Cover Art for THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA and Excerpt
Thanks to the miracle of the Information Age (thanks, Al Gore!) I have discovered the cover art for my latest book. This is THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA, second volume of the ‘Count to the Eschaton Sequence’ which began with COUNT TO A TRILLION.
The bad news is that the publication date is December 24, 2012.
The Hermetic Millennia
Complete with a nice comment by Spider Robinson!
And here is the ad copy from the jacket flap:
A kaleidoscopic vision of future history and human evolution, as witnessed by the one man who may hold the key to humanity’s salvation against an approaching alien threat
Continuing from Count to a Trillion, Menelaus Illation Montrose — Texas gunslinger, idealist, and posthuman genius — has gone into cryo-suspension following the discovery that, in 8,000 years, a powerful alien intelligence will reach Earth to assess humanity’s value as slaves. Montrose intends to be alive to meet that threat, but he is awakened repeatedly throughout the centuries to confront the woes of an ever-changing and violent world, witnessing millennia of change compressed into a few years of subjective time.The result is a breathtaking vision of future history like nothing before imagined: sweeping, tumultuous, and evermore alien, as Montrose’s immortal enemies and former shipmates from the starship Hermetic harness the forces of evolution and social engineering to continuously reshape the Earth in their image, seeking to create a version of man the approaching slavers will find worthy.
AND for your reading pleasure, here is an excerpt
CHAPTER TWO: The Sea of Cunning
AD 2540
1. The Bright Judgment Seat
The Master of the World was in exile.
The Senior of the Landing Party of the Hermetic expedition, the Nobilissimus Ximen del Azarchel, called Ximen the Black, sat alone in state atop the only throne ever to exist upon the gray and lifeless globe that formed the sole remnant and remainder of his reign.
Set between two topless pillars, the judgment seat was ivory hammered over with fine gold, set on a massive base and wide, adorned by spiral narwhale tusks that gleamed like the horns of mythic unicorns, and reared like spears. The high and arching backrest was adorned with the dark, triangular visage of a bull in rage, and from the image real horns projected, bent down as if to half-embrace who might in that seat, or menace any who stood before.
In the deadly brightness of a sun undimmed by atmosphere, the gilded and argent chair blazed like a mirror in the desert, a striking contrast with the dark-garbed figure seated beneath the bull’s face: a bright flame with a black heart.
It did not seem arrogance to Del Azarchel to make his seat to match the throne of Solomon described in the Book of Kings, for he deemed himself, with his multiply augmented mind, wiser than any ancient monarch, prophet, poet or magician.
Nor did the Djinn that ancient sorcerer-king was said to have sealed in brass jars and bent to his command seem any less fearsome and terrible than the mind housed in the amber pillars that arose to either side of the judgment seat. These cylinders were as thick around as a strong man’s thigh, as tall as two tall men. Traces of fluorine hidden in each rod-logic macromolecule gave the pillars a lambent fulvous hue, as if they were hewn of transparent gold.
Between these shining pillars the massive dais of the throne was black as midnight, and sat foursquare, and before the footstool descended six steps broad and shallow. Twelve life-sized lions hewn of black marble but with manes and eyes of blazing gold and fangs of hand-carved ivory stood rampant in pairs, one to either side of each step, frozen in mid-lunge. Scribed into the surface of each stair and set with star-sapphires, a different creature or emblem representing a figure of the zodiac cowered beneath the paw of each of the twelve black lions: a frightened water-bearer with dropped amphora, a shattered balance scales, a fallen virgin with scattered hair, a prone centaur with a broken bow, a supine bull twisted in agony. The throne almost seemed a chariot pulled by a dozen great beasts, trampling the constellations underfoot.
Del Azarchel wore the dark and silken garment of a starfarers, and needed no other robes of royalty. What he had worn beneath the light of the Diamond Star in Centaurus was august enough to serve him. The scholastic hood which normally hung down his back he had drawn to shade his features from the intolerable light. Within the triangle of the mouth of his hood, the glint of his white teeth between dark mustachios and goatee could be glimpsed, the drops of cold fire caught in the diamonds of his iron crown, and the strange light from no-longer-human eyes.
