Blackie sent five smaller galaxies in the shape of four long and one short streamers above his position and formed them into the image of a white glove with a black palm: The signal of a duelist ready to fire.
2. The Parley
CIRCA A.D. 5,000,000,000
During these same years, Rania took a triangular cloud of stars and accelerated them away from Blackie’s core position, so that their light, reaching him, would be white, not reddened by Doppler shift. A signal for parley.
Montrose sent signals left and right, wishing he had something faster than the speed of light to coordinate his fleets. Even using Andromeda’s trick of vibrating the local strands of the Engine only transmitted ten percent above lightspeed; on these scales, that was practically nothing.
Blackie sent forward a globular cluster of dark stars, either neutronium or coated with neutronium Dyson spheres, and positioned them in the emptiness between the battle lines.
Montrose, wryly, re-formed the glittering body Virgo had given him (which had softened into a spherical blob over the last few subjective hours), and added mass from a nearby galaxy, and a few thousand volunteer stars. A small spiral satellite galaxy who had tied all his stars together into one rigid frame using interstellar-length threads of hyperdense material maneuvered into position and hung above the arm of Montrose, looking like a round Greek shield. In his other hand he held, or rather curling the star clusters pretending to be his fingers appeared to hold, a supermassive black hole, with the beam of coherent ultraviolet and x-ray radiation as his lance.
Montrose and Rania flew forward. The black globular cluster of the herald proffered long thin threads of ultradense material toward them, allowing them to exchange words at faster than the speed of light.
Ximen del Azarchel said, “Alive and alive! Montrose has sprung to life again, even wearing his yokel teeth and ungainly nose to mock me, that I might have the pleasure of killing him again!”
“Howdy, Blackie. I got a message from Captain Grimaldi for you.”
Montrose squinted at the sphere of thousands of stars. Here and there were little twitches or sparks of energy forming and vanishing. He realized those were the signs of planetary and interplanetary civilizations evolving into being and disappearing again. He wondered if any of them, during their brief existence, realized what the shapes in the stars around them meant.
Ximen said, “Alive also is my treasure, my princess, whom I thought in her folly had slain herself by disobeying me when I commanded her to flee Le Gentil. These years and millennia have been a torment to me, an emptiness beyond all words! To fill that void, long and long I sought to destroy your destroyers.”
She said, “You cannot touch the Ulteriors. They are beyond time and space.”
“True. But their servants, their lore, their mathematics—that is what always came between us, between you and me, when we were man and wife. To them, not to this cowboy, belongs the blame that you denied me the comforts of the wedding bed! Had you known my love, you would have yielded to me! For so long I blamed him! That ungainly clown with his bad grammar! It was not he you loved but the godlike and impossible superbeings who created the continuum!”
Rania said, “I love him entirely and deeply because I see the light of heaven in his eyes when I look at him. He makes me brave. I love you as a daughter loves a father, for you raised me. But I hate that dark spirit in you which always and forever draws your thought to darkest things. Turn away from it, O Father! Even now it is not too late!”
Blackie was not listening. “Oh, how often I dreamed of you, Rania, and woke and kissed you, only to have you vanish in my arms. Whether this was a vision telling me you yet lived, or magic, or madness, I know not, nor care. But I will have you again, and once Montrose is truly dead, you will cleave to me.”
Rania said, “You deceive yourself. Once I thought Menelaus was gone, and even so it was clear we were not meant to be, you and I.”
“This time, this next time, it will differ.”
“No. Millions and billions of years and countless lives have been spent in this insanity, Father. Give me your blessing for my marriage to Menelaus, who has been faithful and long-suffering beyond all men who ever lived.”
“Never. I would destroy the universe first. I nearly have enough of the Engine under my control to destroy it now.”
She said, “There is a realm from which I come where all such evil deeds and ill-meant passions fall away like forgotten dreams. Can you not trust that the Ulteriors will keep their word, and preserve us all alive, if only we set the Engine into proper operation?”
