The Architect of Aeons (9 page)

“Your theory that independent men, independent minds, would be better suited to fight off these invaders is true on a small scale, and in limited engagements, but it is not true when world fights world! Your requirement does not scale up.

“For one mind the size of Earth to contest the fate of man with one mind the size of Uranus, that Earthmind cannot, at the same time as it maintains its unity, maintain, for each brain cell of its nervous system, conditions allowing each nerve cell to go its own way for its own monocellular reasons.

“During peacetime, when there are no schedules, and no crucial minutes count, the elfish and invisible tricks of the phantasms you introduced into our eyesight, the blindspots you built into us, can be tolerated. But in wartime, when needed supplies go astray, or humans, being human, commit their various crimes and combats against each other on levels where we could not interfere to halt them, despite the damage to our equipment and personnel, the enemy, hindered by no blindness, and seeing the works of men, could exploit.

“And we Swans were too independent, too fierce, to combine all our posthuman minds harmoniously into one Potentate. Instead, we fell to quarreling among ourselves. Left brain against right brain, one split personality against another. Earth was psychotic. The Virtue of the Hyades regarded us with contempt. Asmodel did not bother to conquer us. We did not deserve the compliment.

“The fault is yours, Menelaus Montrose. Even one of your limited intelligence surely saw that when you made us, creatures of perfect liberty, perfect independence, perfect individuality, you condemned us. Can it be you do not apprehend it, even now? The only way surely to be immortal is to join the No
ö
sphere, to submerge oneself into the computer unity, and the Swans grew too proud, too fiercely individualistic, for that; the majority of us unplugged, and fled and became hermits. But the only beings concerned with the long-term destiny of mankind are immortals.

“The war, for the Swans, is over, and events many millennia hence will trouble us no longer, we who will be dust long before. Why should we sacrifice? For
you
? Did you make us to serve your good, and lose our own? Did you not use us as a mere instrument? Did you not create us, our race, our psychology, our way of life, as nothing more than a checkmate in your endless war of wits against your rival who stands here before me?

“Enough! The Eremitic Order represents a nobler cause. Liberty is our god. We serve no other, not you, Montrose, not your war aims, not your strange dreams of remotest futures.

“It is not meet that free men should perish for the service of others, or perish for tomorrows no child of ours will ever see.”

6. Caliban and the King

The august voice continued, full and awful as a tolling bell.

“Ximen del Azarchel, do not speak! Undo that smile you hide. The blame is yours as well, madman!

“Del Azarchel, everything you dreamed was in vain. It was utmost folly. You must understand that the expedition sent by Epsilon Tauri was sent in vain.

“The existence of the antimatter star at V 886 Centauri, and the Monument in orbit around it, was a lure, meant to attract the attention of a starfaring race.

“But consider the odds. Consider the math. That star was fifty lightyears away from Earth. Practically in our backyard. No. Practically in our pocket.

“The statistical odds that the Monument would just so happen to be so nearby to a primitive and backward race that even they could reach it is astronomically small—too small for the Hyades seriously to have contemplated the possibility.

“It was an accident.

“Had the Monument been at a reasonable distance away, thousands of light years, we never would have noticed and been lured by the contraterrene, much less have gone there and tripped their alarm.

“Imagine the analogy, Del Azarchel. Suppose that Spain at her height sent out messengers to all her colonies worldwide, from the East Indies to the West Indies, California to Argentina, Zanzibar to Goa to Naples, inviting them to gather their greatest warships and galleons at Cadiz, and some rude savage as naked and backward as Caliban from Prospero's Island intercepted the message, understood only the first few letters of the first word, and answered—but only because he was at Rota, seven miles across the bay from Cadiz, and was able, straining his every resource to the utmost, perhaps with friends, to paddle his crude dugout canoe across the waters.

“Let us picture Caliban to be precisely as successful as the
Hermetic
expedition. You wear the uniform of that bloodstained ship: are you proud of it? Let us say Caliban's canoe has two crew, call them Tarzan and Mowgli, and let us say, as happened with the
Hermetic
expedition, two thirds of the ship's complement die in the travail, or are murdered, and the wretched survivor cannot reach Rota again without stealing resources from Cadiz.

