Montrose stopped walking.
It was an orbital antimatter bombardment.
The magnetic launch-bottle could accelerate the particle to relativistic velocities, but the explosion, the total conversion, would happen at the outermost fringes of atmosphere, wherever contraterrene met terrene matter. The Hermetic’s mining aura, fired simultaneously, could focus a beam of magnetic influence to drive the resulting particle spray downward rather than in all directions, but it would spread. Only a fraction of the energy would touch the ground.
As a weapon, it was absurdly wasteful. As an act of conspicuous consumption, meant to awe the enemy into surrender, it was not wasteful at all.
Then came other images of cities dying in fire beneath the heavy canopies of mushroom-shaped clouds.
Once when he was young and in the service, Montrose had been kicked by a mule. It was an old beast, and he had been wearing a heavy jacket, so the blow did not kill him, but it sent him to the infirmary with his ribs taped up. The sensation he felt then was like that.
Back when he had first seen these pictures of mushroom clouds on the walls of the bedchamber where he woke, of course he assumed he was looking at a nuclear war. Of course he had not imagined the Hermetic at fault, because she carried no nuclear warheads.
Stupid. Stupid, because he knew enough high-school physics to know what causes clouds of that shape. Heat, not radioactivity. The characteristic mushroom cloud shape was a byproduct of energy expenditure. You would get the same thing above a large-scale meteor strike, or …
The next image showed the Hermetic and the open-framework cylinder-ships from Earth. It looked like the cylinders were making reentry. But no. The Hermetic had accepted the surrender of the crews (a string of suited figures was shown being drawn in the airlock) and was using the empty hulls as drop-energy weapons. A mass of metal that large, made of substances designed not to melt on re-entry, landing in a city, or atop a dam, would release as much kinetic energy as an atom bomb, but without the messy radioactivity.
There had been no war for the Hermetic to stop. Why had he assumed that? Because that was what he wanted to assume, maybe?
There was another portrait of the Princess here. In this one, she was crowned with the wreath of olive leaves, and held a dove on one wrist.
He now knew the meaning of the peace so lovingly portrayed at the end of the corridor. It was what might be called a Caesar’s peace: The peace a conqueror brings to a trampled land once he’s won total victory, and his wrath is sated.
He stared at the painted features of the lovely girl. The face was very similar to the face of Grimaldi, as if the Captain’s features had been redrawn in more delicate lines.
Montrose turned over in his head the Diophantine Equation he expected had been used to create her, the world’s first completely artificial being. Every gene must have been calculated through … this absurdly complex equation, not to mention medical tests and proofs-of-concept, would have had to have been performed before the corpse cooled.
Or beforehand. There was a ghost of a memory in his head. Montrose was sure he had seen the Captain’s dead body, floating in the zero-gee axial chambers of the Hermetic, where the coffins were stored. The body was not burned at that time. The carbonization must have happened after, as part of the preparation process to prepare the body’s mass to act as raw material, to create an artificial womb in one of the body cavities where the girl, Rania, was to be grown.
Which meant there had been no suicide. There had been a mutiny and a murder.
The corridor ended in a semicircular atrium paved in shining lapis lazuli beneath a slanted ceiling of polished onyx set with stars, images of Olympian gods, coats of arms, lozenges, and tablatures. Along the walls were suits of armor from the past and suits of space-armor from the present, as well as pikes and swords and daggers hung up in patterns like steel flowers.
He heard voices up ahead, speaking softly, but that was all. No one was near him, no one was watching. He turned. The door at the far end of the corridor was shut, presumably because the railcar beyond was gone. Montrose did not know by what control or signal another could be summoned. There had been no control, no strip of sensitive material near the door: To him, that door was firmly locked.
The weapons were not nailed so firmly to the wall. The largest dirk he could find, he tucked through two ring-clips on his back-harness, where the long scholar’s hood (hanging down his back like a miniature triangular cape) would cover it. He left behind one of the purely ceremonial oxygen tubes to make room.
4. The Undecorated Hall
Beyond, grim and dark, was a flattened dome held up by metallic ribs, an architecture as ungainly as the underside of an umbrella, as massive as the tomb of a pharaoh. It sharply contrasted with the splendor of the atrium outside.
This presence chamber of the Hermeticists, if it truly was the throne room and headquarters of the masters of the human race, was impressive in its Spartan simplicity: The chamber here was unadorned, utilitarian, severe. Beneath the flattened dome, a single table circled the room, with cushioned chairs on steel frames facing inward. The table was a hollow zero, surrounding a round central floor paved with high-quality library cloth. Eight large screens hung from articulated swivel-arms overhead. At the moment the screens were tuned to a luminous setting, and bathed the area in an aquamarine light. The walls and overheads were gray slabs.
There was only one ornament in the chamber: in an alcove to one side stood a life-sized iron statue of a Great Ape. There was a plaque at the statue’s feet, but illegible in the dimness. The statue was lit by a lonely spotlight set in the alcove roof directly above it, so that the brow ridge and jowls of the simian were cast into dark relief. The artist had emphasized the massive and sloped shoulders, the protruding belly, the crooked legs to the point of exaggeration: or perhaps the sculptor had never seen a living specimen. Come to think of it, unless one of the men in this room had made it, the sculptor certainly had not, since the species went extinct only a few years before Menelaus had been born.
No other decorations or amenities. Not even a carpet. That was it.
Menelaus did not see spittoons or ashtrays, and the pitchers and tumblers before each chair seemed to hold nothing but water. Apparently these new rulers of the world did not indulge in any drinking or smoking to soften their moods when they met, which Menelaus knew to be a big mistake. The Congress of the United States, back before the Disunion, always met sober, and look at what had come of that.
The other thing which struck him as odd was the lack of servants. There were no secretaries arranging papers, no computermen organizing data presentations. But the rulers of the world—if that is what they were—apparently set out their own papers and poured their own water pitchers, because several gray-haired men in black silk shipsuits were doing just that when Montrose entered the chamber.
Menelaus counted in his lightning-quick fashion, at a glance. There were seventy men in the chamber. No Princess. The girl was not there. Menelaus thought he should not feel so foolishly disappointed—he had more important things to fret him. He should have listened to his instincts, and known that any man, even a man as smart and bold as Blackie, who drinks of absolute power, gets drunk as hell. It mutates how he thinks, how he sees things. Blowing a whole city of innocent souls to Purgatory was merely a day’s labor, a matter for quiet pride of workmanship, or was merely the winning score in a game, a matter for cheers and toasts.
Foolish or not, he was still disappointed.