“But the Ulteriors live in an environment of infinite energy. There are no limits of resources.”
“The Malthusians do not believe that. The Malthusian argument is that the Ulteriors must have some limits; otherwise, the Ulteriors would not have created the cosmos as an extropy fountain. There are always limits.”
Montrose frowned down at his plate. “You know about the Ulteriors and their works because you are one, or will be, or something. Blackie also knows, or thinks he does. You know the Malthusian argument for their side. Because Blackie joined them, didn’t he?”
She said, “What makes you say so? How could he have?”
“Because of what Andromeda said. Milky Way was a Mowgli galaxy, she said, and so did not know about the Eschaton Engine and the need to keep all wars small and local, and not harm the manpower needed to man the Engine. Right? Except Andromeda could have told Milky Way. Said she tried and weren’t believed. So who was her ambassador that did such a bad job at being silver tongued? She told me that, too. Blackie. Her best servant, she said. Work of art, she said. I say he lied to Milky Way, fooled Andromeda, and kept the war going, despite you talking the Throne in charge to call it all off. This forced Andromeda into bankruptcy instead of Milky Way.”
She said, “That is not the way it works. Virgo will destroy both if either one exceeds the Concubine Vector limits on war damage, death or waste. Why in the world would Ximen want his own home galaxy destroyed?”
“Well, I figure that if he heard the dark energy broadcast from Hydra Supercluster, he learned their view of things, their Unreality Equations from them. They must have agents somewhere in range, a local man, an evil star or sneaky planet somewhere. Blackie phoned them back. Made a deal.”
Rania’s face grew frightened, and a bit of hot sausage dropped from her chopsticks to the breakfast bowl, unnoticed.
“What is wrong?”
She said, “The reason why Andromeda exiled Ximen and me to Le Gentil is that the Seyfert emitter here is one of the strongest and best in all history. We were attempting to discover how to use the Eschaton Directional Engine on a larger scale than anything Andromeda attempted. But if he is a Malthusian, he might have done—anything—to the control stations of the Engine.”
Montrose said sharply, “Why did he transmit himself to the Virgo Cluster?”
She said, “It is the only other node of the Eschaton Directional Engine that can be reached by our local anchor point. He said the journey was needed to get closer to the Great Attractor and examine it more carefully. But he was lying, wasn’t he? Ximen! Why would he lie to me?”
Montrose said grimly, “Because he thought you would be safely out of range when the collapse happened.”
She did not ask him of what collapse he spoke. He saw from the look in her eyes that she knew.
Menelaus grimaced and closed his eyes and lowered his head. But he was not praying. Little wrinkles of rage and pain gathered at the corners of his deep-set eyes and around the grim line of his mouth. Rania put her hand on his hand, like a small and tender bird landing.
Menelaus looked up through the glass roof tile at the broad oval of the combined galaxy. “Andromeda and Milky Way, whoever or whatever was left of the human race, or any of the Archons I once knew, the Colloquium, the Magisterium, the others … Alcina … they are all dead, aren’t they? Wiped out. The light from the disaster has not reached us yet. It happened long ago. The Eschaton Engine wiped them out.”
He stared at the lights in the sky, the light of stars long dead.
Menelaus said, “The timespace collapse effect expands at the speed of light, doesn’t it? We will never see it until it overtakes us. And we cannot outrun it.”
He gently patted her hand that lay on his. “Sorry, my princess. I wanted to protect you, but Blackie finally and absolutely won. He probably foresaw what you did: that I would come out of long-lost storage as the legendary Judge of Ages and Warlord and First Nobilissimus of Milky Way, and take up the threads you left dangling, and tie them together and make peace. And there was no way for him to know who or where I was, and so the only way to kill me—Blackie is smart enough to figure out why you refused his bed—is to kill the whole galaxy I was in. To kill the whole Local Group.”
He looked at her sadly. “I cannot save you.”
6. Obliteration of the Local Group
“I wonder what it looked like when it died?” he murmured.
