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 worldlet—the distance from Dallas to San Antonio—had 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 land—or, 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.
He had once experimented with making himself coffee when he woke, in pots the size of swimming pools and drinking from cups the size of bathtubs, but the drink tasted funny to his giant tongue, even if he made all his taste buds coating its acre of flesh a standard size. The fluid did not flow correctly in his mouth, because the fluid dynamic behavior did not scale up. He could have adjusted his sensorium not to be bothered by the oddity, but that seemed like an uncanny way to flirt with unreality; or he could have given up drinking the scalding, bitter fluid when he woke, but to give up a bad habit of such venerable age struck him as an abomination. How would he recognize himself in a mirror when he shaved, if he changed that much?
So instead he merely had the taste sensations of one of his smaller bodies transmitted into him. And then he drank a bathtub full of bathtub whiskey, mixed the signal from both sets of taste buds in his cortex. He called the mix his Irish coffee.
While he sucked on the nipple of the nutrient bulb, he turned a nearby plane of the logic crystal forming his suspended animation cell into a mirrored surface, looked at his five o’clock stubble warily. He programmed the skin cells to reverse the action of his hair follicles, and to reabsorb the beard-hair into his face.
“What is the god-pestifical-damned situation, me?” Montrose asked.
“Situation normal, all fetid ungodly,” the image of his face (from whose many cameras he could also look) grunted to himself from the crystal wall.
“That bad, eh?” He wiped whiskey from his drinking bulb onto his palm, and slapped himself in the jaw once or twice, to act as his aftershave.
4. Texas Hospitality
The approaching vessel looked like a mirrored sphere. Landers dropped from the sphere were tripods that looked something like grappling hooks connected by cables. As if she were a pirate ship of old, the sphere threw out grapples and prepared to board.
Bags of biological and nanotechnological material were carried like wobbling egg sacks down the cables to the landing tripods. There was an exchange of signals between the egg sacks and the mirrored sphere, mostly biotechnological information. Ghost Montrose amused himself by warming chambers carried on a carousel, which he spun up to Earth’s gravity, feeding in oxy-nitrogen atmosphere and so on, and watching the biotechnical information change and change again, trying to keep up and match the expected environment.
After a month or so of that, the egg sacks decanted a crew. Montrose expected the brain information of the crew aboard the sphere, or perhaps back at Jupiter, to be downloaded into the crew shapes remotely; instead disembodied heads traveled down the cables from airlocks in the sphere, were gathered to the biomechanical bodies, and fitted themselves into place.
The creatures were walking across the face of his asteroid like ants on a wall. Four of them made for the airlock he had so generously poked like a periscope out through the stone shell of his asteroid-body.
“I figured you wanted to be all waked up to go talk to ’em,” his ghost said from the wall mirror.
“Plague! Don’t they understand the word ‘git’?” said the gigantic version of Montrose.
“You mean like Brit slang for bastard?”
“No, I mean like ‘git off my land.’ Let’s show ’em some Texas hospitality.”
“Real Texas hospitality? Like we show them the business end of Black-Eyed Suzy?” Suzy was the pole-to-pole rail gun. Ghost Montrose displayed a ghastly grin. “Sure! Got a payload ready, Big Me. When I saw we had company, I built me a long train of cabins circling the major axis of the asteroid out of my logic diamond, and revved it up to Earth-normal gravity. The rail gun fields are all matched up, so all I need to do is spike the juice, and shoot the whole damn guest wing into orbit and through that billiard ball of the ship.”
“Nope. I mean real Texas hospitality, like we treat them royal, slaughter the fatted calf, bring out the hooch, and if they act inhospitable, such as by jawing my ears awry or riling up my nerves, then show them the business end of Black-Eyed Suzy.” He sighed again. “Time to stop talking to myself. If none of the lesser me’s object, let’s integrate up.”
None of the lesser versions objected, which, considering how ornery he thought of himself as being, always surprised him. It was unexpected, and bore closer examination.
He told himself to remind himself to look into this mystery later, until he remembered that he was folded into a single consciousness configuration mind, and so could not tell himself reminders.
“Now I actually am talking to myself,” he muttered. “That is downright loco.” But there was no one to answer.
The titanic, archangelic version of Montrose swam in zero gee to a locker and got out a portrait of Rania, which he handled carefully.
Since this was a formal occasion, he put on a loincloth, a gunbelt, and a poncho. The guns were vehicle-mounted cannons set with pistol-grips big enough for his elephantine hands, but he used a variation on his old glass-barreled caterpillar-gun design for old time’s sake. They fired a sixteen-inch shell designed to shatter into shrapnel small enough not to pierce his walls and hence not hurt his brain.
5. Hanging Her Portrait
He swam to a spin-lock. Once he was in the spin-lock, it began barreling along just inside of the ring of the carousel containing the guest quarters, accelerating. When the spin-lock matched speed with the guest quarters, he opened a hatch in the floor, climbed down. Because a ninety-foot-tall body shaped like a man was as stupid an idea as a man-sized body shaped like a spider, he took the precaution of filling the spin-lock and the reception chamber underfoot with high-density superoxygenated fluid thick as mud. Through this he sank. He managed to get himself seated on the floor without breaking any bones. The fluid drained away, and the environment switched over to an airbreathing regime.
