The Architect of Aeons (20 page)

Farther he looked, and further he reached, eager for wonders, drunk on starlight.

The galaxies were grouped in clusters, and the clusters into superclusters. And there were things larger than superclusters: the gravitationally bound galaxies formed complexes of massive, thread-like structures fifty to eighty megaparsecs long: filaments of galaxies, Great Walls of galaxies. And the vast, empty spaces tens and hundred of megaparsecs wide, where no walls of superclusters reached, and no cluster ventured, and only a few isolated sparks of galaxies floated like lost embers, were the Great Voids.

He drew his eyes and instruments closer to home, and noted, not without wonder, the relative motion of the Andromeda Galaxy, closest large neighbor to the Milky Way. The two galaxies were on a collision course, and would merge in less than three billion years.

Montrose was so absorbed that it came as a shock to him when a message, smuggled by Del Azarchel backward through the repeater Montrose had been using to spy on him, emitted a low chuckle, and formed a message.

Well, Cowhand, would you care to check my work? I have been waiting patiently for you to volunteer. Surely you care about the result?

2. Madness Among the Stars

Montrose sent back a noncommittal reply, the electronic equivalent of a grunt. He was too proud to admit that after so long a period of observation, he had not figured out what Del Azarchel was seeking.

Del Azarchel no doubt guessed his thought. He opened a voice channel and sent wryly, “Come, is this also not clear to you? Must I spell out everything? The Monument Mathematics contains the skeleton of a Universal Grammar, a philosophical language which translates all possible forms of encoding thought into all other forms. I have been looking at the natural astronomical phenomena as if they contained encoded messages written by an alien intelligence. I have been examining the patterns in the stars.”

Montrose responded with voice signals. It was easier than sending text or Monument code, and he could add a nonchalant note to show how little he cared. “Blackie, if you think the stars spell out a message just for you, that you can read with your secret decoder ring, I think it is time to check your skull for divarication errors.…”

“Or check the stars. Check variations in the motions of stars, nebula, and gas clouds, their growth and decay rates, the periods when stars go nova, everything. When I analyze it by Monument algorithms, a certain pattern emerges.”

“A
linguistic
pattern?”

“The language of nature. As I said, physics is merely a metaphorical means of speaking that unmelodic music we call speech, whose metaphors are very precise and crisp and colorless. I have been reading the scroll of nature, hearing the voice of creation.”

“And what did you find?”

“I found the voice was out of tune. Nothing exactly matches the Monument's given model of how the clockwork universe should be working. Some stars are out of place. Some are too dim. Many galaxies are not in the locations they should be if gravity were a constant and operated by the rules of Einstein. There is something changing the stars.”

“What kind of change?'

“Activity. Energy expenditures. Collisions. Something is reaching between the galaxies and creating similar patterns of stars going dark, or going nova. There are too many Population I stars, young stars of heavy elements, and too few Population III stars, older stars of low metallic content. There are too many planets, more than can be accounted for. The streams of dust and nebulae are disturbed. It is as if … almost as if…”

Montrose waited, wondering.

Del Azarchel said solemnly. “Old friend, you and I both put faith the Monument formal symbolism, the logoglyphs and mathematical codes. We thought the Monument Builders had discovered the universal syntax, the absolute langauge, the ratios and expressions that described both matter and energy, time and space, mind and body, and the evolutionary patterns of everything from atom to abstractions. Half by providence and half by design, both of us each in his own way altered his nervous system at a deep level to encode those notation ratios into us. We are partial Monument emulators, just as Rania is. We both put absolute faith in the Monument.”

“What is your point?”

“The cosmos does not match what the Monument describes.”

“Come again?”

“Things are not where they should be if the laws of nature are as they should be and everything were evolving as nature directs. There should be fewer novas, far fewer supernovae. And those supernovae should be found grouped together, as one triggers the next. There should be no pulsars at all, no quasars. There are too many spiral galaxies for natural processes to account for. There should be no Great Attractor in the Virgo Supercluster, none of these long threadlike strands of superclusters, woven of clusters of galaxies, reaching in long bridges across the macrocosmic void. What if…”

As Del Azarchel spoke, he also opened his files for Montrose to inspect. Montrose said nothing, letting the figures and logic symbols dance in their grave waltz through the several layers of his mind.

