The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  And for so long the great ship had been his place of exile, expelled from Earth by Swans, and been his mausoleum; or, rather, had been his private little Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circle of frozen hell where Archbishop Ruggieri with Count Ugolino were buried together up to their necks in ice, closer than man and bride, and Ugolino gnawed forever upon Ruggieri’s skull.

  So, too, had Del Azarchel been trapped with Montrose, gnawed upon by the man’s intolerable habits of thought and mind and personality, the smell of his unwashed feet and his endless cigarettes, and the abomination of uncouth grotesquerie which served Montrose for a sense of humor. Like a man who holds a burning glede as a trial by ordeal, and will not let go lest he be condemned, Del Azarchel would not, could not, permit himself to be the first to cease the cooperation between the two. He had, after all, agreed to a truce. He had given his word.

  He wondered if the Cowhand had made a similar vow, and merely hid his discontent with it better than Del Azarchel could.

  And the fool was skilled. There was no denying that. A genius himself. If only he had not been born in Texas! If only he had been born among civilized men!

  Secretly, Del Azarchel had always longed for a day when his enemy would once again become his friend and servitor. He had not dared hope, but he had dared to daydream how it should happen: Montrose would contemplate the marching ranks and files of numbers and notations and symbols of logic, each rank holding as boldly as a line of Spartans. And Montrose would be frantically searching for some error in the alien’s logic, some slipped decimal in their codes, some ambiguity in their sign-to-signification ratio … and finding no error, no escape.

  Del Azarchel had dreamed of Montrose finally being confronted with a truth so logical and so clear that even he, even Montrose, with his vast and supernatural capacity for sentimentality and self-deception would be unequal to the task of denying the obvious.…

  Del Azarchel had dreamed of making Montrose more intelligent, forcing him to join Del Azarchel on a higher plateau of human evolution, commanding him to turn and look back down, back at what his lower, more apelike, less-enlightened self had done …

  … and admit Del Azarchel had all along been right. Had been superior.

  All this was as it had been. And now? Now, all was changed.

  Now, the vile smells and viler grammar were just droll eccentricities to Del Azarchel, a source of pleasure, because it gave Del Azarchel yet another pathetic thing to forgive in his pathetically fallen foe, and therefore made Del Azarchel’s magnanimity in victory more rare, more grand, more admirable, more large.

  The sail was a thing too large to admire while admiring the vessel. Del Azarchel had to spread his wings and open up additional layers of visual interpretation in his cortex, more like the brain of a deer than a man, something with a wider angle of vision, to take in the immensity.

  Seen from afar, the sail was a silver-white circle many miles wide. Closer, the details could be seen of the molecular textures of differing smart fabrics, which produced an intricacy like the crystal arms of a snowflake. This mix of fabrics was designed to alter performance characteristics in case any new acceleration-ray technologies were developed after launch. If the propellant were upgraded, for example, from laser energy to particle beam, pellet stream, or a collimated beam of mesoscopic particles, the sail fabric could alter its molecular profile to accommodate the change as easily as the skin cells of a chameleon.

  At the moment, the sail was tuned to a basic mirrored setting, for she used only Sol’s focused sunlight, not laser light, to drive her. NTL Emancipation faced her mirror image in the vast circle of the sail. With his acute vision at its highest setting, Del Azarchel could see himself, black and winged, outlined by the mirror of his cloak behind him, reflected in that second sky shining in the sail.

  Del Azarchel drank in the magnificent sight. Always before, to see a ship such as this hanging without motion, no further from Earth than Jupiter, was like hearing an ongoing sustained note of sorrow in the background of an otherwise glorious symphony of splendor.

  Not this time. Now he knew joy.

  “Soon,” he whispered. “Not soon as men count time, but I count it, soon, you shall fly from my wrist, and stoop the prey I seek, and all the secrets of the higher civilizations shall be ours.”

  Del Azarchel felt a moment of admiration, perhaps even love, for these creatures of the Hyades stars, whatever they were, alien machinery, living systems, one species or many, or something that was at once neither or both, or so advanced that all those distinctions were nothing. They commanded the millennia by the tens and scores. They were ambitious on his level of ambition. In his heart, he counted himself as one of them, as a member of the galactic hierarchy, not as a man of Earth.

