Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  The cliometric vectors started by Mickey after he converted Hyades to the faith, spreading holiness and crusade, and, later, by the Cataclysmic races of TX Canum Venaticorum, spreading unification and peace, spread and met and merged with centers where other human viruses had blown, including the seeds Montrose the Authority had spread from the globular cluster of M3. One by one, starting with the Rosette Nebula, the rivals of mankind in Orion Arm were overcome, or seduced, or welcomed.

  Montrose had conquered a small but symbolically significant bite of the Perseus Arm, their home worlds in the Soul Nebula, and humiliated the Colloquium, the most ancient of all the Archons, forms of life as slow and gigantic as living glaciers, because noncooperation was no longer an option, now that the vast disk of Andromeda was a naked-eye object looming in the night sky of all worlds.

  He joined with his old enemies, the Praesepe Collective, the only other creatures who understood love and death. And, later, the soulless beings of the Abstraction, silvery nanomachine life which had no memory of any biological origins, cool and heartless (but with a sardonic sense of humor which surely came from some living heart at one time), merged with the Benedictines and Jesuits and Dominicans, and the other great Empyrean polities of the spreading human-based alliance.

  Another memory: dozens of him, wearing black Dyson spheres as an outer shell, surrounding black holes with ferocious disks of white-hot plasma at each core, took up positions in and around the significant star clusters of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and dictated terms of surrender.

  The resistance had been weak, since the Symbiosis had already been torn by internal dissent. An earlier version of Montrose had visited and been martyred in millennia past, spreading Rania’s message and the mathematics of the Infinity Count game theory, where no one was outside retaliation, and no one inside the Concubine Vector. Many of the Symbiosis had heard, studied, and believed.

  And another: A duel between himself and the emissary of the Circumincession of Sagittarius. Each duelist was given a single red dwarf star, and the identical sets of small ringworlds to induce turbulence. He and his opponent, over the centuries, lashed out with vents and whips and stabbing darts of core plasma. Montrose feinted starboard and corrected into the center, avoiding the war planets the foe deployed as thick as chaff, overloading the gravity lances controlling the enemy sun. Montrose laughed as the foe star diminished to a neutronium pinpoint, issuing a wash of x-rays that slew his enemy. He never found out the fellow’s name, or if it was a member of a race that had names. But the Archon of Circumincession with ponderous grace had yielded, and forsook its futures, and adopted the cliometric model of Orion, based on the Infinity Count Equations of Rania.

  The visions of memory came thick and fast now, countless years of strangeness. His one recurring campaign was to tell each odd and alien form of life about the secret of peace, the mathematics of playing a game with no end. Again and again, for countless years, into numberless dull and hostile audiences, he taught them how to count to infinity.

  Richer in heavier elements than other arms of the galaxy, and having a larger proportion of stars orbiting the galactic hub in the belt most favorable for the formation of biological life, Orion Arm, despite being the smallest arm of all, eventually rose to predominance over its neighbors, and hegemony.

  And the Milky Way began to know peace. Rivalries dwindled. Each part of the galaxy began to trust. The stars and constellations agreed to shoulder the expense, the unearthly expense, of maintaining unified collaboration across such distances.

  And the great mind began to wake.

  When had he finally commanded stars in numbers sufficient to power the broadcast of himself into Andromeda? With Andromeda looming, he could only afford to use his personal supply of neutron suns. M3 had been entirely reduced to dark matter, as had many another globular cluster: all the stars of M3 by then were singularities and power sources. It had been early in the Eight Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Century, as he recalled. A.D. 802,701 to be exact, a date he selected for nostalgic reasons. And then…?

  “Is my hour come yet? I am due for a good day, one of these days. Has my wife come?”

  He sat up in the snow. The armor he wore was not the dueling armor he had expected. The breastplate was chased with a design of red and gold fusils or lozenges, quartered with scallops and roses, and about the whole figure writhed the three-headed Serpent of Aulis, with three sparrows above, wings spread as if in frantic flight, tiny gold beaks open. The baldric was inscribed with letters of gold. N’Oubliez. Never forget.

