The Hermetic Millennia Read online

  One of the tendrils held in its loop a ship’s crewman, who was lowered from the body of the craft to the ground, like a circus girl wrapped in the trunk of an elephant. The figure was slim and slight, long-haired, and wrapped in a long blue gray toga.

  The goggles of Sir Guiden were staring upward as the robed figure descended, but it was impossible to see the knight’s expression. Montrose was standing next to him, a scarecrow next to a tin man, his gaunt body hidden in a poncho and his thin hook-nosed face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed duster.

  Fifty of the Knights Hospitalier in their powered armor stood deployed on the lawn, some atop the walls, some among the mausoleums, some standing at ease nearby. The armor did not move, but every helmet had optic fibers as fine as the antennae of crabs, which swayed left and right, up and down, front and behind, as each man used his motionless goggles to look in all directions. Every pair of boots bore the golden spurs of knighthood, even though no horse ever made could have long endured the mechanized armor in its saddle. Equally archaic were the claymores, katara punching daggers, and Broomhandle Mauser pistols dangling at jaunty angles from their baldrics and cinctures. Less anachronistic were the launchers or particle-beam lances slung each from an articulated shoulder mount. The air support corps consisted of ten men, each carrying a winged drone called a hawk on his wrist. The narrow glass instrument heads of the drones on the wrists of their masters ticked back and forth as hypnotically and restlessly as the optic antennae of the motionless men.

  The Knights must have assumed the descending blue-robed figure no threat, since, aside from a rippling among their antennae, they made no move as he swung close to Montrose.

  The slender figure, Montrose saw as he was lowered in a swoop, was a male. The swath of robes that swirled around his limbs must have been smart material, woven with thousands of tiny motile fabric strands, because a hood unfolded by itself to shade the man’s features from the rain. The full-body tattoos that had been fashionable in earlier days were not in evidence. However, the man had decorations, complex as circuitry diagrams, imprinted in colored inks onto his hands and fingers, feet and toes. The feet decorations glowed red, and shed heat when the man stepped on the cold grass.

  “Woggy! Friendlies and mates! Are we ready for up-go, no?”

  Menelaus said, “No. You gunna land that thing?”

  “The fair Soaring Azurine never lands! The serpentines can hoist. Or are you easily dazed?”

  Menelaus spit on the ground. “I reckon I daze about as well or poorly as the next feller.”

  “We can have the serpentines lower a booth, if you don’t want to dare the hoist. These are too current for you, no? The booth is opaque, and there is no sensation, no jar. You can balance a land glass atop an egg on your head, brim-full, with water tension curving above the level, and your hair will be dry as before as after you jerk up.”

  “I’ll use the hoist.”

  Almost before words cleared his mouth, slithering steel tightened and tugged. Montrose yelped as the ground slid dizzily away from his feet. The steel snake made a motion like an anteater pulling an ant into its mouth, and Montrose was inside the hatch, and the deck of the airship was beneath him. It was that rapid.

  Whatever controlled the tendrils must have assumed he spoke for Sir Guiden, because the armored figure was wrapped in a second steel snake and also lifted swiftly and smoothly into the ship.

  The people current to this age evidently were used to vertigo, because the checkerboard pattern of the deck had every other panel transparent, and showed the dun earth swaying underfoot. Large, slanting windows looked out right and left; a dome showed the bottom of the lifting body above. The slight motions of the wind rippling against the cigar-shaped gas bag overhead were imparted to the deck, so a smooth and gentle pitch and roll continually rocked the cabin.

  The cabin was appointed in a lush, even sybaritic style: Gilded fountains made eye-confounding patterns of water and spray amidships, couches and settees on flexible silvery caterpillar legs swayed to either side, heaped with pillows, furs, and cushions. Small tables shining with what might have been musical instruments or fluted wineglasses hung above and below eye level, and were held on the long and gently swaying tendrils the crewman had called serpentines. The serpentines, like well-trained servants, were never in the way. Menelaus spent a moment amusing himself, rushing and jumping back and forth, trying to get one of them to trip him or snag his neck clothesline-style, but the sleek metal tentacles were too agile and too well programmed and slithered neatly aside.

