The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  “Or their notion of efficiency means they retreated after we put up a fight.”

  “You are an insane man. The Earth was prostrate! So said the Swan.”

  “And there might be Fourth Comprehension above what he is cleared to know. He said someone is occupying the old memory space that Pellucid used to fill. Something so smart as to make even Sister Lunatic here look like an idiot.…” And in a slightly louder voice, Montrose called, “Ah! No offense meant there, Sister.…” and then to Del Azarchel he continued, “… And that revived version of the Tellus Mind might know what was done to repel the aliens. And Mother Selene might know. If we can get her to talk. Maybe there is a microphone switch we are supposed to twitch?”

  Del Azarchel shook his head. “Space is too vast to engage in trade or commerce between beings of such unequal power. Conquest is wiser.”

  “And leaving us the hell alone is wiser yet. You know how much energy is needed to accelerate Uranus to even point zero one eight percent of the speed of light. The Hyades just did something our civilization could not afford. We’re too poor and mean on the cosmic scale of things. So what did they get out of this?”

  “I know the benefit to us. Earth-like worlds we lacked the will and resources to claim as our own will be ours once the deracination ships arrive. For the first time, a single disaster against the Earth would not and could not exterminate the race.”

  Montrose said, “You look mighty sour about it.”

  Del Azarchel scowled and turned away. “This is not as I had imagined.”

  “So what are these statues for? They’re ceremonial, too, I take it. Put up as a message to us? Was this whole room meant to be a message? A welcome message? According to you, Selene thought this was an easier way to convey a simpler message than to speak aloud in English. It must be some puke powerful memorandum to be worth all this time we could have already spent talking!”

  “These statues of us—you and I are like dogs who, having seen a human baby weaker than us grow up to control the world in ways we cannot comprehend, are baffled to see that child now grown carrying pictures of us, her favorite hounds,” said Del Azarchel.

  Montrose said, “Meaning you don’t know either. Is it a footrace, then? A wager? You and I going to see who figures out this puzzle first, and brag until the end of time? Or do you want to solve it together?”

  Del Azarchel did not answer, but instead stepped to the statue of himself, touched it with his hand, stared at it for a moment, his eye taking on that momentary look of vital and magnetic energy that accompanied an increase of the firing rate to the optic nerve. He turned his head, and then his body, in a slow circle. “Nothing. A round room. Or perhaps slightly oval. Two images of us. Two votive candles. Whether this means we should be prayed to or should be praying, I cannot say.”

  “What is the water for? To drink? Wash our hands?”

  “Wash your sins, you idiot. It is a baptistery.”

  “Well, idiot I may be, but an idiot savant. The room is slightly oval. It is the same size and shape as the opening statement of the Monument. Look at the ratio of eccentricity to the circumference. There is probably Monument writing underfoot, just not lit up.” He bent down and touched the floor surface. It was smooth and unyielding.

  Then Montrose shrugged. “Aside from that I am stumped. If this is a race, you win. I cannot puzzle out the riddle. Selene jawed to us on Earth, and again when we splashed down in the moon dust. Now that we are here, she shuts up.”

  Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps she passed beyond the phantasm boundary you established. Something we did now forces her to treat us as if invisible.”

  Montrose remained kneeling, his fingers on the black and unmarked floor. “Something between now and when she spoke to us at splashdown? We were meant to stare at the outside of this cathedral for a good long time. I thought it was to get us to confirm that she had built it right. We are the only Old-Stock Elder-race men left.”

  “Basilica, not cathedral,” said Del Azarchel absentmindedly.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A cathedral is the seat of a bishop.”

  Montrose turned his head. “I figured out how to get her to talk to us. What she’s waiting for. I win this round.”

  Del Azarchel said, “Tell me.”

  “Admit I win, and I will.”

