“It was longer than that.”
“Not counted by my waking hours. Your world was just a feast day for me, an oasis between lifetimes aboard ship. Ximen came to me again after I was trapped at M3, and freed me, and learned what I was.
“Years we were together there,” she continued, “wrestling with the Principalities and Powers of M3, and then, again, later decades of our lives in service to Andromeda, or in her jails, physical or mental, or suffering her trials by ordeal, and struggling once again against Archons and Authorities.
“Finally, we were sent here, to Le Gentil, far from them, to prevent those Archons from learning that Andromeda meant to betray her own war effort. I think, at first, even Ximen did not know I had persuaded the great Throne of Andromeda called Mindfulness to peace. He thought we were here to study the discontinuity filament.
“Always he sought to consummate the marriage, but by then I had awoken to the truth, and in my heart, I knew you lived. Had but I sooner heeded my heart! As he had before, he made a copy of me, stole my mind, an outrage more intimate than any violation of mere flesh could be, and edited out my memories of you, so I would love only him. I retaliated and did the same in return, making myself a child of him to raise, a copy who had no recollection of you, a twin who might have learned to be free of hate, to show him he could be happy!
“Many times he tried again, always ending in sorrow and separation, and once in interstellar war. Four thousand years of battle and barbarism, his stars and servants and races against mine! At the time, it seemed to last forever. Now, it seems but an hour.
“I am so sorry I did that! Raped his memories as he did mine, I mean; I am not a perfect woman, Stinky, but for your sake I wish I could be. The Ulteriors, they have selected such a weak vessel! But I reabsorbed her memories back into me, wove the thought chains into my psyche; but he killed himself as a weakling.”
“In a duel with guns?” he asked.
“How else?” she said. “Those were millennia of misery.”
“Poor girl! You used yourself as a tool. You sold yourself to a man who loved you to get what you wanted from him and then felt bad about being used! I see what is wrong. I know. You are like me and Blackie, raised like an orphan. No one tanned your hide when you was young, so you think it’s okay to break the rules.”
“You do the same.”
“I only break other people’s rules, not mine! My mom saw to that. You need a mom.”
“I have a husband.”
“Or two.”
“How many wives do you have? Ximen told me you promised to marry a clone of me.”
“That weren’t me. That was a clone of me, and I killed him.”
“As a weakling?” she asked brightly.
“I suppose.”
“In a duel? With guns?” She smiled archly.
“Before he so much as grazed the girl’s flesh with the tip of his left pinkie. But I did not lie! It’s not good for you. Pollutes the soul.”
She shrugged her creamy shoulders. “I repented and did my penance, and now it is past. Besides, I had a mission to fulfill. My fate is to stop the whole war of which Andromeda is but the smallest sortie.”
“Blackie said he figured out what the Monument actually did to you. He ever mention that?”
“He talked of nothing else. That was the main reason he wanted me as a prize.”
“So what are you?”
“A messenger.”
“A what?”
“I’ll tell you at breakfast.” And she kissed him.
4. Breaking Fast
Four hours later, night ended. The titanic spiral disks of the combined bi-galactic mass was a white cloud in the purple sky, visible by day. Montrose produced a poncho of red silk for himself, and she wore a white shift, belted at the waist with a cord she had woven from her own golden hair.
Like all newlyweds, they quarreled immediately. He wanted her to cook; she explained that she had never cooked in her life. Aboard ship, she ate rations of gruel produced by coffins; on Earth, she was feted and fed; on rations more plentiful she lived and grew old aboard ship; at M3 she was trapped as information; later, when Del Azarchel forced her into a new form, she was given a variation of a Patrician body that could absorb nutriment directly from cosmic rays. And in their long years together, Del Azarchel forbade she should eat except what a servant prepared, lest her royal status be demeaned by manual toil.
