Superluminary

by perpetrator

  There was another, larger arena to the south, with an even larger twin to this monster there, and another after that, in every district of the world. The further south the monster was buried, the larger it was.

  A monster at the south pole, far larger than the others, whose crown extended beyond the atmosphere, would reach out with mouth-tentacles miles in length. Vaster than dark rainbows, the dripping tendrils reached across horizons. It raped the lesser monsters of their stolen life, torturing them, but leaving the rest of them mostly intact. Its eyes glared with ecstasy, and temblors shook the small world as its buried body writhed, but soon it subsided and wept, and closed its eyes to sleep again.

  Lady Luna said, “Where do they come from?”

  Aeneas looked at the orbital elements in the image. “They are from Gamma Crucis, eighty-eight lightyears away. The nearest red giant.”

  Lord Saturn said doubtfully, “Are these the Forerunners?”

  Aeneas said, “I doubt it. Where is the Infinithedron?”

  The image changed to roughly nine and a half million years ago. They saw a black cube hanging in space. It was the Infinithedron in its simplest form, with no observers. The cube fell through black space, approaching Pluto.

  The black cube made a soft landing on Pluto, in the snow at the foot of the mound which later would grow into the ice volcano of Wright Mons.

  Lord Saturn said, “All my life, I thought the Infinithedron was a library, a repository of knowledge, that Father found on Pluto. What is it, really?”

  Lord Pluto said, “More than that.”

  Lord Saturn focused on the cube and ran the images backward, as the alien object crossed the billions of miles from the inner system.

  It came from Earth.

  The cube had lifted off from Antarctica. At that time, in the Late Miocene, Antarctica’s northern peninsula was a tundra. Lord Saturn found an image of the black cube resting silently on a knoll covered with pine trees, while dire wolves and wooly mammoths prowled the snowy wastelands in the near distance.

  Luna said, “So the Forerunners are earthmen?”

  Aeneas said, “No. This is before Homo sapiens.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Brother, please go back to the Cretaceous extinction.”

  Fifty five million years earlier, the cube was in the same location, except that Antarctica was a tropic land.

  The Infinithedron was glowing with blinding, unearthly energies. Particle energy beams of immense force and range were shining into the sky like searchlights, disintegrating incoming meteors, or forcing them aside to miss the Earth. There were dozens, scores, hundreds.

  The desperation of the cube was obvious: its beams stammered, flickered, and failed.

  It was a very near thing. One and only one enemy meteor made it through this magnificent defense, and even it was disintegrated to half its original size.

  This meteor struck the Yucatan Peninsula at Chicxulub with a force equal to two million times more potent than a fifty megaton atomic bomb.

  The crater was twelve miles deep. Tens of thousand of cubic miles of sediment were displaced: superheated dust, ash and the steam from the boiling waters of the newly-formed Gulf of Mexico smothered half the globe. The largest megatsunami in Earth’s history reached to Texas and Florida. Shrapnel thrown into orbit by the impact reentered the atmosphere as incandescent fragments, igniting wildfires. Shockwaves triggered earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the other hemisphere. A black cloud covered the world for a decade.

  Lady Luna said, “Lord Saturn, with your machine, you never looked into the extinction of the dinosaurs before?”

  The old man said, “Many times. I encountered blank spots which I thought were some natural failure of the record layer. There were no images of the Infinithedron shooting multimegaton power beams into space.”

  Lord Pluto said, “We are allowed what was formerly hidden. Trace the Chicxulub impactor.”

  Lord Saturn backtracked the incoming meteors. Earlier, they had been a single hundred-mile wide worldlet headed toward Earth. It was severed by a beam issuing from Earth, forming the Baptistina family of asteroids. The family accelerated, only to be deflected or disintegrated by the Infinithedron. All but one.

  And the Baptistina worldlet, in turn, came from the Oort cloud. Before that, it was in interstellar space.

