The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  “Oh, pox and pustules!” growled Montrose, and he tried to pry the long-barreled pistol out of the hand of the red statue. “Hand it over! Be a pal!” he said to the figure.

  “You must endeavor to forgive,” came the inhuman voice from the black statue behind him.

  “I’ll forgive you of whatever-the-hell you want, if’n you just hand over the damn shooting iron,” said Montrose through clenched teeth. “Pesterification! Blackie! Come y’here and put your face just so. Maybe I can work the thumb trigger even with the stone hand in the way.”

  “Would you disturb the sanctity of this place?” said the dark statue softly.

  “Only to murder Blackie. I’ll mop up after.”

  “The unforgiving shall linger unforgiven, and your love be lost. Can you be true to your beloved, and not be true?” And the strange voice hummed with echoes in the vast chamber.

  Montrose let go of the pistol and looked over his shoulder. “I don’t rightly much like the sound of them riddles.”

  The black statue saluted him by raising its gold sword, saying, “I like them even less.”

  “What the pestiferous taint do you mean? Who needs to forgive me?”

  “Those from whom you beg alms, on whose imperfect grace you henceforth rely.”

  “Can you translate that from fancy to Meany?”

  The voice said, “Nobilissimus Del Azarchel must pardon you, and you him, if only for imagined wrongs.”

  “Pox! I ask no adds of him! I’d rather roger him with a red-hot corkscrew.”

  “Too, the human race entire must forgive you for what you are about to do; and Noösphere called Tellus, or what remnant yet remains, for what in ages past you did.”

  The red statue, at the same time (for all present could follow two or several conversations at once) had raised its balance scales, and was saying to Del Azarchel, “Love surpasses all barriers and bounds, for it is the fundamental substance of the universe. But I cannot abridge the legal and psychological requirements of the phantasm imperative. Dr. Montrose installed specific structures of behavior into all basic machine-language codes used by the entire Tellurian Noösphere, which we, and all subsidiaries, are wise to honor. Until you are above the Third Comprehension, you will not comprehend.”

  “One more thing to add to his account when the reckoning comes,” said Del Azarchel, looking sourly at Montrose.

  “The reckoning has come and gone,” said both the black statue and the red, in unison.

  And the floor as black as outer space lit up with a glittering dazzle of silvery lines, as if drawn in an ink made of mirrors, of the angles and spirals of the Monument notation.

  2. The Concubine Vector

  In the years since the rise of the Swans, thousands and tens of thousands of minds operating at the posthuman level had worked on translating the Monument, not just Montrose, Rania, and a half-dozen Hermeticists. New methods of translating the hieroglyphs had been perfected, which opened up additional layers of meaning, and made connections between disconnected segments of the Monument, in much the same way that a poem broken across lines has a different meaning than when read linearly.

  This “enjambment” was difficult to read. Even all the resources of the Tellus Mind at the core of the Earth, for hundreds of years, could not perform the exegesis. One enjambed segment in particular defied analysis, where the Cold Equations describing the logic of the interstellar polity dealt with the special equations of quid pro quo that obtains when no mutual benefit is possible.

  In each possible social and political system, there were certain circumstances where injustice was tolerable, or, at least, where the cost of detecting and deterring the injustice was prohibitive.

  Both men knew examples. In the Spain of Del Azarchel’s past, when he and his gang were shoplifters, he knew shops expected a certain amount of theft from walk-in customers because the economic loss from only inviting in trusted customers was too high. For specialty shops dealing in jewelry and the like, the risk-reward ratio differed. In each different case, Del Azarchel’s gang was careful to steal just under the amount it would cost to build more heavily augmented guard-baboons or train the store alarms to more discriminating intelligence.

  In the long vanished United States, which the Texans of Montrose’s youth still in legend recalled, the laws made the conviction of criminals difficult, because his people held it wiser to let nine guilty men go free, than to condemn the tenth man who was innocent. In each case where Montrose was defending the guilty, his firm tried to produce enough doubt in the minds of the jurors, or enough nostalgia for the lax laws of gentler days, to make sure their client was one of those ten freed men, guilty or no.