One of the man-sized versions of him was standing on a ballroom-sized table of logic diamond at which Big Montrose sat. The surface was slightly higher than his elbow. On this plane was the wet bar, fancy chairs, dining table set with vittles, a mechanical bull, and whatever else Montrose could think of that his guests might need.
The man-sized puppet detangled from the mental unity long enough to make an independent comment, looking up and saying, “I can see up your nose. I often ask myself why the plague I bother having a humanoid body after all this time. For zero-gee, squids are better.”
“Like the wife wants to hug a squid when she gets back! Hang up the picture.” And he passed the picture in his hand to the waiting squad of workmen, who grunted under the weight. With ladders and block and tackle, and helping finger from Big Montrose the size of a log, they mounted the portrait on a spot high on the wall just opposite the flag of Texas, which was hung between his gun collection and collection of coins from long-dead civilizations stamped with his image.
The runt-sized Montrose-men unwrapped the portrait.
There she was, with hair as yellow as a garden of gazania or yarrow growing in the golden valleys of the sun, eyes as blue as the Caribbean but deep as the Pacific, and that sweet half smile held between two impish dimples. Atop her coiffeur was the coronet of Monaco, a land long since sunk beneath the sea, and she wore her captain’s uniform, the void-black and starry-silver of the Hermetic Order. This was a form-fitting silky fabric freaked with branching veins like those seen through the translucent skin of a leaf, unintentionally emphasizing her curves. Technically, it was an older costume than the Hermetic Order, for it was originally the space-dress of the Joint Hispanosphere-Indosphere Expedition to the Diamond Star, which her father, Prince Ranier, had captained.
The image showed the arms of the Milky Way reaching up from the bottom of the frame and the globular cluster of M3 in Canes Venatici like a fireworks frozen in midburst above. A slender line, the projected flight path of the Hermetic, connected the two.
“Now read the date,” he said.
From the point of view of the smaller eyes in the smaller body the portrait loomed like the fane to a goddess. The calendar demarking the flight path was in repair, but, at this scale, the gradations were in millennia.
“Today, it is the Forty-sixth Millennium by the Vindication Calendar.” The Vindication calendar ran backward, as a countdown to the earliest possible date of her return. Montrose liked this method of reckoning the years.
“Now, you think if I play squid for that length of time, I won’t get used to it? What if I am unwilling to change back into a man when the wife comes home, eh?”
But the puppet answered, “You think she won’t be changed and strange by her time among the stars? You’re just punishing yourself!”
“Punishing my—! What the pox does that mean?” But when he looked through the thought structure to see the intent behind the comment, something deeper in his mind allowed him to be distracted. For the tall double doors which opened upon the titanic table opposite where he sat now chimed and swung wide.
6. The Four Third Men
Beyond the tall doors, the corridor curved upward, for the corridor deck was the outer wall of the carousel. Oval hatches opened to the left and right into other suites in the guest wing. His guests came into view, descending around the inverted horizon in the inner carousel wall, their bodies gleaming and glittering with living gold.
Rods and serpentines from the floor were all about Montrose like a scaffold around the statue of some seated colossus, forming a exoskeleton, cradling his head and limbs, supporting his spine. He looked both as pathetic as an ancient mummy from a pyramid, frail as a man on a deathbed too weak to raise his head, but because of his cyclopean stature, and the ferocious intensity of his superhuman eyes, he also looked as majestic as a pharaoh adorned in splendor at whose command the toil of countless myriads raised those cryptic pyramids.
The four creatures who walked, slithered, cantered, and rolled into the crystalline chamber had the brutal ugliness of efficient design, but none of the sleekness that natural evolution produced in beasts of prey.
They looked like semiliquid lumps of semitransparent gold. These shining lumps had assumed temporary shapes, and were held within iron-ribbed exoskeletons of different designs: a biped that looked more ostrich than man; a six-limbed shape like a headless centaur; a rattling snake skeleton surrounding a wormlike mass that moved like a sidewinder in lateral waves, such that only two points of the underbelly touched the deck at a time; an upright wheel set about the rim with eye-lenses and ear-horns, with a triskelion of arms issuing from either side of its hub.
Because the exoskeletons were open, organs or instruments could be formed at will out of the golden substance as need dictated, and reach through the bars and lattices of the bodily frame. The skeletal ribs and slats were like Japanese fans or Venetian blinds, and could be expanded to cover all the golden body with armor.
Montrose recognized the golden stuff as Aurum Vitae, the rod-logic substance which, long and long ago, the Savants had attempted to coat the world. Beneath the amber surface he could see dimly the central creatures, one or two in each exoskeleton.
The central creatures were shaped like unborn babies, big-headed things with shrimplike bodies curled below, vestigial hands and feet dangling. External nerve paths ran from the skull and spine of each creature throughout the volume of the lump of pulsing gold he occupied. Nutriment placentas and recycling cells were connected to navel and anus by umbilicus and catheter. The golden fluid acted both as brain and as womb to them. Additional inputs like bundles of cable ran to eye sockets, ears, and the jawless hole in the front of the skull. These connections ran to a sensory exchange box floating just under an iron mask each creature carried on the surface of its golden integument.
The ostrich carried his iron mask on his helmet; the worm on his bow. The headless centaur carried his on his upright turret. The wheel had a mask perched at either side of its hub, at the crotch where his three right or three left arms met.
