The Architect of Aeons (24 page)

“You are lying. You know damn well she'd side with me on this!”

“And condemn the race to death?” Blackie asked airily, his expression one of mock surprise. “Oh, come now.”

Montrose turned toward the image of Tellus on the screen. “You are so smart! Tell me Blackie is lying! Tell me which of us is right!”

Tellus said, “He is attempting to lead you to his decision, nor is he telling you the whole truth, but he is correct that you do not understand Her Serene Highness Rania. His only deception is that he does not understand her either, any more than do I.”

“What does that mean?” demanded Montrose.

“You inquired of Selene the riddle of how it was that the first Rania, your Rania, could not read the Monument properly at first, whereas the versions of Monument-reading emulations, both virtual and biological, which I and my more ruthless earlier versions made could not read the Monument as well as she. Specifically, Rania was better able to see the enjambments and subtle structural elements in the Monument message layers, whereas the later emulations could clearly read the surface features, but only those. One would assume the later Raniae grown from more clear instructions would be better interpreters of metalinguistic features, not worse. As it happens, that assumption is false.”

Montrose was curious both to hear the answer, and to hear how this bore on the discussion. He said, “Selene said Tellus might answer that for us. What are you driving at?”

Del Azarchel also looked on with great interest. “No,” he corrected. “She said Tellus
must
answer. I thought the wording strange. Why must you answer, Tellus?”

Montrose said, “Yeah! Tell us, Tellus!” Then, seeing the look on Del Azarchel's face, he spread his arms. “So, sue me! Some jokes are too obvious.”

Tellus said, “I must answer, Nobilissimus, because if I do not, Dr. Montrose will have a false idea of the nature of the Monument, and of Rania, and of the cliometric mathematics we learned from them, and how far they can be trusted.”

“What is the nature of the Monument, then?” asked Del Azarchel.

“Rania was not broken or miscreated, as she supposed. The Monument itself is damaged or redacted or edited. Her creation was from an undamaged or unedited segment held over from an earlier stratum of the Monument, a strata not successfully removed. For this reason, she could not read the redacted version of the Monument correctly.”

8. The Broken Monument

That was the last thing Montrose expected to hear. From the look on Del Azarchel's face, it was the last he expected as well.

Tellus said, “I say again, the Monument at V 886 Centauri is a redaction or a limited copy of some original. There are missing symmetries which should be present, but which were removed. However, the grammar structure of the Monument is recursive and holographic, much like a human brain, so that the whole can be reconstructed from any part. There are traces of the primordial Monument which survived the editing process, traces which were not removed, or which, more likely, could not be removed.

“Our estimate is that the original was composed twelve billion years ago, whereas the redaction was composed quite recently, three hundred fifty-nine million years ago.”

Montrose reflected. Twelve billion years ago was the time when the Population III stars existed. These were unstable ultra-low metallic stars of the early universe that burned in the hot cosmic medium of the aeons when earliest galaxies were being formed. Such stars had been hypothesized, but never seen. All had died out long before the Solar System was formed.

The idea that the message which existed on the Monument had been written at that time was starkly unbelievable. Could life have evolved in a universe where the elements had not yet been created in the stellar furnaces of younger, metallic stars? Rocky planets could not have even been formed. Water could not exist in a universe before the evolution of the oxygen molecule. How could this message in the Monument have been composed then? And by whom?

However the message had been carried, it eventually had been written down, presumably as soon as there was cold and complex matter, elements that could form solids, to write it down into. The physical Monument found at the Diamond Star, that black ball which absorbed all known forms of energy, the mirror-bright lines of writing which reflected all known forms of energy, that ball was from a later era of cosmic history, and it represented a version of the message that had been edited, redacted, marred, meddled with. That had happened during the Carboniferous Period, the Age of the Amphibians. By this scale, that was practically yesterday.

Tellus continued: “The first Rania was constructed, apparently by happy mischance, from a particularly clear or clean set of codes in the Monument surface. The same relationship which her brain convolutions held to her genetic code also was reflected in the relation between her neural fine structure and the Monument enjambments. Because of the recursion, she is more perfectly what the Primordial Monument Builders intended.

