“And even if Rania were not the issue,” said Montrose apologetically, “I gotta kill you for killing Captain Ranier Grimaldi, the finest man who ever lived. Sorry. I ain’t hot mad about that one no more, but it’s still got to be done.”
“As I must kill you,” said Del Azarchel amiably, “to repay your treason for when I trusted you, and put the inmost thoughts, indeed, the soul of Exarchel into your hands, and you used the opportunity to inflict your phantasm virus into my perceptual system. You reached in and twisted my very thoughts to your personal advantage. I will never be able to achieve perfect communion with Exarchel due to this. I too no longer am keenly angered about this. But it needs to be repaid.”
“Share a cigarette? It’s my last pack. I was saving them for this day.”
“Don’t mind if I do! If you kill me, Cowhand, you’ll inherit my tobacco fields on Ganymede.”
They lit both cigarettes from the heat of the blade of Del Azarchel’s energy-dirk.
“And if I don’t, I’ll be smoking myself in perdition, Blackie, and won’t need to save the rest.”
The two stood together in silence, puffing. But it was a companionable silence, not an awkward nor a cold one. The delicate yet sooty smell of tobacco surrounded them, a scent not known on Earth in countless years.
3. One Last Question
After a time, Montrose said, “Speaking of which, seeing as how we are all chummy and friendly-like, and about to shoot each other, let’s put our cards on the table. I said there was one thing I could not figure. If I ask you nicely, will you tell me? For old time’s sake? Curiosity is killing me. I have turned it this way and that in my mind, and I just can’t figure it. So I admit you are the better man—you got me. Will you tell me how you did it?”
Del Azarchel said, “My friend, my only friend, after a heartfelt plea like that, including that gill of totally false humility and flattery, I can deny you nothing! I don’t remember any tactic we’ve discussed where I outsmarted you, though. Ask away. I swear by the grave of my sainted mother—may she rest in peace enjoying in heaven the sainthood I purchased from the Church for her—I will tell you what you ask. In return you must answer one of mine. One thing has always puzzled me, year after year, century after century, and I promised myself that if I ever saw you face-to-face again in this life, that I would cajole the answer from you, or else be nagged by wonder forever. Have we a deal? One for one? It is but fair.”
“Deal. You first.”
“Ah no, Cowhand. Allow me the honor of allowing you the honor of going first.”
“Well! When you put it that way—when you put it that way, I cannot make out what you said.”
“I said you first. Don’t argue, or I shoot you.”
“Fair ’nuff. Here is my question: I cannot figure out how the current Melusine society as described to me can exist. Back in the year A.D. 9999, I released a group of spores carrying not one, but a huge set of interrelated nanite packages, viruses to rewrite genetic code. Honestly and not to brag, but I thought this was the cleverest thing I ever done or heard tell of, because I was both trying to lure you into opening the Devil’s Den hibernation facility—ah! You look surprised! Didn’t know I set this up to draw you in here on purpose, did ya?”
Del Azarchel said sheepishly, “Both I and Ull, who was my factotum at the time, did a statistical analysis of the distribution patterns of your spores, and we concluded it had been an accidental release. For one thing, the spore mated with various lichen and fungi and produced a harmless chemical that did nothing but produce a harmless color change and served no other purpose. For another, it was based on a biochemical weapon. With your background, growing up in a high-infection zone from the Abecedarian War—well, I would expect you to use such means only in the most extreme circumstances. Not to change rock moss from red to black.”
“—Like I said, I thought it was clever work. The color change altered the eating habits of the arctic tern, and there was another genetic redaction code which would also show as harmless on normal analysis techniques, that changed an inherited characteristic in the tern bloodstream and altered their magnetic sense to alter their migration patterns. As you know, the arctic tern enjoys the longest regular migration known, over forty-four thousand miles each year. I used them as a vector to spread yet another spore, and since the distribution would be over such a long area, including crucial sea migration routes of the newly unextinctified whales, that it would be nearly impossible to detect changes to the plankton population triggered by changes to the chemical concentrations in the tern droppings. Because migrant birds poop in the sea, right? So—”
Del Azarchel seemed uncharacteristically perturbed the longer Montrose went on. He interrupted with unusual brusqueness, “Usually I can tell when you are joking, Cowhand, but you look entirely sincere, as if you are actually talking about something you really did that you thought was clever. You are not a convincing liar, so I know this is not an act. But what are you driving at?”
“Okay, sorry, Blackie, I forget English is not your native language. To sum up, I came up with an indirect way to create a genetic change in the whales that the Melusine were using. This change would not directly change personal behavior, but would change institutional behavior, like the genes that control herd instinct and pack pecking order—the gene has to be in more than one member of the herd or pack for it to be active, because otherwise the behavior has no context, so a normal statistical comparison of one mutant would not pick out the mutation. It was tied into the sex drive, so it was powerful and fundamental. Now, here is the cunning part.
“I tied a meme change into the gene change, so that once the institution got started, it would create a self-replicating and self-reinforcing set of ideas that acted as their own incentive to spread and multiply.
“Frankly I was thinking of it as a religious instinct: I knew a church would be created, and churches teach that you gotta teach church teachings to the young, and to save the heathens—so even someone who did not have the “church” gene, once he was infected with “church” ideas, would spread the ideas, and if even a suspicious guy like you looked back along the vector trying to figure out what gene it had come from, well, there is no way to narrow it down.
“I hid the church gene among many similar formations in the genetic intron, where it was lost in the crowd of lookalikes. It was spread from lichen, to terns, to whales, and the whales in the Melusine Pentad—their basic social unit—always had a radiotelepath, one of the ‘special people’ with and watching the group. And so the meme spread telepathically and swiftly. The meme was a mental Anarchist Vector, creating an extremely powerful incentive toward personal liberty, tied into the libido.”
Del Azarchel said, “You are describing the rise and fall of a group called the Anchorites, which evolved out of the Oceangoing Melusine. They existed on the earth, or, rather, in the sea, during the first century of this current millennium. They were an odd and nonconformist species, unable to react compatibly with the Final Stipulation of the Noösphere Protocols. Are you actually claiming credit for having brought them into being?”
Montrose said honestly, “I am not sure if that is them. You tell me. You defeated the vector change I introduced into history, if everything I have heard about these Melusine is true. This world you rule? Can you give me the equations? I want to see which counter-vector of the Mind Helot matrix deflected my Anarchist Vector, and how.”
Del Azarchel was only too happy to talk shop.
Both men hunched down awkwardly in their bulky duelist armor, and, holding bayonet or dirk in hand, scratched into the dirty ice puddles around them one line of hieroglyphs after another, depicting in equations more precise than any word the nuances of the incentives molding the patterns of history, equations even the other Hermeticists could not read.