2. The Presence Chamber
Dawn had been a week ago, so the sun was nearing noon. Untwinkling stars were in theory visible in the deathly black sky, but the human eye could not adjust to both extremes at once. Overhead was merely an abyssal dark that caused no vertigo, because there was nothing seen in it. There was no Earth to loom in the sky, nor would there ever be, for this was the Moon’s far side, which faced forever away from the world of men.
The Sea of Cunning, Mare Ingenii, was a cracked basin of obsidian crossed with fissures like whip scars, filling a crater sixty miles wide, with inkblots of dark lava spilling east and west. Here was a wasteland where no living thing had ever grown, no note of any sound had ever been heard and no grain of sand ever been stirred by any gasp of wind. Crater walls as white and pockmarked as the corpses of lepers blazed in the distance, turned to intolerable fire by the undimmed sun. The black slag of primordial lava flows formed a wrinkled carpet. The ground was shot and blistered, pocked and dinted by eons of impacts as if by mortar and machinegun fire.
Midmost, looking like a black coin dropped on the floor of a long dead furnace, was the dark floor of the presence chamber of the Master of the World. Unseen beneath, hollowed out of a lava tube, was an antique lunar base from the First Age of Space Travel, perfectly preserved and recently restored to life. Like the horn of a leviathan, one tower rose through the dark sand and broken plates of the Sea of Cunning to the surface. The roof of this buried tower was the dark floor of the throne room of Del Azarchel.
A dome so pure and featureless so as to be invisible embraced the chamber from zenith to the rim of the deck, and this floor was flush with the lunar skin, so that it seemed one could step without barrier from the dead world into the bubble of life. Within, the inhuman silence of the vacuum seemed to press like a weight upon the fragile dome, a silence that could be felt in one’s bone marrow.
Upon a floor set in this silent nothingness, seemingly exposed to outer space without canopy or barrier, grim as the lunar landscape, rose the bright judgment seat of Ximen del Azarchel on its dark dais. To left and right, lucent icicles, rose the golden pillars. Before him and below was an immense table of black metal shaped like a hollow circle. The floor plates within that circle were tuned to black, but able, upon command, to put the images of all the Earth that he once ruled below the feet of Ximen del Azarchel, or spin out the mathematical trees and twigs of scenarios of predictive statistics, that he might see by what means he should come to rule Earth once again.
3. The Iron Crown
Incongruously, finger-motion-sensitive screens could unfold like crystal wings from the leonine arms, or eye-motion-sensitive screens unlimber like a peacocks tail from the narwhale horn frame, to hang like a zodiac before his face, and the metal armature that held these screens would half embrace him like squid-limbed butler proffering polished trays of delights. All screens, now, were dark, for the miraculous world-wide information systems they governed were long ago decommissioned, blacked out, or blasted to wreckage.
He raised a hand gloved in what seemed black silk. Although there seemed to be none within the chamber to see that signal, nonetheless, upon that gesture, the five of his fellow Hermeticists rose from three circular iris-hatches in the floor, drifting upward with the eerie grace only lunar gravity allowed.
The men did not quite land, nor quite walk, but moved toes against the dark deck with ballet smoothness. Their black garments rippled like silk and silvery anti-radiation mantles fluttered like capes as they passed.
All men in the wide chamber wore similar bodies. The Hermeticists in their lunar-adaptive forms were tall and emaciated, lacking in water-weight, with dry cracks at lips and nostrils. Even the heaviest of them had a sunken, skull-like cast to his face, a strange leaden highlight to his skin, a side effect of the special nanomachinery lining their bones and filling their bone marrow to prevent microgravity decay. Their eyes were as mirror-shining as the eyes of a cat, or filmy as the eyes of a sea-beast, for growing additional micro-organisms meant to shield their eyes from accidental radiation exposure turned out, unexpectedly, to be less cumbersome than polarized faceplates or dark goggles.
