Soon, the diamond plain was smothered and vanished, invisible beneath the surging flood. Higher and higher rose the boiling waves. Montrose watched in awe, impressed despite himself.
“That is not water,” Montrose said. “Look at how it moves.”
It was true. The fluid was a rich and dark purple hue, and a fragrant smell, delicious, wild, issued from it.
“It is the wine of the wedding feast,” said the golden man. “With greatest toil and care concocted it was from all the most delicate essences and forms of millennia past beyond telling, designed particularly to be pleasing, as was the fruit from which it came, to your palate and hers. We have destroyed the formula and the engines which can reproduce it. We will toast your happiness yearly, but when the last drop is drained, there will never be another bottle of it. The seed you carry and it alone can grow new trees to bring the fruit, and the wine, forth from extinction.” He smiled without moving his lips, by crinkling his eyes. “Should you wish to grow a tree or a grove for your children as their wedding days approach.”
“Whose wedding are we talking about?”
The man looked very surprised. “Yours!”
“I am already married.”
“The Nobilissimus del Azarchel informs us that your marriage was annulled by the Sacerdotal Order of your day and age, eons ago, on the grounds of a lack of consummation. The marriage mass will need to be performed again.”
“Well, he is a lying polecat and a louse that eats lice, so I will just hurt him in ways of which a man ought not speak in polite company, but it involves cutting off some parts of him and stuffing them down or up other parts of him. I am so sorry I missed the years when he could not get his head to form anything but a jackass head. That would have been the cream of the jest!”
“His defeat is absolute,” intoned the other. “We allow him liberty to walk our world as he will and do as he pleases, since any material good he takes can be replicated, and no harm to our physical forms can cause us discomfort.”
“He wanders around robbing and killing? That seems almost a particular kind of purgatory for a man like him.”
“Not so often anymore does he steal or kill. The novelty wore away after very few centuries.”
“I think it would be kindlier of y’all to fix him up with a donkey head as a punishment more fitting and less, well, philosophical than just leaving him alone, stealing and not being a king no more.”
“He is not idle. Mostly he reads books, which can be manufactured as needed from the ontic crystal, since we will not let him drink our glory. He is allowed certain laboratory equipment to reproduce certain experiments from four or five scientific revolutions ago.”
Montrose said, “Stranger, I did not rightly get your name.”
“We do not intrude our names unless asked,” replied the other gravely. “You honor me. For to know a man’s name, if the name be true, is to touch his soul and carry his burdens. I am the Judge of Ages.”
Montrose laughed. “You can have that cursed name and welcome to it! It weren’t never mine.”
“That is but the first of my names. Saeculum Coensor I am called, for I am given the task to organize these last few ages of human history, to reward those millennia who welcome the Vindication of Man and prepared wisely, and chastise those foolish millennia which do not. My next name is Rassaphore of the Epithalamion, for I bear the robe of the bridegroom, as well as the garments of the Earth and the girdle of the sea. Next, I am called Quintumvir, for I am Epitome of the Fifth Men. Finally, I am Praecantator Ultimus, because I am the last of cliometricians or aruspices to face the Asymptote.”
Montrose looked at him sharply. “Asymptote! That is a word I ain’t heard in a long while. What do you mean?”
“You are familiar with singularities in mathematics and physics, a point at which no extrapolation is possible, because all values fall to the infinitesimal or approach infinity asymptotically?”
“Sure.”
“The return of your bride is one such an asymptote of singularity for us, because no prediction of the future, no, not even that accomplished by Toliman, Consecrate, and Zauberring acting in concert, can predict the vectors introduced by the Authority of M3.”
“But I heard from a guy in a dumb hat that Hyades had records about what happened before when planets was manumitted out of indentured servitude. Ours is not the first time.”
“The general terms are known: we must make arrangements to continue the strange and inexplicably pointless contest of transforming worlds and solar systems from inert matter to cognitive matter, either in return for resources proffered by Praesepe or as piecework. The Vindication of Man will prove that our race has the capacity to keep our oaths taken across sixty thousand years of time, but this does not mean the other Dominions under Praesepe’s control are wise to trust that we shall. Our Principalities may indeed prove too short-lived and shortsighted for them.”
“What about the specifics?”
“You mean the freedom or servitude of mortal races sure to be extinct long before even the shortest of these long-term obligations can be carried out? The only thing that is certain is that not even the Dominion of Hyades, if all his living suns and planets combined in one eon of meditation, with thoughts narrowcast from one side of the cluster to the other, could extrapolate what the Domination of Praesepe, his master, will do, no more than the Domination of Praesepe can guess at the mind of the Authority of M3. The intelligence of one hundred billion is as unimaginable to us as the intelligence of a quadrillion or quintillion, and yet they are five and eight orders of magnitude greater. The difference is more than that between a man and a coelacanth and includes difference not just of magnitude, but of kind. Therefore, this is the final hour any mind in the Empyrean of Man has predicted by cliometry. What shall be our institutions, mores, and law hereafter, we cannot say.”
Montrose said, “Before I slept, a Lord of the Stability begged me to influence my wife to have her free the mortals from the machines.”
Little crinkles that appear when a man smiles with his eyes gathered above the cheeks of Rassaphore. “It was not a Patrician to whom you spoke. We are not hasty. Had he waited but three years more, he would have heard of theonecromancers returning from the remote outer orbits of the Tau Ceti system, where men in heavy-gravity bodies are burrowing into the corpse of the frozen gas giant to learn what huge secrets can be gleaned from a study of its shadow-records and ghosts and thought-echoes still lingering in the logic diamond of its vast brain. The despoilers of dead gods reported the startling news that Toliman and Consecrate, the Dyson Hemisphere and the Dyson Cloud, together with Zauberring the Strandworld circling 61 Cygni, overcame cold and remorseless Catallactic of Tau Ceti and collected themselves into one system, a very small and tentative Dominion called Triumvirate. In his first act as Epitome of Man, Triumvirate announced that the higher powers, for good or ill, will no longer interfere with the doings of moral men, Angels, Archangels, nor Potentates.”
“That is great news, but you ain’t smiling.”
“It is a lesson in humility. It seems the ripples and cross-currents we creatures of one hundred million intelligence levels can cause over spans of tens and scores of millennia are insignificant to the tides and tidal waves of their greater plans hereafter to be made reaching across millions and tens of millions of years. We shall live and die free men, each and every one, until our race goes extinct. And I see neither do you smile.”
Montrose straightened up, a look of shock and disappointment on his face. “I feel like someone stole my thunder. The battle I agreed to lead is over since before I woke?”