The Vindication of Man Page 6

  Because of my love, I cannot doubt you will be waiting for me, faithful to your vow, and because you are faithful, because you are a man of such stature that I cannot doubt you, I find myself helplessly in love.

  The time for me is less than a century, and for you, hundreds of thousands of years. Once we are together, none of that will matter. Love is eternal, it partakes of eternity, it is timeless, and the vast desolation of heaven cannot make love lose its way, nor starve, nor dwindle, nor diminish, nor any yawning gulfs swallow it nor hold it back; neither lightyears nor years can abate love that is true.

  15. Postscript

  Beloved, my Menelaus, my sweet, my strong man, my soul of strength, pray this prayer for me that I may return, alive again after dissolution, alive when it is impossible that I should live, alive after entering the mind of the Authority in the core of M3, and pleading with the inhuman, superhuman presences found within the core, and winning redemption for mankind, generations I will never know, but who are still bound to me, in iron chains of obligation, in soft ribbons of affection and maternal devotion. Even if no organism descended from man ever knows me, I left the world as its ruler and will do my utmost to save and vindicate those descended from my subjects, however great the time, for that love also knows no limit. For the sake of their forefathers, I mean them to be free.

  Ask the world to pray for me, beloved. This is the prayer I select:

  O Holy Protectress of those who art in greatest need,

  thou who shineth as a star of hope in the midst of darkness,

  blessed Saint Rita of Cascia,

  bright mirror of God’s grace,

  in patience and fortitude thou art a model of all the states in life.

  I unite my will with the will of God

  through the merits of my Savior Jesus Christ,

  through the merits of the holy Virgin Mary

  I ask thee to obtain my earnest petition,

  provided it be for the greater glory of God

  and my own sanctification.

  Guide and purify my intention,

  O Holy Protectress and advocate,

  so that I may obtain the pardon of all my sins

  and the grace to persevere my ordeal,

  as thou didst in walking with courage, generosity, and fidelity down the path of life.

  Let me survive dissolution into the pale horror

  Let me find what dwells within

  Let me win their inhuman hearts

  Let me overcome their malice of indifference

  Let them agree to free me

  Let me return to life

  Let me cross the desolation of heaven

  Let me return to Earth

  The blue waters and blue skies of Earth, the sweet scents of Earth

  Let me feel my lover’s arms again

  Let me face certain death in certain knowledge that my savior lives

  What I ask is impossible; and I who ask it am helpless

  Saint Rita, advocate of the impossible, pray for us!

  Saint Rita, advocate of the helpless, pray for us!

  16. Not to Worry

  A.D. 68010

  As Montrose put the needle reverently away, Mickey saw his face and asked him what troubled him.

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me, since you asked. Rania gave me a prayer she wants all the world to say for her. I ain’t once got on my knees to pray for her return. Not once in sixty-six thousand years.”

  Mickey said jovially, “Not to worry! My people back in the day performed many rituals to placate the Swan Princess who stole the divine fire from heaven and hid it in a diamond for the sake of Man, the Lady of Hope. Two turtledoves is the proper sacrifice for the poor, and a white ewe without blemish for those any goddess of bounty has blessed. So our devotion makes up for your lack! Were there any Witches aboard her ship?”

  Mickey had evidently forgotten how long ago she had launched, or perhaps he had never been able to grasp the true magnitude of eons involved. The Hermetic dated from before the Ecpyrosis, the destruction of the world by fire; therefore, to Mickey, her ship was no more real than the ship of Noah from before the Deluge, the destruction of the world by flood.

  Montrose said, “Damn! I need a priest. I reckon I should do some confessing.”

  “Eh? And all this time I had you pegged as a confirmed skeptic, Menelaus Montrose.”

  “Well, my religion was more like, Shut up and shoot straight, but I am beginning to think that is theologically insufficient for my spiritual needs. All these damned years; one drop at a time, time enough to fill a ocean, are weighing on me, piled on like I was at the bottom of a sea trench; all this hostile void and vacuum and emptiness and death outside the few little bright blue planets men live on; all these vast thinking machines, big as gas giants, and bigger. They are inhuman. Like things out of a nightmare of Saint Johnny on Patmos. Facing this, a man needs something more than a bottle of hooch to put the spirit in him.”

