Superluminary

by perpetrator

  The smile of Lord Mars vanished.

  Spacewarps were still possible inside the captive Dyson. Lord Mars called on Aeneas and returned to the round table in one step. He threw his useless sword clattering to the floorstones.

  Aeneas asked again, “What does it mean?” But now he was staring at the dropped sword.

  Lord Mars spoke with no change of expression. “It means, sire, that this was too easy. I have failed you. It means this was a trap.”

  33. Obliteration of Man

  In an immense dead city that formed a hollow sphere of ribs encircling the black heart of the galaxy, only one window was lit. From it a single beam reached. In the ray of that beam Warlord Rhazakhang the Obliterator was hanging, motionless.

  To speak, the Ultimate Overlord thrust into the brain of Rhazakhang the ideas he wished him to possess; to listen, he ripped the thought directly out. Both operations left trails of painful damage.

  Had words been exchanged, they would have been like this:

  “Let Warlord Rhazakhang rejoice! The matter of Sol is concluded. The Living Worlds have been found, and destroyed, and the horde of their living energy been added to our feast coffers.”

  “All souls are thine to consume, Overlord!”

  “As reward, receive thy portion.”

  For the first time in countless centuries, Rhazakhang received a pleasing sensation from his master rather than the normal, endless pain. Life energy, golden, sweet and glorious, filled the cells in his body.

  Rhazakhang recovered a level of intelligence, and opened old memory chains, he had not enjoyed in eons.

  He remembered the taste of consuming the last survivors of organic life. Their worlds had been found hidden in a nook of this very Great Sphere englobing the galactic core-singularity where the Overlord ruled. He recalled the savor of pain, the smack of fear, the spice of agony and self sacrifice as wives and mothers saw lovers and children shrivel and die in their arms... and this feast had no such scent.

  The bliss was interrupted by a lance of pain. As if he had bitten a wasp in the midst of a mouthful, the thoughts of the Overlord stabbed his brain.

  “Your doubt is plain. Let Rhazakhang unfold the source of his suspicions.”

  “The victory was too easy, Overlord.”

  “How so? The humans acted precisely as you predicted.”

  “Heretofore, the Tellurians were more erratic. They posses free will.”

  “Let Rhazakhang contemplate that his swift destruction would please his master, if you are so insolent as to imply that an underling can penetrate a deception that fools his superior!”

  “That destruction would also please me, if I am proved wrong. Grant me sufficient energy to travel to the battle scene. If some Living Worlds still live, the trove of their life will pay both for the expense of sending your servant, and will placate your wrath.”

  The Ultimate Overlord brooded for a time. In some half-buried memory deep in his soullessness, he recalled what creatures who possessed free will were like. Having recently fed, his feelings of rage, jealousy, bitterness, and hate were also once more inside him, which he had not for many eons felt.

  It was worth any expense to confirm the obliteration of life.

  The Ultimate Overlord said, “Go!” The ringworld-sized armatures of the Great Sphere began to spin.

  When Rhazakhang arrived at Ara A, some of the other warlords showed signs of insubordination, resistance or self-will. It was a common side effect of feasting. After a series of pitched battles, he killed them and ate their souls. Rhazakhang placed his own trusted servants, Dzazanang the Ineluctable and Vsasrhazing the Exsanguinator, into the places once occupied by the dead warlords. Eventually normal operations resumed.

  Dzazanang, his marshal, escorted him to the World Armada of the Tellurians. Neither one, strictly speaking, was in a space vessel. The machinery of propulsion and defense they wore like armor, with lesser servants tucked in convenient pockets in the plates.

  Inside Dyson of Xormxragon the Deceiver (a dangerous underling, but one whose involuntary sacrifice brought this victory), were the prey planets. There were punctures from nova-beam fire here and there penetrating the Dyson hull. Some were covered over with force fields. Others simply allowed the plasma of Ara A to flood inside, and spheres of fire were growing there.

  The human worlds were orbiting some two light minutes beneath the hull, surrounded by the eyeball-shaped dark stars that had destroyed them, and countless swarms of battlemoons and combat worlds. Once they had been green. Now all life, down to the last microbe, was gone.

