She looked thoughtful for a moment, touching her red amulet lightly. Montrose realized she was making a phone call, thinking to her radio, or raiding some sort of database or subconscious level of her mind. Then Zoraida said, “No one of the Second Comprehension can answer such questions.”
“Someone on this globe must know!” thundered Del Azarchel.
Zoraida bowed again, and with a gesture even more stiff and formal than before, said, “I take you now to one who no doubt does.”
4. The Third Comprehension
They entered the ship’s cabin. The light from three large transparent windows built into the translucent stern of the ship filled a chamber made of diamond and paneled with silver. In the center of the cabin was a shallow pond. It was filled with a luminous substance the consistency of milk, swimming with sparks and motes and streaming scarves of light. Whether this was technology or biotechnology, Montrose could not say.
Seated on a large lotus leaf floating in the center of the crystal pond was a slender manlike shape in a serene posture. The face was stylized, as perfectly white and fine-pored as porcelain, sharp of chin, with long, narrow, slanted eyes, high cheekbones, and oddly long-lobed ears. The mouth was wide but thin, nearly lipless, and never moved from a horizontal line. The hairs of his head were neural antennae, countless in number, and his hair swayed like the hair of a mermaid.
Two wings like the wings of an albino peacock, each feather bright with an eye, mantled his shoulders; two others girded his waist like a cincture, forming a living skirt or toga; two final wings curved from his spine and covered his feet as if a glittering white blanket.
Montrose noticed that none of the hundreds of eyes dotting the wings were looking at them. He said, “This is an element of the planetary mind, ain’t it? Just a flesh puppet run by the giant nanotech brain what I had fill up the nickel-iron core of the planet. But I thought the Virtue erased the core mind?”
Zoraida said, “This is not the Potentate itself. As you deduced, the core mind was damaged during the war. The Swan is in the Noösphere but not of it. His mind is not mingled with the damaged core mind of Tellus.”
Montrose was staring at the winged and meditating figure in the center of the chamber pool. “I assume if we plug our brains into a nerve jack, and become part of the Noösphere, the Noösphere will become aware of us?”
Zoraida turned toward Montrose. “That was needed in the early days. The Swan occupies an ambiguous and intermediary position. I may be able to attract his attention by telephony. You have seen that we mortals can maintain Melusine and Locusts, at least in small groups, in our polity, without lapsing the boundary of the phantasm which hides us from the higher awareness. But much depends on the skill of the Intercession! Adherence to ancient precept is crucial, nay, tantamount! Even the most minor abrogation is never forgotten. You must not refer by name or title or any indirect means to any of the crew when speaking to the Swan, except those persons whose names you were told. Not even a wry hint about how difficult it was to raise your landing boat to the deck surface unaided! Do you understand me, and do you understand the spirit of what I am saying? Do you agree to be bound not only by the word, but by the spirit? Otherwise, I cannot intercede for you, and you are at liberty to go your way and try to attract the attention of the Noösphere to yourself for yourself.”
Montrose squinted at Del Azarchel. “This is what you meant by resonance effect?”
Del Azarchel smiled cruelly. “In any hierarchy, the lessers impersonate their betters. You scoff at the information strata the Seconds use to control the Firsts? You established the precedent by erecting a barrier between Man and Potentate.”
They both solemnly agreed to her terms, and Zoraida slid back her left sleeve and tapped the surface of the large red metallic amulet affixed to her wrist. She engaged the touch-sensitive layer, and tapped out a quick code. “This may take several hours. I can send for the slavegirl to bring you refreshing beverages to … ah!”
The meditating figure had opened his eyes, and opened a vertical slit in his forehead to reveal a third eye, and his uppermost pair of wings now spread out, and all the eyes on all the bases of the feathers turned and regarded Montrose and Del Azarchel gravely.
Both men flinched and raised their hands before their eyes, Montrose smirking and Del Azarchel grimacing, unable to meet the gaze of the hundred-eyed creature before them.
“Menelaus Montrose and Ximen del Azarchel, you are the fathers of our loss. Your folly too large for words has led to grief too great for tears. Hear me, and comprehend the nature of your iniquity.”
5. The Lamentation of the Swans
“I am called Enkoodabooaoo,” the august figure intoned gravely. “Though I appear to your eyes as an Archangel, what you call the superior intellectual level beyond man, I am not. I am a severed and separate being: an Inquiline, to use a term you know.
“The psychological need for independence and self-assertion which you, Menelaus Montrose, designed into the souls of Swan-kind served us so ill during the End of Days, by preventing that perfect cooperation and self-sacrifice that war demands, that the effortlessness of our defeat, our utter overthrow, choked us with shame. As independent beings, we cannot survive without honor, and the departure of our honor with all our loved ones crippled us.
“We Swans departed the mental matrix of the Noösphere, leaving it in the care of minds not organized in the same way as ours. I am now a hermit, living in isolation, seeking a metaphysical balance pointless to describe to you. In losing this war, we lost our souls.
“No! Do not speak! You are as ignorant children compared to me, and I have no love for you, and no obligation moral, legal, or otherwise running to you! Silence! What I say shall answer any questions worthy of asking.
“Because I no longer participate fully in the Noösphere, I can, at times, with a certain part of my mind, become aware of the phantasms which mortal men are now to me. The mortals may remain outside the mental civilization of Earth, in the independence of barbarism, merely by never seeking to have any nerve-machine interfaces implanted in their brains. I permit them to exploit my powers: this vessel, for example, exercises control over wave and wind via my appliances which agitate the human nanotechnology in the water or which disturb the alien picotechnology in the murk clouds which mar the atmosphere. And yes, like tricky elves the rustic cannot see, I am aware that my vessel will visit destinations I did not seek, as if blown off course by errant wind or playful Ariel.
“Your phantasm system, by which you sought to preserve your race at its lowest level of evolution, in the name of the undomesticated chaos you call liberty, is by now no more than a legal nicety. It is to preserve the customs and protocols by which the Noösphere prioritizes its internal mental balances that we all agree to the blindsightedness, to be aware of the unintegrated men, and to pretend to be unaware.
“But that system lost for us the war, and the blame is entirely yours, Menelaus Montrose.
“Your theory that independent men, independent minds, would be better suited to fight off these invaders is true on a small scale, and in limited engagements, but it is not true when world fights world! Your requirement does not scale up.
“For one mind the size of Earth to contest the fate of man with one mind the size of Uranus, that Earthmind cannot, at the same time as it maintains its unity, maintain, for each brain cell of its nervous system, conditions allowing each nerve cell to go its own way for its own monocellular reasons.