  It was the heraldry, more bogus than a federal dollar, the courtiers of Rania had imposed on him after his morganatic marriage. The rank-maddened generation of that long-lost era insisted that their royal husbands have some sort of lineage, real or make-believe.

  He stood. Someone had thoughtfully provided a caterpillar-drive pistol and a sword. He drew the blade and held it up to the clouds. The sword he recognized: the hilts were splendid with jacinths; a white serpent and a red were intertwined along the length. And here also were letters: Ultima Ratio Regum. Kings get the last word.

  2. The Klemperer Worlds

  He looked left and right. He stood on a hillcrest in a pine forest. In the distance, a line of fog hinted at a river valley. There were mountains on the horizon in each direction, as if he were in the dead center of some vast crater. The clouds hid the sun, if there were a sun. The smothered glare of the light came not from one blurry disk, as one might see on a cloudy day on Earth, but instead there was an arch of light as if someone had ignited the pathway traced from dawn to noon to dusk, if he were in a latitude where the noon sun was less than halfway up the sky.

  “Hullo, whoever is there? This is Blackie’s damned sword, not mine.”

  He felt like tossing the blade away, but since there were no lights in the distance, no farmhouses, no sign of habitation nearby, and since he did not know what world this was, or what year or millennium or eon, he thought he might as well hang on to it. He sheathed it.

  It was obvious, after about three seconds, that the creatures who re-created him from old archives had been working from incomplete records, and so some of the elements from the myth might have been swapped or misremembered, including whose sword was whose.

  Montrose grimaced. “I’ve been through this about a zillion times. You do not get to stick thoughts into my poxy, plague-stained head. If you want to talk to me, you grow a microphone, or a body with a mouth, and come and damn well talk, using air vibrations. Or semaphore. Write something down on a rock or something.”

  Again, it was a three-second pause before he had his answer: the lines of snow tilted slowly away from the vertical, and a great wind began to blow. He lowered his faceplate and felt oxyhelium sprayed up from nozzles inside the mask. He had to brace himself against a tree as the gale battered playfully past him, and then dig himself out of the snowbank the overburdened pine branches dropped on him.

  The clouds had parted. The light from the sky was not daylight. It was not day. This was not a world with a sun.

  From the east, looming, enormous, looking as if it would surely pass Roche’s limit and shatter, or topple forward into the landscape, was a full moon that filled a tenth of the visible horizon. It was a habitable world, with motley green-brown continents and blue seas and white swirls of cloud so earthlike Montrose was stabbed with homesickness. Above it was a second moon, smaller in visual arc, this one a reddish-brown orb coated with cracks and craters, yet somehow alluring, beautiful. A streaked malachite world was above that, showing a smaller disk yet. Then, an opal world, an onyx, a smaragd. At the highest point was a tawny orb the hue of a lion mane, smudged with clouds of royal blue. To the left of this yellow moon was a carnelian, a peridot, then a tourmaline, then a chalcedony. Looming in the west, filling the sky alarmingly as the world it faced, was the vast orb the hue of a grackle egg, a world of landless ocean dappled with flotillas and archipelagoes of icebergs chased by storm clouds. Twelve worlds, in
cluding the one on which he stood.

  Assuming the worlds were of comparable mass, it was a Klemperer rosette, all the planets equidistant from each other, orbiting a common barycenter. A double hexagon could be a rather stable organization, with each world sitting in the Lagrange 4 and 5 points of the others.

  One odd effect for which he could not account was a band of blue which rose and followed the planets through their arc. He saw clouds and other dark matter there, and the sky was blue and blotted out the stars beyond only there. Elsewhere the sky was dark blue or black. It was as if a torus of atmosphere filled the orbit, and all the planets sharing that orbit shared that air. Presumably the doughnut-shaped intertube of atmosphere was revolving around the barycenter as the same rate as the planets. But it was like seeing a helium balloon without the balloon skin: Why did the pressurized volume not simply explode at once into the surrounding vacuum?

