The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  Montrose said, “Hold up. It is not clear to me. What am I resigning to?”

  Del Azarchel sneered, “Be resigned to always lagging stupidly two steps behind me. Our course is obvious.”

  Montrose said, “Fair enough. You win this round. Tell me the obvious.”

  The words of Del Azarchel rang out, clear as sounding brass: “We must finish hearing the unfinished symphony. It broke off at a note of hope. A note Rania no doubt heard! To do that, we must command great Tellus to decrypt and sing the Cenotaph to us, after teaching him the decryption art, after curing his mind. Due to your phantasm barrier, humble and human Selene cannot teach Tellus, nor talk with him, nor cure him. The task is ours. It is the task the Blind Swan was too proud to impose on us. Are you to proud to take it up?”

  The window glass focused on another part of the harsh, dark moonscape, and there, close to the base of the mountain, was a launching ramp and acceleration rings, and a lifting vessel looking like an antique unearthed from an orbital Space Chimera tomb, transparent as glass and sleek as an eel. Illusions cast from the window formed hair-thin curves or razor-straight lines of light against the black sky, and sketched the plane of reference of the Emancipation, her inclination, her longitude of the ascending node, the argument of periapsis and mean anomaly at epoch; a wink of diamond light gleamed at the intersection of the semi-ovals and rays.

  At the same time the two statues, the red and the black, now stepped to either side of where panels cunningly hidden in the walls slid aside, showing a long corridor whose many glass doors, one after another, held partial pressurization airlocks. Unlike true airlocks, these were used in emergencies, as each cell lessened the air pressure slightly as the runners passed through from one to the next, in the hopes that the biomodifications of seasoned spacefarers, or medical attention aboard ship, could reverse the damage of the bends. Such partial locks were used only when time was short.

  It was not a subtle hint.

  6

  Pantropy and Terraformation

  1. Visions of Greater Heavens

  Their launch window allowed a rendezvous with the NTL Emancipation, but the aspect was unfavorable, and the transit long. From the surface of the moon, it was one hundred sixty hours, nearly a month, before they achieved the high, translunar orbit occupied by their mighty ship.

  As before, Montrose spied on Del Azarchel’s stargazing. Whether it was serious research or idle pastime, he could not tell. Unlike before, Del Azarchel’s data path went through the communication laser, to the Emancipation, to the elaborate astronomy houses fore and amidships there, which used the immense vastness of the sails to gather starlight from the edge of the universe, and then to the ship’s ratiotech core for analysis, which was carried back to Blackie on return signal.

  Ten thousand lightyears from Earth, he saw the turbulence in the Great Nebula in Carina the Keel, where powerful radiation and strong interstellar winds from a phalanx of massive and hypermassive stars were creating havoc in the storms of gas and dust. Here were young stars, each in its vortex like the eye of a hurricane, drawing in the cloudy matter and screaming out their radio noise, newborns uttering their first cries.

  For the first time, Montrose suspected he glimpsed what Del Azarchel sought. The motions of these clouds exhibited the same patterns of slow expansions and contractions which he had previously seen in the Local Interstellar Cloud. The Great Nebula material was consuming the fogbanks of faint interstellar material issuing from its neighbors. What did the patterns represent?

  Now the eyes of Del Azarchel turned toward views some thirteen million lightyears away, far across the intergalactic night. Here a giant elliptical galaxy in Centaurus, NGC 5128, was colliding with its spiral neighbor and absorbing it. Countless stars were being born in the violence. Jets and lobes of X-ray and radio emission issued far out into the intergalactic void from the highly active core of the merging galaxy, where a supermassive black hole burned at its heart.

  Montrose forgot Del Azarchel, over whose shoulder he looked, fascinated at the crash and crescendo of cosmic violence. He goggled at the vision of the colliding spiral galaxy pair NGC 3808A and B like bright whirlpools of fire unwinding each other. He gaped at the burning nebula of Arp 81, remnant of a pair of spiral galaxies which had collided one hundred million years ago. He stared at the Mice Galaxies NGC 4676 and Arp 242, connected by a tidal bridge of stars, but leaving long tidal tails of wandering stars far behind them as they merged. He gasped at Mayall’s Object, and he saw the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 with its relativistic jet.

