Superluminary

by perpetrator

  He removed his foot, and gestured toward couch with his swordpoint. “You!” he said to Aeneas. “Lie down. Take a load off . You look like crud.”

  Lord Mars turned to the rest of them. “I am not his bodyguard. You can find some way around me, even if I took him to Mons Olympos.” That was where Lord Mars had his main camp. “But ask yourself. Who here can disarm a black hole? Who can reach into a black hole and come out again?”

  Lady Luna said, “Only someone who can bypass the speed of light.”

  He said. “Nope. Close. Guess again.”

  Lady Luna pouted. “My answer was good! So who can disarm a black hole?”

  Lord Mars put his sword back in his sheath. “That kid on the couch. No one else. Kill him, we die.”

  Silence gripped the room. Aeneas sat up, and put his feet on the floor, waiting to see what his fate would be.

  Lord Uranus turned his mask toward Aeneas, “So Lord Tellus himself is your patron! He is willing to slay everyone everywhere merely to keep you alive. Feel smug now, if you like. But now you understand how unbalanced he is.”

  Lord Mercury had drained his winecup and was using it to toss and catch a small golden ball in the air. With his eyes on the golden ball, he said casually, “I suppose we should make sure Lord Mars is telling the truth?”

  Lady Ceres rolled her eyes and spoke. “Mars has no interest in family squabbles. He could have made himself Emperor by sheer brute force, had he wished it. Had he wanted to save Venus’ youngest child, he could have simply demanded it.”

  Lord Mercury did not look at her. “But one of us could assassinate Aeneas without Mars being the wiser. Do try to keep up! What say you, Lord Uranus? What does your peculiar superscience tell you?”

  Lord Uranus spoke bitter words, but in a toneless, matter-of-fact way, “It tells me Father cheated me. You all know that. Well — I suppose our niece Penthesilia does not know, does she? And I suppose I have to get used to calling her Lady Luna. She does not know about me.”

  Lady Luna said, “I don’t understand. Lady Venus told me your field of study was astrology.”

  The mask raised one eyebrow. “One of her little jokes. But stars issue psychic waves which I can read. Psychometry of the stars. I can read their dispositions, but not their minds. They have none.”

  Lady Luna said, “How can a ball of nuclear plasma have a disposition?”

  Uranus answered, “How can numbers be rational, or musical chords be passionate? Neuropsionic particles radiate from each sun in particular waveforms that carry meaning: the light of our sun is holy.”

  Lady Luna said skeptically, “Your science can measure holiness?”

  “I am using a human word to express a concept of nonhuman Forerunner science. Certain symbol-forms embedded in the information layer of the cosmos are equal in data-radius to the entire sidereal universe. Those in rational proportion with the universe are holy; unharmonious are unholy. Forcing the sun to kill all of her children would register as unholy, since it is against her nature.”

  Lady Luna was bewildered. “But what does it all mean?”

  Lord Uranus said, “It means the universe is stranger than we know. Also, it means my superscience has no useful technical applications. Dad gave it to me because he hated me.”

  Lord Mars said, “Your science is useful to me, now. Can you confirm my report?”

  Lord Uranus held up his signet ring. Aeneas sensed activity on several bands radiating from small instruments in the buttons of Lord Uranus’ uniform. This activity was mated to matching signals issuing from a certain machine with a metallic radar-shadow sitting half a mile away in the wing of the palace complex occupied by Lord Uranus and his staff.

  After a time, he lowered his ring. Lord Uranus said, “No alien enemy left a nova bomb in the Sun.”

  Only Lady Luna breathed a sigh of relief. The others knew Uranus too well.

  Venus said sweetly, “Yes, brother? We’re waiting...”

  Lord Uranus said, “It is not alien handiwork. Sol recognizes it as our father’s. He means to obliterate everything in the solar system. An observer standing on a planet one hundred light years away a century from now will see their night sky turn bright as day. The purity of the sun is offended by the abomination of desolation inside her.” The mask of Lord Uranus was expressionless, but he shook his head in wry amusement. “Father never ceases to surprise me!”

  Ceres said, “This time, we must find Father and kill him!”

