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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D. Thank you, Ted. And thank you, Jim.
Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun:
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun.
O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro’ all my fancy yet.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
PART ELEVEN
The Edge of Orion
1
The Cataclysmic Variable in Canes Venatici
1. The Ghost
A.D. 92000 TO 95500
He was dead, that was sure; but not entirely, and not permanently.
When awareness fled and all activity ceased, it could have been called sleep or hibernation. But he had been in those two states of being before, frequently, and for long periods, and this was something more still, more silent, less like life than that.
When awareness returned, Menelaus Illation Montrose was a pattern of leptons distributed throughout a featureless lump of gray metal falling through darkness and nothingness. He had neither hands, nor head, nor heart, intestines, or eyes.
Nor did he have engines, fuel, reserve energy, or motive power, and the sails had been three-fourths torn away. Had they been wholly torn away, as his assassin had planned, he would have been well and truly dead by now, dead beyond recovery or revival.
Instead, the sails absorbed enough ambient starlight to allow him, every three or four hundred years, for three or four minutes, to wake. Chemical energy reserves woven into the gray lump of the ship’s mass were sufficient to energize a cubic foot of his outer hull, stir it to motion, and form lenses and antennae to take measurements. It annoyed him that he had a perfect memory, since even the comforting routine of noting in the log the progress of his endless, weightless fall through unhorizoned, infinite space was denied him.
His velocity, relative to the tiny speck of Sol (lost somewhere in the stars of Piscis Austrinus), was very near the speed of light.
In three thousand years of flight, even the nearer stars changed position against the unmoving backdrop of farther stars only over centuries. There is no vertical nor horizontal in space, no weight, no sensation of motion.
Free fall is falling; in a way, it is infinite descent. And yet, in another way, at even the most immense velocity, when there is nothing against which to compare it, it seemed perfectly motionless. Montrose was both plunging down an unending drop and was utterly still.
His ghost occupied the information lattices running through the gray nanomaterial substance that once had formed the hull and furniture and panoply of the alien supership he dubbed the Solitude. Somewhere near his heart, frozen in a solid lump of medical nanomaterial, was his corpse, a work of biological engineering superlative enough to be able to survive storage indefinitely, without degradation.
The alien technology preserving his mind information was beyond superlative. It was perfect. He would remain undying and uninsane, his mind suffering no aging, no divarication, for so long as his perfect prison lasted.
On he fell.
2. The Wreck
He was traveling at right angles to the plane of the galaxy, so as to depart the Milky Way by the shortest path, thus to offer Montrose the least possible chance of survival.
By any calculation, the chance of survival was indistinguishable from zero as of the moment the ship’s fuel supply was exhausted transmitting a copy of Del Azarchel’s brain information onward, leaving his original self behind to shatter the hull, to destroy the drive core, to sever the sail shrouds and then to die.
But, even so, a close passage to a star might have given the hulk containing Montrose energy; encountering any heavenly body in deep space, even a small one, might have given Montrose raw materials, molecules to be nanoengineered into repair material, or mass to be annihilated for thrust.
The fuel had been a mass of exotic particles formed by attotechnology beyond the capacity of any second-magnitude beings or civilizations to create: the alien Dominion occupying the Praesepe Cluster could not create the substance and yet, somehow, by spooky remote control, had transferred or transformed the tritium mass in the fuel bank into a negative mass version of itself, so that the isotope of hydrogen was repelled rather than attracted by gravity.
It was an impossible drive, a diametric drive: a negative and positive hydrogen particle pair would accelerate continuously, the negative mass atom moving away from the positive, and the positive falling after, as absurd as a man lifting himself into the air by tugging mightily on his bootlaces.
Nonetheless, the law of entropy cannot be defeated, and the exotic particles lost energy, apparently into nowhere, in the form of accelerated proton decay exactly equal to the potential energy arriving apparently from nowhere. Nature always found some way of balancing her books.
The act of transmitting the brain information of Blackie del Azarchel to a globular cluster outside the galaxy has absorbed the last iota of the impossible fuel. The tanks had not just been drained dry. The exotic hydrogen atoms had been spent, hollowed out as their protons decayed, evaporated into a cloud of electrons, burning the tanks with an explosion of lightning, then crushing them in an implosion of vacuum.
Freak accident, or, rather, the freakishly superhuman forethought of the alien designers of the ship, was all that had saved Montrose from utter destruction.
With the care and precision of a scientific thinker, Del Azarchel had selected the ship heading before his acts of sabotage, so that the flight path ahead was statistically as far as possible from any known heavenly bodies. Presumably Del Azarchel performed this act of malice to tack as many zeroes as could be behind the decimal point of Montrose’s current zero-point-whatever percent chance of survival.