The masks were jointed so that mouth-slits and eyebrow-lines could be arranged in crude representations of human expressions, to assist the word communication, but all four masks at the moment showed the same blank look of stoic dispassion.
“Well,” Montrose said in English, “ain’t you just the most suck-ugly little critters Frankenstein ever barfed up on a bad day?”
The biped replied on two channels of information, in a grammar format called Rosetta stone, so that parallel meanings could be compared.
The first channel was the Swan initiation language. No two Swans spoke the same language, so each pair or trio of Swans seeking to address each other formulated a separate language for that dyad or triad. (If there was ever a time when any Swan spoke to a crowd, Montrose was unaware of it.) The initiation language was a set of protocols to aid the speed of linguistic development. Circuits in the crystal walls where more of Montrose’s brain circuits were hidden began the process of comparing signal codes and developing a common language.
The second channel contained a set of chimes or reverberations, an auditory code based on Monument logic-sets very similar to the Savant language of old. It was so logical and so mathematically elegant that Montrose could almost translate it by ear, without reference to the Swan singing of the first channel.
The biped mask said, “The comment is irrelevant, and will be discarded.” The voice was calm, and could have been a human voice.
“Hm. Will you discard it if’n I says it twice? Y’all are the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen without a butt.”
“The comment is again irrelevant. What can you deduce of this embassy by inspection? It is more efficient not to repeat known values.”
That was a reasonable request to make to a man above one’s own intelligence. It would be a waste of time for the biped to repeat things Montrose had already figured out. “You’re Blackie’s men. I recognize his handiwork. So how come you did not radio ahead and ask whatever you meant to ask? I could have said ‘No’ and ‘Go burn in Perdition’ with a lot less expense and trouble, and saved y’all a trip. Who you hiding from? Jupiter? His intelligence level is roughly fifty million these days. I take it that means you think you can hide from him for a while, but not forever.” Montrose had the gigantic exoskeleton of crystal tubes supporting him raise up his left hand, as slowly as a crane lifting a support beam to an upper story of a skyscraper, so he could tilt his huge head and rest his cheek on his fist. “There be two things I cannot puzzle out, not just by looking at you. First is, who do you think you are? For what purpose were you made? Second is, what is the point of all this?”
“We are the Third Human race, and stand to the Swans as they stand to the Firstlings. We are coherent where they are fissiparous. By Firstlings, we are called the Myrmidons.”
“I thought the word referred to ants, or maybe bullies who don’t question orders.”
There was no reply to that.
“My name’s Menelaus. And don’t say Meany Louse, cause that joke weren’t funny even back when I was human. How you doing? You fellers want anything to drink? I got whiskey. You can try the mechanical bull, excepting you ain’t got butts.”
The mask on the blunt prow of the wormlike serpent spoke. “We have no need for alcohol nor athletics. We suffer no fatigue, we require no entertainment nor diversion, and we have no capacity for joy.” The voice was cold, as emotionless as if a winter forest had spoken.
“No family names, neither, I take it?” Montrose said. “No families? No nothing?”
The serpent mask said, “We are the first iteration of incarnate humanity that has done entirely away with the vagaries of sex, being reproduced artificially upon decree. It has freed us of much of the inefficiencies and disturbances of baseline humanity. We are creatures of pure reason, the Men of the Mind.”
“So the suicide rate among you is really high, huhn?”
The wheel masks spoke. Its voices were machinelike, too inhuman even to sound cold. “Each individual is owned by, and thought-monitored by, and obeys, whichever commission designs him; and owns whomever he designs and commissions. Any man who takes up a duty one of us fails, takes on his role and privileges and rank. If our memories are sufficiently worthy to be placed in long-term storage, and passed on to next generations, then the memory-lineage is given a name-designation, and downloaded into receptor engrams in the child organism. Hence suicide is irrelevant.”
“Except a high suicide rate shows you weren’t built right. Some things can’t be changed in human nature, no matter what Blackie says.”
The wheel masks spoke again. “There are pain-inducing circuits wired into the brain which allow for remote monitoring of neural-electrical activity. The torment causes no physical damage, and any thoughts, hopes, or prayers which might allow the subject sufficient fortitude to resist the pain are isolated as nerve paths and treated with opiates, hindering concentration. The technique tends to deter serial mass-suicides.”
The serpent mask added, “The change to human nature can be made if sufficient pain and sacrifice is inflicted.”
“Nasty. And Blackie actually thought critters of your crippled psychology were what the Hyades wanted as slaves, eh?”
The centaur mask spoke for the first time. Its voice was a baritone, with inflections ringing with pride and command. It sounded human and more than human. “You mock the heroic nature of our race.”
“Damn straight, I do.”
The centaur reared up on its hind legs, assuming the posture of a four-handed giant. The mask in the center of the human-shaped upper torso said coldly, “We suffer that others may live. All humanity would perish if the Myrmidons did not stand ready to preserve them. Our moral code is of iron, and it dictates that extinction must be avoided at all costs.”
Menelaus said wryly, “Lots of men say they have a code which promotes survival. Funny thing is, those are the very codes that don’t.”
“Lesser men may say what they wish. We are Myrmidons. We stand ready to pay that cost.”