Montrose offered to cook chili-covered bratwurst for breakfast, and a small bucket of scrambled eggs. He showed her how to do it, bending over her and putting his arms around her, casually kissing her neck as he reached over her shoulder to explain the niceties of frying meat in grease, breaking eggs, boiling beans and meat in a pot, adding more onions, red peppers, and hot spices than humans could stand.
She took her first lesson with a luminous, almost childlike smile on her face. “This is but the first of many adventures! I should like to eat a giblet! Or a grit!”
“Uh…”
“Sarmento used to lull me to sleep when I was little, telling of this magical food called bacon. He said one could put it on anything to make it exquisite! Teach me how to slaughter pork next!”
“Uh, I never learned how. No farmers I knew kept swine. Pigs are too similar to humans in disease vulnerability, so the Jihad spore did for them.”
“Beef, then! Teach me to slaughter beef! Or kill a mutton. I thought your family were cowboys! At least, Ximen calls you that.”
“Aggy and Achy—Agamemnon and Achilles—punched cows. Their favorite part was stuffing suppositories up the anus of a bad-tempered bull to keep the plague off, or checking them for spots. Hector got trampled once. The best steak he ever ate, he said, was the tenderloins of that mean cow, when it was her turn. But his spine didn’t grow back right, and pained him something awful, and so he worked with the Purist after that, hiking all over, trying to find water with enough radioactivity to kill the spore, but not too hot to drink. Napoleon kept bees. Diomedes was a butcher’s ’prentice, and Nelson was a Digger’s boy, helping Old One-Hand Hannigan to scavenge buried military equipment from bombed out army bases, hot ruins, and ghost towns. Heh. Ghost towns meant something else in those days.
“Me, I mixed gunpowder, aligned gunrails, programmed gunbrains, and chaff packets. I had the best job. The young ’uns worked in the fields, weeding and bioprogramming, because by that time the winter broke, and we had green again.
“So Dimmy is the guy you want, but he’s dead, his race is extinct, and I am pretty sure old Sol died of old age. Me, I can show you how to pluck a chicken by shooting its feathers off one at a time. And how to beat up a beggar and get him to move along. You have to use a long stick and wear a rag over your mouth. And how to kill a man with a knife without letting him cough or bleed on you.”
“Do you mean how to kill a knifeman, or how to knife a killer?”
“Both.”
“Neither. I was sent to save lives.”
“So let’s talk about your old job. Messenger for things from beyond space and time.”
5. The Ulterior Beings
To eat, they sat on the floor mats, Montrose sat cross-legged Indian-style, and Rania knelt.
Montrose sharpened his memory. This was a conversation he did not want dulled with the passage of time into a golden fog. He wanted to recall each nuance.
Rania said. “When I passed through the Dyson Oblate surrounding the core of M3, there was a moment of nothingness, a moment that was not in time, a place that was not in space. During that moment, the patterns from the Monument which live in my genes and braincells and in my thoughts met and matched and made a resonance with the exact same pattern written on the walls of spacetime, the three-degree background radiation and the expansion discontinuities which form the echoes of the Big Bang, still chiming from the explosion that ignited the cosmos.
“Instantly, I saw what I had always known. The shape of the voids and great walls, the overall structure of superclusters of g
alaxies as they condensed out of the primal nebula that once filled the universe, the uneven ripples and ridges that formed, showed the location and the purpose of the Eschaton Directional Engine. I saw it! You must believe I saw it!”
Montrose said, “Mindfulness of Andromeda said it was a Darwin Engine; any races who did not get to be advanced enough fast enough would be destroyed by those who did. The higher race would use the Engine to stop entropy in their one small volume of the universe by folding the rest of the universe into a black hole, dropping it into a singularity, and using the event horizon as some sort of source of endless power. Andromeda called it extropy.”
“Andromeda is deceived. The Eschaton Engine is only dangerous if used by part of the universe to benefit that part, and fold spacetime positively, into an ever-dwindling sphere. It was meant to operate in the other direction—that is, to fold timespace negatively, like a saddle, and abrogate the event horizon surrounding the cosmos. There is an Ulterior, a realm outside the lightcone of the Big Bang. It is inhabited.”
