And of course, in an era when there was only one starship in orbit, and she was armed with antimatter, no opposing army dared to gather in great numbers, marching in bright uniforms under brave banners, in any one spot on the Earth’s surface, lest that spot be simply and efficiently sterilized. A near-lightspeed discharge of energy would give no beforehand warning, except maybe for a whine on ear-radios.

The political structure seemed a crazy-quilt of different systems. Some areas were still run by elected officials, some cities and freeholds. Certain Churches elected their pastors and bishops. Other lands were ruled by an hereditary aristocracy, composed mostly of the children of whatever dictators and local warlords happened to be in power in their half-ruined countries at the time when the Hermetic returned Earthward, heralding her victory with fire from heaven.

In order to halt the civil wars sure to spring up when an old dictator died, Del Azarchel’s world-government had simply decreed the dictator’s heirs, and no one else, took his position. States and statelets that did not agree, or whose leaders were barren, were declared “anarchic” and the Hermetic government would summon its sudden army as if sprung up from dragons’ teeth from the four corners of the world-map.

These, and any land whose leadership was weak or tribal, were decreed to be “wardenships” and placed under the “protection” of some stronger nearby power, such as Manchuria, Southern Africa, or that “Greater Egypt” that stretched from Tyre to the Atlas Mountains. These were the strongholds of the Old Order, the Purists, and they had been bribed into joining the New Order by being granted power over their neighbors.

The great public works projects about which Del Azarchel had boasted—warming the Antarctic or rendering the Gobi or the Sahara fertile and green, were carried out on “wardenship” lands—where the subject populations could be ordered to evacuate, or ordered to do unpaid stoop labor, or moved around like chessmen on some continent-sized board, pushed hither and yon as Blackie and his gang ordained.

There were no general taxes gathered by the Concordat government. Since they controlled the contraterrene, which was the basis of the money system, the Hermetic Conclave paid state expenses out of their own coffers. They funded neither a standing army nor poor relief, and paid neither for bread nor circuses, so theirs was one of the least expensive empires in world history. So, some aspects of this world-state seemed not so bad.

Other aspects were crooked only a little. In terms of prestige, Spain was showered with benefits from the world-state, since Del Azarchel and so many of his fellow men of the so-called Brotherhood of Man actually retained patriotic sentiment for their homeland. Likewise favored was tiny Monaco, who recognized Princess Rania as their sovereign. These areas enjoyed, during this moment in history, a military and economic ascendancy over their neighbors, and so they were the darlings of the Hermeticist world-state, and awarded privileges other areas lacked. The Indian subcontinent, on the other hand, was under strict control. Other areas, like North America, were just too broke and backward to merit much attention, and were mostly left alone.

Other aspects were crooked very much so. In addition to the secret armies and the Medieval aristocracies, the modern world was interpenetrated, like termites in a wood floor, with a specialized intellectual class of men selected for their loyalty to Hermetic ideas: the so-called Psychics. These were like the Mandarins of ancient China, who won their positions by a series of strict examinations. In theory, the order was open to anyone, and in practice, it meant anyone willing to sever all loyalties to family and homeland, and serve Del Azarchel’s ambition. They were the staff and the clerks in the halls of power and the agora of the media, and they made up the backbone of the academic world.

There was not much freedom of religion left: national boundaries had been outlawed, and national churches, like the Church of England, had been demoted, absorbed, abolished, or forgotten. Del Azarchel used the still-sore memory of the Jihad as an excuse to bring church officers into parliamentary chambers and courts of power, but also to plant state officers on pulpits, in abbeys, and at the head of monasteries—all of which received elaborate, colossal amounts of funding from Del Azarchel. Non-Christian religions were tolerated, if they were organized by a hierarchy that expressed loyalty to the world-state, and non-Catholic denominations were almost tolerated, Protestants and Mormons being bribed or blackmailed into irenic and ecumenical councils where all voices together, and with no sincerity at all, proclaimed the unity of the faithful. The agnostics and atheists, who formed a much larger percent of the population than they ever had done in Montrose’s day, had formed something like a labor union to protect their interests, since they were not allowed to form a political party, and later, in order to get the legal right to teach their own children their beliefs, a church named the Natural Assembly of Nothing. But to hold a position of trust, commission in the militia, academic post, or to receive the imprimatur of lawful publication, a man had to swear an oath of conformity.

The whole deal sounded very European to Menelaus. He remembered his mother telling him about their ancestor, a Montrose who led armies in the Civil War (not the real Civil War, the English Civil War), fighting with the Covenanters, but switching to the Royalist side, and trampling the Scots in a series of brilliant campaigns. What had those wars been about? “Folly,” his mother said, her voice as cool and bloodless as the voice of a snake, “Human folly. The names of folly they fought under were Anglicanism, Arminianism, Catholicism, Puritanism; the excuses were royalism and parliamentarianism. But the real reasons they fought are always the same: Phobos, doxa, and kerdos. Fear, fame, and loot.” What had happened to the first Montrose? “His deeds caught up with him, and he was hanged, and ended his life dangling on a rope.” Will that happen to us, Mommy? We’re Montroses, too. “Not here. The First Amendment keeps churchmen out of power, so the jackals have nothing to fight over: there is no meat on those bones.”

He asked more questions, one of which must have offended her—he never knew what made her wrathy, since her expression never changed—and she punished him by making him go read Thucydides. (Darned book did not even say how the war ended, but just broke off in the middle.) But he took the lesson to heart that freeborn men did not allow any son of any bitches to tell them who to pray to or how to do it, and certainly no self-respecting Texan allowed the tax-gatherers to rake in his hard-earned whiskey money to pay for some other man’s preacher. Each man had to pay his own way for his own brand of jollity and his own brand of misery.

In North America, they had still called it “The First Amendment” long after the Constitution was torn to shreds and mostly forgotten. Montrose had not forgotten it, though, since his mother’s strap had seen to that.

So this whole modern set-up stunk like a dead dog as far as Montrose was concerned.

4. Time for Leaving

But he did not have as much time for book-learning, tramping and shooting and sewing as he might have liked. Whole days were lost in hallucination, sleep, headache, or fever dream. The Ghost of Del Azarchel did not bother to dissuade him, did not volunteer any help beyond routine calculations. The Ghost was aloof.

I am required to protect you, Learned Montrose, as honor demands. No less. Not to like you, and certainly not to aid you in undoing my father’s Great Work.