“And let us say further, that Rota is so vile and barbaric that even a Caliban, enriched and armed with merely one canoe-load of stolen loot, can make himself for a season overlord of his starveling tribe.

“And to secure his reign, he prevents any further trips to Cadiz for additional supplies, or arms, or firearms, which had been the only hope of the wretched starvelings of Rota to survive should the great Monarch of Spain direct his eyes against the petty thief, or send his humblest man-at-arms. Or do you rather think the King of Spain will grant Caliban an audience for answering a message meant for His Majesty's viceroys and admirals?

“Is this not the horrid history of the
Hermetic,
O thou most arrogant Hermeticist? Is it not a fair picture of your administrative philosophy, and of the survival rate of those unfortunate enough to be caught in your wake?

“Fool! The antimatter star was meant to attract the attention of entities such as those the Monument describes. It was meant for self-aware star systems who maintain continuous mental communication across interstellar distances, stars enshelled in multiple concentric Dyson spheres; and these megascale structures in turn are merely cells in brains the size of star clusters thinking large, slow thoughts. The tendrils reaching from the nebula and the archipelagoes of cloud and sunless planets streaming through the void show intellectual patterns, and form subordinate entities, larger than solar systems, reaching from star to star, cluster to cluster, and serving greater minds yet.

“The Monument's message was meant to lure these Dominions and Dominations, Hosts and Principalities and Virtues. It was not meant for people. It was meant for living nebula and sapient star clusters. A self-aware planet like Tellus is merely a speck on this scale. In the days when the
Hermetic
expedition set out, Tellus was not even awake, and the core was a dead lump.

“The ambush of the Diamond Star was meant for bigger game. A shrew has been snared in a bear-trap. We men have not yet colonized our nearest interstellar neighbor, Proxima. Nay, we have not yet colonized even our nearest inter
planetary
neighbor, Mars.

“All human history from that expedition to this war was a mistake. It was all an error.”

At this point, the Swan closed the eyes of his face as if in memory of pain, and lowered his wings.

7. War and Rumors of War

Montrose's ugly face was distorted with a look of grimacing guilt, for it seemed he believed the Swan's accusation, and Del Azarchel's handsome face was made handsomer by the fire in his eyes, for it seemed he did not.

The Swan spoke again. His voice was dry of all emotion.

“Hear what you need to know of the war, and learn your place. First, learn that it was no war. We were rats, and we swam out to meet the ironclad warship which loomed in the harbor, and we jarred our teeth on the hull. That was all.

“We dubbed the Virtue
Asmodel,
after the governing angel of Taurus, and its measured intellectual range was an order of magnitude above the Potentate of Tellus. Even had all the mass of Earth been converted to sophont matter and logic diamond, the black gas giant was fourteen times our mass: theirs was roughly the brain mass of a man as compared to that of a rhesus monkey.

“Asmodel was a Uranian mass with an hydrosphere of picotechnological murk black as ink, black as the pupil of an all-seeing eye, with an atmosphere as filled with fleets and storms and swarms of nanite diamond, auxiliary machines, and operatives, as Venus is with cloud. The whole mass was the shape of a vast convex, forming a sail absorbing the trailing light from Ain. When the mass passed the orbit of Pluto, it collapsed into a globe of storms, ringed with bands of darkness; and it fell toward Sol, assuming a highly elliptical orbit. Its albedo was so low that we lost track of it.

“Then, in
A
.
D
. 10920, the core of Asmodel ignited like a small, failed star, and the clouds emerging from the explosion formed streamers reaching toward the planets of the inner system, and the larger asteroids.

“It was searching for evidence of our interplanetary colonies, and found … nothing.

“The core of Asmodel went dark again, and major part of the uranian mass solidified once more, and shrank as it approached aphelion, becoming a body only twice Earth's diameter, an egg of smooth crystal, and its atmosphere was a banner behind it long as a cometary tail. From the energy traffic, we deduce this tail was its periscope, the source of its observation across the interplanetary distances of our doings. But it also acted as a launch accelerator, for it shot silver tool-swarms into orbit.

