Del Azarchel must have made a similar calculation, because he turned toward a group of creatures Montrose did not recognize: tall men and beautiful women whose hair was a strange shimmering like the wigs of Scholars, and skin as pale as theirs, but their eyes were the black-within-black of the Melusine. Montrose saw these were not wigs, but masses of Locust tendrils, each one as fine as a strand of silk, and as many as hairs in a wig. The hair swayed and moved as if an invisible updraft of wind were blowing about each pale face.

They were not twins; nor were they of the same family or race. Indeed, Montrose could not tell which human stock these beings sprang from, for each face was an individual work of art, and if one had a Roman-looking nose or a Japanese-looking eye, or the jawline of an Australian aborigine, or the lips of a Persian, his other features might resemble some other stock, or none at all. All the faces were beautiful with a cold beauty, and, unalike as they were, all were stern and ascetic with the same spirit.

Montrose saw what Del Azarchel did: these dozen figures were the center of the communication flux binding the areas together.

To them, Del Azarchel said, “Your victory is temporary and meaningless. The Jupiter Brain will grow and overmaster you.”

One of the Swans, tall and thin, beak-nosed and with swaying silvery tendril-hair falling past his shoulders, stepped forward.

From his body language, poise, and stance, Montrose saw this was another aspect of the Anserine again. The same gathered voice as had come from Alalloel spoke from his empty, tongueless mouth. “Not so. We deliberately misled you as to the internal conditions of the core of Jupiter. Your estimation of growth speed is off by two orders of magnitude. It will not be two hundred years before the mass of Jupiter is converted to logic crystal, nor even two thousand, but over two hundred thousand years. The Hyades World Armada arrives in the solar system in four hundred years. All events will be resolved, for good or ill, long before Jupiter wakes: we will be dead, or be free.”

Montrose stepped toward them and winced. He had forgotten the shattering pain in his gun hand. The pain lent anger to his words. “You speak of freedom and yet you raid my Tombs, abduct my people, insert tendrils in their heads, and drive them into your mass minds, sucking their souls away!”

The Anserine said, “You speak in ignorance. No matter. We will not be mastered by him nor judged by you. Your time as Judge of Ages is done. Your interference in history, benevolent as may have been its intent, is a trespass. Our history is our own. We will write our own destiny with our own Cliometric calculations. As for you, we consider you to have forfeited your right to your Tombs due to the ill use to which you placed them.”

Montrose said, “And as for my clients? Men who trusted me with their lives? What of them?”

“All those hundreds of persons in your eighty-nine Tomb systems you have preserved for medical or scientific reasons, or as sanctuary from current power, or as penalty of exile, or for the sake of curiosity—how were they more than pawns to you? You gathered them merely as a strategy to use against the Master of the World. Fortunately, their numbers are small enough that they can be absorbed without disaccommodation into our protocols. The biosuspension Xypotech procedures maintained by Pellucid were destroyed when we destroyed Exarchel. All the Tombs are automatically opening worldwide.”

Montrose glanced at Del Azarchel. He smiled a crooked and bitter smile and said, “Hundreds. Hundreds of persons in my eighty-nine Tombs. They don’t know what they just did. They don’t see it. You don’t see it either, do you, Blackie?”

Del Azarchel flashed him a dark look and said, “I saw it long ago, and long ago prepared a counterthrust. When Rania fled the solar system, she altered the orbits of the tiny amount of contraterrene she did not herself need as fuel, and radioed the information to you. After our duel was interrupted, and the Beanstalk fell on us, Exarchel had us both in prison hospitals—and one of Rania’s loyal Scholars spirited you away. Exarchel could not see where you went. And so he was slow to understand what was happening. You had the contraterrene needed to keep the depthtrain system operating. Just to prevent tunnel collapses requires an energy pressure higher than nonamplified matter can provide. For years, no, for centuries, I did not understand your obsession with claiming control over these underground places. Do you now say that you had this planned from the start? I suspect you stumbled across the idea by serendipity.”

Montrose said, “The idea was planned out. Who I was going to get to run the thing, that was more jury-rigged. I thought I could trust my Clan not to grow corrupt, and I could not. Then I thought maybe the Church was a better candidate to run things while I slept—while I ain’t much of a churchgoing man myself, anyone can see that she’s been around longer than any human organization still in business, and might actually hold property over generation after generation waiting for slumberers to wake. And historically, Churchmen run hospitals and graveyards, and I figured this weren’t much different. And then you destroyed the Church with your Witches, and you caused the Collapse, and you, not me, you lost all the records. By that point I had enough men, the Knights Hospitalier, to run the Tombs from the inside, so I only needed minimal contact with the surface world. Every generation, from the Witch-doctors to the Medical Corps to the Maidens of the Hesperides to the Iatrocrats, has cooperated in secret with my people. Why would they not? Doctors don’t want their patients to die.”

The tall Anserine spokesman said, “Explain these remarks. How do they touch our present concerns?”

Del Azarchel turned to the Anserine, saying, “You fool. Everyone is beneath the earth.”

Montrose said, “It’s not everyone. That would be ridiculous. Some died in accidents or battles, and my people could not get to them in time. Others could not be preserved even with the best medical coffin system I could make. But it is a lot of people. A whole lot.”

The spokesman said, “This is unexpected—please confirm you are claiming the Tomb system is more extensive than anticipated?”

Del Azarchel laughed. “Exarchel never kept a record of all the populations over the centuries and millennia who entered hospitals and sick-houses and Nymph deleriumariums and did not emerge, because Montrose’s acts were edited from his mind. Montrose moved all Tombs far below the crust, below the mantle, out of any possible surface-detection range, back when I had my Witches digging up Churchmen to prevent a resuscitation of my poor, senile, machine-hating Mother Church. Montrose kept near the surface only the minimum possible number of Tombs to maintain a steady contact with the current world, to replace thawed followers, or to hear rumors of war or disaster in case he needed to offer sanctuary to anyone.

“He does not have eighty-nine Tombs, nor eighty-nine hundred. He has over one million ten-thousand-man facilities buried at various levels between the mantle and the core. His failsafes all performed a fail-over when Pellucid died just now: without the memory space, his coffins cannot correct for the cellular information of all his clients, millions and millions of them. So up they come. He is bringing up more than your society can possibly absorb. Do you have any food to feed them? They can pay. For all of your metals and minerals of the surface world are exhausted, are they not? You’ve possessed yourself of some of the volume he has vacated? You have no idea how small a volume that is. The swarms of populations will have all the wealth of the buried world at their command, oil and gold, copper and tin, uranium and suchlike.”