Or perhaps it was a mere artistic flourish, a genius of malice. Once the ship was out of the galaxy, the chance of rescue dropped from asymptotically small to absolute zero.
Montrose would be falling forever, imprisoned in the endless hell of infinite heaven.
First, the drive core had been housed in a sphere of what seemed like heat-resistant ceramic material of ordinary properties, made of ordinary matter. It should have been as easy for the bullets shot by the dying Del Azarchel to shatter as a china plate. Del Azarchel had not expected the strong nuclear bonds of the atoms to grow impossibly and absurdly macroscopic, reaching not across angstrom but across meters, and suddenly to web the entire macroatomic housing of the drive during the split second of impact, altering its physical properties, rendering it invulnerable.
Part of the shroud stanchions had been in the le
e of the drive core housing, and so no gunfire struck there, either. Montrose had retained roughly a fourth of his original sail, less than nine million miles in diameter.
The small radius of sail he retained could, over the centuries, act as a drag, slowing him. But not slowing him enough. All too soon the galaxy would be behind him, and there were no globular clusters or satellite galaxies within any possible fallpath anywhere before him, given the small confines of his widest possible cone of sail-driven lateral movement.
He had no hope, no plan, no options. Montrose was a man in the narrowest coffin in the widest night into which any human person had ever been thrown.
The stark insanity of facing naked infinity yawning in all directions beckoned. Despair was equally large, equally endless.
So he composed love poems to his wife. They were doggerel, but there was no one around to criticize.
He composed love letters, volumes of them, libraries, each in its never-fading place in his perfect memory. He told her endlessly detailed plans of what they would do when the two were reunited; he named imaginary children, and invented daily diary entries as they grew, and, later, did the same for grandchildren.
He told her his opinions about imaginary dialogues the two of them would have shared across the years, had they been together; he apologized contritely for imaginary quarrels they never had enjoyed the opportunity to have; he forgave her magnanimously when she offered imaginary apologies in turn.
Somehow, it kept the endless night and infinite madness at bay.
And on he fell.
3. Hypernova of a Supergiant
A.D. 96000
An unexpected event occurred: one of the largest stars in the galaxy, VY Canis Majoris, died a death in an apocalypse of fury and light commensurate with its size.
Like the primal titan imagined in some primitive mythology whose warbonnet jarred the crystals dome of heaven, who, when slain by younger gods, shatters ocean and earth at his downfall, cracks the upper roof of hell and topples all into Tartarus, so was VY Canis Majoris on the pyre of its own body.
To call it a nova would be an insult; even to call it a supernova would be an understatement. A special name is reserved for a stellar apocalypse of this magnitude: hypernova.
The red supergiant star had a radius some two thousand times that of tiny Sol, and was already surrounded by the cloud banks, fumes, and colored nebulae of earlier convulsions. Had VY Canis Majoris been placed in Earth’s home system, Saturn and all worlds inward would have been swallowed, and Uranus would be its Mercury.
So great was the giant circumference that a ray of light would require eight hours to pass from one hemisphere to another, and six billion Sols would have fit into the unimaginable volume without crowding.
So vast a star is vast in mass as well, and must, during its short, hot life, burn bright indeed, lest the immense outward pressure of stellar fusion be overmatched by the immense force of its own gravity.
But the hotter stars exhaust their fuel all the quicker. A supergiant dies in a few million years, not the billions humbler stars enjoy.
The moment of death was appallingly swift: in the one millisecond when the last fuel at the core was exhausted, the outward pressure failed, and the immense gravity of VY Canis Majoris collapsed the star core inward on itself, crushing the plasma into component particles, squeezing the degenerate matter past the point of no return, into a substance denser and heavier than neutronium: a singularity was compressed into distorted existence at the core of the colossal sun.
In that same millisecond (long before the outer layers of the sun knew themselves to be dead), this submicroscopic pinpoint of absolute density, uttermost nothingness, drew layer after layer of the supermassive star into its infinitely deep, immeasurable steep gradient of its gravity well: a horde of mastodons all forced into the same mousehole.
Even that titanic supergravity could not force the matter into so small a pinpoint at once.
A nightmarish convulsion of magnetic and torsional, nucleonic and subnucleonic forces erupted, sought escape, and exploded outward in two opposite jets through the dense layers of the star, kilometers and megameters and gigameters of solid plasma, blowing through the radiative and convective zones, photosphere, chromosphere, and corona, erupting far out into space, twin rivers of fire, farther than the radius of any solar system, and continuing onward at speeds beyond even this supermassive star’s immense escape velocity.
Shock waves from these two jets echoed through the massive star, like a bell rung in ebullience to cracking. The accretion disk exploded and sent a metal wind, literally, an explosion of nickel isotopic masses larger than worlds created just that instant, rushing outward, and the radioactive decay of the nickel added the brightness of its death throes to the luminosity of the hypersupernova.
