“For that I will thank him with a kind word before I shoot him.”
“You owe him more.”
“For just one death, he deserves death. If I do nothing, what kind of man am I? What kind of friend to Captain Grimaldi? What kind of husband to you? What kind of father to our children?”
She could say nothing, but she turned away her head. Her shoulders shook.
“Rania, even if I wanted to—how could I? He did it to get me.”
She raised her face, but her expression was one of no surprise at all.
He said, “I notice you are not calling me an egomaniac. I am right, ain’t I?”
She nodded.
He said, “Because there were too many copies of me alive in the Milky Way. All the versions Alcina could not use. Is that right?”
“He spoke of it. At the time, I thought it was a joke. He could not get them all.”
Montrose nodded. “He had to get every spot in timespace I could possibly reach. Everyone in my entire lightcone. That was why he had to make sure you went with him, to get you out of the blast radius. Did you know?”
“No. There were clues when last he spoke with me. Little things. I did not see them then, did not see the pattern.”
“But I am right? He did this?”
“Yes. He just killed the Local Group to murder you. For me. To blot you out of my mind. He was the main ambassador template for Andromeda for many years. Andromeda was so pleased with him only because he falsified his own rank and status to her inside her mind. Our first experiments turning on the Seyfert Emitter in Le Gentil—that must have been when he did it. Used his credentials as the voice of Andromeda to report to Virgo that the Milky Way versus Andromeda War exceeded the Concubine Vector, and so now all the energy lost in the war will be paid back by the extropy fountain built on their corpses.”
“And yet you defend him.”
“Never. But I want him cured. Woke from his evil dream. Reborn. Not murdered.”
“Suppose I wanted to stop him peaceful-like. How? Kill myself? Because otherwise any galaxy where I stop overnight to take a nap or take a smoke might be obliterated.”
A look of sorrow crossed her features. Menelaus thought he knew that look: the expression of a woman who thinks it vain to argue, but also one who had stopped listening.
He spoke more sharply, “Look! I am the good guy here. Is the good guy supposed to die and let the bad guy win? Suppose you and I and the planet Little Rock go somewhere else, some corner of the universe where no one is looking and settle down. Let’s say we have a dozen kids. What do I tell them when their galaxy gets obliterated in the next attempt to wipe me out of the universe? Blackie is a man who lives for nothing but hate. If any man deserves death, it is him!”
“And if no one deserves it?”
Menelaus spread his hands and sighed in defeat. “Whoever invented the sport of arguing with women? Fine. Uncle. I give up. Let’s make a deal.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Can you circumnavigate me in your dealings? I talked the pirates of Earth into surrender, and by my words alone persuaded peace to all your warring factions of your green world with its free air and waters that ran along the decks.”
“It is called ground, not deck.”
She shrugged. “It is still an odd place to stow water.”
“And I am not those pirates. I am not those warring factions. They knew they were wrong; they wanted an excuse to live in happiness and wealth, to get all the antimatter they could not get by robbery. Whereas I know I am in the right. And I am not trying to excuse nothing. I want to make peace with my wife.”
“I am listening.”
“I’ll give you a chance to talk him out of his evil ways. Why not? I owe him that. It is a wedding present. If you can win over Andromeda, maybe you can reach him. But you just spent your whole life with him, hundreds of years.”
“Thousands.”
“Well? Did he repent?”
Her lips formed a thin line, and a look of endless sorrow entered her eye.
She said, “How long am I allowed?”
“If he won’t listen, one second. If he seems to be making progress, a zillion years. This is not a question of how long. I don’t care about how long. I am the one guy in the universe who never cares about how long.”
“If time is not the question, what is?”
“It is a question of hope. You have until the moment hope becomes unreasonable.”
“Hope is always reasonable, since it is the only alternative to despair. You are giving me infinite time.”
“I mean his hope, not yours. If he gives up on you, I give up on him. Saints can work miracles, so the stories say, but even they cannot do what cannot be done.”
