Montrose said, “War. Horse cavalry and Mastodon cavalry. Look at the line of organization: that is a posthuman general in charge, someone of our level of intelligence, but nothing as smart as a Melusine or a Swan, much less Potentate.”

5. Battle in the 111th Century

Across the mossy landscape of what had once been sea bottom, the battalions clashed. Soldiers garbed or painted all in green and gold, carrying an emblem of a balance scale, clashed with those in crimson, who fought beneath the sign of a winged hourglass.

The heat was more than tropical, since steam arose from the moss at every footfall. The soldiers were a mix of human and artificial hominids from recent gene records, elephant-legged giants, half-animal Chimerae, dwarfish Locusts, and, from more ancient lines, Neanderthal troglodytes and nocturnal Cro-Magnon. The soldiers of all subspecies wore glass helmets and armor made of prismatic diamond glitter, and fought with energy rays, chemically powered crossbows, and flails and staves and bokken swords made of amber-colored wood.

Or at least it looked like wood. The amber weapons had some odd bio-electrical properties: foot-long sparks and blinding flares jumped from the wooden blades or flails when a blow fell. In addition to beating the moss to emit its clouds of vapor and steam, both armies tossed glass grenades or ignited petards to spread clouds of glinting smoke to baffle the ray weapons of the enemy, and the rays seemed remarkably weak even when they struck. It was as if they feared to emit any large-scale discharges.

Montrose asked, “Can you pick up any energy signals coming off those dead bodies? If they are just remote-controlled puppets, and the brain info is just downloaded … ah…”

Del Azarchel said, “The deaths are real. None of them are connected to any remote information system. However, there is someone or something who is the center of worldwide signal traffic approaching from below. Look there.”

In the image, the warring parties parted as suddenly as the Red Sea beneath the rod of Moses. A single figure, manlike but taller than a man, wearing a living cloak like wings, walked across the battlefield. He was barefoot, and walked with precise, mincing steps, stiffed-legged, his toes touching the ground first before his heel. His hair fibers swayed like undersea plant life in an unseen current.

On higher and lower bands of the spectrum, even through the intervening atmosphere, threads of energy dense enough for ultrahigh-speed communication connected this figure with weather balloons and peach-sized artificial satellites in low orbit, continent-sized orbital mirrors in high orbit, and also with towers and dishes here and there along the mountaintops of both Earth and moon.

Montrose pondered the information throughput volumes with alarm. The intelligence level was far higher than his own, or that of Del Azarchel.

The Swan turned and looked up at him. His eyes bored into Montrose’s startled gaze like a knife into his brain. Montrose blinked by shutting off the feed from his coffin circuits to his visual centers, because he could not meet that gaze. Of course, the calm-faced superhuman creature was merely glancing at the bright sail of the NTL Emancipation climbing to noon, but the effect was unnerving.

Del Azarchel said, “He seems not to notice the battle. A very dignified demeanor! How reticent.”

Montrose opened his visual feed again. He saw the Swan stalking forward. The being did not look left or right at the carnage around him.

Montrose was not sure if Del Azarchel were kidding. “How blind, you mean. The visual information is being edited out of the Swan’s reticular complex before it even reaches his cortex. Everything human is invisible to the posthumans. Phantasms. Remember?”

There was no sign of panic or haste among the men: the image was clear enough that Montrose could see officers on either side were giving orders and hearing reports, dressing their lines to await the signal to resume, and meanwhile heralds waving colored flags were shouting across the field to the foe, looking oddly like cheerleaders in their gestures and poses. The men raised their arms and clashed their wooden swords against glass shields with pride or anger at each exchange.

The Swan had emerged from a nearby river, cutting a deep canyon in the mossy sea bottom, and strolled without seeing between the parted armies to a knob of high ground. Neither did he hear the shouts and slogans apparently being shouted back and forth between the momentarily parted armies.

When he first emerged from the water, the posthuman seemed porpoiselike in his face and skin surface, but he became more human-looking as he walked.

The war leaders and standard-bearers and buglers who were occupying that knob of high ground toward which the great Swan stalked, their coign of vantage for overseeing the battle, with swift and practiced motions dismounted and gathered themselves out of the way, and carefully pulled aside walking watchtowers, electric fence posts, basins, and battleflags, so that the Swan would not trip on them.

The warlords did not try to move their now-riderless beasts aside, and when the winged figure raised his hand as if in greeting, the horses broke their pickets and came to nuzzle him, and the mastodons danced with massive mirth for him, and writhed their trunks like comic pythons.

The wings the posthuman wore were not just antennae: the Swan, done petting the beasts, now expanded the wing surface to many times its size, and rose rapidly from the point of rock, effortlessly as a thistledown rising. The surface of his body changed color as he entered thinner atmosphere, as if he had biotechnological mechanisms for adjusting to extremes.

The face was becoming hardened and featureless in preparation for vacuum: a statue of diamond.

6. Phantasms

Del Azarchel took the time to draw up a detailed version of a sardonic expression to his face, exaggerating the twist of the lips and making the supercilious eyebrow arch higher than he could in real life lift it, before he passed it to Montrose on the visual channel.

Montrose said, “Are you surprised? You were expecting that my phantasm system would be broken by now.”

Del Azarchel said, “It has been half a millennium. One would think a superior brain would notice the gaps in the visual patterns, the unexplained shadows, the unexpected and indirect clues.”

Montrose did not point out that Del Azarchel’s pet brain Exarchel had been inflicted with the same phantasm program for ten millennia, and never combined the tiny irregularities or indirect clues to deduce that he had a blind spot. Instead, he said only, “The more superior a brain is, the easier it is for it to fool itself, and explain things away.”

“Every corpse on the battlefield below there, his blood is on your hands. If the posthumans were allowed to tame the humans, war would be gone. I suppose your posthuman intellect can easily explain your guilt away, Cowhand?”

“Well, I can explain your guilt to you. You thought your posthuman brain gives you the right to rule humans. But logically this means the higher powers from the stars have the right to rule you.”

“I have never rebelled against them. There is a natural order to the cosmos, like a ladder. Everyone has his place.”

“I have never submitted. I reckon that is my place in the natural order. As for my guilt; what guilt? I did not put a bullet in any of those corpses down yonder. All I did was cut off the bottom rung of your cosmic ladder. The rest of y’all on the up-high rungs can enslave each other to your heart’s content, but the humans at the bottom, I dealt out of the game. But I was as fooled as you, old pal. I thought the Hyades were coming to set up shop.”