The Sovereign Road

by Aaron Calhoun

  “Who could come here that you would wish to deny?” asked Garin in bewilderment.

  “The servants of the Fractured One, whose name once was Daath and Gnosoi, giver of the knowledge of good and evil.”

  “It is Daath I am fleeing,” said Garin, his heart racing at the mention of his adversary. “He attempted to slay me in Mythos, but the sacrificial dagger broke in his hand and allowed me access to this place.”

  “Indeed,” said the voice with sudden interest. “We Arethoi are always interested in news of Daath’s activities, shameful thought they are.

  He was once one of us, you know, but was not content to remain in his appointed place. Instead he rose in anger against the throne of He Who Is, and for that act of treason his crystal mind-shell was cast forth from Arethos, leaving only a fracture, a wound, in the fabric of the Cube of Cubes where his domain once stood. You must tell me of your journey,” the voice added after a brief pause, “for if Daath is pursing you even here to the site of his ancient power, then my brethren must know.”

  Garin took a deep breath, and began his tale. As he spoke the moonlight washing over the stark landscape seemed to deepen, shifting from light silver to a brooding grey. There was a long silence after Garin finished, and when at last the voice spoke all traces of mirth had vanished.

  “Child of Phaneros, I see now why you have come here, perhaps even more deeply than you do yourself. The worlds below approach the zenith of their corruption and the time of the Apocatastasis may at last be at hand. I perceive that you have no small role to play in this, small one, but the time for your journey grows short.”

  “All denizens of Phaneros who enter this world must pass through my domain, which in the lower worlds is named Malkuth and Kyriakos, for all the light and wisdom of the realms beneath is but the reflected sovereignty and love of He Who Is. In the Cube of Cubes all things are connected, for the minds of the Arethoi are an ever-vast assembly of bright vessels endlessly refracting and mirroring the Uncreated Light. Yet for those of the lower realms only certain of these paths can be safely traversed, for your minds are too fragile for many of them. But know this! All paths open to you must cross the Abyss, the Primal Wound in the cosmos created by Daath’s betrayal. It is to there that you must go, and quickly, for I perceive that the Brightness of the Uncreated Light also moves within the Cube. Here then are the paths that you may tread.”

  There was a pulse of moonlight followed by a great cracking sound as three tall slabs of translucent crystal burst forth from the ground. Each was easily twice Garin’s height. Their surfaces gleamed with inner radiance, and within them Garin could see swirling visions of strange, unearthly scenes.

  “To your left is the Slab-Gate of Glorious Judgement, in the center lies the Slab-gate of the Foundation of the Stone Rainbow, and to the right is the Slab-gate of Eternal Mercy. All lead to the Garden of Creation’s Beauty and from thence to the wound, but it is up to you to decide which gate you will take. Choose well, child of Phaneros, for some paths are bright yet endless in the undertaking, and some are dark and terrible but strangely easy because of it. Remember always that each sphere, like myself, is a living intellect, and that your journey through each depends less on the sphere through which you move and more on the virtue of the one who is moving.”

  Taking a deep breath, Garin studied the Slab-Gates more closely. The central gate seemed to beckon to him, its surface ablaze with images of endless adamantine plains and arching rainbows. But the longer he gazed at it the more remote and forbidding the landscape seemed, as if he could wander forever across those bright fields before reaching the end. Filled with a strange sense of dread, Garin turned away to the Gate of Eternal Mercy. This one was filled with soft visions of golden pillars overseen by a shining face whose eyes danced with kindness. The entire scene glowed with calm and peace.

  Surely this is the right path, thought Garin, and he took a step toward the gate. Then he paused as he remembered the warning the voice had given. Could he truly pass this way safely? If the success of the journey depended on the virtue of the traveler, was he merciful enough to take this road? Had he ever really shown mercy at all? Then he realized that the face within the Slab-Gate was watching him. Suddenly its humanity vanished, replaced by a leonine visage framed with wings of fire. Its eyes flashed with a piercing light that cut to the very core of Garin’s being, and he knew that he could not go that way. His mercy was too weak and broken to survive an encounter with whatever it was that dwelt atop those golden pillars.