  Here were the three gas giants, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus, and the shrunken and damaged superterrestrial of Saturn. A crowd of lesser planets, worldlet and moons of mankind orbited them.

  Rhazakhang turned upon the worlds lanterns of various colors taken from stars of various psychologies, and examined the neuropsionic echo. He formed a palaeoscope in his outer flesh and observed the ancient aspects of the globes, using a timewarp to bend their world-lines as he did so, so that the past image did not pass outside his vision range.

  Only one had been green a million years ago. The larger of the double planet was the original homeworld of man. The smaller partner of the double planet had originally been gray, waterless, airless. This was called the Earth-Moon system. Rhazakhang expended some store of life energy to allow himself to feel curiosity. He sent flakes of himself as probes to the smaller world. It was the source of all the dreamland disturbances in the area. The ruins of some potent sub-consciousness broadcast system still clung to the mountain peaks, with wisps of dreams still clinging.

  Why would the living creatures bother to terraform the dead globe and seed it with life? The energy costs of such projects were absurdly high. The population pressures on the homeworld could not explain it: Earth had not, even now, taken the form of a single city reaching from pole to pole.

  Rhazakhang altered his shape to match the human norm here. He and his servant created a tube of vacuum through the Earthly atmosphere to the surface of the larger planet and plunged down this tube at terminal velocity. At the bottom, they neutralized their inertia, came instantly to rest, and collapsed the vacuum. This created a shockwave and triggered storms. Flinging a series of contortion pearls from his coat to various points throughout the hemisphere, Rhazakhang stepped from one scene of destruction to another, as curiosity took him.

  Finally they stood in the throneroom of the Lords of Creation. Here at the round table, each beneath his insignia, were the dead leaders of the Living Worlds. Rhazakhang stood on two feet as a hulking, faceless biped. Had he not tucked his extra mass into nullspace, he would have been too large for the chamber. Dzazanang was shaped like a tripod, his main mass at the ceiling apex, forming sense organs as needed at the crotch of the tripod, staring downward.

  Rhazakhang probed the dead bodies with several energies. Dzazanang did not have as much spare energy in his brain as Rhazakhang, so he could only watch his master’s investigations with dull incuriosity.

  Rhazakhang eventually stopped moving. “Explain this.”

  Dzazanang formed a tendril and pointed. “When defeat was certain, the orders were given from this one, Lady Venus, went to this figurehead, Emperor Hypocritus the First, who was under her mental control. He ordered all his subjects to commit suicide, in order to deny to us the benefits of their living force. We are fortunate that some disobeyed the order, or else we would not have recovered any life energy at all. It is unclear why she permitted her slaves to disobey her figurehead.”

  “Did the humans caught alive offer any resistance or defiance?”

  “None whatever, master.”

  “Did their brains show any signs of tampering?”

  “Yes, master. Their memories showed that Lady Venus attempted a mind control to compel them to commit suicide, but the population numbers were greater than her broadcast capacity. They were brain-damaged, and reduced to idiocy, but resisted the compulsion.”

  R
hazakhang reached with a force beam through the walls of the palace, and brought forward a corpse that had been buried in another wing. It was a necroform servant. “They had vampirism technology, but did not use it?”

  “Only to create servants, or destroy the free will as a penalty for crime. Records show only the outer worlds, gas giants, used such servants in any considerable numbers. Emperor Hypocritus the First ordered them all sealed away or destroyed when he came to power.”

  “They had three warpcores of planetary mass and range. Where are they?”

  “Lost. The mind records show each was ordered to expel the others from our timspace coordinate system.”

  “Hm. Lady Venus was the true leader?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  “This corpse here. Her name was Nephelethea Cimon, daughter of Ranidaayani. This red colored man is Lord Mars. His name was Thucydides Achilles Apollyon Tell, son of Isabella. He slew all the other lords in the chamber, and came and put his arms around her, touching his lips to her lips before impaling both through the heart with a single thrust from his sword. The meaning is obscure.”

