The Architect of Aeons by John C. Wright Read Free Book Online

thought-patterns, but very unobtrusive. The Hyades overlords ruling the planet must rule with a very light touch, as bespeaks a truly enlightened sovereign.”
    Montrose smirked at him. “But it does fit the technology growth patterns if some enemy equipment fell into human hands after the aliens was driven back into the black deep of space, don’t it? There ain’t no alien overlords here. Your mind is making up evidence out of random data patterns, like seeing a face in a Rorschach blot.”
    â€œOh? Convert the information spaces in the cliometric model of a fusion plant on a sailing ship to the Monument notation, and you will see what I mean: there is a low zeta-count in the juridical parameter. Does that match what you’d find for a general human victory? You are self-deluded, Cowhand.”
    â€œIt don’t match your model none, neither. You are the self-deludeder.”
    â€œThat is not a word.”
    â€œSince no one’s talked the Queen’s English for some odd eight thousand years and change, I am the only one rightly set to write a dictionary, I figure.”
    By that point, they were standing on the deck. Here were two giants of the ancient posthuman design from the Third Millennium, with bald, vast heads and childish features gathered toward the bottom of their skulls, four nostrils sucking in volumes of air, squat of midriff, standing on toeless elephantine legs. One was dressed in the rough garb of a sailor, the other, leaning on a staff, wore the blue coat of a Simplifier.
    There also were sailors and hands very similar to ancient Locusts, the collective-mind race of the Ninth Millennium, black-skinned, quick and elegant of motion, moving with the precision of machines, golden tendrils coming from their bald skulls.
    The marines had the racial features of Chimerae, a warrior race of the Sixth Millennium, hatchet-faced and burning-eyed.
    Here also was a white-haired and black-robed priestess of the Witch race, her nine-foot-tall stature betraying the use of (by this date) ludicrously ancient life-elongating biotechniques, and her odd body language and haunted eyes betraying the foundational changes in her nervous system for which the Witches were famous, including a more direct access and control to the dreaming and intuitional centers than baseline humans.
    The captain and the first mate were Melusine of the Eleventh Millennium, with eyes entirely jet black, all pupil without sclera, secondary eyepits in the brow for receiving infrared, and delicate secondary ears beneath their human-shaped main ears. They had gold tendrils rising from the forehead for brain-to-brain signal communication like the Locusts, and two additional tendrils sets, long silvery whips or short blue feathers, for other bands of signals.
    An absurdly attractive brunette greeted them, bowing and offering bowls of tea. Del Azarchel looked at the steaming bowl skeptically, perhaps wary of adverse chemicals or nanotechnological agents, while Montrose gulped his down with gusto, grateful for the warmth, and burped and said, “Thank you, ma’am. Right kind of y’all.”
    The woman had a sweet face, high-cheeked with a pointed chin, and dark and slanted eyes, larger than were ever found in unmodified humans, underlined by an epicanthic eyefold, golden-white skin, and hair as black as India ink falling to her narrow waist. Her lips were also larger, redder, and fuller than typical. Her body shape was an idealized form from Hindu mythology, buxom to the point of exaggeration, slender-waisted, full-hipped, with long dancer’s legs. She wore a kimono of green silk patterned with images of cranes ascending and starships descending, with dragons curling around DNA spirals. Over all this she wore a luxurious mantissa falling from a hair comb made of living grapevine twined with ivy. This was both the traditional dress of the Nymphs who ruled the Seventh Millennium, and one of their favorite bodily