Blackie laughed scornfully. “I trust them entirely and completely! How could they even imagine how to lie? Falsehood is something born of entropy, lack, loss, want, and death. No, my child; O my bride, no. I would rather die than receive charity from the hand of a superior.”
“I foresee you will destroy yourself.”
“After I am done collapsing the Virgo Cluster into an extropy fountain, and any other superclusters who oppose me, I shall make an extropic high-energy paradise of my own, a utopia of infinite wealth. All I need do to achieve the dream is slaughter and kill and kill again, without mercy and without let. So simple. To get what you want, you merely must destroy what opposes you! And, to think, I will make of myself what all men have dreamed: sovereign of my own walled garden, a paradise of my own, founded on my terms!”
Rania said, “The Ulteriors will grant all this and more, without a single death, freely and abundantly, out of mere benevolence.”
“Out of mere condescension, you should say! No, Rania! No! I will not bow the knee. I will not be less than myself. I will not serve.”
Montrose said to Rania, “You had your say. Hope that he will hear is gone. I’ve been patient, but now there is no more reason to wait. He dies, or I do.”
Rania said, “There must be a way to reach his heart, if only I forget myself and put my selfish heart aside. But, oh! How I yearn for my life to begin!”
Montrose said sourly, “The future never seems to arrive, does it? But this is the last battle. Once he is gone, we settle down and raise us a thousand kids and planets and stars and all. Deal?”
Her smile, made of stars, was the last part of her she transmitted back to the flagship galaxies behind her, and it faded very slowly, being very bright.
Montrose expected the emissary globular cluster to strike at him in violation of the laws of war, but, to his surprise, the orb of dark stars merely moved back into the massive cluster of galaxies housing Ximen del Azarchel. Montrose shook his starry head in reluctant admiration and dissolved his shape into an ellipse.
The flanking galaxies were already beginning to open fire.
3. The Perfect Look On
The Cherub of Virgo did not interrupt.
Far behind the battle lines, the Perfected galaxies, and those called Credulous taking neither side in this fight, now withdrew, gathering around the dark orbicular mirror which once had been the Local Cluster, the graveyard of Andromeda and Milky Way and all the lesser galaxies which once had been alive. Quasars now appeared here and there in their midst like bonfires, and Montrose, seeing them from afar, realized that these quasi-stellar radio sources long thought by human astronomers to be remnants of the early universe were in fact closer and younger than guessed. Quasars were not natural. They were extropy fountains shedding endless energy from the corpses of slain Thrones and Cherubim. It was ghoulish.
4. War in Virgo
CIRCA A.D. 6,000,000,000
No war was ever more self-destructive. In the first hour, or eon, on the battlefront, like two walls of light, the combatants clashed together. For the vanguard, the niceties of maneuver were lost, and all erupted into a general melee. As when the Milky Way and Andromeda collided, now not two but dozens of warrior galaxies in the vanguard swept through each other, one cloud of fireflies passing through another. It was nearly impossible that star would collide with star. But the spirals and ellipses were flung
by tides and gravity waves stirred up by the interpassage, and arms unspooled into long lines and filaments, or globes scattered like blown dandelion seeds. Thrones grew stupid and brain-dead as the nodes and cells of their interstellar mental communications systems were dispersed and torn.
Which side first adopted the kamikaze tactics, Montrose never learned, but he saw one smaller barred galaxy passing at high speed through a larger elliptical one, igniting scores, then hundreds of stars to nova and supernova, then myriads.
Like lifeboats, he saw globular clusters speeding away from the hellish galaxy-wide storm of light and lightning, energy and radiation. And here and there, he saw very tiny, single stars or even single planets, which perhaps had developed life and civilization in the early part of that collision, and had achieved a sufficient level of technology to fling their worlds out from the dying galaxy, without ever knowing why it died.
