He rubbed his right hand with his left, because the knife scars in his right hand ached in the cold air. Those scars had been lost so many bodies ago, he could not recall. That Andromeda would know about them, pay enough attention to detail to put them back, regrowing every cell in his hand just so, was frankly disturbing.
“All this is real enough,” he said, drawing on his soft glove, and working the control to stiffen it into a hard gauntlet once more. “What is her game? What do I need to do to get her attention?”
Since none of our efforts got her attention, it would be imprudent of me to advise you.
“Suppose I talk to her. Then what?”
Our records show you forever quest for a mythical Swan Princess who stole a star from the sky. The star was made of diamond antimatter. We have no records of any such star, nor could such a thing arise naturally.
“Her name is Rania. The star was real, but it was artificial. It is something the Lesser Magellanic Cloud used to do back in the day.”
In that case, if you speak with Andromeda for yourself, ask her the whereabouts and fate of your wife; for us, in return for the kindness in resurrecting you, ask Andromeda why the Milky Way was permitted to win this war?
“You have got to a lot of trouble to find out. Why is it so important?”
Our legal and social arrangements depend on certain concepts of rightness and balance impossible to describe accurately to one of your intellectual strata.
“Try me.”
Let us say, by way of analogy, that my patrons and makers will be ashamed before their peers if they allowed this mystery to linger unanswered. There is something like a marketplace of the mind which prioritizes information flows throughout the combined galaxy which would lose confidence in the curiosity of my makers, deny them credit; and something like a voting constituency who would rightly doubt the ability of my patrons to solve the great and heartless intelligence test which is this universe and all its dark adversity, if this enigma is not addressed.
On a practical level, the answer may help us combine the Milky Way mind with the Andromeda constituents, remnants and relicts whose goodwill we must acquire to reconstruct civilization on a bi-galactic scale.
“So what happens if I don’t get Andromeda to speak to me?”
You die in lonely isolation on this planet, which Andromeda created to imprison you.
“What the pox? What the devil does that mean?”
I see my prior comment was misunderstood. The world on which you stand, and the cylindrical system of worlds following the cosmic string, are within the environs of Andromeda’s brain. The matter around you, including the air you breathe, is cognitive matter part of the resurrected Mindfulness extended neural system. The node we occupy is twelve lightyears away. We are communicating with you via faster-than-light pulses transmitted across the cosmic string.
Montrose opened his mouth to remind the necromantress that there was no such thing as faster-than-light communication, but then, remembering what he saw when he departed the Milky Way for M3, closed it again. The speed of light in a vacuum was not the same as the speed of light in other media. It was the process of stringing a telephone wire across interstellar distances that baffled him.
No agent of the Milky Way is in a position to carry you to another world, nor to offer you supplies or succor, should you fail.
“You managed to make the wind blow, and move the clouds aside.”
That was done with tidal effects, caused by an ultrashort-range but very costly manipulation of the cosmic discontinuity filament. Once I cease communicating to you through the discontinuity filament, I have no certainty I will be able to find or identify you again, until and unless you can convince Andromeda to open communication with the Milky Way. The two galaxies are now one physically, and must become one mentally, or be overwhelmed.
And with that, the mask went dark, and was invisible against the many stars, or perhaps it had vanished.
Montrose uttered a few choice swear words, wondering why superbeings could not start a conversation with a greeting and end it with a farewell, like normal people.
4. The Wood of Waiting
It ended up taking seven years to break the silence of Andromeda.
Montrose spent the early days in misery and work. He lived in a wigwam of woven branches, and set snares or stalked for game, conserving his ammunition. The alien had so correctly seeded the environment with the proper balance of North American flora and fauna from the preposthuman era, the home land and home years from which he came, that the small errors were even more glaring, such as when he came across a dream-apple tree from Alpha Centauri, or, when, along the riverside, he found a herd of the crested pentagon hive-creatures from Eta Cassiopeiae.
