A voice cried out, “Ahoy!”—a word that was eleven or twelve thousand years old.

2

Aboard the Hysterical Blindness

1. Permission to Board

Sailors from the clipper ship dived into the water and were carried on the backs of dolphins to where the pinnace bobbed in the waves. The men had amphibious features while in the water, goggle-eyed like astonished frogs, blubber-skinned against the cold, webbed of foot and finger.

With astonishing alacrity, they leaped from the water, as high as a dolphin might leap, and grabbed on to the rail that rimmed the upper hull of the landing boat. There were five men with blubbery whalelike skin; they shrank, their blubber as if being absorbed back into their bodies, and their eyes and hands became those of land-dwelling humans. They had the harsh, aquiline features and narrow skulls of Chimera, and some mixture of sea mammal genes were in their genetic cocktail, but they also sported aquamarine hue and the electrotelepathic antennae of Blue Men.

Montrose at first wondered at the speed and completeness of the cellular transfiguration, but then he saw that each man wore on his left wrist a large bracelet of blood-red metal. The Hermetic Order, using similar biomolecular prosthetics, could shed their cellular appearance of youth with comparable speed, but they had been constrained to two morphologies. Some of the nuances of the change bespoke a breakthrough in biotechnology, maybe several.

“Congratulations, Blackie,” he muttered in English. “Looks like everyone on Earth is a Hermeticist nowadays. You must be proud.”

Blackie del Azarchel did not look proud. “I would expect them to take their institutions and heraldry from their conquerors, not from me.”

“No conquerors. Man drove them off.”

Del Azarchel looked skeptical, but did not say more.

The sailors called out in Latin, asking permission to come aboard. Each sailor kept one foot in the waves as he crouched by the rim of the vessel, as if to maintain the pretense that he was still in the water. They called and waited.

Ximen del Azarchel looked at Menelaus Montrose with a look of embarrassed puzzlement. Menelaus said, or, rather whistled, in the ultra-compressed high-speed language Montrose and Del Azarchel had, while bored, designed for shipboard use in case of emergencies. “You are a-calculating which one of us rightly should answer, ain’tcha?”

“I consider myself the captain of the ship…” Del Azarchel answered hesitantly.

“My ship, thank you kindly, pardner.”

“… but I am aware of your contrary, albeit somewhat legalistic claim…”

“The legalism being as that I done own the damnified thing in fee simple, yessir, as seeing you done stole it as a naked act of piracy.…”

“… in my capacity as sovereign Nobilissimus of the World Concordat, in accord with the Statute of Common Space of 2400, all spaceworthy vessels being, by eminent domain, and for the greater good of world peace…”

“… naked act of piracy for the greater good of world peace, like I said. Still mine.”

“The currents are waiting our answer. Shall we talk in unison?”

“What, and make believe you got any sort of right to talk for my ship? What about taking turns. You be captain on odd-numbered millennia, I’ll take even, something like that.”

“A compromise would be tantamount to admitting you have a claim to the ship.”

“Fight a duel? But I suppose we need each other. Toss a coin?”

“The quickdraw game, just using our fingers. The faster one is captain. We could have the onboard brain adjudicate.”

“That’s a kiddie sport!” scoffed Montrose. “Besides, the currents would see us, and we’d look silly. What about paper-scissors-rock?”

“What? Forego my dignity and claim by mere happenstance? Absurd. What about a quick game of blindfold chess? Pawn to King Four.”

“We ain’t got time, the currents is waiting and who says you get white? How about a quick round of wrastling? This deck is pretty slippery. Whoever don’t get tossed in the drink gets to call one and all aboard.”

“The currents will think the gyrations peculiar.”

“Injun thumb wrastling. We can stand and block their view with our backs. Last man with no broke fingers is captain.”

“One does not break fingers during thumb wrestling.”

“One does if’n you play the way I learned it. We both need a pair of pliers.”

Del Azarchel pressed the tips of his fingers against his temples. “This is absurd. We are both Homo Sapiens Postsapiens, with intelligence in the four hundred range, and posthumans in the seven hundred to one thousand estimated intelligence range are waiting for our reply, and we cannot decide which of us should shout back their permission to board, even though we both wish them to come aboard?”

Montrose said, “When I was young, I used to think that if only mankind were smart enough, enlightened enough, we could solve all our problems. Solve war, solve poverty, solve everything.”

Del Azarchel nodded. “I had a similar dream.”

Montrose said, “Then I grew up.”

Del Azarchel nodded again. “I realized that such a dream would only be achieved under a strong and clear-eyed leadership.”

“With you as leader? Nice work, if you can get it.”

Del Azarchel shrugged. “I am willing both to enslave mankind to the Hyades, and to be a slave, merely for the remote chance of becoming part of whatever greater civilization must be out there in the vasty void, ruling the constellations. You doubt my willingness to serve when needs must be?” He inclined his head. “I grant and acknowledge your rank as acting captain. Welcome aboard the creatures who may indeed prove to be our masters.”

Feeling obscurely as if he had lost the argument, Menelaus Montrose turned and called to the sailors.

2. The First Comprehension

It took some time for swimmers to attach cables to the pinnace. The clipper ship had dropped sea anchors, and whales in harness had hauled the huge vessel alongside. Cranes from amidships lowered slings to carry the men back up to the deck, including Montrose and Del Azarchel. They were hauled up to the deck long before the pinnace was raised by block and tackle and swung over to a point above and a little behind the stern.

The clipper ship was large enough that even their fifty-foot-long, fifteen-foot-beam spaceboat was a small bundle dangled over the side. The clipper ship was immense, boasting twenty-two square sails on six masts, plus multiple jibs, staysails, stunsails, and a spanker. She was larger than the giant barge of Emperor Caligula which brought the obelisk to Saint Peter’s Square in Rome from Egypt. Montrose wondered if he were the only one on Earth who remembered that ship, that emperor, that square, that city, or that nation.

He saw the crescent, dim and ghostly by daylight, of the many-colored moon, hanging halfway between dark and icy oceans and skies fiery with auroras. No sky of the Earth he had known contained upper atmospheric pyrotechnics visible even in sunlight. He suspected the presence of dust and debris from the war, or ionization of an unimaginably large volume of the atmosphere, had altered the visibility conditions. A feeling like a cold wind that wanders through an empty house passed through his soul.

While they were swinging from a harness that fit them like a baby’s diaper, dangling from a yardarm, with sailors guiding them with guy ropes to the snow-slick deck, Montrose leaned and called to Del Azarchel, “I musta read too much futurism when I was a whelp, Blackie. I would have liked to see us picked up by tractor-presser beams, or at least guys wearing jet packs, eh?”