Free Sample from the most recent draft of JUDGE OF AGES
This is to show you, my dear readers, who are also (really) my employers, that I am hard at work.
From a scene I was working on yesterday:
Soorm the Hormagaunt, from AD 6850, is talking with Menelaus Montrose, accidental posthuman, from AD 2401. Both have been thawed circa AD 10515 from long-term hibernation, along with a prison camp full of men from various eras between the near and the far future, apparently by a somewhat ruthless group of archeologists, who have broken into the buried hibernation faculty that Montrose built. What or who they are seeking is unclear.
Menelaus is one of several from the Hermetic Order, who are star travelers, but he broke from them and is now their foe. One of the scientific discoveries the Hermeticists discovered on the alien Monument orbiting V 886 Centauri was a predictive calculus of history (Cliometry, for you fans of Mike Flynn, or Psychohistory, for you fans of Isaac Asimov).
Montrose and the Hermeticists, led by Ximen “Blackie” del Azarchel, have artificially augmented their intelligence to superhuman levels, and been using the predictive calculus to create historical trends: but Montrose and the Hermeticists have mutually incompatible visions of future human evolution, and so the two opposing groups interfere with the historical trends introduced by the other. (Imagine Asimov’s FOUNDATION if one rebel psychohistorian had decided to prevent the rise of the Second Empire, and lead history toward democracy instead.)
Naturally, among the mortals, these posthumans have become legendary almost godlike figures. This is the scene where Soorm discovers who Menelaus is.
* * *
Soorm stood still, looking at Menelaus very carefully. “What is it like?”
“What is what like?”
“Knowing the posthumans. The Hermeticists, and starfarers. What are they like, the gods of our world?”
“Sick bastards.”
“Yet you were once one of them, or so Reyes told me at the last.”
“So I am a sick bastard too. People what like to experiment on their own brains are not usually the most balanced of critters, if’n you take my meaning.”
“Why do they rule history? By what right?”
“Pestilence! No right at all.”
“Why them? How did they achieve control of fate and history, so that they decide what empires fall and rise? Why was this power not placed in the hands of someone more — I don’t know the word for it.”
“Altruistic?”
“That is a swear word in my language.”
“Piss-poor language, if you can’t say nothing worth saying in it. The Hermeticists? Blackie and his Black Robed Creeps? They didn’t start out bad, but outer space – years of close confinement falling through lightyears of black nothing, drinking recycled pee water – it drove them stir-crazy. The Captain announced they would never return to Earth, to spare us from the Hyades, and they mutinied and killed him for it. Punctured their souls. You know the End of Days, the year when we get invaded by Principalities, Virtues and Powers sent out by the Hosts and Dominions of Hyades? They brought that down upon us.”
Montrose paused, frowning, then continued, “When they came back to Earth, they had secret knowledge beyond human, and everyone they knew was dead and long done for, and they were attacked by greedy Earthmen. The earth they knew was gone, and the earth they found was gone bad.
“The techniques I’ve developed over the years to make it easier for thaws to acclimate to currents and for currents to welcome thaws—there was nothing like that then. ‘Thaw Shock’ it’s called or ‘Future Grief.’ And these shocked and grieving boys were armed with weapons more dangerous and techniques more sophisticated than anything on Earth, not to mention the Swan Princess.
“They bombed cities, killed millions, and soon they had the world under their bootheel, soon they had power and prestige and toilet bowls of gold to sit on, and that rusted away their broken souls into jagged bits of crud. They were so jealous of me and my magic brain, that they killed themselves experimenting on themselves, at least sixty of them, one after another after another. What kind of man does that? Rather die than admit someone else has a leg up on smarts? They’re twisted as screws.”
Soorm grunted. “Some part of that tale, but distorted, is retained in our lore. But what are they themselves like? I mean—what sort of—”
“What? You asking about their hobbies and love affairs and suchlike? Pox! I got no idea. It’s not like I talked to any these folk for more than a few moments in the last eight thousand years. I remember them from space camp back when I was 25 calendar, 24 bio. That was in AD 2234. We did jumping jacks together and studied orbital mechanics and pressure emergency drills and how to pee in a diaper. It was a five month training regime. I talked to them for a while again in AD 2399, in a powwow we had. We yakked about math. Sort of funny, but I don’t know these guys. Not personally. Now I am 8305 years old calendar and 50 biological. The only one I really got to know is… Ximen del Azarchel.”
Montrose sighed, and shook his head, and said, “Hm. Blackie ain’t totally rotten, but that kinda makes him worse, in a way. But they all think, Blackie too, that we are just their cattle.”
“We?”
“We humans. Us. Normal people. Why are you laughing?”
“For no reason, fellow normal human. Tell me how I can help you.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