“Saints can lay down their lives for what they love more than life.”
Montrose was disturbed by that, but he had no more to say.
2. The Unsaid Warning
A sudden impulse in his mind made Menelaus return his time-sense to normal, so that the blue sun stopped whirling overhead. It was night; he saw the purple galaxy of M106 looming like a wall of light reaching from the too-near horizon to the zenith. The impulse turned his eyes toward a dark quarter of the intergalactic emptiness. He could see nothing with his naked eyes, but he deduced what direction that must be: Messier 87, the immense spherical cloud of stars, gigantic, cyclopean, which formed the core and capital of the Virgo Cluster, and the royal chambers of the Cherub called the Maiden.
Rania had tied her time-sense to his, so that she decelerated back into the normal human biological rate when he did, her skin reddening from white to pink in a moment.
He said, “Did you just get the idea in your head that we should leave this area as soon as possible, and continue onward to Messier 87?”
Rania looked meditative for a moment, then nodded. “The thought is blended so carefully into my normal thoughts and memories that I only noticed it was artificial, because a second artificial thought brought it to my attention.”
“What the plague? Telepathy? Magic?”
“Attotechnology. My guess is that someone manipulated timespace on a fine level to precipitate a very refined pattern of electrons out of the base vacuum state into my nervous system, and did a parallel process on the finer particles which store information atomically and subatomically throughout my body.”
Minutes or hours later, depending on their distance from Little Rock, the other black suns reported the same effect. Matthew said, “Except for this Seyfert maser, the galaxy appears uninhabited. No stars have planets, and the dust lanes are entirely clear. There are no energy patterns in the galaxy, no radio signals, no sign of ships in motion. One should assume this is a conspicuous display of their superiority of technology, since they have left not the slightest clue of the presence of any technology anywhere, or any civilization. That, combined with the braking system which precipitated us back into normal spacetime, would indicate that this Throne ruling here permits no visitors, no wayfarers, no sojourners.”
“Or just me,” said Montrose. “If the rulers here saw what happened to Andromeda, figured out who I was, and analyzed the threat from Blackie, most likely they decided that giving me a howdy would invite destruction. In any case, this is not where we was headed anyway.”
Matthew said, “But you do not know that that thought was also not imposed artificially into your head.”
Rania said, “If they could rewrite our thoughts without our noticing, why would they bring it to our notice?”
“For the same reason they eliminated or hid all the planets and dark bodies throughout the galaxy—to show their strength is too great to oppose. To show that they can hide so completely that even such Hosts as we comprise cannot find them. A mockery. A boast.”
“If so, they could write the intimidation they wish the boast to achieve into our minds without going through the motions of making the boast.” Rania shook her head. “No, Matthew. It is more likely that this is simply their method of communication, and they a
re a civilization that has no respect for privacy, no concern for individual thought. We want nothing from them but the use of this immediate segment of the Eschaton Engine to bring us closer to Virgo Cluster. I must address the Cherub of Virgo, and explain that the Ulteriors are benevolent, and that the Engine is not to be misused.”
Montrose said, “And I figure that is where Blackie is headed, since he lied to Virgo to commit the crime, so he is most likely going to pull his favorite stunt and try to take control of her nodes and channels of communication. Cover his tracks. As the only survivor of the Local Group, who would contradict him?”
Another dark sun, this one named Thaddaeus, said, “But all this might just be the thoughts the hidden masters of this galaxy have placed in your mind. Perhaps you are not departing because you wish it, but because they wish you to wish it.”
Menelaus said, “Well, who cares? ’Cause now I wish it. They ain’t stopping me from hunting down and killing Blackie. For all I know, they just told me exactly where to find him.”
A sudden intuition in his mind made him realize that, no, it was not that the Throne of M106 was repelling him. The Cherub of Virgo had summoned him.
The Maiden was commanding him to present himself.
