Superluminary_The World Armada

by John C. Wright

  In the meanwhile, the news came that the betrayer in service to the vampires had been exposed and killed, but not until after he had (unbeknownst to himself) secretly converted not just his brother and his son to vampirism, but also many of his servants, nieces and nephews. An extensive host of vampires, like some clinging and parasitical vine strangling a tree, had infiltrated all levels of the Empire of Man. The more time passed, and the more the hidden numbers would grow.

  The fourth messenger held news even more delicious: the leader of the Living Beings, Lord Tellus, had been caught by one of the many hidden vampires, and reduced to an automaton, just as their last betrayer had been. This information came from the same channel which told them that Lord Tellus was an ex-vampire who had seeded Tellus with life from his private horde. Because of this, his servants in his intelligence service rated the information as very trustworthy.

  The Overlord was pleased with this and bade Rhazakhang to approach.

  Once more the warlord Rhazakhang the Obliterator approached, and was impaled on a lance of death energy like a mote caught in a spotlight from the high window of the Overlord’s tower. Once more, Rhazakhang assumed the form of a mirrored sphere, averting his gaze from the Malefic Visage.

  Out from his interior material, be brought forth the body of Aeneas Tell, wrapped in a cocoon of forces meant to preserve him, unharmed and alive, even in the middle of a vampiric mass. “This is Lord Tellus.”

  On a force-beam Aeneas was wafted into the window, and down into the immeasurable chamber beyond.

  Aeneas awoke in a soundless vacuum and total darkness even his many senses could not penetrate.

  He knelt, he stood, and the uneven surface beneath him rattled, clattered and shifted. He heard the noise not through his ears, but through vibration membranes in his feet. There was no air here. His echolocation was inoperative. He picked up a round fragment. The thing in his hands was a skull. He threw it from him. It skipped quite a distance, rebounding from bones and more bones beyond. The vibrations he sensed through his foot membranes could detect no floor beneath. It was layer after layer of bones. It was the refuse and remains of countless millennia of ghoulish cannibal feasts or worlds beyond count.

  Nothing was corrupted. No worm, no microbe, nothing lived here.

  Episode 22 The Republic of Creation

  Here in a chamber larger than a world, a place bereft of radiation, light, warmth or air, stretched an endless plain of bones and skulls packed to an unguessed depth. Heaps stood like dunes in a desert of sand, or hills, or mountains.

  Here stood Aeneas, nude, and his many senses probed the gloom, but neither x-ray nor radio waves illumined the dark. His gravity-wave senses detected tidal effects from a supermassive black hole less than a lightyear away, somewhere beyond the vast, dark walls of this place, and he saw the contour of an artificial gravity field which made the ocean of bones a plain rather than a cloud.

  With another organ, he sensed the death energy that allowed vampiric organisms to exist in the shadow condition that was neither life nor death, an unlife where their cellular mechanisms moved, and certain organs and muscles could be forced like awkward puppets into imitating living animation, but where there was no interdependency, no sensation, no growth. That organ was overwhelmed instantly, like an eye struck permanently blind. The death here was omnipotent, and came from all directions.

  He did not have his signet ring, but specialized nerve cells in his brain could detect neuropsionic energy flows. He could detect two sources of thought energy in the area, heterodyned on a death energy beam, passing from a strong source to a weak source, and back again. He had also had a small group of isolated and expendable nerve clusters he could use to synchronize to dangerous thought-signals.

  He adjusted the first isolated nerve cluster to the alien mental frequency. The pain was like a white hot dagger being stabbed into his brain as that cluster shriveled and died. But he caught the gist of the message. It was an imperative, but not in words. It was merely an act of will by which the superior commanded the inferior to think and speculate. Had this imperative urge been spoken, it would have been expressed thus: LET THIS ODD BEHAVIOR BE EXPLAINED. THE LIVING CREATURE EXAMINES HIS ENVIRONMENT, AS IF POSSESSED BY CURIOSITY AND INITIATIVE. AN AUTOMATON DOES NOT POSSESS SUCH QUALITIES.