She said, “Let me show you. Did you equip this body with a nervous system that can interact with the local Hosts?”
He looked blank-faced, his thoughts still sluggish with ire and despair. “Hosts?”
She said, “Stellar-level Kardashev II xypotechs. All the neutron stars I constructed are composed of rod-logic neutron strings. It is much more efficient way of packing calculation power than what Ximen tells me you used for baby Jupiter.”
“I cracked one of them in half to make the planet and the star.”
“I know. The planet used the flowers outside to talk to me this morning, while you were still snoring like a trumpet. Most of your changes were macroscopic and did not affect him, but the picotechnology forced him to move some of his memory into his neighbors. The planet says his name is Petrus Minor, but you can call him Little Rock.”
Menelaus explained that a Patrician nervous system had emission and reception cells, which also could transmit the massless exotic matter particles of which her luminous information body was composed. But her face had already gone still and quiet.
Her skin cells turned icy white, but she was not hibernating. She had lowered her personal time-sense to the rate where messages to and from the double rosette of dark stars within a ten-light-hour radius would have no noticeable delay.
Menelaus slowed his time-sense as well, until the sun was a blue streak of light like a solid rainbow, and the white and dark flickering of day and night evened out into a continuous twilight blur.
He noticed now that he had calculated the planetary motion incorrectly. The fiery rainbow of the sun’s path dipped down to the north, and the oasis waters turned white, but then the rainbow continued to dip. It vanished. There was a heartbeat or two of sunlessness, and then the bow reappeared to the south and rose as the season progressed, until its highest point crossed the zenith, and the lake waters vanished in an eyeblink of steam. Then the rainbow fell through the autumnal months toward the horizon again. Montrose realized his planet, Little Rock, was toppling pole over pole once an orbit.
Montrose noticed Rania seeming to flicker. Once again, he adjusted his time rate to match hers.
Because of this, he did not at first see what Rania had done. She had maneuvered three of the dark stars into an equilateral triangle between their viewpoint and the mingled bi-galactic cloud of Andromeda–Milky Way. The dark suns were visible because the material they shed formed a glowing cloud of exotic matter before and behind them. Slowly at first, and then more brightly, a thin red thread running directly through the midpoint of the dark stars burned. This was the accretion zone of the shed exotic material as it entered the event horizon of the cosmic string and was torn to subatomic bits by tides and turbulence.
The triangle shrank, and then began orbiting more and more swiftly. The dark stars also glowed white hot as they melted and became egg-shaped, distorted by the gravity of the red thread.
Menelaus said, “I saw a similar cosmic string issuing from the core of the Milky Way and from Andromeda. I suppose the immense relativistic jet coming from Virgo A is one as well. And then there was one passing through the Seyfert emitter in little Le Gentil, and now one here.”
Rania said, “I deliberately used a tidal effect of the Engine to accumulate a singularity worth of mass here, right in the precise spot to capture the beam without destroying it, so that I would be left behind when Ximen broadcast himself along the segment. You see, there is a frame-dragging effect here, acting like a Penrose cylinder, which tilts the lightcone of any object above the event horizon but be
low the Cauchy limit…”
Montrose uttered a blasphemy.
Rania said, “I do not think the Mother of Christ can suffer that disease. Please watch your language!” But then she showed her dimples. “You did not know, all this time, what we were talking about?”
“The cosmic string passing through the supermassive singularity at the core of the Milky Way, and Andromeda, and here. It is the Eschaton Directional Engine. That is it. I was looking at the damned engine without knowing it! But Andromeda told me the engine was invisible.”
“Except when it is in motion, yes. The rest mass is almost nil. When it is rotated at lightspeed, however, the reverberation effects can be used to send photon packets from one point to another as tachyons. I have found the wave front of the light wave carrying Andromeda–Milky Way’s last moment of life. Behold the face of Medusa: anyone looking at this image with normal light would be destroyed in the same moment, because the spacewarp expands at lightspeed. But I command the shield of Perseus, so that we can look and see what none can see.”