The sum total of all power any star the size of Sol was destined to emit across its entire life span, in one second, issued from the fiery trumpet blast of the death cry of VY Canis Majoris. Shock waves expanded outward from the self-immolation of the supergiant star in globe upon concentric globe of inconceivable effulgence, brighter than paradise, hotter than perdition.
4. Seen from Sol
A.D. 100,000
The light reached the solar system. The hypernova star was bright enough, even from the surface of Venus or Mars, for the eyes of beasts and posthumans to behold by day.
The Power Neptune, submerged in the flows of deep, slow information beams from the other Powers and Principalities in the Empyrean of Man, stirred in his sleep and brought several miles of his outer crystal layers to greater wakefulness and sensitivity, peering up through the crushing blanket of his atmosphere on high-energy wavelengths to which it was transparent, and observed the hypernova.
Because his mind worked in gestalts of ideational relations faster than logic or intuition, he could bring to the surface of his subaltern minds the unresolved mystery of that benefactor who, long ago, had slain Jupiter and cleared the path for mankind’s triumphant spread across the nearer Orion Spur.
Emissaries from the four other human Empyrean polities—the Benedictines from Sagittarius Arm and the Dominicans from Cygnus, another centered in Hyades and the final spreading outward from Praesepe Cluster—would be arriving within the millennium to define long-term cliometric plans, and set the date for the next Jubilee.
The Uthymoi races the False Rania had produced were extinct, long ago replaced by more energetic and devout races issuing from the throneworlds of Arcturus, Iota Draconis, and Ain.
But for the nonce, it was a matter of merely light-hours to send a signal to Earth’s moon, and provoke, by means of complex self-replicating signals, the ancient, long-decayed logic crystal antique there to youth and to life and selfawareness.
“Reverend Mother Superior Selene, you asked to be awakened should it ever be proven that Menelaus Montrose did not die in the wreck of the Desolation of Heaven. I have no direct evidence that he lives, but the obvious deduction is that a second-order being believes him still to exist, and has acted to aid him.”
Not long after, as Neptune was wont to measure time, a soft answer came from the long-abandoned globe of Earth, and from the kindly and half-senile moon who still kept watch over the haunted world, and, by her servants’ hands, tended the many graves all across the dead continents and dry seabeds.
“Thank you, Great Neptune,” came the message from the remnant of the Lunar Potentate once called Mother Selene. “I foresee I shall not see Menelaus again in this life and that he will outlast me, for by some knowledge I know not whence comes, I now foretell he cannot die until he surrenders all his wrath and accepts what love offers.”
Neptune said, “You are older than I, Grandmother, but I am an order of magnitude in scope of mind above you. I say that mankind, as a free and equal Domination of Dominions, is established and spreading through the galaxy beyond the power of any accident of nature or malice of war to exterminate. Ergo, the future for which Menelaus hoped and strov
e is here, and yet he partakes of no joys of these golden ages of expansion, growth, and triumph.”
But she said, “You speak in haste. I seem to see greater forces arranged against us than even your wisdom envisions. Del Azarchel lives, and who can guess his malice? Merely a human, perhaps, but he is older than even you or I.”
Neptune said, “Neither of us shall know the end of the tale, for good or ill. We have our own fates to fulfill, our own lives to lead.”
She said, “Fate and life I leave to the young. But I am not useless yet, for even the oldest can say a rosary. I will pray for Menelaus, and may God speed him on his long-suffering and hopeless quest.”
5. Seen from the Solitude
A.D. 102,500
He was in a place far, far beyond hope, when the sound of joyful alarms woke him.
Menelaus was surprised when he attempted to grow a lens on the outer surface of his hull, and, instead of a slow process of hours or days, the warm, energy-charged nanomachinery hullmetal blinked, and formed a metal eye which opened.
Again, the slow process of amalgamating visual information, instead of taking several annoying seconds or microseconds, took less time than he could measure. It was as if the virtual cortex where visual information was processed was running at full capacity.
He saw why: a star as bright as the full moon seen from Earth was burning in the limb of the galaxy spread beneath him like a carpet, dazzling, miraculous, wondrous, eerie. It was a single white-hot cannon-shot in the symphony of interstellar radio noise shed by all the stars together. The sails drank in wave on wave of power like wine. His energy cells buried in his core felt full and fat.
Even more amazing to him was the message told by the additional instruments he spun out of the hull substance, antennae and horns attuned to many wavelengths. The magnetosphere of the galaxy for kiloparsecs in each direction, as far as he could see, was enormously strengthened by some unexpected side effect of this hypernova discharge. There was now enough ambient gauss of field strength for his ship to use the old sailor’s trick of tacking against his light source.
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