  Another needle of pain passed through his skull as Aeneas exposed another isolated nerve cluster to the return signal. This was a memory-response being torn out of the servant’s mind. “All part of the deception, Uttermost Overlord. What was done here is the same as was done to the betrayer, Procopius Tell, our servant, since the hour he first stepped on the surface of Pluto, and was infected. Aeneas Tell, who is the current version of Lord Tellus, has been our puppet since that time. His previous successes were allowed against us in order to put the Master Armature into his hands, because he could establish a route to the Andromeda Galaxy, using imagination and initiative that were beyond our parameters. Had we reduced him to full automaton status, this would not have been possible.”

  LET IT BE TOLD HOW THE CURRENT ATTACKS WILL BE HALTED. IF HE IS HERE, CAPTIVE, BY WHAT MEANS WILL HE LEAD HIS PEOPLE INTO AMBUSCADE, SLAVERY, SLAUGHTER, CONSUMPTION?

  “That he was taken is unknown, for all his inner circle of servants, like him, serve us unknowingly. Even now, thinking himself to have free will, the food animal has already placed himself into mental rapport with us. Examine him. Discover his plans and hopes before editing his mind to whatever you wish. He will be reintroduced into his environment as undetectably as he was taken.”

  Waves of pain came. Whether he assisted or resisted made no difference. Memories were drawn out of his mind, leaving behind lines of damaged nerve tissue scarring his brain with each extraction. Perhaps he fell to the heap of bones beneath him, perhaps he stood. Perhaps he screamed, or perhaps not. In the vacuum, in the darkness, numb, he was unaware of his body.

  The first memory was the moment when Aeneas had donned the robe of Lord Mercury. On his fingers were three signet rings. Sig exclaimed: Sir, this is unheard-of! No Lord of Creation can use the signet ring of another! But the ring of Lord Tellus has not only taken control of Lord Mercury’s ring, but it has submitted all its passwords, ciphers, and codes, to my control…

  The pearls lining the coat were cross indexed in the ring memory. Lord Mercury had pearls hidden like secret rooms halfway or fully in nullspace, connected to many locations. Aeneas used one pearl to bring sights and sounds from a target to himself, used a second to step to a secret room hidden halfway in nullspace, and a third to materialize where Lord Mars stood atop a vast heap of vampire corpses. The Ifrits of Jupiter were standing like living lightning bolts on the various steps of what seemed a ziggurat of metal the size of a mountain. Vast gravitic and energetic linkages connected this control area to the armature rings, larger than worlds, circling the shrinking remnant of LBV 1806-20.

  Aeneas said, “I go now to imprint all your children with the warpcore technology secrets, as well as all the others taken from the Infinithedron. I offer you this choice now to foreswear your position as a Lord of Creation, and learn all the secrets of all your brethren at once.”

  “All? Would you have mankind destroy itself? We have just escaped the vampires, sire!”

  “Sire no longer. Only free citizens of the Republic will learn the godlike powers. Decide!”

  Then he was where the Ladies Ceres and Vesta were, then he visited Lord Jupiter, Lord Neptune. He told them they were lord and ladies no longer, if they wanted the secrets of the Infinithedron.

  Lord Neptune said, “If you give these secrets to all men, wise and foolish, honest and crooked alike, each man will build a warpcore and go where he likes. Mankind will be a fugitive race hereafter, flying from galaxy to galaxy as we are endlessly pursued. The immortal undead need never give up pursuit, and, even if they follow at sublight speeds, what are countless eons to them?”

  Jupiter said, “Neptune is right, but for the wrong reasons. He is right tha
t men will fly in each direction of the universe. Civilization will end as we scatter! How shall we gather in numbers enough to return and expunge the vermin who killed my son? We must gather against them, and destroy each last one.”

  Aeneas appeared before his mother where she lounged on the pillows of her throne. She smiled sadly, “You should give the secrets to everyone but me and my brothers and sister. What about the murder of your father? Not to mention my own indiscretions and adulteries. I was not always loyal to your father, you know. The family, including me—we have done nothing to deserve forgiveness.”

