The Architect of Aeons (17 page)

Del Azarchel cleared his throat. “Mother Superior, allow me to say, first, that I am not associated with this man of dubious origins standing near me, but also, if you can call down a divine vengeance upon him as would a goddess of old, I am willing to be struck by the flanking discharge of any lightning bolt provided he is hit with the brunt.”

The voice of Selene chimed, “Your words perfectly capture the spirit of unforgiving enmity which exists between you two. I foresee that this spirit, unless tamed, will destroy you both, and in time will therefore slay the Princess Rania, whom you both claim to serve. Yet you have more in common than you admit. Look Earth-ward.”

3. The Graveyard of the Dead Globe

The wall to one side of the chamber parted, revealing a gallery lit with the blinding ground-glare of the naked sun, unhindered by any atmosphere, reflected from the gold and gray pallor of the lunar wasteland.

Here was a triptych of outward-facing windows whose pointed arches were adorned with Borromean rings. The stained glass showed Jonah in a ship, in a storm, in a whale, and huddling beneath a gourd vine, looking out upon the desolate landscape with its too-near horizon. The two men, curious, moved (as lightfootedly as dreams) to the outward-facing windows.

In this building copying the ancient architectural forms, the control gestures were also ancient. Del Azarchel tapped the glass to render the gray of the whale and the blue of the sea transparent, and spread his fingers to amplify the view.

The cardinal directions for Luna were established before astronomers knew the other wandering stars were worlds. Convention decreed that every heavenly body mapped thereafter would have its direction of spin defined as eastward, and which pole was north or south named accordingly, but not the moon. Luna was the only planet or satellite which ever existed or would exist whose dawn was in the west.

At one time, only the sun ever moved in the skies of Luna, rising once a month, and Earth was at a fixed celestial longitude. But now, in what seemed an almost blasphemous abrogation of astronomical history, the moon had been jarred from her constancy, and turned her face, no longer called the near side nor far, the bright side nor dark, toward the Earth.

Hence it was in the west that the Earth was rising above the silent marmoreal plains cut with eccentric curves and angles of alien script as if with a mad network of dry canals.

Closer, a gray and barren boneyard in the lap of a gray and barren valley halfway down the mountain of the basilica swelled large in view as the window focused. The mausoleums were angular patterns of hellishly black shadows and dazzling white marble in the airlessness, and tall statues of angels gleamed an eerie and regal blue in the Earthlight.

Of the hundred headstones, twenty of them bore some variation on the name
Rania
.

The name variations indicated that one had been constructed from Monument codes crossed with human genetics, another as a she-Locust, another as a Giantess, another as a Witch with special brain segments for intuitions and lucid dreaming, and so on.

Montrose turned toward where the two statues still stood in their niches. “We have some questions, Mother Selene. Like how many Iron Ghost emulations of her did your people kill before they turned to growing biotech versions of Rania to read the Monument for them?”

Del Azarchel said, “Early versions of Rania were no doubt at first much more like the generic Monument-reading emulator the Monument instructs anyone who can read the instructions to build. All the early emulations of Exrania were surely killed. After that, the scientists of this current generation must have been groping to rediscover what I did to create her, and what you did to create the matrix I used.”

The red statue said, “I do not know how many Ghosts, or based on which patterns, lived and died in the Telluric No
ö
sphere. Not knowing which molecular patterns in the nerve cells or blood cells formed the crucial key to Rania's intuitive understanding, a hundred clones of her were attempted, with the results you see below.”

Montrose said more loudly, “Your intelligence level is somewheres north of ten thousand compared to my four hundred fifty, ma'am! How can you not run the Zurich computer runs I ran? This floor I am standing on consumes more computing power than every computer on Earth back in my day! Combined!”

Del Azarchel said, “I want to know who did this? How they dared to create living variations of Rania and make each one live and die a slave? Do they think the advantage will never be mine again? I permit other beings to excel me in intellect only while I gather resources and plan new strategies. Do they think there will be no vengeance…?”

