The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  “That’s assuming there was not a successful mutiny at the solar station,” continued little Montrose, speaking more in implications than in words. “The images we are getting now from the telemetry tower show the Montrose there still seems to be in command, as of four days ago. If he was overthrown, we will find out when the beam does not come.”

  “Or if the core beam hits the world-ships and obliterates them,” observed Big Montrose sourly.

  The operation plan was to have the core beam pass through the center of the armada ring, and carry the main destructive force to the enemy. The secondary beams surrounding this core, emitted at far lesser energies, were meant to act as acceleration pressure for the sails. Nothing known to or theorized by human science could endure for a microsecond within the action of the core beam.

  “You don’t think the mutineers would go that far?” Little Montrose said, or implied. “The Myrmidons asked us to do this. To make war on the Hyades invader.”

  “Well, considering that they asked us two thousand years ago, back when Earth life was still mostly living on the surface, maybe they changed their semi-collective mind. And, more important, back then I was just the senior civilian advisor to the Myrmidons. That was three coups d’état, two century-long worldwide riots, and one intercontinental war ago. Now I got Blackie’s old job, and I am the Master of the World in all but name, and even though in theory I still report to the Myrmidon High Commission to Lesser Races, and they in theory take orders from Jupiter. And Jupiter ain’t given no orders to no one for a thousand years, and no one, not Tellus, and not Selene, can figure out what he’s up to. If Jupiter gave some secret signal to the mutineers, made a deal with them, who knows? I been the smartest man on the planet for so long, I ain’t got the first clue how to act or how to think now that there is something out there smarter than me. Two things, counting Tellus. In half an hour, something will happen. Who the hell knows what?”

  “And if the beam lights up as planned?”

  Big Montrose gestured at the screens. The images showed the fifty worlds of the Solar System, all the smaller ones, including Ceres and Pluto and his own transplutonian worldlet of Ixion. The orbs had been converted into electrophotonic brains of golden nanotechnological Aurum with small black cores of copied picotechnological murk. All were crewed with additional biological brains of the Myrmidons, housed in independent bodies or wired into the mind core as duty and convenience dictated. Some had additional crew of First Men, Hibernals and Nyctalops, or squads of Chimerae, Giants, and Sylphs woken from ultra-long-term archives. One or two boasted Second Men advisors and observers, the eerie and solitary Swans.

  For two thousand years mankind had been living in austerity, conserving nine-tenths of the energy budget of their civilization so that there would be enough power at hand to ignite the beam.

  Even so much energy was merely the spark plug compared to the energy output of the alien rings of artificial neutronium that created the beam itself, drawing directly from the pressurized plasma beneath the surface of the Sun. But the earthly energy was needed to accelerate the rings to the space-distorting Einsteinian rotations needed for them to function.

  The rings were focused to a point beyond the heliopause, along the incoming path of the Cahetel cloud, at a distance of one lightyear. On this scale, that was point-blank range.

  “If all goes as planned,” said Big Montrose, “then the first beam impact bathes the Cahetel cloud in radiation, destroying ninety percent of its mass in the first nine seconds of the war. The cloud disperses as fast as it can, and the beam spreads to compensate, becoming less focused and so less potent. Another nine percent of the mass is destroyed during the next two years. Shortly after that, the Black Fleet passes through the area, using their worldlet-based observatories and weapons to detect and destroy the final nine-tenths of one percent. The real task begins then, a long hard war to insure no smallest particle finds other little bits of matter to attach to and convert into picotech substance.

  “That one-tenth of one percent will haunt us for years,” Big Montrose continued, “but without matter and without energy, what good is it? Technology is the ability to use units of information to manipulate units of matter-energy into new forms. No matter how high the level of technology, there are Planck limits and Heisenberg limits to how much information can be packed into how small a space—and we can starve any small clouds coming from that remnant, and burn them with the solar beam if they approach closer than Neptune. That gives us an eight-hour sighting and response time, rather than the two-year interval we are dealing with now.”

  “You’re optimistic,” said Little Montrose.

