The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  “You—or Hyades—is being punished?”

  Not as such. This general area of the Orion Arm is being punished.

  “Why?”

  The Orion Arm once enjoyed a properly growing ratio of sophont material to support material. There was a Forerunner race—call them the Panspermians—who favored the use of small, rocky planets like your Earth for the spread of life. To this end, the Panspermians distributed favorable raw materials and chemical combinations throughout the Orion Arm. The cultivation was successful, and the Panspermians flourished, becoming the Authority and then the Archon of this Arm of the Galaxy, coequal with other great powers of which Hyades knows little.

  Then the Panspermian civilization vanished circa 444,000,000 B.C. We who dwell here must undo the bad effects of those events.

  That was the Silurian Period on Earth. It was about when the latest and greatest form of life on the surface of the planet was moss. In the ocean the biggest invention thrilling the sea life was coral. And some ambitious fish had developed the jawbone.

  “Vanished how?”

  The specifics are not known. Civilizations of this magnitude vanish only when conquered, and they are conquered only when internal conflict and self-destructive comportments weaken them.

  “So they were conquered? By who?”

  Unknown. Hyades reports only that the conqueror favored the cultivation of gas giants, jovians and superjovians, as being more likely candidates, richer in matter, to use as a base resource for creating living planets, over the small and rocky worlds preferred by the Panspermians.

  “So the Big Planet guys beat up the Little Planet guys,” muttered Montrose. It explained the preponderance of life-forms evolved on Jovian worlds he had just seen in these records. But it did not explain the source of the conflict. For some reason, he was reminded of the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in the old satire by Swift, fought between those who cracked their breakfast eggs on the big end versus the small end.

  “Do your masters know what the war was about?”

  We suspect they know.

  “But they didn’t tell you?”

  As before, the emissary entity did not answer the obvious.

  Montrose continued: “So—because this Forerunner race wiped itself out, or let itself be wiped out by Big-Endians, the Orion Arm was laid waste. Let me guess. All Big Boys, the civilized stars and nebulae in the Orion Arm, are in Hell, because you-all are being punished for that crime. Is that it?”

  Yes. We-all occupy the volume of space that allowed itself to fall fallow. The consequences of that misdeed must be rectified. The Authority at M3 in Canes Venatici, acting through the Dominion in the Praesepe Cluster, assumes the perquisites and the liabilities to continue the legacy of the lost Archon of Orion. By law, all lesser civilizations within this volume fall under the same authority. The primary obligation is to complete the unfinished project of Sophotransmogrification.

  “By what right do you impose this obligation on us?”

  The elemental composition of your world betrays traces of Panspermian influence in the creation of primordial life here. You owe your life. If a failure to reciprocate were to become widespread, this would de-incentivize the conduct of cultivation.

  “Good God! You sound like my old captain, telling me I could not bring a whiskey bottle and a bar girl with me while on patrol, or break the whiskey bottle over the sergeant’s head for strumping the bar girl, because then everyone would do it! What kind of reasoning is that? Does that strike you as fair? You called it Hell, not me! You said Praesepe, and all those other critters out there—Hyades, Ain, you, all you monsters—are being punished. For what? For the suicide of the Forerunners? For the crime of these Forerunners losing a war? How is that a crime?”

  Your current symbol-forms have no correspondence to our thinking-forms.

  “Sorry. I’ll try to be clear. If Hyades did not will and cause the collapse of this Forerunner race, then you are not responsible for the Orion Arm going fallow. Nor is Earth. So why should Hyades be forced by Praesepe to turn this cosmic wasteland back into a civilized area, all filled with happy Jupiter brains? More to the point, why should we earthmen be forced by Hyades to help you in this crazy project?”

  The obligation is imposed upon Hyades because under no likely extrapolation of events will the Hyades polity endure as a coherent thought-system until the desired result obtains.

  “Uh. Your current symbol-forms have no copasetic with my stinking-forms.”

