The Architect of Aeons (2 page)

“What Rania called a Potentate.” Montrose reminded himself with a mental frown what the scale and magnitude was of these monsters they faced. He knew that, by the Kardashev scale, a civilization controlling the whole output of a star was called K-Two, and of a galaxy, K-Three. The Hyades was between K-Two and K-Three, controlling the total output of matter and energy in a small star cluster, and an intelligence in the hundred billion range: what Rania called a
Domination
. In her scale, a civilization that totally exploited the mass and energy output of a gas giant was called a
Power
. The servant of the Hyades dispatched to Sol, large as a gas giant but much more finely organized, was called a
Virtue,
and was above K-One but below the K-Two level, controlling more mass-energy than a rocky planet but less than the total mass-energy of a star system.

Blackie was sending: “Like an ugly duckling finally reaching its own, the Earthly civilization was the first human race truly to supersede humanity. You saw how quickly the Swans reestablished the ancient weather control of the Sixtieth Century, how rapidly they converted the interior mass of the moon to logic diamond, and created the Selene Mind. It's been four hundred years since last we were allowed on Mother Earth but you saw the rate of development.”

“I sure did.”

“They were evolving from something at the edge of what we could comprehend to something beyond that edge. The growth rate was asymptotic.”

“Always is, during a boom, Blackie.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean in real life, and not in daydreams, things got a natural growth rate until they run into a natural growth limit. Then the asymptote flips over: sure, advanced societies still advance, but always slower. Lookit how quick the fastest a man could go went from the speed of a sailing ship to the speed of a supersonic jet. And then in the decades after—what happened? Man did not keep getting faster and faster. Lookit how free mankind got during the Enlightenment, the Industrial revolution, and the abolition of slavery. And then what happened? Natural limits began to set in, and people didn't keep getting more free and more, they started losing their liberty by sips and dribbles in my country, and by gulps in yours. What makes you think intelligence growth doesn't have built in limits?”

“Merely because I know that an ape could not imagine a human. We are not discussing a merely linear increase in thinking speed, but a revolution in the quality of thought, the use of means beyond our imagination. Do you, ah, ‘reckon' that the Swans, while we were absent, might have passed beyond an event horizon of asymptotic growth, and evolved beyond our reckoning?”

“And do what? Invent a technology that allows them to bend light around the entire globe?”

“Nothing so dramatic. Merely a layer of ash and dust brought up from the interior would lower the albedo. Let us never forget, just because we are dealing with entities that crossed one hundred and fifty-one lightyears to conquer us, that even something so small as a solar system is unimaginably vast, even for imaginations such as ours. If the Earth were not reflecting light, if we were out of estimated position by a few hundred thousand miles…”

“So where is Selene, the intelligent moon? Every crater and pothole was supposed to have a weapon inside. She was going to be the great offensive fortress, our rock of Gibraltar in the sky. The face of the moon lights up like a Christmas tree when she fires her main beam, and all the smoke from all the secondary launchers gets ionized in the hash. Where is she now?” Menelaus sent a sigh. “What if the ash and dust got kicked up not from the Potentate masking the Earth? Weapon damage would do the same.”

“I don't believe it.”

“You don't want to believe it, Blackie. Those Varmints are evil.”

“The Virtue is meant to introduce us into the Galactic Civilization!”

“As serfs. Or all-meat patties. And if they was here to introduce us, where is they?”

“They who? You mean the Virtue?”

Not long ago, while orbiting Ganymede, the long-range telescopes of the
Emancipation
's astronomy house had captured an image of the intruder as it passed into the Solar System.

It had been a globular mass the size of a gas giant, adorned with silver clouds swirled into storm systems large enough to swallow smaller worlds. The clouds covered a liquid surface black as sin. They had seen the black mass drifting like a soap bubble toward the blue loveliness of Earth, moving with no visible means of propulsion. Fourteen immense machines or organisms that looked like trees in winter or naked umbrellas had been in orbit around it. These were the orbit-based space elevators or “skyhooks” whose blueprint had been seen on the surface of the Monument: the instruments used for deracinating whole populations of one planet to another. These skyhooks had had the decency to have reaction-drive engines, and move according Newtonian principles, even if the mother mass had not.