  “You should take some of my pharmaceuticals, and it would open your third eye and allow you to walk the winds.”

  “Or give me one more thing to fess up to the parson, I guess. Do they still have priests, these days? I suppose they must.”

  “There is a group that calls itself the Sacerdotal Order, which is under the protection of the Fifth Humans. They say they are the heirs of the Old, Strong religion, and the successors to Saint Peter, but their doctrines have grown confused and corrupt with time. They say Peter holds the Keys to Heaven and Hell. My people taught that Peter lives with the souls of dead children called the Lost Boys, and he never grows old and never completed the journey to the afterlife, but dwells in the great star Canopus, the second-brightest star to the right of Sirius, the Dog Star. The tiny and bright spirit who dwells with him shines her light and rings her bell and calls the lost and wandering ghosts to her. She died, sacrificing her life saving Peter, but is resurrected when the innocent clap their hands, for their faith brings the dead to life again. You can see from where these Sacerdotes derive their ideas and myths: all is but a holdover from the pagan roots of yore.”

  “Hm. Could be a different Peter. In any case, I feel pretty bad that I let a doubt about her come to trouble me and let it grow stronger as she got closer.”

  “What doubt? Did you think her love would fail? That? Is that what has been disturbing your slumber these last few millennia? My dear friend: sleep now in perfect peace. I will stay awake and guard you. When you next wake, you will see her.”

  Montrose patted him on the shoulder. “But what is Blackie up to?”

  Mickey said, “He is already ignoring the return of Rania and looking to the next age, or the one beyond that. His eyes are on the future.”

  Montrose said sadly, “Then maybe I shouldn’t worry. I know by now. The future will never arrive.”

  3

  The Hour of Her Advent

  1. The Looking Glass World

  A.D. 69396 OR 1 ULTRAVINDICATION

  Montrose woke suddenly and completely. That was the first surprise.

  Before he even opened his eyes, he was aware of three things. First, his entire mind, operating at the very lowest ranges of a Potentate level, was gathered into one coherent system. Last time he slept, he had not commanded the resources necessary to perform the reintegration processes. He had not had the money, or whatever they used for money in that era.

  Second, someone or something had interfered with his method of what he called sleeping with one eye open, which meant his ability kept a partial on standby alert, watching the data streaming through the dreaming mind of mad Tellus watching for spikes or strange attractors in the cliometric chords and glissandos of the symphony of history.

  Third, something was strange about his eyes. The darkness inside of his eyelids did not have the normal pattern of phosphenes he expected upon waking from slumber. This in turn indicated that his entire brain capacity, roughly equal to a logic diamond the size of the core of the planet Mercury, or to a
mountain of compressed murk substance, had been fitted inside one mobile biological body.

  This was starkly impossible, unless he had been transferred without his knowledge into another body. The fact that he did not feel a sense of shock implied one of two things: either his subconscious mind had been subliminally conditioned or prepared to receive the knowledge that he was waking in a new body without a shock, or the new mental geometry he occupied was better able to adapt without shock to new paradigms than his old.

  But, then, what was this feeling of lightness, of joy, this sensation he remembered from his childhood? He recalled waking up in the wee hours of Christmas morning, long before the sun was up, unwilling to step out of bed for fear of waking the snoring hulks of his many older brothers, unwilling to put his unshod foot on the cold, hard, harsh floor. Instead, he hovered between sleep and waking, wrapped in the warmth of the rough blankets impregnated with antiseptics and antibiotics, like floating in a cocoon, safe from the fear that winter would come and never leave, eager with a greedy, happy elation of expectation, that only a day of gifts and feasts and visits and pine trees shining with ornaments provoke or fulfill. It was a day too wonderful to be true.

  But then again, no, this sensation was different.

