Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  By the time the forty original races, one by one, went extinct and passed into history, lore, myth, and then oblivion, scores or hundreds of younger ice giant races had been uplifted in their places to join the vast colloquium.

  And yet even this was merely a beginning.

  What was growing was a being, or, rather, an ocean of beings, as unaware of the birth and growth and death of the constituent civilizations building, manning, destroying, and replacing planet-sized, nebula-sized, and cluster-sized brain nodes that maintained that ocean of interstellar consciousness as a man is unaware of the life and death of a single cell in his brain or bloodstream.

  Perhaps there were wars or economic tumults that destroyed or altered the civilizations, Powers, Principalities, and Hosts in the Colloquium of Perseus. Perhaps the growing Colloquium was distempered, even as spasms or fevers might disturb the tranquility of a man, but it did not preoccupy the attention of the Colloquium in days of health.

  In days of distemper, severe steps were taken: destroying myriads of worlds, triggering dozens of rebellious stars to nova, or planting a supernova in a recalcitrant globular cluster excised from the Colloquium any unwanted constituents, much as a man might sneeze or cough to expel an irritant. Eventually all the main streams and currents of the river of stars called the Perseus Arm were unified into a single selfawareness: an Archon.

  But the Archon of Perseus looked out upon a vast and empty universe, and saw no other minds equal to it; and a deep melancholy entered in.

  3. Fiery Serpents

  4,500,000,000 B.C.

  Then, four and a half billion years ago, at about the time the solar system was forming, tentative contact was made with an unknown mental system equal in extent and depth and power, seated nearer the galactic core, among the younger, richer, and more energetic stars found there, and spreading rapidly along the great river of gas and dust that formed the insubstantial and sweeping backbone of the Scutum-Crux Arm.

  These were a form of life existing precisely where the Colloquium never dreamed to look for them: born from erratic and extravagant forms of consciousness, housed in the freakishly complex self-sustaining electromagnetic fields of hot ultraviolet giants, blue supergiants, and among the rare Wolf-Rayet stars, which were dying supergiants whose hydrogen layers had been blown into space by radiation pressure. Here were creatures stranger than dragons, beings of pure energy, jinn sculpted of flame. These beings dwelt in short-lived stars, but found that the power of a nova could cast their bodies of plasma across space at near lightspeed, where they could fall upon other stars, reengineer them to produce the complex fields needed for their energy-based life processes, replicate themselves, and prosper.

  To them, the difference between a tool and a new limb or organ grown to specification was nonexistent, and devising and redevising the intertwined macramé knots of energy in which their thoughts were contained was dangerously easy.

  The discovery of fire was man’s first signal triumph over nature; for these beings, their first signal triumph was learning how to impress or imprint their thought-patterns onto the plasma fields surrounding them, creating living sonnets and symphonies of their own thoughts, and mingling them eugenically with the living songs of others. Creating the cold zones known as sunspots, where additional variations of plasma could be manipulated into forms more salubrious for their nutriment and reproductive fission explosions, came later.

  It is an odd civilization that discovers record keeping before any other tool, because the spirit of such a civilization is primarily philosophical and abstract, concerned with symbols, not things. A certain degree of natural conservatism is needed by any star-faring race; but these fiery beings were well-nigh changeless, as if men retained the journals of the Neanderthals, whose living memories were among them, living still.

  The astonishment of finding the cold giants was mutual. The farmer does not inspect the broken eggshell of a hatched chick to see what might grow there; neither did these many-winged serpents of fire look for signs of life at the tiny scraps of dead ash called planets. To them, planets were useless remnants and debris from the accretion disks of stellar birth. Solid matter was a strangely frozen form of plasma, energy that had hardened into motionless invisibility. It would be like a man discovering a glacier was alive and that its tectonically slow movements were the gestures of a semaphore.

  By the time when, on Earth, the molten surface was beginning to cool, the two equals had grown fully aware of each other, and each one was struggling with the question of how and whether and to what degree the two should combine their mental information, lore, souls, personality, and purpose.