  With a sigh, Garin turned to face the last Slab-Gate. Here terrible images danced: cloud-swathed brazen pillars that rose to cosmic heights, a chaos of fire burning in the heart of a dark sky. As he considered these scenes, he thought of the people of Phaneros as they faced the destroying fire of the entropy clouds. He thought of the realm of Daath, filled with the innumerable prison spheres of those that had fallen to selfishness and despair. He thought of himself, standing here as the representative of an entire cosmos, a cosmos that deserved judgment for what it had allowed itself to forget. It was then that he understood.

  Though he did not wish face judgment, there was no way it could be avoided. It was the very reason he had come.

  “I choose the Slab-Gate of Glorious Judgement,” said Garin resolutely.

  “Really,” said the voice, a note of surprise in its tone. “Are you sure. Few children of Phaneros have ever climbed this far, and none have ever chosen that gate.”

  “Did they make it through?” asked Garin uneasily. “The ones who chose the other gates?”

  “Oh, one or two did,” replied the voice, “though it took them both a millennia to make the journey. The rest, as far as I can tell, are still on the road.”

  Choosing to take the cryptic response as encouragement, Garin offered a word of thanks and stepped through the swirling surface of the Slab-Gate. There was a flash, a strange sense of dissociation, and he was back in the crystal matrix.

  The cloud of scintillations that formed his body flashed down a pathway of purest diamond, moving at a near-impossible velocity. Garin glanced around him as he flew, trying to gain a better sense of the medium through which he traveled. At first he could see nothing but endless miles of glittering crystal, but then he began to perceive the outlines of a vast geometic form, larger than worlds, and at last understood what the voice had meant when it spoke of the Cube of Cubes. Ahead loomed an iridescent membrane, a curvilinear defect in the otherwise angular facets of the crystal matrix that grew larger every second. Suddenly it was upon him. He was overcome by a feeling of disorientation. His vision swam, and when it cleared a few moments later Garin found himself standing on a ledge overlooking an abyss of swirling cloud.

  Overtaken by vertigo, Garin took several reflexive steps backward only to be stopped short. In surprise he turned and saw a sheer wall of bronze. Its surface radiated a dull light as if it had just been removed from a furnace, yet curiously it was cold to the touch. Garin cautiously stepped back from the wall, his eyes following it upward to where it vanished amidst a vortex of fiery red vapors. Then he noticed that the wall was not flat, but gently curved away to his left and right. As Garin pondered this, he realized that this was not a wall at all, but rather the base of the pillar of bronze he had seen in the Slab-Gate, a structure so vast that it dwarfed the Arx Scientia by at least an order of magnitude.

  Garin sat down, leaned against the frigid surface of the pillar, and considered what to do next. He was certain that his goal lay at the top, but was equally uncertain of how even to begin the ascent. Then a deep bell-like tone sounded and he felt a faint vibration from within the column. The air seemed to thicken around him, and again Garin had the overwhelming sense of being watched.

  “Hello,” said Garin. “Can you hear me? I must ascend the pillar, but I don’t know how.”

  At first there was no answer, but then the tone sounded again, this time gaining in volume until the entire pillar was visibly resonating. There was a succes
sion of sharp reports, like stones cracking under a hammer, and a series of bronze cubes thrust their way out of the surface of the pillar to Garin’s left, forming a crude staircase.

  Rising to his feet Garin approached the first cube, a ponderous block of metal as high as his waist. These stairs were obviously not meant for humans, but there seemed to be no other option. Taking a deep breath, Garin hauled himself atop the first block and began the ascent.

  Chapter 25: Forces in Discord

  In a cold room lit by the rhythmic flicker of countless holographic displays, Gedron, The Chromatocron, and the Ouranos Radii worked to calibrate the vacuum sculptors. Each heirophant stood at a raised crystalline podium surrounded by concentric circles of infochrystic workstations occupied by the highest ranking members of their respective colleges. The podiums were thought-responsive, allowing the heirophants to transmit their ideas and wishes to their colleagues near-instantaneously.