  From the leading hemisphere of each planet a stalactite of air rose up, outweighing all mountains, and met a stalagmite of air reaching out from the trailing hemisphere of the next planet. Air had weight. So why did the gravity of the worlds not pull the vast and curving column of air into Venusian globes tight around them?

  Against the starry sky, a thin pink thread ran north to south, slightly brighter where it passed overhead, and darkening to deeper red where it touched the horizon, no doubt an illusion of the oblique angle of the atmosphere, which reddens the sun at twilight.

  None of the worlds were crescent in phase. There was no sun. The light was coming from starlight alone. The sky was crowded as a snowstorm, stars by thousands, by multitudes, by myriads, bright enough to show colors.

  The number of stars was astonishing. Earth’s night sky contains about thirty first-magnitude stars. This held ten thousand. Of second-magnitude and dimmer stars, there were likewise three or four orders of magnitude more plentiful than ever seen from any world of Man’s Empyrean. The whole twilight sky was about twenty times brighter than a night with a full moon on Earth.

  He was in the middle of a globular cluster.

  Looking south, at the edge of his vision, he saw a circle of stars brighter than any morning star. It was twelve more worlds orbiting the thread. A tiny ring of blue embraced them, barely visible, hinting that a doughnut shape of atmosphere also orbited with them.

  Looking north, there was again another circle of bright planets ringing the thread, and a smaller third ring of worlds beyond that.

  The thread headed into a swirled cloud of stars, like the eye of a hurricane seen from low orbit. The cloud was very bright indeed. The Milky Way here was not a dim road through the constellations but an intersection of eight or twelve roads all meeting at that bright cloud. He was inside a thick globular cluster and was looking at the core of the Milky Way from a point above the plane of the galaxy.

  He deduced that this red thread was a cosmic string he had seen once before as he left the Milky Way. It was a superdense and infinitely long discontinuity in timespace, visible, here, only because some form of matter, dust or gas, no doubt was falling into it, forming a tube-shaped accretion disk as the gas molecules were subjected to heat and tidal stress sufficient to fuse atoms. It was red because the escaping light lost energy leaving the intense gravity field. The physical string itself—if that concept had meaning—was invisible.

  No, not the Milky Way. The number and location of the arms were wrong.

  Andromeda.

  He’d made it. He was here.

  3. The Necromantress

  He drew the shining sword and flourished at the wide and spiraling bright cloud of the galactic core.

  “Where the pox is my wife?” he shouted.

  Montrose felt the ache from his bladder again. He figured it would be easier to figure out how the codpiece quick release worked rather than how the diaper worked, so he stepped over under a tree with thick branches (he did not want Andromeda to see him) and did his business.

  Stepping back out into the absurdly bright starlight again, he looked overhead. He now saw a disk of bright fire, small as a dime held at arm’s length, touching (or perhaps eclipsing, or perhaps coming up from) the red thread, apparently at the barycenter of the rosette. It looked like a white spark escaping the red-hot wire being drawn in a steel mill.

  How and why this light was not reddened by Doppler shift was a mystery.

  “What the plague are you?”

  Then a vast mask passed between himself and the bright spark. It was looking at him.

  Perhaps it was only the sail of a vessel passing between him and the distant bright spark, but the sail circle had a long half circle breaking its surface, lit by the fires behind, looking almost like a smile, and above either endpoint were two smaller half circles facing the other direction, also letting light pass through them, looking almost like two eyes squinted up in antic mirth. A nimbus of brightness like the hair of a solar eclipse surrounded the dark mask in each direction.

  Montrose remembered how his older brother Diomedes had hated and feared the clowns and mummers with their strange ever-changing masks and luminous eyes that one year the traveling carnival came to Bridge-to-Nowhere. Now he understood.

  The mask winked, first one mirthful eye, then the other, and then it smiled, and beams of disklight flashed brightly through the orifices.

  It did not take long for Montrose to see the ratio between the semaphore signs and the Monument notation.

  “’Sokay with you if I talk aloud?”

