by perpetrator
He now stood on an unrailed circular balcony overlooking a wide well. It was a five hundred foot drop. Whatever was at the bottom, Aeneas could not see at this angle. But a reddish light was splashed along the undersides of the balconies.
In a circle with him were cryocoffins with transparent lids. Had the ship been in under spin, the sleepers would have been prone. But the ship stood on her nose. The men inside the coffins were hanging head-downward.
All were unmodified. Some had greyhaired, or wrinkled, or scarred, or blemished like characters from a history lesson. Oddly, the coffins were chained shut.
There were fifteen of the nudes upside-down in coffins on this balcony. There were ten balconies below, nine above.
Three hundred crewmen.
“Stars in heaven!” said Aeneas in a hoarse whisper. “These are the three hundred. Were they asleep this whole time?”
Not asleep, sir.
“Grandfather said none of them survived!”
Nor did they, sir.
All the eyes of the upside-down crewmen flicked opened. The eyes were dead, their faces, expressionless. A sensation of weakness, faintness, dying, washed over Aeneas. He staggered, but did not fall. He clamped shut the scales of his subcutaneaous armor, blocking the death-energies. An unarmored man would have been killed instantly.
Their pallor was not due to cryonic suspension. Their cells had been adjusted into the negative bands of the life-energy spectrum. They were not alive, but absorbed life.
These had been turned to zombies, just as Thoon had done to his guards, but at the same time refashioned into vampires, as Thoon had been. They were necromatic automatons, soulless soul-eaters, creatures of negative-life.
Just then, a hand fell on his shoulder, and spun him around.
“Who dares trespass on my keep?”
It was the cold voice of Lord Pluto. But no one was there.
Aloud, he said, “Sir, through no fault of my own, am I here...”
A sharp blow stung his face.
“It is vain to plea for life. Your name?”
Aeneas charged his energy-control organs. Lightning crackled from fingertips and between palms. He sought a target.
“I know you now. The biotech monster, son of Lady Venus. The anarchist. Will you match yourself against me? I am the eldest.”
Pain ignited his brain. All his muscles locked.
Paralyzed, Aeneas toppled over the edge, and into five hundred feet of air.
4. The Technology of Tyranny
Aeneas fell like a tree falls, unable to bend his knees or blink his eyes, toppling headfirst over the brink. It was five hundred feet to the bottom of the shaft under the massive pull of earth-normal gravity. Balcony after balcony flew past him.
Each balcony had its circle of glass coffins surrounding the empty shaft, and each coffin had its ice-pale and nude crewman, upside-down, undead eyes wide open, watching him fall.
He felt the cold pressure of their gaze on his flesh. His skin mottled leprously as the skincells died.
Aeneas could not struggle. All his voluntary muscles were paralyzed. The brain region he used to communicate with his ring was likewise numb. He could not speak with mouth or mind-circuit.
A crawling, reddish glow, the color of coals smoldering in hell, was at the bottom of the shaft. Here was what looked like a gyroscope of mirrored curve. It was an armature of three rings, each at right angles to the other, surrounding a singularity held in concentric force-spheres.
The rings were bright as looking glasses, and smooth as if made of quicksilver.
In the center, invisible in its own gravity, was a hole in space: the light was reddened by the Doppler effect, and cast a sullen, crimson glow up in the shaft, flicking on the undead bodies.
This was a warp core! Aeneas recognized what he was seeing. It was the Ninth Science. The armature rings were Tipler cylinders bent into circles.
The physicist Frank Tipler, back in the pre-Imperial days, had hypothesized that an infinitely long cylinder made of an unobtainable material denser than neutronium, if rotated at relativistic velocities, would create a closed timelike curve, violating local causality, allowing motions at faster than the speed of light.
He looked at it with awe. This superluminary engine was not hypothetical but real!