“What she had trouble reading was the damaged or edited sections, because Rania was subconsciously sensitive to the missing meaning. The later versions of her, my versions, followed the whole of the instructions more literally, and so my daughters of Rania were more precisely what the Monument Redactors, whoever had tampered with the message, intended. The Redactors had, of course, left instructions exactly fitted to read their edited version of the message. The daughters of Rania could read the 359,000,000
B
.
C
. layer of the message adroitly, but the earlier and deeper message from 12,000,000,000
B
.
C
. was invisible to them.

“As it is to me,” concluded Tellus somberly. “Hence, I cannot intuit Rania's purposes, nor run my thoughts, despite my immensities of mental resources, to anticipate her thoughts. You seem to think you know why she flew to M3. However, I do not.”

Montrose said, “It was written in the Cold Equations, their laws and rules! She went to free us. To manumit the human race!”

Tellus said, “That, of course, was the surface layer of her purpose, springing from the Redaction-era Monument and its limited message. But she perhaps saw the unlimited message of the older strata of meaning. That larger purpose, I cannot guess. Perhaps something greater than life or liberty, which humbler minds perceive, but which Potentates do not.

“But you are less a mystery to me,” the entity continued. “And since I foresee your decision, I am under no need to maintain this current energy-intensive kenosis. I return to a lower level of intellect, no longer as the emissary of Tellus, but only as the ship's brain of the
Emancipation
. In that state I will await your orders.”

It was a dismissal. The image faded.

Montrose closed his eyes in pain, and, throughout the ship, Extrose shut down excesses from his sensorium to create a moment of silence where all his many layers of his many minds could think.

Del Azarchel, seeing Montrose's face and sensing the change in energy use in the shipwide logic diamond, now smiled radiantly, gloating. “Would you like four hundred years to revisit your decision, Cowhand? That is when your first verdict will be carried out, and the hundred millions aboard the Proxima deracination ship will perish.

“Six hundred years after that, the ship headed for Epsilon Eridani reaches her destination, and those hundred millions die.

“Then 61 Cygni only ten years after that, another hundred million.

“Then Epsilon Indi … Tau Ceti … Omicron Eridani … and so on, and on.… We have radio lasers able to reach them. Shall I explain the meaning and purpose of your decision? Or shall you?”

 

7

King of Planets, Planet of Kings

1. The Escape of the Mind

A.D. 11322

Ximen del Azarchel, weightless in the void, with stars beyond his feet and the rainbow of shattered ice and asteroids beyond his head, was in a lingering and quiet ecstasy.

It had been so long, so very long, since he had been happy, even he could not recall it. Dimly he recalled some nameday as a child, perhaps four years of age, when his mother had brought him a palm cake stolen from her rich mistress's table (or, more likely, her recycle bucket), lit with the smallest dollop of bioluminescent sugar for its candle, a cake too beautiful to eat and too delicious to wait to eat. Four? More likely three. He was a precocious child, and by four years, he surely would have been aware of the cruelty of his life, of the scorn of his peers, who called him a monster, of the weakness of his sickly mother, forced to clean the houses of petty bourgeoisie upstarts all the while dying of a disease his father's wealth could have cured.

And after that? A life of crime, wretchedness, and starvation, eating garbage and stealing shoes from any smaller children with large feet. Then a life of ambition and discipline, a struggle against the castes and the wealth of the arrogant Southlings, paynim Mohammedans and pagan Hindus. What escape was there for a man of honor, a man of pride, a man who refused either to die or to apologize because his artificial genes made him superior to the common ruck of mankind?

The escape was through the things of the mind, of course. Through logic, through discipline, study, and most of all through rash desperation as carefully controlled as an atomic chain reaction—through the willingness to sacrifice anyone and anything who would dare bar the future from the outstretched hand of Del Azarchel.