  “The lip-touch is a sign of affection. Who is this one? Do you know?”

  “We know. We captured both thought records and written records intact. That is Lord Mercury. Procopius Tell, son of Filchingmort. Note that he died with hand raised, with only the middle finger extended. Again, the meaning is obscure.”

  “It is a sign of disrespect.”

  “Directed at his murderer?”

  “No. At us. He foresaw we would stand here.”

  Rhazakhang now drifted up to perch on the top of the highest of the three heads on the imperial throne. He peered down at the chamber of the dead.

  Rhazakhang said, “There is no emotional trace of the agony typically displayed by organics whose loved ones die. They were remarkably placid. Almost bovine. Speculate as to why this should be.”

  Dzazanang disliked the order to speculate, but, fearful of pain, he released his precious but shrinking store of life energy into higher brain sections.

  This brought old memories, emotions, and creative drives out of hibernation. As always, he first sensation was self loathing, hatred of what he had become.

  He said, “From how well they fought, these were obviously a warlike people. Stoicism is common in such races.”

  “Yet here are signs of affection and there signs of defiance, and other highly-charged emotions of which no trace exists in the cellular residue.”

  Rhazakhang lashed out with a power ray, cutting the roof of the palace away, reaching across interplanetary space, and severing the planet Mercury in half. The surface of the world turned into molten debris, which a wash of kinetic energy tossed into space as a cloud of asteroids. Revealed was a contortion pearl, grown to be as large as the nickel iron core of the planet. “What is this?”

  Dzazanang answered: “A contortion node. It has enough size to move all the planets to any mate, or even a small star. But we found the mate: it was seen hanging near the firing aperture.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “Missing.”

  “Did the Living Men fire the Dyson beam?”

  “Many times.”

  “Was the missing contortion pearl capable of disinertia? If so, it would have been carried along the beam path without harm.”

  “Unknown, sir.”

  “Was the Dyson beam ever fired outsystem?”

  “Only once.”

  “Along what vector?”

  “Its first discharge was toward Coma Berenices, the star SN2005ap in the Coma Cluster.”

  Rhazakhang resumed his full size, spilling out of the broken roof of the throne chamber, coating the city of Ultrapolis, and sending masses of himself, like glacier, creeping down the sides of Mount Everest.

  Into each wing of each building of the city, every door and window, vent and chimney, along all plumbing, he protruded substances, leafing through all books, reading all storage crystals, absorbing the brain cell residue from corpses. He prodded and studied.

  Rhazakhang said, “In the historical records here, is mention of a law made by Lord Tellus outlawing certain kinds of air vibrations called music, and commanding history to be altered. Let us see the instruments by which this was done.”

  Dzazanang used a force beam to drive a distortion pearl beneath the crust of the earth. They both stepped to the spot, changing their bodies to suit the new environment, which was lava. They became streamlined, heavily armored, assuming an aspect of centipedes or sea cucumbers.

  Above them was an anti-continent of downward pointing mountain peaks and trenches like celestial domes, reflecting the shape of the seas and mountains flexing the tectonic plates above. Affixed to this roof of boiling stone were gigantic funnel shapes of nanomolecular assembly factories.

  Rhazakhang looked at the rows of black funnels. Each one was a half a mile long, with an intake vent to drink in numberless of tons of liquid rock, sift it for needed elements, and contort to the surface the goods thus created. A single one could have easily produced all material goods needed for a city. The endless rows marched endlessly into the distance.

  Rhazakhang probed the nearest one. It held traces of recent activity. The logs had been erased, but neuropsionic molecular analysis showed that hosts of gravitic engines had been made, or other war materials. But the final strata of traces showed biological material being created. Flesh, blood, bone.

  Rhazakhang said, “The records say these are the machines that Lord Tellus built to falsify the history records, and create a Jazz Age where none existed. Speculate.”

  Dzazanang felt a spasm of hate, and lost more of his dwindling supply. He said, “The falsification of the Jazz Age was a practice run, to train his people how to do the work. The corpses filling the worlds and moons are fake. No mass suicides occurred. The men found alive were also fakes. They were flesh puppets filled with the life energy of cows. The Tellurian wealth is beyond imagining: they threw us a morsel to sate us, and we thought it was the whole.”

