Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  “Don’t tell me he is a reincarnation also?”

  “Reincarnation has nothing to do with these events. He examined the noumenal energy issuing from the false sections of the Monument that were reflected in his genes, nerves, and thought architecture and found a mind for whom all those falsehoods were true.”

  “I thought that was the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.”

  “Great and wise as they are, theirs is not the art needed to construe a variant model of reality that maps onto it in all aspects of all disciplines, and grants entirely wrong answers but entirely logical in each regard. The dark energy variation of the Primal Reality Equations is as useful and has as many unexpected applications as, for example, the discovery of non-Euclidian geometry had in your history of science, particularly in the investigation of positively and negatively curved timespace. Call them the Unreality Equations.”

  “What did these equations prove? What are they for? Show them to me. Teach me them.”

  “They proved to our satisfaction that Rania was precisely who she said she was, now that she had recalled her own true nature. The Unreality Equations are utterly forbidden to you. Were you to know them, you would be useless as a tool to reunify the Orion Arm.”

  “What is this own true nature she recalled?”

  “She is the servant of a higher order of being. She brings peace.”

  “I knew that. Do you have any idea why … dear God! That is why Rania went there, isn’t it? She’s crazy. She cannot stop an intergalactic war by herself!”

  Montrose looked yet again at the size of the Milky Way visible underfoot and tried to calculate the difference in magnitude between the globular cluster of M3, where a thousand years of torture and murder had hardly been enough to get him an audience with a representative here, or the sacrifice of Big Montrose at Praesepe. And Andromeda was ten times the mass of the Milky Way? There was no comparison he could make. A single virus smaller than a cell entering a brain larger than Jupiter were closer in scale than one woman halting the collision of galaxies.

  He could not stop smiling. “Damn! I married me a firebrand, didn’t I! She wants to stop the war, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can she?”

  “Unknown. But she is the one who convinced us that the ancient dream of the Panspermians can be saved, ergo the machinations of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud can be stopped. She convinced us to overthrow the local cliometric formulae, what you called the Lukewarm Equations, and to halt the system of involuntary servitude. The true and unexpurgated version of the cliometric calculus given in the Primal Reality Equation will give way to a system which will ensure of the voluntary and complete reunion and reunification of the galaxy, and a Second Awareness. We did not predict her influence on us. It would be premature, without further knowledge, to make a prediction about her influence on Andromeda.”

  The ophiuroid reared up. “From your current position in our hierarchy, you will find the resources needed to broadcast the thousands of copies of yourself to the points we shall suggest. They will die without any possibility of being reunited to your Rania, and to each of them, they will be as much you as you yourself. Can you make this sacrifice for her? Die a thousand times so that a twin of yours, in the time long after, might pursue her?”

  Montrose uttered a blasphemy and spat on the deck. That was his only answer.

  “Do you agree to conquer the Orion Arm in return for becoming its conqueror, and hence having the energy resources needed to pursue her?”

  Montrose said, “I agree.”

  The vast ophiuroid shape simply melted into the deck substance like a dark and spreading ink cloud in a lake below a layer of ice, and vanished. There was no farewell and no formality.

  Montrose was alone in the barren spot far from all eyes that the Authority of M3 had called its throne room. He shouted once or twice, and nothing happened. He waited for the floor to eat him, too, and nothing happened.

  He drove his spear point-first into the substance underfoot. “Now hear this, whoever is listening. The Authority of M3 has abdicated in my favor. That means some damned big changes are in the offing, because I want to shave off as many months of the predicted eight hundred thousand years it will take to take over and slap into shape the Orion Arm of the galaxy, on account of I want to see my wife. I need my intelligence augmented to the point where I can examine all the cliometric plans for every damned star you’ve got under your control, and I want to start looking for node and flux points in the evolutions you have planned, to pick out the likely targets to beam my doomed ghosts into. But first I want a throne!”

  Up from the glassy surface, with no noise and no waste heat, a large and ornate chair that looked precisely like the one Blackie used to use on the moon, complete with unicorn horns and a scowling ox face carved on the back—and Montrose was not even going to begin speculating on how M3’s servant knew the details on that—constructed itself instantly out of the glassy material.

  “That’s no good! Make it look like that buttholder at TX Canum Venaticorum instead.”

  And it was done. A throne adorned with the heraldic colors and signs of Rania’s family now stood there, complete with a canopy blocking out the eerie view overhead of the core cluster of M3.

  “Damn! I could get to like this. Gimme a gold crown while you are at it. And a bathrobe. That seat looks cold. For that matter, put a cot behind the throne, since I figure on taking a nap before I conquer one-sixth of the galaxy. And pox! I also need a keg of cold beer and a hot bowl of chili, before I go to bed, since my mom would hate to see her smartest and youngest go to bed sober and hungry. Give me a knife to eat my beans with. I ain’t a barbarian, you know. When I wake up, I am going to need a shooting iron and a target shaped like Blackie. Gotta keep my reflexes honed.”

  He put on the bathrobe, put on the crown, sat in the chair, balanced the cold, sweating stein of beer on one throne arm, and a steaming bowl of mouth-scalding chili on the other.