  Yes. But I am aware of your thoughts. Call me Alcina.

  “Why that name?”

  Of the available figures in your memory, others have associative connotations that are either too strong or too weak.

  “She’s the Enchantress from Eridani—from that cartoon I watched as a kid. She used a vampire-flower from Venus to shoot love-spores into Captain Sterling. They were about to get married, but then his ship, the Emancipation, was plunging into the atmosphere nigh to burn up, and his loyalty for the crew and love for his ship broke the spell…” He shook his head and muttered, “Sweet Jesus! How can I remember that stupid junk after all these years…?”

  Do you recall the rest of the episode?

  “She used her mind-magic to force a timewarp crystal to raise Dr. Hume, the Terraformer, from the dead. He died. That happened to him a lot. As a kid, I wondered why they did not just keep that crystal around, or raise up the marine in the red tunic who died the episode before stepping on the explosive toadstool on the Planet of Peril. Are you saying you raise the dead?”

  In effect. I reorganize nonviable thought-records back into a self-sustaining position, and, if the noumenal resonance effect cooperates, the original sense of self reenters timespace along the same axis.

  “Was I dead?”

  Yes. Andromeda killed you immediately upon reception. I sent thirty-nine iterations of you into the Andromeda environment, of slightly more recent epochs. You are the fortieth, and earliest.

  “Nice round number. Fortieth you sent, or the fortieth I sent?”

  The number of iterations you transmitted and had destroyed in pre-awareness times is a matter of speculation. Records indicate that the original broadcast version of you reached Andromeda in the circa A.D. Three Million Three Hundred Forty-One Thousand. This date falls within the First Billennium. Your mind record dates from the interregnum between the First and Second Awareness, the time of the Orion Collaboration. This is the time of the Third Awareness. This is the Fifth Billennium.

  Montrose understood Alcina was speaking of periods of the Milky Way existing as a single selfaware entity, one mind into which all the selfaware Jupiter Brains, Dysons, globular clusters and galactic arms, Powers, Hosts, Authorities and Archons contributed and cooperated to maintain.

  The Second Awareness had still been in the planning stages of million-year-long plans when he, Montrose the Authority, had broadcast himself in the Eight Hundred and Second Century from stations in long-dead M3 toward Andromeda. That attempt apparently fai
led, as did many repeated attempts afterward.

  Apparently, the Second Awareness had failed, too, and the Milky Way had entered and emerged from yet another Dark Ages while he slumbered.

  “I don’t recall you asking me to go a suicide mission.”

  It was not necessary to ask. Examination of your thought-records showed unambiguously that you would do whatever is needed to recover your wife, the princess Rania. Also, your willingness to do whatever is needed for the benefit of your people is legendary. Of all the possible agents or emissaries available to the Milky Way, you and you alone have a chance of provoking a benevolent reply from the ghost of Andromeda.

  “Ghost?”

  The Mindfulness was also dead, and also reconstructed from thought-records.

  “Am I the same person? The same me? The same self?”

  Yes.

  Montrose was mildly surprised at the decisive answer. There were no qualifications, no ambiguity, just a simple affirmative.

  “How do you figure?”

  Was not Erasmus Hume from your cartoon the same man after Alcina of Eridanus resurrected him?

  “That was make-believe.”

  So is your concept of death.

  He looked left and right at the landscape, the white valleys, dark green hills, and zebra-striped mountains of black rock and pale snow. It could have been an exact replica of the spot in southern Alaska where he had once hidden from Blackie.

  “I do not see a pay phone or a palace. Where is she? Andromeda, I mean.”

  You are in the environs of Andromeda. Every material thing to the subatomic level is controlled by her. She is the one who incarnated you in that form of flesh, garbed you, and armed you.

  He doffed his glove, drew his pistol, pointed it at a nearby tree, thumbed the trigger. He was rewarded with the flat snap of noise as a bit of dowel was pinched from the chamber and flung forward, broke the sound barrier, and made a tiny round scar in the bark. It was a well-made pistol, true of aim, and the charge was nearly full.