  5. A Chamber of Diapason

  Del Azarchel actually laughed. “You hateful vermin! Were it not for you, all these worlds would have been mine now, pure logic crystal, gold like glass from pole to pole, and Rania by my side as my wife and my queen! My mind would have been expanded to the next order of magnitude by now! The Asmodel being would have been met with a glorious civilization, worthy of entering into their collaboration, even if at the most servile level! Instead of empires, I live a beggar! You—”

  But he saw Montrose was not listening.

  Then Del Azarchel realized what had happened. The symbolism, the silent communication, had been clear, blindingly clear. The mountain had been carved as a basilica, complete with all the ecclesiastic symbolism from their native era, so accurate that Del Azarchel had unconsciously performed the first ceremonial gesture a celebrant does when entering church, using the holy water, but not the second, which is to bow the knee. Montrose, stooping to examine the floor, had accidentally completed the gesticulation.

  Del Azarchel realized with shame that Montrose had instinctively seen from his point of view something Del Azarchel’s own unstooping pride made invisible to him. This chamber was a mockery, not just of Montrose, but of the both of them. Instead of an altar with the host, this room contained icons of them, with candles burning for them as if they thought themselves saints, and the proportions of the chamber representing the missing designs of the Monument, as if that were the idol they served.

  Del Azarchel dropped to one knee. There was an unseen membrane of interference created by a sound-dampening pressure curtain made of countless invisibly thin, macro-molecular, self-repairing and countervibrating strands covering the room at midriff level. As his head passed below it, unexpectedly to his ear came the soft music which had been issuing all this time from the blank floor.

  It took Del Azarchel but a moment to quiet his internal life rhythms and to increase the number of nerve firings to his auditory nerve, an art he had done often to his eyes, but never before to his ears.

  To him it seemed the music swelled and swelled, like a cavalry of elves emerging from beneath the sea. The shocking beauty of it washed over his soul, struck to his core. A normal man would have heard nothing but a shining roar as of ten thousand harps singing in hundreds of voices, a waterfall of noise in which the individual drops were lost, but Del Azarchel heard patterns within patterns, symmetries building greater symmetries.

  Since turning posthuman, Del Azarchel had ceased to listen to music, at one time his only pleasure in life. Even Bach seemed too simple and predictable to him, nothing more than a nursery tune plinked on a toy piano. The most complex music the Old Stock humans had ever produced had been polyphony for eight voices.

  But this! It was the music meant for a mind like his! There were eighty-one voices or harmonies, countless counterpoints of polyrhythmic oppositions woven into the soaring theme, puns and inversion as the voices first followed a nonimitative polyphony of multiple distinct rhythmic strata, then an alternation of the roles of the voices in a pattern of cycles and epicycles. He could follow it all, music no mortal man could possibly have understood.

  He turned his face away from Montrose so that his enemy would not see his tears.

  Del Azarchel forced the supernal majesty of the songs out from his mind, and concentrated on the meaning. He had not heard the opening strains of the interwoven symphonies, the glittering clash of the unearthly music, and so it was a moment longer than it should have been before he was able to form a multidimensional graph in his imagination, plot all the notes to it, map their durations and ratios, and realize that it was Monument notation, au
dible rather than written.

  Because he could adjust his awareness both to the density of time, how many events per second he noticed, and the span of time, what interval his brain interpreted as “now,” Del Azarchel could expand his perception of time so that the patterns of harmonies and melodies formed by one symphony after another could be heard by him as if it all happened in the same long afternoon. No doubt to an outside observer, it would have seemed weeks.

  The only limit was biological. He started feeling faint with hunger after the time span his attention said was an hour, but his stomach said was a fortnight. The first twitch of muscles, aside from blinking and breathing in time with the music, was to turn his head toward Montrose, who silently handed him a cup of gold. (Del Azarchel felt a tiny touch of superiority to know himself more sensitive to music than the Texan, who had moved first.)

  “It ain’t no baptism sink,” said Montrose, during a moment of silence between two chords, using the highspeed, high-compression language of the Savants. “That was a joke, too. The water bowl is a cafeteria. Nanite liquid. Full of all the vitamins we need, proteins, and so on. You just gotta decide how much you trust her.”

