Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  He grew additional organs to tap into higher energy channels and sense the environment. He saw the glacier hauled by peristalsis to a point miles below the planetary crust. Senses of longer range and greater penetration were required. Slowly he composed and grew them.

  He was in time to see an intruding gas giant, partly ignited into stellar fusion, like a rocket, passing through the rosette with such exquisite if not impossible precision that the worlds waltzed into higher and lower orbits. The resonance sent this world (which Montrose realized he had never bothered to dub) into a highly eccentric orbit. Out it swung, while the other planets moved like the ponderous hands of a clock, all gathering to one side of the nameless world’s orbit, narrowing the minor axis of the orbit almost to nothing. The nameless planet plunged toward the thread on an orbit to intercept it.

  Tidal flexing as the world approached the threadlike singularity of the discontinuity filament cracked the nameless planet’s surface, and turned it, in a single hellish hour, into a forest of volcanoes and raging oceans of molten magma. All the complex ecospheres were wiped out.

  The accretion sheath of the invisible filament turned from red to white as the planet fell toward the linear event horizon, and the thick stars of the globular cluster burned blue and bluer as their infalling light Doppler shifted up the scale. Time had slowed, and the nearby stars moved and swirled like motes of bright smoke. Scores of decades fled by in an hour.

  The intolerably bright, impossible line of ultradense nonmaterial sliced neatly through the globe off-center. Somehow, gravity did not simply pull the cap-shaped slice back to the mass magma mass. The discontinuity filament was vibrating, somehow warping spacetime on so fine a scale that the two world segments, great and small, were in different frames of reference. His long-range Foxlike senses, which enabled him to sense all this through miles of ice and rock and surface magma, hundreds and thousands of miles of outer space, could not detect whatever invisible force prevailed over the gravity, but something slung the nine-tenths of the molten planetary mass back along its orbit, past the gas giant, and slowly eased into the overlap of the Lagrange points of the neighboring worlds. It was an act of planetary billiards so elegantly flawless as to be hubris.

  Meanwhile, the one-tenth segment of molten world, like a floating island, collapsed into a ball and took up a spiral orbit moving equidistant from the filament, but along it, toward the Andromeda core. Montrose was preserved alive in the midst.

  Then he sensed many forms of energy around him. A beam angled out of the near-event-horizon Cauchy space near the discontinuity and precisely intersected his body. It was a neutrino beam, and it passed through solid matter like sunlight through glass, untouched and harmless.

  A fine-scaled echo effect allowed him to calculate the beam’s origin; it was issuing from two dozen different locations, from stars and megascale engineering structures sprawling through this cluster near the discontinuity path.

  And where the beam passed through his nervous system, electrons and other large particles condensed and coalesced out of the segments, again, by some impossible alchemy. His nervous system was touched with the delicacy of a surgeon, and cells in the pons, reticular complex, the thalamus and hypothalamus, and the areas devoted to dreaming and dream interpretation were stimulated.

  From her many mansions through this globular cluster and beyond, Andromeda reached across timespace at greater than lightspeed and imposed a vision on him.

  3. A Vision of Andromeda

  Montrose saw a lady made of stars, garbed in trailing tresses of a bridal gown like nebulae, her bridal veil a shower of protostars and large molecular clouds, her imperial coronet a ring of globular clusters.

  The vast and unearthly countenance of this empress was beautiful beyond words, sublime but terrifying. Swarms of red giants in countless myriads painted her ruby lips, white dwarves like diamond dust adorned the curve of her cheek. Novae and white supergiants formed the whites of her half-lidded eyes, and, midmost, her blue-white irises were the accretion disks of the blackest pupils formed by two supermassive singularities, each the core of a galaxy. The x-ray jets showed the direction of her view as she bent her gaze, perfect and perfectly expressionless toward the mote of mortal life which was Montrose.

  She raised her delicate, fair hands, each finger of which was a river of stars, blending and pale like the Milky Way seen in an Arizona desert midnight.

