“Escape first, and then revenge,” said Daae. “The Blues have woken men of other times: men you must gather to us. The rods can be broken each separately, but not when bundled together.”
Yuen said, “Even the lesser races from earlier periods, and the degenerate freaks of our future, can redeem, in part, their inferiority, by service to a superior cause.”
Menelaus cleared his throat. “Excellent plan. Do let me do the talking, right, Proven Alpha? The lesser races, uh, have brains not excellent enough to stand the shock of being told how pathetic they are. I’ll have to kind of cajole them into helping us. We are clearly low on manpower: how feasible would it be to break into the Tombs and wake others of our kind?”
Yuen said, “To thaw the sick and the weak? Unless the Blue Men restore them, they will have no weapons and hence no names worth speaking.”
Daae said, “More than this: we dare not provoke the Judge of Ages. How shall it fare with us, if we disturb the Tombs for our purposes, if he comes in wrath to avenge himself on the Blue Men?”
Menelaus turned his hooded head toward him. “You have faith in this Judge of Ages?”
Daae said softly, “Erudite sir, you have studied history, have you not?”
The hood nodded. “More than I’d like.”
“You know that there is a recurrent pattern to history. The persistence of the Tombs over so many centuries, unmolested, despite the rumors of buried wealth, bespeaks some power that protects them from grave-robbers. A great power. I say he will arise to punish this trespass. Are not those who unearthed us defilers of his work, and defiers of his word?”
“Chimerae do not believe in spirits,” said Menelaus.
“I say the Judge of Ages is a real man, a survivor from some earlier period of history, the Second Age of Space, and that he rises from his own Tombs to walk the earth when need calls.”
The hood turned toward the younger. “And what do you say, Alpha Yuen?”
“I say nothing to contradict my Captain,” said Yuen.
“Do you believe in the Judge of Ages?”
“Permission to speak freely?” The younger man looked at Daae, who flicked his eyes in a microscopic nod of assent.
Yuen said, “The Judges of Ages is a children’s story, invented by the superstitious fools of the Final Sabbat. The Witches worshipped everything they did not understand, including the technology they destroyed. Of course, the great Tombs and how they worked were beyond their wits, undisciplined as they were, to conceive. No doubt some coffin contained a victim of a bioweapon. The Witches unsealed a Tomb and were struck down by a disease, something their undisciplined minds could not comprehend, and so they invented the figment of an avenger. They had gods and godlets for all things, houses and hearths and fields and trees. To add one more to their crowded pantheon”—he practically spat the word—“saved them from the expense of mounting a continual guard on known Tomb sites.”
Menelaus said, “The Natural Order of Man, those fruit-eaters called the Nymphs, they believed the Judge of Ages was real. The Hormagaunts from the period of the Iatrocracy besieged his Tomb site to prevent entry or egress. They said they encountered his soldiers, armored men who balanced on the back of an extinct quadruped called a horse and were carried from place to place. These men were called cniht, which means ‘vassal,’ or cavalier, which means ‘horse-rider of disdainful mien.’ Are there vassals without a liege? I wondered why the Blue Men have not unearthed any of these knights, or why they have not risen from the earth, if they are real. Do either of you Loyal and Proven Alphas have any information on the subject?”
Daae shook his head. “Perhaps the soldiers of the Judge of Ages are buried too deeply. Or they fought and were slain before we thawed. But there is no sign of battle here.”
Yuen’s one eye narrowed. “It is noteworthy, Beta Anubis, that you speak several of the aftercomer languages. I take it your slumber was interrupted, that you rose from the buried Tombs and walked the Earth in later years, and learned their ways?” There was no mistaking the suspicion in Yuen’s tone.
“I learned of their ways, Alpha Yuen,” said Menelaus. The Chimerae were always careful to avoid contamination with foreign cultures and ideas. “Mine was a scholastic interment, not medical, and so I could thaw without undue harm.”
Daae said, “Scholastic? You were ordered into the Tombs?”
“Yes, sir. I am a schoolteacher. A mathematician. My unit is the Hundred and Second Civic Control Division, attached to the Third Pennsylvania Legion, College for Dependents. Academic Joint Command told me to study the causes and results of civilizational decline.”
The eyes of the two other men grew intent.
Daae asked, “What caused our glory to pass away?” His voice was hushed, the tone of voice one used over an open grave, at a funeral.
“Remember I come from a day when atomic world civil war burned everything that could burn. We were reduced to savagery,” Menelaus said solemnly. “All Chimerae are genetically programmed with instincts designed to protect the race. It was the one thing that makes us better than the Witches. How could we have done this to ourselves? So I was ordered to reconstruct, if I could, the predictive mathematical analysis of history called Cliometry, which legend says the Giants knew. I thawed in A.D. 5884, I learned that Richmond, that great city, in a single hour was fallen, and no candle burned there, and there was no sound of engine, no noise of mill or drill. I thawed again in A.D. 5900 and A.D. 5950, and there was no sign anywhere of the Command, and no one to report to. I continued forward into the future, century upon century, because there was no officer, no Alpha, to rescind my orders, or tell me to stop. Therefore I will continue my assigned task until the End of Days, or the arrival of the Hyades, or until an Alpha properly dismisses or relieves me.”
Yuen said, “Are we truly as far in the future as you say? Is it truly all gone? There is no trace of us? Did nothing we erect survive?”
Menelaus said, “I saw ten coffins from the Chimera period in the yard, broken open. So there are eleven of us, counting me.”
Daae said solemnly, “All is lost. The Chimerical way of life passed away, and the black Oculus-pierced domes of our anti-chapels, where once our bravest men gathered to pour out curses into an empty and uncaring sky against an unreal God before our duels and battles, stood isolated and silent upon the hills of Appalachia, and along the shores of the poisonous, sterile waters of the Chesapeake. The woodlands grew and the cities crumbled, and the race that comes after us dances amid our ruins.”
Menelaus said, “And you, Alpha Daae? Why did you inter yourself?”
Daae said uncomfortably, “I was of the party that opposed the dissolution of the Senate. Agathamemnon ‘Fairlock’ Raeus assumed certain emergency powers, combining the military leadership with the civilian government. I wished to preserve my bloodline to the day when Raeus would be forced out of office, and the Senatorial form of government restored. I suppose there was some error in my coffin brain, or—”
Menelaus said, “No error. The coffin never thawed you, because the conditions were never met. The World Empire lasted four hundred more years, and we never returned to our old form of government. Even by your day, the rot was too far advanced to halt.”
Yuen spoke with explosive passion, “But how did it happen? How was it permitted to happen? Whose army is so great to encompass us? Who overthrew us?”
Menelaus shook his head. “No one. The Chimerae were invincible in battle.”
Yuen said, “Then how?”
Menelaus said, “By slow and easy stages of corruption. The specific causes were many and complex. The foremost was a biotechnical improvement during a time of moral decline. Like the Babylonians, we were undone by simple drunkenness. It was called ‘Greencloak’ technology: Implanted artificial glands to intoxicate and alter states of consciousness spread by illegal medics first among the Kine, then among the lower ranks. And then it no longer was illegal, and then it was no longer stigmatized, and finally it was not permitted to be criticized.”