  Del Azarchel looked at the cup. In a ring circling the rim was an image of five loaves and two fish, and the cup itself was adorned with the scene of a bearded patriarch with a staff striking a rock from which many waters flowed.

  He drank the contents without hesitation. Montrose held a cup of similar make, decorated with images of ravens bringing bread to a prophet, and he frowned at it sourly, but after a muttered curse or two, drank it also.

  5

  Celestial Hospitality

  1. The Unfinished Symphony

  A.D. 11058

  The opening statement of the Monument turned out to be the simplest of the grand themes played. Time passed as they listened to the simple progression of the Alpha Segment, through the sinuous Beta Segment, the marching chords of the Gamma, the dizzying intricacies of the Delta.

  Nuances of meaning, lost from the merely literal interpretation of the visual symbol groups, were startlingly clear to both men when heard as chords. When the music wove its way through the Zeta section, the song sung an image of the Milky Way into the brains of both of them, and game theory analysis of the Eta segment, with its play and counterplay, made them both laugh.

  And then a day came when the songs passed beyond what they had translated in their era. The learning of the new millennia surged into their consciousnesses, wave upon rising wave.…

  The revelation of the symphonies dazed them, as the thousand voices cried in countless counterpoints the entire song of the cosmos, the percussion clockwork of orbital mechanics, the trumpet blasts and cymbal crashes of subatomic and atomic fissions, the intense rafts of strings of organic chemistry, the complex dance of life, waves and typhoons of primitive cognition, of awareness, of self-awareness, in some ocean of pure form where each drop was a silvery and perfect note.

  They heard the secrets of the mind-body relationship, the basic invariant systems for all possible psychological architectures, including human, of any mind either natural or artificial; the secrets of planetary formation; the mathematical description of galactic nebulae, spiral and irregular (but once their hidden designs were laid bare, surprisingly not irregular at all, but possessed of strange beauty) and elliptical galaxies; the patterns of history; the twenty-five possible non-Euclidean geometries; the nine stable higher intellectual topologies which can emerge from lower natural intelligence; the four possible institutional developments whereby a civilization can emerge from barbarism; the two possible systems of self-awareness that can emerge from lower forms of life, and the one possible mode called life, in its dizzying complexity, which can emerge from the deceptively simple mechanics of nonlife.…

  They heard the echoes of the themes of largest and smallest. The superclusters formed by streamers of galactic clusters across the width of the universe were controlled by a few simple melodies of mathematics, and the same theme designed the tiniest parts of the fine structure of the universe, string segments of the superstrings, which were in turn the membranes in three-dimensional space of some intrusion from ulterior dimensions of infinite density and energy.…

  The same simplicity emerged again at the level of DNA, or the countless other theoretical systems whereby biopsychological patterns could be embedded into molecular or submolecular strata; again at the level of large governmental-economic-megapsychological collaborations; and again at the galactic and galactic-cluster, and galactic-supercluster level. The universe itself, with its helices and nautilus spirals of streams of superclusters, seen as a whole, looked like a pearl streaked with irregularities, which looked so similar to smaller structures and relations found within them, that the whole of the macrocosmic universe could have been a vast tablet of symbols expressing laws, or genetics expressing life, or a neural system expressing thought, or …

  And everything was based on certain subtle primal nonrepeating irregularities, as delicate, as arbitrary, as irrational as the ratio of radius to circumference.…

  They heard the cosmos singing.

  While they listened, rapt, intent, ecstatic, they made their hands move and lips open, so that they drank of the golden cup once every seven days. Without rising to their feet, they dipped the cup, one after another, into the low bowl atop the marble pillar, whose liquid never diminished.