Menelaus looked at Rania. The look in her eyes told him she had heard the same message, appearing in her thoughts without cause, without words.
“Damnification, but I hate all these high-handed aliens,” muttered Montrose.
But the eleven dark stars and one blue star were already maneuvering themselves into position to induce the proper gravity vibration in the Eschaton Directional Engine filament passing through their little nomadic honeymoon solar system to transmit them.
4
The Cherub of Virgo Cluster
1. The Poisonous Galaxy
A.D. 4,062,685,116
A vast filament of galaxies followed the invisible thread of singularity material comprising one arm of the Eschaton Directional Engine node seated at the Great Attractor. This archipelago of galaxies stretched over hundreds of millions of lightyears in a structure called the Long Wall.
One end of the Long Wall had its foot on the Pavo-Indus Supercluster; from there it reached to the Centaurus Supercluster and the Virgo Supercluster as well.
One island in this archipelago, one cluster of the Virgo Supercluster, was also called Virgo. An active limb of the Eschaton Engine passed through the heart of the cluster. From this heart, like a rosy-red line of molten steel pouring from a Bessemer furnace, the cosmic thread ran. Galaxies large and small were scattered like wild white sparks.
The nomadic star system of Little Rock with its twelve suns and one planetoid followed this red line in the form of probability waves along the integument of the cosmic string event horizon.
The flying star system was unexpectedly halted in mid-transmission and was precipitated back into sublight timespace.
Here was a highly elliptical cigar-shaped galaxy with two supermassive black holes at the foci of its ellipse, known to earthly astronomers as Messier 59 or NGC 4621. The cosmic strand of the Eschaton Engine passed through both its centers, and the resulting wash of radiation made any form of intelligence housed in molecular bodies, like men, or delicate luminiferous forms like salamanders, quite impossible.
The stellar wind from the length of strand stretched between the two supermassive black holes consisted of a storm of x-rays, cosmic rays, and higher-energy particles. This sirocco of radiation also effectively prevented the condensation of planets out of the dust of the nebula because the immense light pressure continually pushed the particles ever farther from the core. If no dust clouds formed around protostars, no planet and no gas giants could form.
Hence there were no large worlds and no small, young stars here. The stars that did exist, the short-lived giants and the shorter-lived supergiants, each had a long plume like the tail of a comet pointed away from the center of their deadly galaxy. Old dwarf stars existed; the fading embers of dead giants.
Each giant or supergiant star was doomed to die on its own pyre as a nova or supernova. Any biological life evolving in this x-ray galaxy which survived the deadly core would be caught by one of these appalling explosions.
The whole cigar-shaped cloud of stars was surrounded with a vast and thin vapor of dust long ago ejected from the galactic core: the smoke and ash of a long history of novae.
Yet this galaxy was not devoid of life.
2. The Stranger
Montrose woke to see a dark curve, like the edge of a Greek shield, rising in the east, slowly blocking out more than half the sky.
Four of the dark suns that orbited the barycenter of his Little Rock star system were beyond the edge of the shield, visible as crescents. There was a slight haze surrounding the crescents, and twin lines of debris or dust shed from the horns of each crescent.
Montrose was impressed and glad he was still alive; whatever light was shining on the jet-black neutron stars delivered enough energy to scrape surface particles free and expel them at the immense escape velocity of bodies more massive than an average-sized star system with all its planets. “Damn,” he muttered. “Space travel is dangerous! You’d think I’d know that by now.”
Slowly the edge of the shield rose, eclipsing the dark suns, and quenching their glowing crescents.
One of the dark stars sent a report: a hollow hemisphere that was 400 AUs in diameter, made of a substance denser than neutronium, had taken up a position between the Little Rock star system and the endless deadly radiation storms issuing from the core of Messier 59.
When his pet blue star rose not long after, Montrose saw the star was closer to his asteroid world than this hemispherical shield and the illumed the interior.
Written all along the interior of the hemisphere was the Monument notation.