“So what about your suicide rate? That don’t sound like survival at all costs to me.”
The centaur folded itself down on its haunches. “An elite force must purge the weak from its candidates: it is the same for races. Life serves life.”
The wheel said, “We are designed directly based on the Monument mathematics describing the mind-body correlations.”
“Which means what?”
The ostrich-shaped biped said, “It means we are highly adaptable, having only rudimentary personality formations, and therefore the aliens, no matter what their psychology, will surely find us useful. At the apex of all memory chains, the basic curriculum of value judgments and axioms from which the Third Race takes its form, is the Senior and the Learned Del Azarchel.”
The serpent added, “Our mental forms are designed to be compatible with what is known of the Hyades behavior strategies.”
“So his personality is reflected in all of you? You are all Blackie? Your whole damned race is Blackie? And he tortures himself to keep from killing himself? What kind of twisted freak is he? Pox on my poking stick! After all this time, I still ain’t got no idea what makes his sick mind tick.”
The biped said, “The comments are irrelevant, and will be discarded.”
One of the smaller Montroses standing on the table said, “Mortiferous pestilence, but I ain’t heard Blackie called Senior in a long time! Not the Master of the World no more, eh?”
And the voice of Iron Ghost Montrose said from the crystal wall, “He’s back to Landing Party boss.”
Montrose pondered that for a moment with several of his minds.
7. Voyages to Stepmother Earths
A.D. 14303 TO 14551
Long ago, Blackie had launched the Emancipation to Epsilon Eridani, ten lightyears from Sol, bringing a delighted Montrose. It was not exactly his first interstellar voyage, but it was the first one he made while sane. Now that Jupiter had decreed an end to Blackie’s exile, he had no trouble finding volunteers to create a new Hermetic Order, from which he bred and selected a picked complement of Swans officers and Firstling crew, mostly Sylphs.
Fairer than all songs, brighter than a sword unsheathed, the great ship opened her wings of fire, and rode a river of light across the endless night.
The world there, a tide-locked world called Nocturne, had been too poor to build a deceleration laser, so the Emancipation had shed one sail ahead, and caught in her deceleration chutes the reflected beam from that sail as it retreated into endless space.
The humans—if they could he called that—had enthusiastically embraced the sciences of pantropy which Jupiter had narrowcast to them before their first landfall. The deracination ship was still present in orbit, as an O’Neill colony from which populations had been, from time to time in centuries long past, floated randomly to the surface in great bubbles of alien material. Through pantropy those humans and their livestock were radically altered to allow them to survive, and a different species dominated each zone of ever-colder and ever-darker climates from the plutonian West Pole to the almost-terrestrial clime of the Terminator, the line of eternal dusk that surrounded the pole-to-pole equator of the planet.
The world was ruled by a cabal of cliometrists called Actuaries, who manipulated economies and events to force families and clans to tinker with their gene plasms and produce the various freakish sub-races to fill the allotted slots in their biologically determined caste system.
The dayside of Nocturne was uninhabitable, but Montrose and Del Azarchel had shown the Actuaries how to grow self-replicating acres of solar energy cells across the dead sea bottoms there.
In gratitude for the industrial revolution this innovation had fathered, the Actuaries had cannibalized the hulk of the deracination ship to build a launching laser in order to allow the Emancipation to sail back to Sol.
The round trip had taken less than a century.
Later, Del Azarchel was commanded by the growing Jupiter Brain to mount an expedition to Delta Pavonis, the other surviving colony, nearly bankrupting the Earth to do so.
This colony was twice as far away, a world called Splendor. Like a white gem set in an opalescent ring, Splendor shared its orbit with a bright, multicolored ring system stretching entirely around Delta Pavonis, a sun ringed like Saturn. This asteroid belt was thought to be the remnant of a disintegrated gas giant of which Splendor was supposed to be a surviving moon. At every latitude, the immense and brightly colored bands of the belt were visible, a rainbow running from horizon to horizon through the sun.
Falling stars were a daily or hourly occurrence. The icy landscape was broken with crater lakes, remnants of asteroid falls of dinosaur-extinction size, apparently falling with appalling frequency. It was a location only minds utterly indifferent to the chances of survival would select to plant a colony.
Their cold, low-gravity, diamond-bright world had a year some four hundred days long, but, unlike Nocturne, rotated with a ten-hour day, so the deracination ship could assume a geosynchronous orbit and lower its vast length like a space elevator, allowing a low energy method of ascent to orbit, and easy access to the seventeen large moons and countless smaller satellites crowding the world.
A single equatorial ocean cinctured the globe. Glacier covered the entire northern continent and the southern, sculpted into ghostly, fantastic shapes by high winds and low gravity. All was ice-locked save the belt of rugged seashore fjords and cliffs and narrow valleys where human fields and farms and walled towns grew. The golden domes and steaming spires of the seven competing ecological stations, placed among the precipices and crags of these fierce shores were now the seats of the world’s arrogant ruling clans, the Houses of Splendor.
The local life, a spongy seaweed and a plethora of colorful jellies, lichens, molds, and balloonlike invertebrates, was obliterated, and the chemical composition of the equatorial ocean-belt and atmosphere slowly changed to suit human needs, as bacteria, then spores, then arctic sea life, piscine then mammalian, was introduced, one layer at a time, carefully, slowly.
