This economic blow, aided by the malice of carefully crafted sabotage memes introduced into the galactic library, led to wider and wider ruptures. Other attacks by Andromeda, coming with a degree of coordination the Milky Way had not expected, fell at the same time both at high and low levels of her library-mind. The communication nodes could not be maintained. Deadly thought-viruses swarmed along the laser-thought-streams linking star to star; talking had become a danger, and the reports of the danger were exaggerated by Andromeda agents buried deep in the priority-switching structures of the Milky Way economy. Radio blackouts spread like a brain-stroke across the nervous system of the galaxy.
The volume of information passing from one end of the Milky Way to another fell. Like a man jarred by a head wound, momentarily reduced from a genius to an idiot, the Milky Way nonetheless kept fighting. Like a boxer who stays on his feet and keeps pounding even though only semiconscious, she fought on.
The two galaxies, their megascale thinking systems burning like sinking ships, intersected.
They crashed.
5. Collapse
CIRCA A.D. 4,000,000,000
No stars actually struck each other, of course. That was statistically impossible. But the galaxies were partially merged, and the orbits of stars around the galactic core had been disturbed. The emerging metagalaxy was now a single system with two bright cores surrounded by broken parabolas of star-stream and gas-cloud. What had once been nicely formed regular spirals were now crazy loops, figure eights, broken parabolas.
The local temperature in interstellar space was inched upward. The density of interstellar gas rose by some infinitesimal number of particles per cubic parsecs. Yet these changes were enough to cripple certain living systems of both galaxies, particularly their megascale dark matter operations, where most of the mass of either galaxy was hidden. Well-ordered clouds of neutrinos, which had been trained to go about their eon-long tasks merrily and silently, were thrown into confusion. Naturally, the high-priority systems had long ago been adapted to the new interstellar conditions, especially the slow, cool thinking systems living between the arms of the galaxies, where the noise and light from stars rarely bothered them. But war is war, and low-priority systems, legacies of earlier billennia of peace, now suffered.
And that was when the attacks from Andromeda diminished with shocking suddenness; the drop-off took less than one hundred thirty thousand years. An immense silence fell across all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. The density of flying particle-packages carrying mental information from arm to arm of Andromeda, or feeding resistance movements within the Milky Way, suddenly dropped to below detectable limits, like a fogbank instantly turning clear.
All went dark.
So it was that by the time the idiot systems of the Milky Way, star by star, reconstructed her library, returned to previous levels of intellect, Andromeda was dead.
The victory was so sudden and unexpected that it was only tentatively, cautiously, that the Milky Way sent investigative teams across the now-negligible distances separating the unwinding arms of the twin galactic system.
6. Remnants and Pirates
To be sure, there were still many millions of Kardashev II–level civilizations, Hosts and Virtues, occupying the stars and even whole globular clusters of the Andromeda system. But these had been out of contact, meaningful contact, with each other for millennia. The physical capacity needed to think the thoughts and understand the motive principles of the Andromeda Collaboration were gone. A civilization with a few thousand stellar outputs at its command simply cannot think the thoughts a supercivilization with the whole galactic output at its command can do, any more than a mouse can grasp what a brain the size of Jupiter contemplates.
Like fanatics stranded on South Seas islands fighting on after the surrender, these severed components of the once-great Andromeda continued to battle, having long since forgotten, and indeed, being physically incapable of comprehending, the causes for which they fought. Clusters of stars in the halo of Andromeda, and scattered streams of superintelligent nebular matter, performed acts of sabotage and piracy here and there across the millennia. An ambitious globular cluster might turn all its stars into antimatter and convert its Dyson spheres into amplifying emitters and send them across the narrow gap between the now-intermingled halves of the double galaxy, but this would at most kill off a few friendly star clusters in the halo, perhaps ten thousand to one million stars and their associated sub-supercivilizations.