  As he spoke, a second realization came. Dzazanang spoke again. “No palaeoscope will ever reveal their escape route, since the time-record layer is not accessible from inside stars. They allowed themselves to be lured into the Dyson below the surface of Ara A, perhaps knowing it was a trap, for just this reason. It is the only place where the palaeoscope is blind.”

  Rhazakhang said, “Speculate: How did they make living beings?”

  Again, a spasm of hatred stabbed Dzazanang. “Life is made from life, master. Their records show the technique. One needs living matter, even if only a single cell, to go into the matrix of the nanomachinery. It must consume nutriment to build up its life energy, which ultimately comes from the parent star.”

  “Where did they learn this lore? It does not come from any of the Nine Sciences we take from the Forerunners.”

  “Master, they grow and live. They do not think like us.”

  Rhazakhang said, “The Living Beings have escaped us.”

  And because there was no one else at hand, Rhazakhang began draining life from his screaming servant. Then he forced him to sing flattery while he beat the underling comatose.

  Before he slipped into unconsciousness, Dzazanang called out, “Remember, master! Victory is still within grasp. The obliteration of Man is close! There is a betrayer among the Living Beings, who will lead them into our hands...”

  Rhazakhang was mollified, and did not kill his servant.

  34. Second Earth

  And Aeneas, to celebrate the fifth year anniversary of his coronation, decided to hold court on the surface of Second Earth.

  Aeneas set his new throne on the grass beneath a circle of trees atop a tall hilltop on a small island in the middle of a blue lake surrounded by flowering slopes and white mountains. The flowers in the distance reflected pink, purple, white, saffron and periwinkle in the calm mirror of the lake. The new world was sculpted to look as much like Earth as p
ossible: this area was modeled after Heaven Lake, in a peninsula memorializing Korea on a continent memorializing Asia.

  It was a beauty spot. The first time he held court there, however, it was raining, and the miniature sun was at apogee, and was setting, so that the wind was blustery and cold. The seats of the Lords of Creation were set in a circle, each under its proper tree, but there was no table here.

  Most of his relatives had erected parasols or pavilions of fabric or energy above their ornamented seats, or lit braziers against the cold, or used a kinetic filter field called ‘Maxwell’s demon’ that only let fast moving particles touch their skin. Most, not all. Lord Pluto, in helm and mantle and dark armor beneath his cypress tree, and Lord Mars, scarlet and nude beneath his ash tree, did not deign to notice the wet, or perhaps their nervous systems could no longer register human discomforts.

  “Welcome to Second Earth,” Aeneas said to the gathered Lords of Creation.

  Lady Venus was seated beneath a canopy of living peacocks, who interlaced their wings closely enough above her to intercept each drop. Behind her was her myrtle tree. “Son, why so uncomfortable a throneroom?”

  Aeneas said, “Two reasons: first, our business will be carried out with more dispatch if the discomfort of our subjects is reflected in our personal discomfort.”

  “And the second?”

  He said, “I shall answer anon. Lord Uranus, have you good news to report?”

  As ever, the mask of Spyridon Tell, Lord Uranus, showed no expression. He was seated before a Rowan tree. “Better than hoped. Urvasthrang the Annihilator was called into the great consultation by the visiting dignitary, a creature named Rhazakhang the Initiator of Obliteration. Urvasthrang was cross examined by direct mind-to-mind contact, as were all the vampire lords, but Rhazakhang believed everything we ordered Urvasthrang to think. There was no sign that he detected the imposture.”

  Aeneas said, “Does the enemy suspect how we escaped? Or where we are?”

  Lord Uranus told his mask to display a thoughtful frown. “I can only speak for sure about my project. Lord Rhazakhang was allowed to discover our manufactories beneath the crust of Earth, and the megascale contortion pearl under the crust of Mercury. He is now convinced we have fled Ara A toward Coma Berenices. He will order a pursuit made.”