No, I could not follow his thoughts, and I dared not speak, for fear of distracting him—I was his moronic and retarded younger brother, after all, and he loved me, but I did not want to jar his elbow.

He was sending streamers and rills of the Aurum along the underside of the great Calais Bridge to England. Another part of him was already in London, and Big Ben, which had survived so many wars and bombings, was already draped as if in shedding leaves of gold.

Oh, some fighting had broken out, but the Aurum could recombine its surface molecules to produce various forms of poisonous gases, or could line up its capillaries to shoot the resisters with shards of crystal that would simply implant and grow in them, joining them to the main mass of gold in a moment. The attempts to flee or fight were so pathetic that I laughed, and I shared my laughter with other Savants in the real world, and with all our perfected spiritual versions already inside the living gold.

My laughter stopped when one arm of the mass moving down the Seine went numb. There was no accounting for such a thing, and for some reason the central network of priorities within the Aurum itself was not passing along the news of the failure to higher centers. My upper self did not see it, even when I told him about it. I think I was the only one who noticed the effect. A numb area that the other areas did not even notice was numb!

It was one of the banks of the Seine, the site of an ancient cathedral, something left over from the Dark Ages. I was only a few blocks away, and I was armed with one of those recently invented nightmare weapons our golden age produced, a lance of darkness.

The numb limb of the Aurum had detected signs of an intelligence system below the cathedral, in a buried mausoleum, and had bored a small hole in a hidden door, and slid part of itself inside, reaching deeper and deeper—something it found benumbed it. But what? To that cathedral, that mausoleum, that door I went to discover.

I traced the motionless stream of Aurum to the cathedral and dissolved any locks with the dark cloud of microscopic hunger silk particles my lance could emit. First I melted the wrought-iron gates leading to the boneyard, then the oak doors of the cathedral itself, and then the steel service hatch leading down from the buried mausoleum. The material did not matter. I had a variable emission setting, from supersonic to slowly seeping cloud, and a variable target setting, so that I could instruct the particles what to eat and what to leave alone. It was an ultimate weapon, one of the cleverest bits of machinery I have ever held in my hands. I never got a chance to use it, aside from those three doors I melted.

Down the stairs was a hibernation vault, one that was not on any of our maps, buried in secret beneath the cathedral graveyard. Hiding coffins beneath coffins! It should have been funny. These were cryogenic coffins, and marked with the Maltese cross, the sign of the Sovereign Military Hospitalier Order of Malta, the sign of the Hospitaliers: a sign I had reason to hate.

But I had no reason to spare any of these Slumberers here. Were they not deserters trying to flee from this, our time, my time, my golden age?

I was deep enough that I was merely scarred and scalded, not burned to death, when above me and outside, the sunlight caught fire.

My lance of darkness was damaged. It ignited and burned like a torch, shedding little flakes of hunger silk that ate a hole into the floor. My arm was dissolved, but the hole was a bit of good luck, since I was able to throw myself into it and, with only a few broken bones, to land atop a second set of coffins farther down.

The coffins stirred to life, and the Sleeping Knights of Malta woke. There were larger coffins for their horses. It would have been a comical sight, seeing those great beasts turn from living statues to confused and staggering quadrupeds, and shaking their manes to spray the chamber with medical fluid, just like so many big dogs who did not care whom they wetted! Had I not been where I was, maimed and dying, I might have smiled at the sight.

The knights rose naked from their coffins, and wounded as I was, I was still a form of life superior to them. I was the expendable fleshly copy of a mind who existed in three iterations in the infosphere, and would exist forever.

Yet some wrestled me, and I wounded several quite badly with my semifunctioning lance, but those who bled returned at once to their coffins to be healed. It was meant to delay me until one of them donned his armor, and this was powered armor designed to wrestle the Giants.

Forward came the suited one, a gorilla of steel, and took the lance of darkness from my hand, and broke it.

My trial consisted of a single four-minute exchange of questions with the armored figure, their Grand Master, a terrifying fellow named Sir Guiden, whose face I never saw.

He asked my justification for my acts. I told him it was the right of the superior to deal with the inferior as he wished, for his strength, his moral clarity, his mental supremacy, the inhuman mechanisms of history and evolution: all gave the strong the right to do what they will.

Sir Guiden said he served the Omnipotent, a being infinitely strong, who willed that men should show mercy. He said I could depart into the fire outside, and die; or remain, and enter suspended animation, and live, but never see my home year, or the world I knew, again. That was his mercy.

The world I knew had passed away already.

The Aurum was sensitive to heat, of course. As I said, that was its weakness. The Giants, in their fear and madness, had decided to sacrifice all the cities of mankind where the beautiful living gold was spreading, and not even Exarchel could stop them.

It should have been our day of triumph. It was a day of fire.

Did they act at Montrose’s behest, the Giants, the creatures who vowed to protect his Church to which he had donated all his wealth and power? I cannot doubt it. This was his third and most terrible Judgment. He destroyed the Concordat. He destroyed the Cryonarchy.

And now he ended not merely the golden age, humanity’s time of most daring advances, by ending the reign of the Ghosts, but he also judged and ended the cities and metropoleis of man, and ordered them burnt.

Is my answer clear enough?

Montrose hates kings and rulers and men who own other men. He is a force of chaos. In each Judgment, the Judge of Ages breaks the power of those who rule, and he casts down the proud.

He is, in other words, simply put, a madman and a monster.

6. Regrets

His madness is malign, whereas the madness of the Nobilissimus Del Azarchel is sublime: but in both cases, to those of us used and abused by their purposes, as helpless as dogs or cattle among men, the result is the same. Anyone recalled a hundred years after his death will be forgotten in a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, or eventually—and it will be as if he never lived.

My regret of the Day of Gold was not the anonymous millions we killed. By now, they would have been dead anyway—who cares if tribes of mastodon-hunters in the Neolithic lived in peace or died by plague or predator?

My regret is not that the Day of Gold should have changed the Earth forever, but failed. The Earth is still changed forever, wrapped in ice rather than gold, and all done without me while I slumbered. So my failure is the same as my success.

Had I succeeded, it would have meant that the inevitable came a few centuries earlier: but so what? What should a few centuries more or less matter, when measured by beings beyond man, who will live countless millennia to the final hour of the Eschaton? The beings beyond the Asymptote are such as I can never be, and to which I can make no donation.