The Vindication of Man Page 16

  2. The Juggernaut

  On one of the higher bands in his eyesight from points of view in the alley walls behind the cart, Vigil saw a burst of radioactivity and heat. Inside the cart, a fusion cell was heating water to steam.

  As the cart stood, it formed a traditional shape called a juggernaut, a type of armored car used by Myrmidons to crush Firstling men.

  Instead of the guns and cannons of the ancient form of juggernaut, called a tank, this juggernaut followed the traditional form from the sad period of the Long Twilight, after the Golden Afternoon had passed, and the wars of man grew distorted under the pressures of the Absolute Rules imposed by Tau Ceti, creating such bizarre anachronisms. The Absolute Rules forbade automatons and firearms to be used in combat and electromotive amplification, but not steam-powered prosthetics. Atomics could not be used in weaponry, but could be used to heat water. The limbs were jointed, and the muscles were hydraulic cylinders powered by branching copper veins of steam.

  With a great rattle, the juggernaut brought her many hidden arms into view, each carrying a weapon or emblem permitted under the Absolute Rules.

  In the right hands of the juggernaut were a naked sword, a burning lamp, a mace, a spear, a bifork, an arrow, a goad, and a lotus; and in the left hands were a shield, a bowl, an octagonal discus, a noose, a longbow, a conch shell, a serpent, and a severed human head. Blood poured from the decollated head into the bowl made from the top of the skull held in a lower hand below it.

  Up she reared, huge, a body of metal throwing aside the disguise of wood in a spray of splinters. The hard metal hemispheres of her bosom were decorated with a necklace of skulls. Beneath, the wheelless body of the cart now stood on saw-toothed treads made of jointed metal slabs.

  The cart was wheelless because the sly-eyed wheels of the cart flew into the air like so many helicopters, the cruel, dead-center eyes steady in screaming circles of spinning blades.

  The face of the three-eyed juggernaut lifted up, throwing aside splinters and dust from the serpents of her hair. Her face was blue, and her lolling tongue coated with blood, and her teeth were like the teeth of a lioness.

  Worst of all, there was a fourth eye inside her mouth, indicating absolute control over all appetites, total self-command which no Swan, no Fox, and certainly no Firstling human being, could match.

  The four eyes at the wheel hubs grew bright, as did the four eyes of her face, her forehead, and on her tongue. Too late, Vigil realized what he was facing. This was no Nomad, no Firstling in masquerade.

  This was a Megalodon in truth, a Third Human, a space-borne form of life that had descended to Earth to occupy the ancient Myrmidon war-car shape of his ancestors.

  Then the four living wheels spat from their spokes a glittering spiral cloud, a swarm of thousands of jewels fine as dust specks.

  The Megalodon was a master guru, as skilled as Vigil in the art of nerve indication, or more skilled: for this bright cloud her flying wheels wove solidified into a canopy, burning with gems, behind and above the head of the juggernaut. And the burning canopy displayed a mandala of uttermost terror.

  It was a sixty-four-fold mandala made of eightfold mandalas, as complex as the bloom of a rose, showing patterns within patterns of eye-dazzling neural signifiers. It was louder than a silent explosion and brighter than unseen lightning.

  One of Vigil’s internal creatures sacrificed itself to prevent his conscious mind from seeing the sixty-four-sided mandala. All his memories and reflexes running through that internal felt numb, and the shocking pain of its dying agony echoed in Vigil’s nerves.

  The vendetta wand, that irreplaceable antique, was not so fortunate. It had no internal buffers prepared for self-sacrifice. Instead, it uttered a high-pitched whistle, calling for restorative software which had been extinct an eon before the planet Torment was born, and it died in Vigil’s hand. Little gems and logic crystals flaked away from beneath Vigil’s fingers and dropped to the cobblestones, tinkling.

  Vigil was now unarmed. Even his giant strength was nothing compared to this steam-powered behemoth. He could perhaps dodge the blows from sword and spear and mace and bifork, and he could hope the bow and arrow would miss, but he could not outrun the deadly sound of the conch shell, or the deadly light from the burning lamp. Worst of all, he could not make himself unfrightened by the sight of the severed head, nor could he close the vulnerable nerve-channels deep into the racial subconsciousness that primal fear opened. The scent of the lotus leaf had no doubt, by now, exploited those open channels to insert all fashions of false reflexes and fatal thoughts into his lower nervous system, because smells did not pass through the midbrain complex as sights and sounds did before leaving their imprints.

