Illiance said, “But it cannot have escaped your attention that all the revenants here gathered in this site have some connection with the figure of the Judge of Ages, and that none of the relicts thawed so far are Tomb Guardians. Why the Tomb Guardians, whoever they are, decided to group all slumberers with this connection in one spot is unknown. Yet this lends indirect support to what Larz says.”
“How so?”
“If those who slumber here were gathered because each has a connection with the Judge of Ages, the pattern is not contradicted that one of them, Kine Larz, would be able to describe his look and costume.”
“Yup. You just look for a guy in a long red robe and a longer white wig, and I am sure that will be Hizzoner his own self. Why did Ull tell you y’all were looking for him? What is his bogus cover story, again, exactly?”
“Your question cannot at this time preoccupy us.” Illiance said apologetically, “For us, but two questions more urgently claim our attention. First, we do not understand the meaning of the Judgments of the Judge of Ages. Why does he destroy some periods of history while leaving others intact? Second, we do not understand the meaning of this so-called chess game of evolution that seems to be going on between the Judge of Ages and the Hermeticists. It is a violent game, in which anything from the murder of specific individuals up to the destruction of whole civilizations—or even races—are merely moves in it. The Tombs are part of it.”
“You think this Tomb is a chessman in that game, like a castle? What about the theory that this Judge of Ages built the Tombs merely to have a place to lay his head? He sleeps in the cold ground while he waits for the human race to get advanced enough to build another starship, so he can go seek his wife. That is what the legend says.”
Illiance nodded thoughtfully. “The legends could have been started or encouraged by a deliberate manipulation of the statistical tendencies of history. And, also, it is possible that the Tombs were built for more purposes than one. A posthuman mind might foresee more goals than humans know. The idea that the entire worldwide system of Tombs was designed and built and maintained over millennia and aeons merely as part of a very long-term strategy enacted by the Judge of Ages against the Master of the World is strangely compelling.”
“Sure, the strategy of a man who wants to be left alone.”
“It is odd indeed that this site alone had armor breached so severely yet so neatly.”
“Are you implying that you found this site like this? Here I thought you folks ripped the roof off.”
Illiance spread his hands. “Do you see in our camp here the heavy machinery of the type needed to cut a hilltop peak in half or pull up a layer of carbon nanotube-fiber reinforced titanium alloy roof armor three yards thick? This was a man-made attack: our investigation of the trace energies left behind indicate a lased magnetic monopole beam reached down from Mare Cognitum’s Riphaeus Mountains on the Moon and introduced a potent upward vector to rip the armor upward. The assault at that range, two hundred thirty-eight thousand miles, would be beyond any conceivable retaliation of the Tomb defenses. The beam crossed one and one half light-seconds of distance, and would have been diffracted sharply when it entered the atmosphere: the calculation processing power needed for so delicate an operation over such a distance indicates superhuman intelligence. But you look skeptical.”
“No, that is just the natural cast of my features. It seems a really … odd … way to break in. So who cracked open the Tombs?”
“The superhuman intelligence to which I refer,” said Illiance, “is that of the Hermeticists. Kine Larz claims to have seen one: this suggests they are not mythical beings or, to be precise, that such myths as we know may have accumulated over millennia around a kernel of literal fact.”
Menelaus stared down at the little Blue Man. He reached out his hand as if he were about to take the other by the shoulder, but he did not actually touch the other man. “Illiance! If what you just said is the case, then the Hermeticists are the ones who broke open the Tomb armor, yet did not appear here to exploit the opening. Doesn’t that make what you and your blue buddies are doing here a little suspicious? Do you know who you are working for? Who arranged you to come here? Don’t give me guesswork. Do you know?”
Illiance showed no change to his tranquil expression, but his footsteps slowed, and he stopped walking.
Menelaus said, “Illiance, if what you just said is so, not only are you in grave danger, but you have also placed your dog things and everyone you dug up in danger. There are two posthuman enemies running around the blind corridors of history like titans, not caring what cities and empires and aeons they step on, one of them buried under the Earth’s mantle, and the other one hidden on the dark side of the moon, and they mean to destroy each other. If this Tomb site is part of that war, you are meddling in that war. You are stepping between two duelists about to shoot. Which side are you going to be on?”
“Such a decision would not be convoluted: Simple Men act primarily, as do all living organisms, toward our own self-preservation and toward the promulgation of the ideals and thought-structures of our mental environment. But this must be determined when convenient.”
Illiance gestured to an oval opening in the seashell substance ahead. “The first of the two relicts occupies the uppermost chamber, which we shall see first, and then we will return here.”
Menelaus glanced inside the oval opening as they passed. He saw a bald blue figure seated facing away from the opening on a spread of gem-dotted blue fabric, which seemed to be one of the coats unfolded to use as a rug. The figure was bent over several medical appliances and a reading machine, which were connected by a nest of cables to a coffin, angrily lit with little red lights. The sight was disquieting, horrible, though he could not consciously say why. There was no other prisoner in evidence.
Their footsteps carried them past and up the slope.
2. Ghost Death
“The first of the two relicts is from A.D. 2525. He has a very complete, if very crude system of interface and interactive neural systems, much like a Locust, but no receptors. We can download what he thinks, but cannot upload to him queries to impel him to think on the topics of our interest.”
The corridor narrowed and the ramp of the floor grew more steep, and led through a sharp twist up to a small and final chamber very near the tip of the spiral tower.
Light here came from an oval opening high on the wall. Gray clouds and drifting snow were visible. It was cold. There was bioluminous fungi streaking the walls, but it was thin and patchy near the window, as if the fungi fared poorly in the cold. Heat came from an unadorned ivory bowl of black liquid resting on the floor. The inky liquid was motionless, not bubbling, but it nonetheless radiated a scalding warmth that robbed the air of moisture and scent.
Seated on a mat on the floor was Ctesibius the Savant, and the aura of his dignity seemed to fill the air even as the odorless heat of the black bowl. The bowl of hot black liquid was to one side of him, and a bowl of artificial peaches (Menelaus recognized them as grown from the half-dismantled coffins in the mess tent) was perched on a handful of snow in a matching bowl to the other side of him.
His clothing had been returned to him. The grotesque piercings of his skull were covered by a film of antiseptic cloth, covered in turn with a long white wig of curls that looked ridiculously like ones those courtiers in English courts in olden times were wont to wear, and, later, only justices in courts of law. He wore silk vestments of a striking green, the color the symbolized eternal life, trimmed with gold, to symbolize machine life. On his upper right breast and lower left skirt was the same emblem tattooed on his brow, the sign of three diamonds, to indicate his three donations, his three souls, which he had deposited by apotheosis into the infosphere.