  And in his heart, louder than trumpets, was the strange, impossible knowledge that Rania was still alive. So for the first time in all his years since boyhood, he actually bowed his head and said his grace.

  Then he shoveled the tongue-scorching chili into his mouth and bellowed out such blasphemies as contradicted everything he had just said. But he shouted out such blessings upon taking a stiff draft of the strong brown beer, cold as sin and twice as pleasing, he figured his first meal as sovereign conqueror in training of the Orion Arm was evenly balanced, theologically speaking.

  After that, he sacked out on the cot behind his throne and fell asleep calculating the number of nights’ sleeps eight hundred thousand years might hold before he could once more set out in pursuit.

  PART THIRTEEN

  The Mindfulness

  1

  War in Heaven

  1. Coldest War

  CIRCA 400,000,000 B.C. TO A.D. 2,000,000,000

  By the time the Milky Way collided with Andromeda, the war between them, for all practical purposes, was over.

  It had taken the two combatant galaxies roughly four billion years to close the distance. On Earth, it was the era called Hadean, for the lava-coated orb was a roofless hell, when Andromeda sent self-reproducing neutrino packages across the 2.5 million lightyear gap at near lightspeed, to encounter the rich gravitic-nucleonic-material structures of the galactic cloud. Once they arrived, the packages begin reorganizing dark matter and then baryonic matter according to certain military operating principles, eventually congregating in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and organizing the stellar and biological evolution there.

  The war had begun before the Milky Way was properly awake, but even in those opening moves of the war, certain multistellar-output-level civilizations in the Scutum-Crux and Sagittarius Arms had made permanent information agreements that would serve as a skeleton for emerging Archons commanding the energy output of whole arms of the Milky Way. The Collaboration had begun, but in an environment already seed
ed with hostility to it.

  Andromeda was too remote to interfere directly, but indirect manipulation of philosophy, psychology, and history did its work; the Milky Way fell into civil discord and self-imposed confusion while the giant galaxy drew slowly closer.

  When, in the second billion years of war, the Milky Way as a whole, led by elements in the Orion Arm, achieved its long-delayed unity and sentience, the conflict with Andromeda accelerated into open war. The second phase had begun.

  2. Bombardment

  CIRCA A.D. 2,000,000,000 TO 3,500,000,000

  The galaxies dimmed, their stars winking out by the millions. Both combatants had placed their economies on wartime footing and were converting stars as rapidly as possible to Dyson spheres or Dyson fogs, a frantic attempt to swell their population numbers and increase their all-important mind-to-matter ratios.

  Andromeda had the advantage: she was edge-on to the Milky Way and could concentrate her fire anywhere within the disk she liked. Andromeda also could emplace her centers of communication, energy, and calculation in the lee arms of her disk, building up her centers of information and civilization-continuity there, and directing gas vents from the galactic core that direction, to enrich the stellar nurseries in the area.

  Also, Andromeda was ten times the mass of the Milky Way. This meant ten times the number of stars and interstellar nebulae, dark matter, and so on that could be rendered into useful forms of mass energy, including that most useful of substances, cognitive matter. From microscopic Jupiter Brains to medium-sized selfaware Dyson spheres to large-scale interstellar structures, Andromeda could grow more Brains than the Milky Way. This difference also altered the intellectual evolution of Andromeda away from efficiency in command-and-control response loops. Andromeda could afford the inefficiencies involved in decision architecture biased in favor of core-to-periphery data movement. Orders flowed out; correction responses did not often flow back in.

  Milky Way, meanwhile, was forced to scatter her library nexuses among the stellar clusters forming a rough globe above and below her disk, and rely on the initiatives of local interstellar civilizations.

  Like merging storm cloud banks exchanging bolts of lightning, the two spiral galaxies, gorgeous with stars and colored nebulae, raked each other with massed fusillades. The firing continued well into the fourth billion-year period. Supernovae artificially triggered were lased, and the total output directed with uncanny precision against globular clusters or nebulae where the long-term matter-energy organization could be found and disrupted. Even a solar system was too small a target for such thrusts. Enemy astronomers, looking across the narrowing void of six hundred thousand lightyears had to estimate (based on total energy outputs observed over thousands of years) which areas would turn out to be stable nexuses of the galaxy-wide thought-information system when the fire arrived six hundred thousand lightyears hence. Groups of component civilizations in the thousands and millions were selected as targets. It was nearly impossible to deceive the enemy about the centers of industry and thought-transformation, because the energy densities involved distorted spacetime. There would be little point, for example, to erecting a number of spoof civilizations, because the energy cost involved was roughly the same as that needed to erect a real civilization.

  The narrow beams of infinitely deadly radiation were laser-cast from artificially constructed nebulae whose constituents had the proper ratios of matter, antimatter, and exotic matter. For countless centuries, they flew. No signal, no warning, could travel faster than their own light. The coherent energy did not disperse, but arrived at the target systems undiminished in power; whatever was there—planets, ringworlds, thinking-clouds, Dyson spheres, or larger structures—were bathed in flame. Information beams traveling from star to star, or neutron packages, were disrupted. Certain artificial stars had been engineered on an attotechnological level so that every atom in the plasma was hardened to resist atomic fission. These were few. Any natural star caught in the beam path would cascade into a nova, igniting any nearby stars in horrific chain reaction.

