The Hermetic Millennia by John C. Wright Read Free Book Online

you currents, were supposed to be building me a starship.…”
    “The Emancipation was stolen and the orbital drydock de-orbited and burnt up in the atmosphere.”
    “Stolen? You cannot steal things in space.”
    “Well, Doctor, we know exactly where she is, we merely cannot reach her. The vessel was not complete, but sails and frame were sufficient to make lunar orbit. During the First Space Age, several attempts to establish moon bases in ex-volcanic tubes. When the Jihad brought an end to all that, it was too expensive to ship the equipment back down to Earth. The pirates may have restored one of the bases to life-support operations and be occupying it. We don’t know who their leader is, or why they did it.”
    “It is Del Azarchel. He did it to get some elbow room.”
    “How do you know?”
    “First, Blackie likes to do things in style, and this fits him. Second, that handprint on the moon is not just any old hand.”
    “What is it?”
    “A duelist gauntlet. The black-palm glove. Del Azarchel did not know where on the Earth I was. So he held up his palm large enough that I had to see it. You hold up your fingers like that when you are ready to exchange fire.”
    “He marred the face of the moon forever, merely to hurl down a gauntlet to you, Doctor?”
    “Ah. You weren’t calling me that for a few moments, there. Whatsa matter? You got afraid of me again, all of a sudden, Padre?”
    “Very much so, Doctor.”
    “Why? I’m the same damn fellow as I was a minute ago.”
    “But your foes have grown strangely larger in my eyes, Doctor.”

 
    2
    The Sea of Cunning
    A.D. 2540
    1. The Presence Chamber
    The Master of the World was in exile.
    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 had 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 machine gun fire.
    Like a black coin dropped on the floor of a long-dead furnace white with ash was the presence chamber of the Master of the World: a circle thirty yards in diameter. A dome so pure and featureless so as to be invisible embraced the chamber at the rim, so that it seemed one could step without barrier from the dead world into the bubble of life. From 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.
    Midmost in the chamber was an immense table of black metal shaped like a broken circle, or a tossed horseshoe. The floor plates under that table 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.
    The illusion of equality a nearly round table might create was broken, for looming between the open horseshoe ends was a dais. At one time, the round table had been whole, but he had commanded artisans to cut away the length of table where once had sat those of his order who