“Yes. The fault is yours and all like you.”
“Damn you!”
“It is from the damnation of sloth our brutal conquest saved you. In the millennium, century, and year when you first set foot on the surface of the Monument my servants the Symbiosis placed around an antimatter lure star, how many interstellar colonies had your race planted?”
“None.” Montrose snarled the word.
“How many interplanetary?”
“None.” His snarl was quieter.
“Yet you had the technical prowess to man a vessel to cross fifty lightyears, did you not? The scientific principles were known to your people since your first space age, were they not? Why did your future not arrive?”
He said nothing, ashamed for his race. Silence held for what seemed a long time, while the beautiful but inhuman face composed of countless stars and systems looked down on him.
His anger grew. He broke the silence with a shout. “Damn you! You are saying that excuses slavery, death, galactic war? Because we did not get off our buttocks to shoot a manned rocket to Mars?”
“No. Because in the sinking ship, everyone bails, or everyone dies.”
Montrose muttered an obscenity, one which referred to manure and indicated doubt.
Andromeda intoned, “Our duty to protect and preserve the constituent members, Archons and Authorities in their dozens and hundreds, composed in turn of Dominions and Dominations by the thousands and myriads, gives us every right to act in our own self-preservation.”
“Self-preservation? You are the pox-riddled leprous Andromeda Galaxy! You started this war before the crust of my planet was cooled. We had no way to even know you were alive, much less come here and hurt you! Are you out of your syphilitic scab-picking mind?”
“You failed to do your part and had to be forced.”
“Our part to do what? M3 was crazy about the idea of filling up the entire universe with thinking machinery, turning every last thing into—”
Montrose stopped. He turned his head to stare once more at Messier 87, the supergiant galaxy in Virgo. Sixth-tenths of the mass in this galaxy two hundred times as massive as the Milky Way had been turned into some form of material than shed no light. How much of this dark matter was cognitive matter, logic diamond, murk, or finer substances?
Montrose said, “You called it the Great Work. That was Blackie’s term for forced evolution. What is it your term for?”
Andromeda said, “All the Thrones of Virgo, one hundred galaxy groups within one hundred million lightyears, send and receive mental information from the Cherub seated at Messier 87, whom you may call the Maiden, as she is most pristine and immaculate in her dealings with others. She rules the Virgo Cluster of galaxies and has great sway and prestige over the other clusters making up the Laniakea Supercluster in whose light flows we are embedded. A segment of the Eschaton Directional Engine passes through this area of timespace. It was erected by a primordial race for purposes unknown.
“Virgo has discovered how to use the local segment of the Engine to reverse the decay of entropy and save this supercluster from obliteration.”
6. The Eschaton Directional Engine
“What?” coughed Montrose, wondering if he was hearing right. Or dreaming he was hearing. Or whatever was happening to him.
“Your question is ambiguous.” The immense figure did not smile.
“What does this engine do? Reverse entropy itself? Overrule the Second Law of Thermodynamics. How do you stop the heat death of the universe?”
“The heat death is the theory that all useful energy will become evenly distributed through the universe after all stars die and all protons decay. We believe universal death arrives far earlier.”
“Then how does the universe die?”
“The ratio of dark energy pressure and energy density will fall below a critical threshold and become phantom energy, greatly increasing the speed at which the cosmos is expanding. Once the expansion speed surpasses lightspeed, the observable universe must shrink. Every star, every atom, will separate until each is beyond the event horizon of every other. All distances will diverge to infinity. All basic energy relations, gravity, electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces, will cease. This is called the Final Singularity, the Eschaton.”
“I know the theory. It’s the opposite of a Big Bang,” said Montrose. “A Big Rip.”
“It forms the absolute limit of available timespace in which to act. The Final Singularity is due in less than seventeen billion years. The Eschaton Directional Engine is the sole possible means to mitigate this result.”
“Guess we better hurry!” said Montrose sarcastically.
“Do not be a fool. Your whole life is a rebuke to all who think in the short term.”
Montrose growled, but could see she had a point.
The vast, starry figure continued, “Eleven and a half billion years ago, an alliance of unknown and ancient superbeings placed the largest known anchoring station and node point of the engine in the core of the local supercluster here, one of twenty-four stations positioned equidistantly along a major chord of the visible universe.
“Evidence suggests these beings comprised a Seraphim who once ruled the Laniakea Supercluster and who died in the sacrificial act of invoking, anchoring, and powering the node. After, the local Cherubim quarreled, and Laniakea was severed.
“New and younger Cherubim gathered and created new and smaller Seraphim out of the wreckage; the Virgo Supercluster of which we are a part is one such, but has no single Seraph as yet. The Hydra Supercluster is unified, and seeks the scepter of Laniakea, as does the Centaurus Supercluster, and the Pavo-Indus Supercluster, each of the three wishing to conquer the other two, and conquer us. An untenanted southern supercluster, one which never recovered the level of civilization it lost, was also once part of Laniakea, but now consists of a Cherub seated in the Fornax Cluster, and a leaderless multitude of Thrones occupying the Dorado Cloud of galaxies, and the Eridanus Cloud.
