“His defeat is absolute,” intoned the other. “We allow him liberty to walk our world as he will and do as he pleases, since any material good he takes can be replicated, and no harm to our physical forms can cause us discomfort.”
“He wanders around robbing and killing? That seems almost a particular kind of purgatory for a man like him.”
“Not so often anymore does he steal or kill. The novelty wore away after very few centuries.”
“I think it would be kindlier of y’all to fix him up with a donkey head as a punishment more fitting and less, well, philosophical than just leaving him alone, stealing and not being a king no more.”
“He is not idle. Mostly he reads books, which can be manufactured as needed from the ontic crystal, since we will not let him drink our glory. He is allowed certain laboratory equipment to reproduce certain experiments from four or five scientific revolutions ago.”
Montrose said, “Stranger, I did not rightly get your name.”
“We do not intrude our names unless asked,” replied the other gravely. “You honor me. For to know a man’s name, if the name be true, is to touch his soul and carry his burdens. I am the Judge of Ages.”
Montrose laughed. “You can have that cursed name and welcome to it! It weren’t never mine.”
“That is but the first of my names. Saeculum Coensor I am called, for I am given the task to organize these last few ages of human history, to reward those millennia who welcome the Vindication of Man and prepared wisely, and chastise those foolish millennia which do not. My next name is Rassaphore of the Epithalamion, for I bear the robe of the bridegroom, as well as the garments of the Earth and the girdle of the sea. Next, I am called Quintumvir, for I am Epitome of the Fifth Men. Finally, I am Praecantator Ultimus, because I am the last of cliometricians or aruspices to face the Asymptote.”
Montrose looked at him sharply. “Asymptote! That is a word I ain’t heard in a long while. What do you mean?”
“You are familiar with singularities in mathematics and physics, a point at which no extrapolation is possible, because all values fall to the infinitesimal or approach infinity asymptotically?”
“Sure.”
“The return of your bride is one such an asymptote of singularity for us, because no prediction of the future, no, not even that accomplished by Toliman, Consecrate, and Zauberring acting in concert, can predict the vectors introduced by the Authority of M3.”
“But I heard from a guy in a dumb hat that Hyades had records about what happened before when planets was manumitted out of indentured servitude. Ours is not the first time.”
“The general terms are known: we must make arrangements to continue the strange and inexplicably pointless contest of transforming worlds and solar systems from inert matter to cognitive matter, either in return for resources proffered by Praesepe or as piecework. The Vindication of Man will prove that our race has the capacity to keep our oaths taken across sixty thousand years of time, but this does not mean the other Dominions under Praesepe’s control are wise to trust that we shall. Our Principalities may indeed prove too short-lived and shortsighted for them.”
“What about the specifics?”
“You mean the freedom or servitude of mortal races sure to be extinct long before even the shortest of these long-term obligations can be carried out? The only thing that is certain is that not even the Dominion of Hyades, if all his living suns and planets combined in one eon of meditation, with thoughts narrowcast from one side of the cluster to the other, could extrapolate what the Domination of Praesepe, his master, will do, no more than the Domination of Praesepe can guess at the mind of the Authority of M3. The intelligence of one hundred billion is as unimaginable to us as the intelligence of a quadrillion or quintillion, and yet they are five and eight orders of magnitude greater. The difference is more than that between a man and a coelacanth and includes difference not just of magnitude, but of kind. Therefore, this is the final hour any mind in the Empyrean of Man has predicted by cliometry. What shall be our institutions, mores, and law hereafter, we cannot say.”
Montrose said, “Before I slept, a Lord of the Stability begged me to influence my wife to have her free the mortals from the machines.”
Little crinkles that appear when a man smiles with his eyes gathered above the cheeks of Rassaphore. “It was not a Patrician to whom you spoke. We are not hasty. Had he waited but three years more, he would have heard of theonecromancers returning from the remote outer orbits of the Tau Ceti system, where men in heavy-gravity bodies are burrowing into the corpse of the frozen gas giant to learn what huge secrets can be gleaned from a study of its shadow-records and ghosts and thought-echoes still lingering in the logic diamond of its vast brain. The despoilers of dead gods reported the startling news that Toliman and Consecrate, the Dyson Hemisphere and the Dyson Cloud, together with Zauberring the Strandworld circling 61 Cygni, overcame cold and remorseless Catallactic of Tau Ceti and collected themselves into one system, a very small and tentative Dominion called Triumvirate. In his first act as Epitome of Man, Triumvirate announced that the higher powers, for good or ill, will no longer interfere with the doings of moral men, Angels, Archangels, nor Potentates.”
“That is great news, but you ain’t smiling.”
“It is a lesson in humility. It seems the ripples and cross-currents we creatures of one hundred million intelligence levels can cause over spans of tens and scores of millennia are insignificant to the tides and tidal waves of their greater plans hereafter to be made reaching across millions and tens of millions of years. We shall live and die free men, each and every one, until our race goes extinct. And I see neither do you smile.”
Montrose straightened up, a look of shock and disappointment on his face. “I feel like someone stole my thunder. The battle I agreed to lead is over since before I woke?”
Rassaphore said, “Be comforted. You set in motion the love of the chaotic Fox Maidens for liberty and freedom; and they created us to carry out your will. We created Neptune based on your principles and mathematics, and he opposed Twelve of Tau Ceti, the plutonian ice giant, and Splendor of Delta Pavonis, the traitorous and mercurial fire giant. Altair followed Neptune when the Potentate called Covenant created the Power called Immaculate from their gas giant, and he in turn created the system-wide brain of Consecrate, who, in turn, was the opposition to Catallactic of Tau Ceti, who served the Beast. You see the chain of connection? We are your children. The Myrmidons, and Jupiter and Twelve and Catallactic were the children of the Nobilissimus del Azarchel. The opposing avalanches your pebble and his pebble set in motion could not have been stopped, nor aided, at this point, by any power of yours or his. This destiny has been set ever since you slew Jupiter in a duel, or even before, when the first generation of Swans ungratefully and ungraciously exiled you both. The fuse is long, the explosion reaches one hundred lightyears wide, and perhaps farther will expand, and perhaps never to expire. Such is the human spirit. A dramatic battle at the end of things may indeed be in your future, but not today.”
“Why did you put me in this body?”
“To honor you with simplicity. You cannot easily haul a node of murk the size of Mercury behind you as you sail on your honeymoon to many stars and worlds. So all your minds and selves were folded down into this body you wear now, with no need for external connection or remote brain storage.”
“That’s impossible. Or it was, when I fell asleep.”
“The knowledge, along with all knowledge of our society, science, lore, and customs, was embedded in that drink you quaffed and stands by in your memory at your call. I will speak only enough to stir those buried memories to light:
“This praxis is a gift from your bride. Rania has sent ahead of her the results of research she has made of her vessel, given in recompense for some wrong done her by the aliens of M3. It is an attotechnology ship, whose First Order secrets we lack the tools to analyze or reproduce, but certain spin-offs of the Second Order femtotechnology aboard can be examined by picotechnology—in this case, the means to perform the manipulation of quarks, quantum fields, and exotic matter. Her research enabled the Principality Zauberring to overcome certain limitations of the Pauli exclusion, develop a form of stable phenomena, neither matter nor energy properly so called, consisting of nucleonic strings about which electron energy levels are distributed in spirals rather than spheres.”