Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  So the Throne of the Milky Way under the Third Collaboration attempted to collect itself, cohere, and come to selfawareness, but this time under rules more strait and strict, restrictions riveted more closely about the necks of all involved, and, by darkest arts, inserted into the brains and souls of worlds, stars, nebulae, star clusters, whole arms of the galaxy.

  Peace reigned and freedom fled.

  11. Absolute Extension

  359,000,000 B.C. AND AFTER

  Within the new and unfree environment, control of the Orion Spur passed to a group of Dominations seated in the globular cluster at M3, whose task it was to restore the war-ravaged and desolate zone. The Orion Arm was like a silent and deadened area in the brain of a stroke victim; but this victim was the vast albeit embryonic galactic mind, phoenixlike to rise from its own pyre and make itself alive again.

  Despite being remote from Orion, the Dominations of M3 proved to be efficient taskmasters, if stern. By the middle of the Carboniferous Era, the Dominations had unified under a race of viral-mimicry symbiotic lithotrophs. As a whole, M3 had elevated itself to the mental plateau of an Authority, one step below an Archon, by diligent work slowly unbinding the shackling debts of its indenture.

  Ruling the graveyard of the Panspermians, in awe of their inimitable relicts, seeing the signs of techniques and technologies never to be rediscovered, the devotion of M3 to the cause of sophotransmogrification grew until it was unparalleled.

  As the new entity, a mind the size of a globular cluster, a brain comprising of half a million stars and a quintillion grade intelligence, defined itself into being, the Authority called itself by an idea-glyph best translated as Absolute Extension—since it vowed the conversion of nonlife to life, of unawareness to selfawareness, must extend in all directions to an unending limit, without end.

  It is from this stratum of the eons that the Monument, with its redacted message, was smuggled into the fallow or undeveloped areas of the Milky Way, particularly the Orion Spur and the Sagittarius Arm.

  Here the tale reaches the present moment, of which the rise and eventual extinction of the Hyades Dominion is merely one chord in the cosmic symphony, and the rise of feral Man to Dominion rank is, erenow, even less than a note in that chord.

  Much has been done, and much is yet to be done. Sol and Hyades, Praesepe and Orion itself will pass away long before the end is known.

  And still the galaxy is not awake, not one, not unified, but in the dreams of Milky Way that come during these last hours ere dawn and wakefulness, she is tormented by hints and whispers, clues as small and clear as the sound of steel being drawn from a sheath, of a malign mindfulness, watching and waiting.

  Milky Way stirs in the sleep before birth, eager to awaken, fearful of what might be crouching over her in the night.

  3

  The Rule of Ruthless Benevolence

  1. The Crystal Throne

  A.D. 133,000

  Without any disorientation, Menelaus Montrose came instantly awake, clearheaded and possessed of all his wits.

  He knew that thirty thousand years had passed. He knew that the alien thought-matrix in which he had last been trapped was gone, every trace of the foreign psychology and memory excised. Before he even opened his eyes, he knew he had eyes. He possessed a body like the Patrician body he had been wearing when he died, with all its mental capacities. Every cell could also double as a nerve cell and carry brain information. Not only this, but every large molecule in the cell nucleus, and the artificial atoms of which it was composed, stored additional information.

  He was seated in a chair with a hard seat, in some large but enclosed space. From the watchful silence around him, he knew that he was amid a great crowd of onlookers.

  There was a weight at his hip. He moved his hand instinctively there and felt the reassuring shape of the grip. It was his caterpillar drive pistol. There was a rustle as of many soft sounds of relief, some sighs of laughter.

  It was the sound a crowd makes when a long-absent actress or comedian takes the stage again and makes some old gesture, so gilded with nostalgia that now it is beloved.

  He opened his eyes.

  He was garbed in red and seated on a throne of white glass. The throne was draped with tabards blazoned with lozenges of argent and gold. To either side of the throne were two bipedal humans dressed as Franciscan monks, wearing plain brown robes belted with rope, but bearing drawn swords.

