The Judge of Ages lifted his hand, looking stern. “Do you know the reason why the Giants from the time of the Great Consensus besieged my mountain?”

Illiance said, “Ah … not in every particular. The details are lost to history.”

“They held I was in violation of current laws against preserving biocontaminants. Many of the sick and ill my Tombs preserved were infected with vectors of diseases that Giants had both wiped out, and had lost the technological ability to detect and resist. Before you ask me to repeople your dying world, or restore some dead animal species to stock, I must be certain to introduce no malignancy to your ecology, except perhaps such things as the current generations of flora and fauna can combat. Each vector of the growth and predation and decay rate-changes between all participants in the food chain clusters must be extrapolated, especially of microscopic biota. The calculus involved is immense and immensely multivariable. Put me in contact with whatever self-aware computer system holds sovereign sway over the globe.”

Illiance said, “I express surprise and chagrin. Your Honor, there is none such.”

“Then put me in contact with the Xypotech sovereigns of other spheres. There are surely worlds and moons in space colonized by human intellectual machinery?”

“Your Honor, not to my knowing.”

Menelaus was confident that the Blue Men did not have the upbringing, and might not have had the right-hemisphere neural structures, necessary to interpret facial expressions correctly. They seemed to have as much trouble reading the nonverbal cues of unmodified men as anyone not a zookeeper might have reading the facial and social signals of a monkey. But Preceptor Illiance was slightly sharper, perhaps because of whatever brain modification he had done on himself at the plea of Oenoe the Nymph. Menelaus asked himself whether Illiance saw the Judge of Ages turn pale with shock, or saw his pupils dilate with fear, and whether he would interpret those signs correctly.

The man was breathing slowly through his nose, making a credible job of keeping his face as masked and closed as the face of a poker player. Preceptor Illiance seemed blithely unaware.

For the first time, the Judge of Ages seemed ill at ease. Menelaus was standing closely enough to see the man’s eye movement: his glance darted to the various musket-bearing dogs, pistol-bearing dwarfs, and armed automata positioned about the chamber; glanced at the only exit; looked at the coffin fire-control board and ammo register. But the reaction was still somewhat subtle, and he regained control of himself in a shorter period than might have been expected.

The Judge of Ages said, “What is the date?”

Menelaus answered without translating the comment. “It is A.D. 10515, sir. October thirty-first—Happy Halloween.”

The Judge of Ages said, “The World Armada of the Domination of the Hyades is expected to arrive in this solar system by A.D. 10917—which is in roughly four hundred years. Does the current generation have some method for increasing the rate at which a self-reproducing machine, such as a Von Neumann system, can break down the total mass of a planet and convert it to cognitive matter, into submolecular rod-logic diamonds, and so on? The estimates with which I am familiar were based—or so I thought—on theoretical maximums. We cannot possibly star-lift, mine, and convert a sufficient mass-energy of Sol to form a Dyson Sphere of self-aware logic diamond around the solar system within this time frame, not if the gas giants have not yet been converted to cognitive matter. Ask the Blue Men: was there some other plan developed by the current dominant subspecies of mankind to oppose the Hyades?”

Menelaus had to explain many unknown terms to Illiance. The Iatric language did not have words for megascale engineering, star-mining, inanimate thinking-substances, shells that englobed entire star systems, submolecular engineering, or any word for the idea of self-replicating machines. The combination of ideas—using nanotechnology to convert the gas giants into thinking machines, which would in turn skim hydrogen-helium plasma out of the sun and use the compressed and frozen metallic hydrogen to make a spherical thinking machine larger in diameter than the asteroid belt, and controlling all the electromagnetic forces generated by Sol and the Inner System—this required considerable explanation.

Before the full explanation was done, Preceptor Illiance held up a slender blue hand to interrupt. “Beta Sterling Anubis, please inform His Honor that there has been a misapprehension. We are Inquilines, not members of the Noösphere, which all evidence suggests has been annulled, perhaps destroyed. The Order of Simplified Vulnerary Aetiology hails from A.D. 8500 and later. I am one of the last members of my order, and I entered hibernation in the early Eighty-ninth Century. Of events of the intervening two millennia we have no knowledge and little indirect evidence.

“To our knowledge, there are no plans and never have been any to resist the Hyades by force of arms, not in any era of mankind except the very earliest. An examination of the Monument describes tactics and strategies beyond human power to resist. As has indeed proven to be the case.

“And, be that as it may, the discussion is moot. We have flown extensive search patterns around every energy-use our instruments could detect. Only Tombs as unguarded as the one in which we woke were discovered. We have found no surface life, aside from the forms mentioned. Evidence suggests that the Bell of the Hyades has been here operating since A.D. 10484, and has already swept the globe clean of developed life.”

Illiance blinked owlishly. “As best we can tell, there are no Currents. The world is empty of Man in any form. The Bell has swept it all away. We Simple Men shall inherit and repopulate the Earth once the Bell departs again into heaven.”

6. Darwinian Competition

Menelaus had trouble translating this, merely because he kept pausing to swear and grind his teeth.

At the end of it, the bewigged Judge of Ages wore an odd expression: that of a man trying to look blank-faced because he was pondering, and hiding the blankness of his face because he was confused and clueless. He nodded sagely, obviously unable to imagine what these things meant.

Menelaus said to the Judge of Ages in English, “Say something, sir. Ah, something judicial. Use some legal phrases.”

“Writ of Certiorari. Cloture. Acclamation. Ways and Means. Breach of Privilege. Division. Dissolution. Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod. Ah … Bicameralism? Oh, here is a good one: antidisestablishmentarianism.” The Judge of Ages raised an eyebrow. “You said they were going to record and review the conversation. Are events going to move too swiftly for that?”

Menelaus said to him in English, “If the Montrose luck holds out, sir.”

Menelaus turned and said to Illiance in Iatric, “The Judge of Ages notices what he calls signs of haste surrounding your whole setup here, and wants to know what the hurry is. Why were you in such a rush to find him?”

Illiance widened his eyes in surprise, and looked at the dog things and automata in the chamber with him. “He was able to determine this by one glance at our equipment?”

Menelaus said without cracking a smile, “I am only reporting what he asked, Preceptor. If his brain is a posthuman neural array, it may be capable of unique structures of thought or intuitive logic. Don’t let’s keep him waiting—with someone at his brain speed, each moment might seem like an hour’s worth of boredom.”

Illiance said, “In that case, I am surprised the answer is one he could not deduce without error. Tell him that it was necessary to find the Judge of Ages, and within a very short period of time, because we need his permission and blessing to replenish and colonize the surface of the Earth with biological forms from our own time, which we have reason to believe exist within his archives and mausoleums. We also would be advantaged by his aid in finding all members of our order entombed anywhere in the world.”