Four rugged and scarred black stalagmites rose darkly in the light of the four suns, casting colored shadows on the dark sand like lunatic sundials. Montrose had expected the interior of a Dyson sphere to always be at noon. But in this case, the suns were so widely separated that the barycenter of the system was empty, and the suns turned with grave solemnity, each equidistant from the other, passing closely by various points of the equator as the year turned, each sun growing larger and then receding as the seasons turned.
The stalagmites were positioned around Montrose so that each had one of the four suns—white, blue, red, and gold—directly behind it, and each stalagmite threw one of its four shadows across his coffin. Clearly it was a symbolic gesture, but what it meant, Montrose could not guess.
From the miters of the stalagmites hung down ropy tendrils of black glass. As he watched, the tendrils stirred and swayed, even though there was no breeze.
Two tendrils reared up, one from the pair of stalagmites by his feet, holding lenses which swung apart, giving the organism binocular vision.
The stalagmite to the left of his head raised a tentacle holding a speech emitting organ.
The one to his right held up a power retransmitter shaped like a spear, which was evidently meant to be a weapon.
Montrose closed his eyes.
Montrose sought and found the traces of energy leading back to the initial spots elsewhere in the Dyson sphere, where his energy form had been intercepted and downloaded. It required only a moment of thought to change part of his nervous system back into massless particles, then to pure energy, and write his thoughts into the reception circuits, make a variety of duplicates, and flood the system.
He accomplished at the speed of light what once had taken him countless weary years in M3, and countless weary centuries in the many forgotten Dominions of the Orion Arm. In less than a second of subjective time, he had suborned and controlled the mental environment around him. In a few minutes, ten or twelve, the waveform of his consciousness would spread throughout the Dyson and expand his intellect to the Host level.
But the section of millions of square miles of cognitive substance he already controlled, he saw, to his delight, held the broadcasters and emitters connecting this Dyson to other spheres and megascale structures scattered through this star cluster, one star for each galaxy known to Andromeda, and each Dyson containing the representative organisms and reconstructed life-forms of its particular galaxy: the star cluster was a museum or zoo of each Throne in the Local Group and in the Virgo Cluster on whom Le Gentil had once gathered intelligence.
Montrose saw that his mind would travel through the cluster as years turned to decades, adding Dysons to his intellect until he was a Domination or even a Dominion, but no message and no warning would travel faster than the speed of light, assuming Le Gentil had not learned Andromeda’s trick.
Montrose opened his eyes again. “Greetings, men of Le Gentil,” he said aloud to the back stalactites. “What can I do for you boys?”
A voice came out of the speech organ.
“We identify you as an enemy, as an aspect of the leadership function of the enemy Milky Way galaxy. We wish to discuss surrender terms.”
“Boys, I ain’t got time for this, and I sure ain’t surrendering to no one, no how, not now. I have already made copies of everything I know—technology, mathematics, weapons systems, strategy, how we won, and why you lost, in your memory banks and libraries. I would have inscribed it direct into all y’alls’ short-term memory, but it gives me the willies when any folk do that to me, so I thought I’d be all genteel with you, on account of your name.
“I have examined your little galaxy here, and I can see that it is broken. I’ve taken over all your mental systems and archives and am spreading out from this spot in all directions at the speed of light, and I doubt you have anything that can stop me.
“The war did a number on you boys, didn’t it? Not even a working Authority left, and only very small Dominions and Dominations. But I’ll tell you what. As I spread, I will make repairs and introduce cliometric vectors into the local history, or create a helper race or two, to start the healing and regrowing. All I want in return is that you help me look for a girl I lost a while back. Deal?”
“But we are your enemies. You are of Milky Way, and you are resolved to destroy us.”
“Nope. Milky Way and Andromeda are one system now, happily married, and will be contacting you as soon as some of their long-range transmitters and systems are rebuilt. War’s over. All is forgiven. You get your happily ever after. Now I want mine. Deal or no deal?”