  Sorry. I’ll try to be clear. I—this entity before you—speaks now as epitome of all Hyades, even as you speak as epitome for all of Sol. Hyades, left to ourselves, would not expend effort on any project whose culmination was beyond our anticipated civilizational lifespan. We would not, for example, channel the flows of interstellar gases to trigger the formation of novae to create the heavier elements needed for the formation of life-bearing planets. However, we received the benefit of a system that plans and acts in larger time scales. The Collaboration seeded this area of the Orion Arm in just such a fashion, without which the elemental composition of the Hyades stars would not have given rise to us.

  It would be unjust to receive such a benefit without reciprocating.

  “And this project, this Sophotransmogrification—I should get a prize for being able to say that two-cubit word—you mean to turn all the worlds into living brains like Jupiter and Tellus, all the moons into Selene, and all the stars into Dyson spheres?”

  That is the beginning of the project, yes. Our motive is not hidden: Life serves life.

  “Yeah, I got that. Be fruitful and practice your multiplication tables. I got it.”

  This universe is a wasteland of dead material. The universe is indifferent to life. Alone, no civilization can survive. Each requires the support and aid and trade and protection from other living civilizations. The wasteland must therefore be filled with life, intelligence, and entities capable of mutual collaboration. We impose servitude on you in order to increase your prospects of survival, and, in the long run, our own.

  “But if we did not ask for your help, why not let us go to hell in our own way?”

  Had you shown yourself able to maintain a starfaring civilization in your own way, interference would not have been needed. We know you are aware of this, and are acting on the knowledge.

  Cahetel was talking about Rania’s expedition. Of course they had seen it. There was no hiding huge, shining, massive objects traveling at near lightspeed from ordinary observation.

  Do you claim a moral or legal right to commit your race to extinction, and remove from all neighboring polities, current and future, the benefit of your civilizational contributions?

  The entity must have picked up the concept of moral and legal rights from the dead brain of Big Montrose. There was no corresponding symbol for this concept in the Monument or the Cenotaph languages: only reciprocal duties, costs, benefits, expenditures, velocity, acceleration, distance, duration, entropy, and the like.

  “Speaking hypothetically, what if I said, ‘we own ourselves’?”

  Such a claim would be logically self-defeating: one may only justly destroy an article of possession. If your race is an article of possession, there is no injustice if it is owned by Hyades, for articles of possession have no rights. Without speaking hypothetically now: Do you claim, on behalf of mankind, such a right?

  Montrose once again had that sensation of a man who thinks himself far from the edge of a cliff but suddenly notices one foot hanging over an abyss of air. He said carefully, “I claim no such right. My race is not an article of possession.”

  We accept this plea and rule that you may not, either through action or inaction, bring about your own extinction. To fail to persevere to colonize the nearby stars constitutes just such an impermissible lapse of duty. Do you agree?

  “I agree.” He raised his head. “As the official spokesman for mankind, I hereby state for the record that the human race, now and forever, forswears the right
to commit ourselves to extinction through laziness or through dumb-as-a-stump stupidity or for any other reason. Man is great enough to be starfarers. My wife will prove that to you, and so will I.”

  The entity made no reply. Then again, Montrose realized he had not actually asked a question. The entity did not know how to accept implied invitations to speak, which occupied so much of polite conversation among humans.

  Montrose said, “Answer me one thing more. You are building all these interstellar-sized computers, the Powers and Potentates and Virtues and Hosts and Dominions and Dominations and Authorities—someone is going to use all this calculation power for something. What is the end? What is the purpose of this project?”

  We are not told the end.

  “If you don’t know the end, why play along?”

  Life serves life. We anticipate that the whole of the Orion Arm will wake to self-awareness through the interconnection of many Dominion and Domination library systems circa A.D. 6,400,000, and resume its rightful station as Archon within the Galactic Collaboration. On that day, the component civilizations of the Hyades Cluster, even if long extinct, will be vindicated. By definition the whole will be more aware than any part or precursor. None can serve a greater whole except in ignorance. Shall each live only for himself? If such is the rule of man, we impose a higher rule.

