The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  “No, ugly bug, it is you that miss the point. Your components left behind went there to establish a second empire. The fifteen stars housing human colonies around Sol all shine on graveyards. Maybe Splendor of Delta Pavonis is still alive, but lacks interstellar radio, but I doubt it. He wants mankind to flourish in some remote part of space free from Hyades influence,” said Montrose. “While the expedition was gone, did your astronomers detect any intelligent signs of life in the Sagittarian Arm?”

  “There is, of course, considerable stellar and energetic activity in that arm of the galaxy. Which, if any, is the byproduct of intelligent action is impossible to determine without a specific knowledge of the intelligence’s goals,” said the wheel.

  The biped asked, “Do you conclude the Senior has abandoned us? That he is not aboard the White Ship which has been in transit all this time?”

  Montrose said, “I dunno. But riddle me this: If Blackie was still interested in Earth, even a wee bit, why didn’t he make a second body of himself to leave behind to run this first empire?”

  The biped said, “So he did. They all wanted to go.”

  But the centaur mask said, “He cares nothing for empire. That task is ours.”

  But the snake mask said, “We all participate in some or all of his memory chains. He has not departed from us, for he is in us, and is with us.”

  But the wheel masks said, “The Senior is the Jupiter Brain. More and more of the levels of the mental ecology of that realm of the outer Noösphere are becoming as one with him. He absorbs lesser minds, and compels the loyalty of smaller spirits. Without such loyalty, Jupiter will not expend the vast resources needed to ignite the deceleration beam five hundred years from now.”

  Montrose said, “So you are telling me that Blackie will return here, loaded with as much antimatter as we need, the same millennium as the Second Sweep is coming?”

  “No,” answered the biped. “One thousand sixty-four years later, so it will be in the next millennium. However, our energy budget after that point will exceed the total theoretically possible energy budget of the approaching Second Armada, called Cahetel. We are concerned with this interval.”

  The centaur said, “In his absence, we turn to you to rectify matters.”

  Montrose could feel the gap in his thinking as obvious, to someone of his brainpower, as a missing tooth felt with a tongue. The sensation was annoyingly similar to trying to pick up a watermelon seed with thumb and forefinger. But he was not smart enough to coax the shy thought into view. (Evidently the shy thought was equally smart as he.)

  “I don’t get what you are asking me, or why you are here,” he said crossly. “You are planning to surrender to the Second Armada and turn over the Earth to them for another rape session. Why disturb me?”

  The serpent mask said, “We overestimated your intelligence. We will explain in smaller and clearer steps. The Senior contrived the progenitors of our race to be complementary to what was known of Hyades psychology and practice. All possible reproductive strategies can be roughly categorized into two groups: the reptilian strategy of engendering many offspring and expending small resources on their care and support, or the kindred strategy of engendering few offspring while expending large resources on their care and support. Due to the vastness of space and the cost of moving resources between star systems, the Hyades has adopted the reptilian strategy. The R-strategy means that Hyades will expend no concern nor care for the civilizations it uses to reproduce the cliometric vectors of its social organization.”

  “Yeah. Hyades treats us and everyone like the clap. I got the concept. Where are you going with this?”

  “You acknowledge, then, that to the Hyades Domination, we stand in the relation as an offspring, and the resources expended on us are calculated by the reptilian strategy of utmost frugality?” said the serpent.

  “Sure. Hyades casts out colonies without caring whether they live or die, like sea turtles leaving their eggs alone on a beach. Of course, I always wondered why Hyades put us into a situation where we had to build a Jupiter Brain in order to decode and transmit the secrets of pantropy and terraforming to our colonies. Because if we did not care, we wouldn’t have bothered … but what does this have to do with my question?”

  “Do you acknowledge that the entity astronomers called Cahetel, which will arrive in the Twenty-fifth Millennium, stands in the same relation to the Hyades as do we?”

  “Wait—what?”

