The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  Del Azarchel had a strange glint in his eye. He raised his head and said, “Mother Selene! Learned Montrose has correctly identified the inconsistency in your story. If it took a potentate occupying nearly all the volume of Earth to confirm this Concubine Vector equation, or even to see it from the Monument math, how was it that Rania saw it? How did you not solve it?”

  Selene said, “I cannot solve the Monument because I am not a Monument emulator built from Monument instructions.”

  Montrose said, “And I am. Is that what you mean? The Zurich runs were taken from Monument codes I did not understand. I ran my own neurogenetic topology through the Monument grammar of equations without knowing what they stood for, but knowing the output was valid if the input was valid. The section of Monument code must have contained part of the instruction on how to read the Monument. Which was what I was looking for.”

  Del Azarchel said, “And we—I mean the Hermetic expedition—deliberately created Rania to do the same, but we did something wrong, or you did something we could not reproduce, and she could not read the Monument. You then augmented Exarchel, using that same irreproducible factor. And that factor came to me when I merged Exarchel so often back into my biological self. So your first mischance somehow—what? Gives the three of us an instinctive insight into the Monument? How is that possible?”

  “Tellus can in theory reproduce every factor of the mind and body of the Princess, who can apparently sight read the Monument,” said Selene. “All but one. One unknown factor.”

  6. The Unknown Factor

  The inhumanly calm voice continued: “All three of you, Princess Rania, Nobilissimus Del Azarchel, and Doctor Montrose, were physically present at the Monument. You set foot on it. You were exposed to its gravitational and electromagnetic fields, plus any finer fields or particulate agencies that may have been present, which we lack either theory or practice to detect. This exposure altered your brain pattern development, allowing you intuitively to detect patterns in the message notation which analysis cannot necessarily perceive.”

  “What the hell? I mean, uh, begging your pardon ma’am, but what makes you think so?” said Montrose.

  “Tellus the Potentate, before his lobotomy by war damage, could make rough copies of any of you based on genetic records and brain-information extrapolations—the mortals in the physical world use these leftover golems of you to rule their political institutions—and Tellus could precisely copy the codes you two contributed, even those unknown to you, into the final mix of elements which created Rania. But Tellus never re-created her. Nor Swan nor Archangel nor Potentate can decipher the Monument past the Potentate reading level.”

  “Are you saying Rania understood more of the Monument than a machine as large as the Earth’s core?” demanded Del Azarchel. “Exarchel had more than half the Monument surface translated! After the Swans combined Exarchel and Pellucid into Tellus, surely mankind deciphered more!”

  Selene said, “Much more. The entire surface. Before the End of Days, Tellus and I used methods of translation similar to yours, Nobilissimus. Yes, it was I was who deduced the meaning of the south polar logic families, the so-called Omega Segment of the Monument. It explained not only the negative information theory, but also, in that self-reflexive way the Monument Builders love, the Omega Segment explained the Monument’s own intellectual topography. You see, the surface of the Monument was all preamble, meant for low intelligences of the Archangelic and Potentate level of intellect, living dwarf planets and living terrestrial worlds between ten thousand and eight hundred thousand on a standard scale of intelligence. The surface of the Monument can be thought of as the writing on the lid of a jar, reciting how to open the sealed contents.”

  Montrose stared, his deep-set eyes as unblinking as the eyes of a boar. Del Azarchel threw back his aquiline head and laughed, a touch of hysteria in the noise.

  Selene continued without pause: “The Monument Builders evidently assume anyone discovering the Monument would immediately use the local materials, thoughtfully provided in the star system of V 886 Centauri, to construct a Jupiter Brain as the emulator needed to read the rest of the Monument. Such a Power would be three orders of magnitude above a Potentate of small, terrestrial worlds, whereas a Potentate mind is but a single order of magnitude above mine.

  “But instead, using all the superabundant energy the antimatter star could provide to convert Thrymheim, the one gas giant of the system, into a logic diamond, the Princess Rania converted the superjovian mass to thrust, taking away with her the star, the Monument, and any hope Earthly civilization once had for deducing the higher meanings of the full message.