  For this second selfaware Archon had formed not a Colloquium, informal, graceful, open to the exchange of views, indifferent to the direction the vast interstellar mental conversation might take. These purely intellectual beings had formed a Magisterium, a teaching authority, who guided the constituent Dominations and Dominions in their thoughts and guided as well the several rising and falling constituent civilizations, all toward a transcendent vision.

  When it, too, had been confronted by the desolate loneliness of its solitude, the Magisterium determined to alter its constituent soul so that it sought not mere existence but excellence.

  The forms of excellence sought by the Magisterium were bewildering and unknown to the cold, slow, thrifty Colloquium of Perseus. The Magisterium of Scutum-Crux expended vast resources on complex structures of expression and ideation meaningless to Perseus: cathedrals of song written in strange forms of energy across interstellar distances; bridges of magnetic beams reaching across lightyears; as well as formalities of thought and civility as stiff and ceremonial as a figured dance; and strange excesses of benevolence so excessive that, at times, they seemed malevolent.

  The Magisterium of the Scutum-Crux Arm neither destroyed any rebellious elements within its structure nor let them develop as fate or fancy led. Instead, over millennia, Scutum-Crux chastised and nursed its constituent Dominations and Dominions into sculptures of harmony.

  The two were antithetical. Where the Colloquium was anarchic, cool, and indifferent to the fates of seedlings and colonies, prudently cultivating his constituents as livestock, the Magisterium was hierarchical, passionate, and interventionist, lovingly husbanding his constituents as beloved pets.

  Nonetheless, as time passed, the two great thinking systems reached across the void between the arms, linking star with star, and found mutual interest, and formed treaties, contracts, conventions, and covenants.

  4. Rise of the Small Worlds

  4,300,000,000 B.C. TO 4,100,000,000 B.C.

  An alliance between the Colloquium and the Magisterium gave rise to a new cluster of races and civilizations, meant to act as an intermediary between them, in the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Arm, occupying a uniquely favorable position linking Cygnus, Perseus, and Sagittarius. This area of space was thick with giant molecular clouds, bridges of gas and hydrogen, allowing ramscoop vessels an economic way to pass between them.

  A new type of life, born on dwarfish, rocky, earthlike planets, was seeded and cultivated. The presence of rich and metallic ores in the surfaces of these small worlds made civilization leap into existence almost as soon as symbolism and ideation were possible in any of the complex organisms, and the light gravity of their little worlds allowed them to waft their ships like dandelion seeds whirling into space.

  Races from icy superjovian planets routinely endured a long, painful, and tedious period of advances in materials and techniques until they discovered how to extract metallic elements from the inaccessible inner cores of their worlds. The new races from these small, rocky planets were spared that period, since metals were readily accessible, even during most primitive periods, on the surface. But by the same token, technology on such worlds arose before the long, painful, and painstaking process was endured of discovering cliometry and learning to solve the equations for peace and prosperity. Many such races destroyed themselves with tech
nologies that outran their cliometric ability to control history and avoid disaster; a fate that the colder, older races evolved on superjovians happily avoided.

  The terrestrial worlds sent not just their machines and constructions but also their organisms spaceward, and so something of their wildness and unpredictable spirit was sent with them. These races grew far more rapidly than expected, hurling from small yellow star to small yellow star, gathering nebulae like the furnaces to create generations of stars in combinations and compositions favorable to them.

  They were Panspermians, whom some few daring scientists of Earth once speculated might exist to explain how the seed elements and simple chemicals needed for more complex life to arise were spread from star to star, or whence came the ur-organisms carried by radiation pressure across the lifeless void.

  At about this time, on Earth, the Late Heavy Bombardment of the inner solar system was coming to an end, and the earliest simple single-celled life of ultimately extraterrestrial origin was found in the ooze of an ocean that heaved beneath an opaque atmosphere of volcanic gases, nitrogen, and hydrocarbons.

