“Observe. The way to improve mankind is merely to improve him. The human nervous system is a machine, and its performance characteristics can be directly changed by changing various bits of neural hardware. We have been failing here because each man is trying to improve himself like Montrose did. I suggest a different approach: to improve the race while keeping the basic unit of the race, the individual, more or less the same. Give me control of man, all of him, and I can remake him into my image, and this will establish evolution—because it will not be evolution, will it? It will be intelligent design. My design. I can make them peaceful and sane and able to adapt to whatever troubles come.”

Del Azarchel said, “Then I will give you your five hundred years, if you can match your boast, but I will place it in the midst of an era where it will do no harm if it goes wrong. Father Reyes, I see the pain in your eyes. What is it?”

Reyes y Pastor said, “With respect, Learned Gentlemen and Learned Senior, your thoughts are awry. We cannot plan for the next evolutionary step of man, any more than apes could perform brain surgery on an ape cub and make him grow into a Homo sapiens. The superman will be beyond us, and be nothing we can imagine. We must do the very reverse of all that has been said. We cannot control man to unleash evolution; we must unleash evolution and man will be swept up, buoyed up by wild forces beyond control, yes, whether he wishes or not, to the next form of human nature. The one true religion teaches—ah, I know how skeptical you all are, but history will bear out my witness!—the Holy Mother Church teaches that heaven cannot exist on Earth; to yearn in vain for earthly paradise and peace is the heresy of Utopianism.”

“If we are all heretics,” said Del Azarchel, “what is orthodox?”

“On Earth, life is nothing but the brutal struggle for existence, war of all against all. Blessed are the peacemakers! That word was spoken by Our Savior, and it is truth and holy truth, but as holy truth, it has no application here in this valley of tears called life! Moral codes and liberty and genetic codes, logic and demographics, none of this, my children, is what life on Earth requires to reach the transcendence of the Asymptote. What has hindered us so far is that there are far too few us. Too few who think as we! Let me make a world in our image, a world of men who are unafraid to shape the destinies of all the men beneath them, and they in turn shaped by the men above them, so that all the raw power and agony of evolution will be released like a genii from its brass jar. What will come next, your math cannot predict nor mine!”

Del Azarchel said, “I will give you between A.D. 7000 and A.D. 8000 to work whatever purposes you will, Father Reyes; and the final period between then and A.D. 11000, when the Hyades armada arrives, I reserve to myself either to capitalize the triumphs all you gentlemen have accomplished, or abolish your errors, and in every way to prepare mankind to be what best will serve the intelligences from the Hyades stars. And yes, the race I make in those final days must discover and destroy whatever mad Montrose has prepared of war and revolution, for he seeks ever to bring the wrath of Hyades down upon us.

“The conclave is ended: each go your own ways, draw up your calculations, and prepare! We war not only against Montrose and his servants, and against the perversity of human nature but against the lingering tardiness of Darwin, and against death, time, and entropy itself!”

And the Hermeticists bowed toward the throne; then each man took his leave and descended, weightless as thistledown, through the deck hatches into the deeply buried lunar fortress with no more noise than a spirit returning to its grave.

PART THREE

A World of Ice

Interlude: A Cold Silence

A.D. 9999

1. Alarm Clock

All he wanted to do was to stay dead. Some damn nuisance kept jarring him awake.

Some damn nuisance named Blackie.

Before he opened his eyes, before he knew whether his other organs were thawed, he was aware of his acceleration. No, not acceleration: weight. There was no sensation of motion. He was not aboard a ship. He was still trapped on Earth. Where was she?

With immense pain, and annoyance more immense, he pried open a creaking eyelid. The clock on the inside of the icy coffin lid reacted to the motion and lit up, the faint red letters reading YEAR: A.D. 9999 YOUR AGE: 7789 CALENDAR / 50 BIOLOGICAL.

In 2401, his body had been buried in the debris of the uprooting of the Celestial Tower of Quito, which fell upward into orbit. Rania had used the Celestial Tower as a rotating beanstalk or rotovator to accelerate the ship to the escape velocity of the solar system, forty-two kilometers per second.

The damn thing was thousands of miles long, and the tangential velocity was over six miles a second. Flung the damn starship like a stone from David’s sling toward Jupiter, where she performed a gravitational assist maneuver to exceed the escape velocity of the solar system.

At that point, fearing him dead and with no feasible way to decelerate, she sailed away to rendezvous with the first of the antimatter centaurs she would gather for her fuel supply, while Del Azarchel, forsaken on an Earth whose space programs he himself had gutted, watched helplessly through long-range radar as she took nine parts of his world’s entire energy supply, and hid the tenth part by nudging the centaurs into new orbits.

Del Azarchel, in a gesture of melodramatic noblesse oblige, or perhaps frustration that his visceral desire by his own hand to shoot Montrose dead, had ordered his foe pulled from the rubble, hospitalized, and placed in cryogenic suspension in a political penitentiary. Some of Del Azarchel’s Scholar race, however, were still loyal to Rania and arranged for his escape: and the areas of the world where either Del Azarchel had no control, or pure anarchy did, were expanding.

The struggles that followed between the factions loyal to Del Azarchel and his machine, and those opposed, laid waste to the world. The second half of twenty-fifth century had been the most violent in history, even when compared with the enormities of the Little Dark Ages. There had been a third, fourth, and fifth worldwide civil war since the violent rupture of the Concordat A.D. 2413 into northern and southern hemispheres, and countless lesser wars, invasions, insurrections, tumults, acts of nuclear blackmail. Ninety-five major cities and over a billion people had died over these wars and mega-homicides, slain by atomics, and another half billion in the depressions, famines, plagues, and migrations that followed. The horror the world had known during the Burning of New York the Beautiful had been repeated half a hundredfold. Cities famed in history would never rise again, but had gone the way of Carthage, Nineveh, and Tyre.

And it had aged him. At times, he wondered if Del Azarchel had been causing world wars merely to force Montrose to run out his clock. After the Decivilization, the interruptions came less frequently, but they still came.

He looked at the calendar again. His last thaw had been over two thousand years ago, A.D. 7985. Had there been no interference in history since that time? Nothing to trigger the alarm?

Rania, by the analogous point in time in her metric, was a shade less than 7,500 light-years distant in the constellation Canes Venatici, receding at 99.9 percent of the speed of light. He could picture it perfectly in his mind’s eye: The ship’s flare would have been red-shifted so far beyond the infrared as to be in the radio range of the spectrum. From his frame of reference, the great ship was dark beyond invisibility, massive beyond neutronium, flattened in the direction of motion like a metallic pancake; and the clocks, and heartbeats, and subatomic motions aboard made a single tick once a year.