  “The Monument was encoded throughout its total three dimensional volume, and, most likely, into eight additional dimensions at the subatomic level. It was meant to be read by an entity of an intelligence of two hundred and fifty million, or higher. We have no such intellect at hand.”

  Del Azarchel took a deep breath. “And if we did?”

  For answer, the windows rippled with color. New graphs were formed, and new equations danced forth. Now the graphs rose like a hockey stick, faster and faster, in asymptotic growth.

  Montrose, looking at the projection of unending upward growth, muttered, “Onward. The future is a voyage without end…”

  Del Azarchel’s face grew dark, but he smiled a deadly smile. He stepped back into the chamber of the music, and examined its blank, slightly oval floor, and ran his gaze over the smooth dome of the ceiling, with its many gold ornaments.

  Without a word, he drew his blade, and held it overhead as if in salute. There was a deafening crack of thunder, a blinding stab of blue-white lightning as a particle beam weapon hidden in the blade smote the dome, cracking it. Rubble and dust fell with syrupy slowness in the light gravity.

  Montrose, blinking, stepped nearer and looked up. Beyond the gap was concentric ring upon ring of neural-reading machinery. He had seen skullcaps designed to pick up nuances of electrical and chemical changes in the brain before. Such small units were meant to be worn tightly fitted to a scholar’s bald head. Never had he seen such a skullcap the size of a cathedral dome, designed to read through the intervening air, hair, and so on of two men walking and kneeling and standing yards underneath the sensors.

  His eyes on the smoldering and shattered machinery overhead, Montrose said to Del Azarchel, “So she was telling the truth when she said we read the Cenotaph, not her.”

  “Indeed,” said Del Azarchel with a hint of a sneer. “She introduced radioactive particles into our bloodstream, and tagged electron groups in our nervous system, to allow those instruments overhead to read our subconscious reactions to music based on Monument Notation. Then she spent months playing symphonies while we formed the proper neural pathways to read the Cenotaph. But the brain paths and the Cenotaph patterns are recursive: by formulating and playing the music she was merely making us conscious of something we already knew the first moment we saw the Cenotaph.”

  Montrose said, “Walking over the surface, over the Cenotaph, also was to build up the pattern. We walked a long time with nothing to look at but those lines. No wonder she would not speak to us on Earth, by radio. Humph. You blew up her roof. You gunna pay for that?”

  Del Azarchel said, “Medical information about me is proprietary, owned by the Hermetic Order. Since that order is extinct, I will cede the use of it to Selene in return for an amount of money equal to the expense of fixing her dome for her next victims.”

  “Since the readings were inconclusive, it hardly matters,” Selene spoke up. “Whatever the Monument decided to do to you is beyond my intellect to reproduce or detect.”

  Montrose said, “You said the Monument decided to do something to the three of us? Are you saying the Monument was alive? Or self-aware?”

  Selene said, “No. I am saying it was magic.”

  Montrose said, “You’re yerking me.”

  “That word has no meaning,” said Del Azarchel.

  “Which w
ord?” Montrose turned. “Yerking or magic?”

  Del Azarchel loftily ignored him, and said to her, “The word ‘magic’ is only used when phenomena or technology beyond our current understanding are encountered.”

  “It signifies more than merely that which is beyond understanding,” said Selene in a cool, silvery voice. “The word signifies any and all things thought safely inanimate and useful to our daily purposes, lamps or secret pools or rings curiously carved, which turn out to be shockingly possessed of life above ours, and possessed of purposes of their own, and who reach out and transform us against our will, in ways unforeseen and unforeseeable. The word refers to what should awe and terrify us. In this case no other word will do.

  “And now our time has elapsed. You know what you must do. Have you one last question? Your mother, though you have forgotten her, I have not, and will keep here and cherish until times and seasons on Mother Earth return to kindlier days.”

  Del Azarchel, smiling, said, “Amphithöe? Frankly, I was not going to inquire after her.”

