The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  The Jesuit said, “I can answer, Doctor. The material used for starship sails included smart strands with molecular engines for the repair of micropunctures, altering permeability, absorbing laser energy, and so on. As time passed, the Exarchel discovered additional programming configurations for the molecular machinery, and a larger range of options. Your antimatter monopoly was broken once orbital sails could focus solar energy into any rectenna receiver anywhere on the planet—and, because Earth had been using your power broadcast reception for decades, the rectennae were everywhere. The orbital sails, ah, well…”

  “So what happened to the cities?”

  Brother Roger said, “Many were burned like ants under a magnifying glass. Antimissile defenses are of no value against such an attack.”

  “Who was fighting who?”

  Brother Roger said, “The Giants were fighting the Ghosts.”

  “Giants?”

  Brother Roger said, “Posthumans. Artificial children with your intelligence range. It is a way to achieve posthumanity without making an Iron Ghost of your own brain, as the Scholars do. It was worked out by a scientific convocation held under His Holiness Pope Sixtus the Sixth.”

  Sir Guiden said to Brother Roger, “He won’t know that name.” To Menelaus, he said, “Sir, Sixtus the Sixth was Thucydides Montrose. Research in brain-size increase was married to your Prometheus formula to create a posthuman that did not need to be emulated to be augmented. They are genetically altered before conception to grow gigantic bodies to house their correspondingly elephantine brains.”

  “What about augmenting ordinary people, Guy?” asked Montrose, distracted. “Can people ramp up to posthuman intellect like I did, without going mad, like I did?”

  “Not really.” Sir Guiden sounded grim. “Too many people died trying. Emulation seemed safer, but it requires specialized training and nerve implants to be able to donate a brain copy for scanning. Those with this skill were called Savants. Before the burning of the cities, most of mankind was ruled or led by counsels or collections of these Ghosts, emulations of jurists and statesmen, replaced from their Savant donors every three years.”

  “Why so short?”

  Sir Guiden looked surprised. “For reasons you know very well, sir. Divarication failure. You never released to the world Princess Rania’s solution to the Selfish Meme divarication, which allows for stable posthumans without split personalities, nor your solution for the Impersonator divarication, which allows for an electronic copy of a posthuman brain to be made!”

  “I was just assuming Blackie and his troupe of trained monkeys would have noodled that out by now, and covered the world with Iron Ghosts.”

  Sir Guiden said, “The Hermeticists were said to have a more advanced technology than the Savants, and able to download as well as upload, to put the thoughts of their superintelligent computer copies back into their own brains, at least for a time.”

  Montrose said, “That’s a crude way of doing it. Why did you say ‘were’?”

  Sir Guiden said, “Our intelligence arm has confirmed information that over sixty of the Hermeticists went insane or died attempting Prometheus augmentation.”

  “There were only seventy or so of them all told,” said Montrose in awe. “Did they wipe themselves all out?… That’s … I mean, I got crosswise with them toward the end there, and they were mutineers and murderers, but … aw, hell, they were my partners in training, the only guys I trusted to look over my work for mistakes … the only ones who understood it. Damn. Damnation. All of them? What about Blackie?”

  “Almost all,” said Sir Guiden.

  “Who’s left?”

  “The intelligence reports are tentative. It’s not confirmed,” said Sir Guiden.

  “Tell me what you suspect then, Guy.”

  “We suspect the ringleaders are still alive and sane,” said Sir Guiden. “The Master of the World, Ximen del Azarchel is alive: he still makes speeches to loyal followers, promising a return of his regime and world peace. The commander-in-chief of the world armed forces, Narcís D’Aragó. Sarmento i Illa d’Or, who was head of the World Reserve Bank. The Confessor to the Crown, Father Reyes y Pastor. Melchor de Ulloa, the chief of the Loyalty Police. Jaume Coronimas, who was in charge of all the energy systems and powerhouses of Earth.”

  “Coronimas the engineer’s mate? I remember him as a guy with no hobbies, no girl, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t make jokes. Why is he still alive? I don’t think I ever heard his first name.”