“Allow us to consult with our superiors forty-five lightyears away. In ninety years, you will have a concise answer.”
“Nope! Time is up as of right now. In a minute, if you dally, I will just take control of everything and replace you with critters I make up myself. I have a whole back catalog of them, and plenty of practice. This is what I did with my whole life back when I was the Authority at M3, sending myself places and spreading the virus called Montrose, so I am good at this. I have practice. You seem to be the special museum used to collect data on the Milky Way. So you must know what I am capable of, eh? Is it a deal, or is it not? You help me look, I rebuild your civilization.”
“If you are so powerful compared to us, why are you asking our consent? We fall within the Concubine Vector. You have absolute power over us.”
Montrose understood and swore. “You wanted to surrender to me, didn’t you?”
“We intercepted and reconstituted your signal only out of desperate and irrational hope for mercy, which you are not obligated to show us.”
“Don’t be so sure it is all that irrational. I have a new and better math to teach you.”
The other tendrils of the stalactites raised listening organs as Montrose began to teach.
2. A Hint of Perfume
A.D. 4,000,743,880
In the shape of neutrino packages or nanite clouds accelerated to near-lightspeed, the mind of Montrose like a tattered cloak spread from star to star.
The Le Gentil galaxy was strangely shaped. Small, it was only twelve thousand lightyears in diameter. The stars were old and red, and the interstellar dust lanes had been swept clean, all signs of a very busy industrial civilization, long past. The outer layers and spiral arms had been stripped away long ago by the greater gravity or malice of Andromeda. There was an outer disk of dark stars in the dust-free outer regions, each one of which was a dead black and featureless sphere.
The clues were various and obvious to a mind of his level (and that level increased in power the more of the Le Gentil galaxy he subordinated and added to himself). Del Azarchel had been here; the way the amoeba divided showed his particular personal flourish of his handiwork.
There was an utopian planet of intelligent tumbleweed, brightly colored on many wavelengths, whose hierarchy and philosophy were classic Del Azarchel, complete with kings, nobles, clergy, and every nuance of their iron future written into their cliometry.
In the shattered husk of a tyrant jovian which could have been the twin of great Jupiter, and in the shattered battle-moons, Montrose read hints of overweening arrogance, too proud to retreat.
Here was an exploded star, the remnant of a failed experiment turning the whole volume instantly to antimatter by subdimensional rotation.
And then, like the scent of a long-forgotten perfume, like a dainty footprint in the snow from a slipper he himself once placed on her foot, he found other traces.
Here was a gigantic world, larger than Jupiter but lighter than Mars, concentric shell upon shell, so that every upper race was the heaven of the one below, all passing energy downward and trade goods upward.
A cold planet far from any mother star he saw, with tall strands of escape elevators still rising above a now-frozen atmosphere, and below the ice only the warlords and princes and their machines of a chevrotain race, and all the arbors and gardens frozen neatly and preserved, but the common pe
ople safely exiled.
Next, he found a ringworld speeding toward the core, its sun long exhausted, using a ramscoop to draw in interstellar hydrogen and, at the dead center of the ring, colliding it in fusion. The ring itself was a garden of beauty, and it even had a river running down and around the whole length. The silicon crystal beings of the ring (birds of glass, walking trees of diamond brightness, snakes like rivers of light) greeted Montrose with joy, invited him to their strange baptisms and thanksgivings, and showed him (glittering on the walls of their cathedrals) additional variations on the Infinity Count math he himself had never imagined. Their leader was called the Fisherman; with crystal claws, it pointed the way their legends remembered, deeper into the core stars.
On he fled.
Now he encountered thicker Dysons. Some were like Venetian blinds, intercepting only part of the mother star’s output; others glowed red hot, shedding unwanted waste energy; others were concentric as Russian dolls; only the most thrifty or most advanced wore opaque shells. Ovals and slowly tumbling tubes covered binary stars, or stranger shapes housed multistellar systems.
