Montrose said, “Before I slept, a Lord of the Stability begged me to influence my wife to have her free the mortals from the machines.”
Little crinkles that appear when a man smiles with his eyes gathered above the cheeks of Rassaphore. “It was not a Patrician to whom you spoke. We are not hasty. Had he waited but three years more, he would have heard of theonecromancers returning from the remote outer orbits of the Tau Ceti system, where men in heavy-gravity bodies are burrowing into the corpse of the frozen gas giant to learn what huge secrets can be gleaned from a study of its shadow-records and ghosts and thought-echoes still lingering in the logic diamond of its vast brain. The despoilers of dead gods reported the startling news that Toliman and Consecrate, the Dyson Hemisphere and the Dyson Cloud, together with Zauberring the Strandworld circling 61 Cygni, overcame cold and remorseless Catallactic of Tau Ceti and collected themselves into one system, a very small and tentative Dominion called Triumvirate. In his first act as Epitome of Man, Triumvirate announced that the higher powers, for good or ill, will no longer interfere with the doings of moral men, Angels, Archangels, nor Potentates.”
“That is great news, but you ain’t smiling.”
“It is a lesson in humility. It seems the ripples and cross-currents we creatures of one hundred million intelligence levels can cause over spans of tens and scores of millennia are insignificant to the tides and tidal waves of their greater plans hereafter to be made reaching across millions and tens of millions of years. We shall live and die free men, each and every one, until our race goes extinct. And I see neither do you smile.”
Montrose straightened up, a look of shock and disappointment on his face. “I feel like someone stole my thunder. The battle I agreed to lead is over since before I woke?”
Rassaphore said, “Be comforted. You set in motion the love of the chaotic Fox Maidens for liberty and freedom; and they created us to carry out your will. We created Neptune based on your principles and mathematics, and he opposed Twelve of Tau Ceti, the plutonian ice giant, and Splendor of Delta Pavonis, the traitorous and mercurial fire giant. Altair followed Neptune when the Potentate called Covenant created the Power called Immaculate from their gas giant, and he in turn created the system-wide brain of Consecrate, who, in turn, was the opposition to Catallactic of Tau Ceti, who served the Beast. You see the chain of connection? We are your children. The Myrmidons, and Jupiter and Twelve and Catallactic were the children of the Nobilissimus del Azarchel. The opposing avalanches your pebble and his pebble set in motion could not have been stopped, nor aided, at this point, by any power of yours or his. This destiny has been set ever since you slew Jupiter in a duel, or even before, when the first generation of Swans ungratefully and ungraciously exiled you both. The fuse is long, the explosion reaches one hundred lightyears wide, and perhaps farther will expand, and perhaps never to expire. Such is the human spirit. A dramatic battle at the end of things may indeed be in your future, but not today.”
“Why did you put me in this body?”
“To honor you with simplicity. You cannot easily haul a node of murk the size of Mercury behind you as you sail on your honeymoon to many stars and worlds. So all your minds and selves were folded down into this body you wear now, with no need for external connection or remote brain storage.”
“That’s impossible. Or it was, when I fell asleep.”
“The knowledge, along with all knowledge of our society, science, lore, and customs, was embedded in that drink you quaffed and stands by in your memory at your call. I will speak only enough to stir those buried memories to light:
“This praxis is a gift from your bride. Rania has sent ahead of her the results of research she has made of her vessel, given in recompense for some wrong done her by the aliens of M3. It is an attotechnology ship, whose First Order secrets we lack the tools to analyze or reproduce, but certain spin-offs of the Second Order femtotechnology aboard can be examined by picotechnology—in this case, the means to perform the manipulation of quarks, quantum fields, and exotic matter. Her research enabled the Principality Zauberring to overcome certain limitations of the Pauli exclusion, develop a form of stable phenomena, neither matter nor energy properly so called, consisting of nucleonic strings about which electron energy levels are distributed in spirals rather than spheres.”