Then the larger core of the fleets of galaxies merged. These kept a better discipline of maneuver. The central galaxy where Blackie was housed suddenly, in the eyeblink of a single millennium, turned all its outer stars into what Montrose and his staff at first thought to be very small Dyson spheres. But no—the stars were being turned inside out, so that the solid degenerate matter of the core formed an opaque ultradense exterior, while the fusion and fission continued at the hollow core, powering whatever warrior civilizations dwelled in those impossible conditions.
Blackie flung out these inverted stars and neutronium clouds of dust and nebulae like chaff, defeating and confounding the incoming nova and supernova beams. His own Seyfert lance he bent around a partner galaxy which had collapsed into a black hole to aid him, and the beam passed nearly into and around the galactic mass of nothingness, working unimaginable devastation on the left flank of Montrose. The galaxy that half in jest had formed his shield now shielded him in truth, throwing itself into the beam path of the lance, and collapsing its core into a supermassive singularity to drink up the incoming deadly energy. Half his stars were fed into the darkness at his core, and the others were scattered or ignited by the radiation pressure of the Seyfert lance.
But now Blackie staggered back, sickened and reeling, for a galaxy of dark Dysons, stealthy and invisible behind the gravitic wave which masked and permitted their approach, had flung countless trillions of planets and asteroids, too small to be seen, across the intergalactic gap. The civilizations of these many worlds began a work of propaganda and conversion and war, eating away at the worlds which, like the marrow of the bone, produced the civilization to replace those that died each millennium among the constituent Dominations, Dominions, Authorities, and Archons of the Throne-mind ruling each galaxy. The Cherub of Del Azarchel (for now he was many galaxies in volume, and more than equal to diminished Virgo) convulsed as if with diseases, a cancer of rebellious cells and organs, in civil wars brought on by the message from Rania.
Blackie called out to Montrose over the battle din with a neutrino laser, “To think you, you, would stoop to germ warfare! You fooled me this way once before. Well struck, sir! Well struck! But now wait my reply!”
For Del Azarchel and his staff now had control of two of the lengths of the cosmic strings of the Eschaton Engine running through the Virgo Supercluster and had established a sympathetic vibration. The matching wave crests formed a gravity whip that parted the galactic cluster of Montrose, galaxy severed from galaxy like two corks in water parted by a rising wave between them, putting two halves of the Montrose’s cluster-sized Cherubic brain out of touch with itself. It dazed him like a blow to the head.
Montrose used his own rotating galactic cores and superstring induction accelerators formed from the magnetosphere of the Virgo Supercluster to pluck the length of Eschaton Engine he controlled like a guitar string; his whole reserve fleet of twenty elliptical galaxies was flung forward on the gravity wave in the eyeblink of a few million years, at immense relativistic velocity. Meanwhile he had ignited two of the galaxies in his front line, each star going nova at once in a titanic display, and the radiation pressure expanded a galactic mass of cloud, dust, and nebulae to act as chaff and confuse Blackie’s view of what was happening.
The relativistic galaxies picked up mass as they emerged from the wall of nebula. At their speed, the smallest dust mote had the mass, from the target frame of reference, of a giant world, and giant worlds of supermassive stars, and stars were as if each were its own private universe, driving all its mass forward in a wave of x-rays and cosmic rays, and radiation of such high wavelengths that no names existed for them. And what the supermassive dark core of the galaxy was, all description fails.
Blackie’s central galaxies scattered, but too late; upon collision, instead of merely passing through each other, all matter was ensnared by the immense masses involved. The galaxies merging at relativistic speeds collapsed into a multigalactic singularity so large that only the Great Attractor was larger. Seven-eighths of Blackie’s fleet was either trapped and crushed, burned by accretion turbulence, or, if farther from the center of the disaster, was snatched up in the hurricane of gravitic energy, and scattered.
The Thrones and Authorities of Montrose glowed and ignited with war cries. They now outnumbered and outgunned the enemy galaxies by a healthy margin. Montrose shushed them. “Don’t cheer yet. Wait for their light to reach us! Stay sharp!”
For the heartbeat of five hundred thousand years or so, Montrose could see nothing but debris. Gravity was severely warped throughout the whole area, and photons lost consistency.
