Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  Of course he saw nothing, no more than Del Azarchel would have. With the permission of Carries-the-Anointed, he took thirteen of the massless neutron stars, equipped their magnetospheres with some maneuvering capacity, and accelerated them through the toroid to near-lightspeed.

  Years passed in the outside universe, but to him it was a few minutes. The thirteen dark stars passed at insane velocities out of Le Gentil. The disturbance of their passage was immensely amplified by Lorenz contraction, pulling suns awry.

  He sent part of his cloud body ranging ahead of the darks stars, and when one of the tendrils went numb, he created a temporary monopolar lance out of the magnetosphere of one of the neutron stars, by electric repulsion driving the remaining dozen slightly offcourse. Hence the dozen did not strike the black hole Montrose had deduced, hoped, and prayed must be along this line of flight, but instead were flung about in a hairpin-gravity slingshot maneuver.

  With a group of diametric drives controlling stellar masses, it was the matter of a few careful maneuvers and small interval of time for the stars to assume orbit.

  Three thousand lightyears outside the Le Gentil galaxy, right exactly where Rania had no doubt arranged it to be, was a supermassive black hole.

  The beam containing her information was orbiting, flush with the event horizon, like the ring around Saturn. No time was passing for her.

  And Montrose had brought the mass-variable stars Rania had so thoughtfully provided. Once in orbit parallel to the ring of light, in a perfect set of two hexagonal rosettes, he began shedding antimass particles from the dark suns in amounts equal to continents and worlds, and driving the event horizon down and down.

  Once time started for Rania, the beam of light containing her rose in a long and beautiful spiral, turning from red to pink to silvery white, and then streaming into the waiting receivers, which opened their faces like roses made of dark glass.

  2

  Resurrection

  1. The Oasis

  A.D. 4,000,747,478

  He wanted to hold her in his arms when she woke, so he used the gravity lances of one of his twelve remaining neutron stars to shatter another into two unequal pieces; the larger piece he collapsed and ignited into a blue dwarf star.

  Neutronium does not fuse; Montrose had to create hydrogen by the crude process of rubbing the immense magnetospheres of the dark stars against each other to produce showers of electrons, a region of lightning larger than Earth’s home solar system. It was like starting a campfire with a stick and a fire drill.

  Then he had to blow on the spark. Menelaus shaped the lightning region into two rings orbiting the dark stars, clockwise and counterclockwise, and rammed their leading edges into each other, breaking the electrons and recombining them to form the particles he needed.

  As a substitute for protons, he glued an equal mass of positrons together, altering their strong nuclear force fields to impersonate a proton, and sent a lumpy beam of this pseudoprotonic substance into the electron storm rings to form a passable imitation of the simplest possible element, hydrogen.

  The smaller piece of dark star he made into a body asteroidal in volume and terrestrial in mass, adding exotic matter until the surface gravity was lowered to the norm for Earth. Montrose dumped an absurdly large mass of nanotech assemblers onto the surface of the tiny neutronium worldlet, and they tried, as best they could, to reconstruct a periodic table’s worth of elements out of neutrons, positrons, and electrons with an odd dearth of protons.

  In the end, he required internal electric and Van der Waals forces to hold the atoms together. They were not proper atoms; one positron-coated neutron was forced to carry the number of electron shells of whatever element Montrose ordered it to impersonate. A simple picotechnology trick let him fiddle with the subatomic constituents of the electrons and alter their attraction rates.

  All the atoms of his jury-rigged form of matter wanted to act like noble gasses, but with enough computing power at his call and enough picoscale and attoscale fine manipulation of smaller particles, he made what looked like a serviceable, if oddly lightweight, environment of periodic elements, and these in turn formed an arid but earthlike landscape.

  He used Andromeda’s trick (which he had long since deduced) of using electrostatic adhesion to increase the surface tension of the gasses involved even to absurd levels, enough to keep earthly atmosphere at sea-level pressure in a hemispheric cloud about the spot; the black peaks in the distance were stark and harsh and lunar in the vacuum.

