Got it. So it was murder, and not a duel, because you tried to smear one of the duelists with an orbital deadfall, but it got your boss instead.

The statement is imprecise. The destruction of the terawatt laser was a necessity, since it was the last thing giving Montrose a direct military control over the planet. Obviously the outcome of a necessary act is also necessary, hence not blameworthy. On the other hand, the discharge of Montrose’s pistol through the containment sphere was gratuitous, calculated to cause damage to De Ulloa, which led to his eventual death, which means it was murder.

And how did you survive from 2461 to 3090?

By hibernation, obviously.

But you were not in the Tombs.

I was in the Tombs of the Moon, beneath the Sea of Cunning on the Moon’s dark side. There are working hibernation coffins aboard the hulk of the starship Emancipation, which is buried in the lunar dust there, and it was my Master’s pleasure to thaw me only when he was thawed, so that he need not be deprived of my services by premature aging on my part.

Why is your skin white? Is it symbolic?

No. Natural melanin interferes with surface skin-cell reception and transmission.

But your race, the Psychics, are older than the first working Xypotech emulation, are they not? So why were you designed with this albinism feature? There was no system at that time to send and receive cybernetic neural information.

Highly Evolved Ximen del Azarchel designed the Scholar race with this functionality in mind, and had evidently already deduced the basic transmission properties xypotechnology emulation systems would one day have. We were designed to interface with machine intelligence and serve as adjuncts and auxiliaries from the very beginning. Highly Evolved Ximen del Azarchel never foresaw any prospect of forced-evolution to posthumanity via merely biological or biochemical augmentation.

During the duel, what did they say to each other?

Ambiguous pronoun.

De Ulloa and Montrose. You said that the two of them faced each other with long-range microphones. They obviously meant to talk before they shot. The old women hiding in ambush must have heard something, and you must have talked with them. What did they say?

De Ulloa said it would no longer be possible for Montrose to hide himself and his coffins on holy ground. The Uniate Orthodox-Catholic Church continued stubbornly to maintain a male hierarchy system, but the Simon Family revolution in gynolongevity meant that more and more prestige, money, power, and influence would pass inevitably from male to female hands. The Church was already dying, and the territory owned by the Maltese Knights would pass into the hands of some government friendly to the Delphic Order, at which point the Tombs would be forced open and the unwelcome and reactionary elements preserved from the past would be updated or eliminated.

This meant the end of Montrose and also of his way of life. His marriage to Rania and all marriages would be annulled.

De Ulloa predicted a world free of guilt and war and exoteric religion, since these are masculine characteristics. A world without property; a world where human beings lived gently on the land, leaving small pollution footprints. Religion hereafter would follow an esoteric ideal, and be permissive rather than restrictive. But most important, the restrictive intuitions known as marriage, as masculine–feminine constructions of grammar, and as private property would be obliterated. The masculine traits of certainty and objectivity would be eliminated from the human psyche, since these are controlling, domineering, aggressive, illegitimate. Contemplate that every genocidal war or torture regime in history was propagated by males certain of the objectivity of their beliefs! Eliminate the objectivity; eliminate the hostility.

Really? Is it objectively true that eliminating objectivity eliminates hostility? Or is that just a subjective opinion?

Question is not pertinent.

Sorry. How did De Ulloa plan to maintain a working industrial and scientific base of his new guilt-free society if there is no private property and no objective truth?

Would you like his exact words? Since they were the last words the unparalleled genius who was my Master ever spoke, I made special note of them, and my memory is precise.

6. Last Words

“Once society is totally feminine, the feminine principle of love, of sharing, of total acceptance and total toleration will overwhelm and annihilate the masculine institutions: the laws of language, the laws of thought, and the laws of government will be replaced by a holistic and all-embracing system of peace! Peace with other nations, races, tribes, and systems! Peace with Mother Earth! I do not wish for anything but the joy and happiness of mankind, gentleness, balance.

“But for this grand dream to work, the past must be utterly and absolutely destroyed!

“You see, we who are smarter than everyone else on the planet have further visions and more penetrating, and so our dream is better. That is merely logic, is it not? Since my dream is better, it must prevail, and anyone and anything that hinders or annoys my dream must be obliterated, and all memory of it erased. All tombstones must be blank: all Tombs must be empty.

“This is Year One of the new glory! This is the first day of the sovereign reign of the Delphic Acroamatic Progressive Transhumanitarian Order for the study of Longevity! The Order that establishes the future! There is no history to remember, no past to recall, no traditions: the past is a mistake.

“You must understand me, Montrose! You are like me. You live for the future!

“So we have to dig up your Tombs. We have to destroy the Giants. We have to destroy the past. In the new order, you cannot own a piece of the ground, and say this is mine and that is yours—the ground is your mother! The Earth is your grandmother! How can you own your mother? Your so-called marriage to Rania is nothing more than that: an attempt of the masculine to own and control the feminine.”

7. The Reply

What did Montrose say? Is that remembered?

Yes. I could hear the whole exchange through my circuits. I know his exact words.

Menelaus Montrose said these words in this order, “Mulchie, I am convinced! The past has to be erased! Let’s start with you.”

And my master nobly answered: “We should have spaced you when we had the chance! Del Azarchel stopped us, but I was all for putting you out the air lock back that first moment on the punt, when you augmented your intelligence. You were trying to become smarter than me, so that you, not me, would have the moral right to do anything and everything you wanted! You should have died then and there. Well, ha! That is an error I can correct right now! You are part of the past, and the past is going to be scraped clean.”

Brilliant words, are they not? So many levels of meaning! And Montrose said this:

“‘Smarter than I.’ Anyhow, Mulchface, there is one bit of the past you cannot erase. Remember the time you tried to break into my mountain using the Giants? Banging on my roof and waking me up when I need my beauty sleep? You recollect that? Well, I don’t cotton to trespassers. Keep the hell out of my yard.” Then he opened fire. At about the same moment, the falling space platform landed between them. There were no words thereafter.

14

Rumpelstiltskin and the Widow

1. Description and Deception

At this point, Illiance lightly reached up and touched Menelaus on the elbow, saying “Available time happens to be diminishing, Lance-Corporal Beta Anubis. Perhaps a more useful line of inquiry would be to ask him for a description of Menelaus Montrose.”