“The means he selected were elegant and unexpected. I can see here that most of y’all here don’t know the origins of your race.
“Here we go. I’ll keep it short.”
5. The True History of the Witches
“Blackie captured a posthuman Giant named Og, drilled Savant reading circuits into his head, brain-raped him, made a copy, and then over the phone or by remote lecture, had Ex-Og persuade the Consensus of Giants to embark on a program.
“The idea for this program was to crossbreed certain volunteer families through arranged marriages and bribes and insurance schemes and the like to solve certain problems no one generation was long-lived enough to solve. You know how like the Bach family had a knack for music? Og, or, rather Blackie, used the Monument methods to decode genetic emergent properties in human DNA, to breed the Simon Families for mathematics and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Then he used Cliometry to design the Longevity Institute, breeding the Simon Families to have transmission and inheritance laws to pass down ownership and rewards of research patents in what were basically living versions of complex information feedback loops. These loops were established with people and their roles acting just like the attractor nodes in a game theory lattice—ah, never mind. Let us say he blessed the families to increase and multiply and keep to one task forever, and they formed hereditary orders.
“The Order of Transcendental Mathematicians was one such hereditary task force, and they were set to solve the problem of the One and the Many; the Order of Reductive Neurologicians was another, and were set to solve the problem of Free Will; the Semantic Order were set to solve the problem of the relation of Symbol to Thought, and establish the Philosophical Language; the Order of Empirical Utopiagenic Engineers were to devise the perfect form of government, and the perfect form of man to cohere to it; but the Longevitalists, your order, was set to find the secret of Eternal Youth.
“The secret was really not that hard to find, since Blackie just slipped it to your grandmas, who took credit for it.
“So all the wealth and fame and rejoicing from a grateful world (or at least, from every mother who wanted her daughters to have a very long and very healthy life) landed square in the laps of the Simons. Blackie had released part of the secret of youth, but gene-locked it so that women and only women were long-lived. The secret is in bone marrow production of telomere-repair enzymes, and turning off the genetic clock that tells adolescent bones when to stop growing—which is why you dames are crazy tall.
“And the inheritance laws and tithes built into the clan structure accumulated all the wealth of the scientific revolution into the hands of a few old ladies at the root of the family tree—it is amazing how much wealth you can keep if you have two or three generations of husbands and children feeding into the family trust funds, especially if the rest of the world dies off and pays estate taxes and changes management three times quicker than you.
“After that, the all-male hierarchy of the Church was like a club run by teen boys in a world run by wise old grandmas who’ve been around the block and know which side of the egg to blow. The Simon Family organization also triggered a scientific revolution like a controlled reactor explosion, because all the scientists of that generation were in those families. So the Simons had not only wealth, but prestige greater than any institution in the world, secular or ecclesiastical.
“But there was one other thing the Simon Families had: They had an idea. The Simon Families, one and all, believed that man’s ideas were built into his genes because that is the situation Blackie set them up to live in and raise their kids in. The idea of generational inheritance of ideas implies that ideas are carried in your genome. And once you believe that all ideas are little double-helices of molecules and nothing more, you don’t believe in ideas, not really. You don’t believe in the design of the cosmos. You don’t believe the universe is a rational mystery, just a mystery; and you don’t think man is a rational animal, just an animal.
“The Simon Family belief in eugenics led to your children and grandchildren believing in Witchcraft as easily as arson leads to ashes.
“Once your so-called science tells you to believe human beings, including scientists, are simply not rational beings, you stop doing real science, or doing anything reasonable, and magic is the order of the day. Science becomes just a cult like any other, except with an idol uglier and duller than most; and it becomes part of the structure that the powers of the world use to cow the unruly and cull the weak, just like any other cult.
“And once you start worshipping power for its own sake, you stop looking to see what ideas are objectively true or honest, real or sane, you turn into Witches, and pick your ideas how you might pick to decorate your mantelpiece with bric-a-brac: by how they happen to strike your fancy.
“When that happens, you no longer have ideas, they have you.
“And when the emergency comes like an Indian War-Band howling over the harvest fields, and you really need a good idea as badly as a settler needs his rifle, well, all you got is bric-a-brac on the mantel, not a weapon that shoots.
“You witches were the fiery torches Blackie used to burn down the cathedral called Western Civilization that was standing in the way of his Machine taking over.
“And once the torches were but used-up stubs, he threw you away.”
6. Monster Witness
Menelaus started to climb heavily back to his wounded feet. A Warlock pushed through the line of musketmen, bent over Menelaus, and put a hand on his good arm, helping him to rise.
Menelaus whispered, “Who are you, friend? Your crones won’t like your helping me.”
The man was tall and lean; his eyes were dark and unblinking, as if haunted with wild thoughts, with a skeletally thin face, and a moustache that drooped past his jawline. His robes were adorned with patterns of holly and ivy and mistletoe, and images of wooden soldiers dueling crowned rats. At his brow he wore a horseshoe magnet, the ancient and ridiculous symbol of a machine-hunter.
He whispered to Menelaus, “My name is Drosselmeyer. Once, before I lost my youth, I slew five Savants whom I found nude upon a midnight in a frenzy of machine-worship atop a windowless building where ancient lights still burned, and ancient voices spoke; and the moon above shone clear.”
“Pleased to meet ya,” said Menelaus, wondering if the man were crazy.
“Is it true? The Hermetic Order made us, our race, our way of life? Then I stand behind you. Am I not an exorcist? Do I not hunt the Machine?”
Menelaus smiled. The man might be crazed, but he was not crazy. He patted the man on his shoulder. “It is all true. You were made by your enemies. I am your friend. We stand together.”
Drosselmeyer took this literally, for he drew his athame, his Witch-knife, of sharpened black basalt from his sacred belt, and stepped behind the shoulder of Menelaus. Tiny little movements and whispers from the gathered Warlocks, crones, and Demonstrators ceased: a wintry silence was about them, and all eyes were on Menelaus.
Menelaus turned back to Fatin and raised his head and raised his voice. “You’ve declared your case. Now answer mine! Riddle me this: How do you maintain a scientific civilization when your scientists are forbidden from reaching politically inconvenient results under your Thought Decontamination Laws? Or maintain an industrial civilization without factories, defend it without an army, pay for it without a currency, run it without laws, or civilize the next generation without marriage? Answer: you don’t.”