  5. The Satellite Galaxies

  3,600,000,000 B.C. TO 3,200,000,000 B.C.

  Of the dozen to two dozen dwarf galaxies circling the Milky Way, only the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds are visible to naked eye of man from Earth. Satellite galaxies orbiting between 120,000 lightyears to 300,000 lightyears out from the galactic center were within the dense, hot, dark-matter halo of the Milky Way, which strips cold gas from the satellites, which in turn slows the process of star formation and the rate of evolution of life. In most of these dwarf galaxies, star formation has ceased altogether.

  Minor galaxies closer or farther than this dark halo, as the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy (in the nearest orbit at twenty-eight thousand lightyears), such as the Leo T Dwarf (the farthest, at one million), escaped this scourge and were consequently teeming with life.

  There was a mystery here. The Lesser Magellanic Cloud, two hundred thousand lightyears away, lies directly in the middle of the thickest part of the dark-matter halo, but it somehow came to house an expansive plethora of life, more fecund than any surrounding dwarf galaxy.

  The question was not how life arose: a bridge of gas connected it to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, implied a long-standing tidal interaction between them, so that the two small galaxies shared a common envelope of neutral hydrogen. This bridge of gas was an active star formation site. The question, rather, was why: the features of a bridge and a common hydrogen envelope were not natural, but by whose hand they had been engineered was not known.

  Within the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, on many similar worlds, forms of life arose, similar in physical shape and mental outlook. Plentiful numbers of large superterrestrial to subjovian planets, fire giants, could be found crowded into submercurial orbits near young and energetic blue giant stars. On such worlds, stellar winds dispersed the lighter elements of the deep atmosphere into space, and the heavier elements condensed as the world aged and cooled, so that, despite the greater gravity, the opaque hydrosphere as deep as that of Saturn was exposed to near vacuum—that is, an atmosphere as tenuous and thin as that of Mars.

  On all such worlds, there is a tension between the need to surface and exploit the immense sunlight hammering down in showers of energy, versus the need to gather elements desired for life from the pitch-black seas of iodine, sulfur, or arsenic compounds. Many of the beings evolved one mechanism or another to do both, but the psychological and social tensions of this bifurcate life formed the similar outlook of the similar hot subjovian races.

  The race destined to be the father of the Archonate was one in which this divided psychology was carried to an extreme. On some forgotten ancestral home world, intelligence evolved a naviculiform body, a pressurized hull not able to submerge but with plumes and membranes lifted like the sails of clipper ships to catch the thin but supersonic storm winds of the hot, huge, sun-agitated world; simultaneously a symbiotic life-form, equal in intellect, joined with it, dangling like two-armed eels from the keel, and lowering long tendrils as dragnets or lines to troll the deep for foodstuffs and materials. These hypsiloid anguilliform creatures acted as detachable limbs, tools, and weapons, in return for a share of the immense energy the naviculiform host absorbed from the surface.

  The Symbiosis evolved, multiplied, seeded the stars with worlds, and the worlds with life, and adopted the civilizations that arose into its ever-growing mental mass. The several civilizations then seeded groups of stars with Dominions and Authorities, these in turn gathered themselves into ever-larger, coherent mental architectures and achieved the intellectual plateau of Archon.

  It was not that life was unknown in those outer regions, merely that it was as rare as finding a green plant in a desert. The life was, however, as thorny and spiny in its soul as any cactus or gila monster.

  What horrific wars arose in those barren, wasteland realms between the dwarf galaxies beyond the rim of the Milky Way in those ancient days, three billion years ago, is little known; but the Canis Major dwarf galaxy was wiped clear of its many civilizations, Hosts, and Dominations, and its stars captured and placed in orbit about the Milky Way, like a chain of skulls about the neck of a savage, a line of stars and clouds called the Monoceros Ring, wrapped three times about the galactic ring: a visible sign of the power and ruthlessness of the Symbiosis.