  For it was the Hyades who broke Montrose’s rebellious spirit.

  Del Azarchel had read his Dumas, and he knew full well that vengeance was allegedly a bitter thing, never satisfying to the avenger. And so he had been braced for a moment of dejection and ennui in his hour of triumph. But, no, it did not come. There was no loss, no cost, no terrible price paid. He simply was winning.

  For Montrose had wept. Yes, hard as he pretended to be, as the years turned into decades, and the transmissions from the deracination ships had grown more infrequent and more desperate, Menelaus Montrose wept.

  2. The First Diaspora of Man

  A.D. 10917 TO 11125

  It had happened in this wise:

  On each vast deracination ship, the tens of thousands of the abducted nations, civilizations, and races were thawed and awake, confined in a cylindrical space many miles long. It was spun for gravity, and coated on the interior with electrosensitive polymorphic material like smart mud. Down the weightless axis was a tube of luminous plasma, a linear sun that never rose nor set. Beneath the mud, buried in solidified murk, were held the millions in suspended animation, flies trapped in amber. Whole cities had been swept up, and were scattered throughout the interior volume, so the prisoners did not lack for tools and even weapons.

  The vast disk-shaped bulkhead of the aftmost hull was honeycombed with coolant tunnels, used for venting heat from the plasma sun, and in places the hull was transparent, or thin enough that patient and clever work could cut through. And after a disaster or two, it was discovered that even more patient and more clever work could erect a series of baffles and airlocks to prevent the ship from automatically expelling everything in the coolant tunnel near any breach, puckering it shut, and sucking the ejected debris through space to the mouth of the vessel, where the powerhouse for the plasma sun reduced everything to its elements.

  Once outside the ship, however, not even Hormagaunts who adapted themselves to the vacuum could cross the distance between the vast cylinder and alien pilothouse controlling the sails. Presumably the ship’s brain and the crew, if there were any living crew, were seated there. But the pilothouse was separated by one hundred thirty thousand miles, and connected only by impalpable cables of magnetic energy to the slowly moving cylindrical body. Anything attempting to cross the distance was destroyed by focused energy from the sails, perhaps an automatic meteor defense.

  In the twenty-six years since the departure of the first deracination ship toward Proxima, no spokesman, no instructions, no overseer representing the Hyades overlords had addressed the abducted thousands aboard.

  The brilliant Swans and diligent Locusts trapped aboard one of the ships, the one headed toward Tau Ceti, had discovered how to use electric signals to change the consistency of the mud. A correct combination of signals could instruct the mud and form it into hills and valleys, rivers and lakes, expanses of fertile soil. The Tau Ceti-bound expatriates also constructed a transmitter powerful enough to reach across the one-fifth of a lightyear gap separating Sol from the globe of receding ships. This gap, at that time, was roughly three hundred times the semi-major axis of Pluto’s orbit.

  Tellus had transmitted the Tau Ceti ship’s discoveries across the light-months toward th
e other ships receding through transplutonian space. This was easily done. Every schoolboy on Earth knew the longitude and right ascension of those ships, their speed and distance, nor was there any intervening material or medium to hinder the radio signal.

  Which of the other deracination ships had the presence of mind to erect a receiver was unknown, but eight had erected transmitters of sufficient power to reply: the ships bound toward Proxima, Omicron Eridani, 61 Cygni, Altair, Gliese 570, Eta Cassiopeiae, and HR7703.

  The millions aboard now knew certain codes to program the matter which coated the inner hulls of their world-sized prisons. But there were neither safety features nor warnings in the electronic signal codes the abductees had deduced, or the environmental instruments the aliens had left for them to find. It was another intelligence test.

  It was a merciless test. Reports from seven of the radio-fluent ships over the next few years were horrific. Countless numbers had died in earthquakes, floods, and quicksand caused by improperly programmed landscapes. As many died from an improper balance of gases as the artificial atmosphere interacted with changes made to the artificial soil.

  The eighth ship, bound for Omicron Eridani, fell out of radio contact ten years into her one hundred sixty-four year journey.