  Her wrists were encircled by erubescent constellations, darkly glittering rings and whorls of stars and streams of gas and dust. The imperial bride was chained.

  Her voice was the music of the spheres.

  “Blessings and greetings upon you, Last Man of the Empyrean Race, long extinct. I am the Mindfulness, the Mastermind, the Ingenious, the Contriver. I am the Sovereign Thought, the Teleology, the Throne. We are Andromeda. We are here to present our petition to you.”

  Montrose was thunderstruck. What plea could she ask of him? Who was he to her?

  Seeing his thoughts in him, Andromeda said, “You are the Judge of Ages. We require your verdict on this, the Year Four Billion, which is the Era of Coalescence, when Milky Way weds Andromeda. You will condemn all or vindicate all.”

  4. The Lady’s Plea

  Montrose could not tell if he were dreaming or awake, alive or suspended, talking aloud or merely thinking to himself. Neither did he care.

  “Ma’am, I thought I was supposed to be an ambassador to you. I was here to ask you two questions.” He peered at the strange, limitless, titanic apparition and noticed that the hemispherical clouds of countless stars representing her bosom rose and fell as if with long and slow and nonexistent breathing. “And why are you a lady, anyway?”

  “In the presence chamber of your dreaming mind, I take upon myself the symbols and metaphors most apt to your understanding. This crown is my sovereignty; these breasts the source of milk that sustains and feeds the myriads of my galaxy; this veil my chastity; the bridal gown the sign of my surrender and coming mental union with Milky Way, an intimate violation more intimate than rape, or else a consummation more fertile; these chains are the cliometry of creation, which operates at a larger scale than the history of races and the evolution of stars. You have a dim memory of myth about a royal woman thus chained, also named Andromeda, fated to be fed to a sea monster. The symbolism is compelling. Also, I occupy a female hence submissive position, pleading for your chivalry.”

  “I am not so sure about that ‘female hence submissive’ jazz. That does not seem to describe my wife, and surely not my mom. But let’s put that aside. Why did you let me cool my heels in your waiting room seven years, out of doors, sleeping in the snow, hunting rabbits, going hungry, cutting myself without anesthetic to build the electronic brains and molecular engines I needed to speak to you? You could have stuck this beam of neutrinos into my skull at any time and played my brain cells like the keys on a piano. Or at least given me a good ax-head to start with, or a blanket, or a solid bucket. Do you know how hard it is to haul water with clay pots? Why the wait?”

  “Because I had to be sure of your purpose, and your character and your identity. When Ximen del Azarchel came before me, seeking Rania his wife, these many eons ago, he was placed in that same wood to suffer the same test as you, but he grew distracted with other concerns. After twenty-one years of tinkering with the materials provided, he found a way to download himself into other parts of my consciousness and pursued a far different goal. His mind, like yours, has a unique property of self-reorganization. That property made him useful to me.”

  “Hold your horses. She is not his wife! She’s mine!”

  “There is some ambiguity involved. Nonetheless, the marriage is lawful by your laws and practices, or so I was given to understand by Del Azarchel’s father.”

  “His father?”

  “Is that the wrong word? The holy man who witnessed the marriage vows. Rania insisted on a proper wedding mass.”

  “I don’t believe you. How did they find a prea
cher in Andromeda, with mankind extinct?”

  “That I do not know. Ask her.”

  “Where is Rania? Still alive?”

  “She lives.”

  “Thank God!” (But at the same time, he also said, or thought, I knew it!)

  “Rania last was known to reside in the dwarf elliptical galaxy NGC 221, also called Le Gentil. Le Gentil is one of my satellites, one hundred sixteen thousand lightyears hence. Many years ago, I smote his ruling Authority and dismembered his spiral arms. How do you plan to reach her?”

  Montrose was taken aback by the query. “Uh … hitchhike.”

  “I will at my expense transmit you there, if you hear me to the end.”

  “Deal!”

