“Let those with petitions to set before me approach.”
Menelaus translated the words, and for some reason, his voice held a majesty and passion not present in the calm tones of the Judge of Ages.
There was no motion in the chamber, and no voice spoke.
5. Prayer
The Blue Men exchanged twitters in Intertextual. The discussion was technical. Montrose listened with curiosity. Illiance summed up their conclusions: “These words fit the established psychological pattern our negative information calculus has deduced as a normal axis for the person sought. If this is not he, then he composed those words, and this man here is merely reciting them, but this is dismissed as an unlikely eventuality.”
Illiance turned back toward the throne, and spoke again in Iatric. “Most of the surface of the Earth is glaciated, Your Honor. Where the glaciers have receded, only the most primitive biology has reestablished itself: lichen and moss, mushrooms and ferns, but no trees; insects and worms, but no mammals. In the areas surrounding old ruins, or the openings of Tombs, very small oases of older forms of life survive: tundra and taiga, grasses and pine, owls and foxes, and a plethora of simpler creatures.”
Montrose translated. The Judge of Ages asked, “Are you survivors of a war? Or, perhaps, a plague?”
“Consider us the survivors of a plague of Locusts,” said Illiance with a small, sad smile. “The genetic mechanism that ensures strict monogamy among us is counterproductive in situations where rapid repopulation is called for. We seek a biological corrective for this which your faculties could provide. Further, our inquisition has already established that reindeer, walruses, caribou, and other biotic forms which could prevail under current conditions are preserved somewhere in the Tomb system, here and at other sites.”
The Judge of Ages lifted his hand, looking stern. “Do you know the reason why the Giants from the time of the Great Consensus besieged my mountain?”
Illiance said, “Ah … not in every particular. The details are lost to history.”
“They held I was in violation of current laws against preserving biocontaminants. Many of the sick and ill my Tombs preserved were infected with vectors of diseases that Giants had both wiped out, and had lost the technological ability to detect and resist. Before you ask me to repeople your dying world, or restore some dead animal species to stock, I must be certain to introduce no malignancy to your ecology, except perhaps such things as the current generations of flora and fauna can combat. Each vector of the growth and predation and decay rate-changes between all participants in the food chain clusters must be extrapolated, especially of microscopic biota. The calculus involved is immense and immensely multivariable. Put me in contact with whatever self-aware computer system holds sovereign sway over the globe.”
Illiance said, “I express surprise and chagrin. Your Honor, there is none such.”
“Then put me in contact with the Xypotech sovereigns of other spheres. There are surely worlds and moons in space colonized by human intellectual machinery?”
“Your Honor, not to my knowing.”
Menelaus was confident that the Blue Men did not have the upbringing, and might not have had the right-hemisphere neural structures, necessary to interpret facial expressions correctly. They seemed to have as much trouble reading the nonverbal cues of unmodified men as anyone not a zookeeper might have reading the facial and social signals of a monkey. But Preceptor Illiance was slightly sharper, perhaps because of whatever brain modification he had done on himself at the plea of Oenoe the Nymph. Menelaus asked himself whether Illiance saw the Judge of Ages turn pale with shock, or saw his pupils dilate with fear, and whether he would interpret those signs correctly.
The man was breathing slowly through his nose, making a credible job of keeping his face as masked and closed as the face of a poker player. Preceptor Illiance seemed blithely unaware.
For the first time, the Judge of Ages seemed ill at ease. Menelaus was standing closely enough to see the man’s eye movement: his glance darted to the various musket-bearing dogs, pistol-bearing dwarfs, and armed automata positioned about the chamber; glanced at the only exit; looked at the coffin fire-control board and ammo register. But the reaction was still somewhat subtle, and he regained control of himself in a shorter period than might have been expected.
The Judge of Ages said, “What is the date?”
Menelaus answered without translating the comment. “It is A.D. 10515, sir. October thirty-first—Happy Halloween.”
The Judge of Ages said, “The World Armada of the Domination of the Hyades is expected to arrive in this solar system by A.D. 10917—which is in roughly four hundred years. Does the current generation have some method for increasing the rate at which a self-reproducing machine, such as a Von Neumann system, can break down the total mass of a planet and convert it to cognitive matter, into submolecular rod-logic diamonds, and so on? The estimates with which I am familiar were based—or so I thought—on theoretical maximums. We cannot possibly star-lift, mine, and convert a sufficient mass-energy of Sol to form a Dyson Sphere of self-aware logic diamond around the solar system within this time frame, not if the gas giants have not yet been converted to cognitive matter. Ask the Blue Men: was there some other plan developed by the current dominant subspecies of mankind to oppose the Hyades?”
Menelaus had to explain many unknown terms to Illiance. The Iatric language did not have words for megascale engineering, star-mining, inanimate thinking-substances, shells that englobed entire star systems, submolecular engineering, or any word for the idea of self-replicating machines. The combination of ideas—using nanotechnology to convert the gas giants into thinking machines, which would in turn skim hydrogen-helium plasma out of the sun and use the compressed and frozen metallic hydrogen to make a spherical thinking machine larger in diameter than the asteroid belt, and controlling all the electromagnetic forces generated by Sol and the Inner System—this required considerable explanation.
Before the full explanation was done, Preceptor Illiance held up a slender blue hand to interrupt. “Beta Sterling Anubis, please inform His Honor that there has been a misapprehension. We are Inquilines, not members of the Noösphere, which all evidence suggests has been annulled, perhaps destroyed. The Order of Simplified Vulnerary Aetiology hails from A.D. 8500 and later. I am one of the last members of my order, and I entered hibernation in the early Eighty-ninth Century. Of events of the intervening two millennia we have no knowledge and little indirect evidence.
“To our knowledge, there are no plans and never have been any to resist the Hyades by force of arms, not in any era of mankind except the very earliest. An examination of the Monument describes tactics and strategies beyond human power to resist. As has indeed proven to be the case.
“And, be that as it may, the discussion is moot. We have flown extensive search patterns around every energy-use our instruments could detect. Only Tombs as unguarded as the one in which we woke were discovered. We have found no surface life, aside from the forms mentioned. Evidence suggests that the Bell of the Hyades has been here operating since A.D. 10484, and has already swept the globe clean of developed life.”
Illiance blinked owlishly. “As best we can tell, there are no Currents. The world is empty of Man in any form. The Bell has swept it all away. We Simple Men shall inherit and repopulate the Earth once the Bell departs again into heaven.”
6. Darwinian Competition
Menelaus had trouble translating this, merely because he kept pausing to swear and grind his teeth.
At the end of it, the bewigged Judge of Ages wore an odd expression: that of a man trying to look blank-faced because he was pondering, and hiding the blankness of his face because he was confused and clueless. He nodded sagely, obviously unable to imagine what these things meant.