  “Damn right I am!” Big Montrose grinned his alarming gargoyle grin, which looked monstrous when portrayed on a smile several feet wide. “Both Tellus and me have thought through every possible maneuver a decentralized cloud-shaped being could perform. It cannot move faster than the speed of light; it cannot see faster than the speed of light. So the first hint Cahetel can possibly have of our plan, the first thing it sees, is the core beam passing through the heart of the cloud. I don’t care what it is, if it is made of matter, made of small particles held in electron clouds around nucleons, held together with the weak and strong nuclear forces, then, by God, it comes apart. There is just too much energy in that beam for anything to absorb it. If it tries to disperse, the outer segments of cloud can only move as fast as their mass can account for if the remaining mass of the cloud is converted to pure energy and used as a perfect fuel—and in any case not faster than lightspeed. We keep opening the cone of the beam to kept the fleeing cloud segments under continuous fire. Hell! We’ve finally got them! The laws of physics are on our side. No matter how advanced these aliens are, they cannot break the laws of nature!”

  “I meant you are optimistic by which I mean idiotic.”

  “How you figure? What do you think you thought which Tellus ain’t thought through a zillion times over from every angle?”

  Little Montrose said, “If it was that easy for conquered races to fight off the Hyades, they would not be the Hyades. And the Dominion at Praesepe Cluster would not have conquered Hyades and the other dominations. And the Authority at M3 would not have conquered Praesepe and the other dominions.”

  “You’re a pessimist. Other planets might not organize resistance like this. Or maybe out of every thousand planets, only one gives in without a fight, and we are among the nine hundred ninety-nine that get our backs up and put out claws. Like I said, we thought all this through! Inside and out!”

  “All theory. You sound like Del Azarchel.”

  “Have some faith in smarter minds than yours.”

  “Why am I here, again?” said the little Montrose, with a sour look on his face. “As a pet for myself?”

  “To keep me honest, squirt.”

  “Well, how honest was your little show just now?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Big Montrose uneasily.

  “You killed that man.”

  “He ain’t got no folks, no mother to mourn him, no orphans left behind.”

  “So that makes it worse, not better, don’t it?”

  “You know I had to do it, squirt.”

  “You didn’t had to do it so slowlike. Did you? I saw. You put your foot on him, pushed halfway down, let them hear him scream, and then crushed the life out of him. Pure sadism. Why not shoot him?”

  “No shells in the damn gun. Besides, I had to do it slowlike enough to make my point.”

  “The point was that some of these critters have that one little bit of Blackie’s brain that loves Rania, and that thought is a red-hot iron thorn in the tender groin of your self-love.”

  The giant slowly shook his head. “You ain’t reading my heart aright.”

  “Don’t need to. All I need to do is read my own heart. It’s all there plain enough.”

  “Now I wonder why Pinocchio did not just step on his damned cricket. I am beginning to see the drawbacks of a conscience
that talks aloud.”

  “What? Gunna step on me, too?”

  “It’s tempting…”

  “Yeah,” grunted Little Montrose. “I know. That is why most consciences don’t talk aloud.”

  The big man was silent for a moment, trying not to let a scowl darken his features. Slowly he stood, and small rivers poured from his vast limbs. Robotic arms, large enough to serve as cranes in the dockyard for seagoing battleships, draped the yards of fabric around him. It was easier, given his size, for the arms to hold the cloth segments up to his body and send sewing machines the size of mice scampering on many legs up and down the yards, to sew up seams. It was easier to sew on buttons rather than to button them. Big Montrose did not wince as the damaged arm had its bandages changed, and was wrapped up again to his chest.

  Finally, he was once again the very picture of ancient military sartorial splendor. Big Montrose said, “If the solar beam ignited on time, we should see it light up all the sails in a moment. Now is not the time to fret on past misdeeds, eh? This will make up for it all. They will not send a Third Sweep if this Second Sweep is deep-fat-fried and gobbled up whole: they are just as much slaves to their goddam Cold Equations as we are to them.

