin’s Circus

  Eight: Verdict

  Nine: Depthtrain

  Ten: The Trial of the Judge of Ages

  Eleven: The Hidden History of Seven Mankinds

  Twelve: Signs in the Heavens, Figures in the Earth

  Thirteen: The Judge of Ages and the Master of the World

  Fourteen: Chessmaster of History, Fencer of Fate

  Fifteen: The Conjurers of Fate

  Sixteen: Ready to Fire

  Seventeen: The Swans

  Appendix A: Dramatis Personae

  Appendix B: Small-scale Time Line

  Tor Books by John C. Wright

  Far along the worldwide whisper of the southwind rushing warm,

  With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

  Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

  In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

  There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

  And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  PART FIVE

  The World Beneath the World

  1

  The Instrumentality of the Hyades

  A.D. 10515

  1. In the Tombs

  “O Rania, I was better off dead,” muttered Menelaus Montrose, in English, a language which, he reflected, was also long dead. “Unearthed and outmaneuvered, how in pestilent perdition am I going to outsmart getting myself killed entirely? How am I ever going to see you again?”

  Above, the sky was gray with snow clouds, and leaden. A storm was gathering along the southern horizon, above the glaciers now shrouding the Blue Ridge Mountains, the source of some immense, unnatural disturbance.

  Downhill, the pines and frozen rocks were bare of life. The prison tents were empty, the deadly wire was motionless, and the odd seashell-shaped buildings beyond the wire were silent.

  Directly underfoot, down a dizzying drop of catwalks and scaffolds, lay the darkness of the archeological dig. No coffins moved or fired. They were deactivated, returned meekly to their recharging plugs, and were no longer attempting to defend their precious, slumbering contents.

  Instead, wild packs of the dog thing soldiers were dancing, whooping, and barking with elation among the ruins, whirling swords and pikes, flourishing muskets, in the triangle of light that spilled from the broken doors across the silent firing range. Montrose saw none of the dwarfish little bald Blue Men in their jewel-adorned coats.

  He wondered how many hours he had before the persons of ordinary intelligence figured out that Corporal Anubis, allegedly a Beta-rank Chimera of the Sixth Millennium A.D., was instead Menelaus Illation Montrose, experiment in intelligence augmentation gone awry, of the Third Millennium A.D., the so-called Judge of Ages and Guardian of the Cryonic Tombs of the Slumbering Dead—or how many minutes before Del Azarchel figured it out.

  (That man was surely still alive! Fate was not kind enough to have killed off mankind’s other experiment in human intelligence augmentation, mechanical rather than biological, during the thousands of years while Montrose slept in suspended animation. The two of them were still in mid-duel, a deadly fight momentarily put on hold during the immensities of human evolutionary history.)

  Maybe they would not find the coffeepot, or his notebooks, or his gun collection, or his clothing closet. Of course, there was still the giant Texas flag he had pinned up, or the portrait of Rania, or his collection of history books, Witch idols, magazines and old coins with his image on them … sweet Jesus up a tree! There were a lot of clues lying around.

  Montrose watched in helpless anger as Rada Lwa was taken from him. He had carried the unconscious albino Scholar over his shoulder from the torture cell of the Blue Men. Rada Lwa was placed by the dogs into a sling and lowered from platform to platform into the Tombs.

  Back in A.D. 3090 (over seven thousand four hundred years ago by the calendar, but just shy eight years ago by his oft-interrupted inner biological clock) Rada Lwa had attempted to assassinate Montrose. It was unforgivable. And yet the man, by entering the Tombs of the Judge of Ages, was under Montrose’s protection. He was a client. To have Blue Men excavate Rada Lwa, thaw him, torture him, in Montrose’s book, merited execution. But not ten minutes ago, he had discovered to his shock that the Blue Men were Thaws as well; in theory, his clients also under his protection. He blamed himself for not seeing it earlier. In hindsight, it was obvious.

  While the dog things were busy lowering Rada Lwa, Montrose spoke to them in Intertextual: “You know your masters ain’t really and truly archeologists, don’t you, you sons of bitches?”

  The Blue Men, all but whoever was behind them, thought they were looking for the mythical founder of the Tomb system, the demigod called the Judge of Ages: so called because he condemned to death any age of history which dared forget the reason for the Tombs, the point of accumulating slumbering knights and scientists.

  The mythical founder was no myth, but stood among their prisoners, unrecognized, helpless as a child, and angrier than hell.

  Montrose was answered by snarls and a prod in his back with the muzzles of muskets. The captain of the dogs, a stately Great Dane of heroic build, pointed with his cutlass, motioning Montrose to descend.

