Even with the confident prediction that Montrose would be unable to interfere in the long term plans of the Hermeticists, that prediction became more likely the longer Montrose was away from Earth.
Second, and more important, Montrose realized that Blackie was not creating a new race to supplant Mankind in order to fight off the Armada from Hyades when it came. That had been Montrose’s idea, his alone. Blackie had not said a thing about fighting.
Everything in Ximen Del Azarchel’s personality, everything in the way he talked (Why had Montrose not seen it before? How could he have missed it?) betrayed that Blackie was a man who valued life more than liberty, safety to freedom. He esteemed hierarchy, rule, order, and dominion and eschewed that wildness that comes of exploring the wilderness, including the wilderness of stars. The dream of world peace, of an utter end to war, Blackie thought he was close to achieving it, and settling Mankind forever into a peace without end. He thought the world needed rulership, not democracy, not men settling their own messes; the world needed a Caesar. An eternal, iron Caesar.
But Ximen Del Azarchel was not merely a power-hungry dictator. No. He was something far more dangerous: a man with an ideal. Even a selfless ideal.
Why had his mind been able to survive the mind war in the virtual world, when all the Hermeticists made copies of their minds and pitted them, like Gladiators in the Coliseum, against each other? Montrose did not know, but he knew that someone fighting for something greater than himself took more daring risks, and could draw allies and followers to him. No … there must be more than that. The other Hermeticists also had ideals, at least, of a twisted sort. There was something more beneath Del Azarchel’s drive. But what?
Montrose set aside that question for later. At the moment, he meditated on one thing: the plans that the Hermeticists were making for the remotest future, eight thousand years from now when the alien machines arrive to claim the Earth as their property—the Hermeticists did, just as they said, intend to force human evolution to its next step. But the Hermeticists did not mean to fight to survive. They meant to collaborate; to cooperate; to surrender. A live horse is better than a dead ape.
The design for the next human race was meant to be creatures smart enough to be useful to the Hyades, but docile enough not to create any problems.
The asymptote was not meant to produce superhuman free men, but superhuman slaves.
All that talk of a golden future was a lie. Servitude was all that the destiny of Mankind held, and the transhuman race beyond humanity was to be held in subhuman subjugation.
Montrose raised his hands out of the gelatin and clutched his head. It was his best friend that was planning to sell Mankind and the children of men to the Hyades. Del Azarchel, of all people!
The hatred in his heart seemed sharper, purer, clearer than the muddy emotions he had known back when he was a merely human. He missed those days already.
The nurses came in, called by the monitors, or else by the gulping hiccups of Montrose’s sobs. He wanted to turn over, to turn his face away, but the bed of gel would not permit it.
It is embarrassing when superhumans cry.
3. Prenuptial Considerations
Before he even was fully recovered, Montrose found himself introduced to the Rulers and Sovereigns and Magnates of the world. He met Pnumatics dressed like peacocks, Psychics dressed like spacers in wigs, elected Bishops wielding political power, and elected Administrators from those cities or parishes with Republican forms of government dressed in simple drabs—and not a man jack of them he much cared for. He did not like the ceremony, the courtesy, the courtliness, the fawning. His Lone Star State spirit rankled at the inequality.
His disliking did not change when he was elevated to the highest ranks of this ranked society. But three things changed immediately.
First, it was to be a Morganitic marriage, meaning neither he nor his heirs would inherit his wife’s royal titles and noble rights; but she ennobled him and enfeoffed him with lands and rents in a recently-acquired county in Gascony, quite beautiful now that the bacteriological infection from the last war was dying off, the fungi dotting the hedges and trees like leprosy was vanishing, and both grapevines and vintners were returning to the wilderness area. Antiquarians were felling stalks of yeasty growth and burning spore-fields to uncover the abandoned relics the previous generations had mummified before evacuation: a miraculous number of cathedrals, famous houses, and fortresses were intact. Montrose congratulated himself on being from the same province as Cyrano de Bergerac. His title was Count of Armagnac.
Second, he was also given a red bracelet, heavy as a manacle, to wear on his wrist, and Rania’s servants told him he could not appear in public save in the black shipsuit to which he, as a man of outer space, alone was entitled. He kicked up a row and was a little surprised when he got kicked back.
A man named Vardanov, her security officer, was a dark-skinned Slav from Azania: one of those people from the “Old Order” who had been bribed into supporting the Concordat with a title and a heraldic escutcheon. The blond man kept his skin tuned as dark as ivory, and had used the recently-released RNA-spoofing techniques of the Hermeticists to add three feet and a hundred pounds of muscle to his frame. He dressed, like all the court soldiers of this ridiculous time period, in the peaked helmet and metal breastplate of a Spanish Conquistador. He was polite enough to remove his helmet and tuck it in his elbow, and give Montrose a stiff bow, before calling him a fool. The two stood in a small solarium of Montrose’s delightful little mansion in Gascony, looking out on the trellises of vines.
“Come again?” said Montrose, doubting his ears.
Vardanov had a melancholy face and large, sad eyes, so it was hard to tell how angry he was. He spoke in a thick, slow voice, like the voice of a thoughtful elephant. Menelaus could not place the accent: perhaps a combination of Russian and Dutch. “Fool!” he said again, “and why is it you are making my job more difficult, yes?”
The windows opaqued, putting the little richly-furnished chamber into twilight. The dark window also prevented anyone outside from looking in. The man’s big hand dropped casually to the hilt of his bayonet, which was sheathed in his web-belt.
Montrose resolved the man’s stance into a fractal pattern of vector motions, position of limbs and their kinetic values, and compared it with his own. Oddly, there did not seem to be a solution. With his greater mass and reach, if the two of them fought, Montrose (barring unforeseen factors entering the field) would lose.
So stepping forward and breaking the guy’s nose was, at the moment, not an optimal strategy.
Montrose decided that a diplomatic response was needed. “So why should I give a pair of donkey’s swollen black testicles what the hell your job is, or how difficult it is?”
Well, that was diplomatic for him. These things should be judged on a sliding scale.
The man showed no anger on his face, although with his new and heightened perceptions, Montrose could analyze the man’s blush response and microscopic pupil dilations. Here was a creature whose unsleeping anger, frustration, and paranoia, kept him in dangerous psychological balance by a sense of honor, an iron self-control.