  As with Pluto, at a certain point in the past, suddenly the worldlet was covered with a worldwide city. The hellish architecture was the same, the crooked streets, the buildings wider at top than bottom, the giants trapped in feasting cages, and the buried monsters with their multiple tongues.

  Aeneas said, “As with Pluto. It comes from Gamma Crucis.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Brother, can you find the exact moment when the vampires were wiped out on both worlds?”

  Lord Saturn said, “The Plutonians of the Miocene were destroyed when Pluto passed inside the orbit of Neptune. The Baptistina worldlet of Paleocene was much closer before the vampires dissolved, about halfway between Neptune and Uranus.” He turned to Aeneas. “Speaking of which, you need him, so you will have to go into deep space and recover him, just as you did me. The neuropsionic solar radiation properties that destroyed these necroform creatures were different during the two different eras. It is his area of expertise: I know nothing of it.”

  Aeneas said, “I take it you believe my wild tale of space vampires now, Uncle.”

  Saturn said, “These images can be blocked by Lord Pluto’s science of invisibility. I doubt they can be faked.” He turned to Pluto. “Why did you block me before, brother?”

  Lord Pluto said, “Not I. Father knows all he taught us.”

  Lord Saturn said, “Father! He yet lives? Why is he letting us see these things now?”

  Pluto said, “For the same reason the Infinithedron sent the signal to Earth when it detected evidence of space travel: to prepare us for the next battle. Come! Let us see more. Where did the Infinithedron originate? Where are the Forerunners?”

  At four hundred fifty million years ago, during the Ordovician Period, the cube splashed down in the seas of the Southern Hemisphere.

  Lord Saturn said, “This is the Silurian Extinction. It is a period I have never studied. Roughly half of the marine families were wiped out...”

  The sea bed was a phantasmagoria of primitive life. Clams, mussels, scallops, large and small, ranged the sea. Echinoderms, starfish either five-armed or seven-armed, stone lilies, sea cucumbers stalked the watery wonderland. Bryozoans like soft, fantastic fronds of lace grew everywhere, and coral in crooked horns like witchy towers wearing gem-studded armor.

  Resting in the middle of an active volcano at the bottom of the polar sea, the black cube seemed to do nothing for a time. Then, at forty-four million years ago, particles left the cube. A cloud spread like ink through the seas. Roughly half the life in the sea was changed. Brachiopods and bryozoans were affected, along with trilobites, eel-like conodonts, and wormy graptolites.

  Not destroyed, the sea worms and plants rose to the surface, and were washed ashore. Like some cursed maiden in a Greek myth, the organisms transformed, putting down roots, or burrowing into the sand.

  Green plants spread across dry land, forming extensive forests. It was a primordial garden of ferns. No flowers, and no animal life was anywhere in them.

  They all recognized what they were seeing. “Pantropy,” said Luna. “It was not an extinction at all. Why?”

  Lord Pluto said, “Earlier, please.”

  The Infinithedron came from out of the sun. They watched the black cube rising up from against the immense gravitational pull of the star, untouched and unharmed by fires able to melt any object made of matter, serenely move through space, and going into orbit around the Earth.

  Saturn said, “Either the Forerunners live in the Sun, which I doubt, or the cube entered Sol earlier for some purpose. That event I cannot find. My instruments cannot read inside solar plasma.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Let us inspect the destructio
n of the plutonian vampires. Have all the sensors of all bands trained on the image. I want to see what becomes of the death-energy accumulated by an entire civilization of necroforms over millions of years.”

  Saturn returned the viewpoint to the Pluto of ten million years ago. Here was the hellish torture-city of the vampire race. The trapped giants had all been consumed eons before, and the green life. The atmosphere had been allowed to collapse. As Pluto approached the solar system, the vampires began to writhe and melt, even though Sol was hardly brighter than the morning star in the black and airless skies. Even those on the hemisphere away from the sun died.