The crater was roughly twenty miles in radius, ringed with mountains, with a lake midmost. Early in the first month, during his preliminary explorations, he climbed the mountains to the east and found a wall of fog severing this valley from the next. It was like a solid line of yellow smoke tracing its way across the mountain crest. He could stick his hand into it without harm. When he stepped into it, his suit readings told him it was a chlorine atmosphere at roughly ten atmospheres of pressure. How the gasses were kept separate from the earthlike atmosphere of his valley, he could not figure out. Pulling a handful of yellow smog out of the wall of smoke merely made the golden poison trickle between his fingers and go back into the yellow wall again. Other atmospheres of other compositions and pressures hemmed in the valley to the south and west and north. The northern one was transparent to the human eye and contained a valley filled with branching red growths the looked like coral, and little grains of what seemed like living sand that swarmed and slid and crawled across the roots and lower branches of the coral. He made only short expeditions into this landscape, wary of running low on stored oxyhelium he had no way to replace. Then he returned to the earthlike landscape surrounding the crater lake, which he had already dubbed Dancing Bear Cage Valley.
He cut down small trees with the regal sword and made himself a hut. He hunted, skinned, cured, fished, and otherwise made do. Soon he was garbed in buckskin, with a proper raccoon fur hat, tail attached, and moccasins of rabbit hide. He propped the suit up in a corner of his hut, called it Simon, and talked to it without bothering to wonder if he were losing his mind again. He had, and often, and the prospect no longer worried him.
The world neither revolved nor rotated. For nighttime, the cloud overhead turned opaque, the light was smothered, and the animals slept. For day-time, the clouds parted. For seasons, warm air bubbled up from a geyser in the center of the midmost lake, and kept the clouds parted for more hours in the warm months. He never discovered where the birds flew in the autumn, or how they survived in the alien atmospheres hemming him in on each side, but it made him painfully aware of how much like a bear in a cage he was, and one which could not see the onlookers and visitors staring at him.
By the first year, he had found clay, built a kiln, reinvented pottery, the bow and arrow, flint napping, and in general had reached the late Neolithic level of life and abundance.
By the second, he had a working blacksmithy and was mining surface ore from a nearby alien environment whose atmosphere, albeit opaque, was thinner than that of Mars, but which had lumps of iron ore lying on the surface of black sand. Tie by tie and rail by rail, he hand-built a mine car to and from the dark iron landscape. Glassblowing came next, and a long frustrating period making radio tubes.
He tried amplitude modulation signals, but got no answer from Andromeda.
But eventually he found the frequencies and combinations to talk to the ratiotech brains embedded in his armor, his pistol, and the smaller beads he was not pleased to find in his own body.
No doubt these were the mechanisms used by Alcina to track his nervous system changes and read his mind. They also were also able to send and receive chemical signals into the cellular structure of his body.
He wired his hut for the one bulb of his electric lig
ht of which he was immensely proud, and connected it to the paddle wheel leading from the lean-to where he kept his mill wheel. So he considered himself to have achieved ancient, medieval, and industrial levels of one-man civilization.
The next year he leaped all the way into the biotechnology level, since he could send signals into lumps of flesh he cut from himself, talk to trigger the regeneration and regrowth sequence from totipotent cells, and grow a tribe of crude homunculi controlled by radio signals. These apelike hulks helped him erect a radio tower and blow the vacuum tubes he needed for a simple sapientech, a machine not selfaware but capable of value judgments and original thought. He could think of no better name than Friday for that machine.
No answer from shortwave, either.
He used Friday to hack into Alcina’s biotechnology and turn himself into a freakish Hindu god. His sessions in the operating theater Friday built in a pit under the log cabin were nothing to write home about, but he could grow complex neural tools, scavenge them out of his extra heads and hands and so on, and pop them in jars the hulks had blown or grown for him out of glass or enamel. These were hooked back into Friday, and the thing grew so intelligent, he decided it needed a name change. He called it Adam, after Frankenstein’s monster.