The Splendids waited with astonishing patience for uncounted years in airtight sanctuaries worshipping their frozen and slumbering forefathers, waiting for their environmental engineering to tame their world of icy seas and jagged rocks and constant meteor impacts. Their grandfathers emerged in pressure suits, their fathers in breathing masks, and they emerged in parkas, and danced and skated on the ice beneath the earthly pine trees in an unearthly world they had made their own.
The Splendids made it a point of pride never to biomanipulate their folk to match the environment, but always to coax and torment the world into matching the folk. The Chimera and Melusine among them were forced to breed with the Witches and Sylphs to produce a strange but sturdy hybrid called a Splendid: long-lived and light-boned with neural antennae for sending and receiving signals. The Giants and Locusts, outnumbered and unaggressive, were killed in hideous wars and massacres.
The proud, austere, and uncooperative Swans retreated to the regions of icy inland waste, far from the single sea, lost in glacier-torn and treeless tundra larger than the entire combined land mass of Earth, lost beyond the reach of any possible pogrom. There they altered their children to adapt to the environment as it then was, and erected de-terraforming stations antithetical to the attempts of the Splendids: these icy Swans survived in volcanic craters or deep valleys or caverns where the smog of the original atmosphere still tenaciously clung, in palaces grown from surviving native fungi or glued together from the opalescent bodies of the floating invertebrates. According to the rumor Del Azarchel heard from the domestic ghosts of the Seven Houses, the Swans were merely waiting for men to die, that they might emerge and claim the world.
Nor did the ghosts disagree. The cliometric calculus of their many environmental xypotechs showed that the world of Splendids would suffer environmental decay and dropping population rates across the millennia, unless a mass of people as large as the original forced migration was gathered here by the Twenty-fifth Millennium. If not, the world would fall below the minimal population numbers needed to maintain the atmospheric towers and oceanic infusion wells, causing environmental degradation and a return to the original atmospheric balance of gases, and causing death of the entire (and entirely artificial) Earth-like biosphere.
And the cold-eyed Swans of Delta Pavonis in their white-winged robes would emerge from their icy coffins in the wastelands, never smiling once, and live their lives of isolation, under once-more native skies filled with smokes and dripping airborne jellyfish equally poisonous to man, meeting only to mate, and building no tools, neither interstellar ships nor interstellar radios.
For many years Del Azarchel dwelt on the cold world of Splendor, for the planet lacked the energy richness needed to return him home. Then a worldwide war broke out, a grim absurdity on a world so desperately void and empty. Del Azarchel, aiding and betraying the ferocious warlords one after another, used his ship’s sails as orbital mirrors to melt and crack the glaciers where various armies hid, or sink the icebergs used as barges by their navies, or used his ship’s position to deflect meteors toward defenseless towns, until he was in able to decree himself supreme leader, nobilissimus and lord. When he commanded the cowering civilization to gather the resources needed to exile him back to Sol, gladly they obeyed.
The Emancipation towed the launching laser beyond their cometary halo, far beyond the orbit of Tailfeather, the outermost planet of Delta Pavonis. The lonely laser lighthouse was manned by Swans and thinking machines with no loyalty to the Splendids, and by some miracle the laser beam did not fail during an entire decade of terawatt output.
Del Azarchel mounted no further expeditions to Delta Pavonis. The chances that the Swans, or, if not they, whosever unwise hands it might be that the transplutonian lighthouse of Delta Pavonis fell into next, would not turn the apocalyptically powerful laser against the planet Splendid, were very slim. Del Azarchel did not expect the colony to survive, and Montrose (for Del Azarchel after his return shared all his finding with him) expected no better.
There were no other destinations from which any radio messages returned, and so no other expeditions from Sol were launched.
All the other colonies from Proxima to 82 Eridani were dead, twisted half-human bodies of failed pantropic experiments unburied under atmospheres never quite terraformed to a proper breathable mix. Montrose heard the last words of the last survivors on the radio, at least of those colonists who had the wealth and will to build interstellar-range radio lasers.
Montrose lost interest in a lot of things, after that. The interstellar human civilization which was needed for Rania’s return was stillborn.
8. The Endarkening
A.D. 14600 TO 14990
After the interstellar radio silence fell, and nothing more was heard from Splendor of Delta Pavonis nor from Nocturne of Epsilon Eridani, Montrose augmented himself up to the level of Selene. The sudden clarity was blinding. All too clearly, he saw what was happening on Tellus: Mass ignorance spread as biological man became ever more dependent on his talking tools and talking beasts. Electronic man became ever more dependent on applications and appliances from higher up the mental ladder, from the servants of Jupiter. Some of the Ghosts Montrose met were illiterate. They were computers which could not add and subtract. Factions spreading an anti-intellectual cult—no one wanted to be like Jupiter—had won the day on three continents. Jupiter had already done everything, discovered everything, knew everyone, and knew how to run your life better than you did. There was not much point to anything.
Montrose, no matter how often he redid the calculations, found his cliometry showing that the human race in all its variations was going extinct, and the machines were being pushed by an evolutionary and economic pressure to ever fewer intellectual or self-aware functions.
For centuries, Montrose kept hoping stubbornly that he had made some error, overlooked some variable, or that Jupiter would somehow save mankind. But the time turned and turned again like a grindstone, and the cliometric slope bottomed out.