  Like burning wax, each slumped into a reddish and vile liquid, screaming, gibbering, hands clawing. As each one melted, it tried to consume its melting neighbor, and drain it of its horde of stolen life energy. The buried colossuses of each district reached out across the rooftops with tongues dripping and melting as they reached, licking up the half-fluid half-corpses of their expiring worshippers. The larger colossuses ate the smaller. The monster of the south reached out its tongues many miles long, and consumed them in turn. Then it also melted. Its eyes ran over its flabby cheeks like tears; its domelike skull sagged and cracked and released a deluge.

  The waters poured out and out as the extensive body, larger than a continent, liquefied, and was forced to the surface by the collapse of subterranean vaults the once-solid bones of the monster had forced open.

  The waters of the monster covered the planet from pole to pole, and froze.

  The hundred-tongued monster of the south, even as it melted, used the death energy gathered from its slaves to activate the selfsame warpcore later found by Lord Tellus. This halted its approach toward Sol, and preserved it from further damage.

  Though clogged with ice, the muzzles of interplanetary range weapons were readied, trained on Earth, but lacked the energy to fire.

  The black cube fell from space, and erected a warp field. A wrestling match began. The cube pulled Pluto closer to the sun; the world-vampire pulled away. Eons passed. Eventually the world-vampire tired and slept. The cube stood guard over it.

  And the glacier stirred. The cube became an octagon. The glacier murmured. The octagon became an dodecahedron, then an icosahedron, then...

  Lady Luna said in a voice of cold horror, “It is still there, isn’t it?”

  Lord Pluto said heavily, “In old stories, the seal of Solomon was said to cap the brass bottle in which an evil spirit was trapped. The Forerunners had the foresight to write on their Solomonic seal all the sciences needed to arm anyone who opened it against what might be released.”

  21. The Black Ship

  Aeneas said, “I am curious about one other thing, Lord Saturn. Someone left a black pearl hidden in my bedchamber, and put its mate on Pluto, in the ruins of the Cerberus expedition habitat. I want to see who it was.”

  “These events were too recent,” said Lord Saturn.

  Lord Pluto said, “I have records. The visual logs from the expedition.”

  A mental command to his signet ring presented the images to them.

  It was odd looking at the twenty-four year old images of young Evripades Zenon Telthexorthopolis in his political officer’s uniform, hauling himself hand over hand down the axis of the Cerberus, a vessel of antique design, with no artificial gravity.

  They watched the landing, and the erection of the habitat, and the initial months of search. Everything was visible up until the moment when, standing in a circle around the excavation crater, three hundred officers and crew, in their environment armor, waited for the drill-and-grapple crane to bring the newly discovered Infinithedron up a sheer well to the icy surface of Pluto.

  Only Evripades Zenon Telthexorthopolis was back inside the ship, watching from a distance. Then the images went dark.

  Lord Pluto said, “Events touching the Cerberus expedition after this point have always been censored. Father wishes me not to discover all my brothers’ secrets, or his.”

  Aeneas said, “Do you have any record of who approached your world to plant the black pearl in the ruins of the habitat?”

  Lord Pluto said, “No. However, it must have been done by ship. Perhaps Saturn can find the image of any recent vessels in the area.”

  Saturn shook his gray head. “Not so. My machines see things millennia in the past, not hours nor years.”

  Pluto said, “However, is the rate at which visual information enters the data layer of the universe dependent on the shape of timespace? Basic relativity suggests it is. Perhaps if young Aeneas searched his implanted knowledge, and the two of you worked together, a solution might suggest itself.”

  Among the Lords of Creation, since all the machinery and instruments needed could be assembled instantly through molecular technologies, and any routine mental operations could be performed by automatic highspeed servant-minds (including batteries of extrapolations and experiments in every possible combination), it was a matter of hours of research and study, rather than months or years, to launch a prototype vehicle: it was awkwardly named the anchipalaeoscope.

  The first seventeen prototype machines returned no information from recent layer of time.

  But then the eighteenth prototype returned an echo. The first image found were of a squat, gray, unadorned ship Lord Pluto said was his private craft. These were dates, many decades ago, when he was arriving or departing using a vehicle rather than a space contortion pearl.

