Montrose heard cheering issuing from many voices, many klaxons, echoing in the distance. He even heard the voices of the Firstlings and other non-Myrmidons mingling with the general outcry.
It was the voice of free men.
PART SEVEN
The Long Golden Afternoon of Man
1
The Starfaring Guild
1. A Fine Shot
A.D. 51554
The rumor that a Vindictive sharpshooter had established himself in stable orbit among the rubble of the broken flotillas of hulks and habitats still called the Asteroid Belt, and had a commanding vantage of Earth, Venus, and Mars, was not denied by the Archangels, but anyone who read this news from a public data fountain had his name and biometric response noted.
First Humans were immune from Archangels because of covenants with the Sacerdotal Order whom, it was rumored, even the higher Powers feared; but this ancient immunity did not prevent the posthumans from reporting the capillary responses and pupil dilations, as well as changes in neural flows in the cortex, of various True Human readers to other Humans, including Humans Not So True. The Great Swan of Malta was known to have left his mountain peak in midst of the seas of Libya, traveling by night on wide and silent wings over the Mediterranean across the island chain that once was Italy toward Egypt, where the Hidden Queen of the Fox Maidens was said to be sojourning in disguise, perhaps to bedevil the archeologists and theonecromancers meddling with the corpse of a fallen orbital Archangel found there. It was no good news for the True Humans when a hermit of the Second Humanity roused himself from his endless cybernetic dreamstates, and sought to consult the sovereign of the Fourth Humanity. The Foxes were closer to humans in their emotional matrix, more prone to meddle in human life, and correspondingly more dangerous than reticent Swans or dispassionate Megalodons.
Perhaps the two consulted over the human interest in the Vindicator, or perhaps the two conspired with the Judge of Ages, who was rumored to have his throne buried under the pyramids, as well as slumbering armies and sleeping treasure cities.
In any case, cavaliers and ladies among the True Humans avoided showing interest in the topic of the sharpshooter. Among the lower orders, the discreet silence was not so strict. One wag walking the frozen canals of New Ximenopolis carried an umbrella bearing the slogan in bright red ideoglyphs for the benefit of eyes above the atmosphere: FRIENDLY! NO TARGET!
This was the year Minus 444 by the shortcount calendar, reckoning the time until the next Sweep by Hyades; it was Minus 17444 by the Unrevised Vindication Calendar; and it was Minus 18944 by the Anomaly Calendar; and the Sacerdotes called it Year of the Lord Plus 51554, even thought it was unchancy for them to say who or what was their lord, or say why this calendar, of all the calendars, counted up rather than counted down.
By the reckoning of the Unrevised Calendar, the Feast of the Fourth Ignition stood at Plus 154, and yet no cessation of the Years of Fasting which led up to the Feast Years had been announced. Even Academics living the shadow of the mile-high dome over the mountains of the Madagascar peninsula, prone to skepticism about the claims of the Sacerdotes, marked the tally off the calendar with thinly disguised hope, waiting for the long-delayed Energy Feast, when men could turn on lights and power again.
In mid-September of Minus 444, after the Paleo-Myrmidon City Complex east of Jerusalem was reduced to rubble and sucked into its own crater by a NAFAL singularity-event bullet, the radio messages from the Chimera of Mars said nothing other than that the situation was being investigated.
The bullet accelerated only at impact. It maintained its existence in normal spacetime for one-half a nanosecond, and massed (relative to the target) an estimated 30,000,000,000 pounds. This was long enough to pull the central mass of the city into a pinpoint and deposit it twenty miles below the bedrock, drawing a large part of the suburban infrastructure, cables and power stations, switching nodes and magnetic rail lines, behind it into the crater. The tangled mass of iron and carbon was superheated and compressed into a half-square-mile volume shaped like a very narrow cone.
But the nature of not-as-fast-as-light acceleration is that the mass increases only in the direction of motion. Objects even slightly away from the straight line suffer less relativistic distortion. Mass meters in Jerusalem itself barely registered the tidal effect.
And the bullet-life was not long enough to disrupt the geological integrity of the mantle, or to disturb the irritable and nervous Archangel called Demeter, which had established herself across the inner plates of the crust, with structures extending to the core, as the nursemaid and life support and repair crew for the renascent version of Tellus.
There were no earthquakes, and only a few storms: the disturbance to the Weather Control predictions was below intervention threshold. The Retaliation Mechanism established by Jupiter crouching at Mount Erebus in Antarctica trembled and stirred uneasily, and fearful gams and teams of watchful Melusine beneath the Ross Ice Shelf noted the energy systems all along the volcano cone tick over from their fifth standby awareness-level to their fourth, but the nightmarish Retaliator did not wake.
By all accounts, it was a fine shot, expertly executed.
So it was that when the traveling mountebank Zolasto Zo announced his troupe would add the apostate pontiff Hieronymus to their entourage, to give a series of lectures on calendar reform, the Ship Yard Assassin for the Starfarer’s Guild assigned to the Stratospheric Tower in Spanish Guinea, where the Forever Village slept, was much disturbed in his mind.
2. A Reluctant Starfarer
The assassin’s name and style was The Glorified and Refined Quaestor Norbert Brash Noesis Mynyddrhodian mab Nwyfre of Rosycross. He had crossed the Vasty Deep but once, starfaring to Senile Grandfather Earth from the one satellite of Proxima Centauri.
Less than four home-years had been compressed into a few ship-months’ journey during his faring. Technically speaking, regulation permitted him to affix the praenomen Venerable to his name, as if he were from an older time; but he could not have sat at mess and met the eyes of Starfarers from the Third Sweep Worlds, Chrysoar circling 51 Pegasi or Nightspore of Alpha Boötis, men who lost one-third or one-half a century of home-years in passage. And some had five or ten cruises under their belts: what was four years of time-exile compared to four centuries? Some were from aeons so long forgotten that they did not use the term, but put Lorentzed before their name, in the archaic style.
The only praenomens he insisted be observed were those he had earned. When still a youth, unexpectedly and inexplicably, the Noösphere of Rosycross had offered him full immortal honors, a record made of his brain down to the subatomic level. His thoughts would endure as long as civilization had power.
Afterward, despite the normal savant precautions of hypnocoding and chemical intervention, a divarication had struck, and Norbert was torn in two. The flesh-and-blood version of Norbert suffered a painful infatuation with a girl half his age, the sloe-eyed and red-lipped eroticist Svartvestra. His ideal was Stoic, archetype called Traditional Brash, of the Fiercely Individualistic Nonconformist phyle. It was not a type known for romantic weaknesses, so Norbert was ashamed at how he failed to fit in when others of his Fiercely Individualistic Nonconformist gathered for the soul-sharing rituals. He wanted to be exactly like all the other Fiercely Individualistic Nonconformists. But he wanted Svartvestra more.
Her ideal was Hedonist of the Meretricious Revelry Artiste archetype, the precise mismatch of his. On her part, she was delighted to toy with his affections, always promising and implying more than she meant, since it outraged her clan and delighted her fans, and brought her an intoxicating notoriety.