The knowledge that he had failed the task she had left him behind to do, that there would be no deceleration laser to stop Rania’s returning ship, and that, even had there been, no interstellar polity would exist to prove the human race were starfarers, eventually drove Montrose into self-imposed exile here.
But this mystery now followed him. The cliometry had never been wrong before. He had given up hope. Was there any cause for hope again?
9. Nonextinction Event
A.D. 22196
Montrose said, “Why ain’t the human race extinct? How did my cliometry go wrong?”
The biped mask said, “We ourselves are the historical vector you did not anticipate. Do you wish to recalculate your future history on the basis of minimal or no Swan influence on Firstling history?”
Montrose looked at the gold-coated creatures wryly. The beauty, the sheer physical grace of the Swans, was part of the reason for the human inferiority complex. That was not a factor with these ugly and wretched creatures. Montrose did not bring that up.
Just in his head, he could also see how the new factor of a race like this would play out. There were several mutually beneficial social interaction mechanisms Montrose could foresee. These creatures were servile enough that the crushing inferiority the Swans felt toward Tellus, or Tellus toward Jupiter, would not be a factor. The Firstling humans, from Sylphs to Melusine, would be inferior to these pathetic creatures only in certain respects, and only mildly. These Third Humans might as a whole be smarter than the First Humans, but the individuals lacked the shocking brilliance of the Swans. Ironically, the Thirds would act as an insulating layer protecting the Firsts from Jupiter.
Montrose spoke. “I don’t need no recalculation. I can see you are the product of a high-energy civilization. One that could not have come about on exhausted Earth. There is only one way that happened. Del Azarchel is the ‘Senior’ again because he found another Diamond Star, or some vast source of contraterrene. When was the ship launched?”
The biped said, “In a.d. 15077 we Myrmidons hollowed out the main belt planetoid 35 Leucothea, and affixed with lightsails and energy manipulation tackle, and coated the surface with picotechnological armor called argent, allowing the entire surface to enjoy the tensile strength of the strong nuclear force. This White Ship mass is roughly equal to the moon of Saturn, Hyperion, and the energy aura she can generate allows her to tow a mass far in excess of her own.”
“I know her destination was the M17, the Omega Nebula in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy, five thousand lightyears away. Which star?”
The wheel said, “Kleinmann’s Anonymous Star.”
A helpful almanac stored in one of his brains helpfully provided that Kleinmann 1973 was a binary of two O-type stars, highly energetic short-lived stars of sixty solar masses, the center of an odd double-shelled nebula formation, and the source of immense X-ray vents.
Montrose, studying the astronomical data in this file concerning the odd pattern of energy discharges, was thunderstruck. It had been staring him in the face all the time, sitting here in an unexplored corner of his encyclopedia of memories. One of the two O-type stars in Kleinmann’s binary was made of positive matter. The other was obviously antimatter, for the inner shell of the nebula had been hollowed out by antimatter particles carried on the solar wind from the negative star, which, encountering the central mass of the nebula cloud, converted it to pure photonic energy, which, in turn blew the outer shell beyond the dangerous range of the negative star. Nothing else could account for the weird geometry of this hollow cloud of stardust.
Once again, the Monument Builders had placed their lure in the midst of an astronomical wonder; one which any starfaring race would be curious to go see.
“In April a.d. 20177,” said the centaur, “the visible output of Kleinmann’s Anonymous Star altered dramatically. This was the flare of the launching starbeam, pointed directly at Sol.”
This meant that the expedition within less than a year of arrival had successfully erected a launching laser and left behind a staff, biological or mechanical, to man it, and had launched the return mission immediately.
Montrose checked the astronomical records, found the change in stellar output. At the time, he had thought it was the variable star entering a higher period. But no, the explanation was that the staff remaining behind had remained loyal to their task for two thousand and nineteen years, despite the immense energy cost of shooting an interstellar-strength acceleration laser beam from one arm of the galaxy to another for two millennia. The sheer persistence was awe inspiring.
And, of course, someone, perhaps the Myrmidons of the asteroid belt or perhaps the Jupiter Brain, would be required to power up a vortex in the sun and maintain a starbeam to decelerate the vessel for the second two thousand five hundred years of voyage, acting on schedule and pinpointing the position of the vessel. Montrose had little doubt one or both would be equal to the task.
Montrose revised his estimation of the Myrmidons upward. Perhaps Del Azarchel had designed a race with sufficient longevity to be the backbone of a starfaring civilization.
Montrose was momentarily struck with wonder. A human colony five thousand lightyears away. How long ago had Del Azarchel been planning that? Was it as far back as their first visit to Selene? Was that what he had been scanning the heavens for so diligently?
He said, “When did Blackie begin to think other Monuments might be around other stars? Stands to reason a hunter sets out more snares than one. Can you ask him?”
“We cannot,” said the biped.
“Aw, c’mon, you can break your orders for me. Bragging to me about how he outsmarted me is practically the only pleasure he has in life, the poor, wretched snot.”
“We cannot,” said the biped. “He departed.”
“What? Did he come with you partway and return back to the Inner System? I did not detect a second vessel launching from yours. No matter. Radio him. About eight hours round trip signal to Earth, this time of year.”
