The Architect of Aeons (16 page)

And so in all general cases where a marriage of interests cannot be found, there are times when the weaker party finds it economical to yield to the stronger.

The voice of Selene, cool and dispassionate, drew their attention to recursive parallels hidden in the enjambment. She spoke (or squawked) in the high-density language of the Savants, which was notable for the precision of its expression. “This part of the Cold Equations that govern interstellar polities is the one your Rania called the Concubine Vector. It is so shameful a vector that the Monument builders did not explicitly draw it out. Rania discovered it by augmentation of that section of her brain that deals with music. The musical instinct in the brain intuitively follows patterns and symmetries that exist in mathematical ratios. Hence, the musical consciousness can at times deduce truths the rational consciousness cannot.

“In the last years before the arrival of the Asmodel mass, the entire logic diamond at the Earth's core examined the Monument through musical notation, attempting painstakingly, by sheer brute and unlovely number-crunching, to work through possible variations and deduce the enjambed and hidden vector of the Monument: to deduce statistically what a musician could intuit instantly.

“It was only by deducing the Concubine Vector that we, the human race, who are far lower on the ratio of power imbalance with interstellar life than the Monument measures, could foretell what Asmodel's instructions and strategies would be.”

“How was it possible at all? Surely in wartime, no being acts predictably,” said Del Azarchel. “Would not Asmodel use the same equations to deduce what you would deduce, and do the opposite?”

“Were we of equal stature, perhaps so,” the silvery voice continued. “But, first, contemplate that the Hyades must instruct their machines and their agents to operate by precisely predictable mathematical patterns controlled by these Cold Equations, or else they cannot foresee nor foreordain their own obligations across interstellar distances and time-gulfs. Second, contemplate that the slope of the power imbalance was vertical. This was not a war, no more than is the struggle between fishermen and fish.”

Montrose said, “And what did you deduce?”

She played for them the theme and counterpoint from two different parts of the Monument.

Montrose and Del Azarchel listened to the Concubine Vector, frowning or smiling as the implications became clear to them.

Perhaps a long time after, or perhaps a short (posthuman time sense was flexible), Selene spoke again. “We deduced how to save ourselves. At the eleventh hour we adjusted our strategy of resistance to accord to the Concubine Vector parameters.”

“To make the resistance more effective?” asked Montrose.

“Not as such. During the war, Asmodel placed fourteen distortion engines in the photosphere of Sol, which can still be seen as permanent sunspots of immense diameter. The sunspots are the anchor points of monomagnetic flux tubes capable of focusing a measurable fraction of the solar output into lased emissions of interstellar range. Where the mechanism is that produces these effects, or of what substance it is composed, if any, is unknown and undetectable. Tellus interfered with the interstellar flux tubes using mechanisms in sub-Mercurial orbital and attracted one of them toward Earth.”

“I don't understand,” said Del Azarchel. But his harsh tone of voice showed that he did.

“Displaying the ability to move the Earth as a dirigible planet without destroying the surface was an engineering feat that demonstrated that we had achieved the minimum level of sentience.”

Del Azarchel grimaced at this, but adjusted his brain chemistry so that his expression grew placid the moment he noticed Montrose squinting sidelong at him, suppressing a smirk.

The smirk died of its own accord when Selene added, “Altering the Telluric orbit also used the remaining available energy resources Tellus could command. It was the same as exposing our throat. It was a surrender gesture.”

Del Azarchel said, “Since to impress the Hyades with our worthiness to be their slaves was a prime part of my scheme to allow mankind to survive First Contact, while I am disappointed we so nearly did not meet their standards, nonetheless, I am grateful for the sake of our survival we did. They accepted the surrender?”

“Impossible,” said Montrose. “Men are men, even when they aren't! There must be some resistance even now, plans to fight back!”

Selene did not answer in words. A new set of music themes rolled forth, as different in mood and expression and symbol as the symphonies they had heard heretofore as impromptu jazz differed from a dirge. It took a moment for Montrose to examine the multidimensional mathematical model in his head that the language of music had just opened up to him.