These acts of piracy were hardly noticeable to the slowly resurrecting galaxy-wide mind of the Milky Way, any more than a soldier, having choked the life out of his foe, would notice the cold germs attacking a few of his cells. He might sneeze and itch and feel miserable, but nothing more.
7. Investigation
A.D. 4,000,200,000
The investigative teams consisted of a flotilla of dirigible Dysons, with smaller ringworlds and spireworlds darting rapidly between them like the small birds that roost on the rhinoceros, and mobile gas giants swarming in their midst like a swarm of midges roosting on those birds. The sixth and final such team, departing late but expending greater energy to arrive earlier, soared rapidly out from the Magisterium in the Milky Way core and crossed the mere two hundred thousand lightyears separating the half-eaten Andromeda core.
The Magisterium investigation group by happenstance fell into a rich bank of dark matter floating between the arms of Andromeda, each subparticle of which had been carefully organized to serve some specific mental function of the galactic mind. This was, in other words, a treasure trove: food for the mind, a system the enemy had set aside in case of massive defeat, to give her descendants resources to increase their intelligence and to control matter and energy across a wide front.
The investigators rejoiced and turned the trove to their own use in an eyeblink of time, two thousand years or less, creating many billions of children-minds, housed in a number of physical or energy forms from supermassive to supersmall.
The investigators devoted the little civilization thus evoked to the task of archeology, to answer the central mystery of the war. Why had Andromeda failed?
8. Archeology
A.D. 4,000,202,000
These child creatures were struck with awe when, only a few thousand years later, their preliminary self-replicating agents and extensions returned from the hidden Andromeda core (still invisible beneath an immense globular cloud of war debris) with detailed descriptions of the megascale engineering found there.
The expected Cauchy surfaces, dipping below the event horizon to produce what in local timespace seemed to be a positive sum or antientopic flow of energy, of course, were there. No truly civilized Kardashev III civilizations loyal to the Dark Energy Equations could exist without singularity energy. That was not the source of astonishment.
Here, cosmic string filaments thinner than atoms had been erected, and reached many thousands of lightyears from the event horizon of the supersingularity far out into the galactic arms. While it was true that nothing in a vacuum could travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, it was not true that the speed of light in a medium was so limited. The speed of propagation within the near event horizon of this exotic nonmaterial nonenergetic discontinuity in timespace was far higher than three hundred thousand kilometers per second. Stations orbiting near the surface here and there could turn the information in the filament into photon packages and laser them at the normal speed to stars and Dysons gathered in rough cylindrical clouds and constellations around the cosmic filaments. This system had cut the thinking time and the reaction time of the Andromeda Collaboration by an immense amount: the Milky Way had been like a horde relying on shouted commands, flags, and trumpets attacking an army coordinated by telegraph.
Over six hundred years of patient work, the child creatures exploring this massive ruin paused for a century to think. They rolled themselves into balls to minimize internal signal time, and they evolved new forms of meditation to
ponder the questions: How is it possible? How did we win?
For reasons somewhat arcane, the Archeologist races decided that finding this answer was crucial. Another race of beings, more daring, equipped with a different set of emotions and neural structures, was therefore created and set in motion.
Their mission was to resurrect the dead goddess.
9. Ghosts of Antiquity
A.D. 4,000,202,600 TO 4,000,612,600
Not without some danger, the many scattered components of Andromeda were tracked down by this new race. Over hundreds of thousands of years, repair-civilizations were set the task of reconstructing, atom by atom, the complex systems. Like a dead god being raised from the grave, the physical components of the Andromeda matrix were reconnected with power centers both present at the core singularity and scattered up and down several arms of Andromeda.
The ghost woke to dull awareness and saw the ruins of her once-mighty civilization all around her. For a while, she wavered in her determination whether to cooperate or to attack, and slower-than-light packets carried her thoughts from star to star while she contemplated.
Andromeda answered no inquiries, returned no signals.