Even falling and tumbling, his senses could form a clear, crisp picture in his mind. These armature rings were not infinitely long, but a circle having no endpoints could produce the Tipler effect. The frame-dragging effects acting at right angles to each other could create a core of warped space, whose center could project a variety of metrics, geometries, spacefolds and membrane intersections on the fabric of space around it.
Aeneas saw one other thing as well: lines of gold, thick as the pipes on a calliope, running down the shaft and converging on the warpcore.
The singularity was not made of normal matter. Anything which had mass, if its gravity well were steep enough, would form a singularity. This was a warpcore formed by death-energy produced from all the unliving necroforms who had once been the crew.
The great engine was so unimaginable, so impossible, that it almost distracted him from the fact that it was about to kill him.
His armor would not save him from impact, any more than an egg in a metal flask could be flung down stairwell unbroken. Striking one of the armature rings at this velocity would surely kill him, or so he prayed.
If he missed the silver rings of Tipler substance, he would strike, or, rather approach, the hollow singularity at their center. Time would distort, and he would be falling forever headfirst into a bottomless knot of tortured spacetime. Meanwhile the accretion disk of pure death-energy would drain his nerve cells of self-awareness and willpower, his muscles of motion, his bones and cells of growth, his flesh of heat.
The tidal effects would tear him into a single bloody strand of spaghetti, but preserved by unlife, he would never die, and the sensations of pain would never stop.
A voice spoke: “Save him! He is needed!”
As swiftly and suddenly as that, his downward motion stopped.
A disinertia field gripped him, and a tractor beam intersected his center of mass, and moved him carefully to the side, so that he would not strike the armature. Above a bare metal area of deck, the disinertia field snapped off, and he fell face first to the floor. He could not raise his hands to break his fall nor even close his eyes to protect his eyeballs. It was very painful.
A while later, he heard the metallic footsteps of Lord Pluto approaching, and felt the vibration in the deck.
“Well, young son of Lady Venus, I keep you alive for now. You have, however, seen what can never been seen, and so you must never leave this place.”
Aeneas could see the drive chamber all about him, the armature of the warpcore, the balconies above, but not Lord Pluto. He could feel gauntlets hoist his nude body up on a shoulder, an awkward burden with arms and legs sticking out. He could feel the cold metal surface of the helmet his uncle wore, the fabric of the cloak over his shoulders, the iron-clad fingers. He could smell him, hear his breathing.
Aeneas had a visual cortex considerably more complex and convoluted than an unmodified man. Segments of extra brain matter had been grafted in to allow him to interpret visual information from gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, radio waves reaching from high to low, and also from Geiger counter organs, paramagnetic and electroreception cells.
But his magnificent, complex sensory systems detected nothing. His every sense told him was held in midair by no one.
The disinertia field acted, and the tractor beam flicked down from an emitter held on an arm projecting from the uppermost balcony. Aeneas and the unseen Lord Pluto, lacking inertia, were brought immediately level with the top of the twentieth balcony without any jerk or jar.
The nozzle swiveled and the beam reversed polarity, becoming a presser beam. They were thrust through a open hatch in center of the overhead. The hatch was directly ab
ove the tractor-presser emitter. Inertia returned. The hatch clanged shut, and Aeneas was dumped unceremoniously onto the hard surface, face upward.
Lord Pluto faded into visibility. He was a tall figure, draped in a long cloak. His face was hidden behind an opaque, unornamented helmet. His gauntlets and boots were metal. There was a square iron chair without cushion or footstool. Lord Pluto stiffly sat. He raised his fist. The signet ring on his finger twinkled. A harsh and colorless white light came from the bulkheads.
The deck had no carpet. To the left of the iron chair was a board with a loaf of bread and a carafe of wine. To the right on a stand was a square object Aeneas did not at first remember was a book. There were no other furnishings. The cabin walls were bare.
Aeneas scanned the room with different combinations of his senses. There were no mechanisms in the room, no energy flows, nothing hidden behind the walls. He wondered what was preventing his nerves from operating.
