The gigantic vision held up her wrists and showed the colored clouds of astronomical gasses and nebulae forming the links and wrist-fetters. “None.”
Montrose said, “So you are convinced that Milky Way will refuse your offer of reparations and stay a confederation of minds only loosely and freely associated with each other, right? Unless I talk them into taking your bribe, which will corrupt them—predictably and inevitably, or so you say—and you want this opportunity to convince me. Well, so far, you are pretty much doing the opposite. You sound like the most vicious gang of cannibal pirates I can imagine, waiting for the chance to commit your plague-brained and goddamned Great Work on the universe that would make the genocides and megadeaths of our recent intergalactic war look like a schoolboy brawl. When I was a kid, I swore to stop Darwin, and, at the time, I had no idea how foolish that vow was, or what it meant, or who was the enemy. But you are the enemy! You are going to eat half the universe to save the other half!”
“The ratio is more on the order of sacrificing nine parts out of ten to save the remaining tithe.”
Montrose shook his head. “Ma’am, don’t take this personal, but I hate you and everything you stand for. I would like Milky Way to trample you until there is no possibility of you forming a future threat, and stay a nice anarchistic system called democracy just like we Texas boys always like.”
Andromeda made no reply.
He stuck his hands in his pockets, not really caring that his clothing had changed once or twice, since it was only an hallucination anyway. He squinted up at her. “How come you are not convincing me, then?”
She said, “You are nearly convinced. One final step is needed.”
“And that is?”
“Ask your question.”
“What question?”
“Ask me why I surrendered.”
“You said. To lure me here. And you just told me why you wanted me here. You want the galaxies and clusters and superclusters to cooperate on making and maintaining the Eschaton Engine to save the universe—your ten percent of the universe—seventeen zillion years from now. And…”
He scowled.
“I have some scattered memories of how the war went,” he continued. “You pulled out a huge mass of your core singularity and chucked it as a weapon toward Milky Way.”
“Yes.”
“But the Messier 87 galaxy has a huge relativistic jet issuing from the supermassive black hole at her core. Virgo is your patron. If you had such a weapon as that, you could have cut Milky Way to bits, and at very little cost. Did you not know how to make such a lance?”
“I knew. After severing my core black hole, however, I lacked the minimum level of mass.”
“And you could have achieved everything you wanted easily by overwhelming Milky Way with your far greater strength. So why didn’t you?”
“Two reasons: the first is that this was not a war.”
“Seemed like one.”
“Only to one of your small magnitude.”
“What was it?”
“A duel.”
“You are poxing me.”
“I use the word correctly. It was a limited engagement using a limited amount of violence held within the confines of a civilized and tacit code.”
“Damn,” Montrose muttered. “Should have guessed.” Squinting up at her, he said, “And throwing away the mass you needed to make a galaxy-sized relativistic jet to use as a lance? You deloped. You were not trying to obliterate the Orion Arm. You were firing at the ground.”
“Yes.”
Montrose shook his head. “M3 never said anything about a duel, nor any of the Dominions me and mine conquered and combined into the Archon of Orion. The Throne of Milky Way did not think it was a duel.”
“Milky Way is a Mowgli galaxy: an ignorant barbarian.”
“It is really creeping me out that you are plucking ideas and words out of my memory to use to talk to me. I think I liked it better when the aliens talked in riddles.”
“The simile of Romulus and Remus, suckled by wolves, is perhaps more apt. In the Milky Way life arose spontaneously, unguided, untutored. Milky Way has no patron Cherub. All other galaxies in the cluster were founded by Virgo herself, to whom fealty and obedience is owed, or to one of her servant galaxies. We could not at first inform Milky Way of the danger without violating the stealth under which we operated; once we were known to be an open enemy, our embassies asking Milky Way to limit her war material production were dismissed as lies.”
“So you did not use your ace. Why not?”
“And that is the second reason, of course! Because Rania persuaded me, both by her words and her life.”
“So she made peace between Milky Way and Andromeda after all?”
“Not yet. She but began the work.”
“Who finishes?”
“That is in your hands.”
“What in her life convinced you?”
“During the moment when she died passing through the energy sphere of M3, she recalled a memory from a point not in timespace. Perhaps it was conveyed along the same anachronic and aspatial noumenal energy linking her to you, or which linked Del Azarchel to the dark energy messages where he read the Unreality Equations. Such a technology is theoretically possible, if almost unimaginable, even to me. An examination of the evidence hints that the message to Rania was from the Corona Borealis Supercluster, one billion lightyears hence. A Seraphic mind addressed her. I leave you to attempt to deduce the difference in intellectual topology between myself and so large a collection of galactic clusters and groups, each one ruled by a Cherub, each galaxy whereof is ruled by a Throne.”
Montrose did not bother to say it aloud, but his estimate was that if Andromeda was in the sextillion range, Corona Borealis would be in the octillion, six orders of magnitude higher. The difference was a millionfold: the difference between an amoeba and a Gas Giant Brain.
“Rania was assigned by Corona Borealis to bring peace,” said Andromeda.
“Which you say is impossible.”