  But the most astonishing and violent sight he saw was the object called ESO 593-IG 008: it was the fusion of two massive spiral galaxies and a third irregular galaxy in an astonishing triple collision.

  Montrose saw Seyfert galaxies shooting vast jets of matter into the intergalactic night at half lightspeed or more; and he saw interacting pairs of ring galaxies, and saw oddly shaped three-armed spirals and one-armed spirals and galaxies with detached segments and companions no science of astronomy as yet had explained. They seemed somehow like battle-scarred veterans to him, maimed and halt.

  The disembodied and posthuman intellect of Menelaus Montrose, his frozen form free of physical distractions and his senses bathed in data streams issuing from instruments far more potent than human eyes, soon became lost among the wonder of the stars.

  Farther he looked, and further he reached, eager for wonders, drunk on starlight.

  The galaxies were grouped in clusters, and the clusters into superclusters. And there were things larger than superclusters: the gravitationally bound galaxies formed complexes of massive, thread-like structures fifty to eighty megaparsecs long: filaments of galaxies, Great Walls of galaxies. And the vast, empty spaces tens and hundred of megaparsecs wide, where no walls of superclusters reached, and no cluster ventured, and only a few isolated sparks of galaxies floated like lost embers, were the Great Voids.

  He drew his eyes and instruments closer to home, and noted, not without wonder, the relative motion of the Andromeda Galaxy, closest large neighbor to the Milky Way. The two galaxies were on a collision course, and would merge in less than three billion years.

  Montrose was so absorbed that it came as a shock to him when a message, smuggled by Del Azarchel backward through the repeater Montrose had been using to spy on him, emitted a low chuckle, and formed a message.

  Well, Cowhand, would you care to check my work? I have been waiting patiently for you to volunteer. Surely you care about the result?

  2. Madness Among the Stars

  Montrose sent back a noncommittal reply, the electronic equivalent of a grunt. He was too proud to admit that after so long a period of observation, he had not figured out what Del Azarchel was seeking.

  Del Azarchel no doubt guessed his thought. He opened a voice channel and sent wryly, “Come, is this also not clear to you? Must I spell out everything? The Monument Mathematics contains the skeleton of a Universal Grammar, a philosophical language which translates all possible forms of encoding thought into all other forms. I have been looking at the natural astronomical phenomena as if they contained encoded messages written by an alien intelligence. I have been examining the patterns in the stars.”

  Montrose responded with voice signals. It was easier than sending text or Monument code, and he could add a nonchalant note to show how little he cared. “Blackie, if you think the stars spell out a message just for you, that you can read with your secret decoder ring, I think it is time to check your skull for divarication errors.…”

  “Or check the stars. Check variations in the motions of stars, nebula, and gas clouds, their growth and decay rates, the periods when stars go nova, everything. When I analyze it by Monument algorithms, a certain pattern emerges.”

  “A linguistic pattern?”

  “The language of nature. As I said, physics is merely a metaphorical means of speaking that unmelodic music we call speech, whose metaphors are very precise and crisp and colo
rless. I have been reading the scroll of nature, hearing the voice of creation.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “I found the voice was out of tune. Nothing exactly matches the Monument’s given model of how the clockwork universe should be working. Some stars are out of place. Some are too dim. Many galaxies are not in the locations they should be if gravity were a constant and operated by the rules of Einstein. There is something changing the stars.”

  “What kind of change?’

  “Activity. Energy expenditures. Collisions. Something is reaching between the galaxies and creating similar patterns of stars going dark, or going nova. There are too many Population I stars, young stars of heavy elements, and too few Population III stars, older stars of low metallic content. There are too many planets, more than can be accounted for. The streams of dust and nebulae are disturbed. It is as if … almost as if…”

  Montrose waited, wondering.