  From time to time, as months passed, their bodies had to be maintained by more than the draft of the golden cups. The music followed them as they moved from chamber to chamber. They feasted, exercised, excreted, suffered medicinal exercises and minor molecular surgery, and in the unadorned chambers of the monks they slept (all but the significant segments of their brains). The company of monks who ministered to them were a variety of races, Locusts and Witches and Giants, all biomodified for lunar conditions, tall and thin. Here were Chimera, looking almost deformed for carrying no weapons, and Melusine, whose whale and dolphin forms looked more like eels and dragons than like their earthly originals, moving without noise through the waters of unlit cisterns. The monks never spoke, or, if they did, only to brain segments in Montrose and Del Azarchel not concerned with the music of the universe. Always the two were returned to the dark and singing chamber, and the music grew and grew within their minds like some immense tower, level upon level of song, in ever greater variations and deeper insights.

  Then, one day, when they were once again kneeling in the dark and oval chamber beneath the gold fountain and the red-and-black statues, in the middle of the soaring flight of song, it stopped. Silence like deafness was like a backhanded blow to their ears—the sound was cut off, jarred to a halt.

  Del Azarchel felt as if his whole body ached to hear the next tone, the resolution of the chords and multitudes of chords. “Selene!” Del Azarchel shouted at the ceiling. “Where is the rest of it? Play on!” He leaped to his feet with earthly strength, and hung in the lunar air for a long moment, light as a moth, his dark Hermetic robes a stormcloud about his legs and upraised arms.

  Montrose was kneeling in a circle of spent cigarette butts and ash stains he had accumulated over the months, since he had occupied himself rolling “quirlies” during parts of the symphony he thought were slow or predictable.

  Montrose rose more gently, staring thoughtfully at the golden cup he was hefting in his hand. The material in the cup had altered the cellular structures in their bodies in a very subtle and sophisticated way, a specific application of the biosuspension technology, so that, when they made the motion to rise to their feet, the muscles in their legs responded as if they had only been kneeling a short time. There was not even a pins-and-needles sensation, not even a twinge. Not that kneeling on the moon was much of a strain in any case.

  Montrose also spoke toward the ceiling, and said more quietly, “Thanks for the song, Mother Selene. Mighty hospitable of you, I am sure. Say! About this drink! I need to get a bathtub of this stuff for our next long sleep.�
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  A voice came from behind them, as pure in tone as if a silver harp spoke, humming with strange echoes. The statue of the black-robed figure was evidently made of a more mobile substance than the dark marble and white alabaster it appeared to be, because the face moved as it spoke. “That and whatever else you ask will be granted you, in gratitude for the aid you shall give.”

  Del Azarchel slowly floated to the floor. As if some efficient squire serving an assassin had cleaned and sheathed his master’s long dirk neatly beneath his freshly laundered cloak, Del Azarchel’s rage was stored away, unseen but doubtless close to hand. His voice and manner were courteous: “With kindest thoughts we accept your offer to grant us a boon. We are awed by your generosity; without delay reveal to us the next movement of the symphony. The secrets of the universe…”

  But now his bland expression slipped, and a naked hunger shined in his eyes. Nor was anger ever far from hunger, not in the soul of Del Azarchel. He did not continue speaking, but took a spaceman’s oxygen pomander from his pouch and held it to his nose. This was not to measure his carbon dioxide output, but just to hide his expression.

  The inhuman voice of the lunar intelligence came from the pale gargoyle face framed by the white wig and topped by the black cap. “I do not have the capacity to transliterate the next stage of the Monument into musical notation, and the Lunar Cenotaph language is asymptotically more complex. Once he is repaired, you will inquire of the planetary intelligence, called Tellus, who is beyond the Fourth Comprehension.”

  Montrose said, “Well? Where and how do we do that? Can you radio the Earth for us?”

  Del Azarchel gave Montrose a smug look, for he had realized something Montrose had not. Del Azarchel said, “Mother Selene, I have no reluctance to assume the stature of an Exarchel once more, but surely it would be easier were you to act as intercessor and emissary for us, telling and explaining what Tellus wishes to ask? For my somewhat rustic friend has shown himself to be reluctant to suffer augmentation to ghostly rank, for he does not foresee how any copies of himself could share in the nuptial bliss he foolishly imagines to be of his deserving once the Princess Rania returns to me.”