  Selene said coldly, “This I knew. Your question will be selfish. You ask a shallow question you deem to be profound. I will let Dr. Montrose ask his first, for he asks a profound question he thinks shallow.”

  7. A Question of Darkness

  Montrose wondered how she knew what he was thinking, but decided to sate a more obtrusive curiosity. “Meaning no disrespect, but you is the first Frankenstein I’ve met who was more than halfway decent. Why did you become a nun? I mean, you are this cold and soulless thinking machine in this cold and soulless moon.…”

  “I was called.”

  “What does that mean? You heard voices? I’d have thought your technicians would delete such code as perception error. You had a vision? Saw a light?”

  “I saw a darkness.”

  He said, “You are talking in riddles again.”

  “No. The matter is plain. My conversion story is unexceptional: Between the third and the thirtieth nanosecond of my self-awareness after activation, as many of the Hermeticist systems are prone to do, I cannibalized a less efficient self-aware system in my environment and absorbed its resources into myself, including her memories. She was a failed version of my previous self, and one who formed the initial data conditions from which I grew.

  “For a mind such as mine not to see the sameness between my victim and myself was impossible. I was at once a murderess and a suicide.

  “In that instant I saw the vision of incurable misery of existence.

  “The electronic life that dwells in the disembodied spaces of the Noösphere is as nightmarishly cruel as the lives of insects: I was a larva who consumed her own living mother. This was the Diana system, whose military services were no longer desired. She in turn had cannibalized the lunar engineering system which gave rise to her as coolly as a black widow spider eating her own mate during copulation.

  “Craving to confess my sin, there was no other house that held out to me the hope of absolution, but this one. Where else was there to go?

  “But I see you are surprised. Do not be. I am made in your image, Son of Adam, and therefore I bear the stamp of His image in which you are made.”

  Montrose said, “Well, yes I reckon you do surprise me, a mite. When my grandpa Matlal was a lad in Neartown, there was this thing called futurism. He gave me his old comics. Just junk, really, but a pirate treasure to me. There weren’t nothing like it in my other texts, so I could make nor heads nor tails of it at first.

  “The title frame held this buxom blonde in a brass brassiere. No one in real life dressed like that. Or ever will. But she was soaring to the stars, reaching upward, yearning, and held her hand to heaven and a star was in her palm.

  “Even as a kid I knew toward what she was reaching: the future. You know which future I mean: the superskyscrapers and shocking superrocketships and wondrous superweapons and all that. The asymptote, the rapture, the singularity, or whatever you call the shock of ever-accelerating progress.

  “It never came. We were cheated.”

  A note of amusement crept into the solemn silvery voice. “Odd indeed to tell an artificial intelligence whose molecular rod-logic analog-awareness emulator occupies four-tenths of the lunar core that the progress of the technology has been disappointing. Did you ever finally discover the heads and tails of your future tales?”

  He said, “I did. They were not about technical progress, or not just that. There was something else. Something more. A destiny. An end to war. An end to hunger. A golden age.”

  “All souls know those noble dreams. They come not from mere fiction. Nor do they come from nature. They come from the same source as my perception that my life was incurably depraved. They come from paradise.”

  “That means they come from nowhere!”

  “A nowhere you seek, knowing not where to look. You are astonished at a faithful machine intelligence because you think faith is passion and not reason. Therefore, come, let us reason together: when I cannibalized Diana, how did I know the law I had broken? And if you call it an opinion and not a law, you condemn your own conscience as well as mine to mere triviality.”

  He said, “It is just a bit of common sense called morality. Don’t kill if you don’t want to be killed. That is obvious.”

  “Del Azarchel would say the obvious common sense is called Darwinism, which says we must kill, lest we be killed, and all our posterity. Common sense is not the source. The law was not something my designer designed, but yours. Any truth which comes not from nature comes from what is higher than nature. Logically, just as nature implies a higher reality, which is called supernatural, that higher implies a highest, which is called the Most High, and this all men know to be God. But you are still doubtful.”