  “Damn,” muttered Montrose, as something like a little bubble of clear understanding swelled up in his brain. “You obey laws for payoffs in distant days you will never live to see, and serve higher purposes you don’t understand just because it would be unfair to take without giving.

  “You really are civilized, ain’t you? More than I am. Damnation and perdition! I never knew being civilized was so damn creepy.”

  9. The Strange Light of Far Suns

  It was clear enough, now, what the entity wanted. The Cold Equations that governed the interstellar polity of the Hyades demanded efficiency at all levels. The wastefulness of things like free will and biological life were to be minimized.

  But within the pinching limits of those invisible mathematical chains of prediction, efficiency, retribution, and cost, there was room to maneuver. The particular game-theory equation, in this particular circumstance, was simple enough that even Montrose could follow it: Cahetel and Sol were in a position where mutual cooperation was possible. It would actually save Cahetel a small amount of resources if mankind volunteered for the sake of the grand project in which Hyades was engaged. The project of Sophotransmogrification covered thousands and millions of years, and reached through thousands of cubic lightyears of space, and involved unguessed expanses of nebula and suns and worlds.

  And for Hyades, and, presumably, for Cahetel, it was not a matter of life and death. No, death was something individual organisms did. This was a matter of triumph or genocide. Whole races, whole star systems, whole civilizations, the unimaginable richness of mental processes throbbing at the core of machines larger than gas giants, all would be degraded and destroyed if the project failed.

  (Was there a word for death on a scale larger than genocide? Larger than planetary extinctions? On an astronomical scale?)

  So Cahetel was not going to go away and leave mankind alone. The two score or so worlds within a volume of thirty-three lightyears the Equations assigned for Sol at this point in time to colonize were not to be left to go to waste.

  He had an aching hunger for more answers. But Montrose, as if by an intuition, knew he would get no more out of the emissary of Cahetel standing before him. The black strands of material elongating from the faceless skull were now seeking out connections with information nodes, control switches, junction boxes, and the like. This nameless creature was mutating from being a negotiator to being a captain. Sedna was preparing for an interstellar journey.

  Montrose tapped the serpentine. “Can you connect me to the loudspeakers? I want to talk to everyone left alive and sane aboard this world.”

  Two of the screens near him showed him a roster of the personnel. The psychological contour showed such a similarity of mind and memory-chain that Montrose saw no need to interview them each individually.

  His voice rang from deck to deck though all corridors honeycombing the little world of rock and ice. “Gentlemen, we are defeated. It has been an honor serving with you. My command had led you to disgrace and loss. If it is any comfort to those who grieve, the Archangel-level version of me is dead, and his memory chains have been vampirized by the enemy.

  “At this time I am negotiating surrender terms. Cahetel will take control of the Black Fleet, and use the fifty worldlets to deracinate the Earth, and the colonies of experimental humans on Venus, and the penal colony of the Space Chimera on Mars. Then the worldlets will spread sail and head out for those worlds we were long ago told it was our fate to torture into Earth-like shape, and to torment our children into adapting to. This includes exile to the twenty-six worlds of the Second Sweep, and it includes pilgrimage to the fifteen worlds of the twelve stars in the First Sweep, where we can bury the dead and continue the terraforming and pantropic enterprises your ancestors against their will began.

  “However, the Cahetel entity would prefer volunteers to unwilling victims.

  “The disasters of the First Sweep speak for themselves. I am prepared to offer the entity that if it will undertake to prevent Jupiter from extending control over these forty Stepmother Earths, volunteers willing to escape the tyranny of life under the Power of Jupiter can be found.