This was related to the Monument universal semantics, but it was not the same. Translated back into the lines and sine waves, this was the music of the message written across the face of the moon. Not the First Contact message of the Monument. Asmodel's message. The only cenotaph for all the souls slain by Asmodel.

Yes, he could see very clearly the parameters along which the Asmodel entity worked.

It had neither retreated in fear nor stayed in pride to conquer.

Both Montrose and Del Azarchel had vastly overestimated the human race's importance in the scheme of things. The reason for the very slow approach of the Virtue Asmodel across the millennia had been because mankind was not worth the fuel-price of a swift approach. It had also been to allow mankind the time needed, under the pressure of immanent invasion, to establish institutions, sciences, technologies, and self-aware world-library systems.

It had been to allow Earth to go from a Kardashev Zero to a Kardashev One level of civilization: to be a polity that controlled and used all the energies and resources of their tiny speck of globe. At the very last minute, thanks to the total cooperation of all aspects of the bicameral society of Earth, both No
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spherical and Phantasmal, that Kardashev One level, the minimum level, was reached.

But Asmodel had no reason to linger and rule the Earth. The earthlings were not sophisticated enough to domesticate. It merely scooped up raw material, including thinking materials such as people, from the planet's surface and parts of the logic diamond from the planet core, as well as enough of the ecosphere to sustain them only for the voyage, and shipped them off by lightsail to distant and worthless worlds.

They saw the conditions of the stars, one after another after another, like a roll call of names, famed in song and prose, of the nearby yellow stars, near twins of Sol, his sisters: Promixa, 36 Ophiuchus, Omicron Eridani, 61 Cygni, 70 Ophiuchus, 82 Eridani, Altair, Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, Eta Cassiopeiae, Gliese 570 in Libra, HR 7703 in Sagittarius, Tau Ceti. The music unfolded mathematical notations that formed images in their brains.

All were very nearly Earth-like, near enough to make their morbific flaws all the most hideous.

It was a roster of unfit planets, a freak show: a torch world, too close to his sun for human life; or a tide-locked world with no rotation, half fiery Hell and half Niflheim; or a cold world orbiting a dull star; or a world tormented by open plains of lava; or a globe choked with an atmosphere of deadly gas; or one flooded with seas of venom; or a subterrestrial too light to hold an atmospheric thick enough to block deadly radiation; or a superterrestrial of bone-breaking gravity; or a globe tumbling pole over pole through an orbit eccentric enough to boil the seas in summer and freeze the atmosphere in winter; or one cloaked in magnetic fields too intense for human nervous systems to remain sane; or a world entangled with an asteroid belt, doomed to endless extinction-level collisions.

Worthless. Unfit for human habitation.

A new movement started, a cliometric analysis of the futures of such worlds, like a fan of possibilities, a glimpse of hope, a gleam.…

Again, the music cut off abruptly.

Montrose said slowly, as if each word were pain, “The final expression Phi substructure in the Concubine Vector shows a negative sum for any long-term relation. It says only marginal worlds, ones not worth their colonists, are where our people are being sent. They are being sent to die.”

Selene said, “With the immensely powerful magnifications the twin orbital mirrors permit, we have studied the target stars of the First Sweep and verified the Cenotaph reports: these worlds cannot support human life as it is currently constituted, neither surface-based nor Melusine, nor Man nor Swan nor Ghost. Hence, all the deracinated are fated to die.”

“I do not understand,” said Del Azarchel. But his tone of voice made it clear this was something he wished were true, not something that was.

Montrose said, “The First Sweep stars are those to which our populations have been hauled by force. The slave colonies. Proxima Centauri and Delta Pavonis.…”

“I know that, you fool!” said Del Azarchel. “I do not understand the purpose!”

“Be at peace,” said Selene, with strange, unnatural calm. “We have already established the ceremony of mourning for the myriad populations doomed to perish, albeit, clearly, the genocides will not take place for decades or centuries.”

Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps some sort of provision aboard the ship will act as an intermediary.…”

Selene said, “Deceive yourself with no false hope. The Hyades slave ships will lower the earth life to the surface, desert or deep ocean or mountain or volcano, and expel them without further ado. Whether they live or die is no concern. The Cenotaph is utterly unambiguous on that point.”