  Montrose, with a smirk and a shrug, politely raised his hands in surrender, and walked and climbed down the last length of scaffolding into the cleft.

  He tried once ag
ain, this time only addressing the Great Dane by name: “Rirk Refka Kak-Et, you do know your masters are Thaws who just so happened to wake up earlier than their fellow clients, and looted our coffins and thawed us against our will?”

  Looking down, he saw that the armor was gone, peeled away by some immense force, along with the bedrock and the first three levels of the Tomb. Avalanches and snowfall had toppled this first level onto the second, and the second had been cut or blasted open to reveal the third, leaving only a set of protruding decks to the east and west like bookshelves.

  As he descended, he saw above a squad of dogs lowering an oversized coffin using a block and tackle. As it passed him, swaying in the wind, he was close enough to read its alert lights: The Giant inside was awake, only mildly sedated, fully thawed and healed. The coffin was being used as a claustrophobic prison, not a hibernation unit.

  Creaking, the lines lowered the Giant’s coffin faster than Montrose (with dogs above him and dogs below) could negotiate the rungs of the synthetic tubing which formed the ladder. Montrose ached with the desire to speak with the Giant. His brain, due to its size, could match the feats Montrose’s, due to its composition, could perform. A short conversation with him, and the many mysteries plaguing Montrose might be answered.

  The wind grew soft as the sky shrank to merely a narrow blue ribbon above, and the sunlight grew dim. It was cold between the narrow canyon walls of stone, and colder still between the metal walls of the Tomb.

  “Your masters, they do not know any more than I do who or what—if anything—is alive out there in the snowy wilderness of the Ice Age. Some human civilization is still on the surface, perhaps extremely advanced, and they will surely notice this activity here.”

  The armored floor here was all but gone, and at the lip of this huge hole, the scaffolding the dog things had erected led down to the third level. Roofless, the floorplan of the third level was exposed.

  To one side, the southern half was a labyrinth of cells and corridors worm-ridden with smaller passages designed for coffins to slide easily through, where men must duck walk or crawl, and murder-holes and ambush vents led from the smaller passages to the maze of main corridors. The northern half of the floorplan was an empty space of metal like a firing range, overlooked by a massive door. This door was thirty feet tall, with gunblisters and energy emitters thick as grapes on a trellis on its massively armored doorposts and lintel. The beetling cliff above the door to the fourth level was intact, so that the door was like a metal plug at the back of a throat of stone.

  And the door was open. Gold light poured up from shining stairs.

  “You know that, right? You savvy? Thaws are clients of the ultra-long-term hibernation tombs—sleep in the ground, under the armor, for centuries, millennia, waiting for the End of Days when the star monsters come from the Hyades.”

  Montrose did not mention that he, personally, was waiting for an event predicted to happen long, long after that. Driving off the Hyades invasion was meant merely to preserve the Earth in her Earthly state until Princess Rania returned.

  He looked down at a noise. He saw Oenoe, garbed in her green mantilla, walking serenely between two lines of cavorting and howling dog things. The strange angle of the light from the open door cast the shadows of the dog things like angular phantoms across the walls, whose jerking dance was a thing from boyhood nightmares.

  With her was Soorm the Hormagaunt, unconscious, or dead, being hauled limply in the metal clamps of a lumbering automaton. Preceptor Naar, looking bored, rode atop the walking machine.

  “Did your little Blue bosses warn you about the star monsters? They will be here in a century. A dark mass, equal to a small gas giant, has been approaching us from Oculus Borealis for the last eight millennia.”

  Down the final ladder, there was steel floor underfoot. Menelaus and his dog escort stood in a narrow corridor which connected both halves of the level. The connecting corridor was supposed to be the most dangerous spot here. To the east were powerhouses and storage vats for the dangerous nanomaterial used in biosuspension, as well as the main and secondary refrigerant systems. To the west were staff living quarters and utility rooms and guard stations with periscopes leading to the surface. This corridor was open both to the massive guns of the door, and to the sniper fire from the secretive coffins.

  “When the Hyades arrive, the Master of the World, a posthuman named Del Azarchel—even you have heard of him, I see—and the externalized Machine Intelligence of Del Azarchel, Exarchel, wise beyond all the genius of the Blue Men, will sell mankind into slavery, and the Blue Men will be to the Domination of the Hyades as dogs are to men—no matter how smart, still just pets.”

  The artificially anthropomogrified creature did not speak, but from the flex of its spine and the prick of its ears, Montrose saw that his words had struck home. Now the dog captain was listening carefully.