  “The Cahetel entity, like Asmodel before her, is not an expedition as you understand the term. The Hermetic was sent to the Diamond Star as if she were still dependent upon and loyal to the authorities who dispatched and funded her. This was an error. When Hermetic returned, history had erased those authorities, and the new generation of polities on Earth, who were strangers to the Hermetic and her crew, attempted to confiscate the ship and cargo.”

  “A piratical crime we are still feeling the echoes of,” muttered Montrose. “Had it not been for that, Blackie would not have declared himself King of the World and Emperor of the North Pole or whatever.”

  “It was not a crime at all,” said the serpent coolly, “but a perfectly rational action which should have been anticipated. The expedition erred because the authority who sent it assumed a K-strategy, a kinship strategy, could be maintained across a fifty lightyear gap between Sol and the Diamond Star, across the one hundred twenty-five year interval between the expedition launch and return. We calculate that Hyades makes no such error.”

  “You mean the Hyades does not give a tinker’s damn about what happens to the Cahetel expedition?”

  “Affirmative. Because it is not an expedition properly so called, and neither was Asmodel. They were colonies. They happened to be colonies in motion. According to the Cold Equations the Hyades must use to organize their affairs in the long term, the expense in energy and the profits from cultivating the human race and seeding us to colony worlds, surely is borne by the entities, whatever their form, that live in the Cahetel Cloud or the Asmodel gas giant.”

  “Then they stand or fall all on their lonesome. That means—”

  It meant that armed resistance to the Hyades was not futile after all. They were not fighting an entire interstellar empire, just one boatload of adventurers, a cross between a squad of big-game hunters and slave-raiding party.

  It meant that the realization which so long ago had driven him into this self-inflicted exile was simply and hellishly wrong. Montrose was, despite himself, momentarily appalled at how long it had been. Eleven thousand, one hundred and thirty-five years. It was roughly the same amount of time that separated the Hamburg culture of Late Upper Paleolithic reindeer hunters from the year of his birth. And what had he accomplished during that time? He had napped.

  The serpent mask said, “Our psychology, which you dismiss as loveless and cruel, is based on this same mathematical model of reproductive strategy. This enables us to understand Cahetel. If the expense of conquest is too great, she must retreat to serve her own economic self-interest, and seek another target. Cahetel has no loyalty to Hyades, who will not avenge her downfall. If Man can drive off the Cahetel Cloud, she will not be allowed to return home to the Hyades stars.”

  “The Swans thought they could make the attack too expensive. All that will happen is that the Hyades will tack the extra cost to our bill, and keep the human race as an indentured servant for longer.”

  “Correction: the Cold Equations show that the entities like Cahetel and Asmodel take all the entrepreneurial risk themselves. We suspect Asmodel has been destroyed, because too many human colonies died, and the return on investment was insufficient. And, unlike the First Sweep, we need only maintain opposition for one thousand sixty years. At four lightyears distance, the White Ship will be within effective firing range.”

  “Hold up. What opposition? Was Asmodel destroyed? Destroyed? Are you saying—” Montrose realized that the Witch-woman, Zoraida, who had told him so unthinkably long ago that mankind had won
the war, had been no wild-eyed idealist. She had been right.

  Man had won.

  That meant he could win again.

  10. Dissent

  The biped spoke up, his voice cold and crisp. “Have we not been clear? With the departure of the Senior Del Azarchel, our prime memory chains have suffered divarication. There is an opposition faction among us who advocate a more efficient strategy of Hyades-Tellurian interaction. The five of us here occupying these four bodies represent the memory chains of this faction: you may called us Dissent.”

  “What is the, ah, more efficient strategy you advocate for Hyades cooperation?”

  The centaur said in a voice like a hunting horn: “Fight to the last man, and die in the breach.”

  Montrose did not bother to hide his expression of shocked stupidity. His eyes did not bulge out only because they were so deep set, but he stared, speechless.

  The centaur held up its gauntlets and said, “We are come to plead: Lead us. Inspire us, advise us!”