  Someone coughed politely. Montrose stopped his game and looked. Here were three figures: the man who had welcomed him, and two women. All three were dressed in translucent blue gray ankle-length togas of smart material with filmy capes and scarves of the same material floating from their shoulders. The fabric flowed and flickered oddly around their limbs, togas rippling like living things, and the translucent swallow-tailed capes fluttered like wings in a breeze. All were barefoot and slender. One woman, the taller, willowy blonde, wore a wreath of flowers, but aside from this, the fantastic headgear of the Cryonarchy had thankfully passed into history. The shorter and younger woman wore a purple sapphire shaped like a teardrop on her brow, with an untamed mass of hair dyed a luminous hue of purple framing her thin face, her eyelids painted black. Her eyes were violet and wild.

  The long-haired man who greeted them on the ground, Menelaus realized, had not been “crew.” This was a private ship, a houseboat, not a military vessel.

  A fourth figure, also a man, was dressed in the black cassock and white dog collar of a cleric, his garb from days older than Montrose’s own. It was this man who stepped forward and offered his hand.

  “I am Brother Roger Juliac of Beeleigh, Society of Jesus.”

  “Meany Montrose. Howdy do.”

  “Yes, Highly Honored. I know of you,” intoned Brother Roger with an inclination of his head. “I am the astronomer who discovered the anomaly.”

  The man had the hard and rugged face and thickset build of a boxer. Montrose could not imagine anyone who looked less like a man of the cloth, or an astrophysicist.

  Montrose still had caterpillar-drive pistols in both his fists, so he took his right pistol, thrust it butt first into the surprised man’s left hand, and then clasped his right. After the handshake, he snatched his pistol back.

  Sir Guiden, watching this exchange, said to Montrose over the silent, internal channel they shared, “Liege, you know the gesture of a handshake is meant to show that you have no weapon in your sword hand.”

  “Really? I figure handing the friar my shooting iron shows I am even more peaceful than that. You gunna take off your helmet?”

  Sir Guy said silently, “The shipmaster and his wives are dressed in hunger silk. It can be used as a weapon. The micropores can flay skin and strip proteins out of the blood and muscle exposed.”

  “If these folk are so fierce, why’d we leave our goon squad below?”

  Sir Guy replied, “The airskiff serpentines will protect you from attack, if you are a friend, and the men could not protect you from them, if you are a foe.”

  Menelaus had noticed that the gondola did not have any armor, or locks on the ports or hatches. Since anyone hoisted aboard was wrapped in deadly metal cable, and remained in reach thereafter, and since the people aboard wore yards of smart cloth that apparently could eat a man’s face, perhaps locks and bars were not needed.

  Meanwhile, at the same time, Menelaus was talking aloud to the Jesuit with his real mouth and listening with his real ears. The first thing he said was, “What anomaly?”

  Brother Roger said, “This is Tessa Azurine, and her permanent paramour, Woggy Azurine, and the sexpartner is called Third, since she is between names at the moment. I am their mendicant and confessor.”

  The man waved and grinned. “Gulps! Bro Ro is weight-valued, since the Giants be less like to scald flocks what have a spook-speaking man amidst. Not mendicant he!”

 
The taller of the two women curtsied like a willow bending, and her blue gray robes writhed like mist. “We scorn no refugee; we share lift, fire, and salt. ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Adam hath not where to lay his head.’ You are a Sylph of Time as we are Sylphs of Wind, blown you know not where.”

  The girl with the purple hair and the gem on her brow was pouting like a child, and her eyes were not focused on anything in the environment around her. She spoke aloud to no one in particular, “How about Trey? No? Like a card.”

  Montrose grunted. “Yeah, um, pleezta-meetcha, gals, guy, nice digs. Sure hope y’all feel better soon.”

  The willowy, flower-crowned woman, Tessa, said, “But we are not sick, no?”

  “I ain’t touching that line with a boat hook, ma’am. Brother Roger, what anomaly?”