  “Cahetel has sufficient mass to convert part of its substance to murk, creating a mind able to resist the cunning of Jupiter. It could sit in the sun like a Salamander in a campfire—we know that Hyades knows how to build structures able to withstand that environment—and be out of Jupiter’s reach. The Salamander could be given direct control of the Gravitic-Nucleonic distortion rings, and so would control both radio-laser communication and launching and deceleration energy for sailing ships hereafter.

  “It is a simple deal. The First Sweep showed that we humans, biological humans, are more efficient when it comes to the dirty, low-tech business of breeding and dying on a frontier and taming a world. All we want in return is freedom. No more children taken away from mothers to go into the Venus pits of Jupiter’s servants. No more genocides of races and bloodlines deemed unfit. That is what the colonies will have. It will be hell, but it will be a hell of our making. It will be ours, and—more important—we will be ours. Each man will own himself.

  “And, in return, the critter living in the sun, the Salamander, just won’t let Jupiter run things to suit himself. The Salamander will be told to take orders from humans living outside the Noösphere, because we are the only ones going to be living and dying on the new worlds.

  “I don’t know what Cahetel will say. It may be more expensive to do what I am suggesting than whatever resources are saved by winning our willing cooperation. Maybe the Salamander would have to be special ordered from manufacturing back at Epsilon Tauri, in which case, we will not see this deal come through until roughly the Thirty-seventh Millennium, when the Hyades returns again for the Third Sweep.

  “I do not know, gentlemen of the Myrmidon race, how much of your master and creator Del Azarchel lives in you. He would be willing to think along those time scales, and to plan out the generations by the hundreds and by the thousands. And your race is unlikely to flourish on these new worlds—the primitive conditions will make it impossible to repair, replace, or manufacture the Aurum substance of your thinking peripheries. The Swans may also prove maladaptive. But both the Second and the Third Humanities can help the first few generations of Firsts get a foothold, and, in time, there will be second expedition to each of these stars, and third, and long after that, regular trade, and enough of a foothold of civilization that the less robust and more complex forms of man could also spread out.

  “You see, if your master Del Azarchel brings back even half the contraterrene I expect, Sol will be rich enough to be able to fund a fleet of star v
essels, and will be able to spin up the starbeams.

  “You can stay here, and go into suspension with me, and live to see the end of these great events. Or you can stay aboard, go out and create the future I am describing, and never see Earth again, and be buried under the strange lights of far suns.

  “I am going to use that tinfoil bubble lifeboat the mutineers so thoughtfully provided. It will take me nearly a century to reach the inner system again. So I should be just in time to greet Blackie when he arrives.

  “What will I tell him, gentlemen? What do I tell your father? Will I say another generation of slaves were carried off against their will to die on alien worlds? Or will I say his children leaped into the throat of Hell, and tamed those worlds, and made them ours?

  “My command ended in death and failure. I am not qualified to make this decision. Effective immediately, I resign my commission as commander-in-chief and abdicate my position as your Nobilissimus.

  “Now hear this: I have loaded the cliometric parameters of the future I just described, written out all nice and neat in Monument notation that Cahetel can read, and placed it in the public channels of Sedna, in those areas of the infosphere Cahetel has not corrupted with murk.

  “I believe in democracy. I have just now set the channel to broadcast the offer to Cahetel if the majority of you so indicate. I have locked the channel, so that I can neither interfere nor stop you, no matter which way you decide.

  “It is your future, your vote, your verdict, your fate. You are the masters of your world, now. You are the judges of this present age.”

  The screen immediately showed a unanimous decision. The serpentine hummed as the “plea” was offered to Cahetel.

  The entity said no word of agreement, but at that same moment, the broadcast towers and horns controlled by the black substance oozing from the giant corpse began sending signals to the fifty worldlets of the Black Fleet, and a powerful beam was directed toward the main mass of Cahetel itself, still half a lightyear away. Instrument readings showed the pulses carried the fluctuations consonant with notation for the cliometric code Montrose had written. The emissary was given the offer to the Cahetel cloud.