A cold immediately entered the little seashell-shaped room.

Ctesibius said regally, “I have slain the godlike being who was my soul and my brother, committing suicide and deicide and fratricide all at once. But a Savant does not undo his word, once given. Tell the Interactor I will answer his question.”

3. Goal of the Ages

Is that all they want to know? It is appalling that your blue creatures have committed such crimes to discover what is common knowledge to all. I will tell you his origins, and you will know.

The first group the Judge of Ages ever judged was called the Hermeticists. They had established a world hierarchy and, for the first time in history, a single world government, called the Concordat. They were the only friends and compatriots he knew, for he himself was a Hermeticist. But justice then was bought and sold like a commodity, and Menelaus Montrose could not tolerate that.

He turned on his friends, because he imagined they had failed him.

This is about A.D. 2360, and lasted until A.D. 2400, forty years, when Montrose woke up and shattered the world like a dropped wineglass. At his behest, Swan Princess Rania stole the Hermetic, absconded with the world supply of antimatter, and started riots and wars to destroy the Machine.

When she left the system, he was the only person who knew in what orbits and exactly where the remaining crumbs of antimatter were. He was the only person who could do the math to correct for accumulated cell errors in long-term hibernation. His was the only voice any machines left in space, loyal to Rania, would listen to.

About twenty years later, during several world wars whose causes no one remembers, Montrose found relatives, everyone descended from his cousins and brothers, and gave them his powers, the passwords to the still-active satellites, the orbits of the contraterrene, the secret of the Tombs, everything.

They became the first and greatest Tomb guardians. The Cryonarchy is the common name for it, though officially they were a Special Advocacy commission of the Concordat, or so the world government still called itself then, even when the Concordat was broken and there were no less than fifteen so-called Concordats, each claiming to be the world government.

The Cryonarchy Clan of Montrose established peace between 2481 and 2509: but their arrogance offended Montrose when he woke for but a single hour, and without examining any evidence or talking to any witnesses, he condemned them.

He turned on his family. He donated all their wealth and power and prestige to the Church.

Oh, there was only one Church worth mentioning on the world at that point in history: Del Azarchel had seen to that. Any groups not willing to be ruled by an ecumenical general council, he just hounded with taxes and laws and restrictions, and propaganda and jailtime and confiscation and torture—but that was not enough to get his way. The Swan Maiden, the posthuman, did something, perhaps using the Cliometry to introduce social variables and erode all opposition … whatever it was, she was able to finish what he started, and branches of the Church that had been severed for over a thousand years were forced back into one somewhat uneasy alliance. The Church—but you don’t know what I am talking about, do you? Do you even have any records of how things were in my day, or what institutions and ideas ruled the world? Or does it all look rustic and quaint to you?

The Church created a race of Giants to defend her. Montrose slept and the Church became corrupt. With control of the only supply of antimatter in civilization, Popes were propping up princes, advocates, Cryonarchs, parliaments, or throwing them down again, much as Popes had done during the first Dark Ages. Buying and selling crowns just like money-changers in the temple? I guess you don’t catch that reference.

But the pattern was clear. As soon as he woke again, Montrose would see that his Church had failed him. Meanwhile, the Giants grew arrogant, as Giants will, and placed themselves above the law. He no doubt would wake and condemn them for having failed him, the creations of his attempt at evolutionary science, his heirs. They would join friends and family and faith in the ever-growing list of what the Judge of Ages judged and found wanting.

But he did not wake, and the corruption lingered.

History forced us, the Savants, to take on Montrose’s role. Exarchel, the Xypotech Machine, was really the only emulation we had of history’s first and only successful world ruler. But we set about making more.

Men of science were approached, business leaders, military leaders, artists, philanthropists, newsmongers, lyricists, philosophers, princes of the world, and, yes, even princes of the Church. The finest minds of Earth.

It was not easy. The download process is difficult, and requires skilled and active cooperation at every step by the Donator. And it was done at first in utter secrecy.

Of course we were successful. How would we not have been? With Exarchel directing us, we had the only posthuman mind, intelligence level above 400, awake and moving events on the Earth. The real Del Azarchel—but I am not supposed to call him that—Glorified Del Azarchel of the First Donation, he fled to a hidden base on the Moon. Princess Rania was lost in the mathematical paradoxes of the Lorenz transformation, frozen between one tick of time and the next, somewhere between here and Messier Object Three. First Ancestor Montrose was in slumber.

The Consensus Advocacy? Those freakish Giants—do you know what we called them? John Henries. That’s right. ‘When John Henry was a little baby! A-sitting on his pappy’s knee!’ Er—I guess you don’t catch that reference, either. Henry did manual labor, driving railroad spikes, at a time when the steam-powered drill had just been devised that could do the same work faster, and cheaper, and tirelessly. He was able, just barely able, by dint of Herculean effort, to drive more spikes than the steam-drill—but the effort killed him. Meanwhile the steam-drill manufacturer came out with a more reliable model next year. I guess you don’t know what railroad spike is, do you?

The point of this is that, with Montrose buried, no one was smart enough to detect our plan.

4. The Outer Circle

There was an outer and an inner circle. The outer consisted of pawns, who were told nothing, and volunteers willing to brave the mob should the mob turn on them. They went public.

At first, the Iron Ghosts ruled no more than a publicity cooperative; then a publishing house; then they helped some local elections of guilds and civic administrators; perhaps a deaconry of a local Chapel, or the command of a local garrison of police. The emulations were brilliant and nonthreatening. They never stood for office themselves. All they did was advise.

These Iron Ghosts were the posthuman versions of famous, feared, and well-loved public figures. We tend to think of genius as something that applies only to mathematics, physics, engineering, or Monument translation. No. A genius is a man who accomplishes great things in any field he enters—nay, he changes the field, evolves it, stamps it with his unique personality. A genius is a man in any field of any art or science or study or humanity who asks the questions no one before had thought to ask.

It was a golden age! Not just in the sciences, but also in the arts. I hope you even to this day kept records of the novel of Glorified Paxton’s Those Who Err or the intricate sonnets of Glorified de Montaubon called The Adorations or the plays of Glorified Chiminez! The work of Jones, Von Bremen, Sir Edward Marlinson, or Tierney! Alas! But I know these names are nothing to you.

The scientific revolution, yes, of course, it proceeded apace. There were new miracles each day. New weapons. New nightmares. But the artistic revolution was something unparalleled in history. You know there are times when a cluster of brilliant minds emerge at once, such minds as will be talked of for a thousand years. Why, for example, do we know, in letters, the works of Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles? But we know nothing of playwrights from Sparta or Thebes, nothing worth reading for a thousand years, until Shakespeare or Marley or Goethe or the French Renaissance? Why do we know, in philosophy, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and then for another thousand years nothing but piffle and hairsplitting? Einstein and Heisenberg and Bohr and Oppenheimer, all born in the same generation—and five hundred years after them, who? All in the twentieth century! Name a single physicist from the twenty-second century! Ah—well, except for Cochrane, of course. Never mind. You see my point.