He was surprised when his signet ring answered his thought. I cannot identify the source or nature of the paralytic energy suppressing your nerve actions. Involuntary nerves are unaffected. The bioadmantium fibers used to command your non-carbon-based bones and scales are likewise unaffected. Reply through them.
Perhaps Lord Pluto could only paralyze biological structures he expected to find in the victim.
“How are you reaching me?”
I am routing through the local neuropsionic network into your cortex.
“What? You are using his house net?”
There are no security protocols here.
That, more than anything else, brought home to Aeneas how isolated a hermit Lord Pluto must be. But with no children, wife, servants, visitors or life on this world, why lock anything? The thought was disorienting.
“Can you send a command signal to the warpcore orientation controls?”
To the what?
“It is directly below us. That silvery armature holds a hollow singularity within a contortional polygravitic field. When spun up to speed, it can create or collapse a warp field able to alter the fundamental physical constants of nearby timespace, and allow normal matter to be transmitted without harm though a closed timelike curve! It is warp technology, the final science! Grandfather Tellus was rumored to have it, but it was never confirmed. Some of my uncles do not believe warptech exists at all!”
Only as he said this, did he realize that the thing was impossible.
“Am I going mad? How could I recognize a warpcore? I don’t know about it! How can I know this?”
It is no delusion. Activity in the correct lobes of your brain indicates you have the proper memories present.
“How? Memories from where?”
At that moment, the panels of the ceiling retracted into the walls. The colorless and harsh lights now turned their beams upward. A wide, dark dome was above. Hanging beneath the center of the dome and almost filling it was a coppery metallic orb.
The substance was one he did not recognize. It was neither matter nor energy. The orb was covered in hieroglyphs, as convoluted and folded as a cauliflower. It looked like a dull orange brain. Little discolorations speckled every side of it. Aeneas had the impression of immense age.
Lord Pluto said, “Behold, Son of Lady Venus. This is the Infinithedron.”
Even as Aeneas looked up at the metallic shape, he saw its wrinkled surface was in motion. Wherever his eyes turned, the folds opened, redoubled, and re-folded, adding wrinkles upon wrinkles. But when he looked back to another hemisphere of the complex surface, he saw it was, at first, the same as it had been when last he looked at it.
Lord Pluto said, “It is a fractal symmetrical many-sided solid whose faces cannot be counted, because the act of counting or calculating them increases the number. This is the Final Library of a race Father called the Forerunners. It cannot be examined completely, because the act of examination increases its complexity, unfolding more symbol surfaces. It was apparently merely a black cube of six letters when the expedition first found it. Let us allow it to rest!”
The ceiling panels slid back into place. The harsh lights cut off. It would have been pitch black in here to a normal human, but, of course, Aeneas could still see the heat Pluto gave off, sense the energies riding Pluto’s ringfinger, and hear the radar-ping from his armor, feel the magnetic contours of the armored figure in his iron chair.
Lord Pluto was sitting with his elbows on the chair arms, the fingers of his gauntlets templed before his bowed helmet.
“A fascinating question is how is it that you recognize a superluminary engine, the one secret Lord Tellus never revealed to any of his children, but you do not recognize the Infinithedron?
“A second question, of less interest, is this: you appear to have knowledge of the superluminary science. It is also called the Final Science. It is the Tyrant Technology. It is the one that Father would use to quell the various powers granted his children whenever they rebelled, but that he did not use during our last, successful, rebellion. Knowing you to be in possession of that science, what possible reason could exist for keeping you alive?”
Aeneas felt a moment of anger, followed by crushing shame. Of course nothing was locked, and Sig had been allowed to open a neuropsionic circuit through the household net! There was no easier way to eavesdrop on thoughts, than to let a fool put them on your net for you?
Sig protested. Sir, I examined the net most carefully beforehand. No observer is present! It is impossible to read thoughts without being read!
Evidently Lord Pluto had some means of masking his presence not merely to senses, but also to thoughts. Aeneas cursed himself. It was not his fault that he was on this world!
