The Hermetic Millennia by John C. Wright

Author:John C. Wright [Wright, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780765329288
Google: Go3TYwkblDkC
Amazon: 076532928X
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction
Published: 2012-12-24T08:00:00+00:00

5. Madness

I know the fate of Master of Fate: in the Year of his Lord 7466, Reyes y Pastor went mad.

Still in his household, I served, and I saw it all. Reyes began talking about a king in outer space who has a child but no wife, and Father Reyes was urging but not ordering his servitors and slaves to serve this king.

Reyes then enacted a strange make-believe type of glandular donation, but using bread instead of real glands from real children, wine instead of real blood. But he insisted that these are the proper mechanisms for producing the biochemical change into a new organism, which he called a glorified body.

Within the next few years, some of the other Hormagaunts were given an office as “Shepherds”—even though there were no sheep—and were called “Father” as Father Reyes was—even though they sired no sons.

The Fathers not only spread this imaginary biochemical change, but some also wandered the newly treeless lands, telling Iatrocrats that to kill and consume children was forbidden, telling the Clades to welcome the stranger and the sojourner, telling Donors to obey their masters in all things, but to disobey when ordered to cease to serve the imaginary space king, and to rejoice in the death that this disobedience would provoke.

The Old True Way was openly defied, and this new way, this thing for which we had no name, spread from the Pacific Islands through Indonesia to Indochina through Angkor to Tabrobane. It sounded like the Nymph-talk, but it was a nonsexual form of sex, a nonhomosexual nonincestuous form of brother-love: indeed, in its name, some of the Clades forswore reproduction altogether and became eremites, living in isolation and begging the king in outer space to forgive the crimes of the world.

Others of the Clade-folk took one and only one mate, freeing their harems and studs, and they claimed their flesh was one, but they did not consume each other or make the flesh to be one. Nor did they mate only in the mating times and seasons, but for lifelong. Bowers of blooming flowers they grew to solemnize and celebrate this wonder, even though it was nothing but reproduction using sexual organs to exchange fluid, rather than the more dignified and hygienic pods and matrices. They used the old instruments of long-vanished Witches to compose songs about this, called Epithalamia, and the songs were very fair to the ear, so that even Hormagaunts would weep to hear. It was insanity, and did not serve the progress of the race toward posthumanity, but it was a beautiful insanity.

Reyes y Pastor called himself the Master of the World, and Lord of History. Who could have stopped him and his madness? But one did. The real Master of the World sent another down from the darkness of heaven, from the morning star, your ship.

Sudden war and horror came, so swift and so complete that no mortal could have compassed it, only a posthuman. First, the foe raised a storm. How you posthumans can command the weather, I do not understand, but I saw it.

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