Their shipsuits were built along lines opposite to those of the bulky atmospheric armor of the First Age of Space: an only mildly biomodified human skin, when mummified by skintight garb, was discovered to have sufficient tenacity to resist vacuum. A second cushion of very light material was used to hold a layer of partial atmosphere next to the skinsuit, in order to help with pressure differentials the free motion of human joints necessitated. This outer silk was a like a living layer of air pockets that expanded and contracted with each movement, granting the Hermeticists an eerie shimmering to play over them, like ripples seen on the scales of restless sharks.
There were silver fittings at waist and shoulders, and the heavy ring of a collar at the neck. All the men were bald as a monks, with skull-tight cowls that covered ears and cheeks and buckled beneath the jaw. Each wore his hood drawn up, but not sealed nor inflated. Goggles and mask hung below the throat like a second face.
There were only minor variations to the uniforms.
Melchor de Ulloa was a very handsome man, even in his lunar form. He was always wreathed in smiles of bewildered good cheer and in the scent of lavender. At his throat was an ornament like chicken’s claw within a circle, representing peace, a symbol called Nero’s Cross. He was the ship’s Political Officer.
Narcís D’Aragó, the cold-eyed Master-at-Arms, dangled a powered rapier from his baldric, and an Aurum pistol in his thigh holster. This weapon fired a nanotechnological smart package designed, upon impact, to disassemble nonliving material such as armor or clothing, and non-important material such as flesh and bone into a puddle, and next to form electro-neural connections to any nerve cells it encountered floating in that puddle, such as disembodied eyeballs, brain or spinal tissue, linking those cells to the nearest signal nexus for download.
Sarmento i Illa d’Or was a man of muscular bulk, broad shouldered as a bullock, light of step even under Earthly gravity, and in his gauntleted hand an emission wand called a soul goad, used to control thralls, parolees, or courtesans modified with skull implants via shocks of pleasure or agony that left no marks. Aboard ship he had been the quartermaster, and during the time of the World Concordat, the Master of the Feasts.
Jaume Coronimas, who had been an Engineer’s Mate aboard ship, and the Broadcast Power Master during the Concordat, wore a cowl pieced by two small holes, and through these rose from his scalp two tendrils like whip-antennae made of yellow bio-prosthetic metal, and these gold tendrils swayed softly toward the signal sources in the room, peering forth from the mouth of his hood like two inquisitive snakes. His face would have been thin and gray even had his skin not be adapted toward lunar conditions.
One man was not like the others. Father Reyes y Pastor, the expedition Chaplin, was in red, and wore ermine and scarlet cardinal’s robes atop his black silk. Hanging down his back was a broad brimmed red hat with elaborate tassels upon tassels, the galero. The hat was not on his head, for he wore the black hood of a scholar, proud of his academic achievements above his ecclesiastical station.
Ximen del Azarchel wore a uniform no grander than the others, save only for the dark metal circlet atop his air cowl. This was the Iron Crown of Lombardy, a band of gold and emerald segments, jointed with hinges and set with precious stones in the form of crosses and flowers. Within the band was a narrow circle of iron, if legend spoke true, beaten out of one of the nails taken from the True Cross. It was the most ancient insignia of royalty surviving Christendom, and held its most precious relict, and had been kept, until late, in the Cathedral of Monza in Milan. Extra segments made of ultra-dense metallic alloy had been added to enlarge the band able to fit Del Azarchel’s skull. One of these new segments was marred where a small caliber assassin’s needle had been deflected from his temple. A delta of scar-tissue running upward from the corner of his right eye to beneath his cowl was a memento of the same event, and surely made the wearing of that crown painful in his brow, even under the elfin gravity of the moon. Painful or no, he did not set the crown aside.
No more than a glittering hint of the crown was visible then, for all had drawn hoods for relief against the killing light of the unshielded lunar noon. The coppery eyes of the Hermeticists glinted like red coals in the mouths of dark, triangular furnaces.