Adam was able to use the cellular mechanism to grow and control viruses that could manipulate molecules precisely. It was with infinite gusto that he downed the thimble of beer he constructed molecule by molecule, and told himself he was broken into the nanotechnological age. He had to wait to spring to capture bees, and grow an apiary, and get himself to roughly the level of technology he knew when he was a child. That was the fourth year.
By the fifth, he had a working molecular engine and was making chemical combinations that could not exist in nature.
By the sixth, he had a perfectly fine emulation of a pair of collies he had tamed, named Laddie and Lassie, able to run the molecular engine. After only a short delay of a few months when he irradiated the forest by mistake, and burned the trees like matches, he had a crude but serviceable atomic compiler and could make the artificial elements human scientists had given such fanciful names—argent and unobtainium, adamantium, orichalchum.
The real Laddie and Lassie disappeared during the fire. He searched among the leafless, black, dead and upright tree trunks crowding ash-coated slopes. The only day in those years spent in the wooded valley that he wept was the day he found and buried those dogs.
Neutrino signals, high-energy waves, geon waves, earthquake percussions, molecular neurocodings released into the atmosphere—no reply from Andromeda. He could see, but could not read, the subleptonic energy array that flickered and danced between all the atoms of earth, water, and air all around them, and measure the energy beams reaching off to the other eleven worlds of his rosette, and even, once, he caught the backscatter of an exotic form of energy being transmitted through the cosmic discontinuity filament. But anything he imposed or manipulated into the gigantic flow of thought-forms was simply deleted, or isolated.
Alcina had surely tried all these things. What made him, Montrose, have any chance where wiser and more complete minds had failed? He asked the empty suit aloud that question, and worked the control to make the shoulders shrug.
But that gave him an idea.
By the seventh year, he was able to perform some basic functions of the Fox subatomic, atomic, and molecular technologies he had working inside his body, mostly from suit components he had scavenged, brought to life, turned into multiple-oriented self-replicating organisms, and wove into his own biostructure. It made him nine feet tall, but he kept his basic human look, face, hands, and so on.
The breakthrough came during the first test run of his new body. He was climbing the northern peaks toward his iron-mining pentagons (he had biomodified the Eta Cassiopeiae creatures to take over certain tedious tasks for him) that he turned, and, looking down, saw the overall shape of the valley. The damage from the forest fire had not regrown. There were seedlings here and there, hardly taller than grass, or stumps putting out new wisps of green, but by and large, the ground was clear of any obscuring canopy.
It was not round, but slightly oval.
The rivers wound in a general spiral toward the center, but with certain canals which cut straight across the landscape. He saw how the burn stumps of oaks were planted in a spiral that was slightly irregular, whereas the ash trees, the elm, and the slender smoking ruins of the larch formed other patterns …
The ratio of distance between the focal points of the oval versus the length of the major axis reflected the vibration ratios of the hydrogen and hydroxyl natural emission frequencies, multiplied by Fibonacci sequence values. Where had he seen that before? For some reason, he was reminded of the basilica he once had seen on the moon …
And he laughed aloud. The valley, the whole valley, was the opening sequence of the Monument, folded inward on itself in the shape of species of trees, water courses, and the mathematical relations between certain mountain peaks and hillocks.
It had been too big for him to see.
The whole of Dancing Bear Cage Valley was a message from Andromeda.
3
The Throne of Andromeda
1. Words in Woods
A.D. 4,000,612,628
Montrose could sight-read the mysterious metalogical and mathematical code of the Monument. The irony was not lost on him that this art, once so implacable that he had sacrificed in vain his own sanity to learn, was now to him routine.
This was the unredacted version, the so-called Reality Equations. He saw the sequences that had been missing from the Monument at the Diamond Star: the Concubine Vector asymptotic diminution, the Bellman-Ford algorithm of vector routing, and the Count-to-Infinity solution.
The hardest part was deciphering the references to vast intergalactic distances, defined in terms of fractions of the spacetime curvature of the sidereal universe itself, to identify which clusters and galaxies were being discussed.