“String atoms rather than ball atoms.”
“If you like. These strings are analogous to elements and can be woven together in knots and sheets in a fashion analogous to molecules, but with distributed strong and weak two-dimensional interaction areas rather than zero-dimensional point sources. The material interacts with normal chemicals and photon excitement in a somewhat predictable way, but the number of fractal folds which can be made in a molecular sheet of the material is practically infinite. Hence, the amount of information that can be encoded and stored in the energy states of the subatomic particles, in the vibrations and waveforms of the strings, and then transferred by changes in the surface folds to chemicals released into neural systems greatly exceed what either molecular level storage density of logic diamonds or the atomic level storage density of murk.”
“Still sounds plagued impossible. You cannot stuff a planet-sized brain into a human body.”
“Your subatomic particles, variations in electron shell orbits, nuances of nucleonic organization, and so on can store as much information in a single atom as is coded in a large brick of murk technology by stringing the atoms together into binary sequences. It is as if an entire library were written on a silk sheet so fine that it could be wadded up and placed in the head of a pin. But come! These dry matters are no fit discourse for such a day as this!”
The man of gold raised his arm, pointing at the blue-white sky. “This is the hour of joy! Look upward. We have made your eyes like ours so that you can see her approach. We have devised that your eyes will return to their more traditional appearance when she more closely approaches, for then they will be needed to meet her gaze and speak all lovers’ vows which words cannot encompass. But for now, your eye must be stronger than human, to see her afar. Look where I point. There is her ship, the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum! There!”
“I see nothing but a blue sky, pardner. You jaspering me, is that it?”
“Not so. I merely overestimated the rate at which your mind would adapt to our neural formats. You should be able to penetrate the opaque day sky with eyes like ours. The knowledge you drank is not yet digested. It does not matter. We will blot out the sun for you.”
Montrose said, “Wha-what did you say?”
But he had heard right. Less than eight minutes later, a black bite seemed to be taken out of the sun. These new eyes could look directly at the sun without harm, and so he got to see something he had never seen with naked eyes before: a full eclipse. The black disk occluded the sun, and an eerie twilight fell across the landscape of forest, glass mountain, and purple wine-dark sea.
From the crescent of light at the edge of the disk, Montrose could tell this was a planetary body, not a sail nor an orbital mirror. How the technology of this era could maneuver another world into position between Earth and sun without shattering it was a mystery.
“You can move the planets?”
“Not I. That honor I granted to the living planet Pyriphlegethon, who well recalls aiding you in beforetimes to behold her. Now, by his shadow, he shades your eyes. Your sensitivity is greater far than you might believe, because each incoming photon can be separately analyzed into preons and entangled photon pair information deduced. The deeper your heart desires, the clearer your vision! Look, I say! Look!”
And he saw. At first in the night sky he noticed only that certain distant dots of light moved more rapidly than others. Then his eye resolved them into crescents waxing or waning, gibbous or full. Then he could see them as globes with continents, seas, swirls of clouds. One was green as a lime, covered pole to pole with layers of viridescent storm; the next was white and crisscrossed with fine dark lines and crater mar
ks too evenly spaced to be natural. The next had a ring like Saturn’s, but made of a single band of exotic material, connected by dozens of space elevators to the equator; then a world entirely ocean with polar icecaps covering half the north and south hemispheres. To stare at worlds from space is like to stare at human faces, for each was individual, rich with secrets, handsome.
And on and on. There were two hundred which had lights, like the lights of cities seen at night, shining between the horns of their crescents. Then there were three hundred more, coated from pole to pole with the pallid yellow white of logic diamond, or with morbid indigo and black of murk, or else with the opalescent blue-white glass, like the landscape where he woke seen from afar. Half a thousand worlds altogether were here, ranging in size from balls smaller than Ceres to superterrestrials eight times the mass of Earth. Mars and Venus, far away indeed from the orbits they had known in his youth, were lost in the thicket.