Inward. Here a more ambitious engineering regime took hold; threads of material harder than neutronium ran from star to star, a spiderweb of titans. Sections of it registered the same energy signal Montrose last saw surrounding the red thread of Andromeda’s faster-than-light telegraph. But other sections were inhabited, or formed a ball of string around likely stars, absorbing energy and transmitting it to other core stars, or wrapping it like a cocoon.
But these cocoons produced strange butterflies indeed: at the core of each ball of threads was the remnant of a controlled explosion of a nova, supernova, or hypernova. Where multiple star systems had been ignited, were pairs and triads of strange remnants. These remnants were dark spheres of pure matter of immense diameter. They were strange because gravity had not crushed them into black holes.
Montrose deduced that this was attotechnology, the highest form of technology the universe permitted, for these dark but weightless stars were commingled with exotic matter of massless particles. The ancient interstellar engineers had erected shells or lattices of diametric material to prevent the degenerate matter of infinite collapse from forming.
The closer Montrose came to the core of Le Gentil, the fewer stars burned. He came to an inner region where all the stars had been reduced to these strangely massless balls of stellar-volume neutronium.
Some of these cocoon systems were inhabited, but only by the lobotomized and ignorant descendants of the Dominions that once ruled here; the creatures were hardly smarter than Hosts, and some were as dim as mere Virtues. They had no legend of the meaning of the works their ancestors reared.
But they also offered him bread and wine, the sole substances in their environs made of uncollapsed baryonic matter, which they preserved only for ceremonies.
3. The Seyfert Ring
A.D. 4,000,744,182
At the core itself was the emitter of which all these massless neutron stars were the attendants and heralds. The long-dead Throne of Le Gentil in an extravagance of stellar engineering had formed the supermassive black hole of his core into a hollow ring, over a light-minute in diameter.
The toroid was shepherded by orbiting neutron stars, some of whom retained their native mass. Montrose could see the ability to raise (and perhaps lower) the mass of the neutron stars would allow the event horizon of the toroid to be raised or lowered, and also alter the spin rate of the toroid. It was a giant version of the drive ring Del Azarchel had studied aboard the Solitude. And Montrose laughed, and realized that Seyfert galaxies were not natural phenomena either. He was beginning to doubt anything in nature was natural.
Montrose found a race of flats living on the surface of the largest of these exotic shepherd stars, a mass which should have collapsed to a pinpoint in an instant, but which instead maintained a girth greater than that of UY Scuti (a hypergiant star that had been alive when Montrose was young), over a thousand times the radius of miniscule Sol, a billion miles and a half.
Over the radio, he was greeted with calmness and kindness, offered the orbital elements of a pyx containing bread and wine, and told quickly what he yearned to know: Rania had created the flats and founded this abbey solely for the purpose of manning the Seyfert emitter, and to carry her message to him. But Montrose had never arrived, and time had passed, war came, and the abbey here had fallen into decay. There had been a written letter, a voice file, and a set of images left for him. Long ago, one by one, slowly they were destroyed by time. Now only the tradition remained.
The tradition said that Rania had long thought him dead. Then, the way star eddies swirled as Andromeda had been seen, thousands of years ago, to collide and merge with the Milky Way, had somehow convinced her that Montrose, impossibly, beyond hope, was still alive. She departed, but she left behind an order of monastics to tell him to hurry after, called the Poor Brethren of the Epistle to the Bridegroom.
“That is all you got?” He sent radio signals to the neutronium surface of a sphere no life made of clumsy atoms and huge molecules could approach.
“Yes, sir,” answered the Abbot of the Epistoliers. “After the Throne of Le Gentil died, there were civil wars, and a collapse. Barbarism overran us. We tried to maintain what our ancestors gave us.”
“I understand, believe me. It happened to a place I know called Texas, once upon a time.”