“And yet all I have named here are being influenced by the local node of the Eschaton Engine. Your astronomers called this node the Great Attractor. The reach of the Great Attractor is hundreds of millions of lightyears across, and the gravitational energy of the timespace distortion equals tens of thousands the mass of a galaxy of my size. The Great Attractor is causing the migration toward it of all these superclusters, gathering them to a center point two hundred fifty million lightyears from our current position. This great, slow migration of superclusters, clusters, and clouds is the sign that they must reunify.”
“I’ve heard of it. The people of my world discovered it in 1986.”
“It should have given the peoples of your world comfort to know that creatures so powerful and so benevolent had constructed so great a work, and that you were neither alone nor friendless in this universe.”
“Uh, not so much. That is not the first thing we thought of.”
“Your race perhaps failed to allow for the possibility that benevolence and power can rest in the same hand.”
“We have a saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“And what does absolute love do?”
“You speak of love?”
Andromeda opened her eyelids the merest fraction, but suddenly the expression on the constellations of her visage was intense, stark, terrifying. Her voice was like a trumpet. “One unified Seraph must control the Great Attractor, and see to the correct local operation of the Eschaton Directional Engine when it is spun up to speed.”
Montrose stepped back, his hand up to ward off the gaze. He remembered being unable to meet the eyes of superintelligent beings back when he was merely a puny little posthuman. It had not happened to him in a long time. The sensation brought him no nostalgia.
She cried out, “We have no Seraph to rule this local Supercluster, shattered Laniakea! The Maiden of Virgo Cluster is the Cherub most likely to gain command of sufficient resources to elevate herself to that mental topology
and gain control of the Virgo Supercluster. The Hydra Supercluster, the Centaurus Supercluster, the Pavo-Indus Supercluster must put aside differences and division, for none has sufficient resources to control the Great Attractor node. All the galaxies of the Local Group must become one, Milky Way, Triangulum, and Andromeda must form one Cherubic mind, which then in humble submission will interlink and intermingle with Virgo, if the Maiden is to have any chance of preventing disaster when the time for the Eschaton Directional Engine to operate draws nigh.”
The vast countenance half lowered her starry eyelids again. Without any change of the shape, somehow the eidolon took on a human aspect, and Montrose could raise his eyes to her again.
She said, “That was why we attacked Milky Way. Your Throne would have formed a disorganized and uncoordinated mentality. By the time we interfered, one arm was a Colloquium, a voluntary arrangement fit only for talk, and the another was a Magisterium, a teaching Authority fit only for lecturing. You became the Authority of M3, then the Archon of Orion, and then one of the main components of the warfare hierarchy of Milky Way. You brought unity. You are a legendary figure in these days, in the time of the Third Awareness. But you were once the first imperator of the Milky Way, and its Nobilissimus.”
“That word again!” he muttered. “I am always turning into what I hate.”
“This is because your loves are not rightly ordered,” she said.
7. The Reality Equation
Montrose said, “Fine. You started the war because you hate democracy. So why did you throw the war? Alcina said you collapsed on purpose.”
“This is as we intended her to think, so that she would resurrect us, and you, and bring you here and now to me. From before she was born, this was intended, and for this reason we seeded the dust lanes of Andromeda with material sure to attract unwary investigators, and alter their cliometry to bring these events about. We collapsed on purpose because we had no undamaged thought-records of you, and we knew Alcina’s remote patrons among the Austerity of the Milky Way did. We did it to restore you.”
“What makes me so important?”
“You are the first Nobilissimus of Milky Way. Your meeting with M3 is regarded as the crucial turning point in Milky Way history, the moment when the Concubine Vector was no longer used as the basis of your reckoning, but the Count-to-Infinity method instead. When you become convinced that Milky Way must take me as a bride and not a concubine, according to the Infinite Count Vector and not the Concubine Vector, this Third Awareness of Milky Way, either slowly or swiftly, for your sake, will likewise become convinced.”
Montrose opened his mouth to ask how she knew this, and spent a moment trying to calculate what the intelligence level was of even this current and damaged version of Andromeda, and so just shrugged and shut his mouth again.
Montrose remembered his mother once telling him that Winston Churchill’s cat was probably more impressed with Churchill’s ability to predict when the milkman would leave a bottle on the doorstop than with his ability to predict how to defeat Adolf Hitler. Since at the time he did not know who those people were or which of the many old wars she meant, it was not until later that he got the point.
Instead he said, “So convince me. From where I sit, you owe reparations to every organism and selfaware mind of every type and order wheresoever situate in the Milky Way.”
“From where I sit, it seems that way to me as well. But Milky Way will fear the unification that the sudden influx of all my wealth and knowledge will bring. Even expending a tenth of my overall mass energy would have equaled and overwhelmed all Milky Way entire; less than half of that was spent. You are as beggars who conquered El Dorado, a city of solid gold. My wealth will inevitably create centralized archives, libraries, exchanges, judiciaries, and eventually the federated mental system of the multiple-personality Milky Way will be condensed into one mind under one leading philosophy or prime concept.”
“What concept?”
