The slumber coffins broke down. Without Ximen to run the genetic emulations, crewmen were waking with cancers and neural aberrations. Doomed, childless, our mission a failure, lacking all hope, while I slumbered, one crewman committed suicide, and then a second.
I foreswore all slumber thereafter, greatly blaming myself. Ximen thought I could bring peace. What use is bringing peace if the threat is not war but despair?
9. The Emulation of Hope
I searched the records of the Monument carefully, looking to see if there were other codes for messengers and emulations like myself, messengers to bring hope.
I found something. Something odd. I coded the Monument notation line by line into the empty crystal core of the Bellerophron section of the ship. I made my own little ghost, and it woke and spoke to me and told me what to do.
How like you I turn out to be! I made the cocktail of neural alterations just as instructed, and prayed, and meditated and injected myself.
In a dream I saw the unity of all things, and I walked outside of time and space. Here, there was another mind, in sympathy with mine, though vast beyond all description, issuing from one billion lightyears away. Because we both had entered the same framing sequence of synchronic semiotics, the ideas or forms overlapped, and we touched mind to mind. I was a droplet touching an ocean.
I woke the crew, and I spoke the words the massed coalition of living minds Corona Borealis Supercluster of Galaxies had instructed me. I told them of the hope beyond the universe. I told them how small our current mission was and what the greater thing was that awaited us.
There were no more suicides then, no more talk of mutiny nor despair. We all knew it was not willed that we should fail, even if it were willed that we should die. Gaily, and with joyful hope, I and my crew awaited we knew not what.
For the ship began to slow more rapidly than the exhaust vent from the neutron star could account for. We checked and rechecked the readings, but there was no mistake.
It was a miracle. If only Ximen had waited for it.
A beam of energy from M3 had found our sails and was imparting deceleration momentum. The aliens had reach across space with their strange hands, spread their fingers, and caught us.
10. The Dyson Oblate
The Diamond Star remnant dwindled to nothing, and the singularity at its core evaporated in a burst of Hawking radiation. The twelve remaining living souls spent over fifty years in the alien deceleration beam, but by the end of that time, the last cryogenic suspension coffin we were taking turns to share had failed, and we all turned old and gray.
We passed a quarter million stars, roughly half the cloud. The number of young blue-white giant stars, and the symmetries and patterns of the variables, showed that the civilization here had been engineering stellar life cycles since roughly the Carboniferous Period. The Authority at M3 had been herding stars, triggering supernovas, and forming solar systems in the resulting nebulae to bring forth worlds where elements high on the periodic chart existed in abundance. They had been doing this since the years when, on Earth, amphibians and arthropods were reigning.
The deceleration beam wafted my ship, crewed by octogenarians and sad memories, to rest at a point within a hundred thousand miles of an oblate Dyson sphere.
Supersphere would be a better term, because it was in an orb eleven lightyears in diameter at the equator, ten from pole to pole, that surrounded the entirety of the dense, compressed core of the cluster. The sphere captured one hundred percent of the emitted energy not of one but of hundreds of bright stars and dark star accretion disks at its center. It was visible to us only because it reflected ambient starlight and interstellar radiation on various wavelengths.
When we had first seen it on our approach, hundreds and hundreds of lightyears away, this core supersphere was transparent, but as we approached, it grew into a mirrored surface, reflecting all forms of radiation on all wavelengths from it. Perhaps it was built during those years, and the light of its completion had not yet reached us. Perhaps its optical properties changed according to the distance of the observer.
Closer still, and the reflections blurred into each other, perfectly and uniformly randomized, so that the surface of the Dyson oblate seemed a flat plane of pallid milky white to our eyes, a mathematically perfect surface to our instruments radiating at a few degrees above absolute zero. Particles of interstellar gas or dust encountering the surface, or rare interstellar micrometeorites, were disassembled when they struck into component subatomic particles and absorbed with no loss of momentum, no flare of waste heat.
There were dimples or indentations larger in diameter than the rings of Saturn, regularly spaced across the surface. Hence, my crew dubbed it the big golf ball, which made them less afraid of it. These indentations were parabolas pointed at various nearby stars, nebulae, and subclusters in the cluster. It was not the emitter of the beam which had braked us. The nearest was about one lightday away, six times the radius of Pluto’s orbit. Jury-rigged probes sent into the focal point of this nearest dimple detected fluctuations both of electromagnetic energy and in the neutrino count, which had to be signals.
We did not possess the calculation brainspace needed to translate those signals via Monument Notation analysis.
Twelve years passed, and we could not attract the attention of the Authority beneath the surface of the oblate.
11. Overlooked
We tried everything, including discharges of energy which would have been considered acts of war had any damage been done. Material objects encountering the pallid wall were eaten; energy of any wavelength or composition was reflected back. Apparently the aliens welcomed mass, but not energy.
Once only, our instruments caught a glimpse of a material object leaving the surface. It issued from a point on the oblate half a lightyear from our position, so we saw the motion six months after the fact. From the distortion as it passed between us and a nearby star, it seemed to be a superdense, ultrathin thread of material, roughly nine thousand miles long, about the diameter of a uranium atom in cross section.