But when the view cleared, Montrose was frightened to see what looked like a dark and curving image of the entire surrounding universe. It was a dark mirrored sphere surrounding an interior continuum: a spacewarp, a miniature universe.
Blackie had sacrificed most of his mass to create a collapsed zone of spacetime, slaying his own loyal followers as once he slew his liege in Andromeda. The original three Seyfert galaxies, now dark and missing their arms, hung in the lee of the spacewarp, safe.
Montrose growled, “But we thought he did not have enough mass to do that!”
One of his servant galaxies said, “But look, sire! The foe creates a standing wave along a filament of the Great Engine, producing an artificial gravity to complement what he lacked in natural mass.”
It was true. A thin line of red light passed directly through the axis of the dark mirrored globe of the spacewarp. Blackie had built his interior continuum directly atop a limb of the Eschaton Engine.
The cosmic string filament evidently allowed communication into and out of the interior continuum, for now the interior beings came to the aid of Del Azarchel. Even as Montrose watched, the stations, like dark, feathery masses radiating upward from the surface of the miniature continuum, generated quasars and sent them like all-consuming fire among Montrose’s divided fleets.
Montrose had no defense, no more capacity to maneuver. All was lost.
2
Interior and Ulterior
1. Death’s False Glamour
A.D. 7,106,601,776
He sped up his time-sense again and again, moving into ever small mental systems to do so, trying to give himself time to think of something.
Eventually he stood on the balcony of a space elevator, overlooking the jet-black flat landscape of a neutron star far beneath, wearing a human-sized body and utilizing no more than a Host-sized brain.
He watched members of a many-legged millipede race whose name he did not know crawling along the regular features of the surface. The mass of the star made the light from the surface red.
Many of the local stars were now red dwarfs, embers of novae, drained of force, and the colored clouds of ten thousand nebulae wove like scarves through nearby space and far. He looked at the black mirror rising in the distance and at the clouds of light of enemy galaxies between him and it. The quasars wreaking such havoc were invisible, but he could see the white arms of galaxies in the distance caught in mid-destruction, curling and black and jagged with the forces
obliterating them. And near at hand, dozens of stars were brighter than the sun at noon, ignited to supernova ignition by the focused influx of energy and photon masses from the quasars.
Rania, wearing a white robe and carrying two wineglasses, stepped out on the balcony.
“It’s lost,” said Montrose. “We can live out our lives happily, I guess, because it will be half a million years before the leading edge of the nearest nova hits us. I can make us a small solar system, and you and I can get started on that family. What do you want to call the first boy? Micky or Guy?”
“Perhaps was should call him Simon, so that he learns to be persistent even in failure.”
Menelaus stared at her. “Failure?”
She said, “Ximen always forgets the same lesson: he lives for the Darwinian struggle, to be the fittest, to survive, to conquer, to overcome the world. He has no idea how those who are in the world but not of it think. How does the man who overcomes the world act? I mean, one who has overcome it truly?”
“Why can you see any hope in this?”
“I look with eyes undeceived by the false glamour of death, and so I am unaghast.”
Montrose shook his head. “Woman, will I ever understand you?”
“Soon. Resume your existence as a Cherub or Throne, and study the incoming quasar energy. It is issuing from the interior dimensions Ximen just made.”
He drank the wine first and kissed her.
2. Treason of the Interiors
A.D. 7,200,000,000
The quasar beams contained a simple, stark message. “We, having lived in a negative-entropy universe even for a short time (from our frame of reference, albeit surely it is eons for you) are now willing to perish in order to preserve what to us is an outer, entropic universe. Altruism, the total loss of self for the sake of the other, is the only rational intersection of interests between the infinitely blessed and endlessly cursed. The benevolent inhabiters of the Interior Dimension decree that Montrose must succeed in destroying us and stopping the Extropy Fountains. Although you are less than myth and long-forgotten memories to us, we know our bounty is being taken from us to be used against you, to work harm, and we stand ready to perish rather than permit this enormity to continue.”
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