The Seyfert emitter here was large enough to feed an entire Dominion made of exotic matter into its mouth. Tradition said it had broadcast Del Azarchel and Rania into the Virgo Galactic Cluster fifty million lightyears away.
There were no copies left of either of them. Del Azarchel had used the method M3 once used, except on a truly staggering scale, to send masses equal to scores of stars into an exotic condition, and then to the speed of light.
Their message given, the flat servants wanted nothing more than to restore the emitter to use and follow her. The Abbot of the Epistoliers, whose name was Carries-the-Anointed, gravely radioed to him that the cliometry predicted they would emerge from the current dark ages in one million years and regain the intelligence and raw materials needed to operate the intercluster-range Seyfert emitter.
That was what Montrose also wished, more than anything. But the idea of another million-year wait to then begin a journey of fifty million years made him want to drag the spiderweb of stars into the shape of obscenities the size of constellations.
He gave the flats of the neutron star abbey his blessing and as much spare energy and aid as he could. He began to think about how to prepare something analogous to a hibernation tomb for himself in his present condition, occupying a large and cloudlike body diffused throughout cubic lightyears of space, and so make the time pass quickly.
But it was years later, not centuries, when he had gathered all stray scraps and copies of himself from the nearby stars, for all of him had followed the line of clues here.
It was like waking from a doze to have his widely distributed mental system gathered in one spot, his wits and senses sharpened. Montrose inspected the hyperdense substance of the Seyfert emitter very closely, sending one-molecule wide scraps of himself ever closer to the singularity. He was seeking a way to enter an orbit so close to the event horizon that time would stand still for him, and a million years pass in a moment. Of course, to come out of such an orbit would require …
Montrose, shaped like a black fog between the stars, focused his many sense organs and instruments on the flock of massless neutron stars surrounding the Seyfert emitter one more time, and finally realized what they were for, and laughed and laughed.
There was to be no wait of a million years.
These strange neutron stars were massless, yes, at the moment, until someone used the convenient magnetosphere in which they were wrapped to accelerate the ring of star-lifting satellites found orbiting each star. Montrose recognized the handiwork. It was hers. Star-lifting was the technology in whose shadow Rania had be
en born, the art of mining the stars.
Star-lifting would work on a neutron star as well as a hot star. In this case, lifting the antimass layer of a neutron star would alter the ratio of antimass to mass. The massless stars in reality were mass-variable stars. How much gravity they emitted was a matter of convenience. They were all gravity lances of unthinkable power and scope.
Take a body near an event horizon and subject it to a countervailing gravitational force, such as by putting a large star directly overhead. The body can move away from the black hole and toward the star using less energy. By definition, this means that the spacewarp of the gravity well has flattened: the event horizon is pushed downward. Montrose had seen this precise effect when he flew directly above the pole of the Milky Way, following the route to M3. Rania had seen it, too, and she evidently saw more implications to this phenomenon than he.
He radioed to the Abbot. “Were Del Azarchel and Rania sent along the exact same line when broadcast?”
“Well, no, sir,” said Carries-the-Anointed, a thoughtful look flicking across the one-dimensional boundary line circumnavigating the two-dimensional electron carpet effect which was his body. “Our records show that she went first. He insisted. She made the calculations very carefully, using her whole Dominion to do so, and went. Once she was on the way, he also went.”
“How much later?”
“The records do not say, but, the legend says both their bodies were a crowd of eighty-one neutronium superplanets in a nested sequence of rosettes, roughly four hundred light-minutes in radius, so it would have been six hours’ difference.”
“And the relative motions of Le Gentil and your target in the Virgo Cluster? What is the difference in arcseconds a lapse of six hours would make?”
“Almost below detectable threshold, sir. But—”
“But enough!” And he began laughing.
He helped the abbey impatiently through a technological revolution or two and repaired some of their instruments. Then, all impatience gone, he looked along the path Rania, but not Del Azarchel, had taken.
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