  “Is that what you want for your masters? For Mentor Ull and Invigilator Illiance? Lives of servitude? Or worse?”

  The dog thing said nothing, but looked at Montrose with eyes as hard as stones, ears laid flat against its skull.

  “Do you know Ull and Illiance and all the Blues here are serving the Machine? Well? Did you know that?”

  The Great Dane’s answer was to cuff him backhand across the mouth.

  2. The Connecting Corridor

  By the time Montrose had reached the level in the gloomy corridor where the other prisoners were being kept, the Giant’s coffin was out of sight. There was a splash of light on the wall opposite, a reflection of the golden light pouring out from the opened door, which was blurred and darkened for a moment with shadows as the bulky coffin of the Giant was maneuvered into the stairwell. A moment later the shadows passed, and the reflections gleamed again undisturbed.

  At the northern mouth of the connecting corridor, the Blue Men had piled their sandbags, raised square shields of refractory reflex metal, pulled up floor plates, and dug in their gunnery nests. A second line of defense had been erected at the other end of the long corridor, to fend off still-active coffins that attempted from time to time to sally and dislodge them. Beyond this line of sandbags, the wreckage of such sallies clogged the labyrinth of corridors to the south.

  Menelaus, his robes of metallic tent material clashing as he stepped, walked down the connecting corridor.

  Larz the Fixer, one of the prisoners, relaxed, chuckling to himself. Larz was lying on his back atop an impromptu cot of toppled sandbags with an enormously smug look on his face and his hands tucked behind his head. Next to him was a bowl and several small bottles of rice wine, some empty and some not.

  This was the man, this worthless little man, a low-caste Kine from the time of the Chimerae, who had boasted to the Blue Men that he could force open the Tomb door.

  Larz was not dressed in his prison overalls, but was in an extravagant civilian costume from the late 5900s: The half cloak of the overalls of the Kine, instead of bearing his name and assignment, was covered with gauds and bezants, with coils of braid at the shoulders and colored scarves hanging from the armpits. He wore the bright pink boots of a professional kick-fighter. The switchblades in the boot toes clicked open and shut like little blunt-nosed creatures flicking out their tongues as Larz idly drummed his heels against the deck.

  The serpentine stolen from Yuen the Alpha Chimera was lying near his hand, and it was extended to its full length: it lay like a thread of silver water across the empty expanse of steel floor, winding here and there to avoid buried mines and pressure plates, reaching from the sandbags to the door controls, where it had found a compatible plug.

  “Impossible,” Montrose muttered in English, his eyes narrowed. Larz could not have hacked his locks and wards. Either Soorm had opened the Tomb doors from the inside, or something equally unlikely. Could Larz be a Hospitalier in disguise?

  He tried to stop and speak to Larz, but Larz, thinking him a Beta Chimera from his era, cowered back, whimpering and calling on the dogs to protec
t him, and the dogs in turn hustled Menelaus down the corridor past Larz.

  Midway between the northern and southern defensive positions were bales of ammo and other supplies, as well as angry digging automata in need of minor repair.

  Nearly a score of figures could be seen there, separated by armed automata and watched by their assigned guard dogs, who were looking with envy at their dancing brothers not far away, yapping and yammering, tails wagging.

  The prisoners were all dressed in their period costumes. Menelaus wondered why the prisoners, now, had their garments returned to them. The Blue Men were very naïve and stupid in some ways, but sharply intelligent in others, close enough to posthuman in their thinking patterns that they could control lateral thought-techniques to see gestalt patterns in events. A man with his clothing and possessions on him altered his “tells,” his body language and subconscious reactions. All the Blues need do, if they were as smart as Menelaus thought they were, was observe the prisoner’s behavior in the Tombs, and compare this to the reactions of any undamaged information systems in the Tombs to the prisoners. Any wrong reactions would pinpoint the imposter. Had Montrose been visible to the Tomb systems, this tactic would have no doubt already revealed him.

  Coming down the corridor, passing within perhaps three feet of Menelaus, was Invigilator Illiance in his jeweled coat. He gave Menelaus a polite nod, but did not pause to exchange any words.

  In his hands was the coffeepot from Menelaus’ workroom.

  Illiance glided down the corridor toward the silent firing range chamber. He was too small to block the light from the door when he went downstairs, or at least, not enough to alter the reflection of the light bouncing from a distant floor to the nearby wall, but Menelaus could hear the soft, light footsteps passing without hurry down and down.

  Menelaus observed his fellow prisoners.