Again, no one answered, not even Del Azarchel. Those proud men, masters of the world, pursed their lips and cast down their gazes and did not meet his eyes.
Reyes y Pastor broke the silence. “The, ah, Chair will entertain a motion, ah, to…”
“Never mind,” said Montrose. “You don’t have to expel me. Open the damn door. I’ll leave under my own power.”
He walked to the doors, turning his back to the whole table of black-garbed, dangerous men. Montrose wondered if he would feel it, the blade, the bullet, the energy beam, or whatever they meant to use to cut him down. Surely they were not going to let him walk out of here, free as air, free to tell the world what he knew. Surely not.
He stood with his nose pointed at the steel valves of the massive door to the chamber, his back to his executioners, waiting for them to get up the nerve to kill him. He waited, listening to the blood pounding in his ears, a sound so like the sea.
It came as no surprise to hear the rustle of black silk as hands moved stealthily. Perhaps there were hidden holsters. Montrose did not turn his head, knowing any sudden movement would be his last.
The surprise came when a voice rang out. It was the machine again, the Xypotech Del Azarchel.
Do not harm him! He has been under my protection all these years, and I see no reason to alter. I value his life above your lives.
The human Del Azarchel cried out, “But why? He threatens the Great Work! Why spare him?”
The inhuman Del Azarchel replied: Because I have given my word—machine or not, alive or not, I am still the Nobilissimus Ximen Del Azarchel, Senior of the Landing Party!
The next voices were as hushed and cowed as the tiny noises made by mice. “Chairman, I move that we release the hatch—” “Seconded” “—call the question?” “If there are no objections, the motion—”
The next noise he heard was the very quietest click, and the sigh of the door-pistons.
The big doors opened. Out he went.
“Well,” he muttered to himself. “I hadn’t expected on that! Now what?”
12
A New Age Dawns
A.D. 2400
1. Images
The skies above Utrecht were lit with fireworks like flowers of red and silver-white, brilliant against the stars or against the huge, ghostly image-works. Microwave cannonades from De Haar castle had heated the air to clear away the threatening clouds, and only a few nimbus, rosy and silver in the reflected lights, hung near the horizon.
The images loomed through the midnight like towers of smoke. Menelaus could only guess at their meaning. Huge in the east and west, their cowls tangles in the stars, were bearded monks in cassocks, each holding aloft a pale sword half-transparent in the light of the rising moon. Elsewhere across the constellations was an image of a child in swaddling, leading a parade of strange figures that promised what the year to come might bring, cornucopias of prosperity, goats whose teats dripped ambrosia, waddling Buddha-figures with sacks heavy-laden with gold.
Opposite this parade of glories was a bent graybeard, clouds around his knees, leaning on a scythe, his silver hourglass held above a more melancholy group of shapes. Larger than thunderheads, blurred and bluish in the distance, rose faces Menelaus did not recognize. Something about the stiffness, age, and solemnity of the images told him he was looking at an obituary of famous figures who had passed away that year—famous, he supposed, to the people of this time. To him, it was a procession as solemn and strange as the rain-worn angels seen in some ancient boneyard.
Between these two parades, one image, taller than the rest, arrested his attention: Times Square in New York, an artist’s representation of what the city might have looked like had it survived to the present day, was painted across the night sky. The glittering ball of Waterford Crystal from the top of the Allied Chemical Building was poised to descend. In the gloom of colored lanterns below him, Menelaus could hear the chanting of the people as they counted, some upon the sward of gray grass patched with snow puddles, some in boats and pleasure barges drifting in the fanciful ponds some architect had scattered through the French gardens, their waters crystal blue in the December midnight:
Tien! Negen! Acht! Zeven! Zes! Vijf! Vier! Drie! twee …
Despite the importance and formality of the event, Menelaus wore no more than a rough jerkin and leggings of buckskin he had sewn himself, mittens of white rabbit fur, a shako cap made from a wolverine pelt, its teeth on a thong around the crown.
He had sauntered up to the party with a pistol tucked into the rope he was using as a belt, but a man-at-arms dressed like a waiter (Menelaus could tell by how he stood and held his eyes that the man was a soldier) carrying a silver tray oh-so-politely asked him to check his weapon. The soldier-in-servitor-tux stared at the way Menelaus was dressed, but said nothing. So polite.
No, there was nothing wrong with checking your weapon at any place where drinks were served. It had been that way back in Houston, back in the Twenty-Third Century—no barkeep would let someone packing a piece in his saloon. But it was the fact that the people among the crowds outside did not wear those sashes or baldrics, or wore metallic wigs—none of them could carry a weapon, drunk or sober. The members of the upper class, the psychics or psychoi, as they were called, or soldiers in their employ or retainers in their service, only they could bear arms.
There had been Marines in full dress kit at the huge main doors of castle De Haar, but they were for show. The real weapons were tiny electronic things, no bigger than dragonflies, controlled from some remote location. Everyone important had arrived with a horse-drawn carriage or a ground-effect car, and had brought a dozen people, retainers and ladies-in-waiting and whatnot trailing after like so many brightly colored ducklings after a duck. Montrose, on the other hand, arrived on foot, alone, walking up from the riverside, threading his way to reach the front entrance through the back gardens (where off-duty servants sat drinking beer to cheer the New Year on). Neither the servants in back nor the Marines in front stopped him. He did not even bother to display the self-luminous, singing, and engraved invitation the messenger had brought him (this had been a thin and supercilious youth, dressing in luminous silk, with a steel-blue wig of shoulder-length hair—but a careful youth, despite his dandy looks, because he gave Montrose the slip when Montrose tried to shadow him through the narrow and crooked streets of Tripoli). Montrose still was not sure if the message, or the messenger, were real.
He looked down at himself, at his buckskin costume, this silly dancing-bear outfit, which he wore because he was too proud to wear the black silken shipsuit which the age said he was entitled. And he came to this party because the mad thing in his head told him to come. Was he real? Either of him?
The fact that this world was one where not all men had the right to self-defense was one he deeply resented. Resented? No, it was a hatred, so black and primal he could not understand it. When had the idea of destroying this ridiculous future and all its broken promises began to seem normal to him?
It had been at the chalet, he decided.
2. Mount Fairweather
Menelaus had dwelt for over a month in a little cabin in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, a few hours’ tramp through the snow from a lonely spot where the Brachistochrone curve of the supersonic train broke through the crust to the surface. The Iron Ghost of Del Azarchel had been his only companion, a disembodied voice that drew expressions and figures on the walls of luminous glass. This voice from the walls claimed to be Del Azarchel, and therefore had title to the chalet, and could do with it what he wished, without consulting his fleshly father, and Montrose did not argue the point.