And she also simply turned her back and walked smoothly down the curving slope of the seashell corridor and out of sight.

15

The Calculus of Fate

1. Arsenal

He had been hoping that the coffin’s motive system would be intact, so that he could merely leave the patient inside and order it to follow him: but the damage to the treads and millipede legs would have required a machine shop and replacement stock to fix.

Menelaus discovered the footlocker had not been looted, and so Rada Lwa’s original clothes, including his Scholar robes, hood, and mortarboard were untouched. He wrapped the drugged body of the albino carefully in the robes. Didn’t want the man to freeze. And he put the flat, square cap on the man’s head to keep his scalp warm.

Also in the footlocker was a one-piece undergarment of thick silver fabric. The undergarment had a web of input-output ports, caches, and amplifier-transmitter beads he did not want anyone with a highly cyborged nervous system to wear, particularly if Ctesibius was correct and every snowflake they were about to walk over was sophont matter. He put that on himself, and was pleased to find it had two large web belts. He had to cut open the inseam of the garment legs, however, because he was taller than Rada Lwa, so the loose legs dangled below.

Since Rada Lwa’s interment was penal rather than voluntary, Menelaus did not fret himself over appropriating the man’s gear for the common good. It was not like Rada Lwa was really a client.

He was able to dismount two of the railguns from the coffin hull. Each railgun had two-foot-long accelerator wands and a bulbous drum of slurry, but without a proper stock. The subsonic weapon was six feet long, but it was pliant like a garden hose, and could be rolled up.

Ambitious, he took the time to unbolt and extract the antipersonnel laser emitter along with cord and power pack only to discover after the bulky unit was lying on the floor before him (box, emission tube, cords, and all) that the power pack was at one-eighth charge. Enough for about fifteen seconds of action continuous, three times that if used in pulse mode; maybe three minutes, or at lower power, just to burn out eyes and soft tissue.

He realized there must have been a stern fight with this particular coffin. He shook the slurry drums on the rail guns and heard that they were half empty. This meant a second or two of “spray and pray”–type fire, or twenty shots of high-caliber fire, or forty of lower caliber, depending on the desired burst pattern. There were no bullets in this design: the ammunition was a viscous fluid or mud with a high metallic content, ejected supersonically by a linear accelerator.

Menelaus suddenly paused and cocked his ear. There came the rumbling murmur of many engines starting at once. It was the sputtering and coughing of internal combustion engines, as sound he recalled from his youth, millennia ago. There was also the deeper note, and a whining roar, both high-pitched and subsonic, the cracking din of many helicopter blades being spun up to speed. Then, a crescendo like many thunders, the jackhammer sound rose into the air, and then slowly began to diminish, moving farther away.

Only then did he realize how long he had been toiling over the coffin, how many minutes he had been unscrewing, unwinding, unbolting. Too long. He should have been interrupted before this.

He decided it was time to go.

He was able to maneuver the heavy laser into the large shoulder pouch that formed the back of the garment, and he tied the looming emission tube with the loop of the sonic hose so it would not bang into his head when he walked. The web belts from the Scholar’s undergarment he crossed over his chest and shoulders like bandoliers, and they were heavy enough that he could sling from them, if awkwardly, two of the railguns he had looted. If he timed his step and swayed his hips just right, the long barrels would not bark his legs. The subsonic weapon he was able to sling across his shoulders.

There was no hope of hiding such large weapons, even under such a bulky robe as his. For good luck, he slipped the splicing knife into the baglike fold of tent material that served him as a sleeve. He thought about scraping some of the lichen from the walls and using the sublimation properties to make an impromptu tear gas: but there was no time.

He wrestled Rada Lwa over his shoulder, only dropping him once. Menelaus muttered, “In the pixies, Captain Sterling was always flinging a wounded crewman or cute space girls in short skirts over his shoulder. Guess it’s harder when they are not a wide-awake actor trying to hold still.”

One hand wrapped around Rada Lwa, his heavy weapons tangled with his legs beneath his sweeping metallic cloak, and feeling like a one-man army, he strode with a confident step down the sloping ramp.

He wondered that there had been no other personal possessions in the footlocker aside from the garments. A Scholar would certainly carry a library cloth, if nothing else. Then he used his implants to examine the transmission beads dotting the stolen garment he was wearing. In a moment he had found Rada Lwa’s library.

2. The Notes

Menelaus could use his implants to copy the data directly into his cortex. Menelaus paused when he saw the ownership line: Rada Lwa had been a servant in the Cryonarchy before Menelaus had robbed them of their political power. After the fall of the Cryonarchy, he severed his connection to the Montrose Clan and sought out their enemies, the Hermetic Order.

Nothing else in the library was of any particular interest to Menelaus except the notebooks on mathematics, which were extensive.

It seemed that De Ulloa had been teaching Rada Lwa Cliometry, and had taken a section from Del Azarchel’s predictions for the forty-fifth century as an example. This was a scrap from Del Azarchel’s own work, a listing of the social influences, their vector amounts, and the decision forks, all laid out neat and nice in a fourteen-dimensional matrix of ninety thousand variables.

Menelaus realized what he was reading. He was thunderstruck by astonishment and anger so palpable that he could actually feel it race down his spine and weaken his limbs, so that he almost dropped Rada Lwa again.

Then he shrugged and decided to go ahead and drop Rada Lwa one more time anyway, just because he was in the mood for that. (He did not kick the unconscious man, however, because he was feeling so very merciful: Menelaus congratulated himself on his forbearance.)

Appended to the predictions for the forty-fifth century was an executive summary: At or about this point in time, the 51 will introduce a biochemical-psychology code system to allow the various nonhuman sapient creatures Prometheanized by the Simon Families to cooperate.

The Simon Families were the precursors to the Delphic World Order, or, in other words, the Witches. The 51 was himself, his locker and suit number from the NTL star-vessel Hermetic. Prometheus Augmentation was Montrose’s own process he had discovered and inflicted on himself. He had released the secret to Thucydides Montrose, who used it to augment the intellect of the Giants to superhuman levels. De Ulloa and his Witches had taken it in turn and used it to augment animal intelligence to human levels.

The prediction about Montrose was eerily accurate. Menelaus had indeed introduced in and about the region of Lake Superior before the brief Re-Industrial Age of the Nameless Warlock Empire in the forty-fifth century a genetic-political arrangement, coded as biohardware, that he called the cooperation code. This cooperation code was based on Rania’s work, her solution to the so-called selfish meme problem: the Witches had been suffering a particularly acute version of that problem. Their social system incentivized and overrewarded what Montrose called “meme envy”—the tendency of any information system, either a computer system or a human economy, to copy and borrow from successful systems it encountered to the degree that the original information is lost. Piracy was encouraged and originality discouraged.


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