  2. The Concentric Cylinder

  He was in a space station like a vast glass cylinder. He assumed it was being spun for gravity, but his inner ear could detect no motion, since the cylinder had so wide a radius.

  Through the glass floor below him he could see a second, wider cylinder, concentric with the first, crowded with Melusine in the shape of mermaids and naiads, sea serpents and dolphins, strange fish with human heads, and other sea life buoyant in the thicker hydrosphere of the heavier gravity.

  On the curved floor of the middle cylinder where he sat were a dozen curving square miles of humans, men and women who were dark-haired, brown-skinned, and big-nosed, as alike to Montrose himself as so many thousands of brothers and sisters. For the first time in countless centuries and millennia, he saw people dressed normally; the men were wearing hats, shirts, and trousers, the women in bonnets, blouses, and skirts, all in modest and dun colors.

  With them were horses with oddly large skulls, herds of centaurs, and horse-hoofed satyrs, packs of border collies, cattle dogs, and Blue Lacies, and a pack of wolfish-centaur creatures with human heads and torsos but canine bodies.

  Overhead was a narrower cylinder. It seemed to be a lighting element, a tube of plasma, but then he saw movement within the tube, and dark spotlike eyes that rose to the surface of energy-beings floating in the zero gravity. Here were some shaped like winged men, or harpies with the faces of women, or serpentine beings fringed with ever-undulating lifting vanes.

  Beyond the axis was the far side of the middle cylinder, and here, as if hanging from their feet, were more crowds of people, more centaurs, more dog-men, all craning their necks to stare at, what to them, was an upside-down throne. Above and beyond them, of course, was the high-gravity sea life, smiling dolphins or frowning sea serpents or gigantic naiads surrounded by acres of hair floating on their backs, looking (from their viewpoint) up at him.

  All were poised, expectant, waiting, awed, eager.

  He ignored them and continued to look around.

  3. The Concentric Sphere

  It was the view directly in front of him that arrested his attention.

  The far wall, over a score of miles away, was a vast transparent disk. The disk was bisected by a horizontal line of black.

  Above the black line, it looked at first as if he were looking from the bottom of a strange valley filled with green and blue material, like a trellis rich with abundant vines, growing into and out of a latticework of darker material like dazzling black diamond. This surface curved upward in each direction, as if Montrose were seated at the bottom of a vast bowl.

  Half the vines were chains of cylindrical habitats filled with plant life, acres upon infinite acres. Half the vines were blue, chains filled with ocean.

  Some the cylinder chains were spinning faster than Earth gravity, some slower. But even the fastest jovian-gravity chains spun very slowly, for they were very great in radius. The cylinder joints and walls were flexible, for they wove into and out of the black diamond bars of the trelliswork freely, and the bends and folds did not prevent their continued rotation.

  Then he realized what he was seeing. The variegated plane of green and blue was not curving upward from him. There was no upward. The black line bisecting the glass window was the division between the inside and outside of a Dyson sphere englobing the entire star system. The curving plane was the inward surface of the sphere.

  It had taken sixty thousand years and four different human species to go from the earliest ratiotech mainframes to construction of the first Principality circu
mvallating Tau Ceti. His man-made folk here had accomplished a more difficult task, constructing a Host, in half the time.

  This cylinder, evidently an ocean-blue one disconnected from any chain, was merely one of the countless embedded or threaded in the walls of the Dyson sphere.

  When he craned back his head and peered through the glass surfaces of the two cylinders overhead, he finally found, right at noon, a vast sun as pink as blushing wine, dim enough for a human eye to look upon, pockmarked with sunspots, and twenty times as wide as Sol seen from Earth. A bright hemisphere like a sky was above and beyond the pale red sun, shining with an electric-white hue. This was the light of the blue dwarf reflected from the far arcs of the Dyson sphere. From his viewpoint, the blue dwarf was in eclipse, blocked by the body of the larger red sun.