The five drifted in soundless grace to their places at the round table. Places, not seats, for no chairs were needed, nor did human legs grow weary in a world of one-sixth weight.
There were more than six score empty places to each side of them. Each empty place was covered over with long, triangular silken lengths. These were the hoods removed from the shipsuits of the departed. Their tassels hung mournfully to the deck, swaying ghostlike in the ventilation of their own internal circuits.
The Hermeticists were alone. No servant had ever set foot in this upper sanctum, not a chambermaid to sweep, not a butler to present a bulb of wine, not a technician to set to rights the thousand intricate circuits of the information systems. No unmodified human could withstand the radiation that time to time poured invisibly from naked outer space a few feet overhead, detected by the dry clicking of counters. Nor was it in the present purposes of the Hermetic Order to acquaint mankind with the full spectrum of biotechnological modifications they employed for their own uses. Therefore the chamber was stark and bare, except for such things as the Hermeticists found it either a necessity, a divertissement, or a discipline of meditation, for their own hands to make or mend.
Del Azarchel spoke: “Faithful and beloved friends, equal partners in my reign, partners now in my downfall, the entire living world, the Mother Earth so fair and green, is lost to us, with neither a drop from her endless seas nor a wisp of her abundant airs and winds allowed to us here.
“This Luna, this hueless world of lifelessness, through turmoil and fire we achieved with the daring theft in her orbital shipyard of the great ship Emancipation. Her sails, as nothing else could do, turned aside the deadly force of the mirrors of the Giants, those same orbital mirrors which burned the cities of man like ants beneath a magnifying glass. That power became propulsion for us, for we turned death to life by that same alchemy of knowledge which assures us our supreme authority above mankind.
“As if sailing hither on a sea of fire, this dead world our new world we made, and found this ancient base, long forgotten from the First Age of Space Travel, on the far side of the moon, and far from the orbital mirrors of the Giants, and, with diligent work, and not without the sacrifice of loyal servant lives now mourned, our genius restored it from death to life.
“Here allow me to restore our hopes. History is merely one more language Monument Builders decoded, and only we, only we anointed few, can speak this language to issue decrees and cast spells in it.
Del Azarchel pointed, and all the floor lit up with branch on branch of Cliometric equations.
The calculation set was profound, reaching an illusory dozens of feet down below what now seemed a crystal floor. De Ulloa cried out in awe, Sarmento grunted, and the golden antennae of Coronimas perked up in surprise. Reyes y Pastor crossed himself, and even the impassive masklike face Narcís D’Aragó twitched and raised an eyebrow.
4. The Allotment of the Eons
Del Azarchel addressed the remnant of the Hermetic Order.
“Each of you have seen the Cliometric projections. Some lines of evolution are dead ends. One will break through to the next level of intellectual topography, an event horizon of human augmentation beyond which no predictions can be made. Study the chessboard, Gentlemen! Where would you make your move? Not just Montrose, but human nature and inhuman entropy are all your oppositions in this game. Learned Melchor de Ulloa, you speak first.”
Melchor de Ulloa spread his supine hands, a gesture which could have been used either to placate or to beg alms. His voice was honey. “A society where everyone’s rights are respected produces liberty and this produces invention, discovery, change, and evolution. The main hindrance to man’s ever upward triumph is hatred, aggression, and fear. The only cure is toleration, education, and the growth of institutions based not on rigid rules and dogmatism, but on open-minded willingness to attempt all options, seek all experiments, try all, dare all, risk all: and thus will man discover all. This willingness is based on social factors independent of political economic structures: it is the artistic vision, the world view, of the consensus of the people that eventually shapes society.
“Scientifically speaking, this consensus is based on structures in the lower brain, related to various subconscious symmetry-recognition ganglia whose nature we have examined intimately during our work to elevate the Cetaceans to sapience. The Monument describes eighty-one nonverbal communications systems, of which one, music, is comprehensible to the nervous patterns of mammalian Earthly life.