The distant spheres of Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus were visible, but of the old asteroid belt, or Pluto and the outer planets, there was no memorial. Neptune was surrounded by an extensive artificial ring system equal parts murk and logic diamond: his Angels and Archangels, and moons to replace the ones he had lost in old wars, to house his Potentates.
“What are these?” asked Montrose in a whisper. He had never heard nor imagined such a thing as a solar system with five hundred worlds in it.
“Most are terrestrial-sized worlds sculpted very recently, within the last eighteen centuries, out from the massive corpse of Jupiter. They are called the Deodates. Others are Cold Potentates or Rogues, designed to dwell at slower thinking speed far from any star, but, startled by the deaths of Lethe and Styx, have made the long, slow voyaging hence from interstellar space, anchoring energy fields to their magnetospheres in imitation of the semi-immaterial sails of Rania’s Great Ship. Look to the horizon! As the globe turns, she will come in view.”
His view was blocked by the forest. Montrose impatiently scanned the treetops, found the tallest, and climbed it. He could not recall the last time he had climbed a tree, but he scampered up as lightly as when he had been a child, as quickly and efficiently as when he had been a sharpshooter for the cavalry. Perhaps this new body he had been given had muscles more pliant and potent than normal, or perhaps the soaring spirit in him, the eagerness, made him light and lent him strength.
3. Up a Tree
Above him, he saw a human figure. As he drew near, Montrose saw who it was. He did not even wonder how the man had known where to find him.
Blackie del Azarchel was seated on one of the upper branches of the tree, a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his brow, smoking a cigarette in a holder, his long legs crossed at the ankles and propped against a second tree branch. He was dressed in the expensive coat and leggings of a Spanish grandee of the Twenty-First Century, with a cravat at his throat and lace at his wrists.
“Dr. Montrose, I presume? Fancy meeting you here.” Del Azarchel smiled his most charming smile.
Menelaus stared in utter disbelief. And then his expression darkened, and his deep-set eyes began to glitter dangerously. He drew out the triangle of diamond from his sleeve and wrapped part of the sleeve tail around the base as an impromptu grip so he could hold the shard like a dagger without cutting himself.
Del Azarchel flicked his cigarette lightly away and tucked the cigarette holder into an inner pocket. “Not to worry, my man. It would be wrong for a man like me, who plays the long game, to interfere with another man’s honeymoon, foe or not.”
“State your business. I am in too good a mood to poxing rut with you, today of all days.”
“What is that diamond shard you carry? It is cognitive substance, probably containing more calculation power than our entire civilization, back when I ruled it.”
“I was picking my teeth with it.”
Del Azarchel controlled his expression admirably and said only, “Do tell. Whenever I begin to forget the many alluring aspects of your multifaceted personality, our next meeting always reminds me. I have come to give you a wedding present.”
“You told me you thought she would reject me and cleave to you. You giving up?”
“Not as such. As I say, I play the long game. No, I am merely conceding the point, not the match, and, as a gentleman, a type of being a clod like you perhaps will never understand, I wish to give you a gift.”
Montrose told him into which orifices, in which order, he could shove his gift sideways, no matter what it was. “I care for nothing from you, Blackie. You done me such ill as has never been done no man, before or since, not even in legend.”
“Ah!” said Blackie, raising a forefinger and laying it aside his nose. “But this is a gift which only I can give, and I selected it honestly, to be something you indeed would crave.”
“I doubt it.”
“Again, do you underestimate me? Such is your nature. My gift is my absence.”
“Come again?”
“I will depart for an age of time from this world, perhaps from the Empyrean altogether, and allow you two to reacquaint yourselves. Look! I see in your eye that you would want this very much.”
“What do you want in return?”
“It is a gift, freely given. But do tell Rania, when you see her, that I send my love and greetings. And ask her for me: What are you going to do with that ship? I mean, if she has no immediate need for it…” He shrugged and smiled again.