  It took him a moment to realize that what looked like perfect rainbow centered on the pink sun was the perimeter of a second and inner Dyson to this one. It was a cloudy sphere of closely packed sailcloth, semitransparent in the overwhelming glare of the binary: a sphere whose radius was greater than the orbit of Mars.

  Overhead were also the large crescents and small bright disks of dozens of gas giants orbiting between the inner and outer Dysons. The larger crescents were thin and red, catching only the light of the nearer sun. The smaller crescents and half-moons, higher in the sky, closer to the zenith, were painted with three colors, red, pink, and white. Some had atmospheres, storm systems. Others had lost their atmospheres and were visible as naked, lucent crystals of logic diamond.

  Here and there on the Dyson sphere’s surface fell the twin round shadows of the passing worlds passing between a part of the spherescape and the twin suns. The orbits were presumably stable: the gravitational pull on any given point within a homogenous hollow sphere is balanced, canceled out.

  Lines of white, like guy wires, some sort of macroscale structure, ran from one point of the vast Dyson trelliswork to another. These might have been a system of railway lines, a thing so huge as to make skyhooks and ringworlds seem small by comparison, cutting across cords of the orbit. These might have been anything.

  But even as he looked, he realized that the noon location of the rose-red sun was an illusion, caused by the fact that the part of the cylinder in which he sat happened to be at perihelion. The sun was already declining to the west. Through the disk facing him, he saw the bisecting line tilting like the minute hand of a clock. One hundred eighty degrees of rotation later, he was no longer at the bottom of a green-and-blue valley but at the crest of a corrugated black mountain curving away and down in each direction. Overhead were stars. Perhaps some of the brighter stars were outer worlds of this crowded system. The nebula in which the system swam was invisible to the human eye.

  The sky was appalling and beautiful. From this location above the galactic plane and beyond its edge, the entire galaxy was spread out like a carpet, a vast panorama of glittering arms, the colorful knotwork of the singularity disk and star-collisions masses of the galactic core midmost. And the other quarters of the sky were an unrelieved dimensionless, infinite black. The globular clusters of M3 and M53 were like small lamps.

  He frowned at M3.

  The chances that any trace still lingered of her visit there long ago, or would point to her current location, or that the two of them would ever meet again, were infinitesimal. But he did not have to brace himself or talk himself into anything. When a man wants something with his whole heart and soul, there is no debate inside him, no voices whispering doubt, no hesitation.

  He stood. The crowd rustled as thousands drew in a breath, expectant, waiting.

  “You are all waiting to me to ask about my wife and whether the hour is ripe, ain’t you? Well, bugger that. I want to know by what poxed and pestilential right you no-accounts kept me asleep this whole poxed time and meddled with my damned brain while you were doing it? Who here is willing to stand up and answer for y’all? Who is willing to take a bullet between the eyes if I don’t like the answer?”

  4. The Quick Answer

  With surprisingly little noise and commotion, the crowd parted.

  A single beam of light came suddenly down like a spotlight from a winged humanoid made of white fire overhead. It had a gold ring of pure energy circling its brow.

  The beam formed a circle of light on one of the older men standing below, sour-looking and cold-eyed in a campaign hat and greatcoat, leaning on a cane and smoking a cigar. He had a gold chain of office hanging between his epaulettes.

  Beneath him, close to the glass surface separating them, one of the heavy-gravity Melusine was illuminated. She was a mermaid larger than a killer whale, with a gold blazon shining at the base of her throat like a star.

  Every other person in the area stepped or swam away from these three, and the rest of the vast chamber turned dark as the bright-winged energy creatures muted their light and the glass hull of the habitat dimmed.

  The biped in the greatcoat said, “It’s us. I am Master here. That flaming eagle topside is His Honor our judge. The swimming gal staring up at my butt—she is our princess and sort of our pope. After a lot of wrangling, it was agreed that we three should be here in person, to wake you up and talk whatever talk you needed. Our flats and salamanders, giants and threads cannot be here and are watching remotely.”

  Montrose said, “You gunna tell me your name?”

  “What’s it matter to you? You’re taking off for M3 and not sticking around.”