  3. Second Contact

  A.D. 11298

  Decades had passed before the Omicron Eridani ship reestablished contact, and news returned from beyond the distant abyss of space. The grim events were these: a layer of slumberers had been thawed from the murk, to find their miles-long cylinder airless, and themselves trapped in tiny airtight closets.

  In those closets they endured for months while their Melusine discovered how to program the mud to find the hull breech, grow over the area, and solidify into a stress-resistant shape. Other mud layers formed the correct mix of gases and liquids to fill the empty interior, and to thaw segments of murk containing crops and seeds.

  These survivors did not know what had caused the breach, but the traces were left of the endless tornadoes which had swept the previous group of tens of thousands into outer nothingness. Eventually digging into the aft plate, they found transparent sections of their world-sized prison. Then they beheld the slowly retreating silhouettes of corpses, cloud upon cloud, outlined against the gleaming vastness of their sails. No worm and no bacteria existed in the radiation-filled vacuum of the acceleration-beam from Sol in which the sailing vessel swam. The bodies would never decay.

  4. The Plea of Tellurians

  A.D. 11300

  Once and once only were Montrose and Del Azarchel recalled from exile at the moons and rings of Jupiter and summoned back to Tellus.

  Montrose had forgotten how pleasant natural gravity felt, after so much time in carousels or free fall. He redesigned his bones and muscles not once, but twice, during the long Hohmann transfer from Jovian orbit to Telluric. The transfer orbit was a much longer one that it would have been before Asmodel, since the Earth no longer orbited in the plane of the ecliptic, and there were fewer windows to achieve an energy-efficient orbit.

  They were not permitted to attempt a planetfall in their ship’s pinnace. Earth provided the means for their descent. The two men were lowered in a landing shell on a beam of energy that ignited the air beneath them. There was a sickening period of free fall, and then the landing shell was plucked out of the air by a diving vessel like a sparrow caught by a hawk. The diving vessel spread wings and parachutes and splashed down in the mighty Mississippi.

  Stepped pyramids of enormous size, windowless, hundreds of feet high, loomed on the banks of the great river, and among them were minarets like upright swords, and obelisks that flashed gold crowns in the sun.

  More than one flight of marble stairs ran down to the water. Guarding these stairways were pillars atop which centaur mares with the heads and breasts of cold-faced women reared, or snarling black-winged leopards.

  Ximen del Azarchel and Menelaus Montrose, with an entourage of silent, fawning, raccoon-like Moreau in goggles escorting them, passed from their diving vessel in coracles to the riverbank.

  At the top of the stair was a broad, green field spread between the looming ziggurats. The grass was waist-high. It was some species of grass evolved or made after Montrose had departed the Earth, and he did not recognize it. The grass-blades were thin, dark and waxy, almost like the leaf of a palm tree.

  Within the field, as far as the eye could see, were white statues of men and women of many races, Sylphs, Witches, Chimerae, Nymphs. Here were monstrous Hormagaunts, no two alike, and handsome clades of twins, no two unalike.

  Half unseen in the grass were statues of Locusts in their several variations. Winged statues ten or twelve feet tall stood here or there amid the others, narrow-faced and narrow-eyed beings, their hands raised, palms turned inward, in graceful postures of welcome. These were Swans. There were other types Montrose did not recognize. In the distance were the silhouettes of motionless Giants, bald and grim as worn mountains.

  In the air overhead was hanging a scroll, partly unrolled. The visible section was thirty feet tall and fifteen feet wide, written on both sides. Silently it stood, rustling in the wind, but not drifting. There was no trace of whatever power kept it aloft and held it in place. The hieroglyphs were illegible, yet seemed electrically charged with meaning, as if tensed to shout their messages.

  The glyph shapes were based on a simplified Monument notation, but they curled and writhed beneath the surface of the scroll. At the corners of the scroll were metallic eyes that neither Montrose nor Del Azarchel could stand to look into, and so they knew this was a manifestation of some higher power.

  “No one here to welcome us,” said Montrose, putting his foot on the grass. Immediately a strange sound rippled over the silent scene, a harmony of soft wails, hoots, trills, and rippling echoes. With it came a throbbing as if some immense heart, larger and slower than a man’s were beating. “Whoops! Reckon I spoke too soon.”

