Montrose was pleased, if a little shocked, that Sir Guy allowed him to walk around under the sky. It implied that assassins of the Cryonarchy were no longer seeking his life.
The Cryptonarchs had been, at one time, the only people Montrose thought he could trust with the secret of xypotechnology, cryotechnology, and with the power of the antimatter recovered from V886 Centauri, the Diamond Star. They had been his own extended family, grandsons and great-grandsons of cousins and nephews.
But the Cryonarchs proved unworthy of the trust Montrose had invested, and had fallen prey to time, to corruption, to weariness. He had removed them from power by the simple expedient of altering the orbital elements of the remaining world supply of antimatter, a few ever-dwindling crystals of anticarbon diamond. These centaurs occupied orbits beyond Neptune, where encounters with particles of normal matter were rare, but not so far as to encounter the paradoxically thicker areas of deeper, transplutonian space, where there was no solar light-pressure to clear particles away. Then Montrose had given the orbital elements to a priest named Thucydides Montrose, along with his latest formulation to create augmented intelligence.
Montrose was not much of a churchgoing man himself, but the Roman Catholic Church had been in business two and a half millennia, older than any institution of man. He was wagering that Black del Azarchel, a Spanish Roman Catholic, would not lightly destroy it.
Looking up at the heavens, Montrose had the sinking sensation that he might lose that bet. Because there was a second reason why it might be safe to walk around under the naked sky, aside from the remission of the Cryonarchy vendetta against him. Sniper technology must have fallen to a new low. That implied a widespread civilizational collapse.
Clouds the hue of iron hid the sky, and drizzle fogged the air. Before him was a cathedral made of gray stone, withered with age, with a rose window like a cyclops eye, and two square bell-steeples rearing like port and starboard conning towers on some motionless ship of stone.
Angels with mossy faces stood on posts to either side of iron gates rusted open. The boneyard was beyond.
To judge from the names on the tombstones, this place was in England or North America. He assumed he was in the northeastern states, Blondie territory, or what had been back in his day. Outside the walls, he saw deciduous forest, nude and wintry, stretching over hill country. Directly beyond the cathedral gates, a trail of smaller trees ran straight downhill, but there were not even fragments of asphalt or macadam present to show if there had once been a motorcar road there.
Behind the cathedral and its outbuildings were structures he did not recognize, tall metal-sided towers topped with windowless domes that looked a bit like grain silos. Above them, hanging in the air were long streamers, hundreds of yards tall, rippling slightly in the rainy breeze. They were made of blue gray material, semitransparent, and were almost invisible against the cloudy background. They looked like collectors gathering particles out of the air and drawing them down for storage in the silos.
Overhead, huge, imposing, larger than a submarine, hung an airship. Sir Guiden raised his hand. The ship descended, but Montrose could see neither ground crew nor docking tower.
The air vessel needed none. From a hatch in the bottom gondola stretched many long snakelike tendrils or whips of metal. Guided by some unseen intelligence, they reached down and formed man-sized loops. The upper length of the tendrils flexed and moved, expanding and contracting to compensate as the wind made the airship roll and yaw. The lower lengths were as motionless as if they were embedded in glass, and hung three feet off the ground.
One of the tendrils held in its loop a ship’s crewman, who was lowered from the body of the craft to the ground, like a circus girl wrapped in the trunk of an elephant. The figure was slim and slight, long-haired, and wrapped in a long blue gray toga.
The goggles of Sir Guiden were staring upward as the robed figure descended, but it was impossible to see the knight’s expression. Montrose was standing next to him, a scarecrow next to a tin man, his gaunt body hidden in a poncho and his thin hook-nosed face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed duster.
Fifty of the Knights Hospitalier in their powered armor stood deployed on the lawn, some atop the walls, some among the mausoleums, some standing at ease nearby. The armor did not move, but every helmet had optic fibers as fine as the antennae of crabs, which swayed left and right, up and down, front and behind, as each man used his motionless goggles to look in all directions. Every pair of boots bore the golden spurs of knighthood, even though no horse ever made could have long endured the mechanized armor in its saddle. Equally archaic were the claymores, katara punching daggers, and Broomhandle Mauser pistols dangling at jaunty angles from their baldrics and cinctures. Less anachronistic were the launchers or particle-beam lances slung each from an articulated shoulder mount. The air support corps consisted of ten men, each carrying a winged drone called a hawk on his wrist. The narrow glass instrument heads of the drones on the wrists of their masters ticked back and forth as hypnotically and restlessly as the optic antennae of the motionless men.
The Knights must have assumed the descending blue-robed figure no threat, since, aside from a rippling among their antennae, they made no move as he swung close to Montrose.
The slender figure, Montrose saw as he was lowered in a swoop, was a male. The swath of robes that swirled around his limbs must have been smart material, woven with thousands of tiny motile fabric strands, because a hood unfolded by itself to shade the man’s features from the rain. The full-body tattoos that had been fashionable in earlier days were not in evidence. However, the man had decorations, complex as circuitry diagrams, imprinted in colored inks onto his hands and fingers, feet and toes. The feet decorations glowed red, and shed heat when the man stepped on the cold grass.
“Woggy! Friendlies and mates! Are we ready for up-go, no?”
Menelaus said, “No. You gunna land that thing?”
“The fair Soaring Azurine never lands! The serpentines can hoist. Or are you easily dazed?”
Menelaus spit on the ground. “I reckon I daze about as well or poorly as the next feller.”
“We can have the serpentines lower a booth, if you don’t want to dare the hoist. These are too current for you, no? The booth is opaque, and there is no sensation, no jar. You can balance a land glass atop an egg on your head, brimfull, with water tension curving above the level, and your hair will be dry as before as after you jerk up.”
“I’ll use the hoist.”
Almost before words cleared his mouth, slithering steel tightened and tugged. Montrose yelped as the ground slid dizzily away from his feet. The steel snake made a motion like an anteater pulling an ant into its mouth, and Montrose was inside the hatch, and the deck of the airship was beneath him. It was that rapid.
Whatever controlled the tendrils must have assumed he spoke for Sir Guiden, because the armored figure was wrapped in a second steel snake and also lifted swiftly and smoothly into the ship.
The people current to this age evidently were used to vertigo, because the checkerboard pattern of the deck had every other panel transparent, and showed the dun earth swaying underfoot. Large, slanting windows looked out right and left; a dome showed the bottom of the lifting body above. The slight motions of the wind rippling against the cigar-shaped gas bag overhead were imparted to the deck, so a smooth and gentle pitch and roll continually rocked the cabin.
The cabin was appointed in a lush, even sybaritic style: Gilded fountains made eye-confounding patterns of water and spray amidships, couches and settees on flexible silvery caterpillar legs swayed to either side, heaped with pillows, furs, and cushions. Small tables shining with what might have been musical instruments or fluted wineglasses hung above and below eye level, and were held on the long and gently swaying tendrils the crewman had called serpentines. The serpentines, like well-trained servants, were never in the way. Menelaus spent a moment amusing himself, rushing and jumping back and forth, trying to get one of them to trip him or snag his neck clothesline-style, but the sleek metal tentacles were too agile and too well programmed and slithered neatly aside.