  The Jesuit said to her, “Tessa, if you could ask the Azurine to ascend to the observatory, it should be passing through the area directly.”

  Tessa said, “Azurine, my adored, acknowledge the order.”

  A melodic voice answered from the wall, sounding like wind chimes. “I delight to obey, my adored. I ascend. For your delight, I play an ascension theme from your preference profile.” A haunting sequence of woodwinds and plaintive chords drifted through the air, soft and without melody, but a trumpet added a note of triumph when the airship broke through the cloud, as if through a gray floor, up into dazzling daylight.

  Montrose said to the priest, “You! Now that the pleasantries are done, what poxy anomaly?”

  Brother Roger said, “Energy discharges from V886 Centauri. The radiospectrography and gamma ray analysis are constant with an, ah, interplanetary event.”

  “No damn point in pausing for drama, Padre, because I grade on info, not on delivery.”

  Brother Roger said, “Ah. As you say. We believe the ice giant planet Thrymheim was driven into the star. The terrene matter of the superjovian world interacted with the contraterrene plasma of the star’s atmosphere.”

  Thrymheim was the single planet orbiting the Diamond Star. It held a far Neptunian orbit, beyond where the antimatter in the solar wind could reach, and so was not disintegrated.

  “Driven in why? As a weapon?”

  Brother Roger shook his head. “Criswell mining operates by inducing a ring-current around the star by ionically charged beams oppositely directed from each other. Usually the mining satellite ring is equatorial, so that the ejection mass—”

  “By Mother Mary changing baby Jesus’ stinking holy diapers, Padre! I was on the expedition, and I am a star miner, so I know how the damn process works!”

  Brother Roger said, “There are dark lines in the spectrographic analysis consistent with an off-center arrangement of the mining orbitals, Honored.”

  “Blight and clap! What are the vectors?”

  Brother Roger said, “I have not been able to deduce, from the limited information available fifty light-years away, what the various constituent pressures—”

  “You are saying the mining satellites focused the explosion like a jet engine.”

  “Explosions. So we speculate, Honored.”

  “Which way is it pointing? Wait. Explosions, with an s, plural?”

  “Indeed, Honored.”

  “She broke the damn planet into bits, made it into an asteroid stream, and is feeding in one or two earth-masses at a time. Thrymheim was fifteen hundred and ninety earth-masses, as I recall. The whole solar system, Monument and everything, has been turned into a damned Orion drive, just on a massive scale.”

  Sir Guiden turned on his suit speakers, to let the people in the cabin hear the question, “Liege! How do you know it is she?”

  “Meaning what?” Montrose said.

  Sir Guiden said, “The Bellerophon was lighter than the Hermetic, and should have overtaken her either when they made starfall at V886 Centauri, a few months more or less. We tend to think of red dwarfs as small and dim, but a sailing ship can reflect and focus a beam of star energy to burn targets across interplanetary distances, and small stars have more than enough power for that.”

  “The pursuit ship didn’t have no crew aboard, it was just Del Azarchel’s second emulation, an Astro-Exarchel, and a passel of teleoperated tools. You’re thinking Rania might have bought the farm during whatever shoot-out banged when they butted heads?

  Sir Guiden said, “Liege, are you trying to be obscure? Farm?”

  “Sorry. You think Rania died? No fear of that!”

  Sir Guiden said, “How not?”

  “I know Blackie. He don’t think this big. Oh, this is her work, all right.” Montrose threw back his head and laughed. “What a gal! Did I tell you she’s mine?”

  Brother Roger said diffidently, “Honored—if you intuit the meaning of this anomaly, I would be grateful if—”

  “It’s eight thousand five hundred years until the Hyades Armada arrives here. Not much time. What is the biggest block to our being able to fight them when they come? We’re too small, too weak, too stupid. What is the main thing you need to get smarts? I don’t mean one man, I mean on a large-scale, bigger-than-worlds, multiple-centuries sort of deal. Library smarts; datasphere smarts. What’s it take? Energy. It takes fuel to calculate. Fuel to think. Now, the whole damn and plague-ridden universe is made out of energy, but not in a form ready to use. I was going crazy trying to figure out how many expeditions we could make to the Diamond Star for contraterrene, how much fuel is lost in transport, how many ships, considering that a ship can tow only about as much fuel as you might like to use for a round-trip, and not too much over.”

