The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  The screens that thronged the dome showed the views from various elements of the fleet of worldlets. Sedna was currently near the rear of the flotilla, which occupied a doughnut-shaped volume. The flotilla had traveled roughly one hundred twenty light-minutes in the last two years, while the Cahetel entity had approached fifty-two thousand light-minutes closer to the Solar System. On an astronomical scale of a battlefield larger than solar systems, they could hardly said to have moved from their initial positions.

  Little Montrose wondered, not for the first time, what kind of minds, with what kind of psychology, could grasp these astronomical distances and make plans along such astronomical intervals.

  Pluto was the most forward of the planetary flotilla, and had polarized her mighty sails during the last month, to give her surface observatories a clear view of the enemy. Spending two years in the penumbra of the solar beam had heated her surface elements and formed an atmosphere, and the crewmen aboard Pluto had emerged to cover the lee hemisphere of the planet, the side facing the Sol’s beam, with gardens and arbors.

  The reflected light from the cloud had reached Pluto, from Sedna’s frame of reference, over four hours ago, and the concentrated light from Sol had struck Cahetel a year ago, and took a year to carry the message of what had happened to the observatories on Pluto, which were then relayed to the receivers on Sedna. It was these images Little Montrose raptly watched.

  “Space battles would be a lot easier if space was smaller,” muttered Little Montrose.

  “Beam impact in ten … nine … eight…” Big Montrose was saying, his eyes fixed on the image of the vast, dark thunderhead of Cahetel. The cloud was irregular, with wispy arms reaching many thousands of miles in each direction. The energy of its deceleration jets, facing toward them, surrounded the whole mass with a spray of nebular discharge paths, glowing blue and blue-white on the upper wavelengths of the spectrum. The whole looked like some freakish flesh-eating blossom of the Amazon river, with a heart of blue and petals of black.

  The main mass of the cloud of particles was roughly globular, but since it was four light-minutes in diameter, the trailing hemisphere of the cloud seemed oddly distorted, since the image of the light from the bowshock of the cloud reached the Plutonian receivers four minutes before.

  Little Montrose tapped the serpentine still circling his waist, and said. “Hey. You awake? While I was asleep, did anyone ever figure out how Cahetel was decelerating in the middle of an acceleration beam?”

  The serpentine said, “Yes. Observers on Pluto, able to detect and analyze short-range discharges, discovered that seven-tenths of the cloud mass are artificial particles such as existed, in theory, during the first three seconds of the universe, and not after. They possess a property called supersymmetry. Such particles were neither electromagnetic, nor neucleonic, nor gravitic, since the forces of the universe had not, before then, been separated into the forces known to the modern universe. The influence of the energy beam from Epsilon Tauri, coming from their stern, breaks the supersymmetrical particles into gravitons and photons and so on in the midst of a super-powerful toroidal magnetic field in the center of the cloud. This acts as a heavy particle accelerator…”

  The serpentine helpfully showed him an image on a screen near at hand, the electromagnetic aura of the field throbbing at the center of the cloud, the source of its impossible reverse acceleration.

  His eyes bulged, and his jaw dropped. He recognized the characteristics, the magnetic contours. It was a ring of artificial neutronium, a ring wider than the diameter of Earth. It was the same size and shape as the acceleration rings Asmodel had left floating in the surface of the sun. A twin. The energy contour was as identical as the shape of the same snowflake, the same fingerprint.

  “POX!” shouted Little Montrose. “Stop the beam! Cease firing! When our beam hits, that thing is going to—!”

  Of course, the events he was seeing had happened over a year ago. There was no stopping the solar beam.

  “… two … one … Sorry, what were you saying . .?”

  The beam struck. The observatory images from Pluto showed what looked like a lance of lightning impaling a storm cloud. The dark mass was suddenly bright with textures and folds of the cloudscape, complex as the folds of a brain cortex. The cloud was as wide as the orbit of Mercury, and even a beam as wide as the diameter of Saturn’s rings was merely a small spotlight playing across the valleys and hills and kraken-armed streamers and films of the cloud mass.