Signals from outside the Local Group, from the Thrones of the Pinwheel Galaxy of M101 or Bode’s Galaxy of M81, from the Cherubim ruling the Fornax Cluster and Eridanus Cluster, showed that the war damage between the Milky Way and Andromeda had not gone unnoticed. Even now, ancient and powerful efforts are being organized against the war-weary and greatly weakened pair.
Montrose adjusted his body to withstand the various other environments surrounding him and climbed again the peaks into the hills into those valleys. Eventually he found the marks, either obvious or hidden, either visible to human eyes or to other senses he grew through his nervous system using Fox techniques, corresponding to the Beta Segment of the Monument, then Gamma and Delta, outward in a spiral, mile after mile, all the way to the Upsilon Segment.
How many days he walked or burrowed or flew or sank or swam it, he did not count. Each vale kept a different rhythm of light and dark, impersonating different planetary revolutions.
In this Upsilon valley, which contained an atmohydrosphere of methane and liquid ammonia, Montrose, in the shape of a monstrous whale, finally found the cliometric statements of Andromeda’s future at the bottom of a silent, tideless sea.
The future composition of the galaxies controlled by the Virgo Cluster held two possible branches. Nothing less than total cooperation between Andromeda and the Milky Way would enable either of them to survive the exploitation, or even the attack, by opportunists throughout nearby Virgo Cluster hegemonic space. The other option was marriage: a single bi-galactic system. This would require an appalling unity and intimacy, one which the Throne did not know how to convince her constituent elements, the twelve Archons of Andromeda, to adopt.
It was a simple prisoner’s dilemma, but there was only one possible iteration with no possibility of retaliation. Andromeda could be betrayed, easily and without future loss to the Milky Way.
Andromeda saw that she would be obliterated if she did not trust her archenemy, the Milky Way, absolutely and without reservation. But thi
s new version of the Milky Way, the Third Awareness, was a stranger to Andromeda.
What basis can you offer for marriage and communion with a total stranger?
It would have taken many seasons to regrow the trees in different spiral shapes to spell out an answering message.
However, the dream-apple tree had survived the fire, since it was, of course, designed to withstand the flares of Proxima. He found it wrapped in its own silvery and heat-resistant underleaves amid a pile of smoldering charcoal.
The dream-apple tree was an outrageous masterpiece of the pantropic bioengineer’s art. It was designed to adapt and lacked some of the checks and balances more cautious pantropists built into the adaptation vectors of later trees on later worlds. With the help of Adam, it took only a slight modification of the dream-apple tree to compress its growth cycle to a few days and have it mutate itself into false-oak, false-elm, false-ash, and so on, so that Montrose could copy the text pattern of Andromeda.
Montrose spent a season planting the seeds, but the forest grew with magical, dreamlike, frightful swiftness, and many flowers and blooms he had accidentally brought into being, exotic orchids, black roses, mirror-leaved lilies, lianas with leaves of metallic gold, adorned the weird forest with a phantasmagoria of color. The gold and silver blooms seemed to repel each other, and the ecological competition forced them, by some impossible coincidence or drollery of his own unconscious mind, when seen from the mountain peaks, into the argent and gules fusils of the coat of arms of Monaco.
His answer: Love.
2. A Nameless World Shattered
A.D. 4,000,612,718
That night, the fountains of the lake bed were opened, and flood water rose, and the rains poured down from a black sky. Montrose cursed and swore and struggled, trying to keep afloat some of his creatures and part of his ratiotech breadboard, but soon he was overwhelmed.
He grew gills and sank to the bottom, fuming with anger.
The waters filled the valley to the level of the surrounding peaks, and then froze. Icebergs joining together became a solid ice-rink surface overhead. Down and down it grew as the temperature sank, until the lake, all the way to its bed, was solid glacier. Montrose could not keep a sphere of ice around him heated by any biotechnological trick at his command, and so he used a Fox-technique to sustain the life in him, frozen, motionless, but feeding off the radioactive decay in his bones, from cells which were the remote biological descendants of the batteries of his suit.
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