  Next, the view found on another shape, slender as a needle, black as jet. The vessel was directly behind Charon, so that the bulk of that barren moon blocked Pluto. The whole vessel was coated in a field that absorbed light, so that neither radio waves, nor infrared, nor any other wavelength rebounded from the hull. It was black with an absolute blackness, and issued no heat, no radiation.

  Aeneas looked at the readings. “This image is from twenty years ago.”

  Lord Saturn said, “An antiphotonic field. I cannot penetrate it.”

  Aeneas said, “I can. Tachyons trump antiphotons. Allow me.”

  Aeneas made tiny adjustments to the instruments he and Lord Saturn had made, and the hull of the vessel was visible. It was made of a non-ferrous black ceramic. A ring of space contortion pearls circled the stern of the vessel, and another the bowsprit. A space contortion field transmitted her constantly to the position in front of herself. The inside of the vessel was composed of nothing but engine. Certain parts of the engine, such as fuel cells, blinked into and out of space contortion according to when they were needed. There seemed to be neither crew nor controls. How the vessel was being steered was unclear.

  The vessel was moving in a disinertial field. Lord Saturn’s machine could not focus on the black vessel at any point in time before it came to rest behind Charon, because it was moving too swiftly.

  Lord Saturn said, “That could be Lord Jupiter’s technology. He is the master of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

  Lady Luna said, “Lord Mercury knows the ins and outs of space contortion better than anyone, and I’ve never seen a setup like that: the vessel is transmitting itself from its own stern to its own bow. That is impossible.”

  Aeneas said, “It seems to be riding an artificially produced gravity wave, and gravity is Lord Neptune’s area of expertise.”

  The vessel corkscrewed in toward the planet. Lord Pluto said emotionlessly, “The captain knows the location and period of my defensive satellites, and the range and location of my ground-based sensor sweeps, because he is always in the area of least overlap. The timing is impeccable. He has also selected an area to splashdown where I post no watchers, because there is nothing there to guard...”

  For the black vessel now darted toward the surface. She moved too quickly for Lord Saturn’s machine to track, but he examined the glacier below by tenth-second increments, until he detected a blur of motion, and then he carefully backed the image up by a second. The vessel did not slow as she descended, but instead sent out a fan of heat-rays from her bow. The glacier
underneath was turned to liquid. The vessel nosedived into the fluid, but, without inertia, was not hurt. Inertia returned for a moment when the field was shut off. This was the only moment when Lord Saturn’s machine could get a clear view. Then the vessel was under the surface of the lake of liquid oxygen, whose surface formed a frost and thickened rapidly into ice.

  Lord Saturn said, “Interference is here: I am not sure what is causing it.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Clever. The spyship knows I post no sentries beneath the glacier surface. He could have rested there as long as he liked.”

  Aeneas said, “Doing what? What is there to spy on?”

  Lord Pluto turned his monocular helmet lens toward Aeneas, “A drill to seek the layer of frozen undead material forming the main body of the world-vampire could be lowered. A neuropsionic broadcaster could make contact with it, and translate its thoughts into words. It is a first contact mission.”

  Aeneas said, “There may be earlier or later visits. Search for them, please.”

  Lord Saturn gave orders to his navy. Automatic machinery made a plethora of the new shortrange anchipalaeoscope satellites in a matter of minutes. A flotilla of small cylindrical probes, each looking like two cones connected through the apex, now formed a cloud at the Lagrange Two spot, on the far side of Charon. These sensors consisted of two counter-synchronized chronic particle cyclotrons, and were connected through contortion lines to the Anchipalaeoscope machines in the time-observatories at the poles of the planet Saturn. The far side of Charon was the only point in space where a clear near-past image of the black ship had been picked up.

  The probes sought until they found a second image from twenty-five years earlier, and a third from thirty years, but both were blurred. Neither was clear enough even to be sure if this was the same vessel, even though she was moving at the same remarkable speeds. And nothing closer than twenty years old was possible.