  And so in all general cases where a marriage of interests cannot be found, there are times when the weaker party finds it economical to yield to the stronger.

  The voice of Selene, cool and dispassionate, drew their attention to recursive parallels hidden in the enjambment. She spoke (or squawked) in the high-density language of the Savants, which was notable for the precision of its expression. “This part of the Cold Equations that govern interstellar polities is the one your Rania called the Concubine Vector. It is so shameful a vector that the Monument builders did not explicitly draw it out. Rania discovered it by augmentation of that section of her brain that deals with music. The musical instinct in the brain intuitively follows patterns and symmetries that exist in mathematical ratios. Hence, the musical consciousness can at times deduce truths the rational consciousness cannot.

  “In the last years before the arrival of the Asmodel mass, the entire logic diamond at the Earth’s core examined the Monument through musical notation, attempting painstakingly, by sheer brute and unlovely number-crunching, to work through possible variations and deduce the enjambed and hidden vector of the Monument: to deduce statistically what a musician could intuit instantly.

  “It was only by deducing the Concubine Vector that we, the human race, who are far lower on the ratio of power imbalance with interstellar life than the Monument measures, could foretell what Asmodel’s instructions and strategies would be.”

  “How was it possible at all? Surely in wartime, no being acts predictably,” said Del Azarchel. “Would not Asmodel use the same equations to deduce what you would deduce, and do the opposite?”

  “Were we of equal stature, perhaps so,” the silvery voice continued. “But, first, contemplate that the Hyades must instruct their machines and their agents to operate by precisely predictable mathematical patterns controlled by these Cold Equations, or else they cannot foresee nor foreordain their own obligations across interstellar distances and time-gulfs. Second, contemplate that the slope of the power imbalance was vertical. This was not a war, no more than is the struggle between fishermen and fish.”

  Montrose said, “And what did you deduce?”

  She played for them the theme and counterpoint from two different parts of the Monument.

  Montrose and Del Azarchel listened to the Concubine Vector, frowning or smiling as the implications became clear to them.

  Perhaps a long time after, or perhaps a short (posthuman time sense was flexible), Selene spoke again. “We deduced how to save ourselves. At the eleventh hour we adjusted our strategy of resistance to accord to the Concubine Vector parameters.”

  “To make the resistance more effective?” asked Montrose.

  “Not as such. During the war, Asmodel placed fourteen distortion engines in the photosphere of Sol, which can still be seen as permanent sunspots of immense diameter. The sunspots are the anchor points of monomagnetic flux tubes capable of focusing a measurable fraction of the solar output into lased emissions of interstellar range. Where the mechanism is that produces these effects, or of what substance it is composed, if any, is unknown and undetectable. Tellus interfered with the interstellar flux tubes using mechanisms in sub-Mercurial orbital and attracted one of them toward Earth.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Del Azarchel. But his harsh ton
e of voice showed that he did.

  “Displaying the ability to move the Earth as a dirigible planet without destroying the surface was an engineering feat that demonstrated that we had achieved the minimum level of sentience.”

  Del Azarchel grimaced at this, but adjusted his brain chemistry so that his expression grew placid the moment he noticed Montrose squinting sidelong at him, suppressing a smirk.

  The smirk died of its own accord when Selene added, “Altering the Telluric orbit also used the remaining available energy resources Tellus could command. It was the same as exposing our throat. It was a surrender gesture.”

  Del Azarchel said, “Since to impress the Hyades with our worthiness to be their slaves was a prime part of my scheme to allow mankind to survive First Contact, while I am disappointed we so nearly did not meet their standards, nonetheless, I am grateful for the sake of our survival we did. They accepted the surrender?”

  “Impossible,” said Montrose. “Men are men, even when they aren’t! There must be some resistance even now, plans to fight back!”