  “It is non-diatonic music, composed of birdsong and beast calls and river sounds,” said Del Azarchel. “But I see no source. Give me a moment, and I should be able to deduce its symbolic import.”

  “It’s a howdy song,” said Montrose, smirking at him with a half smile. “What they got instead of a brass band to welcome us to shore. But I still don’t see no people.”

  “You see them plain enough,” said Del Azarchel in the same tone of voice, and with the same half smile. “You just do not recognize your handiwork. These are all slumberers, in biosuspension. They have somehow devised some internal cellular control to induce suspended animation and hypothermia without coffins around them.”

  There came a rustling in the grass then, and a slender figure in a bright green kimono came out from between the tall stalks, and swayed toward them, her footfalls like a glissando of music.

  “Mother!” said Del Azarchel, nodding his head in a bow of less than one degree of deflection from the vertical. “I am pleased and surprised to find you alive. I assume it was by your intercession that the term of my exile was suspended? We are grateful for the welcome.”

  “No other voice but mine,” said Amphithöe, “would have overcome your pride, O my son.”

  “Why are we here?” Montrose uttered no other greeting. “Some sort of assembly or meeting? You called it a vision of harmonizing futures at war.”

  “We must reconcile a conflict of cliometry, and select our destiny.” She bowed toward him, and then sank to her knees. “We are come to plead for our lives, our souls, our sacred freedom, and the lives of our children. We plead to you, only to you, Judge of Ages.”

  Montrose stepped back a step, as if alarmed at seeing the delicate woman kneel to him. “I never called myself that.”

  Del Azarchel had a look of surprise on his face, almost of shock, which sharpened suddenly into the look of a black fox. “Oh, this is rich beyond dreaming!” He turned to Montrose, his eyes twinkling, unable to hide the white fire of his grin in his dark beard. “Come, sir, will you n
ot heed our own mother’s prayer? She abases herself! You know what she wants.”

  Montrose stepped forward, his face red with a blush. Whether it was a blush of anger or a blush of shame was not clear, not even to him. He took Amphithöe roughly by the shoulder and drew her to her feet. “Stand up. I don’t know you, and you are not my mother. She’s a far piece fiercer than you, for one thing, and uglier, too. Get up! I have not agreed to Blackie’s plan. I am not going to break the phantasm barrier, and let these machines that think they are gods take over your history, your lives, your thoughts. The Jupiter Mind can mind his own damned business. I have not agreed!”

  “But you will,” said Del Azarchel, soft as a snake whispering. “Because you must.”

  Amphithöe was standing on her tiptoes in her little jeweled slippers, because Montrose, forgetting how tall he was, was pulling her arm too roughly and too high. She raised her nose and wore a calm expression. “I am your mother in my heart. But if your true mother were here, what would she do?”

  “She’d lick me with a strap, I guess, and tell me not to do it, never to agree with Blackie.” Montrose had a hollow, haunted look to his eyes now. He let go the little Nymph woman’s arm and stepped back.

  Del Azarchel gritted his teeth and said nothing. Del Azarchel was canny enough to know when not to speak. Reason can reach a man willing to be reasonable, and rhetoric can stir a man willing to open his ear. But when a man was wrestling with those ghosts called memory, no voice can reach him.

  He had been certain, despite the words of Montrose, that Montrose would yield to the pressure of the inevitable. But now Del Azarchel’s sense of certainty stumbled. Del Azarchel had not expected anyone on Earth to be clever enough to preserve Amphithöe in suspension and thaw her for a stunt like this. Clever, but it had backfired. Del Azarchel adored the memory of his own mother as a saint. Montrose did not.

  In an agony of disgust, his stomach boiling as if he’d swallowed acid, Del Azarchel watched and waited for his centuries and millennia of planning, plotting, warring, and scheming, his assassinations and deceptions, all to come to nothing. To nothing! And all because the little human boy buried in the memory of posthuman Montrose still feared and respected a woman long dead, and who, in the grand scheme of things, was less than a monkey.