  A flick of an ice asteroid created a lake of cobalt blue, round as a coin, and about it he set in a circle of desert garden of dark green and waxy plants, while white and level sand dunes outside ran beyond the dome of atmosphere to crooked and impossible mountains and tablelands of neutronium.

  The asteroid horizon was near at hand, so that even the nearby mesa peaks seemed to be leaning drunkenly away from the observer, the farther peaks at lunatic angles.

  The sun was a minuscule pinpoint of dazzling azure acetylene that rose and set once every four hours.

  His was a garden of saguaro and barrel cactus, prickly pear and desert blooms. The Bigelow’s monkeyflower was garish purple, the devil’s lettuces a delicate yellow; the dogbane and jimsonweed dull green and white; the desert mariposa orange and oddly sensuous; the western forget-me-not was small and pure and pale and surrounded by needles.

  In the midst, he put a house made of glass, since they had no neighbors. A futon strewn with petals he placed on the tatami mats. Opposite this was a fruit basket, a chocolate bowl, and an ice bucket holding a wine bottle. Midmost was an extravagant glass shower whose every wall could spray cold water or warm, and below, a basin big enough to bath in, or perhaps swim in.

  He tore a chunk of flesh from the left side of his body below his heart. On a raised mat, he placed this inchoate mass. It created more of itself out of a molecular feed until it was a hundred pounds of pinkish semiliquid. This was the nanomachined substance she would wear.

  He needed no coffin, no physical connections. Entangled particle pairs connected the light patterns of the exotic material he had intercepted with this physical form. All he needed was a physical matrix sufficiently like the energy pattern to precipitate that pattern back into the sublight world of matter.

  Montrose lovingly and carefully and scrupulously prepared the body. No sculptor carving out of whitest marble ever toiled with such frantic calm and zeal over the idol of a love goddess destined for a golden fane as he. He remembered every detail of her, the position of every mole and freckle, the composition of her eyelashes.

  But he was wary of making a mistake or putting the physical matrix out of synchronization with the mental, and so he activated a feedback loop to allow the body to adjust itself to the image Rania maintained of herself in her memory.

  As the information flowed in, the naked body glowed, shedding the waste energy of sudden nanotech reconstructions of blood and muscle and nerve cells to their new forms. Life blazed.

  He saw her body shift, growing rangier and less curvaceous. Imperfections appeared, and her skin lost some of its youthful glow. Lines appeared about her eyes, and her cheeks grew hollower. On her countenance were signs of sorrow, and suffering, but there was also a look of patience, wisdom, and depth that had not been before.

  Menelaus was shocked. Had she changed? Grown old without him? Where was the idealized bride, his idol, he had carried in his heart all this time?

  Her brain waves appeared, and heartbeat, just as she arched her back and drew a breath.

  That sound was like a note of music.

  She sat up.

  In silence their eyes met.

  Graceful as a rising theme as it soars, a glissando of strings and winds, she stood, her whole soul in her gaze, and he saw that beneath the signs of age and grief was an inner strength that had not been before, a depth her younger self had not possessed.

  And she smiled, and she was young and timeless again.

  She cam
e into his arms, and, with no words needed, their lips met, and then he knew his long years of idolatry had fallen short. More than he dreamed was in the circle of his embrace. His bride was back.

  2. Tears, Words, Smiles

  The two stood, his strong arms crushing her soft form to him, her white arms reaching up hungrily to entwine his neck. To one side, through the clear crystal of the chamber, above the little desert garden, the intersecting double-spiral cloud of the combined Andromeda–Milky Way was rising, filling a quarter of the dark heavens, and to the other side, the bright round cloud of Le Gentil was setting. The rest of the sky was the utter blackness of intergalactic space.