The spinning equilateral triangle of dark suns now shimmered like the surface of a mystic pool.
In the center was a vision of an event immensely remote in time and space; it was a beautiful cloud of stars, wild and dark as a thunderstorm seen at midnight, dark at the center.
It looked like an eye. The whole circle of stars was the white surrounding a perfect ring-shaped rainbow of light like an iris. The rainbow was lovely blue at the outer and largest ring, shading through the spectrum to a delicate rose red around the inner ring. Next was a thin line of silver, and then an opposite rainbow curved in perfect unison inside it, this one with a red outer ring surrounding a small blue circle. Inside this smallest blue ring was another and smaller storm of stars, exactly matching but mirror-reversed from the outermost star-stream. Midmost was utter darkness like the pupil.
Montrose realized the outer rainbow was the turbulence effects of the stars being dragged into the spacewarp, glowing red as they passed into the event horizon. The inner rainbow was its reflection. The warp itself was a silvery bubble growing at lightspeed of which he could only glimpse the horizon like a razor-thin and perfect circle of mirror-silver. Light reflected from the warp surface, in insolent defiance of all sane laws of nature, was not affected by the growing singularity beneath the silver space-flaw. Instead this escaping light ignored a gravity well as massive as the two galaxies, and which soon would grow to encompass the entire Local Group.
Rania was scowling. “Something is odd. Why is it so regular?”
Montrose said, “What are those dark, feathery structures coming out from the edge? Must be hundreds of thousands of lightyears long. They look like eyelashes on an eye.”
Rania said, “It has three parts. The first is the dark core where the compressed matter is being forced into negative space. It ejects nearly infinite energy, but that energy must be gathered, harvested, and altered into a useful and transmittable form. The second part is the Interior, that silvery bubble around the dark core. Thrones outside the core warp are gathering together to render this energy to their use. Those structures that look like eyelashes are folds in spacetime used to remove the energy safely from the silver area. They are extraction engines, longer than the diameter of a galaxy, prepared to orbit the warp once it reaches full diameter and stops growing. The extractors will descend to the warp event horizon and occupy a different metric of spacetime. It is analogous to how a body near an event horizon suffers what seems to outside observers to be far slower time, albeit in this case, due to a standing wave effect surrounding the extropy fountain, their time seems far faster. They are an interior dimension where entropy is reversed. Presumably Virgo established a number of loyal servants at just the right distance from the spacewarp to be precipitated into the interior dimension when it formed, but far enough not to be consumed by the dark core itself.”
“So there is a black hole in the middle like a peach pit, a silver shell around that where entropy is reversed like a peach, and the extraction thingies form a bridge between our universe and this inner dimension, like a straw stuck into the peach to suck the juice.”
Rania looked at the vision. “It is a beautiful and terrible thing, bright with a black heart, but it is still in its growth phase. At this point in the past, so many years ago, what we are now seeing, the fold was not complete, and the inner darkness was still visible. All the stars and satellite galaxies, globular clusters and star clouds around it will be consumed; after that, no light would escape, and the interior continuum would be invisible from the outside. I assume signals could still enter, for how else would the servants of Virgo know to which quarter to direct the extracted energy, for the benefit of Virgo and all of us left here outside?”
Montrose said, “Well, at least we can see it before it hits us. I cannot believe Blackie finally wins!”
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Wins?”
“Nothing can outrun the speed of light in a vacuum. I cannot rescue you.”
Rania said, “Is that so? Aha! So it is my turn to play the man.” Her smile was sunshine.
Montrose suddenly felt stupid. “Ah. Of course.”
“Andromeda taught us the praxis,” said Rania. “The integument space just above the event horizon of the moving cosmic thread is compacted, almost as if being carried along with it, and any particles as well, at roughly ten percent above the vacuum speed of light. This segment of the Engine passes through the core of Virgo, leading toward the Great Attractor. Ximen is still in transit. We can follow, and outrun even light itself, and, yes, take Little Rock with us.”