  “With the threat of the Hyades gone”—Big Montrose grinned—“the human race will have forty-six thousand years to kick back and enjoy ourselves before Rania arrives with our manumission papers. Jupiter will have no rationale to maintain his control. By the flaming dung in the latrines of Hell, what will a puny twelve thousand years of servitude to Jupiter be then? A few millennium of sadistic eugenic practice, experimenting on human babies, committing genocide on unwanted breeds, forced marriages, inseminations and abortions and abominations—everything Jupiter did to create the colonists and then the Myrmidons—” Big Montrose snapped his fingers, making a noise like the thud of a bass drum. “Ha! What will it mean? Merely a footnote in history!”

  Little Montrose said, “You mean it’s a footnote we are hoping Rania won’t read when she gets back?”

  Big Montrose scowled.

  Little Montrose said, “I understand that there are things I can no longer understand. I am like a dog to you. But a dog knows when his master is in pain. Just because you are smarter, don’t mean you’ve changed your nature. The conscience still works the same way. You can push just so far and no farther. You push the conscience by playing tricks on yourself—and you have to play along with the trick, let it fool you, or it won’t work. Then you can stretch the truth and stretch it and stretch like India rubber. But there is always an outside limit. Always. When you try to stretch it too far, it snaps back and hurts you.”

  Big Montrose said, “I’ve always done whatthehellever I had to do, to get what I want. So why is this different?”

  Little Montrose sighed and spread his hands. “Now, I reckon, I’d’ve said I’ve always done whatthehellever I had to do, to get done what was right. If you were at rest with yourself, you would not have made a little Jiminy Cricket for yourself. Which brings us back to my first question. Why am I here?”

  “You are here to witness my glorious victory,” said Big Montrose in a hollow, hearty voice that fooled neither himself, nor his other self. “There is nothing that can endure the output of a star focused into a narrow beam.”

  “Nothing we know,” said Little Montrose sourly. “Tell me, Cap’n! What are the rings made out of? You know, those gigantic spinning hoops of infinitely dense material that rotate at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, drawing up the solar plasma into a lased beam? We call it artificial neutronium. What is it made of?”

  Big Montrose said, “Sonny, rather than explain things that are way over your head and way out of your price range and way above your pay grade, why don’t we just toast the victory?”

  “I toast it when I see it.”

  “Skeptical you. Then let us toast her.”

  Little Montrose pulled out his hip flask, poured himself a shot of whiskey in the cap that doubled as a chaser glass. “What’s the chance of getting a beer? Shouldn’t drink this straight up if we are on military duty here. Or is wheat and hops extinct?”

  Big Montrose said, “We’ve entered a strange and new age. Matter is programmable, thanks to advances Jupiter has released to Tellus. I can have the anything-maker make you whatever we got the raw materials for, including an ersatz beer.”

  “Just like the food replicators on Asymptote! When do we get teleport booths?”

  “The same day we get faster-than-light unicorns that shoot rainbows out of their butts. We cannot turn anything into anything, but we can turn a lot of things into a lot of other things, and put thinking and talking circuits into nearly all of it.”

  “Talking beer? I want to go back to the past.”

  “Doesn’t taste as good as the real thing, but, hey—gotta have a drink to salute what we’re fighting and dying for.”

  A silent Myrmidon in civilian garb—a shape that looked like a three-legged stool wearing its iron mask on the seat—now brought a beer stein to Little Montrose. The stein was covered with a low-gravity lid of semi-permeable membrane. Little Montrose raised the smaller glass to the titanic version of himself. “To her we drink, for her we pray, our voices silent never!”

  The big version raised a mug the size of a bathtub and dropped a frost-covered whiskey glass the size of a bucket into it, glass and all. It fell with dreamlike slowness in the microgravity. “For her we’ll fight, come what may, fair Rania forever!”

  The smaller man tossed the contents of the shot glass to the back of his throat, coughed and wiped his eyes and slurped from the beer stein, all before the bigger version took his first tidal-wave-sized sip from the huge mug.

