One hundred and sixty-four years had passed since last he woke. He paused to let that figure sink in. It was roughly the amount of time between when the Constitution of the Old Union was written, and when it was abolished by Roosevelt the Usurper. Another century and a half or so years after that, and the last president, Jefferson Dayles, was gone, and the Pentagon had declared Martial Law “for the duration of the emergency” that was to last, as it turned out, at least a century and a half again.
Grim example. Think of another: One and a half centuries was exactly the amount of time between the first lift of the Wright heavier-than-air flying machine and the launch of the first unmanned nigh-to-lightspeed interstellar vessel, NTL Croesus.
Long enough for the NTL Hermetic to have sailed to V 886 Centauri and returned—bearing all the wealth of the antimatter star, all the treasure of scientific wonders gleaned from deciphering the Monument—to end war and usher in a lasting peace.
He found himself grinning. And Blackie had evidently ended up on the top of the heap.
Menelaus turned.
And then he forgot everything, the old white-haired picture of Del Azarchel, the sinister silvery silhouette of Earth’s only manned starship, now returned as Earth’s only interstellar warship; he forgot it all.
He was looking at the princess. It took his breath away.
5. Portrait of Royalty
Her hair was gold as a summer noon sun. The artist had captured the girl’s serene face but also a haunting twinkle in her eye, on her cheeks a hint of a suppressed dimple of laughter. Her gown was the gown of a fairytale princess. She seemed like a mischievous little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes; but as if her mother were a queen.
A coronet of diamond blazed in her hair, and white ermine hid one shoulder, leaving the other shoulder nude. Her bodice was white and set with small pearls. Her upper arms were naked, but elegant opera-gloves clung to hands as slender and shapely as branching coral. A ribbon of red and silver circled her trim waist, a regal gleaming medallion dangling below, pulling the ribbon into a Y-shape that curved along her hips. Her trains fell in smooth folds from her dress, like acres of snow descending in ripples from the curve of a hill. Only the toe of a diamond slipper could be glimpsed beneath the hems, like the glass slipper from a fairy-story, and her pose was elfin, a ballerina caught in mid-step, as if she were from a world not as weighty as Earth.
Behind and to either side were Doric columns holding ermine robes and shields of red and white diamonds. For some reason, there were two tonsured monks in the picture, standing to either side of the pillars, brandishing swords. A mantle decorated with stars was over her head; a map of Earth was under her gleaming toes.
Menelaus envied the painter his imagination. No real-life girl could be that pretty.
There came a noise behind him.
The door opened a crack, and someone knocked politely.
“C’mon in!” shouted Menelaus. “Tell me where the hell I am and what the hell the date is!”
Opening a door here in the future was evidently an elaborate affair: A wigged footman in a bright red coat backed into the room, bowing, giving Menelaus a better view of the man’s buttocks than he would have liked. Then a small throng of other people, doctors and soldiers and folks in odd costumes, all shining with strange fabrics and glinting with gems.
A voice of quiet command spoke a soft word, and the throng parted. Here was a dignified old man in sable who sat in the moving throne with a scarlet coverlet on his lap. He wore white gloves whose hue contrasted with his black garments. On his right wrist was a heavy armband of dull red metal, crudely made when compared to the shining rings he wore over his gloves, or his chain of office. The old man’s jacket and coverlet were embroidered with the same monogram: XDA.
He said, “Menelaus Montrose, you are in the best of places in a better world than we ever dreamed—and the date? It is our time. Our hour has come, and all we have desired with it.”
Menelaus squinted. “You in charge around here?”
The old man had a dazzling smile. He had been a handsome man once, and some of that glamour still clung to him. “Ah, my friend, you could say that.”
The old man’s hair, though hoary with age, was thick, and he wore it long, almost to his shoulders, like some ancient statue of a king, and he sported a moustache as white. Perhaps the moustache was what delayed Montrose from recognizing him.
But he surely knew that smile.
“Blackie—! Blackie Del Azarchel! Is that you?”
“The same. Welcome back to life. And such a life!”
5
The Brotherhood of Man
1. A Toast
“Well, hell, Blackie! Stand up and let me take a gander at you—! I been wondering—”
He had been fooled by the lack of wheels. The tall black chair slid forward over the floor, silent as a ghost, and Menelaus could not see the mechanism beneath the chair base that moved it. But it was a wheelchair.
“Uh—sorry—uh … Jesus nailed up a tree! How’d it happen?”
“My staff of doctors say it was spinal trauma, when I was thrown from a stallion, my beloved Eclipse. I think they have misdiagnosed the permanency of the affliction, and do not know its real cause.”
“Damnation and plague! I know what a horseman you are. Were. Damn!”
“Worry not,” said the old man with a twinkle in his eye. “Did I not say that our tomorrow had arrived? Petty problems as this one can be solved: the secret of youth, the creation of life, the conquest of the human nature, the maturation of man from upright ape to soaring angel! The time of Man beyond Man is about to dawn, and you, now revenant from your coffin, restored beyond hope from madness, you shall be in the audacious vanguard. Come! Let us storm the crystal ramparts of the unimagined future, brass trumps blaring, and banners streaming! Welcome to life!”
No sorrow could endure the onslaught of Del Azarchel’s ringing words, his charming smile, his joy.
“It is good to be here,” said Montrose. And he threw back his head, and uttered a whoop of pure delight.
“The event calls for wine!” said Del Azarchel. His eyes were shining. At his gesture, a wine-steward in powder blue brought in an ice bucket, and a parlor maid in a black uniform and frilly cap brought a pair of glasses on a tray.
Menelaus noticed the posture and costumes of the folk in the room. It took him a moment to realize what was missing. Perhaps in his great-grandfather’s time, it had been the habit of non-Europeans of high rank to dress in European fashions, coats and ties and so on. But when Menelaus was young, only lawyers and bankers still affected that old costume. High-ranking non-Indians dressed as much like Brahmins or Kshatriya as they dared, sporting dhoti or pancha, even when not allowed to wear yagnopavita or choti. But no one here was wearing Indian trousers, sacred thread, or brow-paint. This would seem to indicate that the fashions of the world, following the powers of the world, had changed again.
There were three distinct groups: the first wore bright hues and glittered, and the second wore dark uniforms, who bowed and hung back. Peacocks and crows. The third group were pikemen, who stood at attention. Hawks.
The brightly dressed were tall and dark-eyed men with shoulder-length hair of silver. They seemed to be wearing wigs of fine metallic threads, or perhaps some odd gene-engineering allowed them to grow strangely lambent fibers of zinc-hued strands from their scalp. Their tunics and long-coats were patterned with gems and threaded with wires and status lights.