  Nonetheless, where the beam touched, there was a point of light brighter than the sun, and an expanding sphere of destruction, and another, and another. The scattering particles ignited like fireworks. The screens tuned to the X-ray and cosmic-ray bands of the spectrum went white and fell blind. On the visible wavelengths and on radar lengths, the cloud expanded like a smoke ring from the playful mouth of a cigar smoker. The core of the cloud was briefly visible. There were five Earth-sized globes inside, coated with dark ice, arranged in a gravitational pattern called a Kempler’s Rosette. In their middle was a ringworld. The globes acted as shepherding moons to stabilize the spin of the ringworld. In the middle of the ring was glittering the star Ain.

  For the first time in thousands of years, the star Ain, Epsilon Tauri, was visible to observers within the Solar System without the Cahetel cloud to obscure it. In the screen image, the star seemed as bright as a nova, for its stellar beam was pointed directly at the cameras and recorders of Pluto. But the star was reddened and distorted, surrounded by arcs and smears of light, as the photons shed by stars behind Ain suffered metric warp passing through the ring. The ring was rotating, creating a circular space warp, the frame-dragging effect. Only Ain, in the precise center of the distortion, was undistorted.

  The solar beam of destruction glanced across the cloud like the beam of a warship’s searchlight. For a moment, less than a second, it shone straight, an unbent ray. Then, instantaneously, part of the cloud mass imploded, and a volume of particles larger than a gas giant collapsed suddenly into a pinpoint, smaller (so the instruments Montrose saw reported) than the diameter of an atom. This microscopic black hole bent the solar beam, and focused it into the direct center of the spinning ringworld.

  But when the beam, charged with all the output of Sol, struck the center of the Cahetel ring, there was a flare of energy that crackled like lightning out from the ring surface, and traveled up the arms of the vents and filmy extensions of the cloud, as if these were antennae.

  “I was saying,” Montrose said softly, in a dull, stunned voice, “that the technology the cloud uses for decelerating inside the beam from Ain will allow them to control our beam as well. That is why they did not come in the same shape as the Asmodel entity.”

  And then the last thing Montrose could have expected or imagined happened. The cloud vanished, replaced by the peaceful and gleaming stars of empty space. Ain winked brightly in the middle.

  Or, rather, it seemed to vanish. It was not the constellation Taurus he was looking at. It was the constellation Scorpio, and the bright star in the middle was not Ain, but Sol, shining with the deadly emission of the solar beam. Montrose shouted for the Sedna Mind to recalibrate and give him a closer view. The serpentine (which was still embracing him) said softly that Sedna was no longer able to answer.

  “What the pox is going on, Big Me?”

  There was no reply from behind him, but a ghastly smell. He put his hand on the serpentine to turn himself around.

  The figure of the larger Montrose still loomed behind him, but his vast skull was on fire. Flares of a sparks, gushes of heat, and smoke were pouring from the holes where once mouth and nose and eye sockets had been.

  The black substance of his brain was now running out of the eyes and nostrils and mouth of what had once been Big Montrose and spreading over the surface of his burnt and blackened head, crawling upward and backward. It looked like a flower opening. The black murk coated the globe of the head, and dripped in inquisitive ropes down his nec
k and shoulders.

  The outline of the skull was visible through the coating of creaking black substance, holes like the fingerholes in a bowling ball marking the position of the eye sockets and mouth, which continued to emit fragments and worms of the murk material from which the brain of Big Montrose had been constructed.

  The body of Big Montrose, in one last convulsive movement—almost as if the nerves of his arm and hand had been preprogrammed to perform this action if signals from the central brain were cut—gripped a cylinder of metal from his coat pocket, and extended it unsteadily toward Montrose. It was a standardized brain-storage biosuspension unit, bright green metal marked with a red cross. It slid from the dead man’s giant fingers and fell with dreamlike slowness toward the crystal floor of the domed chamber.