  He appeared before Brother Beast, who was kneeling in the barren cells of a monastery before a bare cot, beneath a crucifix. His question was, “How shall mankind prevent the rise of vampires among us? The technology of creating the shadow condition inside dead cells is known. The lure of having servants always ready to think and do your will, but never able to rebel, is too great. And none of us are perfect. Lord Mercury was no more wicked than the rest of us: he merely acted first.”

  Lady Pallas, who was in her library, had only one question. “How did you find the Infinithedron? It was last seen on the planet Pluto when Pluto was destroyed.”

  The next memory ripped from the skull of Aeneas was from many, many decades later.

  It was Easter, and he went to a gathering of his family on Fifty-Third Earth, one of the many replicas of Earth made by collectors or artisans among the terraformers. Easter Sunday had been selected as the date to launch the Greater Magellanic Cloud into warpspace.

  Fifty-Third Earth was near the gravitational center of twelve stars orbiting in Klemperer Rosettes, each with its set of Tipler rings surrounding it. Near, but not at. The center of the star system had running through it a band of material composed of solid gravitons that formed one superstring strand of the Tipler threadball entirely surrounding the gravitational core of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.

  Other groups of twelve stars, each armed with their lesser Tipler ring systems, were evenly spaced along this and the many other strands, and would impart velocity to the strands, and coordinate the interstellar-sized central armature with the six billion armatures surrounding all the large stars in the Magellanic cloud.

  Mass was over, and there were no dances or celebrations scheduled until later. Aeneas was standing with Penthesilia, no longer called Lady Luna, with wine glasses in hand, in one of the many gardens that occupied the reproduction of the great palace of Ultrapolis atop a replica of Mount Everest. It was now a museum.

  Young men and women were in the trees and flowered banks around them, looking up at the skies. Youths and maidens preparing to be given all the secrets of creation made a tradition of visiting here first, using their newly-minted signet rings to read minds and memories and to have their minds read by examiners.

  The examiners were tasked with weeding out anyone who might be tempted to use the vampire technology to drain the lives of others into himself, or to create perfect servants from the dead. But the temptation was small for anyone who spoke with the Forerunners whose memories had been resurrected out of the archives of the Infinithedron.

  At this celebration, each young man or woman was dressed in the heraldic colors of the planet he had filled with life. That was the entry criterion to be a candidate for the secrets of creation: one must be a creator.

  One of the Forerunners stood with the couple. The Forerunner was a solemn quadruped with four arms, a large, domelike head and a sensitive face dominated with two pairs of eyes deep and dark as wells. He wore a hooded robe and leaned upon a white wand. “There will be little enough to see, even with tachyonic vision. The light will not circumnavigate a warpchannel with so large a diameter as this for twenty-eight thousand years, far less than the time needed to reach Andromeda. But even we, at our most ambitious, never dreamed of attempting something like this. We wished only to preserve life beyond the fall of our own galactic civilization. Wiping out all the vampires was not contemplated. Our goals were humbler.”

  Aeneas smiled. “If you call that humble! The Infinithedron was a message in a bottle, meant to find a planet, evolve its life to be like you, and when a civilization sufficiently advanced grew up, to show itself and have them revive those few of you who entered timeless nullspace to escape the rebellion of the vampires. The question is why did you do it?”

  The Forerunner shrugged with his doubled shoulders. “Because that is the way our galactic civilization was started: from the last, lingering remnant of prior Forerunners to us, who escaped when their vampires grew to outnumber them.”

  Penthesilia said, “I do not understand how the perfect servants can rebel. They lack free will.”