  Del Azarchel said solemnly. “Old friend, you and I both put faith the Monument formal symbolism, the logoglyphs and mathematical codes. We thought the Monument Builders had discovered the universal syntax, the absolute langauge, the ratios and expressions that described both matter and energy, time and space, mind and body, and the evolutionary patterns of everything from atom to abstractions. Half by providence and half by design, both of us each in his own way altered his nervous system at a deep level to encode those notation ratios into us. We are partial Monument emulators, just as Rania is. We both put absolute faith in the Monument.”

  “What is your point?”

  “The cosmos does not match what the Monument describes.”

  “Come again?”

  “Things are not where they should be if the laws of nature are as they should be and everything were evolving as nature directs. There should be fewer novas, far fewer supernovae. And those supernovae should be found grouped together, as one triggers the next. There should be no pulsars at all, no quasars. There are too many spiral galaxies for natural processes to account for. There should be no Great Attractor in the Virgo Supercluster, none of these long threadlike strands of superclusters, woven of clusters of galaxies, reaching in long bridges across the macrocosmic void. What if…”

  As Del Azarchel spoke, he also opened his files for Montrose to inspect. Montrose said nothing, letting the figures and logic symbols dance in their grave waltz through the several layers of his mind.

  Come to think of it, had he not himself been noticing the odd violence among the stars? Had he not had a hunch that the star furnaces in Carina or the galactic collisions beyond Alphecca were the handiwork of titans? Montrose was slightly peeved that Blackie had acted on the same hunch and analyzed it mathematically, while Montrose merely gawked and stared.

  Montrose interrupted. “What if what? Someone is herding the superclusters to build a bridge? Setting off supernovas like firecrackers? Is that what you are saying?”

  Del Azarchel transmitted a laugh of relief. “No. Good heavens, what a concept! I was thinking something more realistic and more terrible. What if the Monument is wrong? The math does not reflect reality? This notation we have built into our brains, and written into the base-level machine language of all our xypotechnology, ghosts and angels and archangels and potentates—it is all false to facts. What if our picture of the universe is radically wrong?”

  “How can the math be wrong?”

  Del Azarchel said, “How? Use your imagination. Our nervous systems and computer systems do not let us see reality as it is. Our perceptions filter that reality as surely as the phantasm filter you inflicted on Exarchel. It is not reality that forms our logic assumptions, but our evolved mental architecture. We live in a world where it is possible to divide by zero, and pi is a rational number, but our brains cannot accept it, and so we don’t see it.”

  Montrose was taken aback. Finally he said, “If the Monument is wrong, maybe it is wrong about everything. Maybe the cliometry is wrong. Maybe Earth is not doomed. Maybe the slave ships will not dump millions of helpless people into freezing and burning hell worlds to die. Maybe the word ‘maybe’ is the mule of a mayfly that mates with a bee.”

  “You are talking nonsense.”

  “So are you. The Hyades use this math for all their doings. It is good enough for them to maintain an interstellar empire. If the math is wrong, they are insane.”

  “Insane enough to devote thousands of years and endless fortunes of energy to slay myriad men in an utterly pointless fashion?”

  “Well, like you said, Blackie. This math is built into our brains and minds. If the Hyades are crazy, so are we.”

  “And Rania? Is she mad as well?”

  Montrose realized that it was purely on faith of something she saw in the Monument, something which, apparently, even Selene could not see, which sent Rania on her quest to M3 in Canes Venatici, beyond the Milky Way. Astronomers had never detected signs of life in that remote globular cluster, no signals of civilization. There was no assurance that there would even be an authority to hear her plea in the remote millennium when she arrived. There was only the word of the Monument.

  But all he said aloud was, “Blackie, you leave her name out of it.”

  And there the conversation stopped.

  3. Intrusion Crystal

  In the forward instruments grew the image of the Emancipation. Even with her sails folded, and external cabins deflated, the interstellar vehicle was a sea serpent larger than Leviathan, and the lifting vessel a glass minnow waltzing up to kiss her nose. As if in celebration, the noise of maneuvering jets popped and spat like firecrackers, ringing through the cabin of the lifting vessel. Both men were suited up again, as was the spacer’s tradition during any close approach, and sealed their air hoods.