  “The same,” said Sir Guiden.

  “Weird. They had the same jobs aboard the ship. Draggy was in charge of security, Yellow Door was quartermaster, Pasty was chaplain and Mulchie was chief snoop and ass-sniffer. I never had a nickname for Coronimas. Didn’t know him close enough.”

  “Which one is Yellow Door?”

  “I Illa d’Or. Sarmento i Illa d’Or.”

  “They are all in hiding now,” said Sir Guiden, “Have been, since the Decivilization War.”

  Decivilization. Montrose thought it was a chillingly apt word to describe the destruction of all the large cities of the world. “What were they fighting about? The Giants and Ghosts?”

  The Knight Hospitalier laughed a chilling laugh. “What are wars always about? Loot, honor, fear. The barbarians and pagans are trying to destroy Christendom.”

  Brother Roger intervened, “In this case, we men are not aware of the causes of the war, because neither the Giants nor the Ghosts were able to express their concerns in a fashion unmodified humans could understand. The basic conflict seemed to be a disagreement about the implications of higher mathematics.”

  Sir Guiden said, “Don’t listen to that! The war was being fought about demographic calculation and information space restrictions. The math question concerned equations governing human liberty, economy, intellectual property, and resource priority. These equations formed the conceptual basis for countless laws and regulations. It was no mere abstract argument. It was about whether humanity would be dehumanized and tyrannized.”

  Montrose said, “So Exarchel finally did it! If he cannot enslave mankind, he’ll destroy us!”

  “No, Doctor,” said Brother Roger cautiously. “The, ah, Giants are the ones controlling the orbital mirrors. The only way to destroy the infrastructure of the wire net was to destroy the great industrial centers, where all the thinking houses and power stations were located. Cities like those in Switzerland and China that were tourist sites made of old materials, concrete and stone, not thinking crystal, were spared, as were any under a certain population density and energy use.”

  “And—” Menelaus gestured toward the horizon, at the airships that swarmed like silver fish among the clouds. “These? They are Nomads, right?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” said Brother Roger. “We are a world of Sylphs. The only defense is dispersion. All the survivors departed from the remaining cities as rapidly as possible. The larger flocks cover the sea from horizon to horizon, but once a mirror beam lands among them, they turn silver, emit ink clouds, and scatter in all directions, or submerge. The orientation and focal lengths of the space mirrors are watched carefully, and the aeroscaphes land together only when the mirrors are below the horizon, for barter fairs, and so on.”

  “Hold on. The Giants are the enemies of these floaty folk? Which side are they on?”

  “Not precisely. The Giants intervene only when the artificial intelligence behind the serpentines violates the Gigantic quarantine guidelines on machine awareness.”

  “This airskiff has a Mälzel brain. It’s lightweight in more ways than one, I’d reckon. And don’t tell me, let me guess. You are finding the Mälzels turning into Xypotechs after a few years of use, and they strange loop into obsessive concentration on a few high-priority tasks?”

  Brother Roger looked surprised. “The considerations are rather technical, and, of course, the Sylphs cannot tolerate another downgrade of allowable technology. But how can you be aware of our difficulties?” />
  “Because I had ’em first.” Montrose grinned. “Your problem is basically what was going wrong with Exarchel back when he was a mad mainframe no bigger than a city block. It’s called the Selfish Meme divarication, and it is the first of the seven basic divarication problems. I’m the dude that fixed it: You have to establish a self-correcting noneditable editor in the mind’s base process, what would be called the subconscious in a human brain, and sink the roots of the ego there, where the changeware can’t get at them and anchor to a mechanical process. It’s not a hard glitch to solve: All you need is a four-thousand-dimensional manifold extrapolating the combinational possibilities. You’d think it’d be an automorphic function in Schubert’s enumerative calculus, but no: you use linear differential equations within a prescribed monodromic group, where each function…” Then, seeing the blank stares on him, Montrose shrugged and said, “Well, it’s not a hard glitch for me to solve. I can teach the mechanisms how to create the self-corrective code in themselves. In any case, Brother, if I straighten out this bug in the serpentines, will it get the Giants off the backs of these Nomads?”