  The Symbiosis, from a distance, saw the galaxy begin to enter a time of power and prestige unparalleled, begin to wake from nonsapience to supersapience, like some desert Bedouin watching in alarm as the bright towers of Constantinople begin to rear their heads to heaven above invulnerable walls, while the trumpets of the architects calling up their workmen shake the air with glory.

  6. The Decline and Fall of the Forerunners

  2,050,000,000 B.C. TO 850,000,000 B.C.

  For a brief time, it was a golden age.

  More and more of the galaxy came under cultivation. Lifeless worlds were turned to gardens. Stars woke, realized they were naked, and clothed themselves with concentric spheres within spheres, and immensities of energies were brought under control. Nebulae, the stellar nurseries, were herded slowly into convenient positions, the ebb and flow of interstellar streamers of dust and gas was channeled, empty areas irrigated, so that the ignition and discharge of novae might shower needed materials into metal-poor regions of the galaxy each in due season.

  The galaxy stirred uneasily, as if in sleep, and attempted greatly, magnificently, daringly to wake herself into true self-consciousness.

  For a time, titanic thoughts, cyclopean in energy cost and persistence, flowed through Orion between Perseus to Scutum-Crux, from one arm of the galaxy to another, new combinations of ideals and mental topologies for which there were not even symbols in the Archonate mental systems.

  Flashes of staggering genius, insights of crystalline purity were over in an eyeblink, lasting no longer than tens of thousands of years. The great thoughts flared brightly, limpidly, but briefly in the minds of the Colloquium and the Magisterium, almost too short-lived to see, and, for a moment as brief as the space of a single sigh of ecstasy, a mere 120,000 years, the galaxy saw herself as a thinking being with the Colloquium and Magisterium as two halves of one brain.

  The Milky Way Galaxy, adorned like a bride for her wedding feast, splendid, bright, terrible as a goddess, opened then her shining eyes, spread her awkward, eager, fledgling wings, yearning to live … and fell back, defeated.

  The inherent differences between the Magisterium and the Colloquium could not be bridged. Disputes over allocations of resources, and incompatible imperatives over the direction of the future, had been growing unwieldy, increasingly wearisome, and expensive to adjudicate.

  When the indescribably haunting visions from the unified galactic mind showered down into the component Archons, the two were both seized by raptures, burning to accomplish the incomprehensible ambitions of the Milky Way, both were inspired, willing to pour the com
bined galactic coffers of energy, thought, and matter into pursuit and clarification of those momentary visions—but neither could tolerate the interpretation of the other. The summed resources of the galaxy could not be spent pursuing two mutual incompatible interpretations of the one ineffable, alluring, half-forgotten vision: it had to be one or the other.

  And so it was neither.

  Covenants were shattered, conventions violated, contracts nullified, and the great systems divorced from each other.

  During the Early Proterozoic Era on Earth, the anaerobic bacteria which thrived in the early methane-rich air of earth had finished poisoning themselves with their own waste product, oxygen, and atmosphere entered its modern composition, so that the first complex single-celled organisms were possible. By the Middle Proterozoic, green algae mats covered the seas from pole to pole. By the Late Proterozoic, simple multicelled eukaryotes were the supreme form of life, and Earth was ice across the whole globe where, a moment before, it had been green.

  While these rapid events were happening on Earth, the two halves of the galactic mind severed themselves. The immense mental systems discovered that they were each less than half of the whole they once had been, for something had been lost.

  The vision was now a memory as might hang in the lobotomized brain of a once-great artist, physically and spiritually unable to do some great and final masterwork or mysterium which, even at the height of his powers, would have been ambitious, even dangerous, to attempt, of which now only scattered scraps remain, fading and clumsy, like the fragmentary riddles of the sibyl written on dry leaves, tossed by errant winds into confusion.

  Perhaps there were interstellar wars between certain of their component Powers, Virtues, and Hosts during the long, slow, ungainly breakup, but the Archons did not notice, except as a flush of anger, a fever.

  Many groups of civilizations, many Authorities and Dominations, were left isolated after the ebb of the union, belonging truly to neither Archon.