  Lord Mars said, “And put a bell on the cat while we are at it. What about the lad? I want you all to agree to keep him alive, so he can save us.”

  Neptune said, “I don’t agree. He will make us slaves.”

  Mars gave him a withering look. “Life is short and full of pain but death is full of nothing, and lasts a hell of a lot longer. Pick one.”

  Lady Venus suddenly brightened up and laughed. “I can save him, and you, and all of us!”

  Lord Mars said, “Now you are keeping us in suspense, sister. Out with it.”

  She smiled sweetly and horror came out of her mouth. “I can lobotomize his free will, leaving the rest of his intellect and memory intact. The warptech will be known to him, not to us. We order him to defuse the nova bomb.”

  Lady Luna was looking at her with revulsion. Lord Neptune looked on with newfound respect.

  “It saves his life, doesn’t it?” Venus spread her hands, and shrugged, “And I can reinstall a new personality later, one less willful. Will you all agree to spare his life on these terms?”

  Lord Jupiter said, “All in favor, say aye...?”

  There were no objections. Not even Lady Luna disagreed.

  Aeneas, lying supine with his eyes shut, heard all this. He was too weary even to feel disgust or despair. He was prepared to die fighting. Despite the lethal damage it would do to his wounded organs, Aeneas charged his internal weapons.

  Or tried to. He could not. He tried to rise, to move, and could not. He could not open his eyes.

  His echolocation detected the silhouette of a tall man standing silently by the windows. Magnetic resonance showed he wore a helm.

  His was the heat signature and energy aura of Lord Pluto. Between eluding the lunar beam weapon, the flight aboard the aerospace plane, the talk in the garden and trial in the library, hours had passed. It was enough time for a space contortion wave to have arrived here from Pluto. He had been standing in the room, undetectable, unseen, perhaps for a long time.

  “You are careless, brothers. I have suspended the voluntary motions of the lad, who was preparing to flood the room with lethal radiation,” Lord Pluto said in his cool, dispassionate voice.

  Lord Jupiter said, “I would have been safe!” And he laughed.

  Lord Pluto said, “He used a spacewarp to travel here from my sanctum on Pluto, in excess of lightspeed. Any report that he lacks memory of the warptech implant is false.”

  Lady Venus said, “Then he is more dangerous than I thought, for apparently he found a way to use the warp science to distort my readings.”

  “Did he?” said Lord Pluto coldly. “Did he indeed?”

  “Come!” she said sweetly, “One of you move the couch under the isolation cage, so I can establish the thought-surgery field. We are a suspicious lot: would any of you care to synchronize your ring with mine, and watch what I am doing? I would hate anyone to think me so sentimental that I would put the good of a disobedient child above the good of the family. Who wants to watch?”

  Brother Beast said, “Such arts are an abomination. I will not watch.”

  Lord Mercury said, “If sister is going to warm up her thought-control gear, I want to be well outside of its range. Who knows who will end up as a puppet of hers, if you stay and watch? You must excuse me.”

  Mars said nothing, but he left the library with Mercury and Brother Beast.

  Aeneas felt the mind-destroying cap settle over his scalp.

  12. Defusing the Supernova

  From the remote safety o
f his secondary brain, Aeneas watched as his mother patiently carried out the inhuman thought-surgery on his primary brain, reducing its free will to nothing, killing it while keeping it alive.

  “You may restore his voluntary nerve use, Lord Pluto,” said Venus. “He now has no ability to do anything voluntary.”

  Aeneas opened his eyes. Lady Venus gave her son a wink, and put his signet ring back on his finger. Control of the molecular engines systems allowing him to reorganize his body at will was restored to him.

  Aeneas stood when told to do so. He did not need to playact or pretend to be an automaton. All he had to do was not interfere when the primary brain, which was an automaton, acted.

  Lord Neptune said, “What is this? You returned his signet?”

  Venus said, “To defuse the nova bomb ticking in the core of the sun requires the authority of the Lords of Creation. Besides, I never taught him how to read.”

  Lady Luna said, “If the family realizes you Elders lobotomized one of us, all your children will rise up to overthrow you.”