Come to think of it, had he not himself been noticing the odd violence among the stars? Had he not had a hunch that the star furnaces in Carina or the galactic collisions beyond Alphecca were the handiwork of titans? Montrose was slightly peeved that Blackie had acted on the same hunch and analyzed it mathematically, while Montrose merely gawked and stared.

Montrose interrupted. “What if what? Someone is herding the superclusters to build a bridge? Setting off supernovas like firecrackers? Is that what you are saying?”

Del Azarchel transmitted a laugh of relief. “No. Good heavens, what a concept! I was thinking something more realistic and more terrible. What if the Monument is wrong? The math does not reflect reality? This notation we have built into our brains, and written into the base-level machine language of all our xypotechnology, ghosts and angels and archangels and potentates—it is all false to facts. What if our picture of the universe is radically wrong?”

“How can the math be wrong?”

Del Azarchel said, “How? Use your imagination. Our nervous systems and computer systems do not let us see reality as it is. Our perceptions filter that reality as surely as the phantasm filter you inflicted on Exarchel. It is not reality that forms our logic assumptions, but our evolved mental architecture. We live in a world where it is possible to divide by zero, and
pi
is a rational number, but our brains cannot accept it, and so we don't see it.”

Montrose was taken aback. Finally he said, “If the Monument is wrong, maybe it is wrong about everything. Maybe the cliometry is wrong. Maybe Earth is not doomed. Maybe the slave ships will not dump millions of helpless people into freezing and burning hell worlds to die. Maybe the word ‘maybe' is the mule of a mayfly that mates with a bee.”

“You are talking nonsense.”

“So are you. The Hyades use this math for all their doings. It is good enough for them to maintain an interstellar empire. If the math is wrong, they are insane.”

“Insane enough to devote thousands of years and endless fortunes of energy to slay myriad men in an utterly pointless fashion?”

“Well, like you said, Blackie. This math is built into our brains and minds. If the Hyades are crazy, so are we.”

“And Rania? Is she mad as well?”

Montrose realized that it was purely on faith of something she saw in the Monument, something which, apparently, even Selene could not see, which sent Rania on her quest to M3 in Canes Venatici, beyond the Milky Way. Astronomers had never detected signs of life in that remote globular cluster, no signals of civilization. There was no assurance that there would even be an authority to hear her plea in the remote millennium when she arrived. There was only the word of the Monument.

But all he said aloud was, “Blackie, you leave her name out of it.”

And there the conversation stopped.

3. Intrusion Crystal

In the forward instruments grew the image of the
Emancipation
. Even with her sails folded, and external cabins deflated, the interstellar vehicle was a sea serpent larger than Leviathan, and the lifting vessel a glass minnow waltzing up to kiss her nose. As if in celebration, the noise of maneuvering jets popped and spat like firecrackers, ringing through the cabin of the lifting vessel. Both men were suited up again, as was the spacer's tradition during any close approach, and sealed their air hoods.

The popping noise of maneuvering jets shut off suddenly. By a tradition as old as space travel, the vessel with lower mass was supposed to match the velocity and other orbital elements of the larger to save on mutual fuel. But somehow the titanic spire of the
Emancipation
had her nose within inches of the flyby position, and gave a single short lightning-flash of her titanic altitude jets, so that the two vessels came smoothly together with hardly a jar.

“Something is wrong,” said Montrose. “The mating was too smooth.” But his airhood mike was off, so he did not send the voice signal to Del Azarchel.

Del Azarchel swam into the airlock first. The inner valve opened immediately, as if the nose cabin of the
Emancipation
was already perfectly matched with the interior conditions of the lifting vessel.