  Were there any vulnerable points? Vigil flung out a mudra called shuni, touching his thumb to his middle finger, a calming gesture indicating a shutdown of the fusion cell, but the mudra echoed back at him and benumbed his arm from fingers to elbow, not just rejecting the command with contempt but also punishing him for issuing it. The authority level was beyond that of the Lords of Stability, beyond the range of any member of the First Human Race.

  Then there was no more time for speech, nothing clever to do. Vigil (his right arm flapping uselessly) ran from the juggernaut. The juggernaut on treads that roared like ten thunders rolled after him, fast as a locomotive. And the Rokurokubi threw her head back two yards or more and laughed her crazed and long-throated laugh.

  There was no escape. The Rokurokubi was between him and the alley mouth, holding a brass mirror in her hands, trying to catch and maze his vision in the reflected sight from behind him of the mandala the juggernaut displayed like a parachute.

  Vigil knelt, and, even as the juggernaut emitted a steam whistle of triumph and made to roll over him, he slapped the cobblestones, using his authority as a Lord of Stability to command the cobblestones to disintegrate, to part beneath the juggernaut’s treads, and drop the metal monster into a pit of sand.

  But it was no use. The cobblestones were overwhelmed by the mandala of the juggernaut and shrieked on the emergency channels and were petrified with fear. The frightened stones were as still as stones.

  Vigil tried to leap or roll or scurry to one side before the monster rolled over him, but the juggernaut shifted her fingers so that, without dropping any of her many weapons or emblems, she indicated the mudras of the Ten Primal Forms of Fear, and Vigil’s muscles would not respond to his nerve commands nor his hardwire commands. He forgot how to breathe, as that knowledge was wiped from his cell memory, lung muscles, and hindbrain. And the great treads rolling filled his vision, and he saw all the weapons rise up, flourish themselves, and fall.

  And they all fell to one side or the other. The mace head smashed the cobblestones, sending chips of shrapnel to cut his skin, and the sword blade rang to the stones, missing him; and the head of the goad and the two blades of the bifork smashed and cut the stones to his left-hand side; the cutting octagon of the sharpened discus, and the arrowhead and spearhead and the venomous teeth of the serpent scarred the stones to his right-hand side. The deadly light of the burning lamp fell on him, but his flesh was not consumed; the horror of the conch shell sounded in his ears, but as if distant and dull, and he was not driven mad.

  A mudra of immense power, a power beyond what any First Men commanded, a power that operated below the molecular information level, was protecting Vigil like an unseen bubble.

  Vigil looked behind him with his many viewpoints to see who had saved him.

  3. The Last of the Third Men

  In the mouth of the alley stood a tall shape in a hooded cloak that fell to the elbows and a cape that fell to the ankles. In the narrow opening of the hood, his face was a skull-like mask of metal, iron-eyed and impassive. In one gauntlet was a two-edged sword, made of transparent gold.

  His other gauntlet, this new figure held before him, palm up. At his mudra-gesture, the juggernaut, as if caught in a giant unseen hand following the man’s hand, was pulled
upward so that the treads failed to crush and grind Vigil into paste. The man flicked his wrist, and an unseen force threw the immense machine on her back, which smashed her head and half of her arms.

  The transparent, amber sword he pointed at the Rokurokubi and said, “I usurp all your other commands, including the self-preservation imperative. Destroy yourself.”

  Being disconnected from the Noösphere did not save the long-necked woman. She opened her mouth to protest the command, but liquid formed from her own disintegrating internal organs gushed out instead. The vomit-mass fell across her upper body and clung like glue, and it ignited, burning hot like alcohol. Her snake neck whipped back and forth in frenzy, and she raised her hands as if to tear her burning garments from her, but her fingers did not obey her commands and instead wrung her neck, snapping the many collapsible vertebrae.

