“It is non-diatonic music, composed of birdsong and beast calls and river sounds,” said Del Azarchel. “But I see no source. Give me a moment, and I should be able to deduce its symbolic import.”
“It’s a howdy song,” said Montrose, smirking at him with a half smile. “What they got instead of a brass band to welcome us to shore. But I still don’t see no people.”
“You see them plain enough,” said Del Azarchel in the same tone of voice, and with the same half smile. “You just do not recognize your handiwork. These are all slumberers, in biosuspension. They have somehow devised some internal cellular control to induce suspended animation and hypothermia without coffins around them.”
There came a rustling in the grass then, and a slender figure in a bright green kimono came out from between the tall stalks, and swayed toward them, her footfalls like a glissando of music.
“Mother!” said Del Azarchel, nodding his head in a bow of less than one degree of deflection from the vertical. “I am pleased and surprised to find you alive. I assume it was by your intercession that the term of my exile was suspended? We are grateful for the welcome.”
“No other voice but mine,” said Amphithöe, “would have overcome your pride, O my son.”
“Why are we here?” Montrose uttered no other greeting. “Some sort of assembly or meeting? You called it a vision of harmonizing futures at war.”
“We must reconcile a conflict of cliometry, and select our destiny.” She bowed toward him, and then sank to her knees. “We are come to plead for our lives, our souls, our sacred freedom, and the lives of our children. We plead to you, only to you, Judge of Ages.”
Montrose stepped back a step, as if alarmed at seeing the delicate woman kneel to him. “I never called myself that.”
Del Azarchel had a look of surprise on his face, almost of shock, which sharpened suddenly into the look of a black fox. “Oh, this is rich beyond dreaming!” He turned to Montrose, his eyes twinkling, unable to hide the white fire of his grin in his dark beard. “Come, sir, will you not heed our own mother’s prayer? She abases herself! You know what she wants.”
Montrose stepped forward, his face red with a blush. Whether it was a blush of anger or a blush of shame was not clear, not even to him. He took Amphithöe roughly by the shoulder and drew her to her feet. “Stand up. I don’t know you, and you are not my mother. She’s a far piece fiercer than you, for one thing, and uglier, too. Get up! I have not agreed to Blackie’s plan. I am not going to break the phantasm barrier, and let these machines that think they are gods take over your history, your lives, your thoughts. The Jupiter Mind can mind his own damned business. I have not agreed!”
“But you will,” said Del Azarchel, soft as a snake whispering. “Because you must.”
Amphithöe was standing on her tiptoes in her little jeweled slippers, because Montrose, forgetting how tall he was, was pulling her arm too roughly and too high. She raised her nose and wore a calm expression. “I am your mother in my heart. But if your true mother were here, what would she do?”
“She’d lick me with a strap, I guess, and tell me not to do it, never to agree with Blackie.” Montrose had a hollow, haunted look to his eyes now. He let go the little Nymph woman’s arm and stepped back.
Del Azarchel gritted his teeth and said nothing. Del Azarchel was canny enough to know when not to speak. Reason can reach a man willing to be reasonable, and rhetoric can stir a man willing to open his ear. But when a man was wrestling with those ghosts called memory, no voice can reach him.
He had been certain, despite the words of Montrose, that Montrose would yield to the pressure of the inevitable. But now Del Azarchel’s sense of certainty stumbled. Del Azarchel had not expected anyone on Earth to be clever enough to preserve Amphithöe in suspension and thaw her for a stunt like this. Clever, but it had backfired. Del Azarchel adored the memory of his own mother as a saint. Montrose did not.
In an agony of disgust, his stomach boiling as if he’d swallowed acid, Del Azarchel watched and waited for his centuries and millennia of planning, plotting, warring, and scheming, his assassinations and deceptions, all to come to nothing. To nothing! And all because the little human boy buried in the memory of posthuman Montrose still feared and respected a woman long dead, and who, in the grand scheme of things, was less than a monkey.
Del Azarchel stood with one arm folded across his chest, the other hand as if thoughtfully stroking his mustache. But the pose was actually to hold down the burning sensation in his guts, or to clasp his hand over his mouth should he begin to puke. So! The great superhuman Montrose, the giant who had always been one step ahead of him, always upstaging him! Was he now to decide the fate of worlds based on some greeting-card sentiment about Mother’s Day?
Montrose said, “But Mom ain’t here, and you ain’t her.”
Amphithöe said, “Was she a freeborn woman?”
Montrose nodded. “Scotch-Irish. Been conquered plenty, but her folk ain’t never been slaves. On my dad’s side, I am purebred Mestizo, which is part ’Patchie, part Dusky, part Rattler, all folk ain’t never been free.”
“I also am free, now, because of you. The moon returned me to life in a time and place where the cruel institutions of my day had passed into memory. The ancient methods, perfected by the Nymphs, were being used to adjust the biochemistry of clades and clans to regard each other with brotherly love, with philanthropy and compassion, yet without the erotic core which shames the memory of those ancient times. I was joined into a harmony, and, with the help of acolytes of advanced learning and compassionate machines, that harmony was joined to others and yet to others. The decree was made among all men of all races to abolish slavery and indentured servitude.”
She pointed upward at the scroll in the air.
“This side lists our virtues, and the other side lists our sins. By this devotion to liberty, many stanzas of the cliometric scroll have been moved from the far side to the near.”
She lowered her arm and bowed again.
“The liberty I found on the moon do not take from me, please. I beg you.”
Montrose said harshly, “If I don’t do what Blackie says, Jupiter will not be able to decode the sciences that are the only hope we have to keep the people on the slave ships alive. I’ve seen the math! I have not seen any way around it! The aliens set it up this way, to checkmate us. It is another intelligence test. If we fail, the human race dies, and Rania never returns.”
Amphithöe said, “I have no easy answer for you. The Hyades must pay for their own crimes, and see to their own future, whatever that is. My future that I see, if these projections are unchanged, is that I will lose the liberty I gained, and that my daughters will be slaves.”
“I feel sorry for them,” said Montrose. “But you are just one woman. We are talking about everyone. The whole human race.”
Amphithöe straightened from her bow and, with a dignified slow gesture, her long red sleeve brushing the high grass, swept her arm toward the many white and motionless figures gathered across the acres. “I have brought them!”
“Brought who?”
“The whole human race.”
“Eh? What’s that s’pose to mean?”
Del Azarchel had a look of bitter amusement, as if he were laughing at his own disgust and discomfort. “Surely you see what this is, Cowhand? Each of these creatures here is an epitome. They represent, either as a shared memory or as a proxy, everyone on Earth. This is the final plea of the self-centered, who would damn their descendants to death!”
One of the nearby statues changed from pale white to flesh-toned in a moment, releasing a cloud of twinkling mist. Her garments, which had been tuned to a white shade to match her skin, now flowed and pulsed with peacock hues. She shrugged her wings so that all gleaming feathers and their wise eyes rustled and blinked, and very slowly turned her head.