They had lost sight of the apparition as it passed toward the inner system.

Blackie said, “We are crippling ourselves by operating at less than optimal intelligence. Let us warm up the mind core to full self-awareness.”

“It took me ten thousand years to figure out how to destroy Exarchel, your last fully self-aware supermachine, and that was when I had a supermachine of my own occupying the Earth's core helping me. No thanks. Next idea?”

Blackie said, “Let's take a year or two and look for occlusions. If a body passes before a star, we can find it.”

Montrose said, “We can also keep an eye on any orbital anomalies. A mass the size of Uranus, if it is still in the system, might not mess up the fallpath of Jupiter too much, but we should be able to see its influence on the motions of the smaller planets, Mercury and Pluto. And let's deploy the sails a little bit, and gather in some light.”

“Which may expose us to the Virtue, if the body is still in this system. With our sails open, we are visible to anyone with a medium-powered telescope.”

“Let's risk it. I got two reasons. First, the aliens never approached any object smaller than a planet before. This ship is just a mayfly to them, and we're just specks.”

“Hm. I seem to recall that even humans occasionally swat flies. What is your second reason?”

“We're both reckless and bored.”

By unspoken mutual consent, both men lowered their subjective rate of passing time until they could see through the various instruments in the astronomy houses fore and amidships, or brought in through extravehicular remotes, the jeweled dots of the planets moving like waltzing dancers against the star-gemmed velvet of vacuum.

Intently they watched.

2. Visions of Great Worlds Afar

A.D. 11050

They created indentations in portions of the sail to use as convex mirrors and flexed the shrouds to turn them this way or that. These immense light-gathering fields were larger than any Earth-based telescope could be. It was like having a lens the size of the arctic ice cap.

Montrose soon noticed an anomaly in the drain of resources from the ship's astronomy house: the ship's brain was spending time poring over data peripheral to star occlusion scans. He was curious what Del Azarchel was seeking, and carefully, slowly, and secretly, he heterodyned a repeater signal on the incoming astronomical data.

The first quarter of the sky toward which Del Azarchel looked was the constellation Canes Venatici, toward the great extragalactic globular cluster at M3. Montrose with some effort beat back his rage at this act of voyeurism, so he did not thaw himself, take up the fire ax from the bulkhead, go to Del Azarchel's coffin, and chop his frozen face into bits. Yet Montrose was appalled that Del Azarchel would dare to stare, like an adulterous lover sighing and mooning at a married woman's window, at the stars which so called to Montrose and so recalled his wife to him.

But then Del Azarchel turned elsewhere those instruments more potent than any human eyes. Here in the constellation of Fornax the Furnace was a star called Hipparchos 13044, two thousand lightyears from Earth, whose waltz through the heavens betrayed the presence of a dark body, perhaps twice the size of Jupiter, orbiting it. But the star was one of many in a Helmi stream, originally belonging to a dwarf galaxy that had been devoured by the Milky Way nine billion years ago. The age of the planet was greater than that: it was from outside the galaxy. Montrose could not imagine what interest Del Azarchel could have in this astronomical anomaly.

Closer at hand, the wobble of the failed star HD 42176 in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer, three hundred ninety lightyears away, betrayed a fire giant world, larger than Jupiter and closer to its primary than Mercury, orbiting once every thirty hours: a year short as a day.

It seemed Earth-like planets throughout the Local Interstellar Cloud were unusual. Jovian and superjovian worlds were much more common than smaller, rocky worlds. The current theory was that small planets were naturally swept up in the orbits of larger ones. In Sol's system, for reasons yet unknown, a primordial superplanet had been split into Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and this allowed inner and outer worlds, Mercury and Pluto, to form. Apparently life on Earth-sized worlds was a rare accident.