  The Forerunner said, “It was the pride of intellect. First one leader among us, then another, wanted the advantage of having more intelligence, more vitality, and more life than one mortal body could hold, and so became vampires freely, retaining their free will, but having countless, soulless slaves beneath them to gather more and ever more life energy to themselves, from which the newborn archvampire fed. And even then, with archvampires living and working among us, the civilization did not fall all at once, nor was it corrupted instantly, but each man who was corrupted joined with the vampires, and each living man who resisted temptation, sooner or later, suffered mortal accident or embraced suicide. So their numbers always grow.” The Forerunner turned and wagged its massive head at Aeneas, “I do not see how your plan can hope to break this cycle of wealth and corruption…”

  “It is based on a simple principle,” Aeneas said, “As long as any civilization is not controlled from a single center, as long as it is the voluntary interaction of many centers, there will always be a frontier, where the danger may be great, but the corruption that follows from stagnation is correspondingly weak. From now on, each time the Milky Way grows corrupt with vampires, the outer galaxies of the Local Group will turn their young eyes inward, and destroy the centers of infection. And by the time the Local Group is filled up densely enough to grow corrupt, the colonies in the Virgo Supercluster will retain enough frontier spirit to turn the crusade against them…”

  The next memory was from many centuries later. Andromeda had waited, knowing that the vampires in a dead Milky Way galaxy would be eating each other, slowly growing less and ever less in numbers as the years passed. There was no hurry.

  By the time the Greater Cloud of Magellan reached Andromeda, there were billions upon billions of Creators: every man who wished was a Citizen of the Republic of Creation. Each one laid claim to a world, filled it with life, developed it.

  With so many living suns, there was never any real chance that the necroservant pyramid scheme could start with them, layers of archvampires vampirizing lower layers of vampires. And since the memory and example of the men who had escaped the vampire galaxy of Milky Way was preserved among their unaging mothers and fathers, and was the topic of schooling, of song and sermon, the lessons of the past were not lost in passing time.

  And with an ever growing population, it was only a matter of time before the local and general assemblies of the worlds, stars, star clusters, and arms voted before the Great Galactic Assembly to surround Andromeda with warp fields, and sail the whole thing back to Milky Way.

  Aeneas concluded, “And since Andromeda has ten times the mass of Milky Way, even if you converted every single molecule in the galaxy from one end to the other into your necrotechnology, our Living Worlds simply outnumber it.”

  The Uttermost Overlord had no capacity for laughter, but contempt at the weakness of folly of his prey could stir him, and mockery. The voiceless voice imposed each thought into his brain with its own iron tang of agony: NONSENSE! EVEN IF EVERY STAR IN THE MILKY WAY BECOMES A LIVING STAR, THE EFFECT SPREADS ONLY AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT, AND IS WEAKENED INTO IMPOTENCE ERE REACHING TO INTERSTELLAR SPACE. DARKNESS IS GREATER THAN LIGHT.

  Another memory came. Perhaps it was torn from his brain unwillingly, or perhaps not. It was when Aeneas left his small farm o
n the asteroid he called his own, and returned to the floor of the War Council, to plead his case before the chancellors and senators there, and the representatives of the Parliament.

  “Gentlemen, recall how ineffective the ignition of Sol proved: it was four years before the shockwave passed over Alpha Centauri, and the cost was the loss of our ancestral star system. But recall also that we saw that unfolding a black hole is a faster than light effect: the World Armada emerged from the singularity at the core of the first Dyson we ever captured thanks to that effect.

  “Hence it will be simplicity itself to place me in the throne chamber of the Uttermost Overlord, in the very jaws of his greatest power. Warlord Rhazakhang was turned into a necropuppet even before the famous battle of Luminous Blue Variable 1806-20 was concluded, for he tried to get back in mental contact with Lord Mercury via his ring, but I had found the Infinithedron by then, just where the instructions recorded in the ring of Lord Tellus said it would be.

  “And Lady Venus was waiting for Rhazakhang to step into the mesmeric trap, and the first of the revived Forerunners knew exactly what to tell her to do.

  “Once in the personal presence of this Overlord, he will make a mental link that will allow me to discover the orbital elements of all the suns of the Forerunners currently frozen in time, sunk beneath the surface of the supermassive black hole.

  “When the supermassive black hole unfolds—for the armature we have around the core of Andromeda, which has a much bigger black hole at its center, is much more massive than anything the vampires could possibly have—it will fill all the local timespace within the lightcone of the Milky Way with the living energy, instantaneously. We can flatten space outside Milky Way in all directions, just to make sure none escape.”