Montrose said softly, “Some means must exist—if the shipboard Hyades controls permitted the people to convert whatever life-support equipment aboard the slave ships”—an uneven note troubled Montrose's voice—“habitats could be burrowed out of the crust using the skyhook as a pile driver—a few habitats—for a few years—could—could be by some long shot, could find a way to survive.…”

Montrose in his posthuman imagination was able to picture and feel what the death of millions of people would be like, each and every death, lingering or sudden. The vision of it was like a cold hand, choking him. He wished for the days when he was stupider, and could ignore things, or see them only dimly.

His posthuman intellect could also deduce that such jury-rigged habitats, even assuming an unrealistically high mass of the slave ship converted to useful life support, could not expand, hence could not long sustain a population.

“The long shot is long indeed, Dr. Montrose,” said Selene, “for the Hyades will provide no way. We have no means for seeding crops beforehand, nor altering the gas balances in unbreathable atmospheres. The cruelty is unimaginable: millions dropped at random even in this fashion on Earth would simply be decimated.”

Del Azarchel said, “No advanced species can be so wasteful!”

Selene said softly, “The waste, Senior Del Azarchel, is small indeed to beings affluent beyond measure. There are two hundred sixty thousand stars within two hundred fifty lightyears of Sol, none of which are utterly barren. With so many worlds, even if less than one percent were useful to them, scores of thousands remain from which many hundreds can be selected for slave colonies. Alas that natural man is adapted to the environment of the Earth's surface too perfectly to prosper elsewhere, or even to survive.”

Montrose said, “But why? Launching Asmodel required more energy than our race has ever produced in all our years put together. Why go to such expense just to exterminate so many innocent people? Why not just gas them or blast them or space them or drop them into a sun?”

Selene said, “As you deduced, the behavior is ceremonial. By interfering with the Diamond Star, just as the Monument warned you not to, you triggered a reaction; a reaction which the Cold Equations of their inhuman law requires them to carry out, lest their inhuman neighbors among the constellations perceive the omission. If we were advanced sufficiently to be a race for whom the Monument was written, being expelled naked onto the surface of a hostile world would be no discomfort. Such is our punishment for presuming ourselves to have been so high. Such are the wages of overweening pride.”

Montrose felt sick. The endless years he had struggled against the Hermeticists, and against time itself, to produce a race able to resist the aliens—it was all futile.

He looked in Del Azarchel's eye. The handsome and smiling face was not smiling now. If anything, his eye was even more empty and hollow than Montrose's. He had spent not only endless years, but endless lives sacrificed as if on the altar of some primitive bloodthirsty idol of stone with goggle eyes and gaping jaws.

But here the idol was of the superiority of the unknown civilization of Hyades. To be enslaved, if it meant to serve as an apprentice and learn the master's secrets, that, perhaps, a hardhearted man could abide to see done at such a dreadful cost. But to be enslaved for nothing? To be taken not as sheepdogs but as sheep? Merely to be exterminated as vermin?

Del Azarchel said, “The Cenotaph started to say something about the future of these worlds. What is the rest of this message? What is written on the moon?”

“I cannot read the Moon Cenotaph,” said the moon in her silver voice.

Both men looked nonplussed. “Do you jest?” Del Azarchel said, “But this message comes from the Cenotaph.”

“You read it,” she said.

Montrose shouted, “Why do you talk in riddles?”

Selene said, “Riddles contain multilayered information density. You know enough now to make your decision.”

“What are we supposed to decide, pox it?”

“What do you know?” she asked.

Montrose gritted his teeth. “Mother Selene, I know this is all putrefaction and pestiferication. A pack of lies! It cannot be so that you read the Monument segment concerning the Concubine Vector only recently. Rania translated that section of the Monument just in her head on our wedding night, in less than an hour or two. She knew all about the Concubine Vector. That is why she knew the Earth was going to be treated badly by the Hyades Cluster, who say they own us. That is why she took off for M3. So why are you yerking my piss hose?”