  Of a sudden, and in no fashion he could explain, he began crying. His eyes stung, his nose was dripping, his breathing ragged.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I am so sorry. For taking so long. I should have come quicker, should have done everything quicker, should have … I should not have walked out in the middle of my own honeymoon to go fight Blackie. If I had just stayed with you, been with you … if I had loved you more…”

  Her eyes were luminous, deep, wondrous. “My only and eternal love,” were her first words. “We have an infinite count of time before us, and so all that lies behind is nothing. You are my soul, closer to me than my heart, and so the only thing I cannot forgive is you asking me to forgive! For I have wronged you more deeply than ever woman wronged man. Beat me, and I would not complain; wring my false neck, and I utter no protest. But asking my pardon! It shows a weakness no man to whom I belong can show. I live and die for you!”

  “But it was so long,” he said.

  “To wait for you to save me is nothing. I was filled with you even while you were not there; that is what love is.” She turned her head, and an impish look came into her eye as she recognized the décor of the chamber. Even the decorative rice paper screens had the same pattern of cranes and willows as had been in the topless tower that day.

  Rania favored him with a heavy-lidded gaze and the beginnings of a slow, luxurious smile.

  He wiped his wet cheeks on the hair atop her head. “Well, let’s finish up where we left off, shall we? Our honeymoon was interrupted halfway.”

  And he swept the laughing girl up, his left hand behind her back, his right taking up the sweet firmness of her thighs as she kicked her feet, so that the roundness of her hip was just above his navel, and he carried Rania to the futon, which was strewn with petals of pink and white.

  3. After

  Montrose, wisely or unwisely, turned off the eidetic part of his perfect memory, so that, later, he would have only a human memory with its human flaws and lapses, because without this the scene would not gather the golden patina of nostalgia about it or the mist of romance. Hence, everything they whispered to each other as they lay arm in arm, entwined in each other’s heat and perspiration, interrupted by kisses warm in each other’s breath, he would not afterward recall.

  But she cried and he kissed her tears away. She said, “I thought you were dead. All the evidence said you were dead. Everything said you were dead.”

  “It is not your fault,” he said.

  She said, “I should have known the universe was lying to me. I should have known.”

  “How could you know?”

  “Wives are supposed to know. Did you ever think I was dead?”

  “No. But that is different. I shot any divarication of me that thought you were dead.”

  She said, “He never touched me.”

  “What?”

  “Ximen and I got married. I could not get to Andromeda any other way. But we never consummated the marriage … I couldn’t … I couldn’t stand the idea—”

  “Because he is your father? Or because he murdered your real father?”

  She said, “Neither. He was smaller than you. Stop giggling! I mean spiritually!”

  “That ain’t no giggle, Woman! Texas men don’t giggle.”

  “It sounded like a giggle.”

  “It was a snort.”

  “With your nose, Stinky? A snort would blare like a klaxon.”

  “It was a short snort, since I had no mind to affright my bride. So you just tricked him into taking you to Andromeda by promising him to marry, and then turned him out of the wedding bed?”

  “I knew he would lack the strength to press his right.”

  “Poxfication, Gal, I am pretty sure I don’t want to know what that means.”

  “If I tossed you out of the wedding bed, Big Stinky Baby, what would you do?”

  “Turn you over my knee, spank your cute backside soundly for mouthing off, and climb back in. Deeply all the way back in. Thrusting back in.” He snuggled close to her and kissed her neck. “But, damnation, Gal! I’d be the sure fool if I let any broil between us get so far. I’d make sure ’twould never got to that.”

  “And if I were so angry I was not speaking to you?”

  “I’d ask you for advice on how to win you back. You’re clever about things like that. Twisting people around your fingers.”

  “No, I said, suppose I were not talking to you—”

  “And I said you’d help me win your heart. Ain’t you on my side, now and forever? Ain’t you behind me, my strength that keeps me going, my lamp to light the way? Behind every great man is a woman with a great cattle prod to move him along.”

  “You’re not listening to the question.”

  “Not to dumb questions, I ain’t. You are supposed to be the brains of this gang. I had a whole Dyson globe of bastard children I wished you could have raised.”