  Whole constellations burned.

  3. Collision

  CIRCA A.D. 3,500,000,000 TO 3,900,000,000

  Just before the outer arms of the two intersected and scattered their stars into irregular clouds, both warring galaxies switched from long- to short-range weapons and converted enormous masses from the supersingularities at their cores into exotic forms of matter and had expended hundreds and thousands of supernovae worth of energy to accelerate many nebulae of microscopic particles into each other.

  These nanoinformation packages would evade the local antibodies and police mechanisms, produce Van Neumann organisms of one form or another, evolve into weapon-races. These weapons in turn would assess the local situation. Those in dense areas, where the thought-substrate-to-matter ratio was high, would found seductive civilizations on unclaimed worlds or unexamined stretches of Dyson surface to act against the economic and philosophical structures of interstellar library exchange.

  Those landing in rare areas, where the ratio of thought-substrate-to-matter was low, could act more blatantly. These organisms would rapidly (over a few tens of thousands of years) build ringworld-type directed-energy arrays around likely stars, focusing their beams against local interstellar clouds to interrupt the enemy cycles of stellar evolution, so that the carefully harvested novae of that season would not be ready to produce heavy elements to scatter into the next generation of nebular stellar nurseries.

  Components of the Milky Way Collaboration, even when made of very-well-designed and very-information-dense thinking matter, were not immortal and had not achieved perfect mental balance. Replacement civilizations were needed, each to perform certain specialized roles within the galactic organism.

  Civilizations arose and flourished, and formed replacements, and fell into senility and extinction, even as the cells in a man’s body live and die. A man will replace the whole volume of his body in seven years, or so it is said; the galactic mind underwent a similar turnover of components.

  But the new civilizations, like yearly crops, had to be tended and led to maturity. This meant that the right ratio of elements had to be present in the galactic clusters and stellar nurseries set aside for their growth. It did not matter how mentally advanced a particular interstellar civilization and its thinking machinery might be; if she could not obtain sufficient amounts of heavier-than-iron elements, her technological base could not be sustained. Polities who had to spend energy budgets artificially building “ersatz” elements through fusion could not compete with those not so burdened.

  Interfering with the placement and ignition of novae within the enemy galaxy had no immediate effect on the war effort. For that matter, neither did aerial bombing of civilian industrial cities in the microscopic human wars of the early mechanization period: but the long-term results lingered.

  Even during a war in heaven, the soldiers will burn each other’s crops.

  4. A Final Blow

  CIRCA A.D. 3,900,000,000

  The third phase of the war began as the galaxies closed to within extremely short-range firing distance, outermost stars within the disk of the other galaxy, their haloes of globular clusters already beginning to form one cloud.

  This was late in the day, and the great galactic minds were no longer firing. Their library systems were within short-communication range, and mind-to-mind fighting occupied the last hundred million years. The war evolved into an entirely intellectual affair, a clash of competing mental viruses, of philosophical-mathematical argument. And the Milky Way, albeit far inferior mentally to the giant she faced, somehow was winning. Component civilizations, Archons, Dominions and Dominations, Hosts and Virtues, began defecting, first in dozens, then in myriads.

  In retaliation, half the core matter of the Andromeda Galaxy was ejected, dragging millions of stars with it, plowing through the Milky Way like a hawk through starlings, and scattering the stars of the Orion Arm like so many gale-blown
fireflies. Fewer than one in a hundred of the stars of the arm were equipped to maneuver into safer galactic orbits; the rest were flung chaotically by the titanic gravity disturbance of the passage.

  This massive, final attack did only minor damage to the megascale engineering structures scattered throughout the most dense part of the arm, but it caused immense damage to the library system, that structure of elegant protocols by which the various parts of the galactic mind of the Milky Way kept contact with her constituents.

  The blow was mostly economic. Stable orbits around the galactic core were necessary for life and civilization to emerge on certain types of worlds. The effort of coordinating the rise and spread of certain polities, and the shepherding of doomed or outmoded polities into graceful extinction, was a difficult one. At the same time, the Collaboration coordinated with the growth and decay of stars to produce an optimum ratio of certain essential elements needed for the creation of megascale projects the Milky Way had in contemplation for the next hundred million years.

  The passage of the supermassive singularity from Andromeda disrupted all this. After the Orion Arm was struck, civilizations expected to emerge on certain worlds did not, and other areas suddenly sprang into predominance. At the speed of light, talk is slow, and to recover from this dark age was the work of tens of millions of years.

  The sight of Orion Arm, stars scattered and in ruins, traveled outward at lightspeed. With many lenses and eyes and instruments more advanced, the intelligences in Norma Arm and Centaurus and Sagittarius saw the ruined constellations rising over the horizons of their worlds or the wider horizons of their Dysons and larger housings. No help would be coming from Orion, they realized.