  It was raining a brightly colored rain of gemstones. This was the remnant of the shattered canopy containing the sixty-four-sided mandala. The four sly-eyed wheels dived at the cloaked figure, but then swirled to the left and right as if blind and smashed into walls and street, spokes bent, sly eyes dead. With them, little gems, small as dust motes, also fell, twinkling brightly. The cobblestones were carpeted in a layer of rainbow grit, a scattering of sand without a pattern.

  The blind push broom sighed, and straightened itself, and began slowly to gather the scattered gem dust into heaps.

  Vigil slowly regained control of his muscles and, as luck would have it, found a backup containing the muscle instructions on how to breathe in one of the memento files his mother had made of his birth, including the moment when he switched over from taking oxygenated blood through his navel to switching to an air-breathing regimen. Silently, he blessed his mother.

  But he did not rise to his feet. Those memories of birth and the nearness of his death, the shocks to his nervous system caused by the several mudra and mandalas erupting into his personal infosphere, all left him curled in a ball, the foetal position.

  A series of spasms racked him as his nerve-muscle balances reestablished themselves, and he coughed and shrieked in pain as his breathing cycle restarted. The numbness in his arm was replaced by a painful sensation, as if lines of ants made of fire were crawling up and down the veins and arteries in his arm.

  At last, he climbed to his hands and knees.

  With the eyes in his head, he saw the legs and feet of the figure who had saved him. Vigil looked up. The downwash of the dying wheels as they swooped had flung the hood aside and the thrown long cloak open, revealing what was beneath. The creature looked like a naked man made of semitransparent gold, and the black iron of his bones shone through his skin.

  The organism was more complex, and more horrible, than at first it seemed.

  A central creature occupied the chest cavity. It looked something like an unborn babe, with a vast naked head pulsing with blue viens and tiny malformed body dangling beneath. Bundles of filaments issued from the empty eye sockets in the skull, and tubes into the mouth and nose-holes. The infantile body was held in a metallic frame of rib bones, swimming in gold fluid. Service jacks ran down the bent baby’s spine and wired him to the exoskeleton’s spine.

  The skeleton stood on two jointed metallic legs and had two skeletal hands. Power nodes coated the metal bones like beads.

  The whole of the exoskeleton was coated with a semifluid gold substance that gleamed like metal where it was still and rippled like oil at the joints when the figure moved. Armored plates, translucent as amber, clung to the surface of the golden, metallic fluid, but seemed to be a solid state of the same substance.

  Vigil knew from his historical lore that this transparent gold substance was Aurum Potable, the Philosopher’s Stone. It was both cognitive matter and a mass of nanomechanical tools.

  This gold outer flesh was naked except for a sword belt running from shoulder to hip, and a mask. The mask was angular metal, one of those children’s puppets whose face-elements could move to form simple expressions, raise or lower the metal eyebrows in a frown, twist the metal lips to form a smile or scowl. At the moment, the expression was cold and pitiless.

  Receptors shaped like eyes pinned the hood in place at the shoulders, and other input sensors ran from eye to eye like a chain of office. Here also was a step-down transformer to allow the gold creature to communicate with the Firstling-inhabited formats of the Noösphere without overwhelming their channels.

  Vigil, through the many points of view motes in the air fed into his brain, saw that the juggernaut behind him did not rise nor speak. Of course. Neither human nor Swan could give lawful commands to a juggernaut. Patricians could, but they would not, for they never interfered with human life, not even to save it, unless invited.

  What was he? This man might be a Fox Maiden in disguise, but, then again, anyone might be a Fox Maiden in disguise. But an intuition from the Fox laughter which still echoed in his nervous system told him clearly that this was no Kitsune.

  Who, then, outranked a Megalodon? Who outranked an armored cavalryman of the Third Humans? Who else but an officer?

  The gold creature in the iron mask was a Myrmidon, a Third Human. Rather, it was the Myrmidon, the sole representative of the race of which Vigil had ever heard. To see such a thing was as odd as to see a pterodactyl.

  4. The Ancient of Days

  “You said you were coming to kill me,” said Vigil. It would have been wiser to wait until he was addressed to speak, for Myrmidons (so legend said) were notoriously punctilious, regarding even minor lapses of courtesy or small formatting errors as being mortal crimes. “What changed your mind?”