“Artistic vision fathers cultural values, not the other way around; all moral codes are merely the epiphenomena of the irrational subconscious, and of the dreams only freedom can free. The correspondence between Whale Song and the brain structure of augmented whales has shown the relation of music to core psychology, whose values shape the culture and shape in turn the social institutions, which in turn shape the course of evolution. I see the doubt on your features, gentlemen, but I can demonstrate my claims with a simple spline equation. Give me control not of the laws nor the religions nor philosophy of man, but merely of their music, and I can guide Man to the Asymptote.”
Del Azarchel said, “I have already set in motion what is needful to destroy the Giants, and set the humans of normal intellect free from their control. I foretell a dieback, and a Dark Ages lasting until the Fifth Millennium. Once this is accomplished, I will grant to you between the years AD 4000 to AD 5000 to play out your experiment. Remake mankind as you wish. Learned Narcís D’Aragó, I see you object.”
Narcís D’Aragó stood as if at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back. His voice was ice. “Let us talk no more of natural right, or of phlogiston, or of fairy godmothers. Does a man have a natural right to life? That is quaint poetry, but let him beat against the waves of the sea when he is drowning to see what rights nature gives.
“We should stick to facts. The fact is that rights are artificial, a legal fiction, a manmade mechanism to increase group survival value, nothing more. Justice is strength. Without strength is no survival—and all rational moral codes have survival as their object.
“You recall the Fifth Postulate of the Negative Sum Divarication proof? It proves that the individual cannot survive without the group, and the group cannot survive unless the individual is willing to die for it. What is needed for mankind is logic, the stern and simple logic of survival.
“The existence of religion—pardon me, Father, but it is true—is based on a genetic marker inclining toward mystical altruism, all men being brothers and all that saccharine fluff.
“No. Rational altruism can beat mystical altruism hands down, for money, love, or marbles. Give me control of men’s genetics, and I can shape his destiny, and break human nature open like an egg, and release the dragon within.”
Del Azarchel said, “If Melchor de Ulloa falls short, then I will give you between the years AD 5000 to AD 6000 to accomplish your purpose. If he has achieved the asymptote within his allotted span, your task will be merely to aid him. Learned Sarmento i Illa d’Or! I have never known you to agree with Learned D’Aragó on any point. What say you?”
Sarmento i Illa D’Or, with the studied arrogance of a Hercules, crossed his huge arms across his broad chest, and tilted back his head. His voice was the murmur of a bear in winter, disturbed from long, cold sleep. “Bah! Control the emotional nature! Control the music! Control the genetics! Control the thinking! It is all hogwash. What about not controlling? What about setting mankind free? And I mean free of all restrictions, moral, mental, intellectual—everything. I say there is no rational moral code that does not take into account the simple scientific fact that all organisms seek pleasure and flee pain. This is the starting point of all rational thought about human nature.
“The trick is to tie pleasure into the proper incentives without imposing a system of control the sheep will detect and resent. To do this, you shape the future. You dig the canals and dikes, and merely let the water find its own way at its own pace into your channels.
“The factor that controls the future is demographics. When populations outstrip food supplies, human life is cheap, wages drop, sexual restrictions come into play, and to keep those restrictions, an apparatus of coercion arises that soon reaches all aspects of life. Ancient China was overpopulated, and it sterilized their ability to progress despite an immense head start; Europe outstripped them, because the Black Death had lowered the population level so that every individual life was precious—that, and not empty talk about the sanctity of life—that is what led to the group discipline D’Aragó talks about, as well as the liberty and tolerance De Ulloa mentioned. It is all in the numbers.”
“Shall I make you the angel of death, able to lower population rates?” Asked Del Azarchel with a dark look.
“No, Learned Senior. Give me the heavens instead, and I will raise them.” Said Sarmento.
“What?” said Del Azarchel.