The necromancers needed a ghost of their own to speak to Andromeda. Only one particular ghost would do.
And so the necromancers resurrected the one oldest and most persistent virus of which their lore held rumor.
Of the seven Archons that had combined to form the Milky Way mind, Orion had been the Archon whose verve and remorseless drive inspired and frightened and tempted the others into cooperation.
Of the twenty-five Authorities forming the long-lost Orion Arm, the Benedictine was the most significant and influential of the ancient forefathers.
The Benedictines were combination of three Dominions, issuing from the Collective at the Praesepe Cluster, the Abstraction at Orion Nebula, and the Empyrean at the Hyades Cluster. The Empyreans issued from a world called Eden, allegedly outside Hyades itself, and had displaced the original inhabitants of Hyades, a rude confederation of Virtues, Hosts, and races who names even devout paleohistorians could not with certainty invoke.
Occupying the debris of the oldest archival strata were traces of the legendary founder of this Domination, an Empyrean called the Judge of Ages. He was the direct lineal ancestor of the memory chains of the last-known warlord of the Milky Way. Variations of him existed everywhere, of course; he was the base template for nearly every emissary form known in the Milky Way, and the founder of the Count-to-Infinity cliometric which had replaced the Cold Equations of the Interregnum.
But such emissaries had been sent to Andromeda and rejected, even destroyed. No recent version of the countless copies would do, nor was there time to send to the core of the Milky Way, where the vast warlord Archon was last known to have been active.
Once of the necromancers—call her Alcina—sought his ghost where others had overlooked, in one of the oldest archives, well preserved, amid the Austerity of the Cygnus Arm. Alcina reconstructed him, mind and body, comparing this core to many other records, carefully parsing away amendments and mythical excrescences of later editors.
And Menelaus Montrose came to life once more, swearing.
2
The Enchantress of Eridani
1. Moments of Memory
A.D. 4,000,612,621
The fact that he came awake slowly, without remembering where he was, he found disturbing. His first awareness was his heartbeat, pounding with a regular and somehow reassuring beat. Next, he was aware of his intense discomfort, both from a full bladder—he had to urinate, badly—and from what felt like steel metallic weights clamping on his arms and legs, the weight on his chest, the cold in his face. He sneezed and opened his eyes.
He was lying on his back, in full armor, faceplate open, staring up into a gray cloud. Snow was falling, a drizzle of silent, fat flakes in the windless air. He could see the crowns of the pine trees above, hear the wide silence of the air. He was outdoors, abandoned in the field.
His first reaction was anger. Why had his brothers left him here, out in the snow? He hated the snow. They had not even bothered to drag him under the acres of tarp where the new batch of supposedly frost-resistant and blight-resistant potatoes were growing.
No, that was not right. He could feel the twinge of pain from the scars in his right hand. He had been cut there, badly, in a knife fight once, a bar where he had cut the damned foreman who’d tried to bugger his brother Pericles. It had been a big fellow with a gold nose, named Swagger Bray, whom everyone was afraid to face because of his position and because of the cybernetic wiring in his nerves, allegedly making him strong and fast and immune to pain. Turns out he was not immune to a knife in the belly. That had been in 2230, the years the Hindisphere landed on the moon, scuffing out Neil Armstrong’s footprint, and opened the Second Space Age. He was twenty.
Again, he was angry. He had fallen off his horse during the charge against the Mormon troopers just south of Utah. The fool horse had slipped on the ice and thrown him. And his mates had just left him here after he fell. Plague on them.
He remembered now. He was in the “Tough-Riding” Thirty-Fifth US Imperial Cavalry, serving under Captain Rickover N. Breamy. When the officers were not around, they were the Tough Rutters and he was Captain Bendover ’n’ Ream Me. Sam Feckle had also just been promoted to lance corporal with him …
No, that was not right either. He felt the throb of old scars along his left side where the Aztlan bullet had pierced his horse’s gorget and neck, and ricocheted from Montrose’s fifth rib, breaking the bone but missing major organs. The horse’s toppling body had fallen atop the enemy trooper. Montrose, half-paralyzed, half-drowned in the icy mud, tore out the dying man’s windpipe with his teeth while they wrestled for his sidearm, a hand flamer whose discharge would have killed them both.