  And the floor was no longer the golden white crystal of the Myrmidon Aurum. Starting from the feet of the titanic black-skulled corpse, the floor turned dark. A black snowfall of tiny particles of the murk substance dripping from the skull, eyeholes, and throat-pit of the vast corpse were falling to the floor, and where they touched, the picotechnology was altering the nanotechnology, and the floor grew wrinkled and dark.

  The chair next to Montrose flexed, turned black as India ink, and grew wrinkled and crooked all across its surface. Montrose, in a swift reflex, yanked the serpentine in his hand out of the socket connecting serpentine with the chair arm. There were other serpentines connected to the back of the seat. They turned black, writhed in a momentary spasm, and froze in position, looking like strange undersea weeds. The serpentine in his hand remained silver, apparently unaffected.

  7. Everything Talks

  “What the hell is going on?” Montrose said aloud.

  The serpentine answered him and said, “We are receiving a signal from the survivor on Pluto, a subaltern from the Vingtener memory-chain.”

  “Survivor?” There had been hundreds of men and thousands of minds aboard Pluto.

  “Only one survivor. He reports that all of our technology based on murk pseudo-atomic logic patterns has been absorbed by control signals from Cahetel. The supersymmetrical particle breaking system allowed Cahetel to reflect all photons back toward the source. The emission point sources accelerated rapidly during the broadcast and blue-shifted the visible light into the radio spectrum, on the wavelengths to which the murk was inherently reactive. The solar beam signal which Cahetel reflected will reach Jupiter four months from now, and Earth, who will be nearly in opposition at that time, forty-nine minutes later.”

  Montrose, standing with his fists clenched and the muscle in his jaw twitching as he ground his teeth, twice had to override the automatic rage and fear reactions triggered in his parasympathetic nervous system. (He enjoyed being able to do that: he recalled how often his natural body just plunged him into a rage or a panic without so much as a by-your-leave.)

  But perhaps some panic was reasonable now. The agents of Hyades had left behind the murk traces and the interstellar beam elements deliberately. They were confident that even an attack coming at the speed of light, with no warning, could be parried, manipulated, and flung back at the attacker in the specific wave-forms needed to paralyze and mesmerize and enslave an entire civilization.

  And anyone not using the murk, anyone backward enough to rely on nanotechnology rather than picotechnology, was probably not able to think quickly enough and carefully enough to form a threat anyway. What could technology on the biochemical level of artificial life do against technology on the atomic level of artificial elements?

  And who would use anything other than the starbeam praxis to launch an interstellar-level attack?

  But the kind of mind Cahetel commanded, the sheer thinking power needed, to catch a destructive torrent of energy, and transform it into control signals, and reflect it back across the entire diameter of a star system was appalling in its magnitude. It was beyond monstrous. It was godlike. Montrose adjusted his nervous system carefully, to let a moderate degree of awe and terror grip him.

  It was not so much fear as to prevent his next question: “Can we warn them? The Solar System?”

  “Subaltern Vingtener’s signal should reach any open receivers two minutes after the control signals take control of such receivers. Whether Cahetel allows the receivers to pass the signal through to any survivors, or permits the brains of the survivors to hear the warning, is, of course, a matter for Cahetel’s discretion. Anyone who is entirely disconnected from the Noösphere, such as yourself, and using no murk technology, will be spared.”

  Montrose, although much less intelligent than the larger version of himself who had died, was still much smarter than a baseline human. He saw the implication.

  He looked again at the ghastly spectacle of the ninety-foot-tall corpse, which as yet had not fallen. It did not even seem to be relaxed from standing at attention, despite that heartbeat and breathing had stopped.

  Montrose studied the artificial memory chains which were installed in this body he was occupying, saw how to issue the commands to the multivariable cells in various parts of his nerves and organs, and in short order grew a triple set of Melusine antennae, which he used to detect the electronic and neucleonic activity rippling and throbbing through the black murk coating the faceless horror looming over him.