“Wrong,” muttered Montrose to himself. “When did the ship's brain confirm a nanomachinery match between the two air systems? All these motes and crap humans put in our air, mutations and miscalculations when they misrepair themselves have to be checked.…” He knew there was not enough calculation power aboard the ship for this.

Del Azarchel stopped moving halfway through the rubbery ring of the airlock. Montrose saw a strange red light splashed around the interior, gleaming from the metal clasps of Del Azarchel's dark shipsuit and bright cape.

The interior of the
Emancipation
was glistering with a reddish light, the color of an ember that refused to die. Rivulets of diamond like the delta of a river or a fantastic spray of icicles gleamed from the surfaces surrounding any logic ports in the bulkhead.

Both men headed hand-after-hand down the flexible corridor-tubes inward toward the axis of the ship. The tubes thoughtfully expanded to accommodate their bulk, and cilia protruding from the tube walls like many whiskers hurried them along their way.

The drop down the esophagus of the tube was not dizzying after three days in zero gee, despite the lack of a visual horizon. The tube disgorged them into the axis of the shroud house, the longest of several long bays that extended fore and aft beyond sight. The logic diamond at the core of the ship had expanded, sending out odd growths in fractal patterns like sea coral or the limbs of barnacle-crusted kragens. Heat and light shed from the diamond core indicated furious activity in the ship's brain. This was the source of the sullen red light.

Montrose sent a directed microwave pulse to Del Azarchel: “Did you do this? We had a deal! We agreed to keep the ship's brain as a ratiotech, limited intelligence. Not awake. It was when you were sending all that data to the astronomy house, wasn't it? You sent a signal to trigger a by-his-bootstraps uplift of the ship's brain from ratiotech to xypotechnic self-awareness. The ship grew smart enough that she was no longer a phantasm to the Tellus Mind.”

Del Azarchel merely pointed at the blank bulkhead. Realizing Del Azarchel was pointing at something beyond the hull, Montrose switched his goggles to the simulated image of the ship. Through the surface of the imaginary hull, and in the readouts shining on the insides of his goggles, Montrose saw that the stern sail was directed at Earth and the circuits were warm. The through-path monitor in the ship's spine showed the activity log: an immense amount of data from Earth had downloaded itself by itself into the ship's circuit, unhindered by defenses and firewalls and physical gaps, and somehow wrote itself into the core of the ship's brain.

Montrose said, “This ghost did not force his way aboard. You invited him. You broke the deal. I thought you were a bastard but an honest bastard, someone too proud to lie.”

“What lie? I invited him into my half of the ship. He merely trespassed into yours. I suppose you could complain to him, but—thanks to you—he cannot hear you unless you augment yourself.”

Montrose uttered an anatomically unlikely and grotesquely unsanitary imperative.

Del Azarchel replied in a voice of icy calm, “Must I again tell you what must be done? With Rania absent, you and I alone have an instinctive architectural algorithm in our subconscious minds for emulating Monument structures. It is a decryption key. Once we make xypotech emulations of ourselves, a newborn Extrose and a reborn Exarchel, we can copy the key into this ghost and transmit the result back to Earth. That should be effortless, since we know the Monument Builders would have wanted the key to be open to any mind reading the Monument.”

“You have it backward. The Monument Builders did not want the message to be open to the reader. They wanted the reader to be open to the message. And it is not a message but a mesmeric spell. Selene told us. Magic is what mutates you.”

“What?”

“The Monument Builders alter the mind of whoever reads the Monument,” said Montrose. “It is buried in the subconscious because it is a secret message.”

“Secret?” said Del Azarchel. “Absurd! The whole point of a First Contact message is to be as clear as possible to as many alien biopsychologies as possible! The Hyades were announcing their possession of our planet and all of the Local Interstellar Cloud…”

Montrose said, “The Hyades did not build the Monument. Consider how much work Tellus had to do to figure out how to surrender, and how little work I had to do to read their battle plans and invasion date. If Hyades had written it, that would have been reversed.”