Read The Architect of Aeons Online
Authors: John C. Wright
“What is bigger? You plan to rule the Galaxy? Twelve thousand lightyears in diameter. Takes a long time to send out orders or hear reports. Or did that slip your slippery little mind? You're nuts.”
“You thought me sane enough when we two together vowed to reach the Diamond Star, and to do all else the world called impossible.”
“Except you didn't achieve it. Rania did,” said Montrose.
“She will return in time. Then there will be peace.”
“I should set out after her,” Montrose muttered.
“Indeed? Do you have, convenient to hand, a dwarf star made of antimatter to use for fuel? I think you will find overcoming the difference in frame of reference in order to make an in-flight rendezvous will take the same amount of time, from her point of view, as waiting here to receive her. Or, did that slip your mind?”
“Pox! I gotta keep an eye on you. And shoot you dead. Then I can enjoy my wedding night in peace.”
“Admit it, my friend, you want more than just peace; admit it. You want to see the Heat Death of the Universe as much as I do, or grasp the farthest quasar in your hand, or hear the mysteries whispered beyond the curve of the universe. You want to be an architect of worlds and of destinies, and decree the fates of suns and constellations! You want the future, the shining future, the golden land of tomorrow! Confess it!”
“Blackie, sometimes I do ⦠but sometimes⦔
“Yes?”
“Damn, but sometimes I just want my wife back.⦔
Hearing Montrose heave a sigh, Del Azarchel, somewhere in the dark romanticism of his heart, felt an unspoken breath of pity for this poor, foolish Texan, who was lonely. How poetical!
“⦠Just want her back, and hot in the sack. 'Cause, damnation, am I horny.”
Del Azarchel had quickly to make adjustments to his parasympathetic nervous system to suppress his gag reflex. “Bah! How you disgust me! You know you are not good enough to possess her, you swine.”
“Boy, don't I know it. But swine or no, I am more man than you. Lucky me, eh?”
Del Azarchel uttered some insult from the lists he had long ago and lovingly contrived for such occasions, and Montrose responded with a less witty and more earthy rejoinder he invented on the spot, and the conversation soon degenerated into their normal bickering, and then silence.
Del Azarchel did not pay much attention. The exchange of slurs and sleights was perfunctory. He spoke the insults only because he did not want the filthy Cowhand to suspect.
For if Montrose had known how unnaturally happy Del Azarchel was, surely he would be suspicious.
The glowing coal of joy that warmed him was the knowledge (and he knew not whence it came) that when Rania returned, she would look at Montrose and then look at Del Azarchel.
She would see in Montrose a man who sacrificed his morals and his integrity to save her. Because she was too good for him. It was simply a fact. And she was hyperintelligent, so she could not misunderstand that fact.
She would see in Del Azarchel a man who sacrificed not one iota of his truth, a man whose honor, while very cruel, had never been very unjust, and whose crimes were all justified by the high and noble and necessary ends to which his crooked means had led.
When she returned, he could hand her an empire of worlds of his making, and Powers and Potentates larger than worlds, Virtues and Principalities and hosts. What could the Cowhand on that day give her?
Del Azarchel was to have all. Not just everything he'd craved, but more that he had dreamed to crave.
He knew she would turn to him. His creation.
Jupiter was not the only divinity Del Azarchel had created: for he had made a goddess as well, a creature finer than any human.
His princess.
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1. Exile in Ixion
A.D. 22196
Menelaus Illation Montrose woke in his segmented fashion, first with lower and outer personalities on the human level, passing from dreamstate to hypnogogic state to self-awareness and assessing the situation.
Radar waves had been bouncing off his little hidey-hole here for about half a year: Half a Neptunian year, that is, eighty-two Earth years.
Considering how far away this frozen little dwarf planet was from Sol, and how cleverly he had hidden every external trace of his approach and presence when he moved here ten millennia ago, the first assessment was one of astonishment and annoyance. Given the last known state of Telluric technology after the Endarkening of Man, and the cliometric chains of events extrapolated from it, it should have been impossible for anyone to find him.