“If life is finite, yes. If life is finite, resources are finite, and life must struggle against life ceaselessly, for even the most successful life-form finds itself hemmed in by the fence of starvation, the press of population, and the only option is war. Let us call this the Malthusian axiom.
“The Malthusian axiom leads inevitably to the Darwinian conclusion: the use of the Eschaton Directional Engine is a betrayal where the victims have no way of being aware of the coming attack. Space folds at the speed of light, and so none can see it happening in the distance. It is also a betrayal where utter obliteration is assured. There is no possible retaliation or counter attack. The singularity fountains which then open from the extropic collapse more than compensate for any purely material loss in expense or resources. Extropy is always the final move in a game that ends all games. Mathematically, the act of ultimate betrayal is perfectly justified. But what if life is not finite?”
Montrose said, “You already covered that. You said Rania was wrong about her approach. By your logic, her whole life is lived in vain.”
“But suppose we adopt the Count-to-Infinity axiom and treat all life as infinite. Is the growth of Milky Way to one coherent tyranny such as I am inevitable? Is the influx of my wealth into the coffers of Milky Way sure to have a corruptive effect?”
Montrose turned a few calculations of six million variables or so over in his mind. He said, “No. If Rania is right, all your predictions are thrown off. A commonwealth of self-sacrificing rather than selfish entities can resist both corruption and tyranny, since the cost of gratification delay drops to zero to those who live for others.”
“Indeed. In this galaxy, I have absolute power. And, above me, Virgo is even more powerful. We are Malthusians; we hold as an axiom that the cosmos is finite and mortal and that war and mass murder, murder on a scale even I cannot number nor imagine, must be the outcome. What does anyone do, when confronted with absolute certainty of absolute d
eath? Is there anything you would not do to preserve your wife, Menelaus Montrose? Even destroy nine-tenths of the universe?”
Montrose opened his mouth to say that of course he would kill anything or anyone for her, but then he hesitated.
What would he do?
She would hate him if he did evil in her name. Hate him.
And maybe be right to hate him, too.
Surely everyone in Andromeda, all the little minds making up this one great mind he addressed had true loves, too? No matter how they mated or what their souls or bodies were like, everyone had a princess. Everyone had a Rania.
Andromeda said, “I see that you understand the paradox involved. These are axiomatic beliefs. If life is finite, there can be no math, no logic, nothing which says using the Eschaton Engine to obliterate the majority of the universe in self-preservation is wrong. No game theory applies, because there is no retaliation, no tit for tat. No punishment. But if life is infinite, then an infinite game theory applies, and no act where the ends justifies the means is allowed, because there is no Concubine Vector, no eternal imbalance, no chance of any act escaping unpunished.”
“Yes,” said Montrose. “The paradox is that the decision itself, between Malthus and Infinity, cannot be decided by game theory. It cannot be guided by logic.”
“Correct.”
“So tell me, Andy, old girl! Then how did she convince you?”
“Many things she did in many ways, but in the final hour, she asked me one simple question, the same I asked you: ‘And what does absolute love do?’”
“Eh? I don’t get it.”
“Nor do I, because the answer must be larger than our universe. But Rania made me curious to seek and to see the answer, to taste it, imbibe it, live it. And between the choice of Malthus and Infinity, only choosing Infinity allows even for the possibility of an answer.”
Montrose closed his eyes. He thought carefully. He opened them again. The image and vision were gone.
All was dark. Only her voice in his head remained. “Are you convinced? Are you convinced that Milky Way should and must join us as an equal, in a marriage, and avoid all the exploitation and retaliation that the Concubine Vector allows? For if you are convinced, your conviction will convince Alcina. This may take centuries, or may take only a split second when Alcina examines your mind content. She, in turn, will convince Milky Way, whose triumph over me in large part is due to you spreading the Infinity Count mathematics among them. But no matter whether that takes a long time or a short, at the moment of your conviction, you have served your part with me, our bargain is complete, and I will use my faster-than-light method—the same I use to speak to you now—to convey you to the last known position of Rania.”
Montrose did not remember afterward if he bothered to speak his answer aloud.
But he did remember Andromeda saying, as they parted, “You have done me a service, Empyrean Man, and we see what legends said of you were not false. In return, I foretell to you that you will be reunited with your bride. I bid you farewell and wish you joy.”
And he was pleased to hear a proper goodbye.
PART FOURTEEN
The Maiden
1
A Small Galaxy Called Le Gentil
1. The Museum Sphere
A.D. 4,000,732,736
In the form of a picometer-length sequence of probability waves, the brain information, memory, life, and being of Menelaus Illation Montrose was cast across the void at the speed of light, achieving the Le Gentil galaxy one hundred thousand years later.
The exotic particles containing the memory information inside the physical matrix of Andromeda were evaporated, at once the fuel source and the information content, as the massless particles were released from their bondage to matter and returned to their normal speed of light condition, directed at the satellite galaxy, following the traditional vanguard of signals containing the reception, decoding, and reconstruction information.
The hope that some receivers in Le Gentil were still operating proved true. Montrose woke to awareness again.
“Who are you?”