  Montrose said, “Can you translate for me? It is thinking in a variation of Cenotaph code.”

  The serpentine said, “Yes, although I do not have an access point.”

  Montrose drew out his sidearm. He stared at it carefully, remembering what Big Montrose had said about the manufactured objects in this era, and realizing for the first time that he, Little Montrose, had almost no memory of this era. He did not recall the worldwide wars or riots he had launched, the ministers and dignitaries he had killed, the other men he had humiliated, or robbed, or slandered, or ruined, in his ruthless attempt to become the Master of the World. He remembered that he had wanted and needed to seize control of the war effort of the whole Tellurian Noösphere and of all three human races, and all the resources and manpower of an entire interplanetary civilization—because he did not trust anyone else to make the right decisions on how to fight this war. And his decisions had led to this.

  The pistol said, “Sir? Are you contemplating suicide?”

  He was not surprised it could talk. “Why do you ask?”

  “You have the expression on your face typical of suicides.”

  “No, that is just the natural cast of my features.”

  “And you have the neural and glandular contour consistent with the profile.”

  “Um. It is the natural cast of my glands. Can you configure yourself to—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What the pox? You didn’t hear what I was going to ask.”

  “Your previous orders on the topic were clear. You wish me to act as a transmitter capable of interfering with picotechnology-based information cascades, to enable you to attract the attention of software embedded in murk fragments.”

  “When did I give those orders?”

  “Before you issued me, along with a uniform, to the smaller version of yourself you had formed from isolated biological matrices.”

  “Suit!” He slapped himself in the chest. “Can you talk, too?”

  A voice came out of his uniform buttons. “Yes, sir. Everything talks. All matter is programmable using the techniques Jupiter developed.”

  “What did I order you to do?”

  “To keep your smaller version isolated from any neural contact with logical crystal systems or Noösphere channels connected to any murk-based system.”

  Montrose closed his eyes. He felt a hot sting of tears under his lids. Big Montrose had known. He had known from the beginning. Damn him.

  He handed the pistol to the serpentine. “Use this. Establish contact.”

  “Sir? What message do you want me to send?”

  “Start with ‘Hello, you bastard.’”

  “That concept may not translate.”
>
  “Start with the opening of the Monument First Contact message.”

  There was a quiet hum from the serpentine. That was a surprise. Serpentine operations were nearly always silent. This task, apparently, was straining it to the utmost.

  Time passed. Montrose stepped off the balcony, floated down to the dark floor, and picked up the brain storage cylinder.

  The tag read: MONTROSE, MENELAUS ILLATION (FIRST, ELDER). HANDLE WITH CARE.

  “You sentimental bastard,” said Montrose. And he began to weep.

  It was his original, biological brain, held in suspended animation, slumbering.

  3

  The Virtue Cahetel

  1. The Imperative

  “I have an answer, sir,” said the serpentine after four hours. Montrose was back up on the balcony with the whiplike machine.

  Even in the light gravity, Montrose had found his feet getting tired after a time. The cylindrical braincase he recovered from the floor far below was large enough that, upended, he could sit on his brains like a stool.

  “Show me.”

  And all the screens scattered across the balcony rails and about the dome lit up. They were black, crisscross with the thin silver lines, angles, and sine waves of the Monument Code.

  Montrose read it.

  TWO-WAY COMMUNICATION IMPERATIVE NOTIFIED.

  That was its way of saying hello, he guessed.

  “Who are you?” he said to the gigantic, appalling figure in the center of the silent dome.

  The ninety-foot dead giant tilted its head as if turning toward Montrose, the empty eye sockets from which frozen streams of murk hung like icicles of ink. It must have been pure coincidence. The entity was perhaps trying to position some receiver buried in the circuits and lobes of the murk closer to the needle-beam of the communication laser the serpentine was shooting from Montrose’s talking gun. But it looked like a blind man trying to peer at someone.