  “Eventually.” Said Brother Roger, “It would take only a few years for the solution to spread.”

  “A few—what? Years?”

  Brother Roger said solemnly, “The Sylphs use the serpentines for barter. At landing fairs, serpentines get passed from hand to hand, with the older, more skilled artifacts commanding more in trade. That is the fastest means of spreading data.”

  “Barter? You guys lost the concept of coin money?” The look on Montrose’s face was such that the violet-eyed younger woman handed him an airsickness bag.

  Brother Roger said, “Money operates on the wire net, and no one uses the wire, because that is where the Exarchel was, Doctor. Communication of any form between ships is unhumanish, except heliograph signals, which cannot carry Iron Ghosts, or their data. All transmission bands are forbidden.”

  Sir Guiden said on their private channel, “I recommend you not solve this glitch, as you call it, Liege. You are describing the solution to the problem of madness in Ghosts. If you release it to the world, Del Azarchel, or someone with his ambitions, will eventually create a second Exarchel, or a third, or a million.”

  Silently, Montrose had his implants send back, “I can narrow the solution to these specifics, without giving away the general principle, Sir Guy. Rania’s Cure is actually seven semi-independent ecomimetic functions. Can he deduce the missing general rule just from one application of one seventh of the set? I doubt he has the brains.”

  Sir Guiden sent back, “Why take the risk? Are these drifting people worth saving? They neither sow nor spin. Let the Giants multiply and inherit the Earth.”

  Brother Roger said blandly to Menelaus, “Even the signals you are sending back and forth with your man, the Hospitalier, would invite gigantic retaliation if detected. I am sorry: were those signals meant to be secret? Well, such is the reason we are going in person to the observatory, rather than having a voice-through-the-air conference.”

  The violet-eyed woman murmured softly, as if in a dream. “Telephones. They were called telephones. You could send pictures of yourself dancing raw to your darling list.”

  Menelaus uttered a bitter laugh. “So radio has gone the way of the dodo. I made the Giants and they killed all the boys named Jack. I destroyed the world. I told Thucydides that this would come to a bad end! Told him!”

  “Oh, do not cast down your features, Dr. Montrose! Society survives in a decentralized form,” said the Jesuit. “The Giants spare any automatic factories, provided the electronic brains housed there are Mälzels or ratiotechnology, thinking machines, not xypotechnology, self-aware machines. A single Giant can carry the download of an entire library needle in his head. I myself, with merely very minor neural augmentations, have both photographic memory, linguistic and mathematical savant abilities, spatial proprioception that establishes perfect direction sense, and the ability to speak the high-speed data-compression language.”

  “And what happened to Exarchel?”

  Brother Roger said, “No copy of him remains anywhere on Earth. With the total shutdown of the infosphere, his power is broken forever!”

  “Forever?”

  “For a hundred years!” The Jesuit smiled.

  “That is not as long a time as you might think.…”

  The Jesuit pointed at one of the large and slanting windows. “There is the observatory.” Hanging in the air was a tall cylinder, slightly narrower at the top than at the base, and a ring of vast gas balloons surrounding its waist like a festive skirt. “We should have new plates developed at sunset.”

  “That’s a pretty big telescope.” The cylinder was twenty meters in diameter, which made the instrument inside at least twice as big as the telescopes Menelaus recalled from his day. “And you must not get much distortion, if you can take her up to the stratosphere.”

  “We also use the space mirrors as baselines, Doctor,” said Brother Roger. “Most of the Giants will cooperate with scientific ventures. Obviously they need technology to advance.”

  “Obviously,” said Montrose. “Because they want to breed true, right? The offspring of Giants are humans?”

  “Humans with various bone diseases, yes, Doctor,” said Brother Roger. “A group of scientific clans called the Simon Families was established by Og of Northumberland to solve that and other long-range multigenerational problems. The experiments are passed down from mother to daughter.”