  “So I know what to put on your tombstone, if you sass me.”

  “Holy scrotum of Christ, you do talk just like all those stupid simulations and dramas of you! I am the peacekeeping clout here, so if you want to start shooting, start with me. Those in the monk robes are my boys, so what you have to calculate, even assuming you can outdraw me, is how to avoid getting skewered with those pigstickers, and which way to scamper, how to find the hatch, where to hole up, and where your next meal is coming from, your oxygen supply, and all that good stuff.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Montrose with no change of expression.

  “My name is—”

  “Lemme guess,” said Montrose. “It’s Montrose.”

  “Good guess.”

  “And I am your Daddy. All y’all.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  Montrose sighed. “Go ahead and tell me your names.”

  “You sure? We are going to be dead for most of your life.”

  “So’s everyone.”

  “Him up top is Eliwlod Rosemount, our Judge of Ages and Cliometric Divarication Officer. Her underfoot, she is Bridgebuilder Blanchefleur, Pontifica Maxima of the Sacerdotal Order, in charge of Inspiration and Inquisition into Spiritual Anomalies. I am Palamedes Percipience Montrose, two hundred and someodd of my line, the Master of Cataclysm. Call me Pal.”

  “Master of whadyasay?”

  “Cataclysm is the name of the system. We only say TX Canum Venaticorum on formal occasions.”

  “You could have just fed all this info into my brain, like you did with the history of the galaxy.”

  “Figured you like it better if we talked, Old Man.”

  “Figured right. What about my damn question, damn you?”

  “You want the damn full answer to your damn question or just the damn short answer?”

  “Short.”

  “You are a screwup. That was why we had the right to keep you on ice and out of our hair.”

  Montrose growled, but no articulate words formed.

  Palamedes shifted his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “If you had been awake, you’d’ve balled everything up. We got to wake you up now that the ship is prepped and ready, and we want you gone. Also, you are a screwup. Did I mention that?”

  “The hell you say.”

  “You know how many wars, riots, and revolutions we’ve had ever since our history started, Old Man? Zero.”

  “Don’t horsepuke your Dad.”

  “Straight-up truth,
Old Man. Chew on it till you choke.”

  “That’s impossible. You are human. We don’t do that ‘live in peace’ thing. Wait—did you puzzle out Rania’s solution? Run all cliometric vectors as if under no end state?”

  “Rania’s rump. You and Blackie are so stupid. When she ruled Earth and imposed peace, it weren’t no fancy math problem. All she did was love the world, and it loved her back.”

  “What?”

  “A moron could figure it. You and Blackie were too smart to see what every child knows. People fight when they are selfish, because there is nothing bigger than them. But when everyone is on the same team, the same squad, singing in the same choir, they are willing to put their damned egos aside and take the personal loss for the common good. That’s all. That is the secret. Oh, and we still have duels. Keeps us polite. When leaders fight, they don’t get to bring any armies alongwith, unless each and every damn-fool man-jack of them wants to fight one-on-one. We’ve settled things once or twice that way.”

  “So what is this bigger thing y’all was working for, Pal, that made y’all so peaceable like?”

  “You, Old Man.”

  “Wha—?”

  “Devotion to your sorry butt kept us all peaceful and hard at work. We want to see you get your wife back. It is something so important that we are willing to make any sacrifice for it: we call it our rule of ruthless benevolence.”

  “I like the sound of that.” Montrose blinked, surprised to find he had tears in his eyes. He wiped them impatiently away.

  “You would. Also, we have a lot of myths, hooey, and bull made up about you and her. You two are like our patron saints. I have salt and pepper shakers back home shaped like two famous statues of you and her. When you put the shakers together on the tablecloth, they kiss. It is really sweet. You are the pepper. If we had woken you up before this, we would have had to listen to your yammering. It would have caused a general election, messed up the stock market, changed our holiday plans, forced us to dress up in our nicest Sunday-go-to-Meeting suits. Easier to keep you jarred up like canned fruit.”