  In the center of the room rose four multifaceted columns of sapphire that shone with a spectral azure glow. Between the columns, three holographic images hung suspended in the air like photonic ghosts. To the left was a stylized representation of the turbulent plasma flows of Vai’s surface. Based on a series of mathematical models composed by the Ouranos Radii, the turbulence map enabled the heirophants to simulate the effects of different vacuum sculptor distributions on the ignition process. To the right rotated a detailed schematic of a working vacuum sculptor, its central neutronium filament glowing an iridescent red as beams of virtual quarks played about it. This image was linked to both the Chromatochron and the High Gavitist’s infochrysts and showed the effects of minute adjustments in the filament’s pion resonance frequency on the particle distributions in the underlying false vacuum. A full simulation of Vai itself hung in the center.

  Gedron watched the simulation at it cycled through yet another iteration, its parameters defined by the shifting parameters of the models to each side. As the image brightened he entertained a brief hope that this one might be successful, only to be inundated by a wash of disappointment as the star flashed into a brilliant supernova. That run had been his best attempt thus far at reproducing a successful ignition. But like so many others, it had failed.

  Many of the early models had resulted in asymmetric explosions that propelled Vai onto a collision course with the worlds of the Conclave, but these had quickly disappeared from the simulations when the College of Cosmic Change (the servants of the Ouranos Radii) finally developed a series of vacuum sculptor distributions that were able to avoid large-scale ignition asymmetries. The results had seemed promising even to Gedron’s jaded sensibilities and he had briefly wondered whether his initial concerns about the vacuum sculptors had been unfounded. But the subsequent simulations had not been as encouraging. Some had resulted in successful reignitions, but most still led to supernovas.

  He had first attempted to improve success rates by rebalancing Vai’s density gradients, hoping that a simple solution was possible, but this approach had not been as high-yield as the Ouranos Radii’s efforts. The extensive gaseous mixing the heirophants had used to prolong Vai’s life had already smoothed out most of the irregularities in the distribution of stellar plasma, and there was not much room for improvement. In the end he was only able to increase success rates by five percent using this approach and was forced to conclude that the vacuum sculptors themselves were the real issue.

  Gedron had worked with the Chromatochron for the bulk of the day to determine the optimal resonant frequency for the central neutronium filament, but as the long hours passed he had watched with growing horror as values that worked in one iteration of the model would result in failure in the next and supernova in the third. The source of the unpredictability was clear. The enhanced strong force binding energy created by the vacuum sculptors ultimately depended on the ability of the core filaments to precisely manipulate local virtual quark concentrations, but due to the inherent instability of the quantum vacuum, the degree of control required was simply impossible.

  With a sigh of frustration, Gedron called up a table summarizing the results of their work. So far, the best resonance settings resulted in a fourty percent success rate, with none offering less than a fifty five percent risk of helium flash. With a flick of his wrist he sent the table to the Chromatocron, who immediately frowned.

  “I am aware of this, Gedron. Do you take me for a fool?”

  “Far from it Tauron,” said Gedron. “I merely wished to point out that to date our most successful simulations are still worse than a coin flip.”

  “And yet we must proceed,” replied the Chromatocron. “Surely you are aware that our activities here are being monitored, and we have received no message to cease our attempts.”

  “You have less backbone than I thought,” said Gedron with more than a hint of anger, “to so blatantly admit your lack of authority here.”

  “Oh come,” said the Chromatocron with a dismissive laugh. “You knew also - you had to know - that the Entrope was truly in control. How could we expect less? He is the symbol, after all, of the entropy clouds, and we but representations of the lesser forces of a cosmos soon to be destroyed, or have you somehow managed to miss the real point of the elaborate play we heirophants perform each time we gather in Conclave?”