Before the startled eyes of Montrose, the shape of Blackie turned white, all his clothing, his face and hands, everything. Then Montrose realized that had been a puppet, a projection from a distance. The body sagged, turned into diamond substance, and began to sink back into the tree trunk from which it no doubt had been extruded.
Before it entirely disappeared, Montrose stepped on its collapsing face, reached for a higher branch, and kept climbing.
4. The Solitudines Vastae Caelorum
From the topmost and swaying branches of the crown, Montrose looked toward the distant mountains of glass with his new, unearthly eyes.
The eclipsed sun, a dark orb surrounded by a nimbus of fire, stood above the eastern mountains. Above the mountains, a great curve of pink arose and came into view, running from north to south as far as the eye could see. After a moment came another and a third curve, like the petals of a flower. The great round sweep of the fore royal, main royal staysail, and main upper topgallant rose first over the mountain crest as the turning of the Earth brought more and more into view. More than once, Montrose had to adjust his imagination to the size of the thing.
When thirty minutes had passed, nearly half the sails had risen above the horizon so that all the eastern sky was filled with a vast half circle reaching nearly to the zenith.
Rather than the one or two sails flown by ships like the Emancipation, this vessel flew scores of sails, ovals and circles elongated to leading points, rank upon rank. The sails were arranged in the Fibonacci sequence called the golden spiral, which gave the vast shape the haunting aspect of a rose in full bloom, with the smaller sails gathered toward the center. Some oddity, inexplicable to human science, Doppler shifted the light reflected from the sails so that they were a glowing red hue, pink toward the center, empurpled at the edges of the sails.
And it was bright! The sails were brighter than the morning star, brighter than the full moon, bright enough to flood the world with rosy light, as if the mountains and forest were bathed in cherry petals, bright enough to add an aura or haze of deep purple, loaned by the atmosphere, in concentric circles around the sail array.
When he saw the dazzling reflection of the sun in the bowl formed by the sails and saw the edge of the sail pass behind the eclipsed sun, he realized the vessel was in opposition—that is, on the far side of the orbit of the Earth from his position. The sails were concave, like a parachute, and behind the payload, since the ship was decelerating, braking against the light pressure from fountains and threads of laser energy issuing from fiery deeps of Sol.
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Before another hour was passed, the colors of the sail brightened into a lighter pink, and the center grew white. Montrose saw the shadows of planets sliding across the inner surfaces of the sails, revised his estimate upward of how far away the vessel was, and recalculated the size of what he was seeing. From one side of the great rose-shaped sailing array to the other was a diameter greater than that of the orbit of Venus, over 120 million miles wide.
Then he realized that the center of the sailing array, the fore course, main course, and crossjack, were moving against the background of the other sails. The vessel had released her shrouds so that all but three of the sails were resisting the light pressure with no payload and hence would decelerate much more rapidly, coming to a halt in the outer system. As he watched, he realized that there were very slight misalignments between the petal-shaped sails of the fore, main, and mizzen lower topgallants and the course of sail before and behind. He concluded that the outer and larger sails had been cut loose weeks or months ago, while the vessel was still passing through the Oort cloud, and the middle ranks of sails set free when passing through the Kuiper belt. The vessel was too large to maneuver within the ambit of the inner solar system but had only kept a spanker and two staysails and a flying jib in place to decelerate the very last scintilla of distance.
In the very center of the remaining sails, held in place by magnetic guylines, was a gold ring a mile across, spinning like a carousel, with parasols and antennae like filaments and anthers issuing from the hub. At the extreme edge of his superhuman vision, Montrose could catch a glimpse of the inside surface of the ring: he saw the bright green flash of grasses, gardens, and arbors and the glitter of running streams, waterfalls, and ponds. Like the head of a tambourine, parallel round bulkheads of invisible substance apparently were coating the ring to the starboard and port. Without this, there was no explanation of what was keeping the air inside the huge but frail gold ring, not to mention the darting birds.