  The voice was a surprisingly rich, smooth, and melodic baritone, odd to hear issuing from a horrific metal mask. “It is no concern of mine if lesser beings misunderstand the denotation of a statement. I said I must descend the Tower to perform some killings. So I have. I told you to set your affairs in order. I meant you to assign your office to an heir. This was because you were about to be ambushed. You failed to do so, requiring me to preserve you. This was inefficient. Arise and walk!”

  Vigil climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Why are you helping me?”

  “The Schedule dictates that great Emancipation decelerate and come to rest and Torment come to an end. I oppose those who oppose this fate.”

  “You serve the Schedule?”

  “I serve the highest master, who serves nothing. Like you, he has a retaliation to fulfill and a mate to win.”

  “I owe no retaliation to any man.”

  “To this world, then. Do not play word games with me!”

  Vigil was aghast to find his secrets known to this creature. Perhaps the Myrmidon had sent some microbe into his nervous system and hacked open his encrypted thought. One of Vigil’s internals uneasily reminded him that legend spoke of Myrmidons not so much as conquering the omniscient Swans as merely sweeping them aside. “What retaliation is yours? Your wars are long forgotten. You are the last of your kind.”

  “Retaliation against the universe, which denies my master his due dignity.”

  “Who is the mate you say he seeks? Myrmidons do not mate! They possess neither sex organs nor sex roles.”

  “Adam in Eden possessed no office related to sex ere Eve was cloned from his side. My master is greater than he. Cease your prattle. Walk! The Table awaits. Nay, did I say walk? Run! Even so it may be too late.”

  “My garb is torn! Shall I appear before the Table of Stability also panting from a herky-jerky jog?”

  But the other did not answer, except to raise his hand and twist his fingers into a mudra that Vigil did not recognize. The blur of dream filled his mind …

  4

  The Palace of Future History

  1. The Door Wardens

  The mudra controlling him must have been very precise, for by the time he blinked his vision clear, an energy like fire was rippling through his muscles, making his legs and arms pump and tremble, and he saw the statue of the Sphinx loom before him. He was no
t just jogging. His body, without his consent, was sprinting headlong down the street.

  Vigil shouted the verbal formula for uttarabodhi, the Mudra of Best Perfection; but it was too late, for he gained control of his legs a moment after he slammed into the broad, pale flanks of the gynosphinx.

  Vigil was jarred and shocked by the impact with the stone buttocks. In part because his momentum carried him forward, in part because his numb limbs still moved, he found himself scrambling up across her back and sliding down her spine and stumbling and falling over her winged shoulders and plunging between her huge stone breasts.

  Between the forepaws of the giant stone monster, a small fountain of fragrant water played. Of course Vigil found himself face-first in the fluid, legs kicking and jerking as excess possession-energy departing from his body danced through his muscles.

  He raised his head and looked around. Something had cut him off from the local channels, and so his visual information was only coming in from his biological eyes and from the ornaments on his coat. There was no sign of the Myrmidon.

  The Palace of Future History loomed before him, the dark slabs and silver columns softened in their severity by septfoil floral bunting that ran from one caryatid to the next.

  Four sentries in silver helmets and dark armor, armed with pacification wands and ceremonial swords, stood at the tall glass doors, looking on in wonder. Their surcoats were emblazed with the silver spinning wheel crossed by a black spindle and black sheers. This was the heraldry of the Loyal and Self-Correctional Order of Prognostic Actuarial Cliometric Stability.

  For a moment, the sentries hesitated, not quite stepping forward, reluctant to leave their posts, but perhaps wondering if Vigil were wounded, perhaps horrified at seeing a man maimed before their eyes by so vehement a fall, or killed. But then one sentry made an involuntary gulping noise, as if trying to swallow a laugh; and that was enough.

  Suddenly they were bellowing with laughter, and guffawed, and gasped, and shrieked, and howled. Each time they began to recall their discipline and smooth away their smiles, one would see his fellow’s face trying not to smile, and the mirth would explode again. One of them dropped his wand to clutch his aching sides. Vigil suspected they had been taking drafts of lager or listening to Fox music.