“As it swung past Sol in sub-mercurial orbit, these swarms constructed ring-shaped devices, which it dropped into the sun, partly made of matter, partly of energy, partly of something more dense than neutronium we cannot see nor analyze.

“The uranian mass sent murk like shadows to swarm over our machines and battle-asteroids, and although our nanotechnology could control material at a molecular level, we could neither detect nor deflect attacks which disintegrated atomic bonds. Our weapons fell to dust.

“We flung the moons of Phobos and Deimos, using a magnetic monopolar linear accelerator, at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light at the incoming mass. Nothing known to our science could have halted them: even disintegrating them to their constituent elements would not check the mass-energy of their velocity. Something not known to our science, a frame-dragging effect caused by the core of the dark gas giant rotating at the speed of light pulled the moons into a parabolic orbit, and as if in mockery, the living planet Asmodel restored them to their exact orbits and epochs around Mars.

“We expended the utmost of what we could in nuclear and thermonuclear and antimatter bombardments, kinetic, energetic, informational, chemical, molecular, nanotechnological packages—it all fell into an atmosphere as deep as that of a gas giant, creating flares of lights and refracted rainbows.

“Do you think ships of the greater races would have hulls? No. Atmospheres destroy incoming rubbish, matter or antimatter, more effectively.

“And yet we fought on! Magnificent and futile, yet we fought!

“What point was there to empty all Earthly arsenals into clouds that generate tornadoes into whose each eye five Earths could fall, or that spin out thunderbolts whose blasts more than exceeded our mightiest warheads? And if there were any headquarters, brain, or master node within the gas giant, or in his core or cloud or inky oceans, we missed it.

“Asmodel moved next its mass between Earth and the sun, and resumed its vast, thin, concave shape. It had raised its sail. That was all it did or needed to do. It put up a parasol, and let the world freeze.

“The sun was dark, and there was moonlight no more, and the murk came from space like black rain. All the waters of the atmosphere fell as snow and hail to solid seas, and soon all the gases of Earth's atmosphere began to condense.

“In the same way a medieval castle would gather all the suburbs behind its gates and walls to withstand the siege, when Earth was besieged by darkness, we gathered all the surface civilization, and as much of the oceanic civilization as we could, and drew them underground.

“Had we not practiced? Had we not prepared? Everything was calculated to a nicety. We had supplies, greenhouses, geothermal heat, an artificial biosphere, systems for placing massive numbers into biosuspension. Assuming normal population growth rates, we should have been able to preserve the underground warrens and kept essential personnel alive for eighty years. Three generations of siege!

“And the besiegers waited eighty-one years.

“Perhaps we could have retooled, altered our psychologies, designed new forms of life better suited to the task, but not without spending resources allotted to feed the starving. Not without changing our individualistic and egotistic neuropsychology. Not without sacrificing the poor.

“So the psychological pressure of life in a warren for such independently minded men, with every bite of food, every breath of air rationed, in the end, was too much. The population fell. We did not have enough in numbers to maintain our midlevels.

“Our minds were broken by factions. The people rebelled. Systems broke down.

“Then the Virtue Asmodel directed a beam of energy from the sun through the core of the planet and out the other side. It slowed the core rotation, altered the magnetic properties of the planet, and, more significantly, cooled the interior of the globe. At one blow, our geothermal heat that powered our civilization was insufficient to maintain thought-activity in the No
ö
sphere. The foe collapsed the source of power we thought was independent of the sun.

“We tried to flee, to escape the long shadow of Asmodel, by bending that same energy beam and propelling the world into another orbit far from its blockade—I need not tell you how absurdly, how impossibly delicate that matter was. You gentlemen are both duelists. Throw a raw egg into the air, and shoot it with a bullet, just grazing the egg so gently that you can deflect its fall without breaking the shell. To move this globe was the single greatest mathematical and engineering feat the human mind has ever conceived, and it was done perfectly.