  The popping noise of maneuvering jets shut off suddenly. By a tradition as old as space travel, the vessel with lower mass was supposed to match the velocity and other orbital elements of the larger to save on mutual fuel. But somehow the titanic spire of the Emancipation had her nose within inches of the flyby position, and gave a single short lightning-flash of her titanic altitude jets, so that the two vessels came smoothly together with hardly a jar.

  “Something is wrong,” said Montrose. “The mating was too smooth.” But his airhood mike was off, so he did not send the voice signal to Del Azarchel.

  Del Azarchel swam into the airlock first. The inner valve opened immediately, as if the nose cabin of the Emancipation was already perfectly matched with the interior conditions of the lifting vessel.

  “Wrong,” muttered Montrose to himself. “When did the ship’s brain confirm a nanomachinery match between the two air systems? All these motes and crap humans put in our air, mutations and miscalculations when they misrepair themselves have to be checked.…” He knew there was not enough calculation power aboard the ship for this.

  Del Azarchel stopped moving halfway through the rubbery ring of the airlock. Montrose saw a strange red light splashed around the interior, gleaming from the metal clasps of Del Azarchel’s dark shipsuit and bright cape.

  The interior of the Emancipation was glistering with a reddish light, the color of an ember that refused to die. Rivulets of diamond like the delta of a river or a fantastic spray of icicles gleamed from the surfaces surrounding any logic ports in the bulkhead.

  Both men headed hand-after-hand down the flexible corridor-tubes inward toward the axis of the ship. The tubes thoughtfully expanded to accommodate their bulk, and cilia protruding from the tube walls like many whiskers hurried them along their way.

  The drop down the esophagus of the tube was not dizzying after three days in zero gee, despite the lack of a visual horizon. The tube disgorged them into the axis of the shroud house, the longest of several long bays that extended fore and aft beyond sight. The logic diamond at the core of the ship had expanded, sending out odd growths in fractal patterns like sea coral or the limbs of barnacle-crusted kragens. Heat and light shed from the diamond core indicated furious activity
in the ship’s brain. This was the source of the sullen red light.

  Montrose sent a directed microwave pulse to Del Azarchel: “Did you do this? We had a deal! We agreed to keep the ship’s brain as a ratiotech, limited intelligence. Not awake. It was when you were sending all that data to the astronomy house, wasn’t it? You sent a signal to trigger a by-his-bootstraps uplift of the ship’s brain from ratiotech to xypotechnic self-awareness. The ship grew smart enough that she was no longer a phantasm to the Tellus Mind.”

  Del Azarchel merely pointed at the blank bulkhead. Realizing Del Azarchel was pointing at something beyond the hull, Montrose switched his goggles to the simulated image of the ship. Through the surface of the imaginary hull, and in the readouts shining on the insides of his goggles, Montrose saw that the stern sail was directed at Earth and the circuits were warm. The through-path monitor in the ship’s spine showed the activity log: an immense amount of data from Earth had downloaded itself by itself into the ship’s circuit, unhindered by defenses and firewalls and physical gaps, and somehow wrote itself into the core of the ship’s brain.

  Montrose said, “This ghost did not force his way aboard. You invited him. You broke the deal. I thought you were a bastard but an honest bastard, someone too proud to lie.”

  “What lie? I invited him into my half of the ship. He merely trespassed into yours. I suppose you could complain to him, but—thanks to you—he cannot hear you unless you augment yourself.”

  Montrose uttered an anatomically unlikely and grotesquely unsanitary imperative.

  Del Azarchel replied in a voice of icy calm, “Must I again tell you what must be done? With Rania absent, you and I alone have an instinctive architectural algorithm in our subconscious minds for emulating Monument structures. It is a decryption key. Once we make xypotech emulations of ourselves, a newborn Extrose and a reborn Exarchel, we can copy the key into this ghost and transmit the result back to Earth. That should be effortless, since we know the Monument Builders would have wanted the key to be open to any mind reading the Monument.”