  Lord Jupiter said sardonically, “It is a family tradition, isn’t it?”

  Lady Luna did not laugh.

  Jupiter scowled. “That does not include you, does it, daughter?”

  She said, “I cannot forgive what you have done to Aeneas! You said he would be unharmed!”

  He laughed heartily. “Well, there he stands! Fit as a fiddle!”

  She turned her back on her father and said to Lady Venus, “Can it be reversed? Once you are done with him?”

  Lord Neptune, who was nonchalantly inspecting the fingernails of his blue, webbed hands, answered instead. “Once we are done with him, Penthesilia, we are back to square one. If we let him live, he enslaves us, whether he wants it so or not.”

  Lady Venus said stiffly, “If ...?! You agreed not to harm him. That was our deal.”

  The masked lord, Uranus, interrupted, “How long will it take him to defuse the dark mass? Can Aeneas answer questions?”

  Lady Venus said, “I have established the nerve paths so that he can answer direct questions on any topic, even explain what he can do with his warptech, except he will not teach anyone else specifics. None of us learn his arts! That is as we agreed. He will obey direct commands from a family elder in a flexible, even in an imaginative, fashion. If you ask him to make suggestions, he will do so, but not if not asked.”

  Aeneas heard his voice answer: “I don’t know how long, or even if defusing the sun can be done at all. I have not inspected the singularity bomb, nor been given any tools. To reach into a singularity, I must have a warpcore twenty thousand cubic centimeters in pre-collapse volume. ”

  Lord Pluto said, “I can estimate. Months. A year. Longer. As for resources, each of us must place all the wealth of the worlds we rule at his disposal.”

  Lady Ceres said, “You’re joking!”

  Pluto turned the cyclops-lens of his faceless helmet toward her, “I never joke. Aeneas just said the human race has to produce a sphere of neutronium roughly the size of Halley’s Comet. Given the mass per cubic centimeter of neutronium, this is eight million trillion grams. It must be collapsed into a singularity in a controlled fashion, and then rotated at lightspeed to produce the Tipler frame-dragging effect. So the expense is the same as accelerating Halley’s Comet to ninety-nine percent of lightspeed. The method is something only Aeneas now knows. When Japan built a modern surface navy able to defeat the Czar, or the Americans built the atom bomb, or the Soviets enacted a space program, it required a major commitment of their available resources. Our task is proportionally greater. Whether the Solar System civilization has sufficient resources or not remains to be seen.”

  Lord Saturn said, “It is our good fortune that ours is an autocracy ruled by one family, or otherwise coordinating such an effort would be impossible.”

  Lady Venus said, “Aeneas is to be released to me afterward! That was our deal!”

  Jupiter smiled a genial smile, and said, “Not to worry! I’ll keep an eye on Lord Neptune, and make sure he tries nothing to harm the boy.”

  Lord Neptune said, “And who will keep an eye on you, brother? I do not wish you to winkle the secret of the Final Science out of him! There should be two watchmen, so that they can watch each other as well as you. I nominate Lords Saturn and Uranus.” He turned to the white-bearded Saturn and masked Uranus. “What say you?”

  Saturn and Uranus were members of Neptune’s faction. With Mercury and Brother Beast missing from the discussion, Jupiter was outnumbered. The family vote went against him. Saturn and Uranus were assigned, along with Jupiter, to watch Aeneas.

  The Empire of Man often employed the lifeless or the mindless for manual labor or routine intellectual tasks. Some were abioforms, that is, vat-grown pseudo-organisms existing in the shadow condition of unlife that had never been alive. Others were necroforms, that is, felons guilty of capital crimes who, after execution, were trapped in unlife and required to make restitution. A third group, like Aeneas, were anthroforms, that is, living men whose minds had been neuroelectronically lobotomized to non-volition.

  The treatment of such human-shaped tools was routine. Aeneas had a medical closet where he was stored, a nutritious diet, and an exercise regimen. Brother Beast, who understood more biotechnology than even Aeneas, was called in to help with the diet and conditioning of the various organs in Aeneas’s nine foot tall body no one else understood.