  His elation was like dark woodsmoke, earthy, primal, rising as if from his blood and bone marrow, his cells and glands. It was not the joy of a youth getting a toy but of a man who gives himself so utterly to another that he forgets himself entirely. It was a sensation of conquest and surrender.

  He remembered his first time seeing the cleavage of a buxom young swimmer in a bathing suit when he went to Soko University on the West Coast. It was the type of skimpy, clinging, immodest garb no proper Texan lass ever donned; but San Francisco was owned by the Sumitomo Zaibatsu, and things were different there. She was the captain of the swim team, which was closed to Texans and Northeastermen, even though Menelaus could outswim the shrimpy city boys on the team.

  Her name was Hoshiko. Her eyes were bright as agates, and her dark hair fell past her hips, and she barely came up to his elbow. He had asked her to let him escort her to the Bon festival and the dance. She looked, if anything, even more adorable in her yukata than in her bathing suit. No other Mestizo freshman dared to court a yellow girl, because they feared the Nisei boys; and the Nisei boys feared her too much to court her themselves, because she was as pretty as an idol and sharp as a whip. (As for Menelaus, the evening when four young toughs followed him into a dark alley, where he had had the forethought to park a fire axe behind a trashcan, to express their discontent with the gaijin dancing with the pretty Japifornian girl, had been one of the shortest of the many altercations of his life. Three of the boys ran away as fast as their legs could carry them, with their leader hopping after as fast as his remaining leg could carry him.)

  Earlier, he remembered his first crush on a dark-haired, hazel-eyed beauty from Austin, a girl he saw only twice a year, at fair time. Her name was Jacqueline.

  Earlier again, he remembered his first kiss, stolen from his cousin Lizzy during a Christmas dance, and he had to manhandle her under the mistletoe to have a proper excuse and fight his cousin Lenny the next day, skinning his knuckles and knees and ending up with bits of Lenny’s ear in his teeth.

  All these memories and more were in the background. In the foreground was a joy too bright to stare at, like the sun.

  So there might have been a third reason why he felt no shock. He was too damned happy.

  He opened his eyes, and they were filled with water, and he opened his mouth and choked. The unpleasant medicinal indignities of waking from long-term hibernation had changed, but they were still unpleasant.

  He sat up, struck his head against what, at first, he thought was a coffin lid. But the surface, whatever it was, was instantly broken into shards and fragments about his head and shoulders. Fluid sluiced off him like soapsuds falling off a man who sits up in a bathtub.

  The moonlight glaring in his damp eyes made a bright blur. Before he could blink his eyes clear and look around, from the texture and sound of the wind, he knew he was out of doors, but from the smell, or the lack of it, he could not imagine where. The sound was of a desolate, wide space, a solitude as broad as a desert. He heard no people moving nearby, no voices, no breathing, no birds, no sound of machinery, nothing.

  He spat the fluid from his mouth. Another surprise: the fluid did not strike his chest as it fell. It did not fall, but sublimated instantly to vapor in his teeth. In fact, his chest and upper back, shoulders and arms likewise were bare and dry. The fluid had already vanished from his naked skin. There was no choking sensation in his lungs as normally accompanied switching from breathing hyperoxygenated liquid to breathing air. He felt no liquid in his lungs, but he felt a gush of mist from his nostrils, yet seemingly too small in volume to account for transition between fluid and air regimes. The implications of that were staggering: it implied a revolution of biotechnology at least, if the material was being so rapidly absorbed back into the cell lining of his lungs, or of physics at most, if it was being or reduced in mass or volume so suddenly, whisked away by means unknown.

  He ran his wrist across his eyes, blinking and snorting. He touched his nose. It was still big and crooked. He felt his teeth with his tongue, and the small lump on his inner lip where he had fallen on his grandfather’s big wooden rocking chair when he was three years old, stitched up by the local horse-doctor, and it had never healed quite right. Whoever made this new mouth for him had put it together with the care and artistry of a professional counterfeiter. It made him feel right at home.

  Then he looked around.