“How could you know that?”
“I am one of the inhabitants.”
“That must have one poxy elephant of an explanation. Tell me how that works, seeing as you are here.”
She took a dainty sip of the beer he had set out and looked up at him thoughtfully over the rim of the stein she held in both hands. “You did not call me crazy.”
“Doll, I’ve lived crazy, I been crazy, I know crazy. And I damn well know you are not. But I want the story.”
“When the Eschaton Directional Engine is put into motion as it was designed to do, not one section but all the sidereal universe, everywhere and retroactively through time, will alter its metric. All the mental information, all the lives, could be saved; by gravitic waves, by alterations of spin values and electric charge, the information could be broadcast out from the cosmos into the Ulterior.”
“It is not a Darwin Engine but a Salvation Engine? But what good would a broadcast do?”
“If the Ulterior beings have built the mate, a Genesis Engine to match our Eschaton Engine, then all life will be saved, recompiled, and brought into a new existence.”
“If…?”
“You see, the Big Bang was not natural. It was no accident. The Ulterior beings created a zone of three-dimensional space and linear time. Into this place, they throw their entropy, so that their energy reactions never dwindle, never diminish. Neither their thoughts dim nor their energy forms they use as bodies and tools will ever grow less nor wear out. The only reason entropy rules in this universe, why energy is not conserved in a useful state, is because of the Hubble expansion. The Hubble expansion is the side effect, the cost, of the Ulteriors discharging their randomized waste energy into this space. We are the wastebasket of the multiverse. The outhouse.”
“Swell. They created a hellhole so that they could live in paradise.”
“If, by paradise, you mean a realm without time and suffering, then yes. If you mean a realm without error, without sin, without regret, then no. I do not know, because I cannot remember, if they realized that all the conditions necessary for life to arise were present in the cone of timespace they created, or if they fine-tuned those conditions to assure themselves that life would arise.
“Whatever the case,” she continued, “whether they planned from the start or realized and corrected their error, the Ulteriors established the curve of timespace, the rate of expansion, and the other unchanging cosmic variables, the Planck length and the value of pi, to contain messages, a mathematical code, and a logic structure which, by the rules of this cosmos, any rational being should be able to read.
“The Supercluster of Corona Borealis was the first to achieve the intellectual level of a seraph, in the octillion range, and see and read the message written there. That message is called the Reality Equation because it was written by the demiurges and cosmic architects who constructed this reality in which we live.”
Montrose said, “Corona Borealis? That is the name Andromeda gave, for the entity that, uh, gave you your religious experience when you died.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ve had religious experiences, the ecstasy of the mystics. It was one of the first things I did on Earth—test the capacities of my own brain, stimulate all the cell combinations. This was not that.”
“Your telepathic, uh…”
“My memory. I was recalling something from before I was born. Unless it is foreshadowing from after my death. Before or after are incorrect. It came from outside of time.”
“Well, I am not going to argue with my wife on my honeymoon, but if you are actually one of them, an Ulterior, how did you get in here? Into timespace?”
“Anything can enter into an event horizon, assuming you have a way of surviving the tidal effects. It is getting out that is impossible.”
“Why would anyone enter the cosmic outhouse?”
“Out of love for lives unborn. To save all souls.”
“No one can say you lack ambition. Are you really an extradimensional being? Or do you not remember your life … before? Outside?”
“I was damaged. Something was stolen from me, or broken in me, when first I entered. You have to provide the missing part. We were made for each other.”
“Well, I am not going to argue with an impossible fairy tale that makes me out to be the hero.”
“Good of you.”
“But the Ulterior people. Why did they make the pustulating message so hard to read? You need an artificial intelligence the size of the supercluster of galaxies even to see the damned thing. Why not make it something simple? Something a child of average intelligence could read?”
