“Liege, I have kept faithfully your service for lo, these thousands and thousands of years. But now all the Tombs are being raised, and all the dead shall waken, and many of these will be weakened and wounded and seek of many cures. The mission of the Knights of the Hospital of Jerusalem is with the sick who seek our sanctuary; and my heart is here.” He held out his left hand, and Oenoe took it, smiling, her beauty made all the more beautiful by her joy. She blushed, and did not look the posthumans in their eyes.
“I release you,” said Montrose, with a note of sorrow in his voice. “We’ve been through a lot. Well, slept through a lot. Almost the same thing.”
Mickey said, “Am I not to come with you?”
Montrose said, “I am not going to tell you yes or no, but I have a woman waiting for me up yonder in the far tomorrows, and I do not give a good goddam how many lives and how many centuries I have to tuck behind me. You can come if you like, but I have found out there just ain’t no guarantee that the future will be any better than the past, no matter what the optimists say, and there just ain’t no guarantee that the future will go on getting worse and worse, no matter what the pessimists say. For that matter, there is no guarantee that things will stay mixed good and bad, sinners and saints together, with no great change to human nature, because there have been times in the past that things turned a corner and nothing was never the same again. I don’t know what the people are called who think things don’t get worse and don’t get better. Mediocretists? But whatever they are called, there is no guarantee of them being right neither, because there just is no guarantees about the future. All bets are off. That goes double for the far future.”
Mickey said, “But I heard the Swans pronounce your sentence. Long-term biosuspension requires the use of a Xypotech to track all the cellular movements in a man’s body. No machine on Earth will serve you, even if you were visible to any of them.”
Del Azarchel said, “All things have come together, my dear friendly Witch, in just such a way that Montrose and I cannot do, either one of us, without the other. He has made a bargain with Sarmento so that the now-empty Xypotech core at the axis of the Emancipation can be filled and reestablished from my Xypotech, a new version of Exarchel, which he and I have the skills to create from the raw materials we have at hand, but neither of us alone. I have hibernation cells aboard the ship, he knows how to program them; I have savant equipment to create a new emulation of myself, he can use his solution to make him sane. And this time, I can make sure he puts no extra codes inside me. And I have a ship.”
“My ship,” grunted Montrose.
“Our ship,” said Del Azarchel graciously. “The only place we can go, now that the world and the world’s mind is hostile to us. We have a long hike ahead of us, not to mention a sea voyage, since the Tower will obey my command no longer to carry us aloft, and the only launching-landing craft in service, not beholden in any way to the Melusine or the Swans, is the one hidden in the bay of Saint Christopher’s Island, just offshore of your Mount Misery Tomb facility. Unless you have a closer one tucked away? We will also need to raid your fabulous storehouses of legendary wealth, if you have some stout walking shoes and coats worth wearing.”
Montrose said, “I will open my storehouses. Your eyes will fall out of your head when you see the treasures I’ve accumulated, because they bring me gifts, each one of the billions who sleep, or their close relations. But walk? Why walk? Mickey here stole a Witch plane not so long ago, and programmed the serpentine guiding it to land the crate not far away. I know the location. The serpentine power will last forever. It is a two-seater, and I am sure I can figure out how to pilot the darn thing after a crash or six. The thing is at least as steady as a World War One biplane.”
“And the average life-span of a Flying Ace from those days was, what, again? Fourteen days?” asked Del Azarchel archly.
“Long enough to get us to Mount Misery.” And the crooked grin on the lantern-jawed gargoyle face of Menelaus Montrose was something fearful to behold.
Mickey the Witch said, “I will stay in this era, and seduce a buxom Nymph or two, and find my love now.”
Oenoe said softly to him, “Aea looks with favor on you, or can be made to do so once she adjusts her brain chemistry correctly. You will soon be hers.”
Montrose said, “I warned you. Those women will take over your brain.”
Mickey said, “I have no further use for it. Have you seen the size of her—”
“Those women are dangerous!” said Montrose.
“Should I live a nice, safe life like yours, then, Menelaus Montrose?” retorted the Witch.
“Well, if you are so reckless,” said Blackie with a smile, “then come with us.”
Mickey pondered, frowning. Then he said, “No. The depth and strangeness of the centuries and millennia you mean to cross appalls me: you will emerge from your sleep in a world as strange as some unnamed orb that circles Archenar or Bellatrix, but with no way home to any world you knew. Montrose will find his Lady Love, if the gods are with him and the world is just, and Del Azarchel will find despair, and a hell of eternal time unending.
“But as for me, what shall a Witch of simple tastes do in such unguessed aeons far remote? How can I worship oak and ash and thorn and all the sacred trees, if they are all extinct?
“No. My people are here. The future is not mine; but the present.
“For, see! Even now the first of the great doors on the far hillside moves earth and melting ice aside, and the golden light spills up. I hear the psalms of the Christians mingled with the chants of the Witches and the paeans of the Chimerae, and so, perhaps, the ancient enmities are for a season put aside.
“The men of every era emerge blinking into the sunlight of the latter-day world. It is already far too far in the future for me.
“Go, then, Judge of Ages and Master of the World, away from the Age and from the World that has exiled you, and seek you your strange dreams of love for a more-than-human girl. The blessings of earth and sky, hill and wood and water, and all that dwell therein, now and for aye be with you!”
APPENDIX A
Dramatis Personae
Last interment date in square brackets
Hermeticists
Menelaus Illation Montrose
Melchor de Ulloa—Master of the Witches
Narcís Santdionís de Rei D’Aragó—Master of the Chimerae
Sarmento i Illa d’Or—Master of the Nymphs
Venture Reyes y Pastor—Master of the Hormagaunts
Jaume Coronimas—Master of the Locusts
Ximen del Azarchel—Master of the World
Ghosts
Exarchel—the Dreagh or emulation of Del Azarchel
Exo-exarchel—the backup template of Exarchel expelled into space
Exulloa, Exarago, Exillador, Excoronimas, Exynglingas, and Expastor—emulations
Scholar
Rada Lwa—Intermediately Evolved Learned Scholar Rada-Lwa Chwal Sequitur Argent-Montrose; Psychoi, brain augment to level 257, and a servant of De Ulloa [A.D. 3090]
Cryonarch
Scipio—Advocate-General Scipio Cognition Montrose of the World Concordat, Regent at Large, Lord Protector of the Dead, Director of the Endymion Hibernation Syndicate, aka Glorified Scipio Cognition Montrose, Endorcist of One and a Half Donations [A.D. 2519]
Knight Hospitalier