“We are the Third Human race, and stand to the Swans as they stand to the Firstlings. We are coherent where they are fissiparous. By Firstlings, we are called the Myrmidons.”
“I thought the word referred to ants, or maybe bullies who don’t question orders.”
There was no reply to that.
“My name’s Menelaus. And don’t say Meany Louse, cause that joke weren’t funny even back when I was human. How you doing? You fellers want anything to drink? I got whiskey. You can try the mechanical bull, excepting you ain’t got butts.”
The mask on the blunt prow of the wormlike serpent spoke. “We have no need for alcohol nor athletics. We suffer no fatigue, we require no entertainment nor diversion, and we have no capacity for joy.” The voice was cold, as emotionless as if a winter forest had spoken.
“No family names, neither, I take it?” Montrose said. “No families? No nothing?”
The serpent mask said, “We are the first iteration of incarnate humanity that has done entirely away with the vagaries of sex, being reproduced artificially upon decree. It has freed us of much of the inefficiencies and disturbances of baseline humanity. We are creatures of pure reason, the Men of the Mind.”
“So the suicide rate among you is really high, huhn?”
The wheel masks spoke. Its voices were machinelike, too inhuman even to sound cold. “Each individual is owned by, and thought-monitored by, and obeys, whichever commission designs him; and owns whomever he designs and commissions. Any man who takes up a duty one of us fails, takes on his role and privileges and rank. If our memories are sufficiently worthy to be placed in long-term storage, and passed on to next generations, then the memory-lineage is given a name-designation, and downloaded into receptor engrams in the child organism. Hence suicide is irrelevant.”
“Except a high suicide rate shows you weren’t built right. Some things can’t be changed in human nature, no matter what Blackie says.”
The wheel masks spoke again. “There are pain-inducing circuits wired into the brain which allow for remote monitoring of neural-electrical activity. The torment causes no physical damage, and any thoughts, hopes, or prayers which might allow the subject sufficient fortitude to resist the pain are isolated as nerve paths and treated with opiates, hindering concentration. The technique tends to deter serial mass-suicides.”
The serpent mask added, “The change to human nature can be made if sufficient pain and sacrifice is inflicted.”
“Nasty. And Blackie actually thought critters of your crippled psychology were what the Hyades wanted as slaves, eh?”
The centaur mask spoke for the first time. Its voice was a baritone, with inflections ringing with pride and command. It sounded human and more than human. “You mock the heroic nature of our race.”
“Damn straight, I do.”
The centaur reared up on its hind legs, assuming the posture of a four-handed giant. The mask in the center of the human-shaped upper torso said coldly, “We suffer that others may live. All humanity would perish if the Myrmidons did not stand ready to preserve them. Our moral code is of iron, and it dictates that extinction must be avoided at all costs.”
Menelaus said wryly, “Lots of men say they have a code which promotes survival. Funny thing is, those are the very codes that don’t.”
“Lesser men may say what they wish. We are Myrmidons. We stand ready to pay that cost.”
“So what about your suicide rate? That don’t sound like survival at all costs to me.”
The centaur folded itself down on its haunches. “An elite force must purge the weak from its candidates: it is the same for races. Life serves life.”
The wheel said, “We are designed directly based on the Monument mathematics describing the mind-body correlations.”
“Which means what?”
The ostrich-shaped biped said, “It means we are highly adaptable, having only rudimentary personality formations, and therefore the aliens, no matter what their psychology, will surely find us useful. At the apex of all memory chains, the basic curriculum of value judgments and axioms from which the Third Race takes its form, is the Senior and the Learned Del Azarchel.”
The serpent added, “Our mental forms are designed to be compatible with what is known of the Hyades behavior strategies.”
“So his personality is reflected in all of you? You are all Blackie? Your whole damned race is Blackie? And he tortures himself to keep from killing himself? What kind of twisted freak is he? Pox on my poking stick! After all this time, I still ain’t got no idea what makes his sick mind tick.”
The biped said, “The comments are irrelevant, and will be discarded.”
One of the smaller Montroses standing on the table said, “Mortiferous pestilence, but I ain’t heard Blackie called Senior in a long time! Not the Master of the World no more, eh?”
And the voice of Iron Ghost Montrose said from the crystal wall, “He’s back to Landing Party boss.”
Montrose pondered that for a moment with several of his minds.
7. Voyages to Stepmother Earths
A.D. 14303 TO 14551
Long ago, Blackie had launched the Emancipation to Epsilon Eridani, ten lightyears from Sol, bringing a delighted Montrose. It was not exactly his first interstellar voyage, but it was the first one he made while sane. Now that Jupiter had decreed an end to Blackie’s exile, he had no trouble finding volunteers to create a new Hermetic Order, from which he bred and selected a picked complement of Swans officers and Firstling crew, mostly Sylphs.
Fairer than all songs, brighter than a sword unsheathed, the great ship opened her wings of fire, and rode a river of light across the endless night.
The world there, a tide-locked world called Nocturne, had been too poor to build a deceleration laser, so the Emancipation had shed one sail ahead, and caught in her deceleration chutes the reflected beam from that sail as it retreated into endless space.
The humans—if they could he called that—had enthusiastically embraced the sciences of pantropy which Jupiter had narrowcast to them before their first landfall. The deracination ship was still present in orbit, as an O’Neill colony from which populations had been, from time to time in centuries long past, floated randomly to the surface in great bubbles of alien material. Through pantropy those humans and their livestock were radically altered to allow them to survive, and a different species dominated each zone of ever-colder and ever-darker climates from the plutonian West Pole to the almost-terrestrial clime of the Terminator, the line of eternal dusk that surrounded the pole-to-pole equator of the planet.
The world was ruled by a cabal of cliometrists called Actuaries, who manipulated economies and events to force families and clans to tinker with their gene plasms and produce the various freakish sub-races to fill the allotted slots in their biologically determined caste system.
The dayside of Nocturne was uninhabitable, but Montrose and Del Azarchel had shown the Actuaries how to grow self-replicating acres of solar energy cells across the dead sea bottoms there.
In gratitude for the industrial revolution this innovation had fathered, the Actuaries had cannibalized the hulk of the deracination ship to build a launching laser in order to allow the Emancipation to sail back to Sol.