Daae frowned and raised his hand, and did not answer.
The one-eyed, dark-haired Chimera passed Menelaus his bone truncheon. It was a cubit long, heavy at one end, roughed at the other. It looked surprisingly like what cavemen might have used on the plains of Africa to brain their victims, human or animal.
Yuen said, “In your hand is the thighbone taken from my left leg, which I amputated by thrusting it between the gears of a digging automaton. In the same unlooted machine shop, I melted lead around the knob of the joint to give it some weight, and wrapped the other end in leather, which I had flayed, and cured, and cut from the skin of my own severed leg, to give the haft a grip. The Blue Men are afraid of spirits, and will not take once-living human matter from my hand. The truncheon is called Grislic, and I maimed a man in the mess tent, and laid him low, a Servant of the Machine from A.D. 2520 named Glorified Ctesibius, an Endorcist of the Three Donations. I hold the interference of the dog things to act as a concession! They hurried Ctesibius to the same restoration coffin that regrew my leg, but I hold he would have died of his wounds. Any contest?”
“I do not contest it,” said Menelaus. “The weapon is named Grislic.”
The younger man’s eyes glittered. “As for me, I who carry Grislic, I am Alpha Steadholder Extet Minnethales Yuen of Richmond, Third and Second Manassas, Antietam, and various actions against pirates. The Extet are of the Original Experiment Set, from Homo sapiens and Puma concolor.”
“First Antietam?” asked Menelaus.
“There were two?” Yuen looked surprised.
“What year was your Battle of Antietam?” asked Menelaus.
“AUCR 3144.” This was equivalent to A.D. 4881 in the Gregorian calendar.
Daae spoke up. “His is the Pre-Proscopalian period, the days of the Republic, back when the Command officers were elected from among the Proven rather than appointed by Breeding Tribunals. My squire hails from a time of poverty and golden virtue, when each Chimera in his freehold owned nothing but his weapon, his land, his name, and his harem. In those days, the Betas were loyal, and the Gammas were cowed and hardworking!”
Yuen said sardonically, “The era of virtue did not seem so at the time. We were dying.”
Daae said to him, “You slumbered too soon, Alpha Yuen. The days after your hibernation were days of bloodred gold. In the North, the Final Sabbat surrendered at Buffington’s Island, and submitted to sterilization. The Witches were crushed, their matriarchs enslaved, their menfolk gelded, their children sent to humiliation camps, and their totems and sacred trees chopped up for wood for our war-locomotives of the Long Iron Road. The survivors fled to their sisters in the Far East, and made Peking their final fortress. But they were not as they were.
“By the time of the Battle of Uttarakhand, where my regiment-family served, the Witches had lost their secret Fountain of Youth; they were aged, and the Amazon warriors, once so fierce and strong, rode their white mules into battle with hair as white.” To Montrose, he said, “I am from an era foeless and cheated of glory, and it is no shame that his weapon be the first to drink.”
“But the Battle of Uttarakhand was in A.D. 5402,” said Menelaus. “Alpha Daae, does not that make you the younger? How is Alpha Yuen your squire? Shouldn’t you be his?”
“The Judge of Ages decreed that those who rise from the coffins keep their rank, despite the passage of years,” answered Daae.
Menelaus pulled the hood a little closer around his face, perhaps to hide his expression. “Hm. Strange that I never heard of that.…”
“All the mandates concerning those who slumber and thaw derive from his word. But now tell us of yourself.”
Menelaus nodded his hooded head and passed to Daae an oblong stone the size of a fist. “This weapon is named Rock. I haven’t killed anyone with it yet, but I am plenty tough enough to, if pressed. Knocked out some teeth. You’ve seen me in action with the dogs. Any contest?”
“I do not contest it,” said Yuen. “It is a true weapon and valiant.”
“Nor I,” said Daae with a sober expression. “The weapon is called Rock.”
“Fine. I am High-Beta Sterling Xenius Anubis of Mount Erebus.”
“Mount Erebus in Antarctica?” Yuen asked. “We are a warlike race indeed. What were we fighting over? Snow? Penguin eggs?”
“There was a radar station in Antarctica in my day. It is a method of using invisible waves called radio to detect and range a target—”
Yuen said impatiently, “Come, now! I know what radar is. And horseless carriages, and talking animals, and evil voices that speak out of the graveyards of dead machines, and flying carpets of silver gossamer that soar to the Moon, where the Master of the World left his handprint. My tutors beat the old legends of the Space Ages into me.”
“The Social Wars were fought on every continent,” said Menelaus, “including when a submarine manned by Sino-Chimerae was blown off course and came aground on the Ross Ice Shelf, in McMurdo Sound. The station crew went out with our seal-hunting rifles and spear guns at low tide and besieged and shot ’em, and the Command considered that a real battle, and issued a medallion and everything. So it counts.”
Yuen said, “We—were we fighting each other? What year was this?”
Daae answered him, and gave the dates in Chimera reckoning that corresponded to A.D. 5260 through 5270. “Beta Anubis is from the very onset of a great period of expansion. The whole earth was Chimerical by then, and no Witches left anywhere. But the eastern and western hemispheres, which had been allies for centuries against the Witches and Kine-states, did not agree on genetic policy, and came to blows. The Judge of Ages was angry at Tomb-robbers, and released from his tombs a pair of slumbering scientists so that rocketry and atomic energy were rediscovered. Little is known of the Social Wars, since paper documents burned, and calculation machines were erased by magnetic-pulse side effects of atomic weapons.”
Menelaus turned to Yuen and said, “All matter is made of fine bits called atoms, which consist of positive and negative energies bound together in a balance. When the atom is split, the energy is released—”
Yuen said, “I know what atomic energy is! Magic fire from the sun that burns whole cities at one stroke. The fire leaves behind a specter that dwells in old craters, invisible and silent: mild effects include chromosome damage, hair loss; medium effects include vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue; great effects include marrow and intestine destruction, and death. What sort of opinion do you aftercomers have of the people of my days? We were not savages! We could not remake the machines and weapons of the Space Ages, but we remembered them.”
Daae said, “Forgive us. By my time, the days of the Republic were legend. The same fires that blotted out the world’s memory of the Social Wars erased records of previous eras as well. Only the Judge of Ages, who dwells in the underworld, knows and remembers the truth.”
Menelaus nodded. “For just that reason, I don’t know my derivation, gentlemen, since my lineage records were wiped out. And the atomics made it so the Social Wars weren’t none too sociable. I am sure I have at least some rattlesnake in my cocktail.”
With no word, the three men each saluted the weapons of the other two by a gesture of raising the hand, palm out, before the eyes, as if to shield them from an invisible glory. Then they gravely passed their weapons each back to the proper owner, shillelagh, thighbone, and rock.
5. Aeonicide
“Now that the formalities are over, gentlemen,” Menelaus said, “what do you want? You did not just come all this way to kill an imposter, and you could have done that in plain sight, back at the camp. You didn’t hit as hard or as nasty as you could have done, which means you were trying to guess my mettle. I assume I passed, and that you want to recruit me. What’s the mission?”