The Architect of Aeons (18 page)

Del Azarchel said, “Montrose did not have such a problem with Pellucid!”

Selene said, “If I lived at the intellectual level of a horse, I would perish much more slowly. My energy intake is greater than all the cities of men combined.”

Montrose said, “Ma'am, I don't understand. What ails you?”

“Entropy. After repeated sweeps depopulating the world at regular intervals, with the exhaustion of various resources, particularly surface metals, a collapse back into pretechnology is inevitable. You saw my space program?”

“We saw empty space stations,” said Montrose.

“They are mine, or were. I am part of a final project to shower metals from the near-earth asteroids to Earth against the day of downfall, and produce skyhooks and space elevators simple enough to endure the loss of their maintenance technology. Without a working Tellus mind, however, the effort is doomed to failure. The work continues to restore Tellus to coherence, despite that brain mass loss is accelerating beyond predicted repair times. I do this because it is my duty to care for the sick, and because I am required to hope for a miracle. Can you provide one for me?”

Del Azarchel said, “You ask us for help? You are the superior being!”

“I am but a fellow servant,” she said.

Del Azarchel said, “A living moon! What now prevents all the worlds of this system from being elevated to your level, and then the Oort cloud material, and then the nearer stars!”

“As ever, your ambition outstrips your powers, Nobilissimus,” said Selene gently. “You speak of quickening worlds to life? First save Tellus. First save this civilization. My monks are attempting to record the various discoveries of this generation against the coming ages of darkness. Since there is no worldly reason to expect rescue, I can gather only those motivated by otherworldly and imponderable devotion to do the work.”

Both men stared in disbelief. For a time that was long as posthumans measured time, neither spoke.

5. Last Contact

Del Azarchel whispered, “So we did not survive First Contract after all. We are bleeding to death of a mortal wound … and more wounds, equally severe, are to come.…”

Montrose drew a deep breath as if gathering his wits and steeling his spirits. In a voice of unconvincing heartiness, he said, “We have another tens of thousands of years before the Second Sweep! This time the Earth can ready herself up for a real battle, and we can prepare ourselves for a real siege.…”

Del Azarchel, hot eyed and cold faced, stared at Montrose as if at a dancing scorpion from the desert. With an effort, he kept his voice level. “I would admire, were I not appalled, at how you manage to combine the insanity with inanity, both to an utmost degree. Does no event from the real world penetrate to your fantasy?”

Del Azarchel pointed at the end-state graphs still gleaming as colored lines in the windows to one side of them. Anyone who understood the calculus could determine the number of generations, plus or minus subsidiary variables, before the population dropped to zero. By the year when Rania returned, all mankind would have been extinct for as long as Homo Erectus had been extinct before the year Montrose was born.

Montrose said, “There must be some hope, some variation we are not seeing plotted here or else…”

“Or else what?” said Del Azarchel. His face was haggard and drawn.

Montrose whispered. “Or else she would not have flown away…”

“Speak up, Cowhand. What are you muttering?”

“… from me.” And Montrose straightened his spine. His voice now rang with the honest hardihood that before he had been but mimicking. “Rania. She would not have flown to M3 if it were hopeless. She must have puzzled out this part of the equation node before she left.”

Del Azarchel had a strange glint in his eye. He raised his head and said, “Mother Selene! Learned Montrose has correctly identified the inconsistency in your story. If it took a potentate occupying nearly all the volume of Earth to confirm this Concubine Vector equation, or even to see it from the Monument math, how was it that Rania saw it? How did
you
not solve it?”

Selene said, “I cannot solve the Monument because I am not a Monument emulator built from Monument instructions.”

Montrose said, “And I am. Is that what you mean? The Zurich runs were taken from Monument codes I did not understand. I ran my own neurogenetic topology through the Monument grammar of equations without knowing what they stood for, but knowing the output was valid if the input was valid. The section of Monument code must have contained part of the instruction on how to read the Monument. Which was what I was looking for.”