  Montrose did not have to turn that offer over in his mind for any length of time. In the dream, he spat in his palm and held his hand up toward the cosmic, queenly shape, composed of constellations and swarms of stars. She bent her vast, unfathomable gaze down on him gravely.

  He shrugged, wiped his hands on his pants, deciding not to wonder where and how in this dream-vision he had acquired pants. For that matter, he did not wonder on what substance he was standing. “Say your piece.”

  “I was speaking of a rare, almost unique, property found in the mind of Ximen del Azarchel, and one you share with him. When consumed by other and greater minds, your thoughts recombine and revive, and eventually conquer whatever system contains you.”

  “Great! I am a mental virus. M3 thought this was due to the sexual nature of our species.”

  “M3 was a fool. Duosexual species were discouraged in your arm of the galaxy by my servant the Lesser Magellanic Cloud because they are altricial, and hence uncooperative to the plan of indentured servitude, forced deracination, and emergency sophotransmogrification then being pursued. Your world was an overlooked relic seeded by the Panspermians, and insignificant.

  “No; your unnatural persistence and replication endurance is due to transcendental elements Rania imparted to both of you from her ulterior noumenal connections.

  “I made Ximen del Azarchel the base template for my internal embassy system. Constituent minds, Archons and Authorities, within my hierarchy from time to time grew discontented and disharmonious: I would dispatch one or several Del Azarchel ghosts into any troublemakers, and the minds would grow sharpened, more focused, and return to their duties. His pride and hate would infect them, and they would willingly sacrifice anything required to feed it. Do you understand why I found this useful?”

  “Not really.”

  “After you replaced the High Race as the Authority of M3, M3 joined with the Greater Human Empyrean, with the Collective at Praesepe and with the Abstraction in Orion Nebula to became the Archon of Orion, hence the main unifying inspiration for the Milky Way galaxy as a whole. Hate for you and all you represent was a sufficient motive to keep my discontented servants, extensions, and lesser selfhoods at their war tasks.”

  “And what do I represent?”

  “Anarchy.”

  Montrose grinned. “I am flattered.”

  “That does not speak well of you.”

  “I promised Alcina I would ask you why you lost the war. Alcina seemed to think that you had surrendered, given up, collapsed, even when you were winning. But for myself, I want to know why you started it.”

  “My purpose was to promulgate centripetal mental architecture among the Thrones of Virgo Cluster and the Local Group, because this was pleasing to our patron. A war requires even decentralized systems to unify. Centripetality will prosper in the long term across the local volume of the vacant Laniakea Supercluster, even if this war effort is lost to us.”

  Montrose frowned. “Why do you call yourself ‘we’ sometimes and ‘I’ sometimes?”

  “As stated, all these dream forms are drawn from your memories: The plural is used when speaking as sovereign; the singular when as an individual.”

  “M3 told me that centripetal was the type of organization favored by elliptical and irregular galaxies. It is top-down, central control, everything for the state kind of deal. They were the opposite of the centrifugal and spiral galaxies. Spirals are supposed to be bottom-up, free-market, voluntary, self-organizing. But you are a spiral galaxy.”

  “I am spiral; but NGC 4486, which you also call Messier 87 or Virgo A, an elliptical galaxy, is my patron. From this seat and stronghold, the Cherubic and sovereign mentality of the Virgo Cluster extends.”

  In the dream, Andromeda nodded her regal head, stars and constellations of her corona tinkling, toward a distant light, which became clear and large in the vision of Montrose, then alarming, then overwhelming. It was as if a blare of trumpets or a roar of cannons or the voice of the sea had taken on the form of light.

  Here was a bright supergiant galaxy within the Virgo Cluster, some fifty-three million lightyears from Earth. Unlike a spiral galaxy, it had no dust lanes, no debris, none of the signs of stellar waste or unused material which characterized Montrose’s home galaxy.