  He often smiled strangely into the dead face of Aeneas, and took special care to see to his bodily comfort. But if he suspected anything, he said nothing.

  Weeks turned into months. Aeneas lived as an undead, without leisure, entertainment, conversation, or distraction. Ironically, it was less strict than what Brother Beast might endure in a monastic cell, or Lord Mars in boot camp. And the intellectual problem of organizing the whole solar system in a massive campaign was the first real work Aeneas had ever done in his life. He was fascinated.

  The work was as slow as Lord Pluto had warned. Aeneas needed tools and materials unknown to human technology, which could only be built out of unknown materials with other unknown tools.

  It was as if Piltdown Man knew how to build a space rocket, but he had to explain how to make iron axes and shovels to his tribesmen, so they could start felling trees and digging ore needed to erect a Bessemer furnace needed to smelt alloys needed for drill heads needed for oil rigs needed for rocket fuel. But iron axes needed bronze tools to make them, which needed copper tools.

  The earlier parts of the project took longest. Building a supercollider that entirely circumnavigated the sun just inside the orbit of Mercury, for example, required the countless mountains and icebergs of the Oort cloud be hauled inward, and atomically reorganized.

  It was the largest scale structure the human race had ever engineered.

  Not new elements were to be constructed in output mouths of this monster, but new subatomic particles. Spherical particle shells were recombined into cylinders, cones, or cubes useful for building new fundamentals. These fundamentals were not elements: a cone containing a proton at the apex and a skirt charged with one electron is not a hydrogen atom, nor a cylinder with one antigraviton for an axis with one graviton forming the surface.

  The fundamentals had to be combined into Dark Energy Materials, neutrino chains and antineutronium lattices and more exotic formations, with electrical and gravitational properties impossible to normal matter.

  Due to the neuropsionic particles given off by Sol, necroforms could not be used anywhere in the inner system. Automatons lacked imagination. Thus, living human beings had to do the work, so a vast work force had to conscripted and motivated.

  In this post-scarcity economy, work was never done out of necessity. The three hundred separate races had been designed each to serve one family member alone. Now all must work with discipline and unity toward a larger goal.

  Over these months, Aeneas attended many a family meeting, propped in a corner in case a technical quest
ion arose. He heard his two hundred cousins discuss what threat or lure could motivate so many to do something so much against their nature.

  It was Lady Luna who offered the answer. Only the truth would serve: all must be told that the solar system was about to be obliterated. All would work together or all would die together.

  Aeneas was pleased with her, but only at first. She packaged the emotional import of her message as dreams, and gave out dream-broadcast units for each cousin to force into the subconscious minds of his servant population. It was irresistible propaganda.

  The truth worked, or the mesmeric dreams did. Aeneas, from his hiding hole inside himself, watched with grim satisfaction as a spirit of camaraderie inspired the solar system. Human beings were still pets, and that galled him. But like sheepdogs rather than lapdogs; now Man had work. The hopelessness was gone.

  The Mercury-crossing asteroid 5786 Talos, a flying mountain half a mile wide, was hollowed out, set with gravity amplifiers, and filled with spaceman’s fog. This green fog was one of the more useful inventions of pantropy: a cloud of microscopic plantlife programmed to scrub and scent the atmosphere, and maintain the oxygen balance.

  The warpcore rested in the middle of the workspace and laboratory of Talos. The warpcore occupied an armature of intersecting Tipler rings which, from an outside frame of reference, measured fifty yards wide.

  Lords Saturn, Jupiter, and Neptune were there. The army of technicians had gone, teleported by contortion pearls back to their worlds and moons. The three were alone with dead-faced, dull-eyed Aeneas on a gravity-opaque catwalk overlooking the warpcore.

  Uranus said, “We are agreed? Only the combination of our three powers could have set up this deathtrap. I have altered the orientation of the matter inside Aeneas’ body toward the neuropsionic solar output; the matter will react when the Sol psychic rays return to normal, releasing Jupiter’s trigger, which has set the electrons to ionize. That ionization will power Saturn’s chronic particles to release and trigger proton decay. Every atom in his body is therefore a bomb. Any one of the three of us could disarm it, so we must be agreed.”