Montrose was puzzled. What was Del Azarchel's interest in exosolar planets?

Months passed.

3. Inconstant Earth

A.D. 11051

Both men exclaimed at the same time.

“Eureka!” and “Thar she blows me!”

“What did you find, you disgusting Texan clodpole?”

“I found where the Earth is hiding, though I cannot say how she got there. What'd you find, you dandified Iberian gutterbug?”

“I found out how she got there but not where she is. While looking for occlusions of any stars or background radiations by black bodies, the instruments picked up occlusions of various intervening energy fields. The magnetosphere of the sun is gravely disturbed. This disturbance is enough to grapple the core of the planet magnetically, and impart a lateral vector. I assume the initial acceleration was very mild, because even rocky planets are actually just gooey liquid with a little crust on the surface, and we do not see a trail of asteroids, ejecta, and debris trailing off. And it also shows the Earth was not removed entirely from the Solar System, since the solar magnetosphere does not extend so far, and, at accelerations low enough to keep the planet intact, could not have achieved solar escape velocity.”

“Well, boy howdy, because I done found her. Venus has a slight drift to her orbit, and a wobble to her rotation, and so does Pluto—who did me good service this day, despite the men of old who said he weren't no planet.”

“So where?”

“Up. The Earth is at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Earth is in a ball-o-twine orbit above the solar North Pole and below the South Pole.”

“At the same distance as before?”

“So I guess. Simple orbital mechanics says it is easier to change your inclination than your speed or distance from the center of gravity. In this case, all they did—whoever they were—was increase the orbital inclination to ninety degrees. Boy, are all the astrologers going to be daffy after that stunt. As seen from Earth, the sun will swing through the same northern and south constellation once a year, but the zodiac of signs the sun passes through will be different each year, because the whole orbit is turning.”

“So you have not actually found the Earth?”

“I know where we should concentrate our telescopes. One AU to the solar north, and one to the solar south. Because the whole orbit is turning like the rim of a spinning penny, we won't know from what direction Earth'll be approaching the solar North Pole. Could be up to six months before she passes through that area, and then however long it will take us to match orbits, three years or so. But to us at this speed, it will seem like no time.…”

4. Less Oblate Spheroid

A.D. 11054

“… See? That weren't long,” Menelaus concluded his sentence.

Now the world loomed large within the images the astronomy houses fore and amidships brought in. The moon looked nothing like the moon of old. Logic diamond had coated her seas and uplands, and now new craters of war damage had smashed and cracked the layers of diamond shell so that she resembled the fantastically shattered surface of Europa, rather than the silver-gray moon of Earth's past. Unthinkable energies had scalded strange and lurid colors into the blasted glass, green and gold and lines of crimson like bleeding scars, speckles of peacock blue scattered like pepper.

One crater so large that it by rights was a sea now occupied the lower quarter of the disk like an eye, and the mountains cast up in the center were a beady pupil. It overtopped the exact spot Tycho Crater once had occupied, as if some base or fortress there had been obliterated with a six-mile-wide meteor, or some other weapon yielding a ninety-teraton blast. Tiny ring arcs of dust and gravel orbited the moon, perhaps residue from the blast.

Menelaus was shocked—nay, offended—that the ancient body and the mysterious seas which had haunted so many love songs and images of his youth were now forever gone.

“It's … it's
rotating,
” he told Del Azarchel, unable to heterodyne into any tone of voice the infinite sense of loss and rage he felt. The globe would now turn its dark side once every two weeks toward her primary.

Del Azarchel was also enraged. “The print of my hand is gone. Look here, instead. This.”

In the vast crater that covered a quarter of the surface were the angles and sinewaves, arranged in dizzying, eye-defeating spirals and concentric ranks, an imprint of the Monument notation.

Montrose said, “They left us our own Monument? Can we translate it?”

“Not without considerably more calculation power than this ship currently…”