A ship? A message container? For a technology that could impregnate thought patterns into any sufficiently complex material thing, the difference was moot.
The neutronium thread was last seen heading toward a young blue-white giant star. That star was surrounded by 633 superjovian-sized bodies orbiting between one-tenth and one-twentieth of a lightyear away.
Perhaps whatever was causing the stellar engineering activity there would have been more ready to turn its attention toward us, but there was no fuel for the ship, no working cryogenic coffins.
There was roughly a dozen such man-made solar systems within reach of our instruments. What purpose did they serve? Why were so many young stars taken off the normal path of stellar evolution and turned into hotter-burning blue giants? M3 contains 230 variable stars, far more than in any other globular cluster. Why did the Authority transmute stable suns into variables? Why did precisely one-third display the Blazhko effect of long-period modulation? Many were the secrets I never learned.
Cheerfully we worked at our hopeless task, as one by one old age claimed us.
12. Abandoned
We spent our lives in sick bay. As the only one able to learn each and every field of medicine from the surviving onboard library, I acted as our doctor. With Ximen dead, the Hermeticist prosthetics to expand our life processes grew ever less reliable. There was one ironic loophole: it is easier to increase the life span of women, due to the production, in the ovaries, of the base material for totipotent cells. I was a gray-haired Eos surrounded by a matched set of Tithonius, each one turning into a cricket.
They were as old as mummies and moved carefully and slowly in the zero gee, drifting with medical packs and blood bags like pods of seaweed behind them, fearful of breaking their fragile bones. Peacefully, serenely, giving me words of comfort, one by one, they passed into a heaven my astronomy plates could not spy. One by one, they told me not to surrender, not
to despair. More intelligent I was, but not more wise, and their words cheered me.
Then there were only a few of us left, then four, then three, then only one. He was of course the youngest because he had spent the most time in cryonic sleep during the years when we had working coffins to spare. I am speaking of the mutineer I had spared from the death penalty.
I will record his name here. In life, he was Scholar Intermediate Jehan Baptiste Ghede Lwa Oosterhoff, the ship’s neural syncretism officer. I accepted his parole and granted him pardon and was rewarded by his loyalty. As the years passed, he aided the attempts to attract the attention of the aliens.
He disobeyed me one last time, on the last watch of his life. He stole the extravehicular frame to jet to within a mile, a yard, a foot of the wall. We had a platform there to tend or repair the jury-rigged instruments floating so close to that eerie, impossible, intangible, infinitely deadly surface.
Only once before had a crewman touched it, a physicist named Manvel. When the fingers of Manvel’s gauntlet encountered the pallid mirror, the suit substance dissolved, and the fingers neatly sliced in half. The air inside the suit, at fifteen pounds per square inch, jetted out, along with much blood. I assume each molecule of oxygen and nitrogen and helium vented from the ruptured suit was also absorbed into the cool and pallid surface of the Dyson sphere. But the explosive decompression shoved Manvel away. Even with the emergency internal seals nipping off a severed hand or arm, the unexpected tumble put Manvel beyond the reach of the next nearest crewman on watch, and there were no waldoes within any acceleration solution that could catch him and return him to the ship. I read prayers to him over the radio.
This time was different. Oosterhoff had switched off his ears but not his mike. He was so giddy that I suspect oxygen overdose, his voice high and squeaking in the suit air, a laughing mouse. But his last words made an eerie sort of sense, a mad sanity.
An examination of the gravitational anomalies recorded during Manvel’s accident had convinced Oosterhoff that only inanimate objects were being dissolved, that any living flesh and blood was perfectly preserved on the far side of the surface. Oosterhoff was convinced the surface was not just an infinitely thin disintegration field, but was meters or miles or lightyears deep and housed their mental-pattern information, their souls.
He said that the aliens had no need of nonliving material.
His theory was that the pallid substance was able to make a mold and to replicate each subatomic particle and part of a living brain as it intersected the surface, as if in a three-dimensional photograph, or, since the motions in time were captured, four dimensional.
He thought the whole of the eleven-lightyear-wide cluster-core Dyson oblate surface, each square lightyear of it, each square inch, was an interface surface for receiving and issuing information, neural information, any pattern that could hold a thought, to and from each of the arms of the main galaxy. Nothing else, or so Oosterhoff claimed, could explain the location of so much activity, so many superhuman civilizations, cramped together into one small globular cluster high above the North Pole of the galaxy, with all the stars spread out underneath like a map.
Oosterhoff thought the whole Dyson oblate was a brain. The crowded star systems and collapsed dark stars inside were part of the thinking system, the nerve cells, and the surface of a cortex larger than worlds.
He thought the pallid wall was alive and that it would emulate any living thing attempting to merge with it. This was the simplest and more straightforward way of welcoming a first contact from a creature of unknown biology, background, and capacity.
Theory? Call it a wild guess. An inspired guess, but wild. He said it had come to him in a dream.
The idea has an odd and alluring simplicity to it. Any creature, like the race of man, too foolish to know the whole eleven-lightyear-wide surface was an open invitation would be too foolish to be worth the time to welcome in. And how else could they have made a welcome mat? They would not erect an airlock nor spacedock.