What did a man have to do to get a little damned peace and quiet?
After the Montroses in their various human-sized bodies consulted with records and sensed surrounding energy signals from the inner and outer Solar System, the lower personalities integrated and woke a higher level awareness.
His higher-level mind was now the central mass of the remote plutino maintaining orbital resonance with Neptune. It was named 28978 Ixion. Montrose liked the name; Ixion was a character from myth who won the love of the queen of the heavenly goddesses.
Except for an outer layer of rust-colored tholin and water ice maintained as camouflage, the volume of the four-hundred-mile-diameter worldletâthe distance from Dallas to San Antonioâhad been converted to logic diamond. It was all him, all brain. In chambers and tombs and capillaries honeycombed through his crystal brain cells he kept the smaller and outer personalities. Each had been assigned a human-shaped body, modified in the fashion of the Hermeticists to be spaceworthy.
This variation had an intelligence of two thousand, about what Exarchel enjoyed in his heyday covering the entire surface of the Earth. This Montrose brought more and more miles of his crystal self into awareness, heat, and motion, as he puzzled over the information of his ingathered lesser selves. He watched through several sophisticated instruments covering several bands of the spectrum with a sardonic expression deepening on the completely imaginary face he maintained in his proprioception emulator.
Yes, he had expressions. Montrose long ago had found that if his electronic brain could not feel the slide and tension of facial muscles, his emotional changes did not synchronize with his biological versions and emulations.
So he kept his face running even while he slept, and this allowed him to pry open one disbelieving eye and sigh a majestic sigh, and feel his lips draw back in an angry smile, displaying his large, square, equine teeth, even though, in reality, the eye and eyelid, the breath, the sensation of lips and teeth and tongue and the rest was just a flow of numbers through a sensorium which was itself an emulation. So what? In reality the atoms of his real flesh and blood body were clouds of subatomic particles, which were, in turn, nothing more than a flow of numbers through the foam of timespace.
And so the ghost grimaced and grunted, because a vehicle was approaching from Jupiter. That meant it was Blackie's people. Maybe Blackie himself.
He focused a radio laser and narrowcast a warning to stay away, repeating the message in Latin, Anglatino, Virginian, Intertextual, Melusine Verbal, and Glyphic, and the base introduction pattern for developing a Swan dyad language. There was no response.
Montrose watched them for one hundred fifty days, decided they were not a threat, merely an annoyance, and let the vessel landâor, to be precise, considering the small size of the asteroid he filled, let the vessel lay alongside.
But who and what were they?
He combed through the records collected over the millennia by his lesser selves who had watched and slumbered century by century.
2. Enigma in Sagittarius
The records showed a number of anomalies, ranging from the astonishing to the inexplicable.
In the Sixteenth Millennium there had been a fluctuation in the solar photosphere, and the annihilation of a geometrically straight line of particles beyond the heliopause. Someone had activated one of the mile-wide neutronium rings which the Asmodel Virtue had left floating in the convective zone of the sun.
Any of these seventeen rings, when rotated at near-lightspeed, created a Einsteinian effect called frame-dragging, which acted as a gravitomagnetic Penrose energy extraction mechanism, very similar to that produced by the accretion disk of a microquasar, and emitted a relativistic jet, powered by the ultradense solar plasma. Some unknown (and to earthly science, impossible) side effect of the frame-dragging polarized and aligned the wave-particles in the jet, forcing the energy into a coherent beam.
Montrose examined in awe the record of a nameless rogue ice giant world, a lump of frozen gas larger than Jupiter, the orphan of some failed solar dust-disk that never formed a star, who wandered into the path of the beam hundreds of lightyears away, being evaporated into brightly colored mist.
The reflections of the interstellar laserlight off the mist particles gave Montrose enough information to deduce the precise beam path. It was not pointed at any of the colonies of man, but at the Omega Nebula in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, five thousand lightyears away. What had been launched there and why? The only other thing Montrose could see in that region of space worth investigating was a blue hypergiant and variable star, V4030 Sagittarius, over seven thousand lightyears away, emitting one solar mass per day in its solar wind.