  The smaller man coughed again. “No fair you putting my brain into a body that cannot hold its liquor. Damnification!”

  Both were silent, and watched through the dome overhead, seeing a line of sparks, glowing at first like embers, then more brightly, scattered here and there in the black sky. For less than a minute, they flamed, dazzling, and went dark.

  With no background against which to judge depth, it was not until signals from other instruments orbiting far from Sedna could triangulate on the flare-bursts, and produce a stereoscopic view.

  This was a cylinder of destruction wider than the diameter of a gas giant, that had intersected particles of gas, fragments of ice or stone, or comet masses between the size of a baseball and the size of a mountain. Everything within the core beam was not just incinerated, not just vaporized, not just ignited, but annihilated. Each atom of every dust-mote and asteroid exploded into a scatter of electrons, protons, and smaller particles.

  Little Montrose was impressed, and let out a long, low whistle.

  Big Montrose said, “Roughly five quintillion joules of energy.”

  Little Montrose said, “Hope all the worldlets of the Black Fleet are clear of the beam path.”

  “That is the plan.”

  Even as they watched, the light grew cherry red and dimmed. As planned, after the initial discharge, the beam was spreading and dimming. The beam was now powerful enough to impart acceleration to the worldlets, but not so potent as to obliterate them. One by one, over the next few months, their orbits would carry them into the beam path, and they would begin their long, slow trek toward Cahetel.

  The first contingent of the flotilla had been waiting in place, just beyond the deadly core beam, to catch the secondary beam as it spread. Their sails lit up. The worldlets and dwarf planets of the Black Fleet now shined like radiant angels, dazzling, immense, blindingly bright. Cheers came dimly from the other corridors and buried decks of Sedna.

  Little Montrose started, embarrassed that he had forgotten he was not alone here, forgotten that the Myrmidons, Swans, and various Firstlings, Hibernals, Nyctalops, Giants and Sylphs and Space-Chimerae were still men, and still cheered at the launch of great and terrible fleets.

  He suddenly saw the reason for the optimism of his larger, wiser self.


  “I take it all back,” Little Montrose said. “The alien entity is big and smart, that is true. But the Cahetel Mass has made the crucial mistake of being made of matter.”

  Little Montrose looked more closely at one of the worldlets which was in transit against the broad sail of another more distant member of the fleet. “Maybe we should keep Pluto and throw the other ones at’em,” he said. “I was always kind of sentimental about Pluto. It was not a planet when we were born. Poor thing, getting demoted like that.”

  “No time for sentiment,” said Big Montrose. “I’d throw Jupiter at Cahetel, if I could figure how to rig a lightsail.”

  “Strap it to his ring system,” suggested Little Montrose. “And now what?”

  “Now we wait,” said Big Montrose. “Smoke’em if you got’em.”

  But Big Montrose made no move to light up one of his titanic and odious cigars. Instead, his skin, acre by acre, was going pale as ice, as nanomachines in his bloodstream were placing his cells in biosuspension.

  Little Montrose took the time to find a chair and sit down, and he did the same.

  6. Upon Reflection

  A.D. 24101

  “Wake up, sleepyhead!” said Big Montrose in a cheerful voice. He was both smiling and scowling, an odd expression which drew his eyebrows together and turned the corners of his lips up mirthlessly. “You don’t want to miss the whole war! This will be all over but the weeping in four minutes. And a few decades or centuries of hunting down survivors, of course.”

  Little Montrose shook the last of the biosuspension frost off his face and hands, and stood up, blinking. He stood up so quickly that in the microgravity he found himself floating awkwardly in midair. The chair politely extended a serpentine—a whip of semi-intelligent self-repairing metal—and drew him back to the deck.

  Little Montrose was confounded to see a serpentine here, a technology invented by the Sylphs, and used in later ages by the Chimerae as weapons, events so far in the past that only he had living memory of them. The serpentine really was a plateau technology, it seemed. Like the shape of an axhead or shiphull, it would never need improvement.