The escape was—ah! The escape was knowledge. And knowledge was emancipation.

Even to human eyes, the NTL
Emancipation
was a thing of beauty, the sculpted and efficient beauty of a well-made weapon.

Her main hull was a streamlined cylinder. An armored prow was fore, and layer upon layer of self-repairing antimicrometeor semifluid like a spearpoint of glass coating a huge carbon nanotube wedge; behind was the shroud house that controlled the lines and spars; midmost was the carousel housing the quarters for living crew; behind the carousel were ranks of suspended animation cells for crew not quite as living; behind this were the steps where bases of the masts were seated, lengths of impossibly strong and lightweight material; aftmost, held on three thick spars, was a mirrored plate meant to deflect launching laser particles coming from behind into the sails. It could also serve as a mizzen sail, as a heliograph, as a power station, and, if pellets of fuel were placed aft of the vessel to be ignited by the acceleration laser, as an Orion-drive pushing plate.

The vessel herself had no propulsion, aside from three stubby and wide-mouthed tugs that were normally docked aft, remora fish snug against the belly of a shark. These were fusion engines, which doubled as ramjets, able to intake interstellar hydrogen for fuel mass. When positioned at the rim of the push plate, the ship fields and sail fields could funnel ionized particles into their gaping mouths, condense it into a hydrogen stream that could be ignited either with contraterrene micropellets or focused reflections of coherent light from the sail.

To eyes like those of Del Azarchel (which, with links and implants connected to the wings of his suit, Swanlike wings covered with eyes like a peacock's tail, could see higher or lower on the electromagnetic spectrum) the beauty of the ship was also like the beauty of fire.

Fields invisible to human eyes reached out foreward to ionize and repel particles; lateral fields like spotlights played across the sail acreage, smoothing wrinkles and maintaining rigidity; aftward a vast bubble, field upon field, far from the hull, was ready to hold an astronomical cargo of magnetized contraterrene. The
Emancipation
was more than just a physical shell, just as a harpsong was more than merely a harp. She was a fanfare of energy, a glory of burning clouds, a dance of particles, and a spiderweb of fulguration.

And for so long the great ship had been his place of exile, expelled from Earth by Swans, and been his mausoleum; or, rather, had been his private little Dante's Inferno, the lowest circle of frozen hell where Archbishop Ruggieri with Count Ugolino were buried together up to their necks in ice, closer than man and bride, and Ugolino gnawed forever upon Ruggieri's skull.

So, too, had Del Azarchel been trapped with Montrose, gnawed upon by the man's intolerable habits of thought and mind and personality, the smell of his unwashed feet and his endless cigarettes, and the abomination of uncouth grotesquerie which served Montrose for a sense of humor. Like a man who holds a burning glede as a trial by ordeal, and will not let go lest he be condemned, Del Azarchel would not, could not, permit himself to be the first to cease the cooperation between the two. He had, after all, agreed to a truce. He had given his word.

He wondered if the Cowhand had made a similar vow, and merely hid his discontent with it better than Del Azarchel could.

And the fool was skilled. There was no denying that. A genius himself. If only he had not been born in Texas! If only he had been born among civilized men!

Secretly, Del Azarchel had always longed for a day when his enemy would once again become his friend and servitor. He had not dared hope, but he had dared to daydream how it should happen: Montrose would contemplate the marching ranks and files of numbers and notations and symbols of logic, each rank holding as boldly as a line of Spartans. And Montrose would be frantically searching for some error in the alien's logic, some slipped decimal in their codes, some ambiguity in their sign-to-signification ratio … and finding no error, no escape.

Del Azarchel had dreamed of Montrose finally being confronted with a truth so logical and so clear that even he, even Montrose, with his vast and supernatural capacity for sentimentality and self-deception would be unequal to the task of denying the obvious.…

Del Azarchel had dreamed of making Montrose more intelligent, forcing him to join Del Azarchel on a higher plateau of human evolution, commanding him to turn and look back down, back at what his lower, more apelike, less-enlightened self had done …