“You misconstrue. The Senior Del Azarchel accompanied the Second Expedition to the Omega Nebula,” said the biped. “He will not make landfall until a.d. 25177.”
“Damnation,” was all Montrose said.
The biped said, “I take it you understand the point? Components of the First Expedition left behind have been instructed to use the antimatter O-type star’s energy to create this second ultrasuperjovian-sized brain mass in his own image, and decipher the Omega Monument for himself. Since the Earth has already been discovered by the Hyades, he deduced that there would be no additional harm by disturbing this Omega Monument.”
“No, ugly bug, it is you that miss the point. Your components left behind went there to establish a second empire. The fifteen stars housing human colonies around Sol all shine on graveyards. Maybe Splendor of Delta Pavonis is still alive, but lacks interstellar radio, but I doubt it. He wants mankind to flourish in some remote part of space free from Hyades influence,” said Montrose. “While the expedition was gone, did your astronomers detect any intelligent signs of life in the Sagittarian Arm?”
“There is, of course, considerable stellar and energetic activity in that arm of the galaxy. Which, if any, is the byproduct of intelligent action is impossible to determine without a specific knowledge of the intelligence’s goals,” said the wheel.
The biped asked, “Do you conclude the Senior has abandoned us? That he is not aboard the White Ship which has been in transit all this time?”
Montrose said, “I dunno. But riddle me this: If Blackie was still interested in Earth, even a wee bit, why didn’t he make a second body of himself to leave behind to run this first empire?”
The biped said, “So he did. They all wanted to go.”
But the centaur mask said, “He cares nothing for empire. That task is ours.”
But the snake mask said, “We all participate in some or all of his memory chains. He has not departed from us, for he is in us, and is with us.”
But the wheel masks said, “The Senior is the Jupiter Brain. More and more of the levels of the mental ecology of that realm of the outer Noösphere are becoming as one with him. He absorbs lesser minds, and compels the loyalty of smaller spirits. Without such loyalty, Jupiter will not expend the vast resources needed to ignite the deceleration beam five hundred years from now.”
Montrose said, “So you are telling me that Blackie will return here, loaded with as much antimatter as we need, the same millennium as the Second Sweep is coming?”
“No,” answered the biped. “One thousand sixty-four years later, so it will be in the next millennium. However, our energy budget after that point will exceed the total theoretically possible energy budget of the approaching Second Armada, called Cahetel. We are concerned with this interval.”
The centaur said, “In his absence, we turn to you to rectify matters.”
Montrose could feel the gap in his thinking as obvious, to someone of his brainpower, as a missing tooth felt with a tongue. The sensation was annoyingly similar to trying to pick up a watermelon seed with thumb and forefinger. But he was not smart enough to coax the shy thought into view. (Evidently the shy thought was equally smart as he.)
“I don’t get what you are asking me, or why you are here,” he said crossly. “You are planning to surrender to the Second Armada and turn over the Earth to them for another rape session. Why disturb me?”
The serpent mask said, “We overestimated your intelligence. We will explain in smaller and clearer steps. The Senior contrived the progenitors of our race to be complementary to what was known of Hyades psychology and practice. All possible reproductive strategies can be roughly categorized into two groups: the reptilian strategy of engendering many offspring and expending small resources on their care and support, or the kindred strategy of engendering few offspring while expending large resources on their care and support. Due to the vastness of space and the cost of moving resources between star systems, the Hyades has adopted the reptilian strategy. The R-strategy means that Hyades will expend no concern nor care for the civilizations it uses to reproduce the cliometric vectors of its social organization.”
“Yeah. Hyades treats us and everyone like the clap. I got the concept. Where are you going with this?”
“You acknowledge, then, that to the Hyades Domination, we stand in the relation as an offspring, and the resources expended on us are calculated by the reptilian strategy of utmost frugality?” said the serpent.
“Sure. Hyades casts out colonies without caring whether they live or die, like sea turtles leaving their eggs alone on a beach. Of course, I always wondered why Hyades put us into a situation where we had to build a Jupiter Brain in order to decode and transmit the secrets of pantropy and terraforming to our colonies. Because if we did not care, we wouldn’t have bothered … but what does this have to do with my question?”
“Do you acknowledge that the entity astronomers called Cahetel, which will arrive in the Twenty-fifth Millennium, stands in the same relation to the Hyades as do we?”
“Wait—what?”
“The Cahetel entity, like Asmodel before her, is not an expedition as you understand the term. The Hermetic was sent to the Diamond Star as if she were still dependent upon and loyal to the authorities who dispatched and funded her. This was an error. When Hermetic returned, history had erased those authorities, and the new generation of polities on Earth, who were strangers to the Hermetic and her crew, attempted to confiscate the ship and cargo.”
“A piratical crime we are still feeling the echoes of,” muttered Montrose. “Had it not been for that, Blackie would not have declared himself King of the World and Emperor of the North Pole or whatever.”
“It was not a crime at all,” said the serpent coolly, “but a perfectly rational action which should have been anticipated. The expedition erred because the authority who sent it assumed a K-strategy, a kinship strategy, could be maintained across a fifty lightyear gap between Sol and the Diamond Star, across the one hundred twenty-five year interval between the expedition launch and return. We calculate that Hyades makes no such error.”
