The Architect of Aeons

  Even if the baseline human races, all of them, were nothing but intestinal bacteria to Jupiter, a veterinarian could not afford to be unaware of the actions, malign or benevolent, of humble life growing through his pets.

  Nor could mankind colonize the stars without the praxes of pantropy and terraforming. Nor could these two new techniques in their unimaginable complexity be unriddled without a Jupiter Brain.

  Nor could mankind any longer choose not to colonize these far and deadly worlds—that choice had been ripped from man the moment Del Azarchel’s mutineers had powered up the mining satellites to star-lift anticarbon from the burning face of the small, dim red Cepheid called V 886 Centuri, and the jaws of the trap snapped fast. The Domination was flinging mankind in countless populations at barren worlds of burning rock and biting ice, beneath skies hot with radioactivity or thick with clouds of venom.

  It was a simple intelligence test with but two possible answers: man would adapt and survive, or fail and die.

  Montrose said, “Can I have your word that you will attempt in good faith to protect the baseline humans from suffering under the Power of Jupiter?”

  “I remind you that the praxis of pantropy will involve altering several generations of human beings, and that these tests cannot be carried out on unintelligent test subjects, due to the interrelated nature of neural, biological, and psychological systems. The human experiments will no doubt be raised in imitations of distant environments to test their adaptability, and unsuccessful strains will not be permitted to reproduce. Since one of the foremost traits needed in any pioneer effort is fertility, and foremost psychological drives must favor large families, this will inevitably require a violent suppression, when it comes time to exterminate them, of the very tenacity and fertility Jupiter will be breeding for. Nor is a single generation of the various subspecies sufficient. Nor can the experiments be confined to volunteers, since children do not volunteer to be born. Nor can human life be experimented upon and tested to destruction without pain. However, my intelligence is limited. Shall I inquire of my principal?”

  Montrose nodded, which, in zero gee, merely made his spine flex oddly, and so he raised his hand and gave the knuckle-knock spaceman’s sign for affirmative.

  Eighty minutes passed.

  “Tellus says that the harm you inflicted on mankind by instructing Pellucid and all the race of Swans to violent resistance against the Hyades, and then interrupting the internal perceptions of the Noösphere to protect mankind from the very Potentate assigned to wage war to protect them (and therefore crippling that war effort, making it, if possible, even more vain and hopeless) has now in this hour come home to roost. At estimated growth rates, Tellus will be less than one-tenth the intellectual power of Jupiter by the mid One Hundred Eightieth Century. Any promises made now, considering the imbalance in mental acuity, would prove meaningless. Despite this, Selene—who is aware of this conversation—intervenes and offers to do all things she can to aid the small and humble races.”

  “Why is the moon willing to make that promise, but not the Earth?” asked Montrose.

  Del Azarchel spoke up, not the kenosis. “Tellus incorporated the wreckage of Pellucid and the echoes and records of Exarchel into his base structure. Exarchel by that point was the end product of ten thousand years of xypotechnological development. The Hermetic Order prevented the electronic forms of life, pure mental life, from falling into the nirvana of a halt state by a forever provoking of conflict, mortal conflict, with other variations of each iteration of the mind involved. Countless dead-ends, useless systems, legal and moral and ethical proxies, and information-ecology infospheres were put through the trial of fire, and though thousands died, what lived achieved stability, a more perfect form. Selene, for reasons I cannot fathom, believes in mercy. Tellus believes in Darwin. How can it do otherwise? Darwin made him.”

  Montrose said to the image on the bulkhead, “Is that right? Is Blackie giving me the straight story?”

  But the image said, “The Nobilissimus tells the story to suit his interest. Tellus takes more of his psychology and philosophy from you than from him.”

  “But I love mankind!”

  “Do you indeed? Much of the individualism and unsentimentality of the Swan race was also written into Tellus as he grew to self-awareness, and that competitive streak, the stubbornness, the pride never to yield nor to seek quarter, is more than a little at odds with the maternal instinct you now wish the mother planet had.

  “But this is to no point,” the voice of the image continued. “Tellus is a failing system and will soon pass away. The Jupiter Brain shall rule Man, or no one. Man will spread to the nearby stars, or perish on this single world, aborted. Rania shall live, or die.”

  Montrose said, “I don’t think I need a long time to think this over. Rania flew to the stars to make mankind free, to prove we were worthy of freedom, to prove we were starfarers. If the only way to do that is to be a race of slaves, what is the point? She did not foresee this, because if she had, she would have stayed home with me, and we would have lived out our lives in peace. After I shot Blackie, of course.” He nodded toward Del Azarchel. “No offense, but you were tyrant of the world, and you would not leave us alone.”

  “None taken,” said Del Azarchel magnanimously. “Were the situation reversed, I would have done the same. But … what if she did know?”

  “Eh?”

  “Every man would like both liberty and life, but what if he can choose only one? For liberty also means the liberty to make war, does it not? For to be free means to be armed, and to be armed means to be dangerous—you know this better than any man. It is in your bones. I choose servility and life, because while there is life, I may yet prevail. You chose liberty, and death, and will not bear any man’s yoke. It is noble sentiment, but it is merely sentimental. But what of her? Which way does Rania choose? She granted peace on Earth, and created the dynamic stability called peace in history, but it was by putting me on the throne of the world. Me. The benevolent tyrant.”

  “What the hell are you implying, Blackie?”

  “That she thinks as I do. She wants what I want. Did I not raise her from childhood? Spend years with her? Teach her? Know her?”

  “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 cr
ew; 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.