“Demographics is based on food supply,” Sarmento rumbled. “Which is based on acquisition technology, whether huntsman, herdsmen or husbandman. So give me control of the climate, wind and weather. The ancient experiments in weather control were not implemented by a posthuman Iron Ghost, and so the many variables of climate adjustment could not be managed. If I can establish the growing season, shorten or extend it, then I can shape the agro-technology, the demographics, the pleasure-seeking incentives of human action, and thus the culture that will grow out of it.”
Del Azarchel said, “If D’Aragó falls short, then I give you between the years AD 6000 to AD 7000, but I will grant you longer if you ask, for I doubt your theory is sound.”
Sarmento said, “But I must have more time! The method I propose is very slow.”
Jaume Coronimas raised his finger. “Are you giving away blocks of a thousand years each, Learned Del Azarchel? Learned Sarmento can have half of my time. My proposal is more efficient.”
Coronimas had drawn a series of figures, calculations of his own, in the palm of his left glove with the stylus tip hidden in the finger of his right. Coronimas twitched his golden antennae downward and, at this gesture, the circuits displayed his work at his feet.
“Observe. The way to improve mankind is merely to improve him. The human nervous system is a machine, and it performance characteristics can be directly changed by changing various bits of neural hardware. We have been failing here because each man is trying to improve himself like Montrose did. I suggest a different approach: to improve the race while keeping the basic unit of the race, the individual, more or less the same. Give me control of man, all of him, and I can remake him into my image, and this will establish evolution—because it will not be evolution, will it? It will be intelligent design. My design. I can make them peaceful and sane and able to adapt to whatever troubles come.”
Del Azarchel said, “Then I will give you your five hundred years, if you can match your boast, but I will place in the midst of an era where it will do no harm if it goes wrong. Father Reyes, I see the pain in your eyes. What is it?”
Reyes y Pastor said, “With respect, Learned Gentlemen and Learned Senior, your thoughts are awry. We cannot plan for the next evolutionary step of man, any more than apes could perform brain surgery on an ape-cub and make him grow into a homo sapiens. The superman will be beyond us, and be nothing we can imagine. We must do the very reverse of all that has been said. We cannot control man to unleash evolution; we much unleash evolution and man will be swept up, buoyed up by wild forces beyond control, yes, whether he wishes or not, to the next form of human nature. The one true religion teaches — ah, I know how skeptical you all are, but history will bear out my witness! — the Holy Mother Church teaches that heaven cannot exist on Earth; to yearn in vain for earthly paradise and peace is the heresy of Utopianism.”
“If we are all heretics,” said Del Azarchel, “What is orthodox?”
“On Earth, life is nothing but the brutal struggle for existence, war of all against all. Blessed are the peacemakers! That word we spoken by Our Savior, and it is truth and holy truth, but, as holy truth, it has no application here in this valley of tears called life! Moral codes and liberty and genetic codes, logic and demographics, none of this, my children, is what life on Earth requires to reach the transcendence of the Asymptote. What has hindered us so far is that there are far too few us. Too few who think as we! Let me make a world in our image, a world of men who are unafraid to shape the destinies of all the men beneath them, and they in turn shaped by the men above them, so that all the raw power and agony of evolution will be released like a genii from its brass jar. What will come next, your math cannot predict nor mine!”
Del Azarchel said, “I will give you between AD 7000 and AD 8000 to work whatever purposes you will, Father Reyes; and the final period between then and AD 11000, when the Hyades armada arrives, I reserve to myself either to capitalize the triumphs all you gentlemen have accomplished, or abolish your errors, and in every way to prepare mankind to be what best will serve the intelligences from the Hyades stars. And yes, the race I make in those final days must discover and destroy whatever mad Montrose has prepared of war and revolution, for he seeks ever to bring the wrath of Hyades down upon us.
“The conclave is ended: each go your own ways, draw up your calculations, and prepare! We war not only against Montrose and his servants, and against the perversity of human nature but against the lingering tardiness of Darwin, and against death, time, and entropy itself!”
And the Hermeticists bowed toward the throne, then each man took his leave and descended, weightless as thistledown, through the deck hatches into the deeply-buried lunar fortress with no more noise than a spirit returning to its grave.
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.