  Brother Roger said, “Honored, I don’t follow you.”

  “Rania blasted the Diamond Star out of its orbit around the galactic core, and is bringing the Diamond Star here. It is a dwarf star holding a ten-decillion-carat diamond made of antimatter, and if she parks it in an orbit inside our heliopause, where the interstellar medium is thin, we can go mine it in a reasonable time. How about the antimatter source is thirteen light-hours away rather than fifty light-years? How are our chances against the Dominion of the Hyades then?”

  “But, Honored—”

  “Please stop calling me that. The only titles I ever earned were ‘Doctor’ and ‘Esquire’ and ‘Lance-Corporal,’ and I am only qualified for one and a half of them. So call me Menelaus. If I scare ya, you can call me Doctor Montrose.”

  “Doctor—”

  “So I scare ya?”

  Brother Roger said, “Very much so, Doctor. After you destroyed all the cities of the world, one would be foolish not to—”

  “Wait. What the pox?”

  Just at that moment, the clouds underfoot parted, and the sun shining on the surface of the water sent a dazzle into the cabin. Montrose turned, squinted, blinked, and something in the back of his mind, between one blink and the next, ran some rapid calculations on the afterimage of what he had just seen.

  He stepped over the window. “Anyone here got a spyglass?”

  Sir Guiden said, “He means a snooper.”

  The willowy woman, Tessa said, “He means hunger silk. It absorbs photons as well as proteins.”

  With this, Tessa stepped over to the window and threw a tail of her writhing garment across the glass. The blue gray material stuck as if magnetized, and the surface bubbled slightly. The disk of vacuum trapped beneath formed a lens, and suddenly the fabric seemed to become like a library cloth, because a clear image appeared in it of what Menelaus had seen in the distance.

  It was a flotilla of airships, by scores and hundreds, drifting idly across the face of the waters, or brushing the surface. Long banners, like the lines trailing a fishing boat, hung from the airships and swept through the water. Every now and again one of the airships would turn and dive like a pelican, splashdown, and become a submarine, darting like a shark. One such airship he saw dived into a school of fish, and when it rose, the hull was dotted with sleek bodies that seemed to be glued or held against the surface. Th
e fish melted, and their bodily fluids and guts streamed for a moment against the gray fabric of the airship, and then those streaks too were absorbed.

  In the distance was shoreline, and trees beyond. There were airships here as well, trailing long fabric trains behind them as they drifted. Where the cloth passed, the trees were stripped of bark and buds. Any birds passing near were slashed out of the air by the serpentines, and the blue gray trails of fabric turned the bodies into stains of blood and absorbed them.

  Menelaus, now that they were above the cloud cover, could make an estimate of their speed, and was astonished. “What is your propulsion?”

  The woodwind voice of the ship answered, “Admired, cherished, and welcome guest, six valveless pulsejet engines aft use a nuclear hydrogen-fusion lance running along the lifting body axis to heat and expel an inert nitrogen compound propellant gathered from the surrounding atmospheric gases. The flexible lifting body material allows smooth and uninterrupted transition between heavier-than-air and lighter-than-air configurations, with partial vacuum created for lift by multiple microscopic rows along the dorsal surface. All gaseous raw materials are filtered out of the available environment by the submicropore chemical-lock system known as hunger silk, and recombined by molecular-capillary pseudochemistry in the fore nacelles. Lifting gases are in the buoyancy tanks. Carbon gas is reconfigured into diamond crystal and used for ballast. To submerge, the craft cross-sectional configuration—”

  “Thanks, good answer, shut up,” said Menelaus. To himself, he muttered, “Never woulda guessed. Atomic-powered supersonic submarine-blimps…” He turned to Tessa, “So what happened to the cities?”

  She smiled dreamily. “We have drugs to suppress those memories. Happiness drugs. But the ship can answer you in this as well, my adored ship, more loyal than any human lover.”