“I would not leave my honeymoon hut behind. Let’s go.”
3
Aboard the Little Rock
1. The Purple Galaxy
A.D. 4,026,188,218
Twenty-four million years and twenty-six million lightyears later, Little Rock, carrying Mr. and Mrs. Montrose, reemerged into the sublight universe, and returned to normal space. They were in the Canes Venatici II Group within the Virgo Supercluster, but outside the range of the Local Group. The asteroid was massive as a planet, and its eleven huge dark suns and one tiny blue sun was hovering lightyears out from the polar axis of the galaxy M106, also called NGC 4258.
It was a Seyfert galaxy. A water vapor megamaser—that is, a jet of coherent microwaves—streamed out multiple lightyears from its core. The maser beam was thought by human astronomers to be caused by a supermassive black hole eating up the innermost stars of inward-collapsing arms of M106. Seen close, the beam was a by-product of an intergalactic engineering attempt to manipulate the nearby megaparsecs of the Eschaton Directional Engine.
The whole supermassive core was coated in dense gas and vapor, which gave the gigantic galaxy, equal in size to Andromeda, a strange and impressive purple hue.
Rania and Montrose sent their dark suns ranging through nearby space, to determine who or what had precipitated them out of the spacewarp of the discontinuity filament. One of the dark suns, named Matthew, said he had discovered a set of complex and self-correcting vibrations which hung like an aura along the accretion cylinder of the galactic-magnitude maser.
Whether it was a life-form or not, the subvibrations within each complex vibration could interact with each other at slightly above lightspeed, so that one ray could communicate back and forth across segments of its own length as it moved, to dampen or augment a waveform, stop or permit a vibration, hence form logic gates. Because of this, the vibrations themselves could be programmed like a ratiotech, doing complex calculations and automatic actions, making simple judgment calls.
This implied Little Rock and his escort of twelve suns had been stopped by something like an automatic filter or safety brake. Perhaps it had been established by the original Architects, or perhaps by the Throne of M106, to prevent debris from clogging the cosmic string length.
The conversation picked up where it had been twenty-four million years earlier.
Rania asked,
“And when we overtake Ximen?”
“I kill him.” Menelaus was still sitting and swilling his breakfast beer, his time still slowed, and through the glass walls and roof, the blue burning rainbow of the sun was doing jump ropes over his head and around the planet, an annoying strobe light.
“You must not! I command it!”
“You do not get a vote, Rania.” He smiled.
A look of frustration crossed her features. Then she smiled at herself. “I was born to be a captain and ruled as a princess, and, here, in Le Gentil, was empress of a galaxy. Being a wife takes some getting used to. Why will you not be guided by me in this?”
“Why? He killed Grimaldi before you were ever born.”
“Leading to my birth,” she countered. “Is that so bad?”
“Makes no nevermind. If good comes of an evil deed, that cannot excuse the evil, or else everything is excused. I may be a lawyer, but even I see where that would go.”
“Then you are resolved?”
“Princess mine, when have you ever known me not to be resolved? Resolved is my middle name. Right after my other middle name.”
Her eyes drooped. She shook her head. “My heart misgives me. This leads nowhere but to tragedy! If you love me, you cannot do this thing.”
“Rainy, the light from a dead galaxy, two galaxies, was shining on us a moment ago. I can still see the afterimage in my eye. More souls were just snuffed out by Blackie del Azarchel than can be counted, or imagined, or felt, or put into words! All the civilizations of two big galaxies and two-score satellite galaxies, spiral and elliptical and irregular, clouds of stars, and an infinite number of worlds. Everyone I knew, everyone they knew, and everything they did for countless millions of years of cosmic history. Poof! Gone! Well, it actually took two hundred thousand years, but that is a poof to people old as us.”
“He raised me. He saved your life not once, but many times, during the long voyage to blue Earth, preserving you because he saw you amused me.”
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