  The biped added coolly, “We know, beyond doubt, that you can be trusted to fight and to defy the Hyades. Our own master, Del Azarchel, whose echoes linger in the Jupiter Brain, we do not know beyond doubt.”

  Montrose said, “But you think the Jupiter Brain will permit opposition?”

  The serpent spoke, “Despite being incomprehensible, Jupiter is rational, surely. The Cold Equations determine what they determine. If it is more efficient to resist than to submit, then that efficiency will prevail even in the multidimensional labyrinths of nested mental ecologies forming the intellect of Jupiter.”

  “You hope so,” said Montrose sardonically.

  The wheel, in a voice as mechanical and emotionless as it had used before, said, “We cannot live without hope. Are we not men?”

  Montrose began slowing down the rate of rotation of the carousel on whose walls this chamber and all the curving corridor before it and behind it rested. The joke of maintaining an Earth-like environment had palled on him. He saw now that his next few centuries would be spent in space.

  When the centrifugal force had dropped to half Earth’s gravity, he stood, letting tentacles and bars of the logic crystal (which was, after all, just as much a part of him as his own brain) haul him upright.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “we have more resources to sustain a siege than ever mankind controlled during the First Sweep. This time, we do not pack everyone in the core of the Earth, and wait for the Hyades agent to blot out the sunlight. We use your asteroid homes. We make them all into ships, or warships, or sailing vessels able to maneuver through the interplanetary battle-volume. We fill them with your people, which y’all can multiply like the ants you are named for. Every asteroid with a nickel-iron core, we turn not into a logic diamond, but into solid murk logic, which is more compact. So instead of one White Ship, we will have a ten-thousand-ship Black Fleet, a glorious fleet! We get more minor planets from the Kuiper Belt, and look around for moons any Gas Giants ain’t using.”

  He drew a deep breath, eyes no longer looking at them. He was spellbound with a vision of an entire solar system armed and armored, fortresses larger than worlds, and all the moons and asteroids and meteors streaming like black battlewagons and superdreadnoughts toward the roaring inferno of war.

  “I accept the commission and the challenge. I will advise you in an unofficial capacity. I will fight. I’ll do it for her. It will be a fine thing to be alive again.”

  Montrose laughed, and it was the laugh of a titan. “By all the pestilence of hell! It will be a damn fine thing to be alive again!”

  2

  The War of Sol and Ain

  1. The Cloud

  A.D. 24087

  Thousands of years ago, the cloud humans had dubbed Cahetel had been traveling so near to the speed of light that it seemed to earthbound observers to be a disk flattened in the direction of motion, blue-shifted into the cosmic ray band of the spectrum, and so massive that its gravity distorted the image of the star Epsilon Tauri, also called Ain, lying directly behind it.

  The exact nature of the beam from Ain, which was pointed directly at Sol, occluded and filtered by passing through the cloud, proved impossible to analyze.

  After the cloud passed the halfway mark at seventy-five lightyears, the beam of energy issuing from Epsilon Tauri changed in character, and the cloud began losing mass.

  Earthly astronomers were not certain how a starbeam overtaking the Cahetel cloud from astern could be decelerating the cloud. There were many theories, from the sensible to the absurd. One of the more sensible was that the Ain beam was exciting certain volatile particles set aside for that purpose into jets facing forward into the bowshock wave of the cloud. These jets acted as rockets to brake the payload mass of the cloud, and at the same time the payload was polarized to not be affected by the beam, not accelerated further.

  One of the more absurd was that that starbeam from Ain was magnetic, and retarding the progress of the cloud, or was made of antigravitons, or some other exotic particle, to act as drag-chute or sea anchor or tractor beam.

  No one knew. But the loss of cloud mass as the centuries turned into millennia was more consistent with the absurd tractor beam theory than the sensible polarized beam theory.

  The cloud was now slowing for a rendezvous for the Solar System, and had matched Sol’s lateral motion through the interstellar medium in Sol’s long, slow orbit around the galactic core. It was one lightyear away.