Del Azarchel said, “And we—I mean the
Hermetic
expedition—deliberately created Rania to do the same, but we did something wrong, or you did something we could not reproduce, and she could not read the Monument. You then augmented Exarchel, using that same irreproducible factor. And that factor came to me when I merged Exarchel so often back into my biological self. So your first mischance somehow—what? Gives the three of us an instinctive insight into the Monument? How is that possible?”

“Tellus can in theory reproduce every factor of the mind and body of the Princess, who can apparently sight read the Monument,” said Selene. “All but one. One unknown factor.”

6. The Unknown Factor

The inhumanly calm voice continued: “All three of you, Princess Rania, Nobilissimus Del Azarchel, and Doctor Montrose, were physically present at the Monument. You set foot on it. You were exposed to its gravitational and electromagnetic fields, plus any finer fields or particulate agencies that may have been present, which we lack either theory or practice to detect. This exposure altered your brain pattern development, allowing you intuitively to detect patterns in the message notation which analysis cannot necessarily perceive.”

“What the hell? I mean, uh, begging your pardon ma'am, but what makes you think so?” said Montrose.

“Tellus the Potentate, before his lobotomy by war damage, could make rough copies of any of you based on genetic records and brain-information extrapolations—the mortals in the physical world use these leftover golems of you to rule their political institutions—and Tellus could precisely copy the codes you two contributed, even those unknown to you, into the final mix of elements which created Rania. But Tellus never re-created her. Nor Swan nor Archangel nor Potentate can decipher the Monument past the Potentate reading level.”

“Are you saying Rania understood more of the Monument than a machine as large as the Earth's core?” demanded Del Azarchel. “Exarchel had more than half the Monument surface translated! After the Swans combined Exarchel and Pellucid into Tellus, surely mankind deciphered more!”

Selene said, “Much more. The entire surface. Before the End of Days, Tellus and I used methods of translation similar to yours, Nobilissimus. Yes, it was I was who deduced the meaning of the south polar logic families, the so-called Omega Segment of the Monument. It explained not only the negative information theory, but also, in that self-reflexive way the Monument Builders love, the Omega Segment explained the Monument's own intellectual topography. You see, the
surface
of the Monument was all preamble, meant for low intelligences of the Archangelic and Potentate level of intellect, living dwarf planets and living terrestrial worlds between ten thousand and eight hundred thousand on a standard scale of intelligence. The surface of the Monument can be thought of as the writing on the lid of a jar, reciting how to open the sealed contents.”

Montrose stared, his deep-set eyes as unblinking as the eyes of a boar. Del Azarchel threw back his aquiline head and laughed, a touch of hysteria in the noise.

Selene continued without pause: “The Monument Builders evidently assume anyone discovering the Monument would immediately use the local materials, thoughtfully provided in the star system of V 886 Centauri, to construct a Jupiter Brain as the emulator needed to read the rest of the Monument. Such a Power would be three orders of magnitude above a Potentate of small, terrestrial worlds, whereas a Potentate mind is but a single order of magnitude above mine.

“But instead, using all the superabundant energy the antimatter star could provide to convert Thrymheim, the one gas giant of the system, into a logic diamond, the Princess Rania converted the superjovian mass to thrust, taking away with her the star, the Monument, and any hope Earthly civilization once had for deducing the higher meanings of the full message.

“The Monument was encoded throughout its total three dimensional volume, and, most likely, into eight additional dimensions at the subatomic level. It was meant to be read by an entity of an intelligence of two hundred and fifty million, or higher. We have no such intellect at hand.”

Del Azarchel took a deep breath. “And if we did?”

For answer, the windows rippled with color. New graphs were formed, and new equations danced forth. Now the graphs rose like a hockey stick, faster and faster, in asymptotic growth.

Montrose, looking at the projection of unending upward growth, muttered, “
Onward. The future is a voyage without end
…”

Del Azarchel's face grew dark, but he smiled a deadly smile. He stepped back into the chamber of the music, and examined its blank, slightly oval floor, and ran his gaze over the smooth dome of the ceiling, with its many gold ornaments.