  Selene did not answer in words. A new set of music themes rolled forth, as different in mood and expression and symbol as the symphonies they had heard heretofore as impromptu jazz differed from a dirge. It took a moment for Montrose to examine the multidimensional mathematical model in his head that the language of music had just opened up to him.

  This was related to the Monument universal semantics, but it was not the same. Translated back into the lines and sine waves, this was the music of the message written across the face of the moon. Not the First Contact message of the Monument. Asmodel’s message. The only cenotaph for all the souls slain by Asmodel.

  Yes, he could see very clearly the parameters along which the Asmodel entity worked.

  It had neither retreated in fear nor stayed in pride to conquer.

  Both Montrose and Del Azarchel had vastly overestimated the human race’s importance in the scheme of things. The reason for the very slow approach of the Virtue Asmodel across the millennia had been because mankind was not worth the fuel-price of a swift approach. It had also been to allow mankind the time needed, under the pressure of immanent invasion, to establish institutions, sciences, technologies, and self-aware world-library systems.

  It had been to allow Earth to go from a Kardashev Zero to a Kardashev One level of civilization: to be a polity that controlled and used all the energies and resources of their tiny speck of globe. At the very last minute, thanks to the total cooperation of all aspects of the bicameral society of Earth, both Noöspherical and Phantasmal, that Kardashev One level, the minimum level, was reached.

  But Asmodel had no reason to linger and rule the Earth. The earthlings were not sophisticated enough to domesticate. It merely scooped up raw material, including thinking materials such as people, from the planet’s surface and parts of the logic diamond from the planet core, as well as enough of the ecosphere to sustain them only for the voyage, and shipped them off by lightsail to distant and worthless worlds.

  They saw the conditions of the stars, one after another after another, like a roll call of names, famed in song and prose, of the nearby yellow stars, near twins of Sol, his sisters: Promixa, 36 Ophiuchus, Omicron Eridani, 61 Cygni, 70 Ophiuchus, 82 Eridani, Altair, Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, Eta Cassiopeiae, Gliese 570 in Libra, HR 7703 in Sagittarius, Tau Ceti. The music unfolded mathematical notations that formed images in their brains.

  All were very nearly Earth-like, near enough to make their morbific flaws all the most hideous.

  It was a roster of unfit planets, a freak show: a torch world, too close to his sun for human life; or a tide-locked world with no rotation, half fiery Hell and half Niflheim; or a cold world orbiting a dull star; or a world tormented by open plains of lava; or a globe choked with an atmosphere of deadly gas; or one flooded with seas of venom; or a subterrestrial too light to hold an atmospheric thick enough to block deadly radiation; or a superterrestrial of bone-breaking gravity; or a globe tumbling pole over pole through an orbit eccentric enough to boil the seas in summer and freeze the atmosphere in winter; or one cloaked in magnetic fields too intense for human nervous systems to remain sane; or a world entangled with an asteroid belt, doomed to endless extinction-level collisions.

  Worthless. Unfit for human habitation.

  A new movement started, a cliometric analysis of the futures of such worlds, like a fan of possibilities, a glimpse of hope, a gleam.…

  Again, the music cut off abruptly.

  Montrose said slowly, as if each word were pain, “The final expression Phi substructure in the Concubine Vector shows a negative sum for any long-term relation. It says only marginal worlds, ones not worth their colonists, are where our people are being sent. They are being sent to die.”

  Selene said, “With the immensely powerful magnifications the twin orbital mirrors permit, we have studied the target stars of the First Sweep and verified the Cenotaph reports: these worlds cannot support human life as it is currently constituted, neither surface-based nor Melusine, nor Man nor Swan nor Ghost. Hence, all the deracinated are fated to die.”

  “I do not understand,” said Del Azarchel. But his tone of voice made it clear this was something he wished were true, not something that was.

  Montrose said, “The First Sweep stars are those to which our populations have been hauled by force. The slave colonies. Proxima Centauri and Delta Pavonis.…”

  “I know that, you fool!” said Del Azarchel. “I do not understand the purpose!”