Lord Pluto said patiently, “Please concentrate. That your trespass was unintentional is irrelevant: execution is the penalty. Nonetheless, I am curious about the reason for keeping you alive. Think carefully and clearly. Your next thoughts will determine your fate.”
But his mind was blank. There was nothing to say.
He turned off his ring, ending the mindlink, and the conversation. He waited for death, wishing he could close his eyes.
5. The Many Murders of the Mad Emperor
Lord Pluto sat in the dark on his black chair, draped in his voluminous black cloak, motionless, saying nothing. His helmet faceplate was featureless save for a single camera lens, like a Cyclopes eye, in the crown.
At his feet lay Aeneas, paralyzed and naked, his eyes dry and aching because he could not blink. Aeneas could see the heat signature, ultraviolet image, magnetic contour, and neural activity of the other man. The slow, even rhythm of electroneural flows showed Lord Pluto’s dispassionate inward calm.
Aeneas retained control of the bioadmantium fibers and scales which made up his armor and bones. He flexed the subcutaneous armor scales in his ringfinger in Morse code, hoping Sig the ring would understand.
Sig did. Sir, if you wish me to open a mindlink, please be aware that Lord Pluto’s local net allows him to read your surface thoughts when I do.
Aeneas knew Lord Pluto was keeping him alive only to hear his answers to certain questions. As it happened, Aeneas had questions as well: he saw no reason not to slake his curiosity, even if he had but a short while to live.
Lord Pluto said thoughtfully, “Hope is a peculiar phenomenon of the nervous system. Living beings are often afflicted by it. Necroforms never are. Hope allows life to struggle past the point of futility. The undead cannot. One wonders which of the two is the more logical.”
Aeneas was willing to talk, but not to have his mind read.
Lord Pluto did not move, but his signet ring twinkled. Aeneas felt the paralysis leave his face, mouth, lips and tongue, and also the artificial neuropsionic speech centers in his brain allowing him direct and private thought communication with his own signet ring.
Aeneas said, “I propose a trade. A question of yours for each one you ask of mine.”
“Bargaining is not in my nature. Why should I agree?”
; Aeneas said, “Because I cannot be tortured and cannot suffer deprivation. Do you think pain or starvation can affect me? Hah! I just walked across the surface of Pluto at night, naked.”
“You are proud of being a biotechnological monstrosity,” Lord Pluto mused.
Aeneas said, “It is a branch of the stratonics no one else in the family wanted to exploit. With eight uncles, three aunts, one mother, two hundred fourteen cousins and siblings, all the good supersciences were taken.”
Lord Pluto said, “Your mother has not instructed you in the art of neuropsionic surgery? All my siblings fear her greatly. They suspect she has altered their minds upon occasion without their knowledge.”
“She has imprinted me with what is called autonoetics. I can perform limited neuropsionic alterations on myself. It allows me to change the function of nerves. Other than that, no. And I was given the various secrets of terraforming and pantropy, as are all Lords of Creation. Why is it that your world has never been engineered for earthlike life?”
“The reason you beheld,” said Lord Pluto. “No men are allowed to share a world with the Infinithedron, lest they learn the secrets of the Lords of Creation.”
“You could have birds and beast.”
“Lesser creatures nearing this tower would die, be drained, and their lives would be fed into the warpcore, which I dare not allow. The necroforms would increase in strength, and their dark powers reach eventually to all the continents of Pluto, and lick the nearer hemisphere of Charon free of life.
“But I could ask you the same question,” Lord Pluto continued. “You were given the Trojan asteroid 1172 Äneas when you came of age. It is yet a lifeless rock in space. All the other Trojan asteroids are green as emeralds and blue as sapphires, streaked and dappled with white cloud. Your cousins have erected tunnels of coherent air so as to let iridescent birds and luminous giant insects soar from one floating asteroid to the next.”
“The common man worships the family as if we are gods,” said Aeneas bitterly.
Lord Pluto said, “Not without reason.”