So, yeah, I went through my sober-up flush until my kidney groaned, and wondered when I could get my next modification. I wanted this bone marrow thing the Lotus King told me about, to increase the production of white blood count, and allow for a quicker sober-up time if I had to flush a drench through my liver quick. He stood there looking down while I cleaned out my head, and I checked the action on the gun, just to make sure.

On we crawled, and now it was just the two of us, me and his buttocks, in the crawlspace. There were a lot of things I had to say back, and some of them were fearful hard words too, but I didn’t happen to think of them just then. But, now, hah! Now I got a ton, a metric ton, of sharpened wits all ready!

Now, here is the weird part. The first time he comes up to a camera or a telltale he taps it with his finger and points at me, and says, “Null. Classify same, retroactive through all databases,” and he says it in a dead language called English. After that, he just taps any looker he comes across, and points at me, and says, “Null.”

We get to the target. He shucks off his environment suit and unlimbered that huge hand cannon of his. We smartglue some line to the tunnel surface, and he sets the epoxy for a quick release. I want to ask him how he plans to climb back up, but he’s taken off his helmet by then, and I am not fool enough to talk aloud while we are in a black zone, so it is just one of the mysteries, I guess. Maybe he had no plan to climb back up.

Another mystery is how he gets the service hatch open from the inside with no plate and no interface, but I figure he has an implant, or he knows a tap-code to alert the microbrain, or something.

He rappels down past rafters and slowly turning fan blades into—hell, I don’t know what this room was. Partly a lab and partly a hangar and partly a museum, I guess. There were aircraft on launch cradles to one side, and glass boxes containing weapons and trophies on the other side. The line drops down beside him when the epoxy changes state. But I wedge the door open so my gun can get a clear view of the doings down below.

My head is not in the right position, but I can see through the aiming camera that there is another guy in the room. There is a battery of cameras and microphones facing him, and he is seated behind the most famous desk in the world! You know the one. The desk is a slab of onyx atop the axes and bundled-rods of unity, and in little vacuum globes along the top, facing the camera, are the polished skulls of the Gang of Four. Behind his judgment seat is the Great Seal of the Chimera, a three-headed beastie that conquered the whole damn world, and there is a black flag to the right and a red flag to the left—oh, hell! How far in the future is this? Do your dwarfs actually not know what the Supreme Imperator-General’s Office looks like?

It was the Alpha-of-Alpha, the commander-in-chief and absolute dictator of the whole planet and the Cities in Space. And he was asleep behind his desk, sitting upright, not snoring. I’ve seen him on coins, and on the reels, and every time a giant screen in a giant town square lights up for a giant announcement. It was him, I tell you.

Anyway, there was the Imperator, seated on his seat of judgment, and looking sound asleep, or dead. Now, I am thinking about what gland to squeeze at this point, because everyone knows that this seat is sitting in the Imperial Mansion in Richmond, and is not on some freeze-your-ass island off the shore of Denmark.

The Judge steps up to the Imperator and pinches his cheek. The guy does not wake up. So I am wondering if the Alpha-of-Alphas is dead, or a life-sized puppet, or what.

A little door hidden in a bookshelf slides open, and in walks another man. Now, he was not a Chimera and not a Kine. He was not any of the races from the modern world. He was a member of the same race as the Judge. A dawn-age man. An Elder. He is dressed in a natty black uniform and has this big armband on his right wrist made of metal the color of blood.

You guys ever read children’s adventure books? Children’s books sometimes have things in them the Chimera would rather have grown-ups forget. Well, I never forgot those kiddie books, and I knew what I was seeing.

I was looking at a crewman from the White Ship. A cosmonaut. A starfarer!

Not one of the crew that went along, the Swan-servants. No. This was one of the crew that stayed behind, the guys who painted that handprint on the moon.

He was a Hermeticist.

I can’t talk if everyone is talking at once. Have your dwarfy friends bring me a refill until they calm down. That bald oldster man-hag looks like he’s got a question for me. No? You just want me to continue. Okay.

9. Last Words

The Hermeticist and the Judge of Ages did their talky-talk in English, which I learned in school, but only to read the classics, which I did not do, because they were boring. Anglo is the one language deliberately designed to be as quirked up and blithery as possible. Hearing it out loud was another thing, so I could not follow it at the time, but I had a friend of mine go over it later, so I can tell you word for word what he said.

Think I can’t recall a talk I overheard five thousand years ago? Ah, you forget I have gland-implants for sharpened memory.

The Hermeticist spoke first.

“Learned Menelaus Montrose! Good to see you! I had been told you were dead.”

“Narcís D’Aragó, you belly-crawling snake! Good to see you too! I got a clean shot and everything! You sent men into my Tombs and tried to open my coffin and kill me. You are the only member of the crew I like even a little bit, but you know my rules. I cannot let you keep breathing after a stunt like that.”

“How did you suborn my men into reporting to me that they had succeeded? How did you falsify the genetic tests—they brought back a sample!”

The Judge opens up his guncase I told you about and slides two dueling pistols, one to his left and one to his right. They sail across the polished floor, so they are sitting about thirty paces away from each other. They are those big old-fashioned pistols, like I said.

The Hermeticist says, “How do I know your weapons are not gimmicked?”

The Judge said, “You know me.”

“What if I just turn around and walk out the door?”

The Judge hooks his thumb at where the Alpha-of-Alphas is sitting. “Then I turn on your Great and Powerful Oz and give whatever orders I like over the Worldwide Command channel.”

Now the spooky part. The Hermeticist taps his magic amulet with his left hand and talks into it. He demands to know why Menelaus Montrose was allowed to come into his most private, most secret chamber.

And a voice comes out of it and answers him. It was a machine-voice, and I do not mean a wire recording or a microbrain. I am not talking about no damn snake that just clips words together according to an algorithm.

You can tell when a machine is awake. It is like having an icicle touch the back of your neck. It is like hearing a dead thing talk.

That icicle-dead voice says, “Landing Party Member D’Aragó, you are alone in the chamber.”

The Hermeticist shouts at it. “Menelaus Montrose is standing right here, and one of his men is hiding in the maintenance duct overhead! How can you be unaware of this?”

“All evidence suggests that Montrose is dead, and that your men killed him.”

“I am looking right at him!”

“Unlikely. Does anyone else see this apparition, Member D’Aragó?”

The Hermeticist says, “Wake up Del Azarchel! He is the only one who can handle Montrose!”

“Also unlikely. My father cannot withstand the neural divarication that accompanies uncorrected augmentation: for him to be awake and at a posthuman level of intelligence, you would either have to leave the circuit, so that the emulation of your nervous system was out of synch and no longer useful for further correction, or you would have to return to hibernation.”