  “Be at peace,” said Selene, with strange, unnatural calm. “We have already established the ceremony of mourning for the myriad populations doomed to perish, albeit, clearly, the genocides will not take place for decades or centuries.”

  Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps some sort of provision aboard the ship will act as an intermediary.…”

  Selene said, “Deceive yourself with no false hope. The Hyades slave ships will lower the earth life to the surface, desert or deep ocean or mountain or volcano, and expel them without further ado. Whether they live or die is no concern. The Cenotaph is utterly unambiguous on that point.”

  Montrose said softly, “Some means must exist—if the shipboard Hyades controls permitted the people to convert whatever life-support equipment aboard the slave ships”—an uneven note troubled Montrose’s voice—“habitats could be burrowed out of the crust using the skyhook as a pile driver—a few habitats—for a few years—could—could be by some long shot, could find a way to survive.…”

  Montrose in his posthuman imagination was able to picture and feel what the death of millions of people would be like, each and every death, lingering or sudden. The vision of it was like a cold hand, choking him. He wished for the days when he was stupider, and could ignore things, or see them only dimly.

  His posthuman intellect could also deduce that such jury-rigged habitats, even assuming an unrealistically high mass of the slave ship converted to useful life support, could not expand, hence could not long sustain a population.

  “The long shot is long indeed, Dr. Montrose,” said Selene, “for the Hyades will provide no way. We have no means for seeding crops beforehand, nor altering the gas balances in unbreathable atmospheres. The cruelty is unimaginable: millions dropped at random even in this fashion on Earth would simply be decimated.”

  Del Azarchel said, “No advanced species can be so wasteful!”

  Selene said softly, “The waste, Senior Del Azarchel, is small indeed to beings affluent beyond measure. There are two hundred sixty thousand stars within two hundred fifty lightyears of Sol, none of which are utterly barren. With so many worlds, even if less than one percent were useful to them, scores of thousands remain from which many hundreds can be selected for slave colonies. Alas that natural man is adapted to the environment of the Earth’s surface too perfectly to prosper elsewhere, or even to survive.”

  Montrose said, “But why? Launching Asmodel required more energy than our r
ace has ever produced in all our years put together. Why go to such expense just to exterminate so many innocent people? Why not just gas them or blast them or space them or drop them into a sun?”

  Selene said, “As you deduced, the behavior is ceremonial. By interfering with the Diamond Star, just as the Monument warned you not to, you triggered a reaction; a reaction which the Cold Equations of their inhuman law requires them to carry out, lest their inhuman neighbors among the constellations perceive the omission. If we were advanced sufficiently to be a race for whom the Monument was written, being expelled naked onto the surface of a hostile world would be no discomfort. Such is our punishment for presuming ourselves to have been so high. Such are the wages of overweening pride.”

  Montrose felt sick. The endless years he had struggled against the Hermeticists, and against time itself, to produce a race able to resist the aliens—it was all futile.

  He looked in Del Azarchel’s eye. The handsome and smiling face was not smiling now. If anything, his eye was even more empty and hollow than Montrose’s. He had spent not only endless years, but endless lives sacrificed as if on the altar of some primitive bloodthirsty idol of stone with goggle eyes and gaping jaws.

  But here the idol was of the superiority of the unknown civilization of Hyades. To be enslaved, if it meant to serve as an apprentice and learn the master’s secrets, that, perhaps, a hardhearted man could abide to see done at such a dreadful cost. But to be enslaved for nothing? To be taken not as sheepdogs but as sheep? Merely to be exterminated as vermin?

  Del Azarchel said, “The Cenotaph started to say something about the future of these worlds. What is the rest of this message? What is written on the moon?”

  “I cannot read the Moon Cenotaph,” said the moon in her silver voice.

  Both men looked nonplussed. “Do you jest?” Del Azarchel said, “But this message comes from the Cenotaph.”