  Montrose had parked his body somewhere, so that technicians could work on increasing his brain capacity, while his mind roamed the libraries of the Noösphere. From the many instruments of many astronomical satellites and observatories, he could see two sources of energy in and near the cloud. Something was boiling at the center of the cloud, giving off vents of X-ray and infrared radiation. There were also smaller flicks or blurs of light streaking the astronomical image, looking almost like a meteor shower.

  Hundreds of pellets, from the size of baseballs to the size of aircraft carriers had been placed in the oncoming path of the Cahetel cloud, surfaces inscribed over with the lines and curves and hieroglyphs both of Monument notation and of the later Cenotaph notation left on the moon by Asmodel.

  It was a contact message, explaining in the awkward pantomime language of the Monument and the Cenotaph, that mankind intended to defy Cahetel, to render the prospect of forced deracination to far colonies economically unfeasible according to the Hyades’ own cold equations of interstellar power.

  “Well, well,” said Montrose to himself, “our modest message in a bottle. Our own little UNWELCOME mat.” Then, remembering his old facility at Fancy Gap, Virginia, he added,

  SOL, HAPPY HOME OF THE HUMAN RACE

  —M.I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—

  THIS PLACE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE BADDEST

  BOLDEST WOLF-HEARTED EAR-BITING SUMBITCH

  ON WHICH THE SUN HAS EVER SHONE:

  TRESPASSERS KILLED ON SIGHT. NO KIDDING.

  NO SOLICITING.

  He looked again, through many instruments, at the brightness in the core of the cloud. Every thinking processes causes entropy and sheds heat of some sort, no matter how near-perfect the engineering. The activity in the core may have been Cahetel warming up their judgment engines or thawing out their expert brains to think about the messages Earth had left in the path.

  “Actually,” said Montrose to himself, “it is a Little Billy Goats Gruff message, ain’t it? Don’t pick on me. Eat my little brother instead.”

  Over Montrose’s objection, the Myrmidon High Commands, many years ago when the capsules had been launched, had insisted on including a star map showing the distance and direction to the surviving colonies at Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis. Montrose had argued, but the amassed minds of the Myrmidons had spread out before him the cliometric codes showing that if Tellus were deracinated, neither she nor Nocturne nor Splendor would survive, whereas if Nocturne or Splendor were looted of their populations, Tellus might survive, the
refore the human race. Montrose did not know how to argue against the sharp and clear conclusion of the mathematics.

  “Well,” Montrose concluded glumly, “if the cart is being chased by wolves, sometimes you throw the smallest kid out so the rest can get away. It ain’t pretty, but that’s life.”

  But was it the kind of life he wanted to live?

  2. No Reply, No Countermand

  A.D. 24097

  The message pellets remained bright over the next decade. The cloud was bouncing some sort of beam off them, either searchlights to read them by, or analytical torches to volatize fragments for analysis. It clearly was reading and studying them.

  No answer ever came from Cahetel.

  During that same decade, Montrose found he had to kill three of the Myrmidon High Command who interfered with the war effort, or who crossed him. Myrmidons had neither families to avenge nor formal laws to forbid such murders, provided they were done with the victim armed, awake, forewarned, and facing you. Eventually he had himself declared Nobilissimus, and that brought the number of challenges and duels down to a manageable level.

  Each day, every hour, Montrose expected an imperious command to ring out from beneath the cloud layer of Jupiter, instructing Tellus and the other planetary intelligences to prevent the human races from mounting any opposition to Cahetel.

  The call never came. Montrose pondered the silence soberly for many years, and wondered what it meant. He also pondered it while drunk.

  But he nonetheless continued with the preparations for the Black Fleet.

  3. Fifty Worlds

  A.D. 24099

  When Montrose was born, there had been eight planets in the Solar System. Two hundred years before that, there had been nine; and two hundred years before that, only six; in antique times, there had been seven, counting the sun and the moon as planets, but not Earth.