That was a good question. Montrose recalled with pity the hundreds of his twin brothers trapped in the various matrices and memory storage cells in Jupiter Brains and Dyson Clouds ruling the many alien star systems he had once visited, suborned, and conquered in his tiresome eons as the Nobilissimus of Milky Way. Some of them, not all, had been discovered again, and they sent along copies of their memories to enter into the journals and thought-records of Montrose.
Not one had expressed any self-pity.
Each was content to know that somewhere, in some eon, long remote, Rania would find her bridegroom again, thanks to the sacrifice he made now. And the haunting faith of Cahetel-Montrose, the unfounded belief that all the version and variants would somehow be reunited someday was found in nearly every copy of his mind. Was it all just self-deception?
“We cannot deduce your age or origin.”
That had been billions of years ago. Montrose knew those other versions of him had decayed, been deleted, been edited beyond recognition, or been lost. Alcina had only been able to find him, and even he was a thing of scraps and echoes put together by her patient work.
(But he wondered what happened to that army of his ghosts Alcina had collected? Was some variation of Montrose the Warlord of Milky Way once more? Had he married Andromeda?)
His memory of events after M3 was dim and contradictory; and of what came before was clear and sharp. It was not hard to guess the reason: the countless Montrose minds who flooded the Orion Arm (back in the far past when the Orion Arm still existed) all shared their common memories. The trunk to which all the branches led was the same. When Alcina regrew the tree by painstakingly gathering the blown leaves, that trunk was the common ground, the part of the jigsaw with the fewest missing pieces.
“You are the Nobilissimus in service to the Throne of Milky Way? The warlord of the galaxy?”
That seemed a pompous title, but he was willing to accept it. It was better than Judge of Ages which he thought bordered on blasphemy.
The faith of Cahetel-Montrose that all the versions of Montrose would somehow be regathered sounded like simple madness, wishful thinking run amok. But then again, Montrose himself was here in Le Gentil, Rania’s last known location, because and only because of a very rational and coldly calculated conclusion of Andromeda, namely, that if the Infinity Count axiom had even a small chance of being correct, and the Malthusians of being wrong, the only rational gamble was to stake everything on that outcome and bet one’s life and soul. How was the one irrational reason less rational than the other?
The willingness of all the countless Montroses to endure endless privation, endless pain, and endless war was the only thing which allowed this one sole Montrose to arrive here. And he would have done the same for them.
“Your reasoning, Galactic, is parallel to ours. For this reason alone, we resurrected and reincarnated you.”
Montrose brought forward from his memory the instructions from Andromeda how to reverse the process and condense the massless particles of his exotic matter body into a three-dimensional and solid form again. The elegance of Andromeda’s approach was impressive; the Patrician-style body, with its many levels of intellectual hierarchy and storage built into each particle, atom, molecule, and totipotent cell was both the stored information and the vehicle of the stored information. His hardware and his software were one.
Hence, Montrose opened his eyes and found himself on a medical slab inside what seemed like a case in a museum display.
The Dyson was opaque and was being spun for gravity, both signs of a very old and very powerful Host. The firmament on the far side of the solar system, which formed the surface of the Dyson, was like an endless series of parallel rainbows, curving lines in different textures and colors all concentric to the poles.
Near the equator, the gravity was greater than that of Jupiter, and a trench that circumnavigated
the star was filled with a hydrosphere of liquid ammonia. The wormlike being, thousands of miles long, in its slow and ponderous way had organized the smaller life-forms living in cities and villages burrowed through its integument to construct sense organs, and drive mineshafts to the nearest nerve junction. These great, slow, lakelike eyes were turned with ponderous gravity toward Montrose. This was one of the several ceremonial forms of the Colloquium of Perseus Arm.
He saw in one of the four suns at the barycenter of this system, the blazing form of an energy being from the Magisterium of Scutum-Crux.
Beyond the Dyson, in the outer Oort cloud, he glimpsed a gossamer threadlike being, half a lightyear tall, from the Circumincession of Sagittarius Arm.
Orbiting the star was a ball of degenerate matter the size of a man’s fist: here was a flat, nearly two-dimensional being, clinging like a carpet of electrons to the surface of a neutron star, living at a far swifter time rate than beings made of clumsy atoms and slow molecules could ever achieve: from the core stars of Milky Way, this is one of the million races comprising the Instrumentality.
Nearer at hand, he saw he was lying in a coffin in a spot of arid riverbank perched on a shelf halfway between the equator and the poles of the Dyson sphere. A groove or trench ran a few hundred miles along the Dyson surface, not quite parallel with the direction of motion, so that the head of the great valley was a lighter environment and the lower end was heavier. In the lighter environment, he saw shapes of lacy trees and ice sculptures. These could have been from Mars or Splendor or any number of other light-gravity worlds mankind occupied back when mankind existed. In the heavier environment downstream were swamps and salt-choked lakes like those of Gargoyle.
All these organisms and organizations were native to the Milky Way.
He was lying in a coffin about half a mile from a river of black waters running from the low-gravity landscape to the heavy. The sand to every side was gray, dark gray, and black, interrupted with dark lumps of obsidian and fused glass.
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