  “I had daughters on the ship Ximen’s ghost inflicted on me. They lived and died without you, and that sorrow will never pass.”

  “I heard.”

  “How could you possibly?”

  “M3 sent a cheap copy of you back to Earth. Only Blackie was fooled by her, and only for a short time. So Blackie was too small in the trousers to satisfy you! But I am still twisted up and damn mad that you let it get so far! What happened to your sound judgment, Woman? You are supposed to be so bright.”

  “When I thought you were dead, I was afraid.”

  “Afraid? That is not the Rania I know. Honestly, thinking back, I cannot recall any time you showed fear.”

  “Because you only remember times when you were there. Even when thousands of years and thousands of lightyears parted us, the fact that you were alive gave me strength. On the ship—back when you were crazy, and I was just a little girl—you were the only one who was never afraid. You would laugh when the lights went out or the air pumps failed. You would fix broken things and make them work. You would draw things on the bulkhead to make me laugh, and Ximen would stop the others from killing you. You would hold my hand when I was scared.”

  “But Blackie is the lowest snake I ever heard tell of. No villain in history has killed more people than him, folks with friends and family, children and kin they loved as deep as I love you, and he killed them in numbers so large only astronomers have names for such numbers. And he is your father!”

  “He is not my father. He is my maker. And he loves me. It is complicated. Between us, the relationship is complicated.”

  “You tricked him into carrying you to Andromeda. Used your feminine wiles on him. Used yourself as bait. Wiggled your hips. Batted your eyelashes at him. Or does he lust after you for your mind? Batted your brains at him, I guess.”

  “It was not like that. You don’t understand him.”

  “I have to kill him.”

  “Murder is your own suicide thrown onto another man. It is a madness that feeds madness. It opens the gates of hell.”

  “Open wide enough to chuck him through headlong, I hope. Until he is dead, I am a bigamist. And I know you don’t cotton to divorce.”

  “No. An unconsummated marriage can be annulled at any time, by either party. And, technically, I only promised to marry him.”

  “You lied to him! Damnation, woman, you are colder than I am. I would happily blow his fool he
ad off, but I don’t think I’d tell him a lie.”

  “It was like a lie, but it was not a lie,” she said, thoughtfully staring at the ceiling. Through the glass roof tiles, the pinpoint blue sun, a dazzling dot muted by the rippled glass, was drifting east to west, a slow balloon in the breeze. “I confessed it all to Father Reyes, and did my penance, which was to stop the war. How did that go?”

  “Andromeda and Milky Way kissed and made up. Did you just say Father Reyes? He died three or four billion years ago. On Yap Island, I think it was, killed by that creepy little bugger with the dead eyes. Little blue guy. Can’t remember his name.”

  “Ull.”

  “How the pest do you know that, Gal?”

  “Father Reyes told me.”

  “But he’s dead!”

  “Ximen would never kill his own father confessor. Ximen has been storing Reyes in a spare section of his own brain patterns. He takes him out when he feels the craving for a mass. Reyes was the one who laid hands on the novices here in Le Gentil and made them priests. I don’t think Ximen really understands what the mass is. I think he thinks it is black magic, like a spell to command spirits. It is a surrender.”

  She tossed her hair, as if shaking loose memories free, and curled up more closely to Menelaus. “I don’t mind lying to Ximen when he lies to me. How else is he to learn? He wanted a prize, not a bride. I was a blazon for him to paint on his suit, a stripe on his sleeve. I gave him what he wanted to show him what not to want.”

  “Little heartless minx!” Menelaus chuckled, immensely pleased. “You did it to torture him!”

  “To torture myself. It is so strange. I have spent nearly all my life with him. You and he shared my youth. He was with me during most of the voyage to M3, as a ghost. I never saw that strange new world called Earth again, the world I adored and ruled for only a season or two. So strange to have an empty canopy overhead, what you call a sky. The whole thing is inside out.”