And he did not say, Something a man need not stick a needle into his brain to read.
“I do not know. Ximen said they meant it as an intelligence test. The instructions on how to solve the mind-body problem, how to create a peaceful and eternal commonwealth, how to solve all differences of self and other, are in the equations, as well as the universal theory of all deliberate mental actions and nondeliberate physical reactions. At the core of the Reality Equations is the instruction on how to build and operate the Eschaton Directional Engine, and escape this reality. Ximen said that the Ulteriors meant it so that any cosmos that produced inhabitants who could not cooperate civilly and sinlessly enough to create the Engine, were too barbaric and vile for paradise to tolerate.”
“That sounds about right to me. You don’t think so?”
“The Ulteriors live in a condition of infinite energy. I do not think they understand the limits of matter and time. But you saw the Monument, saw how they embed messages in many levels, to allow the reader to check one against the other, macroscopic against microscopic. Patterns within patterns, macrocosm holding microcosms. Perhaps there is something like a Reality Equation inside even the heart of a child. I notice many of the conclusions of the most complicated sequences of Monument Notation turn out to be, when seen correctly, an intuitive truth, something we all might already know.”
Menelaus, remembering several examples of this, nodded. “Andromeda said all the galaxies, every one, had to join in the effort to repair and make the Eschaton Engine operate.”
But she shook her head vehemently. “To use the Engine as it was meant to be used, to unfold all space for the benefit of all space, requires very little calculation power. It is only when the superclusters are trying to create alphas and attractors here or there, to collapse spacetime onto the heads of their rivals, and those rivals desperately are meanwhile creating great voids and expansion points to ward off that collapse or reverse it back on the aggressor, that the Eschaton Engine becomes an infinite game of chess, a topological chess game played on a board being folded like origami paper, and the wrong fold or the wrong move means obliteration.”
“How come if these superclusters are so smart, they can be fooled on this question?”
“The Unreality Equations all follow logically and mathematically given their axiom, so even the g
reatest of minds is in no better a position to accept or reject that axiom than the simplest. Either you believe or you do not. Either you accept it or reject it. That is an act of the will, not the intellect. An innocent child might decide rightly where a cynical genius would not.”
“What does it mean that the Great Attractor is right in our backyard?”
“It means the Hydra Supercluster is firmly in the camp of the foe and seeks to use the Engine for extropy, and that Virgo Cluster is coming under that influence and yielding to Hydra. It means we are behind enemy lines.”
Menelaus said, “Hydra. They are the ones behind the dark energy broadcasts that Blackie listened to. The Unreality Equations are the ones that define extropy and justify sacrificing nine-tenths of the universe to save a tithing of it. Andromeda dubbed them with a name she plucked out of my memory to describe them: the Malthusians. What do we call our side?”
She smiled at him for some reason unclear to him. “I call them the Amaltheans.”
“That is one of the moons Blackie and I threw into Jupiter as an assembler bomb.”
“Amalthea was the nursemaid of Jupiter, when he was a baby.”
“I knew Jupiter when he was a baby! He was a ball of logic diamond creating more of himself out of the pressurized hydrocarbons of his core.”
“I mean the real Jupiter. The one in the myth. The fake one was named after him, the one that existed.”
“Hm. Gal, one day I will puzzle out your notion of what is real and what is not.”
“The horns of Amalthea were the Cornucopia, dripping ambrosia and nectar, and the horns simply never ran out or went dry, because theirs was the food of the gods, which is spiritual, and knows no lack.”
“Why are they doing what they do? The Malthusians, I mean. Why not just enter into the Ulterior realm with the rest of us once the Eschaton Engine activates?”
“The Unreality Equations show that the Ulteriors would be wasting resources if they actually carried through on their promise to build the Genesis Engine. It would cost them less time and effort merely to stand outside the event horizon and use it as an extropy sink.”