“Shut up, Blackie,” snapped Montrose. “Her damned husband is the only one who takes vengeance on folks what dishonor the name of Rania by making cheap copies of her—something
you
did more than once!”

“Not I! I would never commit such a …
blasphemy
! Sarmento i Illa d'Or bears the blame for that! I never authorized it. But I could not stop him—the code patterns were written in plain sight on the Monument surface, and to transpose the abstractions into human DNA was well within his competence. Besides, he worked with me to create the original Rania, to be our captain, since none but an heir to Grimaldi could open the gene-lock on the ship's brain. I could not take what Sarmento already knew from his own mind! Not without his noticing eventually! I am not to blame!”

“They don't have that excuse. Mother Selene! Who did this work? Who made slaves of Rania's copies and sisters?”

Selene's voice rang out: “You!”

This was so unexpected that both men stood silent, shocked.

She continued: “You both taught your heirs and creatures too well; you designed your Swans and Melusines and machines to follow your philosophy. You taught them that the ends justify the means. Are you not practical men?”

Del Azarchel folded up his glove cuff, revealing the red amulet that commanded his bodily nanotechnology and commanded the ship's ratiotech aboard
Emancipation
. Montrose saw that he intended something dreadful, no doubt to include dropping something absurdly destructive at absurd speeds to the moon's surface. Seeing the endless craters of impacts both from natural and military causes, Montrose doubted the iron core of the moon was in danger, but the two of them might not be so lucky. He grasped Del Azarchel by the elbow, and glanced toward the two statues, red and black. Del Azarchel, seeing the eye motion, realized that Montrose was reminding him that the two figures were not facing each other. The duel between the two of them had yet to be fought. Del Azarchel smiled disarmingly, half shrugging, and folded his glove cuff down again.

Montrose said, “What was so poxy dire Tellus just had to read it so badly?”

Selene said, “Look now, and with care, upon the equations you just heard. Plug in the values for the current society and circumstance of the No
ö
sphere of Earth, both the posthuman and human levels. The Tellus Mind was faced with this choice. If you can, tell me truly you would not have used every resource available to decipher the Monument, seeking any possible loophole of the mathematically certain doom spelled here.”

The stained-glass windows showing the ships and storms and whales and the walled city whose every figure was mourning in sackcloth now rippled and reformed into swirling shapes of Monument notations, and marching rows of simpler math expressed in Greek letters and Arabic numerals.

4. The Graveyard of Stillborn Future

The glass was able to project an illusion of depth, so that, from their vantage, there seemed to be a second line of glass behind the first, this one showing graphs and charts and rotations of the same plot information.

The sine waves of several dozen political-economic trends, population figures, mass library intelligence, and so on, writhed like colored worms from the left windows to the right, but as they reached farther and farther rightward, the colors grew dim, the amplitude grew weaker. After a certain point, all the trends were combined in a flat line running along the axis.

It was death.

Montrose said, “The population levels rise again, and then drop sharply after the Two Hundred Forty-second Century. Why is that?”

Del Azarchel favored Montrose with a scathing look. “It is another sweep up of population to deracinate to the slave colonies. Another raid. A Second Sweep.”

Montrose only then saw what Del Azarchel had already deduced. Earthly civilization not long ago (by astronomical time, at least) must have detected stellar output fluctuations from the Hyades, no doubt indicating the launch of a second Virtue. If the economics of star flight were unchanged, the flight speed was unchanged.

The cliometric charts showed that the psychological damage from a second rapine of population and resources would exceed the first. The numbers were based on predictions of disastrous failures of the colonies, mass deaths followed by more mass deaths. Society would degenerate for numerous reasons, some economic and some psychological.

A Third Sweep was expected by the Thirty-seventh Millennium, reducing the population below replacement levels, even of artificial life. The death spiral then would be set. By the middle of the Forty-first Millennium, the population numbers would have dropped below the minimum threshold able to maintain a technological civilization.