  “Do the Cetaceans have the same problem?”

  Brother Roger spread his hands. “The Moreau, as we call those who dwell beneath the sea, are not well known or well studied. All our shipping is by air these days, for the Moreau cannot survive an encounter with an aeroscaphe. The Exarchel is no longer in a position to supply them with jaw-launched missiles, and they cannot manufacture their own. More of us float above the sea than above land, since krill and plankton are easier for the hunger silk to absorb and convert than most land-based proteins.”

  “Are you going to drive them into extinction?”

  “Ah? Is that your wish, Doctor? That seems as harsh as your condemnation of the cities.”

  “I was asleep! Did these Giants say I gave the order?”

  Brother Roger looked troubled. “Say? You gave the order. The whole world saw you. It was your voice and image over the wire. What does this mean? Is someone acting for you, impersonating you?”

  3. Glimpse of a Distant Star

  Boarding was a simple but dizzying process of being passed from the airship serpentines to the observatory’s. The metal snakes handed Menelaus over as gently as a father picking a tot out of a baby carriage and into a mother’s waiting arms, but the moment of being exposed to the chill and thin winds of the upper air, with nothing underfoot and nothing to cling to, left him wishing he had taken up Woggy on his offer of a booth.

  Ascending to the stratosphere was effortless: The huge balloon, after a polite warning, sealed all its pressure doors, and shed diamond dust in a long and glittering tail, and climbed.

  This interior was as spartan as the Azurine had been luxurious. Menelaus found the photographic plates waiting for him, pinned to a steel bench next to a steel stool, with a lens on a cantilevered arm hanging above. To see images created by chemical emulsions seemed oddly old-fashioned, but the current range of nanotechnologically created chemical mixes could react more sensitively to various wavelengths, including gamma and X-ray, shortwave and infrared, than any digital receptors.

  There was no completely trustworthy calculating machine nor library cloth available in this technophobic age, but Brother Roger was able to give him the basics of the high-speed compression language, and any calculations Menelaus could not do in his head, Menelaus could squeal and click in a single quick throat-rasp to Brother Roger, whose intuitive grasp of notational mathematics was almost as good as his own. Menelaus used him to double check his work for errors.

  The first plate sh
owed merely a large circular smear of light with a smaller one nearly. A distribution of infrared and microwave emissions caught on those plates indicated a contact point below the solar atmosphere.

  Montrose said, “She’s had to overcome the problem that antimatter–matter reactions usually end up blowing most of the matter back toward the source. When a billiard-ball hits an anti–billiard-ball, the two balls are blown away from each other when the point of contact releases all its energy. You gotta push the two billiards together against their ignition pressure to maintain the explosion, and keep pushing. From the magnetic images, I reckon she is using the ring current from the mining satellites not just to focus the explosion like a jet cone, but also to hem in the fragments like an ignition cylinder. I would ask where she got the energy to ionize the whole metallic hydrogen core of the gas giant, but she’s sitting on top of the biggest energy treasure in the known universe, so I guess she just—”

  He was interrupted by Brother Roger bringing the latest two plates. It was after sunset, and at 170,000 feet (thirty-two miles and change straight up) they were above the troposphere and in the stratosphere, the edge of outer space. The pressure outside the armored sphere of the life support was 1/1000 of sea level. Needless to say, the pictures were clearer than any mountaintop observatory.

  There were two images: one magnetic, the other in the gamma ray spectrum.

  Brother Roger passed him the magnetic image first. “There are a number of very puzzling features in this.…”

  Menelaus barely glanced at the magnetic image. “You are getting a diffraction effect caused by the fact that she is using a second set of ring-current satellites to establish a magnetic ramscoop in front of the star. It is going to draw in hydrogen particles of terrene matter, loop them around to the aft end of the Diamond Star, and ram them into the antimatter vortex forming in the aft magnetic jet cone. The incoming particles will have greatly increased mass as she mounts up near to lightspeed, and so more energy will be released with the bombardment.”