Without a word, he drew his blade, and held it overhead as if in salute. There was a deafening crack of thunder, a blinding stab of blue-white lightning as a particle beam weapon hidden in the blade smote the dome, cracking it. Rubble and dust fell with syrupy slowness in the light gravity.

Montrose, blinking, stepped nearer and looked up. Beyond the gap was concentric ring upon ring of neural-reading machinery. He had seen skullcaps designed to pick up nuances of electrical and chemical changes in the brain before. Such small units were meant to be worn tightly fitted to a scholar's bald head. Never had he seen such a skullcap the size of a cathedral dome, designed to read through the intervening air, hair, and so on of two men walking and kneeling and standing yards underneath the sensors.

His eyes on the smoldering and shattered machinery overhead, Montrose said to Del Azarchel, “So she was telling the truth when she said we read the Cenotaph, not her.”

“Indeed,” said Del Azarchel with a hint of a sneer. “She introduced radioactive particles into our bloodstream, and tagged electron groups in our nervous system, to allow those instruments overhead to read our subconscious reactions to music based on Monument Notation. Then she spent months playing symphonies while we formed the proper neural pathways to read the Cenotaph. But the brain paths and the Cenotaph patterns are recursive: by formulating and playing the music she was merely making us conscious of something we already knew the first moment we saw the Cenotaph.”

Montrose said, “Walking over the surface, over the Cenotaph, also was to build up the pattern. We walked a long time with nothing to look at but those lines. No wonder she would not speak to us on Earth, by radio. Humph. You blew up her roof. You gunna pay for that?”

Del Azarchel said, “Medical information about me is proprietary, owned by the Hermetic Order. Since that order is extinct, I will cede the use of it to Selene in return for an amount of money equal to the expense of fixing her dome for her next victims.”

“Since the readings were inconclusive, it hardly matters,” Selene spoke up. “Whatever the Monument decided to do to you is beyond my intellect to reproduce or detect.”

Montrose said, “You said the Monument
decided
to do something to the three of us? Are you saying the Monument was alive? Or self-aware?”

Selene said, “No. I am saying it was magic.”

Montrose said, “You're yerking me.”

“That word has no meaning,” said Del Azarchel.

“Which word?” Montrose turned. “
Yerking
or
magic
?”

Del Azarchel loftily ignored him, and said to her, “The word ‘magic' is only used when phenomena or technology beyond our current understanding are encountered.”

“It signifies more than merely that which is beyond understanding,” said Selene in a cool, silvery voice. “The word signifies any and all things thought safely inanimate and useful to our daily purposes, lamps or secret pools or rings curiously carved, which turn out to be shockingly possessed of life above ours, and possessed of purposes of their own, and who reach out and transform us against our will, in ways unforeseen and unforeseeable. The word refers to what should awe and terrify us. In this case no other word will do.

“And now our time has elapsed. You know what you must do. Have you one last question? Your mother, though you have forgotten her, I have not, and will keep here and cherish until times and seasons on Mother Earth return to kindlier days.”

Del Azarchel, smiling, said, “Amphith
ö
e? Frankly, I was not going to inquire after her.”

Selene said coldly, “This I knew. Your question will be selfish. You ask a shallow question you deem to be profound. I will let Dr. Montrose ask his first, for he asks a profound question he thinks shallow.”

7. A Question of Darkness

Montrose wondered how she knew what he was thinking, but decided to sate a more obtrusive curiosity. “Meaning no disrespect, but you is the first Frankenstein I've met who was more than halfway decent. Why did you become a nun? I mean, you are this cold and soulless thinking machine in this cold and soulless moon.…”

“I was called.”

“What does that mean? You heard voices? I'd have thought your technicians would delete such code as perception error. You had a vision? Saw a light?”

“I saw a darkness.”

He said, “You are talking in riddles again.”