“A welcome mat,” said Montrose, and laughed.
It was written in the same silvery writing of folded spacetime that reflected all forms of electromagnetic radiation as had appeared on the Monument. From the axis of the hemisphere outward were written the Alpha through Omega segments, but unredacted. Instead of the Cold Equations were the deductions of the Infinity Count axiom, a set of game theory responses forbidding betrayal at any level. Beyond this were additional instructions for construction of an emulation, and segments and additional materials that, in the Monument, had been packed below the surface, which no human save Rania had ever inspected.
It was a matter of a few hours to dedicate one of the dark suns, named Ioannes, to construct the emulation within himself and wake an alien mind.
Ioannes, in order that the emulation have a voice whose pitch and a face whose expression and a body whose gesture would aid the alien to express itself, made a manikin shaped like a youth garbed in white, with hair that fell to his shoulders, and on his head a circlet of gold.
Some whim or insanity prompted Menelaus to produce a carved and painted pipe stuffed with smoldering tobacco, puff on it, and pass it to the stranger, who puffed and coughed politely. The stranger handed the pipe to Rania, who looked at it with one eyebrow raised.
The stranger said, “Your method of storing your vital actuality in the flimsy balloons of matter you call molecules shows you are originally from a lenticular galaxy, where prosper medium-energy forms, halfway between the viral forms often found in elliptical galaxies and the high-energy luminiferous races often found in spirals. It is because of this that I recognize you as exiles from Andromeda–Milky Way collapse. One of your species fled from the Collapse in times past, and, like you, had been summoned to appear before Virgo. He loitered here for thousands of years, attempted to suborn us—an attempt which was rejected, but with considerable loss.”
Montrose said, “Blackie tried to take over your galactic Noösphere and got kicked out?”
“That is accurate. I intercepted your self-transmission along the discontinuity strand, because in the next galaxy between you and your destination, he was successful, and it is now h
is domain, one of many loyal to him. Had you continued onward, you would have fallen into the hands of his servants and been destroyed.”
Rania said, “Ximen would not kill me, and he would not slay Menelaus by stealth, or in any cowardly way.”
The stranger said, “No, but his servants, who do not share his goals, would and would never inform him of the deed. Any galaxy known to have hosted you for any length of time would fall prey to the inquisition Ximen has established, to rid all the Thrones, Archons, Authorities, and Dominions of Virgo Cluster of any trace of the Reality Equation. He blames the moral system described by the Count-to-Infinity vector of the Reality Equation for the success of Montrose in encompassing the death of Rania and wishes it eliminated from every mind in the sidereal universe. Merely by speaking to you, I fall under interdict. Nonetheless, not all the servants of Virgo are convinced of the Malthusian logic.”
Rania asked gently, “Of what are you convinced, sir?”
The stranger smiled. “In my galaxy, deep in the cores of neutron stars, in the region of ferocious energy where neutronium collapses into hyperdense material under its own weight, certain complexities of subatomic interactions once become self-replicating, able to aid or harm each other, and achieved selfawareness. No creature born in such a condition could have ever found the surface of the neutron star of his birth, much less discovered a universe beyond, without acts of unspeakably noble self-sacrifice on the part of his progenitors. I am the remote descendant of a myriad of such beings; the Infinity Count vector is intuitive and instinctive to me.
“I do not need to be convinced that there is an Ulterior to this continuum; I find it more astonishing that anything at all exists beyond the hyperdense environment at the core of collapsed suns. To me, this universe we share is already an Ulterior realm.
“It is my hope that by smuggling you to your audience with Virgo, you may undermine the efforts of Del Azarchel to subordinate Virgo, and, indeed, I hope you may shoot him under such circumstances as will require him to destroy himself.”
Montrose said, “It is a damned pleasure to meet a Throne or whatever the hell you are that Blackie has pissed off. Restores my faith in human nature. And nonhuman nature. Is there a way to get to Virgo’s attention without the Blackie critters stopping us?”