By the Forty-second Millennium, letters and laws and numbers would be forgotten, and troglodytes crouching in the unlit caves formed by the ruins of shattered superscrapers would have only oral lore and ritual. The statistics estimating the time before a natural disaster wiped them out were but little different for similar estimates for glyptodonts or saber-toothed tigers.

But a predicted Fourth Sweep in
A
.
D
. 52201 had an intake value higher than the highest estimate for the carrying capacity of a globe occupied by nomadic herdsmen and hunters. There simply would not be enough people to satisfy the Hyades. All would be taken. All would perish.

The Hyades Domination evidently planned to continue to throw human beings by the millions at whatever planets there were, habitable or not.

“If even one of these were a green world,” Montrose said, “there would be hope, a possible growth vector, a way to repeople the Earth from the colonies. No wonder they don't tell the little people. Did that Witch we meet actually think we'd won this war? How can we undo this?”

Montrose fell silent, his head bowed.

Del Azarchel spoke aloud, but as if unaware of others listening, and his eyes grew haunted and his mouth grew soft and quivering. “The Hyades are a superior race. They cannot act without cause. Why such a convoluted means of extermination? What is the reason? Unless…”

The look on his face then was that of some cowering child living off gutter trash, looking at the rich, cruel world of the conquerors striding grandly down wide boulevards. It was the look of someone wounded by an inexplicable universe, inexplicably evil.

“… Unless there is none. None we can ever know,” he continued. “They are simply alien to us. Incomprehensible. We are unlettered Negroes captured by Arabs, too primitive to know the world is round or that lands exist beyond the sea, fated to be sold to Christians who carry us across distance unimaginable to deadly mines in Argentina or sweltering plantations in the Caribbean. We will never understand them. We will simply die.” He turned to Montrose. “There is no undoing this.”

Montrose said softly, “Well, Blackie, I can read the damn math. I was just hoping I was reading it wrong is all.”

Selene said calmly, “Tellus hoped that hope as well. This is why the memory of your Rania was desecrated by the cruel experiment whose only results rest outside on sacred ground.”

Del Azarchel said, “You did not participate in this?”

“Participate?” The serene voice, for once, held a note of emotion, of deep maternal sorrow. “With great travail I had the bodies brought here, that the incarnate genetic information be beyond Earthly reach. Any who would repeat this abomination must again from the primary Monument records deduce the system for encoding Rania's emulation instinct. I have eliminated all secondary records and resources.”

Montrose said, “Why? Why go to the effort? I mean, I'm grateful, but Rania's not even from your era.”

Selene did not answer.

Del Azarchel said softly, “It is one of the seven Corporal Works of Mercy to bury the dead.”

Montrose said, “Well, I am stonkered. Some of you machines are nice people after all. I never would have expected a soulless Xypotech to become a nun. Which leads to my next question: why can't the machines colonize these worlds?”

One of the smaller charts, with its surrounding math, suddenly expanded to fill several panes of the windows, and certain expressions unfolded into more detail.

Selene said, “Machine life on or near Earth is more delicate, requiring greater technological infrastructure, than biological. Nobilissimus Del Azarchel, you must now realize that your dream of an entirely machine-based ecology is as empty as dreams of perpetual motion.”

Del Azarchel said, “You say so? But you are a living example!”

“A dying example,” she corrected him. “The maintenance of my subsystems requires a continual effort of correction, upgrade, replacement, removal of worn molecular parts, and, in short, digestion and excretion like an organism. Such organisms cannot exist without the nutrients in solution around them. I have a mile-deep layer of smaller and simpler machinery around me like a mantle beneath the lunar crust, but this in turn requires constant maintenance and upkeep. I need living men to live in me for the same reason you need mitochondria and other beneficial organisms in you, as well as crops and livestock outside you. I am the apex of a pyramid of technology that cannot exist without a base.”