  It was night. The moon and four other satellites he did not recognize were up. The moon was blue under layers of frozen oxygen, with the seas and oceans black with the debris of once-great forests and cities, now crushed into a strata of dark grit beneath the weight of the collapsed, failed atmosphere.

  Despite the strangeness, the world he sat upon was Earth. But the land for miles and miles, as far as his eyes in the nocturnal gloom could pierce, was a flat and level shining surface like a mirror made of diamond, colorless in the blue moonlight. The world was as barren as a salt flat, empty of tower or house or highway, empty of bird or beast or bush or grass blade.

  In a direction he deduced was west, the land fell away at a sharp cliff to a lower landscape no less flat and diamond-bright. There was a line of fog hovering over the middle distance of that lower glass plain, which might indicate the presence of a river canyon.

  In the opposite direction, irregular peaks of white substance rose above the white surface, as if the mirror there were broken by some pressure from below, to form mountains. They looked black in the distance. The stars were bright, and the sky contained a few high clouds, tinged with sapphire in the blue moonlight, like ghostly feathers. He thought that was a good sign. It meant that somewhere, there was water on the surface of the globe.

  So Menelaus Montrose, waking with the strange sensation of joy without a name, sat naked in a tiny pool of rapidly evaporating white fluid in a little pond smaller than a bathtub and poked his head and shoulders and chest out of the surface of the moonlit, diamond world. He looked like a chick emerging from an egg or like an arctic sailor smashing desperately upward through thin ice for air. He peered left and right, blinking like an owl, and saw the landscape coated with a substance smooth and shining as glass, a world as blank as creation on the second day.

  And he uttered a single swear word.

  2. The Patrician Rassaphore

  Montrose stepped out of the hole where he woke and watched dubiously as it filled itself in and closed up behind him. That he was standing on the surface of some self-aware cognitive substance he had little doubt, but how to signal to it, he could see no way. He pounded on the ground and shouted at it for a while, more to amuse himself than in hope of establishing contact. Smashing at the diamond with his fist bloodied his knuckles, which was a sensation as familiar to him as
the crannies and irregularities of his teeth were to his tongue. One diamond fragment of the radial cracks was a triangle long and thin enough to act as a toothpick, so he took up the diamond shard and picked his teeth as he walked.

  He decided to travel toward the western cliffs, on the general theory that following the land downward was the best way to find a river, and a river the best place to look for people.

  Counting his footsteps and watching the stars turn, Montrose walked for two hours, rested, walked for two hours, rested, and so passed the night. The river fog (or whatever those clouds might be) rising from the lower plain grew taller as the night passed and the sky overhead grew pink with the promise of dawn. He estimated that the globe was rotating at roughly half the rate it had known in his youth.

  The rising sun behind him ignited the mountains, which were made of glass. Montrose stopped walking to gaze in awe at the sky as it slowly grew bright. The level beams of sunlight shining through the translucent peaks sent a series of nimbuses like the serried lances of rows of celestial pikemen streaming across the sky, painting the high clouds and thin mists with royal purple and rich Prussian blue, turquoise and emerald bright as burning copper sulfate, with narrower bands and darts of rose and cerise, carnelian and citrine, gamboge, smaragdine, and saffron. Soon, the whole sky was a peacock’s tail.

  A motion in the distance drew his eyes downward from the wonder of the twilight of the dawn. A long shadow was reaching from the burning mountains behind. It was cast by a figure, slender and graceful, with long snow-white robes fluttering about like wings, who was skating across the diamond surface toward him. Something in the posture and the motion of the legs and hips told Montrose it was a male.

  As the other man came closer, Montrose could see the slight feathers of haze appearing and disappearing around the man’s slippers as his slid forward. The ice-hard substance was flexing and re-forming with each footstep, no doubt forming a frictionless surface. The oddness was that he was not bent over like a speed skater would have been, but his speed was much greater than the rather casual motion of his legs could account for. Perhaps the substance was also moving of its own accord underfoot, like a conveyer belt, imparting additional motion.