  The Chromatocron paused for a few moments, his eyes closed in thought. “Gedron,” he said finally, “I too enjoy the pleasures of existence, but these cannot be maintained unless the society that supports them continues in its present state. Surely this point is not lost on you. Now come, you know as well as I that if the Entrope were directly exerting his power we would not be engaged in our simulation game here at all, and Vai would likely be nothing more now than an expanding shell of incandescent gas and radiation. I still have a great deal of authority over this process, and there is work to be done.”

  Before Gedron could respond, the Chromatocron’s attention was drawn by a series of diagrams and notations that abruptly appeared in the air before his podium. After a few moments of silence, The Chromatocron turned back to Gedron with a smile.

  “Ah, now here is an interesting possibility. A member of my college has postulated a resonance frequency with an additional degree of freedom that opens up strange phase space to the sculptor. Perhaps a change in quark flavor balance will improve things. Observe.”

  The Chromatocron transferred a copy of the diagrams to Gedron’s podium and quickly began feeding the specifics into the main simulations. As the model of Vai again began cycling through its vistas of creation and destruction, Gedron considered the data before him. By opening up strange phase space a number of higher energy virtual quarks entered the equation that seemed to have a small, but real, stabilizing effect on the background vacuum energy. It was an admittedly elegant approach, though he was still not sure it would make a real difference. Then an additional feature of the model caught his eye. By enhancing the probability of virtual matter bearing the strange quantum number, the resonance also opened up the possibility of a larger array of meson subtypes participating in force exchange. Kaons, in particular, seemed to receive a probability boost. Intrigued for reasons that he could not yet clearly understand, he called up a subwindow containing the quantum properties of the meson particle family. He rapidly scanned the list, searching for the K-meson subclass, and as he read their particular properties his vague curiosity suddenly crystallized into a moment of pure insight.

  Gedron looked up at the flickering hologram of Vai; the virtual star had already gone through four hundred thousand ignitions. A plan had already begun to form in his mind, but he needed more time to analyze the model and the simulation run was almost complete. Trying his best to be discrete, Gedron reached into his robes and removed a small personal infochryst, concealing it in the palm of his hand. He waited a few moments, eyes fixed on the diagrams of the altered vacuum sculptors in feigned concentration, and then casually reached out toward the model as if he were considering some specific feature, sc
anning its contents into the infochryst as he did so. As the infochryst flashed with the telltale blue sparks of data transfer, his heart raced with fear. He quickly glanced around, searching for signs that someone had noticed his actions, but all eyes were fixed on the simulation of Vai. When the data transfer was finished, Gedron pointing to a few more features in the model to complete the deception, then dropped his hands to his sides and pocketed the infochryst. If his speculations proved valid, he might now have what he needed to defuse the vacuum sculptors.

  “Gedron!”

  The words startled him, and a deadly chill crept down his spine. Had he been seen after all? Taking a deep breath, Gedron steadied himself and turned to face the Chromatocron.

  “Yes?” he said smoothly.

  “Have you not been following the simulations? I would think you would be interested in the outcomes of the run, given your prior concerns. In any event, here they are.”

  With a gesture, the Chromatocron sent a statistical summary of the simulation to Gedron. Both the reignition and nova rates now approached fourty-five percent. The results were better, but not by much.

  “You see,” said the Chromatocron with a laugh, “Now our chances are better than a flipped coin.”

  Gedron frowned at the Chromatocron’s mockery of his previous concern, but after a few moments nodded in grudging agreement. Satisfied, the Chromatocron turned back to the simulations, leaving Gedron to his thoughts.

  ***

  A few hours later, Gedron climbed the spiraling ramps of the Arx Memoria in search of a private place to work. Though he was sure that most would not understand what he was doing, given the stakes he could not afford to take unneccesary risks. He soon found what he was looking for, a dark row of secluded alcoves near the top of the main library. Far from the bustling activity of the floors below, here there was little chance of arousing suspicion. Gedron glanced around one last time to be sure he was alone, then sat down at the desk and removed the small datachryst from his robes, placing it as far from the alcove’s primary terminal as space allowed. It would not do to have them communicating prematurely.