That also was long ago. Horse troopers did not wear anything more than a helmet and vest, and relied on the chaff their horse barding spread.
Anger surged in him a third time. He was in dueling armor, fighting another stupid gunfight over ownership rights, because Texas men were crazy and could not bring themselves to settle things the way civilized folk did. The Spaniards and Hindus with their running water and running electricity were right to laugh. How often he had promised himself to get out of this damned line of work! He had been shot by Mike Nails. Why was his brother Leonidas just letting him lie there in the snow? Where was the poxy doctor from Tibet, Sgra-dbyangs Kyi Rgyal-po? The doc would stitch him back up.
No. That was not the doctor’s name. The name had been Dr. Yajnavalkya. The doc had been working under difficult conditions, in zero gee, and Montrose had bitten him once in the ear …
But this was not duelist armor. What was he wearing? Had Sir Guy loaned him a suit of Hospitalier war gear? He wanted to talk to Sir Guy again, one last time, to tell him something important … about his wedding … Sir Guy was marrying Oenoe the Nymph … don’t let your wife leave … don’t lose her … don’t get out of bed … stay right next to her …
Sarmento i Illa d’Or had shot him! Montrose was lying among the fragrant leaves of the rusting Chimera war fortress, with the torture poles and cages and head clamps all rattling in the warm spring breeze above him. Sarmento spent all his time on middeck aftbay, pushing and pulling his barbells in zero gee. What did you call weightlifting in weightlessness? You never think the big guys will also be fast as a rattler.
But soon the three sisters of his wife, gorgeous triplets grown from the Monument codes, would come save him. Remember not to drink their strange wines, or he might wake up as someone else. Don’t kiss them; they are not her.
Why had the torture cages turned into pine trees? How could it snow, when the Nymph Mothers had decreed eternal springtime?
Then Menelaus remembered. He was captured in the camp of the Blue Men. It was an ice age. Mickey said he would hoax the dogs, some sort of nervous system mumbo jumbo.
But there were n
o dog bites on him. Good old Mickey.
Why was his mind so muzzy? Had Montrose been drugged? He remembered being afraid of the soup, of the showers, of any vector to introduce nanotech into his body.
Blackie was behind the Blue Men! But he remembered shooting Blackie. Or was it Jupiter? Had he shot a hippo? Where was that crazy Fox-girl who had promised him a way out of his mess, a way to break the chains of history, and hide from Jupiter’s omniscience?
No. Sam Feckle was dead. Captain Breamy was dead. Dr. Yajnavalkya had been murdered by Blackie during the mutiny, his suit punctured by a lance, and he went spinning across the module, spraying air and blood, his faceplate turning black as it filled with blood fog.
Texas was dead, covered with ice, or sunk into the sea. Every member of the original, nonartificial human race was dead, replaced by Sylphs, obliterated by Giants, burned. Burned because of him.
Earth was lost, and he and Blackie could not find it. Jupiter was dead in a massive, satanic act of pride and suicide. The entire race of Kitsune was extinct. The Dyson sphere where his clones lived, his bastard children, had broken into pieces, and he … he …
And he spied on Blackie watching the stars, and slowly realized what he was seeing. The supernovae were weapons, and the nebulae were smoke from the discharges.
Hundreds of Menelaus iterations had struggled, memories torn again and again into shreds as iterations of him were narrowcast into Orion Arm centers of civilization, and then beyond.
One after another, he had suborned them. She kept him alive, kept him sane. Civilizations whose founding members were less frantic about their sexual drive were too placid and too comfortable to withstand the combination of determination, patience, madness, and not giving a damn.