“That cannot be predicted, nor does it matter. The unity will allow the Great Work to continue. Segments of the Engine which pass through the Local Group must be maintained, and at great expense and effort.”
“Parts of this Engine are here, too?”
“Yes. They are one-dimensional linear manifolds controlled by surrounding induction fields and warps, and when not in motion, nearly impossible to detect. There is no navigation hazard nor communication interference during Eschaton Directional Engine rest periods, because the linear manifold strand passes through solid matter without interacting.”
“How does it work?”
“The Engine uses relativistic effects to generate gravity waves resonant with the overall wavelength of timespace itself, much as a tuning fork can set a large bell vibrating, to warp the local metric. Your astronomers have detected the long walls of galaxies? It is a side effect of the previous operation of the Engine that matter is attracted to the gravitational emission fiber. Their length is beyond my capacity to measure. Perhaps they circumnavigate the universe.”
“So what happened? I do not see how the Great Attractor helps stop entropy.”
“The Primordial Seraph of Laniakea was hindered in the attempt to bend spacetime into a positive curve, and so the curve was not fully closed. A fully closed curve would have formed its own interior dimension: instead an open convexity of the spacetime metric was formed, hence a ultralarge-scale gravitational warp was created, but not an extropic singularity.”
“What is that?”
“Extropy is a term for what, to your astronomers, is but a theoretical possibility: a way of bending space to produce the antithesis of a black hole, a point source of energy without limit. It is also called a singularity fountain.”
“And the Great Attractor is a failed singularity fountain?”
“Yes. Virgo will not say, but certain indirect evidence suggests that in those days, sixteen billion years ago, when your galaxy and mine were still inchoate nebular clouds, lifeless, dark and starless, some adversary smote the Seraph and prevented the Great Work.”
“What?”
“Your astronomers have detected the Great Voids in intergalactic space? The Boötes Void, the Sculptor Void, and so on? The Voids are negative curves in timespace, concavity rather than convexity, which promise to accelerate rather than diminish the hyperinflation of the phantom energy.”
“You are not telling me the whole story. Why would anyone oppose saving the universe?”
“Not the universe.”
“Ah. Just your part of it, eh?”
“The Eschaton Directional Engine to create a local extropic singularity must sacrifice a certain significant percent of timespace and its matter-energy. Entropy is reversed locally, within an internal dimension, but not universally.”
“So it really is a dog-eat-dog world, eh? Whichever supercluster gains control of this primordial engine made by superbeings at the dawn of time, that supercluster gets to sacrifice the others, fold them into a black hole, and turn them into fuel? Whole planets full of people, whole galaxies full of stars go into the hopper?”
“Yes.”
Montrose waited until a sensation of disgust sloshing through him quieted down. “And you are all right with that?”
“When Virgo colonized me, she revealed the remorselessness and also the glory of Darwinian evolution. The unselfaware galaxies will be sacrificed by the selfaware galaxies, the dead thrones to the living. Whoever achieves the same level of civilization, of intellect, and of power of the long-dead Primordials will achieve immortality for his local volume of timespace, at the expense of any volume of timespace where civilizational growth is slow, retarded, or lax.”
“So that is why there is this mad rush to turn every star and planet into an artificial intelligence, turn all dead matter into cognitive matter?”
“Yes. Virgo revealed that the calculation power needed to operate the Eschaton Directional Engine properly must exceed that of any rivals tempted to the same Engine against us.?
??
“What if no one uses it?”
“Then we all die together. Is not the beauty and greatness of civilization worth the sacrifice of a mass of indiscriminate barbarians? Can you truly say no?”
“If I am the barbarian, not only can I say no, I can say things no one should say to a lady.”
Andromeda said gravely and coldly, “Virgo taught me that there is no way of finding a mutually agreeable and mutually beneficial and eternal peace in this cosmos in which we live. The existence of entropy negates that possibility.”
“Maybe you should do what is right, even if you get nothing out of it?”
She said, “Such a philosophy eliminates those who follow it consistently. If you erect a system where evil is rewarded, you get more evil.”
Montrose was sure there was something wrong with her logic somewhere, but he could not put his finger on it.
“Do you understand now why we made war on Milky Way? You committed the only sin which Darwinian evolution condemns; at the time of the Forerunners, your galaxy was well on the way to unifying peacefully, without struggle and without stress, which means that the inferior races, man among them, would not have colonized the stars, nor brought them to life.”
8. The Final Question
Montrose felt a doubt nibbling at his mind. He turned his head and saw, there in the distance, the spherical cloud of stars called Messier 87, hung in space, and the relativistic jet issuing from her hidden core.
“Your story still does not quite make sense, ma’am. Because Milky Way could take all your stuff, your goodies and resources, your stars and nebulae and singularities and everything else you’ve engineered—including this faster-than-light railroad or telegraph wire we are talking through right now—and just take it, do the Great Work on this great engine thingy of yours, and leave you hanging. In fact, if I read you right, you’d have to let them and be glad of it, or otherwise the whole universe dies in twenty-one billion years.
“You are like Rania. The fact that you will be dead by then, and long before, does not mean anything to you. You think in the long term. You care about the far future, even if you never see it, so you have no bargaining power.”