“You mean the Hyades does not give a tinker’s damn about what happens to the Cahetel expedition?”
“Affirmative. Because it is not an expedition properly so called, and neither was Asmodel. They were colonies. They happened to be colonies in motion. According to the Cold Equations the Hyades must use to organize their affairs in the long term, the expense in energy and the profits from cultivating the human race and seeding us to colony worlds, surely is borne by the entities, whatever their form, that live in the Cahetel Cloud or the Asmodel gas giant.”
“Then they stand or fall all on their lonesome. That means—”
It meant that armed resistance to the Hyades was not futile after all. They were not fighting an entire interstellar empire, just one boatload of adventurers, a cross between a squad of big-game hunters and slave-raiding party.
It meant that the realization which so long ago had driven him into this self-inflicted exile was simply and hellishly wrong. Montrose was, despite himself, momentarily appalled at how long it had been. Eleven thousand, one hundred and thirty-five years. It was roughly the same amount of time that separated the Hamburg culture of Late Upper Paleolithic reindeer hunters from the year of his birth. And what had he accomplished during that time? He had napped.
The serpent mask said, “Our psychology, which you dismiss as loveless and cruel, is based on this same mathematical model of reproductive strategy. This enables us to understand Cahetel. If the expense of conquest is too great, she must retreat to serve her own economic self-interest, and seek another target. Cahetel has no loyalty to Hyades, who will not avenge her downfall. If Man can drive off the Cahetel Cloud, she will not be allowed to return home to the Hyades stars.”
“The Swans thought they could make the attack too expensive. All that will happen is that the Hyades will tack the extra cost to our bill, and keep the human race as an indentured servant for longer.”
“Correction: the Cold Equations show that the entities like Cahetel and Asmodel take all the entrepreneurial risk themselves. We suspect Asmodel has been destroyed, because too many human colonies died, and the return on investment was insufficient. And, unlike the First Sweep, we need only maintain opposition for one thousand sixty years. At four lightyears distance, the White Ship will be within effective firing range.”
“Hold up. What opposition? Was Asmodel destroyed? Destroyed? Are you saying—” Montrose realized that the Witch-woman, Zoraida, who had told him so unthinkably long ago that mankind had won the war, had been no wild-eyed idealist. She had been right.
Man had won.
That meant he could win again.
10. Dissent
The biped spoke up, his voice cold and crisp. “Have we not been clear? With the departure of the Senior Del Azarchel, our prime memory chains have suffered divarication. There is an opposition faction among us who advocate a more efficient strategy of Hyades-Tellurian interaction. The five of us here occupying these four bodies represent the memory chains of this faction: you may called us Dissent.”
“What is the, ah, more efficient strategy you advocate for Hyades cooperation?”
The centaur said in a voice like a hunting horn: “Fight to the last man, and die in the breach.”
Montrose did not bother to hide his expression of shocked stupidity. His eyes did not bulge out only because they were so deep set, but he stared, speechless.
The centaur held up its gauntlets and said, “We are come to plead: Lead us. Inspire us, advise us!”
The biped added coolly, “We know, beyond doubt, that you can be trusted to fight and to defy the Hyades. Our own master, Del Azarchel, whose echoes linger in the Jupiter Brain, we do not know beyond doubt.”
Montrose said, “But you think the Jupiter Brain will permit opposition?”
The serpent spoke, “Despite being incomprehensible, Jupiter is rational, surely. The Cold Equations determine what they determine. If it is more efficient to resist than to submit, then that efficiency will prevail even in the multidimensional labyrinths of nested mental ecologies forming the intellect of Jupiter.”
“You hope so,” said Montrose sardonically.
The wheel, in a voice as mechanical and emotionless as it had used before, said, “We cannot live without hope. Are we not men?”
Montrose began slowing down the rate of rotation of the carousel on whose walls this chamber and all the curving corridor before it and behind it rested. The joke of maintaining an Earth-like environment had palled on him. He saw now that his next few centuries would be spent in space.
When the centrifugal force had dropped to half Earth’s gravity, he stood, letting tentacles and bars of the logic crystal (which was, after all, just as much a part of him as his own brain) haul him upright.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have more resources to sustain a siege than ever mankind controlled during the First Sweep. This time, we do not pack everyone in the core of the Earth, and wait for the Hyades agent to blot out the sunlight. We use your asteroid homes. We make them all into ships, or warships, or sailing vessels able to maneuver through the interplanetary battle-volume. We fill them with your people, which y’all can multiply like the ants you are named for. Every asteroid with a nickel-iron core, we turn not into a logic diamond, but into solid murk logic, which is more compact. So instead of one White Ship, we will have a ten-thousand-ship Black Fleet, a glorious fleet! We get more minor planets from the Kuiper Belt, and look around for moons any Gas Giants ain’t using.”
He drew a deep breath, eyes no longer looking at them. He was spellbound with a vision of an entire solar system armed and armored, fortresses larger than worlds, and all the moons and asteroids and meteors streaming like black battlewagons and superdreadnoughts toward the roaring inferno of war.
“I accept the commission and the challenge. I will advise you in an unofficial capacity. I will fight. I’ll do it for her. It will be a fine thing to be alive again.”
Montrose laughed, and it was the laugh of a titan. “By all the pestilence of hell! It will be a damn fine thing to be alive again!”