The Authority Minds were expecting planet-sized bodies made of logic diamond or ringworlds wider than the solar system to plunge inside, not hollow metal ships filled with air and water and talking animals.
And so Oosterhoff maneuvered the frame to within an inch of the surface and shoved his head in, as you would shove it into a bubble of water in zero gee. Or into a lake of living water.
He thought the water would enter his brain, eat his brain, make his thoughts part of the alien mental process, and that they would speak to whatever ghost or reflection of his consciousness was mocked into life. He thought he would come out again. He thought he would live again, be himself again. If an atom-by-atom and particle-by-particle copy of you down to the finest level is not you, then you are not you to begin with.
Did he fear for his soul? I think he did not. I had this same talk with Ximen when he was afraid of his Exarchel he dreamed to build, like Koshchey in the old opera hiding his soul in an iron-bound box. What is the soul? It is not in my hand or heart or eye. It has neither location nor composition. To speak of the soul as being inside two brains, an original and a copy, makes no more sense and no less than to speak of the soul as being inside the two halves of one brain. It is not something that can be put inside an iron box; that is a fable for children. Eternal things are not inside anything inside the cosmos. My marriage is not inside my ring.
Oosterhoff’s body jetted away from the surface, spraying blood and venting oxyhelium from his severed neckpiece.
And I was alone.
13. Haunted
I began to see Jehan Oosterhoff’s head reflected in shining surfaces in the ship, a dull screen or a metal hatchframe, but there was nothing when I turned to look.
Once, about a month later, I saw the shadow of a severed head in the bridge armillary from where I floated in the hatch, but when I kicked and entered the chamber, there was nothing. A month after that, it appeared again, directly opposite me on the exercise carousel, pinned to the surface by the rotation, looking up at me, eyes eager, mouth smiling, red neck stump bleeding.
His eyes looked like yours. He had the looked of augmentation, of superintelligence. The aliens had expanded his brain to a higher level.
One watch as I sat in the carousel meditating, my legs folded into a full lotus position, my mind in a new topological space for which we have no word, neither dreaming nor awake, his head was in my lap. He smiled. I could see, hear, and smell it. It had mass. It was real.
Oosterhoff spoke.
You are born of the Monument, and within you is something even the Authority does not comprehend. Beyond this projection, I cannot accumulate enough attention in their system to stabilize myself.
I will be consumed by greater minds, more useful to the terrible, grim purposes of M3. You will not be consumed, but cherished.
My helmet circuits and the suit instruments around me created a blur in the four-dimensional photograph the surface took of me as I intersected it, so I am not whole.
Someone of your weight, build, and age can survive vacuum for seventy seconds. Remember to empty your lungs of air or breathing fluids. You can expel yourself from the sideboat airlock by blowing the explosive hinge bolts.
Or you can wrap yourself in an oxygen bubble of thin membrane and launch yourself toward the surface at sufficient speed to be carried forward by momentum when the bubble pops. Test this on a few empty suits first.
I said, “Prove you are real!”
You first.
“That is not an answer.”
He smiled. All answers are within. Come and see.
And then he was gone. I could feel the warm spot on my leg where the back of his head had rested.
The vision convinced me. I will follow Oosterhoff. I will strip myself of everything and enter naked.
Not everything.
I will keep my wedding ring on my finger.
14. A Last Thought
My last thoughts will be of you, beloved. I have faith
that you still live.
You are too brave and fierce and fine to let a small thing like death and entropy overcome you, nor the nigh-eternal gulfs of time.
I will not say farewell—for I shall gaze into your eyes with my eyes again, your brave and deep and handsome eyes, where imps of strange humor and rustic courage dance and swim. How I miss the look in your eyes, the only eyes that never seem dull to me, never empty, never cowed! No one else can surprise me or make me laugh.
Even though all sense says to doubt it, nonetheless I pray that you made amends with my stepfathers among the Landing Party I left on Earth, and that you shared with each other the breakthroughs in suspended animation and computer emulation needed to bring all of you forward across the ages until the day I return.
Perhaps you think me slyer than an obedient wife should be, but I arranged that you would have sole control of the long-term hibernation technology, and Ximen would have control of the emulation systems, which would require you to work together.
I foresee that if you ever put aside your differences, you will come to love each other as brothers and know that I love you both. I hope you are not foolish enough to duel him; he is a better shot and is likely to win.
I pray that all the Hermeticist crew won your forgiveness and will be waiting to greet my return. You must forgive what they did. What they will suffer if they do not repudiate the mutiny and murders on the ship! It will haunt them in life and punish them after death with more horror than any human court of law can bring. As for their other crimes, you must understand how lonely they were when they returned to Earth and found all their nations gone, the laws they thought would protect them forgotten, the culture and civilization alien and odd.
And they had the means to rule and, with my help, to bring peace.
You are too big a man to beat a foe who is afraid. Make peace with them.
But even if you have killed the men you should forgive and spare, I will not stop loving you. Love is not something I command but something I obey, like a voice from beyond the cosmos.