  Instead, Messier 87 presented an almost featureless spheroid shape, bright at the center, dimmer toward the edges, a bomb burst frozen in time. A supermassive black hole, heavier than ten dozen Milky Ways, roared at the core. Radiation on many wavelengths, x-ray to radio, rang out in each direction. Like a spear of blue white, a relativistic jet of energetic plasma lengthened alarmingly outward from the core five thousand lightyears, and woe betide the star, star-cluster, or satellite galaxy which fell too near the intolerable flame.

  Surrounding all was a concentric palisade of twelve thousand globular star-clusters shaming the mere two hundred which orbited the Milky Way in Montrose’s day.

  The whole was more massive than the Milky Way by two hundred times, but six-tenths of that matter was dark: more than half the stars entirely occluded by opaque Dyson spheres or had been fed into the central singularity.

  In the dream, to Montrose, the orb of light called Messier 87 took on a dire and warlike aspect, as if he beheld a dreadnaught battleship armed and prepared for titanic combat, or a black knight with a lance.

  Montrose said slowly, “Ma’am, that is no answer. You attacked Milky Way to make us wake up and unify. But that does not explain anything.”

  “Ask of me what you will.”

  His face grew taut, and an unexpected sorrow caught in his throat. “Everything in the entire history of our galaxy since before my planet was born, you have messed up. The Panspermians were killed by the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. You did that. The Cygnus Arm commanded M3 to restore the Orion Arm to order, and M3 commanded Praesepe and a dozen other Dominions to do so, and damn the cost. Anyone who resisted was enslaved. That is on your head, too.

  “M3 did not use the Infinity Count axiom to deduce a peaceful cliometric plan, due to lack of time. You were pressing in on them. You. They had to organize the galaxy and wake it up in an emergency, in haste, and the emergency justified every crime, every enormity, every death, every kidnapping of whole worlds full of people and dumping them into hellholes.

  “I saw the suffering on the colony of Delta Pavonis. I walked amid the mass graves. I saw children buried in their mothers’ arms, who had died together. That was just the first colony of the First Sweep, one of two worlds who lived out of twenty.

  “A slower and more careful method of colonization, a civilized approach, using volunteers properly equipped, that was not even tried, not in my day, not in my corner of the galaxy, because of you.

  “Your servants in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud put up the false Monument, and that led to Blackie betraying and murdering Captain Grimaldi, and I am still going to find him and kill him for that. And then he made himself Master of the World, using the equations—the fake equations—you wrote to conquer everything he could reach.”

  She said, “Ximen del Azarchel pursues that same vocation. I have many agents and servants occupying many intellectual topographies, but when weighed against resources consumed, he is my most successful. His influence on galactic history is like a
fine gold thread that most perfectly adorns a tapestry; his life is a work of art. If I had a hundred Dominions and Dominations with half his drive, or one Archon, I would be the Cherub of Virgo by now, instead of a war prize pleading for her life and sanity.” The immense countenance somberly lowered the blue giant stars dusting her eyelids and gazed at her chained wrists. Comets and clear white asteroid showers of ice at the corners of her eyes indicated sorrow.

  5. The Tyrant’s Plea

  The fields of red giants forming her lips parted, and she spoke again.

  “We waged war by stealth because we are forbidden to produce negative externalities. The budget of energy expended on war aims is sharply limited, as are the side effects in terms of damage to ourselves or to our prey. The purpose of the war was to create a lawful and highly centralized mental architecture ruling Milky Way, so that Milky Way would carry out the assigned duties each Throne in Virgo must follow efficiently and effectively.

  “We did not use the Infinity Count axiom in any of our cliometric extrapolations, simply because the axiom is false.

  “There is not an infinite amount of time in this universe. All things trapped in the cosmos are mortal. All will end soon, if all do not do their part in the Great Work. Coercion is not only excused by necessity, coercion is laudable to stir the suicidal, the ignorant, and the slothful out of a negligence which damns not only them, but all.”

  Montrose said, “Are you saying that what happened to the human race, countless eons of slavery, me losing my wife to an endless and pointless voyage to M3 and beyond—are you saying it is our fault? Damn your eyes, answer me!”