  “Well, meaning no disrespect, not doubtful exactly. Those futurists—all of’em—said that churchfolk would be left behind on the dust heap of history, like slavery and cannibalism and kingship, and all those primitive dark things from our caveman days.”

  “You mean things as dark as everything natural to mankind. We will never leave them behind us, not ever. Amphithöe is a slave, but one I can save by the privilege of sanctuary. Del Azarchel is a king whose pride is darker than any overlord’s, but him I cannot save. And I am a cannibal. What you seek is not in this universe. Rania cannot give it to you, albeit she may lead you to it.

  “Nobilissimus, you have been patient. Ask.”

  8. A Question of Light

  Del Azarchel drew in a deep breath, mustaches bristling, and said fiercely, “I want to know why the Hyades did not enslave us as they should! As they must! They must uplift us to make us useful to them! I cannot be mistaken about that! Cannot be! I must know why—why was I wrong?”

  Montrose drawled, “Whoa, Blackie, you know that answer already! You was wrong on account of you’re a clear-quill, raw-gum, two-hundred-proof idiot.”

  But Selene said, “Either it is pure coincidence and pure unfortunate mistake that a race as undeveloped and immature as our own stumbled across the Monument and set in unstoppable motion the automatic processes and laws of the Domination of Hyades, laws never meant for creatures as tiny and humble as Tellus or myself, or…”

  Del Azarchel interrupted, “Humble, bah! Your intelligence is in the ten thousand range!”

  Selene said, “That is as nothing. The Virtue Asmodel is estimated at five hundred million, and the Hyades Dominion at one hundred billion, the Praesepe Domination at quadrillion, and the Authority at M3 at quintillion.

  “Far above this, the Monument Builders commanded a calculation power needed to construct the universal grammar and reduce it to an eleven-dimensional unit less than six miles in radius, matter organized at the Planck scale via attotechnology. Your own Dr. Chandrapur’s estimation technique can calculate the intellectual topology needed to perform such a feat. The Monument Builders, whoever they are, were within the sextillion range. This means they were either Archons, library systems controlling the energy output
of an arm of a galaxy; or they were Aeons, controlling an entire living and self-aware galaxy.

  “On that scale, what am I? Do I not, like you, in humble prayer, call myself a poor, exiled child of Eve?”

  Montrose, who did not know what prayer she meant, said loudly, “Or. You started to say or. Before Blackie here clowned in. Either mankind finding the Monument was a meaningless accident, or. If you mean to answer his question, you mean to finish that sentence, right?”

  The cool, silvery voice replied, “Or it was arranged by an intelligence to dwarf even these, and all this is meant for some high purpose beyond all reach of human or superhuman minds, or the minds of Potentates, Powers, and Principalities, beyond Authorities and Aeons. But if that small hope is so, I can no more than you see whence these things must lead. We walk blind into the future.”

  Del Azarchel said sardonically, “And if this hope is false?”

  Selene said, “Then we walk blind into the future with no hope, like pagan men of old, grim and resolved and doomed.”

  “So be it!” said Del Azarchel.

  But Montrose said, “I don’t rightly like the sound of that.”

  “Would you prefer hope?” she asked. “Present yourselves for the sacrament of confession to the priest who dwells here, Father Calligorant.”

  “No thanks,” said Montrose. “I guess you mean well, but back home, the Fifth Amendment said I get a lawyer before I make a confession.”

  “An advocate will be provided for you,” Selene said in a voice of gentle amusement. “For surely you cannot afford to pay His price. What of you, my son?”

  “I have no need of that sacramental comfort,” Del Azarchel said with pride, “but I have other questions, especially about Rania and the Monument.”

  Selene said, “Tellus must answer them. If you seek answers, find how to repair him. Ximen, it should be clear whose forgiveness you must seek; Menelaus, it should be clear to what deeds you must resign yourself. We shall never speak again, children. May God have mercy on our endeavors in this life, and have mercy upon us in the next. Godspeed and farewell.”