He would have liked to meet them. His brainchildren. But he had been in hibernation and the centuries fled, and they were no more, and never would come again.

5. Helots

The next group of symbols showed the new world that arose after the Anchorites fell. The Paramounts and the Helots were driven by population pressures to emerge from the crevasses and caves of their sunless oceans, and rapidly overspread the surface waters: blind whales and dolphins as pale as albino Scholars, with generations of stored Ghosts in their infospheres.

“The world that emerged from the darkness of the interior was the world of your nightmare and my utopia,” said Del Azarchel.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that the tau function for human liberty is exactly at zero. Theirs is a hierarchy as strict as a pyramid, with rank and dignity clearly defined and nor subject to change. A natural aristocracy, if you will, ruling a naturally servile class.”

“And at the apex—you?”

“Exarchel and I have calculation powers at our disposal that make us like titans among the toy soldiers. The entire surface of the globe is my mind. This Tour de Oro, one of the greatest works of man—they could not have made it without me, and nothing on the surface of the world can withstand its power. I have not even hinted at its weapons. I can make a dozen miniature suns, as bright and hot as Sol but only a few yards in diameter, to fly around my Tower like so many trained pigeonhawks of fire. And yet—such is the beauty of this world—I have no need among my people ever to use such weapons.

“My weapon is much more simple and terrible: each Melusine is born and bred with mind-reading and mind-controlling circuits organically grown into the various skulls and mainframes of their composite bodies. Paramounts rule Helots like a zombie master with his zombie. And each man has absolute and utter control of those below him, to the utmost nuance of thought, and he in turn is absolutely and utterly helpless to those above.

“You are thinking the Helots would be sullen and lazy slaves, inert and waiting for orders, or shambling masses unable to compete with the liberated energy of that disorder you so love to call liberty? This is because you do not comprehend how fine and exact the mind control is. This is not mesmerism. It is not even computer programming. The Helot’s mind, in effect, is a part or subcompartment of the Paramount’s mind, and can be ordered to use all its spirit and genius and devotion and willpower to program itself, coming up with imaginative solutions on how to make its own slavery all that more rigorous, and bind the chains tighter. Even God Almighty cannot achieve such perfect devotion from his choirs of angels, because it is with free will the angelic hosts must serve.

“If a Paramount wishes his Helot to be as devoted as an ancient samurai, to be willing to throw himself on the blade of suicide rather than face dishonor, then with no more effort than you use to raise your left hand, it is done; if he wishes his Helots to be as devout as monks in the First Dark Age, who drained swamps and cleared timber and reduced the tangled barbaric wild to cultivation and civilization, not for wages, but for the Glory of God, he need but raise his right hand, and it is done. Or if, on his whim, he thinks the free market would be more inventive, he raises his foot, and there is a market season, and the thousands and tens of thousands compete and strive and exploit themselves for that grubby materialism you Yanks so romanticize—and then he lowers his foot, and they give all their money back into the central treasury, not recalling or not caring what they did once the season ends. The souls of those below him are merely his members and organs of thought.

“And he is an organ of the one above him, whose every thought he scrutinizes as closely as the conscience scrutinizes a man who feels a pang of guilt even before he brings to mind what he did wrong.

“So where is there room for corruption or vice? There is no darkness in this world at all. Everything that in prior ages hid, or was forgotten, in this world is transfixed with pitiless, penetrating light.

“You see why I make free to offer them to you? The Melusine are fluid, and will fill the shape of any container into which they are poured. You can make them anything you like, even make them once again the Anchorites and lovers of liberty.”

The face of Montrose was greenish with the sickness that he felt, the loathing sense of moral foulness. He could not hide his features: Del Azarchel, like a plant seeking sunlight, bloomed in the disgust and hatred shed from the face of Montrose, and his dark, bearded face was flushed with sadistic joy, seeing how his words were barbs.

Del Azarchel leaned close, whispering as a lover to his bride.

“Come, Montrose, compliment me. I have molded mankind at last to a state of perfection. Mine is one of the most elegantly Darwinian and ruthless social-political systems imaginable! Within the Mind Helotry system, in order to prevent themselves from being brain-enslaved and brain-raped, they must enslave and rape any potential source of threat, and, unlike wars of flesh and blood, the victim always loves and cooperates with the victor, and there is no loss of lives or resources.

“But the struggle for competition and command is even more fierce than Nature red in tooth and claw! The mental war system is far more desperate than any physical war. The pressure to prevail or suffer a fate endlessly worse than death or hell, the loss of free will—no race of people has even been under such pressure! They make themselves into geniuses, or die! This is a golden age! Each group of surface-world Helots, the Oceanic Melusine, when their free will is drained…”

Montrose had an insight. He interrupted. “You sick bastard. You don’t like this world, this setup. You deliberately made it as appalling as possible. Because you want me to take it over. This is your blackmail. You said you’d give me this world if I bowed to you. Because if you give it to me, I can abolish your system and free all the generations to come.”

Del Azarchel merely spread his hands. “You have always before come to the rescue of the wounded worlds I have made. Why should this be different? I hereby condemn this world forever and for eternity to this hell of lifelessness until you take Earth from my hand.”

“Your helot system cannot last forever!”

“It certainly, certainly can. Mind Helotry is a halt state. Once the world is enslaved to the point where even daydreams of rebellion or impulses of discontent cannot be lodged in a brain cell without the permission of the Paramount class, how can any rise up? And if they did rise up, what would they do to those under them: program them with the false belief they have free will? Ironic, to say the least, and hardly worth fighting for.”

“What about my Anarchist Vector? If you look at the social incentives surrounding—” But as he pointed toward Del Azarchel’s equation, the one that described the current world, and he reached his finger to point at the vector sum describing the Anchorite mental technology … it was not there.

6. The Missing Vector

He looked back and forth between the two ice puddles they were using as blackboards. Something was wrong, very wrong. Menelaus blinked in confusion, rewriting and rewriting Cliometric equations in his head, trying to see the missing links, flipping and rotating immense arrays of numbers and symbols in his imagination, trying to find a match, a bridging equation.

There was no match. There was no equation to get from the first array, describing the Anchorite world, to the second, describing the Helot world. That future simply and absolutely could not come out of that past.