In the Seventeenth Millennium, Earth had lost her magnetic field, and unmodified human life walked abroad only at night. There had not been a drop in industrial activity during the day, but it did not follow the spacing patterns or diurnal rhythms of any First Human race, or of the Swans. This implied some new and third race of man, not a mere subspecies, now ruled Earth.
There was an Ice Age covering most of the Earth's surface in the early Twentieth Millennium. At the same time, energy discharges consonant with very large-scale industrial activity had been detected near Ceres, Vesta, and soon the other large asteroids in the main belt. Changes in mass indicated that they were being hollowed out. Changes in surface reflections indicated that they were being spun for gravity. The whole miniature world would form a carousel, against whose walls the centrifugal force could hold a layer of air, parks and lakebeds, farms and gardens. Montrose was delighted. It was something from his childhood comics come to life: O'Neill colonies! Someone had finally figured out that the surface of a planet was not the wisest place to live in this dangerous universe.
Then the Ice Age came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the millennium. A number of energy discharges consonant with the use of asteroid drops as weapons erupted over the globe on several continents. The impacts not as severe as the fall of 1036 Ganymed had been, but severe enough to abolish the ice practically overnight. A structure of flux tubes issuing from the north and south pole of Earth and reaching to the Van Allen Radiation Belts became a permanent part of the magnetosphere during this era; Montrose could not fathom their purpose. Perhaps they acted as guidepaths for energy beams meant to deflect or deter the asteroid drops.
Energy discharges consonant with major wars between the asteroid-based civilization and the Earth continued to register even on instruments as far away as the Ixion plutino across the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Millennia. Then the traces stopped. Unwilling to believe that man had learned the arts of peace, Montrose assumed that a new form of weapon, deadlier or cheaper or both, than antimatter or asteroid drop had been developed.
From these clues, he could deduce something about the nature and mission of the emissaries aboard the vessel hanging near him, but those deductions merely opened larger and deeper questions.
One drawback of knowing that there was a smarter version of yourself you could wake yourself into was that, no matter how sure you were of your results, you always wanted the more expensive energy-hogging super-version of yourself to double-check them.
And here was a mystery too deep for him. This ship should not be here.
3. Picotechnology
Ironically, the asteroid-sized Angel-mind version of Montrose was bulkier than the Archangel-mind version of himself. This higher version of Montrose was housed in a chunk of murk, partly solid, partly liquid, and partly extending half an angstrom into eleven dimensions, which occupied the space in his skull in and around and between the cells of his flesh and blood brain. This brain system was above the ten thousand level, roughly the intelligence Selene commanded.
The science of picominiaturization discovered from retro-engineering the murk left behind in the First Sweep allowed mankind, not without astonishing effort and expenditure of resources, to fit the intelligence complexity and capacity of the core of the moon into a body not much larger than a post-cetacean Melusine.
So, yes, Montrose, at ninety-four feet six inches length, and one hundred ninety short tons mass, roughly the size of a blue whale, had put on a little weight over the years. In zero gravity, the larger body had more advantages than disadvantages. He kept his scars and crooked teeth and crooked nose, because he wanted Rania to recognize him when he returned.
The process of replicating his one brain engram at a time into the portable picotechnology was slow enough that he did not let himself fret about the philosophical and theological implications. He still felt like himself. And besides, his original brain (or, rather, the seventeen-yard-in-diameter remote descendant of his often-repaired and often-replaced clones of his original brain) still occupied the analogous spot near the top of his spine of the leftover space in his now absurdly vast skull, and he could always switch his point of view back to it, when he wanted to go back to a slow, stupid, blurry, and easily distracted version of himself.
Montrose finally yawned, stretched, and floated free from his coffin. One of his smaller selves (out of whose eyes he could see himself) used a barge pole to pass a bulb of nutrient fluid the size of a balloon canopy into his hand. Another little remote puppet of himself in another corner of the endless crystal chambers of his ghost-self was dressed, under gravity, and in an atmosphere. That remote had a cup of hot and black coffee in his hands, and was waiting to drink it when Archangel Montrose drank the nutrient.